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

[Dave]

That’s his hoover attachment

It’s the vacuum of space.

[Jenuall]

[Moonlight]

I wonder if I can find any Cat clerics hiding on it.

[Warbodog]

[Rushy]

It’s very funny that the costume designer came up with a special variant of the hologram outfit for Katerina Bartikovsky that has cleavage, when Camille and Holoship already established that women just wear the same suit. 

[Technopeasant]

Yes, funny, we’ll go with that.

But how else would you dress a future Lady?

[Ben Saunders]

It was a fantasy hallucination, and boy was it a good one.

[Technopeasant]

Every other uniform we’ve seen also had trousers you will notice.

[Unrumble]

[Flap Jack]

Lister: “Devious… you knew that we would reject a dream that was too perfect as fake, so instead you crafted a dream that was existentially terrifying but would feel real once we’d fought for the happiness that was possible. You knew that after I’d taken control and brought Kochanski back, I’d never let go.”

Joy Squid: “What? All I did was create you a dominant Russian woman with a nice rack. That should have kept you placid for weeks. The fuck is wrong with your subconscious?”

[Warbodog]

About a year later…

About 200 years later…

But, of course, the candidate that’s an insane distance away and presumably takes them much further out from Earth than they are already is worth it for being “the most interesting”:

Additionally, they come across some habitable moons over the years too, if the gadget was less picky about it being a planet.

And that’s just the ones they happened to come across in the direction they were going, as opposed to the extraordinary three-dimensional range of the matter paddle.

[Dave]

Luckily the Matter Paddle has a highly sensitive “most interesting” setting that only takes them somewhere where they’d have the most exciting adventure.

[Warbodog]

That’s a lot of information to glean from a display that’s so discreet as to seem almost non-existent.

[Warbodog]

[Dave]

[sleepey]

Dunno where to report this but I guess it’s a sort of mundane observation – whenever I get the “request is being verified” anti-bot thing on this site it only unlocks the main domain, so all the smegadrive images are broken until I specifically go there as well

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

> But, of course, the candidate that’s an insane distance away and presumably takes them much further out from Earth than they are already is worth it for being “the most interesting”:

Presumably waxwork is closer to Earth

And it’s Kryten that believe’s it looks interesting, maybe there were other characteristics about it he liked the look of. 

[Warbodog]

The numbers are all unnecessarily crazy. Going from the established millions to billions of years seems to be emphasising Starbug’s limited propulsion compared to scoop-powered Red Dwarf, but using that metric anyway is like Alex Horne unconventionally measuring large distances in terms of mice etc.

Anyway, if Starbug’s so much slower, how does it reach the ocean planet in Dimension Jump that Red Dwarf passed “two days ago” seemingly in a matter of minutes?

[Warbodog]

[Dave]

And it’s Kryten that believe’s it looks interesting, maybe there were other characteristics about it he liked the look of. 

After his earlier disappointment in The Last Day, Kryten jumped at his chance to finally meet a decent Marilyn Monroe droid.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

[Rushy]

I know it’s mostly greenscreen, but I really like how quiet and ominous the ship is in Back to Earth part 1. It’s probably the most personality Red Dwarf itself has had since series 1. 

[Technopeasant]

I mean, yeah, but it has always seemed weird they decided to make the paddle that capable.

[International Debris]

Best guess, the ‘most interesting’ was one with energy signatures. If there’s no life on Earth it might not be possible to even tell that’s what’s being scanned, whereas all the stuff happening on Waxworld might grab Kryten’s attention.

Be funny if it turned out Waxworld was just a terraformed Mars all along.

[Warbodog]

If they’d ended up making Garbage World that year, Earth would have been one of the closest planets with an atmosphere to Red Dwarf.

[Asclepius]

In Tikka to Ride, instead of beating Lister to death, why didn’t the crew choose to stay on 1963 Earth? It’s not a bad year, all told, and the 60s in general aren’t too bad.

In future adventures, why didn’t they ever re-use whatever device they used to get them to Dallas 1963?

The logic and plotting of Series 1 – which I’m rewatching – is so tight that massive ‘it all resolves at the end of the episode’ stuff like this is more painful.

[Unrumble]

In Tikka to Ride, instead of beating Lister to death, why didn’t the crew choose to stay on 1963 Earth? It’s not a bad year, all told, and the 60s in general aren’t too bad.
In future adventures, why didn’t they ever re-use whatever device they used to get them to Dallas 1963? 

I guess the logic/handwave that they do refer to somewhat in the episode, and which is borne out by their thwarting of the assassination, is that they don’t want to further risk changing the course of history and potentially erasing the future existence of everything/everyone they knew (regardless of their eventual fates).

Admittedly, their frustration could be more out of self-interest than that, simply that Starbug is no longer there, leaving them stranded in this extinction scenario.

[Warbodog]

In future adventures, why didn’t they ever re-use whatever device they used to get them to Dallas 1963?

Lister uses it in Ouroboros to drop his infant self off, because that’s predetermined / luckily guessed.

Kryten and Rimmer forbid further time travel at the end of Tikka to Ride Xtended. Earlier in the episode, Rimmer warns that it could lead to them becoming like their future selves, so it’s covered.

Why not use the Time Drive as a space drive to just go back to Earth in the present though? Fuck knows.

[Ian Symes]

At the very least, even if they’d have kept the Out of Time limitation that it could only travel in time and not space, I always thought they should have gone to a location where they knew Red Dwarf had been, and hopped back to the time when it was there.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

They could steal it from themselves 

[Asclepius]

Kryten and Rimmer forbid further time travel at the end of Tikka to Ride Xtended. Earlier in the episode, Rimmer warns that it could lead to them becoming like their future selves, so it’s covered.

Wow. So they kept in Lister being beaten up by his friends, but removed a plot point about why they wouldn’t be doing this again? Hmm…

[Jenuall]

At the very least, even if they’d have kept the Out of Time limitation that it could only travel in time and not space, I always thought they should have gone to a location where they knew Red Dwarf had been, and hopped back to the time when it was there.

You did indeed always think this – I was just listening to the Rimmerworld Dwarfcast commentary this morning where you mention this very point! So well done for maintaining consistency with 2011 Ian

[Unrumble]

[Dave]

[Ian Symes]

You did indeed always think this – I was just listening to the Rimmerworld Dwarfcast commentary this morning where you mention this very point! So well done for maintaining consistency with 2011 Ian

Haha! I’ve been running this site for nearly 23 years, it’s a wonder there’s anything that I haven’t already said.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

[Nick R]

[Technopeasant]

At the very least, even if they’d have kept the Out of Time limitation that it could only travel in time and not space, I always thought they should have gone to a location where they knew Red Dwarf had been, and hopped back to the time when it was there.

Or jumped back six million years and resumed travel back to Earth.

[Technopeasant]

It’s not a bad year, all told, and the 60s in general aren’t too bad.

Probably a matter of perspective. If they say have a cure for cancer or something by Lister’s time you might think twice.

Without further mentioning Lister and Cat’s skin colour.

[International Debris]

Yeah, there are loads of potential uses for the time drive that don’t involve spoiling timelines. Even if it has to use the time element, how about travelling one second into the future each time? Then they could explore planets and wrecks and everything without needing to fly there.

And yes, it’s time to trot out my monthly ‘bootstrap paradox where they steal Red Dwarf from themselves would have been a much better way to open VII, close the lost ship arc, and include all the enormous interiors from the series without having to invent STARDISbug’ post, plus it would have stopped VIII from being… VIII.

[Rushy]

And yes, it’s time to trot out my monthly ‘bootstrap paradox where they steal Red Dwarf from themselves would have been a much better way to open VII

Lister: “Oh, so that’s where I parked it.”

[Moonlight]

Tikka to Ride should’ve had them use a timewave to go back in time and then get washed forward at the end. And then Timewave would be a good…well, an OK episode.

[Ben Saunders]

Media is always concerned with how going to “the past” could change “the present”, but once you’ve seen the future, anything before that is “the past” relative to “the present”. But they’re biased because they only view it as their present and their future, ignoring the very real lives of other people in their futures. And if you have the attitude that one tiny little change in the past could affect your present, doesn’t it stand to reason that any such small change in the present could alter the future in an equally big way? Much to think about.

Also, when travelling such immense distances across spacetime, how do you define when “now” is in multiple locations lightyears apart?

[Dave]

Media is always concerned with how going to “the past” could change “the present”, but once you’ve seen the future, anything before that is “the past” relative to “the present”. But they’re biased because they only view it as their present and their future, ignoring the very real lives of other people in their futures. And if you have the attitude that one tiny little change in the past could affect your present, doesn’t it stand to reason that any such small change in the present could alter the future in an equally big way? Much to think about.

[Joe]

Media is always concerned with how going to “the past” could change “the present”, but once you’ve seen the future, anything before that is “the past” relative to “the present”. But they’re biased because they only view it as their present and their future, ignoring the very real lives of other people in their futures. And if you have the attitude that one tiny little change in the past could affect your present, doesn’t it stand to reason that any such small change in the present could alter the future in an equally big way? Much to think about.

(CAMCORDER EXPLODES)

[Warbodog]

Lister’s looking straight at them when he asks this, but doesn’t notice anything awry.

[Warbodog]

Hadn’t seen this prototype Smegups [sic] video cover before. From a January 1995 magazine ad.

[Rushy]

I’m always a bit confused by the Classic Wines of Estonia leaflet, because while we do have vineyards, they’re very low-key and certainly not what we would try to entice tourists with.

Classic Buckwheat Porridges of Estonia might be more believable. But less funny, maybe

[Jenuall]

I mean that’s kind of the point isn’t it? The article is supposed to be dull so picking something that Estonia is not known for makes sense

[Dave]

[Author]

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