Red Dwarf VIII is flawed

[Rubber]

Controversial statement, of course, but I rewatched recently and there were some aspects of the series which didn’t sit well with me:

1. What actually goes on with Holly in BITR3? He says he creates a second set of nanos — what? Is that then proven wrong because they’re in AI when he says it? How do you put a computer in AI if it doesn’t lick envelopes? Do both bighead Holly and prison Holly have the run of the ship’s circuitry, or is prison Holly only able to move between the watch and the cell screen? Never ever really followed any of this tbh.

2. Rimmer is subject to two serious sexual assaults in the first half of the series but they go unpunished. How is this acceptable?

3. Rimmer uses coercive control on Kochanski and nobody seems to mind. Appalling.

4. I asked this before but I still can’t get a handle of the scale or location or configuration of the orange prison tower in the CGI exterior shots.

5. Who does Cat live with?

On the plus side, Rimmer’s dad’s ‘conception sperm alibi’ was at least borne out to be true, a decade later.

Topic

[No]

A) stop spamming, B) that looks like a hunk of junk and C) there’s a reason we hang out here and not on TOS in the first place.

It smells of ass in here

[No]

But the https://unofficialreddwarfforum.com/
Doesn’t smell of ass

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Then piss off and stop contaminating it.

[No]

Then piss off and stop contaminating it.

Don’t piss on me you heathen

[Rubber]

I quite like being pissed on, if anyone’s offering.

[Dave]

Pops into the thread to post another delightful floor pun

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Did you come in and think urine trouble Dave?

[Dave]

I thought he might be a “wee” bit of a massive fucking twat.

[Hamish]

You do seem a bit pee-ved.

…can we go back to talking about floors now?

[Dave]

No, I’m board of that.

[Rubber]

Laminate sure if there are enough puns left tbh.

[Hamish]

I guess we are all starting to get tiled of this.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Since Ian pulled the rug out from under his feet, we can definitely get back to the ground work of laying these puns down.

[Dave]

I guess we are all starting to get tiled of this.

Maybe you’re not rugged enough.

[Hamish]

Ian deserves a place in the Hall of Heroes.

[clem]

I’ve just realised this is why I’ve had Freak Me in my head for the last couple of days.

[Yaron Ru]

Every so often I try and watch through VIII (the only series I don’t like) and hope to find myself enjoying it this time, only to end up bitterly disappointed.

I think that if the pieces were spliced just right, there’s a decent “Feature length special” in there, as there are decent stories and jokes, it just requires a lot of cutting. Hopefully one day I’ll produce a cut that works well and can act as a decent unofficial bridge between VII and BTE for fans that would prefer to make it part of their “headcanon”.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

you can’t just ignore and re-write huge chunks of a TV series and call it headcanon. Headcanon is for filling in gaps and unknowns, not changing something you don’t like. Fans of, well anything really, have to take the good with the bad.

VII I might not be great but you can’t erase it and replace it with something else. Otherwise why bother watching the show at all, just come up with your own adventures in your head and call that the show.

[Dave]

It’s my headcanon that Holly has always been played by Floella Benjamin.

[Flap Jack]

If you can headcanon to fill in gaps, and canon can undo or contradict itself, can you also undo actual canon with headcanon?

The answer: not under normal circumstances, but if you have a powerful enough head, anything is possible.

[Yaron Ru]

You can ignore Dennis The Donut Boy and that’s final.

[Rubber]

I always assumed VIII was entirely Donut Dennis’s psychotropic trial for impersonating a senior officer, set in motion countless millennia ago. The regular cast featured in it but only as figments of his imagination.

In reality they simply reboarded the nanobuilt Red Dwarf without a reconstructed crew, and Back to Earth picked up from the end of VII. The chameleonic microbe references in The Beginning refer to something that happened in the intervening period. It was a loooooooong gap, after all.

[srmcd1]

All of Series VIII can be whittled down to one hour. I did it myself. It’s quick and relatively painless.

[bloodteller]

what is it about the “Dennis The Donut Boy” stuff that gets everyone so wound up? it’s one throwaway line in an episode, and it’s not really out of character for him to have blackmailed his way into being Captain, is it? along with “one of the knights has escaped from the AR machine” it really seems like one of those things that everyone inexplicably gets annoyed about

[Rubber]

Why was there a shiny suit of medieval armour on Starbug?

[Dave]

It escaped from the AR machine.

[Ben Saunders]

Why was there a shiny suit of medieval armour on Starbug?

They’ve been all over the galaxy and have picked up a load of shite.

The Dennis the Donut boy line doesn’t even paint the Captain as incompetent or that wacky, I mean the man bullshit his was into a position of immense status and power, you have to be fairly competent and have your head fairly screwed on to be able to achieve something like that.

[clem]

I think that’s it. Hollister wasn’t a comedy character before VIII but that joke doesn’t really work for either characterization. I’ve disliked it ever so slightly less since somebody pointed out it’s likely a reference to “Pinback” in Dark Star, though.

[International Debris]

it’s not really out of character for him to have blackmailed his way into being Captain, is it?

By this point, his ‘characterisation’ was of a competent, well-respected Captain in charge of a five mile long ship.

It’s the equivalent of bringing Petersen back but him being the sober straight man objecting to Lister’s drunk laddish behaviour.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

It also re-charactersises him as someone that is no better really than Rimmer, he is just capable of cheating better than him.

I much prefer the the idea that everyone is actually capable of doing their job and got their on merit, and didn’t just cheat their way to the top as Rimmer regularly tries to.

It might not undermine Hollister’s competence, but it changes it from someone who is actually a stand up Captain to a bit of a no-body he blackmailed his way to the top. It removes a level of respect that the crew would have for him if they found out he didn’t know what he was doing, and he says as much himself.

[Ben Saunders]

It also re-charactersises him as someone that is no better really than Rimmer, he is just capable of cheating better than him.

Doesn’t that make him better than him in general, really? The real world typically works on who can lie and cheat and step over people the best, and “I much prefer the the idea that everyone is actually capable of doing their job and got their on merit” is fairly naive if you look at real life. A Captain can just have all the much smarter people around him do the big brain stuff, he just has to be a decent leader.

[Pete Part Three]

Trying to think of a real-world example of a person who is leading people despite having no qualifications that prove they’re worthy of leading people, beyond the ability to cheat and gain the position on dodgy deals and shenanigans.

Nope, can’t think of any. I guess you’re right, Ben.

[Flap Jack]

The issue with “Dennis the doughnut boy” is that it’s a huge reveal that changes our understanding of the character of Hollister, but it’s also just a quick throwaway gag, and a pretty cheap one at that.

It’s all costs and benefits, ultimately. If you’re paying the cost of a major reveal about Hollister that recontextualises all of his previous appearances, then you need an equally weighted benefit – either this doughnut boy thing is setting up a significant and good story for Hollister that actually acknowledges it or it’s one of the most side-splittingly funny lines ever. It’s neither.

Also it doesn’t help that it doesn’t make much sense for Hollister to randomly confess this in a vlog. I guess we’re meant to assume that the vlog doesn’t actually exist and is purely a narrative device / in his mind.

But of course it happens in the same story that has magical robots resurrecting people who died in ancient history and the main cast being put on trial in their dreams, so I guess it’s not too unbelievable.

[Pete Part Three]

I can see why they wanted to give Mac something funny to do. The man is fantastic at deadpan and Hollister in The End, Me2 and Stasis Leak didn’t give him the opportunity to do anything vaguely comic…but the Series VIII (and Skipper) version of him is such a broad trope. The shouty, incompetent man in charge. And he’s fat! And he has embarrassing medical complaints! Hilarious.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

The Hollister that is giving Rimmer a bollocking in Me2 over failing to seal the drive plate isn’t the same man who is cowardly escaping alone in an escape pod.

They’ve retconned the character to try and make him funny and it’s for the worse imo.

[International Debris]

It largely falls into Doug’s post-VII problem of “I have to make everything funny”, not realising that a serious context can make the jokes inherently funnier. Hollister is played as a serious, if likeable, ship’s captain, and his reprimanding Lister in The End shows he considers the safety of the crew and mission important. That he suddenly becomes a comedy fat bloke with no actual credentials undermines that, and, as Flap Jack points out, it’s not even done for a worthwhile narrative or comedy reason: it’s just a throwaway gag.

I remember watching BBC2’s showings of Third Rock from the Sun as a teenager, and the between-scene CG planet shots, with moons bouncing off planet rings and stuff, made me think of Red Dwarf, and if it was done the same, you’d have daft scene-breaks like the ship going past and suddenly being infinitely long or being bright colours or whatever. And then I realised that wouldn’t work at all because Red Dwarf exists in a serious universe, only one where the characters are witty and absurd circumstances happen to them. But the rest of the universe and its inhabitants have to be serious to make that work, and turning Hollister into a clown doesn’t work at all.

[tombow]

maybe Lister ordered the suit of armor from sort kind of online 3d printer thing. Why not? Starbug is big now, and he was ordering the coffee maker thing in Trojan.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Agree with everything Debris said.

Maybe the suit of armour actually did come from the AR machine. Maybe a Knight did escape, Lister killed him then donned his armour to fight Rimmer.

[tombow]

I’m trying to decide what my actual worst single moment of S8 is, but having trouble choosing.

[Rubber]

I’m trying to decide what my actual worst single moment of S8 is, but having trouble choosing.

Probably either of the rapes for me. Or that bit where Birdman says ‘and this is Pete!’ with a big grin that I think is supposed to be endearing.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I won’t hear a bad word said against Birdman you heartless cretin.

The single worst moment of series VIII has to be the moment the BBC commissioned it I think

[Pete Part Three]

I think I’ll plump for the Data Doctor which was early enough in the series to make me think “what the fuck has this show turned into?”

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

If we’re being serious, the Blue Midget dance has to win surely? Dream/AR sequence or not, that’s just a waste of screen time.

[Pete Part Three]

I think I’ve repressed my first viewing of that.

[Ben Saunders]

The worst part of VIII is discussing it on G&T, again

[Dave]

THE SMEG IT IS

[Renegade Rob]

The worst part of VIII is discussing it on G&T, again

See you in ten minutes?

See you in ten minutes?

See you in ten minutes?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

The worst part of VIII is discussing it on G&T, again

it’s not as though you have to be involved. You could ignore it, the way we ignore your Star Wars ramblings when you go off on those tangents.

There’s plenty of other threads, and you could start you’re own about any number of topics. Why begrudge a thread to the people that are enjoying the discussion just because you don’t happen to like it.

[RunawayTrain]

If we’re being serious, the Blue Midget dance has to win surely? Dream/AR sequence or not, that’s just a waste of screen time.

Yup. Not much of VIII actually made me physically cringe, but that did. Yeesh.

The assaults on Rimmer still confuse me. He took the sexual magnetism virus to become irresistible to women, then when they can’t resist he tries to refuse? I’m not victim-blaming at all, but at the same time the women were not in control of themselves – we saw how it affected Kochanski, and how she felt disgusted and mortified once it wore off; her actions were not willing – so the women with Rimmer would feel similarly, and equally their actions were not willing either.

(Btw if the genders were reversed I would still be confused; it just would may have been more immediately recognised as problematic.)

I can only conclude that Rimmer trying to refuse was another thing for the sake of ‘oh this’ll be funny’ without thinking through the implications. The implications of the virus making someone actually irresistible – not just attractive – are problematic in themselves, too. I cannot see a way around the situation (e.g. Rimmer consenting) that would make it okay.

[Spaceworm Jim]

But there’s also the end scene of Back in the Red, and all the hilarity that implies.

[Author]

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