Red Dwarf – but they never leave Red Dwarf

[Asclepius]

There’s discussion elsewhere about how Series 1 and Series 2 have a very similar feel, and I think that’s true – the slow intros, lack of Kryten, the whole ‘trapped on the ship’ feeling. The claustrophobia. The boredom (of the characters, not of the viewers!), the ‘trapped’ nature of a sitcom.

But other posters have noted that some episodes could fit closer with Series 3.

So, my question for people with more detailed knowledge than me…what would Red Dwarf look like if there was no Starbug, Blue Midget, etc?

We’d still have all of Series 1. For Series 2, we’d lose Kryten (they can’t get to the Nova 5), Better Than Life could still happen (although it would still have a different feel – it’s not like it’s set on the ship in the same way as the other episodes, but I’m going to include it anyway), we’d lose Thanks for the Memory, we’d probably keep Stasis Leak (again, different to Series 1, but still technically not using smaller craft to get off the ship – unless you count Lister and Kryten going to the hotel, which must be by shuttle?), Queeg would 100% stay, but does Parallel Universe? I think they use smaller ships to travel between the parallel Dwarfs…

And Series 3 onwards? Over to you!

Topic

[Warbodog]

Mechocracy felt like this, but they’re loading up the transport craft in that and evacuation is part of the plot, so probably not.

You can probably keep Dear Dave, can’t remember.

I think Krytie TV has them returning from a Canary mission on a shuttle, so I’m afraid you have to lose that one.

[gerrydelasel]

A lot of episodes could still happen, but instead of travelling to a another ship or planet, they would find these things hidden in unexplored parts of Red Dwarf.

[Flap Jack]

OK, I assume we’re not just discounting every episode with Kryten in it on the basis that the episode where they met Kryten (and the off-screen rescue of him) couldn’t happen under this framework. Each episode is an independent creation.

So,

Backwards – no.

Marooned – no.

Polymorph – yes.

Bodyswap – yes overall, but you’d need to rework the final act.

Timeslides – no if you’re banning all travel off Red Dwarf, yes if you’re only banning travel by shuttlecraft.

The Last Day – yes.

[gerrydelasel]

If Red Dwarf doesn’t have its own transport vehicles, does it at least have a landing bay for foreign craft? If so, other ships can still turn up, such as the Nova 5.

[Flap Jack]

I was assuming that other spacecraft can still board Red Dwarf for this premise, but I don’t consider the Nova 5 a good example because the fact that it’s crashed is too fundamental.

[gerrydelasel]

Is the crash fundamental? Isn’t the only requirement that the crew be dead, which is hardly a problem three million years into deep space?

[International Debris]

Yeah, you can have things arriving on board to bring outside plots. Kryten could turn up rather than be traveled to – the skeleton reveal could be him trying to get them into his own shuttle – Thanks for the Memory could probably be reworked so the black box is shot off into space, Bodyswap doesn’t need the chase at the end and could be rewritten.

Parallel Universe is interesting, maybe they could have shuttles that our universe doesn’t? Or they could have merged ships or something. When they powered up the drive they could have just arrived on the female ship.

Camille is another that could work with some rewriting, have her arrive rather than be rescued by Kryten. Obviously there’s some thematic stuff that would be lost. DNA… well, the craft docks with RD, so while they leave it, they don’t need to actually use a shuttle or anything, so I’d count it. Justice is the first since Marooned that’s a definite No, the bulk of the episode and its themes being based on the nature of Justice World. White Hole would need a reworking of the ending, but it’d be doable – it’s IV’s ‘bottle’ episode. Dimension Jump would still work conceptually, but would need a good bit of rewriting to introduce Ace in a similarly heroic way. Meltdown… no ships, but I’m assuming the matter paddle fits into the ‘etc.’ category, in which case it’s another distinct No.

V barely features the main ship at all. If you wanted to stretch things, Holoship has Rimmer transported to a single ship by advanced hologram technology, so would fit, thematically, with the ‘stuck on board’ idea ok to me. The Inquisitor doesn’t need the opening Starbug scene so is fine. Terrorform is a complete No. Quarantine might be doable if Langstrom showed up on her own, although it’d need some strong rewrites to make it work. Demons & Angels… I wonder if there’s a way they could have done this to make it change their own Red Dwarf into one with areas that are high and low? I think the concept is doable. Better Than Life could be done with something appearing on the ship that shoots despair venom.

VI is, of course, a complete no, although I think Psirens, Gunmen and Out of Time would have been workable. 

VII is mostly fine. If you’re being strict about no travel, then Tikka is out, but most others would be doable with some tweaks, which is a sign of how much STARDISbug is just Red Dwarf. If you allow for the linkway to turn up, then you’d be missing Beyond a Joke, you’d need to rewrite Caroline Karmen’s arrival (another pod?), and weirdly, the episode that actually has Red Dwarf in wouldn’t be doable given that it’s about the hunt for the ship.

VIII is made redundant because without losing Red Dwarf and being on Starbug they wouldn’t be able to end up on a newly reconstructed Red Dwarf with the crew. Maybe the crew could have been resurrected another way, but it doesn’t feel like something that would have happened at all. Which is a big plus of this timeline.

BtE… they technically never leave the ship, you could definitely just have the squid appear onboard somehow, although by this time you’d imagine they’d have started quarantining everything that tried to get on the ship.

Trojan could work with the ship docking, Dear Dave is all onboard, Lemons depends on whether you’re allowing for the rejuvenation shower, but let’s go with a No. Entangled is a definite No, Dear Dave works, The Beginning could probably have been reworked.

Officer Rimmer is the only XI episode I can see really working, the others rely on Starbug travel a bit too much. 

Swap the evacuation for a power down and you can work Mechocracy, I think M-Corp might work if you do allow the travel in there as an externally added thing, and Skipper is technically all onboard ship. TPL is a No.

That makes 22 definite No episodes and a large number of rewrites.

[gerrydelasel]

Regarding Parallel Universe, the crew could travel between ships by space walking (space suits and umbilical tethers), and Rimmer could be ‘beamed’ over or whatever.

[International Debris]

I suppose the two ships could also just dock. Have one of those space docking corridor things that those sci fi programmes always have.

[Warbodog]

Then they’d make Baby Red Dwarfs by Parallel Universe logic.

[Flap Jack]

While the setup wouldn’t be totally infeasible with Kryten coming to them rather than the other way around, I still think it would be too major a change. If the Nova 5 has no issues boarding Red Dwarf, what’s the distress? And wouldn’t Kryten have to be the one flying it, despite him personally believing that the crewmembers who should be doing that are still alive? It would also make it weirder in my opinion for the Dwarfers to board the Nova 5 instead of just expecting Kryten and the others to immediately meet them in the landing bay.

But I guess we never clarified how much of an episode we’re allowed to rewrite in order to make the “no Starbug or Blue Midget” restriction work. Maybe I was too hasty in suggesting a rework of the Bodyswap finale.

I think it’s fine if the use of shuttlecraft doesn’t really contribute anything (like in The Inquisitor), but if it is a significant part of the plot then it becomes more debatable. Are we asking which episodes already 99% work without Starbug, or are we asking which episodes can be made to work without Starbug if we permit ourselves to rewrite everything except for the core premises? Sure, maybe the Despair Squid could just be a space-faring creature that directly attacks Red Dwarf and the main plot could still technically still happen, but we’d be losing virtually the whole first act.

[International Debris]

Completely agree with that, but I’m trying to imagine a world in which the idea of leaving the ship never occurred to them, and thus which episode concepts would they have still tried. Some of the ways of achieving them might seem clunky in contrast with the versions we know, but would Rob and Doug have still thought “yeah, they’re attacked and wake up to find they’re in a computer game” was a feasible episode?

Justice World, the psi-moon, GELF villages, backwards Earth: none of these would have been on their radar at all. Stranded robot, high and low selves, suicidal group hallucination? I think they’d have given them a shot.

I mean, we now have a group hallucination of squid ink origin episode that doesn’t involve them leaving the ship. 

[gerrydelasel]

Thinking about it, this isn’t a terrible way of generating new episode ideas…

[Frank Smeghammer]

Thinking about it, this isn’t a terrible way of generating new episode ideas…

As we clashed a touch perhaps on another thread, let this be an olive branch from me to you welcoming you in.

Idea for an episode.

This thread is a must read for a newbie. I envy you if you are getting to see this incredible madness for the first time.

[gerrydelasel]

I have looked at that thread a bit, but at over 200 pages I confess I only looked at the first and last half dozen pages or so. I got the impression it was just jokes and memes rather than serious episode ideas so I stopped looking, should I go deeper?

[Podey]

I’ve never really looked at it but just had a skip through and the best thing I saw in the early pages was Dave’s ‘Feltdown’ and ‘Bodyswab’, an initial episode and sequel dealing with the crew travelling back in time and discovering Earth airport security procedures.

[Rushy]

I think leaving the ship was inevitable, but transitioning into an action series was not.

Part of the appeal of I and II is that Rimmer and Lister are the lowest of the low. They don’t know how to run the ship. They don’t know how to fix anything more important than a vending machine. They can barely grasp Blue Midget, a tiny shuttle that probably has the most idiot-proof controls. 

Given how much of technology we ourselves do not understand, it feels very appropriate and realistic. In so much of sci-fi, the characters inexplicably know things beyond their professional remit because “it’s the future” or “they probably learned it off-screen”.

But in early Red Dwarf, they’re completely reliant on Holly. We see this especially well in Queeg, where they can’t even get any proper food without him. 

White Hole still pays lip service to this concept, but I don’t believe Rimmer/Lister could ever comprehend Starbug or even the bazookoids (the latter based on my own personal experience with having to learn how to handle a bazooka in the army… long story short, I didn’t). 

Even Kryten shouldn’t know how to do these things, he’s a cleaning bot. It’d honestly be funnier if he was enthusiastic to be the science officer, but kept making mistakes. 

[International Debris]

I have looked at that thread a bit, but at over 200 pages I confess I only looked at the first and last half dozen pages or so. I got the impression it was just jokes and memes rather than serious episode ideas so I stopped looking, should I go deeper?

Good God, no. Save yourself now.

[Warbodog]

It was mainly how we pissed about in the olden days before the Smega-Drive.

[gerrydelasel]

Ah, by the way is there an instruction somewhere on how to create smooth animated gifs with the Smegadrive? I figured out how to make it snap between a two or three fames, but does that mean you have to individually click and add every single frame if you want (e.g.) a 1 second animation?

[Unrumble]

Ah, by the way is there an instruction somewhere on how to create smooth animated gifs with the Smegadrive? I figured out how to make it snap between a two or three fames, but does that mean you have to click to add every single frame if you want (e.g.) a 1 second animation?

I’m not sure how to explain it, so I’ll leave that to someone else and just leave an unhelpful gif. 

[Flap Jack]

1. Use red and white arrows to remove and add frames from and to selection.

2. Click “Make GIF” button, and wait for it to load.

3. Click “Download” button.

4. To combine multiple GIFs into one, use Timeline feature as you have already been doing with individual frames.

[Warbodog]

I’ve never clicked Download, I right-click and open the gif in a new tab, then paste that URL in the add image field. However I first managed to get it working in 2021 is still how I’ll do it today.

[Flap Jack]

I always go the Download route, because even though I know that Smega-Drive gifs are set to not expire if they’re linked to on G&T, I’m paranoid that one I post will slip through the net somehow.

[gerrydelasel]

[Moonlight]

I’ve never clicked Download, I right-click and open the gif in a new tab, then paste that URL in the add image field.

[Asclepius]

I think leaving the ship was inevitable, but transitioning into an action series was not.
Part of the appeal of I and II is that Rimmer and Lister are the lowest of the low. They don’t know how to run the ship. They don’t know how to fix anything more important than a vending machine. They can barely grasp Blue Midget, a tiny shuttle that probably has the most idiot-proof controls. 

Given how much of technology we ourselves do not understand, it feels very appropriate and realistic. In so much of sci-fi, the characters inexplicably know things beyond their professional remit because “it’s the future” or “they probably learned it off-screen”.
But in early Red Dwarf, they’re completely reliant on Holly. We see this especially well in Queeg, where they can’t even get any proper food without him. 

White Hole still pays lip service to this concept, but I don’t believe Rimmer/Lister could ever comprehend Starbug or even the bazookoids (the latter based on my own personal experience with having to learn how to handle a bazooka in the army… long story short, I didn’t). 

Even Kryten shouldn’t know how to do these things, he’s a cleaning bot. It’d honestly be funnier if he was enthusiastic to be the science officer, but kept making mistakes. 

100% agree. It was like we were as lost as the rest of them. As a teenager I definitely preferred S3-S6, but my own kid dramatically lost interest as we transitioned from S2-S3. We’re towards the end of S5 now, but it’s definitely been more at more instigation than his!

[Dax101]

I always got the impression that in series 1 and 2 they had to use the machines to get food because there was a more an attempt to make 1 and 2 futuristic and technology-based, so they were not able to get food without the machines working. The machines being the only way they could get food.  Series 3 onwards the crew seemed to be a little more hands on with the workings of the ship. In polymorph Lister is cooking his own food. And White Hole doesn’t suggest they can’t get food, but more their way to produce quality food without technology is tough due to dependency on it

As for travelling around in Starbug or Blue Midget, you don’t need to be the best of the best to know how to drive. I imagine there are things you can go through the motions on without being an expert. And as the show goes on you probably could accept they would at least learn tasks in a basic sense.

[Rushy]

Boiling the piloting of a space vehicle down to “knowing how to drive” is not very wise.

I know how to drive a car. I had absolutely no idea how to drive an armored car after it was explained to me. 

It’s a dizzying array of consoles, levers, buttons. Half of it does things you can’t imagine and the other half does things you can imagine in a way you can’t imagine. 

Now multiply that complexity by ten because we’re talking about space vehicles, not armored cars. 

[Rushy]

I’m not saying it’s impossible to learn, but I don’t think these characters are the type to put in the required effort, and in any case it damages the original concept of them being the lowest of the low. 

[Warbodog]

It’s not totally satisfying in that sense, but you could assume that Lister applied himself to learn these things once he accepted his lot and adapted to survive after a while (series 2 seems to claim it’s been 2 years, later contradicted), like in the first book where he bothered to learn how to mine (great bit), except not depicted.

Cat flying Starbug in VI is harder to make fit, but he also has smell-telepathy through space, so I’ll just leave it.

[Technopeasant]

It was mainly how we pissed about in the olden days before the Smega-Drive.

Now we piss wherever we please.

To combine multiple GIFs into one, use Timeline feature as you have already been doing with individual frames.

I never use the Timeline and just use Ezgif. That also allows me to resize/crop frames between the 4:3 BBC and 16:9 Dave clips.

I suppose the two ships could also just dock. Have one of those space docking corridor things that those sci fi programmes always have.

If they had that and the other workarounds suggested would we notice the absence of shuttles? It was only on my second watch of The Orville that I noticed they never used teleporters.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

It’s not totally satisfying in that sense, but you could assume that Lister applied himself to learn these things once he accepted his lot and adapted to survive after a while (series 2 seems to claim it’s been 2 years, later contradicted), like in the first book where he bothered to learn how to mine (great bit), except not depicted.
Cat flying Starbug in VI is harder to make fit, but he also has smell-telepathy through space, so I’ll just leave it.

Lister is lowest of the low because he doesn’t apply himself. He is actually quite capable. In the books he is (badly) flying those hoppers which are like Blue Midgets. And he lives in a society where flying space ships is quite normal. Whilst Rusty is right, it’s not just “driving car”, it’s not like us being asked to pilot a space shuttle. It’s much more likely relatively normal people have some exposure to space flight. It may be that even technicians are expected to carry a licence for ship to surface vehicles, the same way a lot of jobs require you to carry a driving license. Hence why Rimmer is able to teach Kryten how to pilot Starbug. 

As for Cat, he is shown in the book to be naturally incredibly talented at piloting. In the TV show he is rarely shown to be useless at anything, just very uncaring. Once they lost Red Dwarf self preservation likely kicked in and he probably stepped up to pilot (following a quick lesson from Lister)

[Frank Smeghammer]

Cat first pilots White Midget in Bodyswap where they need to track down Rimmer who has stolen Lister’s body. Rather than do a bodyswap with Lister.

Despite Lister’s reservations, Cat appears to be adept and demonstrates great instincts. He even tells Cat to back out because Rimmer is leading them into a dangerous run but Cat continues to back himself to chase Rimmer right up until the last second when he pulls away and leaves Rimmer to crash land

Basically, if it wasn’t for Bodyswap they might never have discovered Cat’s piloting skill.

[Ian Symes]

Cat first pilots White Midget in Bodyswap

Except in Bodyswap Re-Mastered, where he pilots W…        Midget.

[Dave]

Cat also sits upfront with Lister in Starbug during the scene in Backwards where they’re searching for Rimmer and Kryten, so he’s probably been picking this stuff up for a while.

[Unrumble]

Cat also sits upfront with Lister in Starbug during the scene in Backwards where they’re searching for Rimmer and Kryten, so he’s probably been picking this stuff up for a while.

Maybe Rimmer was also doing driving lessons with him, too.

[International Debris]

Plus, Lister pilots Blue Midget in series 2, so it’s not like these kinds of skills came out of nowhere with the almost-soft-reboot of III. 

[Dax101]

Well if the crew were still around Lister probably wouldn’t be qualified to fly a starbug. But when you don’t have a crew around, yeah Lister will likely take a blue midget or starbug on a ride just because why not? He will get hang of the controls and anything they need in his own way. Whether  with help from holly or whatever. Lister isn’t interested in progression, but would be more interested in just curing boredom.

[Author]

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