Unanswered Questions

[Hamish]

So a lack of proper observation for grammar in the subtitles reveals Mr Cat to date back to series vii? So it’s purely used by Doug?

That should be “Mr. Doug” I have you know.

[Hamish]

Unanswered question: if Lister supposedly likes movies like Revenge of the Surfboarding Killer Bikini Vampire Girls, why do we only ever see him watch sad chick flicks?

[Warbodog]

They had a lot of fun coming up with that one. The unnecessary ‘Killer,’ the titillating ‘Bikini,’ the clumsy ‘Surfboarding’ rather than ‘Surfer.’

[RunawayTrain]

Per “The Beginning”, the simulant berserker generals in charge of death ships are “cross-bred” to produce particularly violent simulants – cross-bred with what?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Hot cross buns … cross bread, geddit?

[Flap Jack]

In Psirens, when they need to figure out which of the 2 Listers is a psiren, why don’t they just use the psi-scan?

[International Debris]

Given that the appearance of the Psiren is just a hallucination, why not get the two Listers to step into something much smaller than a Psiren?

[Jenuall]

The Psirens can project whatever they want into the minds of people, actual physical restrictions don’t really seem to apply so I’m not convinced that would work. The Psiren doesn’t even need to be where the illusion is, they can make a giant flaming meteorite for crying out loud!

[Dave]

Yes, the Psirens could easily just fake a psi-scan reading I think.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

They could have just used the luck virus!

[Flap Jack]

A psiren fooling most of the tech on Starbug? Sure. A psiren fooling the psi-scan, which is (I assume) literally designed to scan psis, as its primary function? No way.

[Dave]

It wouldn’t fool the psi-scan, it would just make everyone think the psi-scan is saying something else.

[Flap Jack]

*me reading the small print in my psi-scan’s manual*

Disclaimer: results of Psi-Scan™ (patent applied for) psi scans may appear incorrect if the psi you’re trying to scan is actively trying to deceive you. All purchases of Psi-Scan™ (patent applied for) units are non-refundable.

Motherf-

[Dave]

If Legion can’t draw on the minds of his constituent people once they become unconscious, why doesn’t Kryten just wait until everyone else is asleep to insist that Legion-Kryten help them escape?

Maybe he just doesn’t want to pass up an opportunity to knock out his crewmates.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Things escelate quite quickly don’t they.  I imagine Legion, knowing that they plan to escape, might turn on them and try and keep them more hostile prisons maybe.

Also, maybe being asleep is a different sort of unconscious to being knocked out, and doesn’t affect him.

[Jenuall]

Yeah we don’t confirm the gestalt status of Legion until the second day at which point things have already started to go south and they’re planning to escape using that brilliant plan from Revenge Of The Surfboarding Killer Bikini Vampire Girls.

If Kryten had been more proactive and worked it out that night then I guess he could have confronted Legion whilst the others were asleep.

[Dave]

Also, maybe being asleep is a different sort of unconscious to being knocked out, and doesn’t affect him.

It was the “now if you will excuse me, they are falling asleep, I must go” bit that made me think of it. Presumably as they fall asleep it has the same effect on Legion that we see when they’re knocked out at the end of the episode.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Oh yeah ok good point.

Which begs the question, how was he going to keep it up?  There’d definitely be times where some were asleep and others were awake, and Legion would presumably be slightly different depending who was awake.

[Pete Part Three]

How can a drive, which can travel in time but not space, be “next to useless” for a crew who have lost the trail to follow Red Dwarf?

I realise that they’re interrupted before they can think about this too much,  but Kryten postulating that they “may have a need” for it in the future, overlooks the fact that they have a requirement for it right now.

[International Debris]

Yes, just fly to the last known location of Red Dwarf and move back in time to when it was there.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

But then we’d never get that classic two parter, Epideme and Nanarchy!!

[loadoftottnumb]

Live together in perfect harmony.

I legit do like those two eps

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

In VIII, is Holly in prison with everyone else? They know they have him from the AR stuff.  How does that work? Why not just turn him off?

[Pete Part Three]

Where does the other Holly go when the crew abandon ship in Only The Good? What’s going on with the other Holly’s head?  How does Kryten’s hand inflate in Back in the Red?  Why is Cat’s biology “cool”? Why is it not anarchy on board Red Dwarf, when the crew discover they’d been dead and the ship is now in deep space?  Why is a mining ship being used as a prison ship? What happened to putting people into stasis as punishment?  Why does no one do any mining? Why don’t they have self-adhesive envelopes in the future? Why are envelopes being used in the future? Where is the other Kochanski? Why does there seem to be an acknowledgement that the show needs to write out the revived crew, but it takes 8 episodes of tediously bad television to get to that?  Why is the Grim Reaper in the show? Why?

 

[Pete Part Three]

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

[Pete Part Three]

[loadoftottnumb]

All this talk of Series VIII has made me think about the nanobots, specifically the new set created by Holly that resurrected the crew.

Its all a bit confusing to me, did he create the new set after the old ones had rebuilt Red Dwarf? Which set recreated the superior Holly that outsmarted him? Did he create a new set after he was ‘switched on’ by Lister when they found Red Dwarf/the planet it had been turned into.

It’s so confusing I’m not even sure what my question is.

[Warbodog]

Yeah, that always seemed confusing and unnecessary. They’d already theorised in episode 1 or 2 that Kryten’s nanos resurrected the crew as a bonus favour, just as they ‘upgraded’ Lister (although that turned out to be ‘part of their molecular process’ and somehow comparable to the gigantic Red Dwarf…), so it seemed to be resolved. But it turns out they actually didn’t, and it was something Holly did very quickly with an entirely different set of nanobots before they landed in the rebuilt Red Dwarf.

Maybe it was just to give Holly something to do. Though maybe that’s what his “bit busy at the moment, Dave” is about in episode 1.

The nanobots would have made the egghead Holly as another upgrade when they rebuilt the ship, since his awareness only goes back to then, though he confusingly lumps himself in with the crew’s resurrection in dialogue.

[Flap Jack]

Ohhh, also it appears you made a mistake in your Smega-Drive search, Quinn, which is that you didn’t try searching for “Mr Cat”, without the full stop.

Cat being addressed as “Mr. Cat” actually first occurred in the show proper as early as 1997, but Kryten didn’t call him that until Samsara, so in that regard you weren’t too far off.

[Pete Part Three]

<div>from Imgflip Meme Generator</div>

<div>from Imgflip Meme Generator</div>

[Pete Part Three]

.

<div>from Imgflip Meme Generator</div>

<div>from Imgflip Meme Generator</div>

[Dave]

[Jenuall]

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

memetioning … come on Jenuall it was right there.

[Jenuall]

[loadoftottnumb]

In ‘Kryten’ we first see Cat looking for a mouse, telling it he just wants to be friends and won’t eat it. The unanswered questions are, did he see a mouse? How did it get to 3 million years in deep space? Did it evolve like the cat? He seemed to be looking on the floor for it so it doesn’t look like mice are very big (unlike rats in another dimension) in 3 million years. Maybe it was in the stasis booth with Lister?

[Jonathan Capps]

Did it evolve like the cat?

[loadoftottnumb]

Ah but he was looking on the floor for it which would suggest they didn’t evolve like rats did.

[Warbodog]

A duller explanation is that Lister recently introduced him to Tom & Jerry or something (we know he’s seen it by series VI) and he was roleplaying, like when he pretended to be a dog in Future Echoes.

[International Debris]

He might not even be pretending, it could be a vain hope like his search for lady cats.

[Dave]

At some point he obviously became familiar enough with mouse shit to know whether it rolls.

(Unless that was a genuine question, and part of his ongoing research.)

[loadoftottnumb]

He also knows the cat and mouse game. Or he did a while after Kryten.

Maybe it was a space mouse like the weevils.

[clem]

Maybe there really were laboratory mice on board like Lister mentions in The End, and Cat saw a descendant of them.

Is it confirmed in Skipper that Mr Rat is descended from a rat version of Frankenstein i.e. Lister’s pet? Or could that universe’s version of the rat in Back in the Red be “the Holy mother” of the rat race?

[Flap Jack]

Alt-Lister does confirm that Mr. Rat is descended from his pet rat that he was put into stasis for smuggling aboard.

[Flap Jack]

Meta Unanswered Question: what happened to the posh visual text editor?

I mean it’s not an issue or anything, I did miss the ability to directly configure the HTML in forum replies, but I’m still curious.

[GlenTokyo]

Perhaps there are just something akin to mice/rats that evolved a little and then chilled out, and fully evolved mus sapiens and rattus sapiens, like chimps and humans.

[loadoftottnumb]

The meme with the Ace Rimmer coffins got me thinking about that. I mean what is going on there? In Stoke Me A Clipper Ace says that he wasn’t the one they met before and he took over from him and wants Arnie to take over next. But our Arnie wasn’t the 3rd Ace as we clearly see there were bajillions before him. So the one we saw early on in Dimension Jump wasn’t the 1st, despite the fact we don’t see him take over from anyone and that Dimension Jumping seems to be a new concept. 

Also are they all hard light? Or do human dead Ace’s coffins go somewhere else? How come they are all in our boys dimension? What happens when they just die without any time to hand over? I mean what is the deal? 

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

I always assumed it was in a different dimension.

Maybe the bodies go to the planet itself?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Infinite realities, infinite opportunities for an Ace to develop. So we did see an original Ace, but there are millions or billions of others too. 

Then, when an Ace dies, they find a Rimmer that didn’t originally grow to be Ace to take over, to get the opportunities they weren’t afforded in childhood. 

Presumably most Ace’s are holograms, as a good number of Rimmer’s would be holograms to start with.  Any human Ace would come back as a hologram before dying a second time and passing the wig on.

Finally, they are seen going through a worm hole to the coffin rings, so they’re not in our Rimmer’s reality necessary. Maybe some sort of omnizone where all universes converge. 

[Author]

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