Unanswered Questions

[Dave]

Who took the picture of young-Rimmer’s dorm room that he uses to go back in time, in Timeslides? And how is adult-Rmmer in possession of it in the future?

The more I think about this the more it bothers me.

Topic

[International Debris]

JMC run the ship and employ the miners, but the whole thing is owned and financed by the Space Corps, who also use parts of the ship to do their Space Corpsy stuff.
I guess.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I’ve always thought of the Space Corp as an international body that regulates space flight, to hold any position of power etc you have to pass tests that they set to hold officer/managerial ranks and then after that you can be employed by any private company or continue on into some sort of military service (which is what Rimmer’s brothers did).

So sort of a public/private partnership that is similar too but not quite like the merchant navy.

[Rudolph]

I always thought of it as JMC owned Red Dwarf and were basically something like BP or Exxon Mobil. But the crew were all Space Corps, who are like the Merchant Navy.

[pfm]

I always thought of it as JMC owned Red Dwarf and were basically something like BP or Exxon Mobil. But the crew were all Space Corps, who are like the Merchant Navy.

I like to think of the JMC as Dwarf’s own answer to ‘the company’, whether this being Weyland-Yutani from Alien (huge influence), or even the real East India Company of old.

[Warbodog]

I like to think of the JMC as Dwarf’s own answer to ‘the company’, whether this being Weyland-Yutani from Alien (huge influence), or even the real East India Company of old.

I watched Outland (1981) when Paul Muller recommended it on here, definitely an influence on that background and Jupiter mining generally.

[pfm]

I like to think of the JMC as Dwarf’s own answer to ‘the company’, whether this being Weyland-Yutani from Alien (huge influence), or even the real East India Company of old.

I watched Outland (1981) when Paul Muller recommended it on here, definitely an influence on that background and Jupiter mining generally.

YES. As far as Peter Hyams’ sci-fi films go, Outland always seems to sneak under the radar, with Capricorn One and 2010 (the 2001 follow-up) being much more well-known. The overall look and feel of Outland owes a great deal to Alien, with some Dark Star thrown in for good measure. To say it wasn’t a huge influence on Red Dwarf, for various reasons (Jupiter mining, Io, no aliens, High Noon/Western themes in space, amongst others) would be a huge understatement.

[GlenTokyo]

Couple of Red Dwarf connections with Outland, Bill Pearson worked on it, and the spacesuits from series I were from Outland.

Video of Bill talking about it

[Jenuall]

JMC getting rid of the evidence is the sci-fi answer.

Now I can’t stop thinking about a Red Dwarf / Half-Life mashup.
“Arnold doesn’t need to hear all this, he’s a highly trained technician. We’ve assured Captain Hollister that nothing will go wrong.”

“I never thought I’d see a Cadmium II explosion, let a lone create one!”

[pfm]

Couple of Red Dwarf connections with Outland, Bill Pearson worked on it, and the spacesuits from series I were from Outland.

Video of Bill talking about it

Heavenly.

[JEZZMUND]

Couple of Red Dwarf connections with Outland … Video of Bill talking about it

Interesting bit with Martin talking about being able to polish up Zinc plate primer – never occurred to me before.

[Phil]

Now I can’t stop thinking about a Red Dwarf / Half-Life mashup.

“We don’t go to Rimmerworld.”

[International Debris]

I think a first-person shooter set in the Red Dwarf universe, with a section set on Rimmerworld would be great fun.

[Jenuall]

Great idea except the first time the player fires a heat seeking bazookoid shot into an empty room their going to be in trouble!

[Ridley]

Or they could use the teleporter.

[Moonlight]

In The Inquisitor, Rimmer is initially wearing his green tunic for seemingly no reason. Then when the timeline shifts, he and Cat are in different costumes which includes Rimmer’s red tunic.

However, at the end of the episode when they are restored, they’re still wearing these alternate costumes (or in Rimmer’s case, his default costume). Does that represent a similar timeline shift as in Timeslides, that we’ve lost the original Rimmer and Cat and now we’re with these alternate versions?

Granted, Rimmer’s costume switch from green to red wouldn’t be nonsensical if The Inquisitor was shot first (but we’ve already had him in red for Holoship in the final order), because then it could represent an onscreen change of costume. I don’t remember if it was, but it’s a Juliet May episode to my memory so that could place it first.

I mean either way his H has already switched style by the beginning of the episode, and switching H’s from III/IV style to the serif V style would have totally sold the costume change a lot harder given that you’re looking at his face way more than his costume.

[Dave]

Does that represent a similar timeline shift as in Timeslides, that we’ve lost the original Rimmer and Cat and now we’re with these alternate versions?

No, all the Inquisitor’s changes are undone when he is removed from reality so that wouldn’t make sense.

[Moonlight]

Then that makes the alternative costumes remaining at the end confusing at best, and does absolutely nothing to explain why Rimmer’s costume change is backwards.

[Dave]

Why does the show need to explain Rimmer switching from the red to green costumes? It never explained why he suddenly started wearing the green uniform in III, and the red version is just a variation on that (which we already saw in Camille).

[Moonlight]

He never switches back to a previous series costume in the original run outside of this, which is a bit odd to begin with. But it’s less that and more using his standard costume as the new, “different” one to indicate a new timeline we’ve never seen before, with the costume he doesn’t wear anymore indicating the normal timeline. That’s exactly backwards to how you should do that. It’s just a bizarre choice and I can’t imagine the logic behind it.

Frankly in my opinion they should have introduced an entirely new costume he’s never worn before to indicate the separate timeline, much like Out of Time did. I think that would make the point infinitely better.

Y’know, in a show where most characters wear the same costume in every single episode with only occasional situational changes. I can’t think of a single other time Rimmer is just wearing an entirely different costume from normal with no situational explanation (i.e. his bathrobe we occasionally see at night or morning throughout the show).

But, and I’ve had backlash against presenting this argument before so I want to stress it, surely in a show where costumes are generally the same across a series or even multiple in a row, it doesn’t make sense to use that regular normal costume as a sign that something is different and use a different costume that he doesn’t wear anymore to indicate normality. I cannot see why you would choose to do it that way around vs. use the green (or a new costume) for the alternate timeline and his regular red for the normal timeline.

You can argue all you want that the way this change works makes perfect sense within the confines of that singular episode in of itself, but I really don’t get why you wouldn’t align the costumes with the rest of Series V. In the greater context of that series it’s a weird outlier.

[Dave]

I guess it might be something they didn’t do intentionally (like the softlight/hardlight costume thing in Gunmen) and it just inadvertently happened to confuse the timeline issue.

I think having it come after Holoship does solve the problem to a large extent though – it’s already clear that his red costume is now the standard costume.

[Warbodog]

Same thing happens in Star Trek’s ‘Yesterdays Enterprise’ when Geordi’s still inexplicably wearing the alternate uniform after they fix the timeline. I figured it was the same out-of-universe costume error. Or cryptic Inception-style twist.

[clem]

It’s perhaps worth pointing out that the green costume also appears in Holoship, on Murray. The Inquisitor was recorded before Holoship though, so I can’t imagine how that would have any bearing really.

[International Debris]

I always thought it was an error. I have a feeling I got that idea from something mentioned on one of the DVDs.

[Moonlight]

I rewatched the Series V doc and they don’t mention it.

[clem]

I always thought it was an error. I have a feeling I got that idea from something mentioned on one of the DVDs.

Are you thinking of Rimmer wearing the red costume at the beginning of Gunmen? That was a mistake, and Lister’s line about firing up the hard light drive was added at the last minute to explain it. That’s according to the Programme Guide, anyway. I don’t remember it being mentioned on the DVDs.

[International Debris]

I might be wrong. Maybe it’s on a commentary.

[pfm]

It amuses me how people are more bothered about Rimmer being in the green uniform (reason for that being, ‘The Inquisitor’ was supposed to be the first episode of series 5, and the idea was the green uniform denoted ‘normality’) than the dodginess of the opening crew scene; with Lister needlessly blathering on about the Trojans for way too long. Granted, there is the famous Kryten ‘die in bed, you Trojan pig-dog…’ line in that scene, so…whatever.

[Jenuall]

Was Lister in that scene, I thought it was just Craig Charles?

[Warbodog]

Maybe the red didn’t work under the green light of the inquisition scene. Would it just go black?

[Spaceworm Jim]

Lister’s comments about the Trojan war are a bit like one of the earlier chapters of Incompetence where Rob stops the story for a paragraph to make an observation about Captain Bligh which I don’t remember being related to the plot in any way. Also, spoiler alert if the titans eventually do a Bookcast on Incompetence and anyone here hasn’t read it, but it ends with a sentence that is a shameless pinching of a phrase from Gunmen of the Apocalypse. I hope I have not ruined Incompetence for anyone.

[Jenuall]

I really like Incompetence, it’s probably my favourite “non-Dwarf” thing that Rob has done.

[Spaceworm Jim]

I really enjoyed it too! The only time I felt like putting it down was the three or four chapters devoted to the main character getting on a train, but I carried on regardless.

[Warbodog]

I enjoyed Incompetence as a sheltered teenager, I can’t tell whether rereading would make it seem funnier and more insightful or just like middle-aged ranting.

Did y’all enjoy Colony? I ignored it for many years through entitled fan stupidity of presuming it was an exchange for more Red Dwarf. Eventually listened distractedly to the abridged audiobook on YouTube and mentally filed it in the bin alongside Terry Jones’s Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic and that sixth Hitchhiker’s book, but I can’t remember anything about it and should give it a fairer shake.

Fat was alright.

[Jenuall]

I think I was early/mid-twenties when I read Incompetence, whether any of it would seem more insightful now is an interesting thought.

I mainly recall enjoying the absurd and yet almost believable nature of everything that happens. Some of it is ridiculous and yet at the same time feels like only a slight tweak to our current reality would leave us in a very similar world to the one Harry Salt finds himself in.

I remember finding Fat to be fine but it definitely didn’t grab me as much as I’d hoped

[Ben Saunders]

Depending on how long The Inquisitor has been at it for, having ALL of his work undone in the instant he dies would radically alter the universe we’re in, wouldn’t it? If he only Inquisited a dozen or so people, then not much would change, but there are legends and shit about him, so assumedly he’s changed at least hundreds of lives. Undoing all of that would mean that the pre-Inquisitor and post-Inquisitor realities would be starkly different, since all of the original people who got removed for failing to meet their own standards would be reinstated.

[International Debris]

It’s possible that so far he only Inquisited people born after Kryten was created, in which case the chance of him affecting the comparatively few human creations they’ve stumbled across would be reasonably low.

[Ben Saunders]

True. It’s also possible that the Inquisitor is self-perpetuating in that, once he’s “fixed” everybody, everybody’s environments and standards will have changed, so they will require a re-Inquisit to see if they’ve made the most of their new reality. And if they haven’t, the process could go on forever.

[Moonlight]

I’m asking Mike Reiss (who co-showran The Simpsons in 1992) on Twitter if he knows of which Simpsons writers worked on a draft of the American Red Dwarf pilot. This is very important.

[Moonlight]

He said Jeff Martin.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

J.F. Martin not Jeff Martin you gimboid

[Moonlight]

Now I’m asking Jeff Martin if he remembers anything interesting that happened during that time. I’m sleuthing.

[Dave]

This is your investigating feat.

[By Jove its holmes]

Just how long do Cat and Rimmer get to have fun with the spinal implanted Lister?

[Warbodog]

Are Rimmer’s swimming certificates as phony as his ‘Arnie Does It Best’ newspaper clippings and the promotions he tells his mum about?

The ‘reveal’ in Back to Reality that he can’t swim is ambiguous, not least for coming from someone who doesn’t exist, but is a gestalt of their anxieties. Rimmer mentions going swimming in the earlier episode, but he could be insecure about his lack of ability and failing to improve, as opposed to literally needing armbands.

[Pete Part Three]

>Just how long do Cat and Rimmer get to have fun with the spinal implanted Lister?

Well, Cat asks for a week.

>Are Rimmer’s swimming certificates as phony as his ‘Arnie Does It Best’ newspaper clippings and the promotions he tells his mum about?

I think the BSC and SSC are genuine, and Rimmer clings to them because they are a qualification. The absence of a GSC is probably the proof that they are genuine awards rather than something he’s fabricated.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Yeah I’d agree with Pete. He is clinging to genuine achievement. It’d be less funny if it turned out he’d made that up too.

[Warbodog]

That was always my thinking, especially since the gag is that he’s using the initials to imply more meaningful honours, so those being fake in the first place wouldn’t really work.

I’ve always linked the Rimmer Experience line about swimming directly to those modest achievements too, as him capitalising on one of his few recognised skills, alongside being able to walk without requiring a zimmerframe.

He’s a compulsive liar, even to himself, but does normally go all in, like breaking the world running record.

Still.

[International Debris]

Yeah I’d agree with Pete. He is clinging to genuine achievement. It’d be less funny if it turned out he’d made that up too.

I’m sure there’ll be a bit in next month’s Last Human section where it turns out he’s made it up, then.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

In Me2 Holly is the one to question what BSc SSc stands for, and Lister is the one to tell him.

However Holly was the one to put the tape together so he ought to know, and I find it unlikely Rimmer would have ever told Lister what the letters stood for, had he even known to ask.

[Warbodog]

He probably worked it out at some point and Rimmer failed to deny it convincingly, like he sussed ‘Bonehead.’

[Author]

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