Should we see Meltdown as Series 4 Episode 1?

[Rad]

Just thinking this when re-watching Dwarf for the survey. Obviously it was originally going to be broadcast as Episode One but was moved because of the Gulf War. In terms of character development it makes a lot more sense to be Episode One because Meltdown shows Kryten unable to disobey Rimmer’s orders and Camille is about him going against orders and breaking his programming. Any thoughts?

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[Connell]

Don’t fuck with my head, man.

[Potor]

Well, Kryten is still unable to disobey Rimmer’s orders, and he hates it. I think that in Camille he disobeys him because the duty to save someone’s life overrides the duty to obey. (Asimov’s laws maybe)

[JamesTC]

I thought Meltdown was always meant to be last. Dimension Jump being the episode that was supposed to open the series.

That is the order they used for the repeat season in 1994.

[HelloMabel]

I always thought that “canon” was determined by actual broadcast order?

[Ian Symes]

I thought Meltdown was always meant to be last. Dimension Jump being the episode that was supposed to open the series.

They both got moved from the start to the end. Camille was supposed to be the third.

I kind of like the way that Lister’s anti-war speech and subsequent light bee swallowing brings the series to a close. It’s a very neat ending to an episode, but also has a bit of gravitas suitable for the end of a series.

[Renegade Rob]

On the one hand, Dimension Jump is in many ways a more natural fit for a series ending, even it wasn’t meant to be either. In comparison to the other series enders, Meltdown does feel a little more filler-y and out of place, while the other finales are contemplative looks back on what had come before; Dimension Jump fits more in that category.

However, there’s an interesting parallel to Backwards and Camille. Both of them involve Kryten meeting Rimmer in the cargo bay and then discovering something while flying around in Starbug, with Holly popping up to make a comment or two. The beginnings of both these episodes are refreshingly similar. And both episodes have that guitar instrumental.

For those reasons, and also for the fact that Kryten’s development in The Last Day segues into Camille quite nicely, Camille is much better thought of as Series 4 Episode 1 than Meltdown. And Meltdown’s war message at the end is a suitable end to the series, however weird the transition is from that into Holoship.

[Karnie]

Even up to Series X Kryten still has problems disobeying orders, So wherever you put Camille it would contradict that; however as was pointed out, the necessity to save a life probably overrode it, since it’s established elsewhere in the series that saving a human comes before the lives of mechanoids and holograms.

[Another Phil]

The order as it went out did have the odd but I think effective result of putting 3 Kryten-centric episodes in a row (The Last Day, Camille, DNA). That might seem a little concentrated, especially as they’re arguably the only Kryten-centric episodes in III-VI, but they flow well from one to the next, and I think of them as the ‘Kryten Trilogy’. The Last Day is about Kryten discovering he wants more from life than being a mere mechanoid, Camille is about him trying to break his programming to gain that experience, and DNA is about him finding he can take it too far and that he is still at heart a mechanoid, just not as limited as he was. Together they turn Kryten from the secondary character he was in much of III into a key part of the team, which benefits the rest of IV, so ultimately I’m glad we got the order we got.

[Danny Stephenson]

It’s weird isn’t it, even by the end of Series III Kryten hadn’t quite fit in. But Camille happened and BANG, it’s like he’s always been there…

[Seb Patrick]

I find Camille to be a better introduction (for a new viewer) to the series and characters than the first eps of just about any other series, with the possible exception of VI. Which just makes it all the stranger that it wasn’t even intended as the first ep.

[Author]

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