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

[Pete Part Three]

Yeah, there’s the beginning of a line in Holoship that you can head-canon for this.

“As Holly has already told you…” Lister says to Sam Murray as soon as his hologram is switched on. Seems a bit odd that Holly would switch him earlier on just to explain stuff to him, and then switch him off while the next candidate is being “interviewed”, so I expect this is really a virtual transfer of information.

It’s all pretend, you know.

[Dave]

Once they work out how to have Holly sustain two holograms in Confidence & Paranoia, why don’t they bring someone else back (after the second Rimmer gets deleted) rather than reverting to just one again?

George McIntyre could have become a series regular!

[Ben Saunders]

It’s a power issue, isn’t it? They have to turn loads of shit off in order to power two holograms. Although we don’t see this, and Lister can still go to the cinema, and Holly still works, I think it is mentioned in dialogue.

[Dave]

Yeah, I think it is mentioned but like you say there don’t really seem to be any negative effects while two holograms are running.

[By Jove its holmes]

Even though the TV version of the Better Than Life game wasn’t lethal, would the creators really want to make it easy for players to leave? Even in the TV episode they fooled the boys into thinking they could just stop the game – until the loan shark showed up.

[Dave]

Maybe they never left.

[Pete Part Three]

He’s not a loan shark, he’s a taxman.

Incidentally, in the novels, I don’t think Better Than Life is *designed* to make it difficult to leave. It’s just an unforeseen side-effect of how well it convinces you it’s reality, and how your *subconscious* will try and prevent you from leaving.

[By Jove its holmes]

Part of Holly’s major plan is to resurrect Kochanski from her canister of ashes, so she can grow young with Lister.

How come Rimmer doesn’t think of resurrecting himself in the same manner, so he doesn’t have to be a hologram any more?

(Maybe because he wouldn’t have a ‘gimmick’ any more. He’d just be a boring ol’ smeghead)

[Pete Part Three]

In-universe, you’d have a bit of a troublesome quandary over the nature of identity. This is kind of raised by Rimmer’s plan in Stasis Leak to put his other self in stasis so there would be two hims (one alive, one dead). Obviously, there’s a clunking big paradox in the way of this plan, but Rimmer’s end-goal of this makes no sense either. If there were two Hims (one for the week, one for Sunday best), it doesn’t actually benefit the dead Rimmer in any way. He would still be dead. And as several other episodes prove, Rimmer selfishness extends to variations of his own persona.

So Rimmer would prefer to be “him” and a hologram, than a variation of him that isn’t *him* be alive.

Oh, I’ve gone cross-eyed.

[Ben Saunders]

I was about to say something along those lines – resurrecting the “alive” Rimmer would “kill” the “dead” Rimmer, which might be good for “Rimmer”, but wouldn’t be very good for “Rimmer”, hacktually.

[Veni]

>hacktually

He’s a bloody shambles

[By Jove its holmes]

In the novel, Rimmer uses his ••••• of a mum as a model for a wife.

Of course, Better Than Life delves into the subconscious and the deep, dark recesses of the mind – it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Rimmer has a hidden Oedipal desire.

[Veni]

That’s timely, I have to write an essay on the theme of the Oedipus myth tonight.

[By Jove its holmes]

Why do people that go to baby changing stations always come back with the same baby?

[Hamish]

Where do babies even come from?

[Dave]

I wonder when George McIntyre’s hologram was switched off. Would he have watched the crew die and then hung around for three million years, right up until the point before Lister comes out of stasis? Would he have immediately been switched off and replaced with a hologram of Hollister once the crew was wiped out (who would have then been replaced by Rimmer)? Or would there be no holograms around at all between the accident and Lister coming out of stasis?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Maybe emergency systems on Red Dwarf automatically shut down the hologram to preserve energy etc, so once a radiation leak was detected, he was just shut off automatically, along with the hold being sealed off.

Now, Holly does say he shut the hold off, but there’s definitely automated systems aboard Red Dwarf, so the conscious part of Holly could still consider these automated systems a part of himself even if he has no conscious input into the action.

[International Debris]

Why does Lister pronounce ‘hummus’ so weirdly?

[Dave]

How does Ace Rimmer discover what the point of divergence is between him and ‘our’ Rimmer?

[Ben Saunders]

yoomins

[By Jove its holmes]

How does Ace Rimmer discover what the point of divergence is between him and ‘our’ Rimmer?

Through the hole in the plot? ;)

[Ian Symes]

It doesn’t take a great leap to be fair, he could have just read Rimmer’s file or swapped notes with Holly – their divergence was quite a major event in their lives, and one that you’d easily notice just from seeing what year he left school.

[Pete Part Three]

Maybe there was a boy in the year below who had long flowing locks, and that was why Ace decided to copy that hairstyle. He’d be able to work it out just from looking at Arnie’s haircut.

[Flap Jack]

Regarding George McIntyre, if the process for selecting the currently active hologram is automatic, then it’s possible George was switched off as soon as someone more important than him died, then they were switched off as soon as someone more important than them died, and so on, cycling through several/dozens of crew members until finally settling on the Captain.

(I’m just assuming that this “most essential” calculation is largely based on rank if the mission is still viable and personality if it isn’t, because if a hologram is non-corporeal, then they’re only strictly useful for their knowledge, which Holly would have anyway.)

Alternatively, if the process is not so immediate/automatic, George would be switched off when the dust had settled in favour of Hollister.

You could write a bleak, not at all funny fanfic about Holoster, recounting how he spent the next weeks/months/years alone with Holly until ultimately deciding he’d rather be switched off. Maybe including monologues given to Lister’s stasis booth, and a part where he instructs Holly to ensure that the cats will be able to survive.

[bloodteller]

> Why does Lister pronounce ‘hummus’ so weirdly?

he doesn’t, does he? i’ve always pronounced it like that and never been corrected on it, and i’m fairly sure i’ve heard other people say it like that too. how do you pronounce it?

[Ben Saunders]

Oh I thought he meant “humans” not “hummus” lol. How do you pronounce hummus?

[International Debris]

I pronounce it how it’s spelled and, in my experience, universally pronounced. Humm-us. As opposed to hyu-mus.

[Ben Saunders]

In what episode does Lister say hyu-mus? That’s bonkers

[si]

I’d never heard of hummus when I first saw that episode, so I just assumed it was the correct pronunciation. It’s only in the past few years I’ve realised that it’s not.

(Although I’ve just realised that Bongo pronounced it correctly – ‘humm-us’ – in Dimension Jump, didn’t he? Well, Lister’s pronunciation didn’t make realise they were talking about the same thing.)

[Pete Part Three]

When Lister tells Kryten to “Tell it to hair”, whose hair does he mean?

[By Jove its holmes]

Kryten’s home era is at least several hundred years after the Red Dwarf fled the solar system.

There would be records as to how human history viewed the loss of the ship.

Holly would have sent a message to Space Corps HQ on Earth when the accident happened, surely?

[bloodteller]

i’ve always pronounced it hyu-mus (or hoo-muss) and heard plenty of people say it that way. that’s always been the more common way of pronouncing it from my experience

also- on some packages of the stuff, i’ve seen it spelled “houmous” but on others “hummus” which is just confusing. it’s one thing to have two different pronunciations of the word but two different spellings?

[By Jove its holmes]

Another Question: Had Graham Chapman never got sick, could he have uplifted “Timeslides”?

(i hate Ruby Wax; Rimmer, please ask Stabem the Scutter to deal with her!)

[Offline]

Seeing darling Graham in such a short role would be a terrible waste.

[Hamish]

> it’s one thing to have two different pronunciations of the word but two different spellings?

[Hamish]

> Kryten’s home era is at least several hundred years after the Red Dwarf fled the solar system. There would be records as to how human history viewed the loss of the ship.

Sure, but are you aware of every maritime tragedy of the last 200 years?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I’m not aware of every airline tragedy of the last 200 years, but I know about Amelia Earhart and MH370 that went missing without a trace.

Presumably Red Dwarf just completely disappearing would make it a fairly big deal that *everyone* would be talking about.

Not to mention, Kryten has been showing to have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of history, given he is a robot.

[International Debris]

it’s one thing to have two different pronunciations of the word but two different spellings?

It’s because it comes from a place that doesn’t use the Western alphabet, and has thus been translated differently in different times and places. Hummus is the ‘standard’ spelling, but there are plenty of different ones.

See also: poppadom (aka papadum, poppadam, pappadam, puppodum, pappadum, etc).

[Offline]

Kryten has been shown to have an encyclopedic knowledge of certain topics but a woefully dismal databank in terms of others, most notably women’s periods, which is odd since he is a sanitation droid and should be adept in human anatomy, unless he was built to serve on all-male Italian starships.

The horror.

[International Debris]

Bras and periods are things you’d imagine he’d have some idea about, given the crew of the Nova 5.

[Ian Symes]

The gaps in Kryten’s knowledge are a consequence of there being no internet in the Red Dwarf universe. All his information is stored locally, so he has to delete things that are no longer relevant to free up space.

[Pete Part Three]

KRYTEN. : My head is littered with unnecessary information, sir. The ability to sing the Bay City Rollers’ greatest hits is no longer a priority. For most cultural purposes, crooning “Bye Bye Baby” is more than sufficient.

This is In the same episode where he talks about having a “histo-chip”. So, um…yeah.

I think they’re making this stuff up as they go along, you know.

[Hamish]

> Presumably Red Dwarf just completely disappearing would make it a fairly big deal that *everyone* would be talking about.

I guess it depends on just how mundane Red Dwarf as a ship was, and how common accidents such as these were. We have no idea how many ships the JMC had in their fleet, or with how much significance the vessel was viewed.

Crew numbers also affect this. 169 people lost is different kind of tragedy from 1,169 people lost, just in terms of scale if nothing else.

[JamesTC]

>Bras and periods are things you’d imagine he’d have some idea about, given the crew of the Nova 5.

LISTER: How come you don’t know what bras are? What about the women on the Nova 5?
KRYTEN: Well, when I cleaned up my cache files, sir, I erased my lingerie database. I didn’t see there’s be much call for it, unless we had a fancy dress party, and you wanted to go as Herman Goering.

[Offline]

Oh look at all of you with your recollection of key dialogue, evidence and plausible theories to support your claims.

[By Jove its holmes]

In Tikka to Ride, Red Dwarf uses the common allegation that J. Edgar Hoover was a transvestite (a mocked up photo of Hoover in ladieswear and makeup appears on Kryten’s chest monitor). Hoover was a lot of very bad things, and held some very horrible views, but hasn’t the transvestite thing been debunked?

[Spaceworm Jim]

Is being a transvestite very bad? How come Hoguey has the…gun thing at the end of The Beginning when Lister took it from him earlier? To be honest, the second question I just pulled out of my Quagaars, I hope people will concentrate on the first question.

[Ben Saunders]

No, being a crossdresser is not a bad thing, it’s a very unfortunate “of its time” joke, much like calling Göring a “drug-crazed transvestite”, as if that was the worst of his crimes. I wouldn’t cancel anybody over thinking crossdressing was funny 30 years ago, but I’d confront them about it today.

[Offline]

Of its time?

Time?

Time.

Time. Wave.

Timewave.

[By Jove its holmes]

” I wouldn’t cancel anybody over thinking crossdressing was funny 30 years ago,”

It was still bigoted and insensitive against the gender diverse thirty years ago in the 1990s. We rightly don’t give people of the past a pass on being racist or sexist just because they were able to get away with calling buxom women “jiggles” and black men “boy”.

[Author]

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