Mundane observation dome

[Warbodog]

Do you have any miscellaneous insights on the series that may be worth contemplating for a few seconds before moving on with our lives? Here are some of mine.

1. The four regulars have names that can work any way around, though this would have been more obvious if David Ross had stayed and wouldn’t work if Chris Barrie used his real name.

2. The series’ lax attitude to continuity extends to the setting. Outside of Holly’s distress calls, I don’t think three million years is mentioned all that much after series I and before VI (not sure about later years). Instead, we get the extremely fudged “dead for centuries” and “travelling for thousands of years” – not actual retcons, but suggesting a more conventional setting for casual viewers tuning in and the sort of stories they’re telling. It’s only millions when they need it to be.

3. 200 years of stasis between series V and VI means that the earlier series took place in their equivalent of the early 19th century by comparison (e.g. Blackadder the Third). Since they didn’t run into a long-lived Camille or one of her great-great-etc grandchildren, it didn’t come up.

4. Although Lister is routinely slagged off in the series, he’s spared the level of seemingly authoritative character assassination that Rimmer gets, because the audience is aligned with Lister’s viewpoint most of the time. For example, we see Kochanski Camille belittling Rimmer’s interests, but we don’t get the equivalent of Hologram Camille reacting to Lister’s pickup lines, we’re left to form our own opinions on those. This flimsy point has not been considered much beyond this single example.

5. Cat’s costumes are overwhelmingly referenced more than anyone else’s in the series, but the least discussed by fans.

6. Ace Rimmer and Duane Dibbley were so seemingly ubiquitous in canon and tie-in merchandise through the 90s (Smegazine strips, T-shirts) that they still feel overused today, even though it’s been over 20 years since they appeared. Maybe they’re allowed back after all.

7. Only series III & V and maybe XI & XII (not as familiar with those) don’t have any sense of an arc whatsoever (though IV’s minor Kryten disobedience arc was already fucked up by episode shuffling). Series III is just about the only series where no episode directly references any previous episode, but it still has the Backwards scrolling text and general references to Rimmer having died and stuff.

8. One of the series’ most famous and quoted scenes – everybody’s dead, Dave – is a straight-up 2001: A Space Odyssey homage and would have been received that way at the time, but doesn’t work like that for most people coming to the episode later on or new viewers who are young or don’t watch old films.

9. Sometimes dismissed as lightweight and gimmicky today, Backwards was designed as an innovative interactive experience to reward extracurricular effort. As well as inviting fans to work out the backwards events and filming logistics, Arthur Smith’s eugolonom is teasingly long and “you scoundrels” is clearly a cleaned-up translation gag even before you’ve heard it. Unfortunately, by the time technology caught up with the intent and the ability to reverse media files properly on home computers became commonplace, Backwards Forwards came out and everyone just cheated with the walkthrough.

Imagine the quality of the musings I left out!

Topic

[Podey]

(“rizz” is what the cool kids are calling “charisma” these days, for the old folks…)

[Podey]

Mundane observation: Mads Mikkelsen keeps appearing in stuff named after RD episodes.

Last year he was in ‘The Promised Land’, he’s just been announced for ‘Back To Reality’. 

I’ll be looking forward to him starring in the upcoming ‘Pete’ and its sequel…

[Ben Saunders]

[Dave]

[Ben Saunders]

[Moonlight]

[Technopeasant]

He’s drying the spoons.

[Podey]

I thought I’d somehow ended up on Backwards Earth, this morning. Got a train that was making the “we’re now arriving at….” announcements immediately after leaving said station, not before it. 

And you won’t believe what happened when I thought I’d do a sneaky trump.

(not *that*)

[Unrumble]

I thought I’d somehow ended up on Backwards Earth, this morning. Got a train that was making the “we’re now arriving at….” announcements immediately after leaving said station, not before it. 

And you won’t believe what happened when I thought I’d do a sneaky trump.

(not *that*)

[tombow]

Mundane observation: Mads Mikkelsen keeps appearing in stuff named after RD episodes.

Last year he was in ‘The Promised Land’, he’s just been announced for ‘Back To Reality’. 

I’ll be looking forward to him starring in the upcoming ‘Pete’ and its sequel…

and his brother Lars was in Star Wars Rebels, which has episodes called “Entanglement” and “The Honorable Ones” (men of honour/marooned) – an episode actually about two enemies marooned together…. it’s spooky…

[Warbodog]

Better Than Life beach, today

[Technopeasant]

So a bit better than in 1988 then?

[Warbodog]

So a bit better than in 1988 then?

Even the SeaQuarium’s shut now, it’s officially dead.

[Moonlight]

Watching The X-Files. They’re hunting an alien that’s hiding in a nuclear power plant, and the following exchange occurs:

“It’s here.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere.”

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

Doug Naylor was reaching for the phone to call his lawyer when suddenly nothing interesting happened for the entire runtime because it was actually a Chris Carter myth arc episode from the revival.

[Warbodog]

It sounded like 6×01 to me, a Chris Carter myth arc  episode with no sense of direction post-movie.

[Moonlight]

It is.

[Nick R]

After making my post in the Ganymede News thread, I noticed that the Queeg subtitles say “Encyclopaedia” but the book shown on-screen has the American spelling.

Plus, Queeg didn’t even mention the word “Colour” (UK spelling!) in the title! This discrepancy is surely a blatant clue about Queeg’s true nature, for those observant enough to catch it.

[Flap Jack]

I assume that in the 22nd century the UK English spelling will have died out due to the prominence of Wikipedia, but color and colour will both persist.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

My 22nd Century will communicate entirely in TikTok dance trends 

so I wouldn’t worry about which 300 year old spelling might be used 

[Flap Jack]

Not sure if this point has been brought up previously, but it occurred to me while listening to the relevant BTL episode – it actually worked out well that Meltdown was shown as the last episode of Series IV instead of the first, because surely the Justice computer would flag up “wax droid genocide” as a serious concern?

Maybe there are ways you could explain it not counting, but if the episode itself isn’t going to address it, it’s better not to have the question in the air to begin with.

[Moonlight]

It doesn’t count as genocide if they’re made of wax, obviously.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Rimmer doesn’t feel guilty for the genocide of the waxdroids.  He does feel guilt for failing to fix the drive plate.

[Renegade Rob]

Might be a little on the nose to post the Katerina gif saying “Morally, ethically, wax droid killing fine.” But I will point out that Rimmer wasn’t in his right mind and that the hero wax droids followed him of their own free will. Still a bad day all around. Also, I think the dinosaur wax droids are still fine and stomping around so it’s not like all the wax droids are dead, unless they all happened to be napping inside the villain’s headquarters. Also, not for nothing, but seeing as the wax droids were being melted down and reprogrammed anyway, there was theoretically nothing stopping the Dwarfers from just going back afterwards and reassembling and programming the wax droid corpses and rebooting them. It might undercut Lister’s admittedly excellent anti-war speech, though. Additionally, some of the blame for VW-day has to go to whatever genius supplied a theme park with working machine guns and land mines. 

[Flap Jack]

Given the mind scan specifically picks up unconscious guilt, I don’t really buy that it wouldn’t detect the Waxworld slaughters. Even if Rimmer consciously justified it to himself, he’s not a total psychopath, so deep down he would recognise it as a crime.

But as I said, it’s not that there’s no possible explanation for those crimes being ignored, it’s that Justice is better for it not needing to be explained at all, either by the episode itself or by us formulating headcanons after the fact.

[Renegade Rob]

Touché and agreed. I still wonder if Rimmer would’ve felt guilt about Waxworld, as I still wonder whether his guilt about the accident had as much to do with the lives lost as much as it represented a career failure on his part. His Waxworld gambit represented him winning, as his plan did indeed work. This is the same guy whose brother later got killed in front of him and didn’t really mind since he got to feel superior in that moment. 

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I really don’t think he would feel guilty about the wax droids.  At best he genuinely believes what he did was right, which given his obsession with the military and fascist leaders is very in character.

Let’s not forget, his guilt about the crew dying comes more down to his own failing, and his guilt at failing to keep the crew safe (when it wasn’t his job).  He accepts (rightly or wrongly) the responsibility for it.

He doesn’t see his actions on Wax World as wrong.  He probably doesn’t even seen them as people. In fact it’s Lister that has to point out to him that they have gained sentience and therefore are people.

[Warbodog]

[Flap Jack]

Again though, while it makes sense for Rimmer not to feel guilt about the wax droids on a conscious level, it also makes perfect sense for him to feel guilt about it subsconsciously. His subconscious knows that deliberately getting people killed is wrong, no matter how much his conscious brain justifies it as necessary to win a war or whatever.

Also, it is ambiguous whether the justice computer looks for guilt in the emotional sense – as in remorse – or whether it detects guilt in the legal sense – as in culpability. Even if Rimmer doesn’t feel bad on any level about what he did on Waxworld, he knows that he did it, and that could have been enough (if Meltdown had happened before Justice, which of course it didn’t).

[tombow]

characters in RD have a fourth wall knowledge of whether an apparent incident is really sad or not, like Cat knowing to be sad when Rimmer has supposed to have died heroically, even though he’s thought he died other times and made jokes.

[Technopeasant]

It also rendered him innocent of attempted kipper dumping.

[Ian Symes]

[Moonlight]

Rimmer considers Kryten an appliance so I don’t think he’d think any higher of what are essentially free standing Hall of Presidents animatronics.

[Flap Jack]

Maybe I’m giving Rimmer too much credit, but I’d say by Series IV he does consider Kryten to be a person. An inferior but still a person. The Last Day alone is pretty strong evidence; he gets fully involved in Kryten’s farewell party and helps protect him against Hudzen.

So, I’m sticking firm to my “deep down, Rimmer knows that a wax droid massacre is wrong” position.

[Dave]

Obviously it’s Holly who’s really culpable, for running the hologram simulation that causes such carnage.

[Renegade Rob]

All this is kind of making me want to see a sequel episode to Meltdown where Rimmer is tracked down and arrested by the surviving Waxworld citizens (assuming there are at least like a couple he missed) and it’s just him in a War Commission tribunal being tried for war crimes for his actions on Waxworld, and of course celebrity legal figure wax droids are involved like Atticus Finch and Tom Cruise from A Few Good Men. 

Tom Cruise Wax Droid: “DID YOU ORDER THE PAWN SACRIFICE?!”

Rimmer: “You’re god damn right I did!”

[Moonlight]

Lister licking his dusty fingers in Waiting for God is way more disgusting than him making out with a housefly or his pus-filled head exploding or any other gross-out moment on the show. Discuss.

[Warbodog]

There’s also that time he sets about eating his irradiated mates the moment he steps out of stasis. Not just one mound, he keeps going back for more. What did he think it was?

[Dave]

[Moonlight]

Lister needs to stop eating dust.

[cwickham]

Checking the start of tonight’s showing of Backwards just to make sure the channel didn’t fall off air or they showed the wrong episode or something for the BBC Broadcasts Guide, and exactly how much more difficult would it have been to read the opening scroll on a CRT screen in 1989?

[Unrumble]

[Dave]

It would have been much easier back in the day if it had been that slow.

[GlenTokyo]

Lister licking his dusty fingers in Waiting for God is way more disgusting than him making out with a housefly or his pus-filled head exploding or any other gross-out moment on the show. Discuss.

Lister eating irradiated space detritus isn’t great but Fuller’s earth has a wide range of health benefits apparently, so I bet Craig Charles felt like a million bucks after that scene.

[Warbodog]

Do you think Timeslides is suggesting that Fred Holden originally came up with the Tension Sheet independently, or that it was will have always been future Rimmer who gave him the idea?

The emphasis on how thick and lucky he was seems to favour the latter in retrospect, but Occam’s razor would favour avoiding an unnecessary bootstrap paradox.

The attentive kid in the episode has never seemed to match Rimmer’s description of him, and he’s been shown not to be the most reliable judge of character.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

Um… I don’t think the episode would even work if it were all a Bootstrap paradox.

Let me lay this out for you- 

Timeline 1: Holden patents the tension sheet as an adult.

Timeline 2: Lister changes history by patenting it as a teenager (thus also while Holden is either a teenager or a young adult).

Timeline 3: Rimmer tries to change history so that he patents the tension sheet as a child, but child Holden overhears him and patents it first.

What do we determine? That Holden couldn’t have got the idea from Rimmer in the original timeline – because if he had then Lister’s plan would never have worked and the entire premise of the episode would be redundant.

[Warbodog]

Timeline 2: Lister changes history by patenting it as a teenager (thus also while Holden is either a teenager or a young adult).

Oh yeah, good points! I wasn’t considering the timeline of the episode about timelines. There’s still the possibility that neither kid bothered going to the patent office (or understood how to do that) until Holden remembered as an adult, but that would be another unnecessary complication. Or the Tension Sheet was already around, but Young Lister hadn’t heard of it.

[Formica]

I also thought this was apparent when the original patent was held by Fred Holden whereas the new one was held by Thickie.

[Flap Jack]

Another reason why it can’t be a bootstrap paradox – in the final version of the timeline, Rimmer is alive in the present (briefly). If it were a bootstrap situation, this would be impossible.

The conclusion to Timeslides is basically the same as The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment “Time and Punishment”, and Back to the Future as well, now that I think about it. They change history, and they don’t fully change it back, but they get it close enough. Tikka to Ride runs on the same logic.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Yeah I think you have to read it as Rimmer changing the past. Young Holden patents the tension sheet whilst young Rimmer is playing Rugby. Young Rimmer carries that with him his whole life and once aboard Red Dwarf realises he is destined to die and travel back to appear to his past self so does something that changes that course of history. Maybe just going into stasis. 

[Author]

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