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

[International Debris]

I see Cappsy’s not fixed the new page bug yet, then.

[Ben Saunders]

The “United America” clip from ‘Cured’ is doing the rounds on Instagram and I’ve given myself a headache reading all the people debating whether the clip is from the 2000s, the 90s or the 80s. I even saw one person says “it’s from the episode ‘Cured’, 1997”. 

I saw it on TikTok and yeah the comments were fried, people were talking as if the episode was from 1990 or 2025

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

[Moonlight]

How the fuck do they know the title but think it’s from Series VII?

[Rushy]

How the fuck do they know the title but think it’s from Series VII?

They asked ChatGPT

[Moonlight]

Honestly that tracks. 

[Moonlight]

Jokes about characters dressing up as Spiderman and Batman to have sex continue into Series VII and VIII after Rob is gone. Make of that what you will.

[Rushy]

I feel like it’s a good way to make risque jokes while also keeping it family friendly. 

[Moonlight]

I feel like it’s a good way to make risque jokes while also keeping it family friendly. 

I know what you mean, but I’m chuckling at the idea that you can make anything family friendly by adding Spiderman.

[Dave]

I like that the brief for these monitor props was to add sci-fi stuff and angular bits to the side of them so they don’t just look like late-20th century flatscreen monitors. But they still do.

Having said that, presumably flatscreen monitors felt fairly new and modern when VII was filmed, so this looked more like futuristic sci-fi and less like two married mid-2020s remote workers spending their day at home together.

[Rushy]

This wig tho

[Moonlight]

I’m just going to assume we don’t have the technology to make a curly wig. I think the hair piece he’s worn since XI is perfectly fine but it absolutely doesn’t have the same texture as his real hair.

No idea what the fuck was going on with his hair in Series X.

Also, did Skipper really need to give him an H the size of Lake Michigan? I can see they’re recycling that one here.

[Nick R]

I like that the brief for these monitor props was to add sci-fi stuff and angular bits to the side of them so they don’t just look like late-20th century flatscreen monitors.

Still, that was more elaborate than what Battlestar Galactica did with all its paper props a few years later.

[Dave]

Still, that was more elaborate than what Battlestar Galactica did with all its paper props a few years later.

The octagonal corner-cutting? Yeah that was a weird one.

[Rushy]

Also, did Skipper really need to give him an H the size of Lake Michigan? I can see they’re recycling that one here.

I have a vague recollection that Doug wanted everything to be slightly off because it’s not their original reality. So Rimmer has a bigger-than-normal H, Holly’s lighting is blue instead of yellow etc. But take it with a grain of salt. 

No idea what the fuck was going on with his hair in Series X. 

It’s an attempt to imitate this military styling, with far less hair volume and colour. 

They did the same for Howard Rimmer.

[International Debris]

This wig tho

I’m getting proper Partridge vibes from that screenshot.

[Rushy]

What an oddly mundane way for the show to officially denounce its mission statement. 

[Warbodog]

They can’t risk messing up the post-human GELF/Simulant dystopian wonderland they’re living in.

It makes sense that Kryten would care a bit, as he’s from 150 years or whatever later than Lister’s time, so it’d be like someone possibly destabilising the whole 20th century for us. (No Hitler maybe, but also no Red Dwarf. Or several episodes would be different, at least).

[Rushy]

I fully agree with Kryten on an ethical level (it takes profound arrogance to rewrite people’s lives in any way), I’m just not sure these particular characters would care that much. 

[Flap Jack]

Yeah, this moment really annoys me. “We can’t risk fucking up the future” is only a real concern if they actually intend to return to it.

The biggest risk is that they do something which undoes their own existence, but (A) the events of Dallas pretty much proved that wouldn’t happen, and (B) going back to after Kryten left Earth would further ensure that couldn’t happen.

Of course there’s always a chance they could go back to their own time and accidentally save or kill some major political figure and put the timeline on a dark path, but that’s a risk just from living in a society with no time travel at all.

And the kicker is that they “address” the idea of using the time drive to go back to Earth but don’t address the idea of using it to FIND RED DWARF.

[Rushy]

The biggest risk is that they 

interact with someone. 

We’re all made up of tiny decisions and reactions that we have every day of our lives. Literally anything the crew do in the past risks rewriting people’s personal lives. 

Major historical events is one thing, but imagine you go back in time and make an innocuous comment that gives someone an idea, that then snowballs into another idea. And then someone who would’ve originally found a blissful happy life as a weaver becomes a depressed writer. 

Imagine you accidentally trip someone, they scrape their knee and decide to go home and have some tea instead of continuing their walk. And by doing so, miss out on meeting someone vital to their life.  

I’m probably overthinking it, but it’s something that always did bother me with Doctor Who and its “fixed points in time”. Everything should be a fixed point in time.

[Dave]

Of course, Twentica later fucks up Earth’s timeline entirely and is never corrected, so maybe it’s all fine no matter what.

[Rushy]

Of course, Twentica later fucks up Earth’s timeline entirely and is never corrected, so maybe it’s all fine no matter what.

The Giant from Twin Peaks has it covered. Everyone lived inside tea kettles during the 1960s and then assumed it was the drugs. 

[Warbodog]

I more buy the argument from earlier in the episode that they should avoid time travel so they don’t get corrupted like their future selves (and even avoid having to fight further future us’es). Even if it’s a bit strange that it comes from Rimmer of all people, but it’s after his “better dead than smeg” epiphany that was a radical shift in the first place (seems like an earlier Rimmer would’ve been quite pleased at how his future self turned out).

[Rushy]

I feel like Tikka Lister might’ve been a bit of an experiment on Doug’s part to see who could be the new ‘troublemaker’ of the group before ultimately settling on Kryten. 

[Unrumble]

It’s an interesting point that is also relevant to the changes they make in Timeslides: does changing ‘your’ past/future for the better outweigh the fact that the version of ‘you’ that is making that decision, will technically cease to exist (“it’s happening, I’m disappearing!”).

Based on Timeslides, Lister seems to think this an acceptable sacrifice, further touched on in Dimension Jump (“I’m made up for him. Whatever he did that I didn’t, he deserves the lot.”), but by Tikka there’s now this stance that any fiddling with history is deemed too risky for civilisation as a whole. Even though from a personal perspective, despite their actions in Dallas re-writing their own history to the point where Red Dwarf itself isn’t there to return to, they continue to exist in the past with all their memories etc intact.

[Dave]

It’s interesting that the early time-travel stories like Future Echoes and Stasis Leak adhere to pretty fixed rules about time-travel being a closed loop where the effects on the past of any actions by people from the future will have already happened the first time around and there’s nothing you can do to change it.

But I guess that’s quite restrictive as a writer and it’s more fun to play with versions where things can change.

[Unrumble]

It’s interesting that the early time-travel stories like Future Echoes and Stasis Leak adhere to pretty fixed rules about time-travel being a closed loop where the effects on the past of any actions by people from the future will have already happened the first time around and there’s nothing you can do to change it.
But I guess that’s quite restrictive as a writer and it’s more fun to play with versions where things can change.

Closed loop feels like it makes more logical sense, but yes, adopting the ‘Back to the Future’ approach offers more opportunity for drama and hi-jinks.

[Technopeasant]

The biggest risk is that they 
interact with someone. 
We’re all made up of tiny decisions and reactions that we have every day of our lives. Literally anything the crew do in the past risks rewriting people’s personal lives. 
Major historical events is one thing, but imagine you go back in time and make an innocuous comment that gives someone an idea, that then snowballs into another idea. And then someone who would’ve originally found a blissful happy life as a weaver becomes a depressed writer. 
Imagine you accidentally trip someone, they scrape their knee and decide to go home and have some tea instead of continuing their walk. And by doing so, miss out on meeting someone vital to their life.  
I’m probably overthinking it, but it’s something that always did bother me with Doctor Who and its “fixed points in time”. Everything should be a fixed point in time.

As Flap Jack alludes to up thread, at what stage are they culpable and who is to say what is the correct course? We all make tiny ripples in the course of every day in our normal lives. It is one thing to go and intentionally change history but to just go back and live is somewhat different. Especially since going into stasis was kind of time travel to begin with.

[Rushy]

As Flap Jack alludes to up thread, at what stage are they culpable and who is to say what is the correct course?

The correct course is the one without time travel. 

It’s one thing to affect others around you. It’s quite another to go back and rewrite what happened. Unless you’re a complete hermit, inevitably you will affect people’s lives in some manner and those ripples will spread. Imagine someone comes back in time willy-nilly and, with the best of intentions, innocently decides to date your mother in the past. You might never even be born, and they’d have no way of knowing you should be born. But your life is just casually wiped out forever. 

[Warbodog]

The characters know that the many-worlds interpretation of reality is true too, and every possibility is being played out elsewhere infinitely, which should take the pressure off.

[International Debris]

As Flap Jack alludes to up thread, at what stage are they culpable and who is to say what is the correct course?

The correct course is the one without time travel. 
It’s one thing to affect others around you. It’s quite another to go back and rewrite what happened. Unless you’re a complete hermit, inevitably you will affect people’s lives in some manner and those ripples will spread. Imagine someone comes back in time willy-nilly and, with the best of intentions, innocently decides to date your mother in the past. You might never even be born, and they’d have no way of knowing you should be born. But your life is just casually wiped out forever.  

Imagine you were only born because someone travelled back in time and dated your mother. Without time travel you’d never even have been born and you’d have been casually wiped out forever. 

[Rushy]

Imagine you were only born because someone travelled back in time and dated your mother. Without time travel you’d never even have been born and you’d have been casually wiped out forever. 

So?

If I’m created through a corruption of the timeline, then I wasn’t meant to exist. 

[Flap Jack]

So?

If I’m created through a corruption of the timeline, then I wasn’t meant to exist.

Except this ideology contains a serious flaw – it requires you to believe in the concept of fate and also not believe in it. You can say “whatever happened is what was meant to happen”, but where do you draw the line? Because “whatever happened” includes the bit where you gained access to a time machine and the bit where you used the time machine – and depending on how time travel works in the story, it may already include all of your time traveling activity in the past.

History is a relative concept. If you have free will, then you’ll change the course of history regardless of whether you’ve time traveled at any point. And if you don’t have free will, the impact of your time travel is as pre-determined as anything else.

The reason why time travelers tend to have a bigger impact is because they have future knowledge which puts them at an advantage over everyone else – but the BftD are no-nothing buffoons (except for Kryten, who as a mechanoid could just lock down or erase his knowledge of future history for safety).

So there should be no reason it would be more perilous to the unfolding timeline to settle down in their original time (or just a few hundred years later) than it would be to settle down in the present.

[Rushy]

Except this ideology contains a serious flaw – it requires you to believe in the concept of fate and also not believe in it.

I believe that free will and fate can co-exist hand in hand. Time travel is a perversion of that.

Unless, as you said, the act of time travel itself is part of history, and you don’t actually change anything by travelling back in time (you were always going to do it, so your actions are an inherent part of the timeline). 

But if the act of time travel is an alteration, then I do not tolerate it because free will/fate is the result of various micro-factors. If you change them, then fate becomes non-existent and your free will will no longer be your free will. 

[Dave]

How do you know as a time-traveller whether it’s one or the other?

[sleepey]

Try causing a paradox & see what happens. Might get some extra storage space out of it.

[Podey]

Resisting the urge to derail the board with ‘Lost’ chat again….

[Warbodog]

When Lister alters his past in Timeslides, he doesn’t end up creating himself with Kochanski in the future, so how does he still exist? Or does he just cut the loop and become the last one?

[Flap Jack]

The most convincing solution I’ve heard on that is the branching timeline theory. Basically, a Lister from a “prime” timeline delivers his baby self, and then that timeline branches off into some timelines that loop, and some that don’t. For the ones that don’t, Baby Lister was effectively dropped off by Lister from a parallel universe.

[Warbodog]

I guess the Lister from Doug’s unproduced special had decided he didn’t need to keep going round and round in time after all and could call it quits. Probably because he’s seen there are still humans all over the place anyway.

[tombow]

King of the Hill season 10 episode 1 – starts off with Hank and Bill catching the rest of the guys trying to secretly go fishing without them. Later they’re all on a boat called the “Queeg”.

[Moonlight]

I’ve become increasingly convinced over the years that the edits of XI and XII are essentially unfinished. The extremely limited pool of model shots they pull from despite having shot many more, weird moments like the studio ceiling being very blatantly shown during an exterior scene in Twentica as if they meant to comp in a sky but never had time to do it, and the bizarre and annoying recycling of music cues even where Howard wrote original music, which gets much worse in XII. It just feels like they had to abandon certain elements of post-production in the middle of the process because they ran out of time and the shows were due.

All that weirdness with the soundtrack and reusing the same transitional music cue ad nauseum makes a lot more sense if we’re essentially hearing temp edits, and that so much less of Howard’s music is in XII makes more sense if both series had to be locked and finalized at the same time but they never actually got that far into replacing the temp music tracks in XII before they had to be delivered.

This is basically the exact opposite of what happened to X where the production was a mess but they pulled their shit together in post.

[International Debris]

So?
If I’m created through a corruption of the timeline, then I wasn’t meant to exist. 

“Meant to exist” suggests a plan or a creator. I don’t believe in either, so I don’t have much of a response. 

But in short, what we think of as the “correct” timeline might itself be corrupted by past time travel. Who’s to say which timeline is more valid or correct than another?

[Warbodog]

Part of the joke of JOZXYQK is that the “cat word” happens to be extremely high scoring (which casts doubt on its authenticity), with the notable exception of the “O,” which is only 1 point.

Maybe that was originally going to be a higher-scoring letter (candidates are 4-point F, H, V, W – or a second Y), but it was changed to make it easier for Craig to say? Though this wouldn’t seem to be a stretch:

Watching the clip on YouTube, it’s not clear which letter Danny might be saying.

But I suppose a better delivery is overall funnier than the joke being more technically comprehensive.

[Technopeasant]

[NoFro]

“You’ll never get me.”

“Yeah, I will.”

That aged well.

[Unrumble]

“You’ll never get me.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49plVGd_IA0

[Rushy]

I’ve become increasingly convinced over the years that the edits of XI and XII are essentially unfinished. 

Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s a complete mess. But I think it has its own charm at this point. 

But in short, what we think of as the “correct” timeline might itself be corrupted by past time travel. Who’s to say which timeline is more valid or correct than another?

I still feel it should be the original. Not because of act of God, but because it was how the lives were going to play out untampered. I just personally feel that should count for something. 

But if we are talking theology, I’m agnostic and leaning towards the idea that there is something, but it’s completely beyond our ability to comprehend. And probably isn’t going to resurrect us to chill in an afterlife forever. Although I live in hope! I try to always be open to the idea of being wrong. 

[Podey]

I think we get in trouble thinking about “original timeline” in regards to Red Dwarf because (as may have been already noted) surely Lister wouldn’t be in it, since it was an act of time travel that placed him under the pool table. 

[Author]

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