Refresh For The Memory: Series X Byte 1

[Moonlight]

Shame we never get to see the ship properly renamed the SS Howard Rimmer.

A bit late but I did post this in the memes thread recently.

[Moonlight]

For the record – it feels like a mischaracterisation that Rimmer would be pro-Confederates.

Two things.

(1) I don’t see why he couldn’t apply the same “admire the military tactics of the generals and ignore the war crimes” shit he does for other fascist movements.

but more importantly:

(2) When does it even ever imply he’s pro-Confederate? He’s watching an alternate history drama. I watched Man in the High Castle but that doesn’t mean I want to live in that world.

[Moonlight]

How did Howard die in the first place, and end up 3 million years in the future? Considering that Crawford doesn’t know about the Simulant uprising and surely wouldn’t have waited that long to make her move, it reads like they fell through a time portal (… or Timewave), or have been in stasis, not that they’ve just been chilling out.

I keep seeing people asking this, and I always thought they pretty much spelled it out by explaining the rod contracts spacetime to bring things formerly connected back together again. Howard and Sim were dragged from post-accident days into the same region of time and space as Rimmer currently is, as he and Howard are connected. Kryten even says “Did the rod do this?” the moment it all happens, after explaining that the rod does exactly the kind of thing that just happened. The simulant uprising being a new idea to them just further cements that they’ve been yanked out of the deep past. 

I just cannot remember ever being confused by this, but it was a decade ago and my memory is utter shit. I do remember watching Trojan like five times before Fathers and Suns released because there was such novelty to having a new half-hour regular episode of Dwarf to watch. The show was seemingly long dead by time I originally found it. I even crushed Trojan down tiny to play it on my little Sansa mp3 player on the way to high school or back.

It’s like a time capsule of 2012 to hear Pree’s abilities described as being “like predictive text on a cell phone”. I feel like even at the time, “autocorrect” was rapidly overtaking that as the go-to term, if it hadn’t already fully supplanted it. 

I feel like predictive text is a more clear explanation considering it implies things like the word suggestions bar that anticipate what words are likely to follow the one you just used, vs. autocorrect guessing the word you are half-finished typing and then typing it for you when that isn’t at all the word you were trying to write. I can’t imagine any version of that explanation with “autocorrect” making it any clearer, or even reaching the same amount of clarity.

Autocorrect and anything else that automatically changes what I wrote without asking me first can absolutely fuck off. That shit is wrong 99% of the time when you’re hanging around in fandom spaces using lots of words that don’t exist in the wider language. And even when you aren’t, it’s still wrong most of the time. I live off the words suggestion bar because I am rubbish at typing on a phone screen, but that requires my input to alter or finish whatever I may have already typed. Once again, no, autocorrect, I did not tell that scam text to “Duck off.” Nobody has ever meant “Duck off” ever.

[Moonlight]

(Tried to append this to my last post but the edit timer ran out apparently and it was all erased. Good thing that modern browsers retain any field information when you go back a page.)

It’s not really reaching for greatness as all the commentary about Christianity is pretty shallow,

As a raging atheist who was only really seriously starting to consciously question the validity of her faith (and I’d never been super on board with any of it anyway) when Lemons aired, I can only help but wish this episode had made some points about Christianity that wouldn’t have scanned to me at the time as a parody of New Atheist talking points that don’t pick and choose the right targets.

If you want to criticize the ten commandments as the supposed most important rules to life here’s a few pointers:
 

(1) Three, count them, the first three of the commandments are just about stroking God’s vanity. 

(2) The fourth one encourages you to listen to your parents, right or wrong. Some nuance in these things might help avoid some pretty awful situations.

(3) Fifth one says don’t murder people. Took us this long to get to something you would consider reasonable for this list, and rest assured it is the ONLY one that should have qualified.

(4) Sixth and ninth are both basically the same thing. Don’t cheat on your woman or even want to cheat on your woman. Seems like we could have eliminated some of the redundancies in this very important list.

(5) Seven says to not steal, but there is no nuance to be found here. If I steal bread for my starving family I don’t think any reasonable person would call that immoral, unless you’re a Republican. Hardly worth the list, as is the tenth, which is about coveting things. That’s like stealing but without the stealing part. Treacherous! 

(6) Eight says not to slander people. Good idea, not worth the list of the ten most important things in the world that you should or should not do.

That covers the existing ones, but perhaps most importantly:

(7) There’s a whole WORLD of things whose absence from this list is jarring. Slavery apparently isn’t important enough to be worth mentioning – elsewhere the Bible has rules to regulate slavery without opposing its practice, and these passages were used in the Antebellum South to give legitimacy to the whole sordid idea. Meanwhile, sexual assault can’t be found either, nothing about physically abusing children, nothing about bigotry against outside groups. All shit that would have been profoundly useful either at the time or well down the line of history. And this feels all the more fucked up when you consider that three out of the ten commandments are about sucking up to God, but they couldn’t be bothered to include a pointer about not enslaving human beings. I’d say we could have used those extra five commandments that Moses dropped but I suspect it was probably just more stuff about coveting.

And this is all just off the top of my head. When Doug said he was listening to Christopher Hitchens when he wrote / thought of this episode, I definitely believe him. It’s got that New Atheist lack of nuance while being very smug about how right you are.

[Warbodog]

It’s got that New Atheist lack of nuance while being very smug about how right you are.

I was reminded of young Lister from Timeslides in that bit. Whatever you think of the message, the messenger is supposed to be a bit of a knob. But it’s hard to tell where the line is with Doug sometimes. I’m genuinely looking forward to rewatching Timewave and trying to get to the bottom of that one.

[Jonathan Capps]

(Tried to append this to my last post but the edit timer ran out apparently and it was all erased. Good thing that modern browsers retain any field information when you go back a page.)

Sooooo passive aggressive.

[Moonlight]

If it wasn’t for that safety net I would be burning your fucking house down after losing that much of a post. My only regret now is that I can’t go back to add more relevant memes to each point, like “Morally, ethically, hologram killing fine” after the one about murder.

[Flap Jack]

I keep seeing people asking this, and I always thought they pretty much spelled it out by explaining the rod contracts spacetime to bring things formerly connected back together again. Howard and Sim were dragged from post-accident days into the same region of time and space as Rimmer currently is, as he and Howard are connected. Kryten even says “Did the rod do this?” the moment it all happens, after explaining that the rod does exactly the kind of thing that just happened. The simulant uprising being a new idea to them just further cements that they’ve been yanked out of the deep past. 

Well, I took the “it bends space time” explanation of the quantum rod to mean it was able to instantly pull Howard’s ship from wherever it currently was in the universe to wherever Red Dwarf is, not that it pulled it from the distant past. As that’s more in line with the stated purpose of the rod.

I didn’t consider that Howard and Crawford might have time travelled 3 million years when I first watched the episode, but I think I just took it as a given that stuff from 3 million years ago does randomly turn up in Red Dwarf.

I guess it being straightforward time travel does make the most sense, but it would be nice if Doug constrained himself to giving the Dwarfers just 1 unlimited power time drive per series.

[International Debris]

I suppose if it didn’t have time travel qualities it would have been written as space rather than spacetime. But as I wrote in my thoughts, it’s the start of a run of bizarrely unexplained ideas in the Dave run. Kryten could have easily explained it rather than vaguely wondering if the rod did it. 

[Dave]

[Warbodog]

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Red Dwarf X. The plotting is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the explanations will go over a typical viewer’s head.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Red Dwarf X. The plotting is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the explanations will go over a typical viewer’s head.

As a consequence people who dislike Red Dwarf truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in Kryten’s existential catchphrase “Smeeee Heeee,” which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev’s Russian epic Fathers and Suns.

[Stabbim the Skutter]

Fun fact: I recently found out Kerry Shale was also the (uncredited) voice of Werner Von Croy from the Tomb Raider series. Make of that what you will.

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