The Time Drive

[Anonymous]

Yes, I know Ed Bye has told on many occasion the tale of getting to a convention only to be verbally attacked by a fan about the logic of the time-drive travelling in time as well as space…

But it’s not really nitpicking. I mean, it does destroy the entire concept of the series – i.e. being stuck 3 million years into deep space with no way home. Yes, Red Dwarf is a comedy show and often plays with its own continuity…but at its core, it’s always been logical. Plots had always been well structured with an attention to detail…and I’m reminded of Doug Naylor complaining that his experience with script writers in the US was negative due to their habit of ignoring narrative logic.

I mean…it’s like giving an aeroplane to people stranded on a desert island…and then criticising people for finding fault in the logic that they don’t try to use it to get home.

Topic

[Pete Part Three]

A Wizard did it.

[Seb Patrick]

I must admit, I always had a problem with the whole “why don’t they just use it to go straight home?” thing until it was explained to me – and I think you can blame the fact that the episode simply doesn’t explain well enough the idea that they feel it’s too risky to go make any more trips back in time (look what happened to their future selves, after all).

What that doesn’t explain is why they don’t just use its distance-travelling capabilities, but still stay in the “present” as they perceive it. Now, if you were being all PiP-ish, you could probably come up with a theory along the lines of “it can only transport you an equivalent distance to the amount of time you’re going backwards in – so in order to go three million light years through space, you also have to go three million years through time”. But the show doesn’t actually do that, so you’re left to wonder.

I can understand the rationale for wanting to send them back to Dallas ’63, because an otherwise great episode comes out of it. But I wish it had involved, say, them immediately deciding to go home and stay there, only to be thrown off by the malfunction and then, when they get back, the machine being broken preventing them from ever using it again.

[Andrew]

> it does destroy the entire concept of the series

Well, thank goodness we’re not overreacting. :-)

There are plenty of similar examples. Lister not getting back into stasis in Future Echoes, or not staying in the past in Stasis Leak, or not trying to change the past again in Timeslides… (I know, two of these are explained away, but so’s the ‘don’t use the time drive again’ thing.)

I think it’s as much OOT’s issue as Tikka’s. The time drive can only travel through time, not space, right? So: go back in time 3 million years and set Starbug to autopilot back to Earth. Using the ‘Bug’s deep sleep/stasis unit you should be able to show up in our solar system just in time to see Red Dwarf leave.

But then, I still don’t see any of this as a problem.

[Pete Part Three]

>So: go back in time 3 million years and set Starbug to autopilot back to Earth. Using the ?Bug?s deep sleep/stasis unit you should be able to show up in our solar system just in time to see Red Dwarf leave.

6 million years, surely?

[Andrew]

That would be, yes, the non-stupid version. Ahem.

[Pete Part Three]

“Mission : To get back to Earth and have a wash” – BBC Videos.

I always rather liked that, but getting back to Earth never seems to be a main concern as the series progresses. A lot of the time they just seem content to salavge from derelict spaceships, play poker and eat curry.

Take series VI as an example. How do we know that Red Dwarf (or the nanobots) is heading towards Earth (and so, therefore, is Starbug?). They could have spent 200 years going in completely the wrong direction and be further away from the solar system than in series V. “Getting back to Earth” has been replaced by “finding Red Dwarf”.

It doesn’t destroy the entire concept of the series that they get back to Earth and don’t stay there, because it was only what the series was ever about for a short period. Ditto Lister being the last human and Rimmer being a hologram. Sure, it spoils the nice little hooks that draw you to those characters, but it’s not the reason that series 8 doesn’t work. It’s just an obvious difference to the earlier stuff.

[Ben Paddon]

I always assumed Lister would be wary about using the Series VII Time Drive to get back to Earth following their incident in Dallas, especially as the Time Drive doesn’t appear to function in an overly reliable manner. But that doesn’t explain how Lister knows it will transport them back to Earth at the start of the episode (which is his motivation for getting the device again in the first place).

[Andrew]

Mumble something about “dimensional anomalies”, and we’ll move on.

Well go on – shake your head and walk out.

[Ben Paddon]

Lovely little catch-all explanation, that…! I should probably come up with something passable for my own writings…

[Author]

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