The sequel to the worst episode

[Rushy]

You sit down with God and he says “you can write an episode of Red Dwarf and it will get made, BUT it has to be a sequel to your least favourite episode”.
What episode are you writing a sequel to? And would you try to salvage the original by proxy or simply make better use of the original concept?

Topic

[RunawayTrain]

There is no salvaging Krytie TV *or* the original concept.

[tombow]

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say my least fave (not the worst), for it’s wasted potential, is Trojan. And in my sequel, Rimmer and his brother find some kind of pathos and connection, even though there’s a punchline at the end where they still think the other is a twat.

Or failing that, a sequel to series 8 or BTE  where we find out that Kochanski and Lister had a happy relationship for a few years, but she left to be a space adventurer (she found an Ace time drive), with Lister’s amicable blessing, and then just move on and don’t mention her again (or at least not as a crush/obsession) unless she actually comes back for an episode.

[Renegade Rob]

My bottom two episodes are Pete Part 2 and Back in the Red Part 3, and they switch positions in my head to the point of being in a state of quantum superposition. A sequel to either would have to be post-Promised Land and not retroactively inserted into Series VIII, but I could imagine following up on VIII’s threads where the Dwarfers catch up to wherever the rest of the crew ended up and sort of carry on with Hollister and Ackerman where they left off (younger me had an episode idea about that very premise where they find everyone the nanobots brought back in a huge Space Corps ship station called White Giant that’s basically the Citadel from Mass Effect, and they’re working on rebuilding and recivilizing the universe). There’s a way to make that not terrible, where you reference the Series VIII dynamic, but everyone’s past that now, so they might reminisce about being in prison and positive viruses and pooping dinosaurs, in the way that Community refers back to Season Four as being the year everyone was acting out of sorts because of a gas leak. Then again, any God that would want me to write a Series VIII-adjacent episode is no God at all.

[Flap Jack]

Can it just be a spiritual successor a la Samsara, or does the plot need to directly connect?

Because like RunawayTrain my least favourite episode is Krytie TV, and if it’s the latter then the only credible sequel I can imagine is that all the male prisoners get given new sentences for their sex crimes.

[Rushy]

One could make a sequel to Krytie TV without focusing on the sex crimes aspect of it. For example, Kryten’s reprogramming kicks back in and he tries to make a new reality TV show based on something else. Also, up the ante on his villainy to make it clearer that it’s not really him. 

[Nick R]

Pete Part 3:

Time wand reverses Cat’s evolution and turns him into a normal cat. Time travel stuff happens, they go back in time to pre-accident-Titan, and the animal Cat meets Frankenstein, and….well, you can guess what happens.

After Cat returns to normal, the episode ends with Lister and Cat bonding over being their own ancestors. Philip J. Fry turns up and joins in too, for some reason. Meanwhile Marty McFly looks on from the sidelines and sighs with relief: “Glad I’m not in that club.”

[Dave]

The crew come across an old space station. inside they find a stasis booth. After opening the stasis booth they don’t believe it. It seems to be Ziggy Briceman, but quite a bit older than they remember. Ziggy managed to survive the Timewave and got off the SS Enconium to get help, I will cut a long story short, at the end of the episode Ziggy makes a death bed confession. It was he who caused the Timewave. He also tells Rimmer that when the Timewave occured, everyone had a working sense of humour so did not like his spitonawrist joke.

That would be the start and end of the episode, there would need to be a chain of events in between, but I think you have the gist.

Thanks for reading smeg heads. Smoke me a kipper I’ll be back for breakfast.

[Dax101]

Timewave obviously. We need to see more of the zany crew of Ziggy and Co.

Infact… Spin off?

[Author]

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