Saga Continuums – a Red Dwarf fanedit series

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

Back in 2014, a young faneditor named Sean McDonnell, who was a member of this very forum until he turned to evil, created two (well, three technically, as he made a second version of one of them) feature-length fanedits of Series VII and VIII.
I come to you now to tell you that since October of 2021, I have been working (with the aid of our own KT) on my own such endeavour to create four 90-minute “specials” that, when watched in sequence, tell a much tighter, and hopefully more Dwarf-y version of events following Out of Time.
At the time of writing the first of these, Canaries, is completed has been submitted for listing on IFDb, the Internet Fanedit Database, though at the moment that’s currently slightly stalled for reasons I’ll explain in a later post.
Anyway, the edit is functionally complete and for legal reasons is not currently available on any platforms, though I intend to eventually upload a password-protected version to Vimeo as soon as this whole listing thing is straightened out.  In the meantime, if you want to watch it, contact me on Discord and I’ll pass a link to you.  (No, I’m not going to tell you what it is.  
Canaries comprises the events of Cassandra through Only the Good…, and if I do say so myself is a massive improvement over the original episodes, with such changes as follows in the non-exhaustive list below:
• No more pencil Dwarf
• No more fat jokes
• All long/repetitive gags have been significantly trimmed down
• The entire A-plot of Krytie TV has been removed – in the new sequence, Kill Crazy has the idea before boarding the Silverberg, and subsequently forgets about it when he has his head injury
• The Time Wand is onboard the Silverberg, thus removing the need for a separate trip to a separate ship
• The sequence of events is re-ordered so that Kryten and Kochanski’s revenge on Lister for the period prank is to trick him into trashing and then cleaning Ackerman’s quarters on live television
• Pete now explicitly follows on from Krytie TV
• Virtually all conceivable filler in Pete is gone – Hollister’s punishment for the prank is the spud duty, Pete’s rampage is significantly shortened, the cow vindaloo is omitted entirely, and Baxter and Kill Crazy never steal the Time Wand
• Rimmer and Lister are now hospitalised as a result of the delayed fight scene
• Via rotoscoping, Birdman is among the escaping crewmembers when they discover the microbe
• No, I didn’t use the alternate ending, because it’s unfinished, it lacks foley and finished effects, and one scene is missing a laugh track, now please stop asking me that
One of the recent additions made at the suggestion of the IFDb reviewer was a short “life in prison” montage using various VIII moments that hadn’t made it into my cut, and one beta watcher told me that the scene, and I’m paraphrasing here, made them nostalgic for Series VIII in a way that actually watching VIII itself could never quite evoke.  I’m quite proud of that, and I’m strongly considering getting the quote printed and framed.
Next I plan to tackle Series VII.  As there’s less of an obvious through-line between these I have a feeling this is going to be a tougher edit, but nevertheless, I intend to try my very best on it, and you can be sure that’ll be submitted to IFDb when finished as well.  Wish me luck!

Topic

[Podey]

Finally making a start on the Part 2, but as my PC is currently out of commission I’ve enlisted the help of wilhelm scream to get an assembly cut together. Once it’s all up and running again I’ll be doing most of the heavy lifting, including giving Kochanski a nice new lavender jumpsuit that you won’t need those sunglasses they hand out during eclipses to look at it

Not to discourage your efforts but my brain reacted to this like if someone changed Rimmer’s blue to pink. Red is Kochanski’s colour! 

[Dave]

I am 100% in favor of a thread where we humorously novelize sections of Red Dwarf that don’t deserve it.

Kryten had a bad feeling about this.

In theory, this shouldn’t have been possible. Sanitation mechanoids were programmed for many functions – latrine hygiene maintenance, end-to-end laundry services, even folding down non-elasticated bedsheets in a way that didn’t leave them scrunched up and lopsided – but general unattributed non-specific negative preoccupation was not one of them.

Suffice it to say, Divadroid International had not seen fit to create software coded with irrational nervousness. Call it a lack of foresight, or a simple disregard for the possibility that a Series 4000 could end up becoming a detective to rival Poirot, Morse or Bergerac, but hunch-based apprehension was not seen as a vital aspect of the coding process for mechanical appliances that would spend much of their life engaged in the relatively undemanding task of scrubbing toilet facilities.

But nevertheless, Kryten was perturbed. And even worse, he was struggling to put his finger on the exact cause. If you had asked him to lay a single mechanoid digit on the source of his perturbation, he couldn’t have done it. Truth be told, he couldn’t even be sure that “perturbation” was a word. But perturbed he was, and he wouldn’t feel properly prepared to begin his daily cleaning duties around the ship until he worked out why.

The day had started ordinarily enough. The three of them had been out on another jaunt down to the nearest celestial body that they had stumbled across: a routine that had seemed vanishingly rare in the early days of their time together, but which now seemed to happen with increasing frequency as Red Dwarf traveled through an inexplicably increasingly crowded region of deep space.

Kryten didn’t mind that he had been left out of the landing party. As always. He didn’t mind that he was always the One Left On The Ship, the Michael Collins of the operation, the one who had to stay back and monitor things from afar but who never got to feel for himself the unquantifiably unique sensation of alien sand between your toes. He didn’t mind that. In fact, he didn’t mind it so much that he would often passive-aggressively refer to himself as Mr Left Behind, repeating this title as frequently and loudly as his programming would allow, and on one occasion even making himself a crude paper hat adorned with his self-styled soubriquet.

But regardless of his simmering resentments, it was his job to stay on the ship, and check everything was going smoothly. And today – rather excitingly – things hadn’t gone smoothly at all.

Kryten had been listening in to the crew’s surface chat via radio, suffering through the usual waffle from Mr Rimmer that typically accompanied the flag-planting ceremony that was apparently an essential part of claiming planetoids for the JMC. And the mechanoid couldn’t have been more delighted when he was forced to interrupt the pompous speech – completely legitimately, mind you – to warn the landing party of a solar storm coming in from the west.

After Mr Rimmer responded with a bizarre non-sequitur about groping bottoms at a British state broadcaster, a niche reference to events that had transpired decades before his birth and sphere of experience – and maybe the first real sign that something was peculiarly amiss with this latest adventure – Kryten had nevertheless quickly managed to convince the crew to return to Starbug for their own safety.

But even after that, things hadn’t felt quite normal. Mr Rimmer kept referring to the moon that they had landed on as a planet, for no discernible reason. Then there was the odd temporal wash that had hit the ‘Bug a few minutes earlier, a phenomenon that Kryten had patiently tried to explain to his comrades but which they seemed singularly unable to grasp.

And now there was this new vessel that had just appeared on the scanner. As Kryten punched up the details in Starbug’s computer, he felt a simulated lurching in whatever passed for the pit of his non-existent mechanoid stomach.

Why he felt so strange about these latest developments, he really couldn’t say. It was commonplace for he and his crew to discover all manner of unusual spacecraft and bizarre astronomical phenomena as they ventured through deep space. In fact, it seemed to happen almost every week. So why should this be any different?

As the name of this latest vessel slowly materialised, character-by-character, on Starbug’s crude green-lit computer screen – “S-dot-S-dot-E-N-C-O-N-I-U-M” – a shrill voice in whatever passed for Kryten’s subconscious gave him a final screaming warning to turn Starbug around and get away from the foreign craft as quickly as its spluttering engines could manage.

But Kryten didn’t listen to that desperate, pleading inner voice as it echoed around his CPU. Kryten ignored that intuitive repulsion as simply a mistake, a mechanoid tic, a quirk of his imperfect programming.

In short, Kryten ignored his instincts.

In a little over an hour, Kryten was going to find out just how costly that mistake would turn out to be.

[International Debris]

Nick and Dave, bravo. Both tremendous.

[RunawayTrain]

Amazing.

(But Dave, did you in fact mean elasticated sheets?  Non-elasticated sheets are the easy ones.)

[Dave]

No, non-elasticated sheets are horrible, I can never fold them right and they always get untucked almost as soon as I use them. Elasticated every time for me.

[Warbodog]

Kochanski awoke to discover she’d been murdered in the night. Lying in a pool of blood, imprisoned in this increasingly insane universe, she calmly decided that maybe it was for the best. She closed her eyes and awaited the sweet release of death.

Then she felt familiar cramps and realised the reality was more mundane.

“Oh no, it’s the wrong time of the month,” she grumbled, climbing down from the bunk.

“Ma’am?” enquired Kryten, lying flat on his back and rubbing Archie vigorously.

“Oh god, Kryten, what are you doing?” Kochanski appalled.

“I am ‘having a wank,'” Kryten explained. “Mister Lister swears by it. Personally, I prefer Mahjong.”

Archie spurted out a jet of liquid soap, or at least Kochanski hoped that’s what it was. “Oh, creator,” Kryten dispassionately exclaimed, then tucked his old feller away and rose to attention.

“Leave it to me, ma’am,” the mechanoid announced, raising a dripping digit. “I’ll have your ‘wrong time of the month’ problem sorted in no time!”

Kochanski smiled as her quirky cellmate bounded off to his errand. He may have a pin missing from his SCSI connector, but when it came to issues of hygiene, there was none more reliable in the cosmos.

She was about to be proven hideously wrong.

[tombow]

The Prophet leaned forward in weariness, his hands on the wooden pulpit, his eager eyed followers on pews below. A flag with the moons of Io hung on the temple wall behind him, adorned with the legend “…and the greatest of these is hop“. 
Had some of the assembled looked at the prophet clearly, they could have noticed a certain resemblance to Dungo, a man who helped a few of them with their ground maintenance, as well as certain other local figures. But noone looked at him that clearly – they were too dazzled. 
He was an Ace, of course, and probably the second most important after the most important Ace himself – the one he was here to oversee. He had decided on arrival if he was going to rule these people, it would be by a philosophy he respected – one made of techniques he had studied on his travels – ones of regular movement and balance, foot to foot, to centre the mind and body. It would benefit the boy for his future tasks, as well as the community he was overseeing.
he watched with a warm struggle as the last stragglers hopped in. “he’s waiting for us” “what a guy” whispers echoed.
but there was one fact that only a handful of Aces of knew, one which only a few of them could even handle. All of them, the entire ring of Aces, were to culminate in this one. And this one’s main purpose was to aid someone else. Not to defeat Nazi supervillains or any of the other fun they had while overseeing the timelines. Only experienced Aces were humble enough to accept their true purpose without despair.
They were there to keep the creator sane.

[Moonlight]

First there was nothing.

Then there was silence.

The nothing hadn’t always been, it had simply been. But the silence, the silence had a distinct beginning, a distinct now. Nothing was just nothing, but silence implied perception. He was suddenly aware of the empty void in which his presence found itself.

Gradually, stimulus began to seep in, like water droplets through limestone. It began as indistinct tactile input, a subtle twitch in what he knew to be his hand. How he knew it to be his hand, he was unsure. He had never been aware of it until now, yet it was all too familiar. How peculiar.

Suddenly, the totality of bodily sensory input hit him like a cement mixer, and within moments, Second Technician Arnold Rimmer found himself casually cleaning one of Red Dwarf’s myriad chicken soup dispensers with a 14C, his favorite of the pipe cleaners. It had a certain subdued elegance to it that he felt the 14B lacked. Although he couldn’t shake the strange feeling that, just a moment ago, he wasn’t. Not only that he wasn’t here, but that he just wasn’t.

Huh. Odd.

Shaking his head, he quickly dismissed the idea as the sense of dissociation quickly faded. There had been no void, no silence, just another soul-crushing day in the life of Z-Shift. Soul-crushing? Rimmer tutted himself for the disparaging thought. He knew he had to stop letting doubts like that permeate his conscience, and silently vowed to make this the cleanest food dispenser this side of Enceladus.

In, out, in, out, in, out. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but damn if it wasn’t essential. Rimmer longed to be recognized for his efforts. He wasn’t just a lowly technician; he was the bringer of meals, the herald of sustenance. A spaceship was a closed system, and with eleven hundred and sixty-nine souls aboard the flow of food needed to stay constant. If you couldn’t get your soup, one could hardly pop to the next town over. He wasn’t just important, he was necessary. Many other jobs aboard this rust bucket were expendable, but not his.

Speaking of expendable, where the hell was Lister? Had he the audacity to shirk his job on such an important day? Granted, it wasn’t a holiday or any other time one would reasonably expect extra rush on the dispensers, but Lister had made a big speech the previous day about how he’d been neglecting his duties and had vociferously vowed to pull himself up by his boot-straps moving forward. Unless that was sarcasm, which it almost definitely was. Either way, Rimmer was poised to hold him to that promise and issue demerits if appropriate. That is to say, when appropriate.

Rimmer fingered his radio, tempted to broadcast his displeasure at Lister’s absence and order him to show up for work. He knew the lowly man wouldn’t be listening, but somebody else would be. That person would take note of Lister’s lack of response, and they would know. They would know how insubordinate and feckless he was. It was almost too delicious to think about. Rimmer, in an overly exaggerated movement, removed the wired microphone from its catch and slowly raised it to mouth-level.

“Lister?” he said. “I know you’re listening. You were supposed to report for Z-Shift duty an hour ago! If you don’t show up pronto, I can’t be held responsible for my actions.”

Fully expecting no response, Rimmer preemptively issued several demerits. He was, predictably, met with abject silence. Wonderful, he thought to himself, and rounded out the demerit count to a healthy five. Five demerits in a few seconds, that had to be some sort of record.

He silently hoped the JMC Board of Discipline had received the letter requesting his demerits be officially recognized.

Mildly annoyed that nobody on this frequency was butting in on his behalf, Rimmer was surprised as his belt-printer whirred to life and began dot-matrixing a letter. At last! Obviously, Lister had written a formal, groveling apology for his tardiness. He hadn’t been sarcastic after all! Perhaps he was sick today; he certainly hadn’t looked too well that morning. Then again, when did he ever? The printout nearly finished, Rimmer fondly wondered if all his talk of duty and honor had finally gotten through to his subordinate. The paper having completed its journey, he tore it from the feed and indulged its contents.

Seven distinct reactions battled for Rimmer’s expression, muddling together into an ambiguous pile of face. Three words in particular jumped out at him immediately; they consisted of “Lister”, “under” and “arrest”. He paused, coughed several times, and then brayed obnoxiously. Scanning for more amusing words, he found “stealing”, “crashing”, “Starbug”, and “stowaways”. The man had finally flipped! It was hilarious. Truly, gut-wrenchingly hilarious. And considering how little Lister contributed to cleaning soup machines, it was definitely worth the lost manpower.

Having enormously enjoyed the highlights, Rimmer took a minute to properly drink in the letter. Why Navigation Officer Kristine Kochanski had apparently joined him in this misguided endeavor wasn’t instantly clear, but he quickly reasoned that it was simply another case of Lister dragging down everyone around him. After all, Rimmer surely would have passed the astro-navs if not for that incessant humming. He knew this to be as true as anything he could see with his own eyes.

A glimmer in his smile, Rimmer folded the paper and gingerly stored it in his bag with the intent to frame it over his bunk. After so much blood and sweat he had finally won! Doing a little jig, he crouched down and 14Ced the ever-loving hell out of that pipe. The herald of sustenance would go on to fight another day, and without any hangers-on dragging him down.

Twelve hours later, he and Lister would be sharing a prison cell.

[Frank Smeghammer]

This thread has some excellent writing, hats off all

Might I interject and suggest moving to a fresh thread however? I do feel bad for Furure Producer that the thread cataloguing his and others’ hard work – similar but much more different in other ways – has been hijacked for this

Now it wouldn’t be G&T if threads didn’t veer wildly off topic at the simplest whim but nonetheless perhaps it deserves its own thread

[Moonlight]

Spun off a new thread, as requested.

[RunawayTrain]

No, non-elasticated sheets are horrible, I can never fold them right and they always get untucked almost as soon as I use them. Elasticated every time for me.

Ah gotcha, folding the corners to tuck them under the bed.  I thought you meant folding the sheets to put them away, sorry.

[Moonlight]

Ah gotcha, folding the corners to tuck them under the bed.  I thought you meant folding the sheets to put them away, sorry.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

I see you plan to upload the finished product to tiktok as well.

Okay no seriously though what does that even mean Formica

[Author]

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