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

[Ian Symes]

This is true, but I think what Ben was getting at was how much and how quickly attitudes have changed in a relatively short space of time. Barbara in The League of Gentlemen is an absolute abomination, but nobody batted an eyelid at the time. Kryten being classified as a woman simply because he doesn’t have a penis manages to be incredibly offensive to trans people, non-binary people and cis women, which hardly gets a mention. You wouldn’t get programmes like There’s Something About Miriam any more, full stop. Hayley in Coronation Street was a big positive factor in educating people and changing attitudes, but even then, if you were casting that role today, you wouldn’t cast a cis woman, as undoubtedly brilliant in the part as Julie Hesmondhalgh was.

I guess what I’m getting at is that the intent behind something is important. You’re right that things shouldn’t get a free pass because they happened in the past, they should still be questioned and held up for criticism, but what’s also important is how the perpetrators feel now. The League of Gents went some way to address the Barbara issue in the recent reunion specials, for example. On a different but similar theme, Matt Lucas has acknowledged and apologised for the dodgier elements of Little Britain and Come Fly With Me, which doesn’t absolve the offensive things they did completely, but the fact that he realises where he went wrong and regrets it makes me feel more at ease with calling myself a fan of his. (Walliams is still a dick, though) Conversely, while there’s very little wrong with Father Ted, Big Train or Black Books in terms of offensive attitudes, I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan of Graham Linehan any more, because he’s a bigoted cunt.

I guess ultimately, in terms of our favourite show, whenever Red Dwarf wanders into dodgy territory now, it’s far worse than when things from 21-32 years ago seem dodgy in retrospect. As it is, the stuff in Series VIII results in an eye roll rather than a vitriolic rant. I’m far more angry about Timewave than I ever was about Series VIII, partly because I didn’t realise the potential for offence in 1999, and nor would the vast vast majority of the viewing public, but by 2016/7, everyone involved should absolutely know better.

[Offline]

That’s what baffles me about Doug when it comes to Timewave. As much as it wasn’t its intent, Red Dwarf through the original run did explore a lot of issues through the lens of comedy in very well-handled ways. Yes there were clunkers like Kryten being classified as a woman for a few cheap visual gags but overall, they got it right in terms of the writing and the approach.

But Timewave? I mean, did everyone just read it, cast and crew alike and all laugh away without the merest thought of maybe this ain’t kosher? Doug is the big boss at the end of the day but there’s a history of him actively listening to everyone around him during every stage of production. Nobody said maybe this is a bit shallow here, a bit dated there, a touch offensive at this point?

Strange episode, strange script, strange everything, I wonder how Doug feels about Timewave in retrospective.

[International Debris]

Barbara from the League of Gents is an interesting one, as she’s the most well-rounded, sympathetic character living in the village, and the core idea of the joke is cabbies talk too much about stuff you don’t really want to know, so what if that was something very personal and, at the time, seen as a bit weird / almost taboo. But at no point are we invited to think of her as a freak in the way we are everybody else in Royston Vasey.
But then the way it’s shown on screen totally undermines it by cutting to shots of hairy legs in a dress with raucous audience laughter and such. I think her character could actually exist in a much more respectful way with relatively few tweaks to the script and a much more sympathetic translation from page to screen.
I still haven’t seen the reunion episodes, but I’m curious to see how she’s handled in them.

[Ben Saunders]

I do believe you have to judge something by the standards of its time, rather than try to apply modern attitudes to it – one would like to believe that their moral standards are an immutable and steadfast part of their identity, but they’re just as much a product of your environment and upbringing, and there’s no way to truly say how you would view things were you born in 1940s Texas, for example, so to morally grandstand over somebody who was is extremely questionable. It is important not to give things “a pass” for being old, true, and it’s fine to dislike something because it makes you feel uncomfortable, but essentially what Ian said is spot on, as well. Unfortunately, making fun of men dressing as woman was just something countless comedies did in the 90s (Friends veers directly into transphobia with the character of Chandler’s dad, which I find much more objectionable now than I did when I watched it in 2003).

[Dave]

Yeah I feel like we’re all more or less on the same page here. Obviously comedy, like any art, is to some extent a product of its time and will reflect the general attitudes and moral standpoints of the day.

That doesn’t excuse jokes or lines or characters that are by today’s standards clearly “a bit dodgy”, but it might help us to understand them and the context in which they were made.

But even then there can be quite a spectrum in terms of how unkindly or sympathetically these things are presented.

In general I think the first six series of Red Dwarf are pretty good in this area and most elements that could risk offending are justified by the setting and characters – eg.most examples of objectification of women are rooted in the perspectives of the all-male crew, and even criticised stuff like Parallel Universe is mostly ok for me as again it’s heavily tied to the characters.

There are odd lines here and there that might now feel a bit tone-deaf but by and large it’s a show with a pretty decent moral compass.

Which is why the broader and less thoughtful gags in VII and particularly VIII clang so badly, and why the Dave-era clangers like the slag line and the Chinese whispers stuff were (rightly) singled out for criticism.

But even given those, Timewave is another level of tone-deafness. At best I think it’s misguided, but really it’s more than that, and it feels baffling that nobody stepped in and said “hang on a minute…” at some point.

[By Jove its holmes]

How does J. Edgar Hoover become President in the alt-history in Tikka to Ride? Johnson was the vice-president. If Kennedy is removed from office Johnson would become President. Head of the FBI is not in the chain of command.

[Toxteth O-Grady]

They never said that Hoover assumed the position of president as a result of Kennedy’s impeachment.
In fact, they state that he was elected – and that he been forced to run for president by the Mafia.

So presumably Johnson served the remainder of Kennedy’s term, but then lost the subsequent 1964 election to Hoover, who by this point had left the FBI in favour of running for the presidency.
Simples.

[Dave]

Who chose the replacement music over George McIntyre’s funeral that’s used on the Netflix version?

[si]

If Rimmer’s duplicate in Me² is projected using Rimmer’s disc (as hidden in Kochanski’s box [fnaar]), what’s projecting Rimmer?

[Dave]

I always presumed you didn’t need the disc running full time, you just loaded the latest backup from the disc and then it could run. Like installing something from a disc.

So it’s Rimmer’s disc, and it loads the same saved version that originally appeared when Holly first resurrected Rimmer.

(Although I don’t know how Rimmer-2 knows to say the “he did warn you” line.)

[International Debris]

Why did they never load another hologram after the events of Me²?

[Dave]

Hold on, we did that one barely a month ago.

[Offline]

Is Craig Charles a rapist?

[By Jove its holmes]

And given he mentions in The Man In The Rubber Mask” about “understanding the issues” about why women under report rape, what convinced BobbyLllew about Charles’s innocence?

[Ian Symes]

Yes, this seems an appropriate way for this thread to develop. Shush now.

[Offline]

Sorry, chief, I meant it flippantly but it does look rather tricky.

[By Jove its holmes]

Why are both Kennedy and Nixon still taught about in schools in Lister and Rimmer’s era?

Surely people with a greater impact on the historical memory will have emerged in the three hundred years between now and then. There are plenty of English/Scots/British monarchs and American presidents who were well known in their own time but are now obscure outside specialst circles.

[Dave]

I dunno, we still get taught about Alexander the Great and Napoleon and Henry Tulip.

[By Jove its holmes]

“Henry Tulip”

Ah, a Series One of Blackadder fan?

I always wondered what Henry does after he takes power to Princess Leia of Hungary after Edmund and the rest die.

[Dave]

“You can take two suits and that’s it.”

Why is Cat limited to such a small quantity of personal possessions in stasis, when Lister seems to have been able to preserve many more different outfits for himself during his own three million years?

[Ben Saunders]

Why do they have to take their clothes and possessions into Stasis with them when clearly everything else on the ship has managed to last 3 million years already? All of Lister’s clothes, the toaster, the furniture, everything.

[Renegade Rob]

How does history buff Rimmer have a hole in his knowledge such that he confuses Christopher Columbus with Colombo?

Why didn’t they just go into stasis after Future Echoes? Also, couldn’t they have just brought a light bee of Rimmer in there with them if he was afraid of being switched off?

Why is Lister the focus of the Red Dwarf crew’s inquiry at the start of Series VIII when he’s the least big deal of that Starbug group, compared to say, a senior navigation officer as well as an android and evolved cat that shouldn’t really exist by the normal crew’s standards?

Why did Kochanski’s hair change from the end of Nanarchy into Back in the Red? (Are we assuming nanobots?) (also, is it fair to even bring up Series VIII in this thread, since it’s basically shooting fish in a barrel?)

If Lister is his own dad, how can there be an alternate Lister when the Inquisitor erases him from history?

More to the point, if Lister’s his own dad with Kochanski, meaning 50% Lister and 50% Kochanski, but that 50% that’s Lister is itself 50% Kochanski, then how many iterations of the time loop will it take before he’s just effectively 100% Kochanski?

Why does that shot out the cockpit window in the beginning of Marooned look so rubbish?

Why don’t they go inside the cockpit once Starbug crashes in Marooned? Are we assuming it’s crushed beyond repair?

How long did Gordon wait for Holly’s move in postal chess before he gave up?

Why do they even still hang out with Rimmer after the shit he pulls in Bodyswap and Quarantine?

Did nobody from the original crew seriously not stumble into the Stasis Leak just using the shower and wind up as white powder?

Are we assuming Series VII-era Lister used the Time Drive to go back into the events of Stasis Leak as Future Lister, or has that timeline been averted somehow? And where were Future Cat and Kryten?

When Holly decided to create Queeg to make a point, was that decision after he almost killed Lister with the yellow cable? Which is to say, was he trolling the whole time, or did he sincerely fuck up in that moment?

Why did they decide to go back to pursue Red Dwarf when the Legion Station literally had everything they could ever need, both survival-wise and sanity-wise?

[Ben Saunders]

Rimmer is a pretend “history buff”, that’s just what he tells women, he’s just really into Napoleon and diesel engines

Bringing the light bee in is a good point, bloody hell. You could have him on as well, he wouldn’t take up much space, being incorporeal (irl excuse: the light bee hadn’t been made up yet)

Hollister just hates Lister and can get away with punishing him the most

Alternate Lister is also his own dad

Marooned shot looks rubbish because it was filmed handheld and you can’t do bluescreen properly like that

Rimmer was mentally ill in Quarantine to be fair

I have no idea what you’re talking about with Stasis Leak

Regarding Legion: “imprisonment is an injury regardless of how you justify it” – Captain Picard

[Dave]

In Future Echoes they don’t go into stasis afterwards because they know they’re not meant to from seeing all the future echoes of their future selves. That’s the whole point, innit.

As for Legion, in Series VI they’re worried about Holly having been kidnapped, and more broadly they want to get Red Dwarf back so that they can continue heading to Earth, and in Legion specifically they are asked to stay there until they die, so there are lots of reasons really.

[Renegade Rob]

Good point, well made.

[Dave]

I have no idea what you’re talking about with Stasis Leak

Presumably that the portal leading from future-Red-Dwarf to the showers goes both ways, and someone from the past could accidentally wander through it and kill themselves. Which I hadn’t ever really thought about.

[Ben Saunders]

I meant the thing about Series VII-era Lister going back to the events of Stasis Leak with the Time Drive… I really don’t know what they mean

[clem]

Not going into stasis is explained in the novel like this: “Since Lister realized he couldn’t possibly go into stasis, on the grounds that the future echoes of himself had told him that he didn’t, he decided he wouldn’t, and instead he’d tried to make the best of a difficult situation.” Which seems like an ontological paradox to me, because where does Lister’s decision not to go into stasis originate?

> Why don’t they go inside the cockpit once Starbug crashes in Marooned? Are we assuming it’s crushed beyond repair?

After they’ve crashed and ascertained that they can’t take off, I don’t see why they’d go into the cockpit. It’s not necessarily “crushed beyond repair” – they just don’t need to be in there and would rather be in the midsection I suppose.

[Pete Part Three]

deleted – just seen someone made the exact same point.

[si]

Why did Kochanski’s hair change from the end of Nanarchy into Back in the Red?

Chloe Annett didn’t have a haircut.

[Renegade Rob]

Regarding Stasis Leak, I’m referring to how Future Lister goes, “In five years time, you find another way to go back in time.” But then we never see this followed up on (which is fine, but still an unanswered question).

If I’m not mistaken, seeing as Lister characterizes his adventuring as around six years when talking to Rimmer at the start of Series VIII, I always wondered, given what we know now, if Lister did end up going back to marry pre-accident Kochanski five years later, from which era of the show does that Future Lister hail from?

Seeing as how in Series VII, they have a version of the Time Drive that lets them go anywhere & when, and seeing how even in Ouroboros, Lister at the end takes the time to close the time loop and drop off his baby self, one could possibly conclude that the Future Lister and Future Rimmer we see in Stasis Leak are actually Lister and Rimmer at the start of Series VII, at a point between Tikka to Ride and Stoke Me a Clipper since they’d have the newer Time Drive but before Rimmer left Starbug.

Just generally referring to the unanswered question of “Did Lister ever become the Future Lister we see in Stasis Leak, even if offscreen?” Sorry for the confusion.

Also, thanks for referring to the novel regarding not going into stasis. Makes sense. And regarding ontological paradoxes, I like Steven Moffat’s concept of those. He was talking about Heaven Sent and basically explained that the first go-around might have played out differently, but once the loop gets going, it “tightens” over repeated iterations until it finally settles into a consistent equilibrium. That for me makes every ontological paradox I see in media much more palatable.

[International Debris]

Doesn’t Rimmer do his ‘Mayday’ bit from the cockpit in Marooned?

As for Legion, I’ve wondered that myself: if I were them, I’d have chosen to stay there even before Legion tried to push it on them.

When they had the time drive, why didn’t they go back to the time and place where they’d left Red Dwarf? Then they could have been the ones who stole it (more amusing than nanobots) and the time drive would have had a sensible purpose.

[Dax101]

Rimmer is not a history buff per say. he just looks up to men with authority. which is the history he knows the most about.

[Renegade Rob]

I’m 90% certain that Rimmer’s mayday bit was at the workstations at the front corners of the midsection. Because he’s trying to send a signal as Lister comes back in from the snow in the background behind him.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

When they had the time drive, why didn’t they go back to the time and place where they’d left Red Dwarf? Then they could have been the ones who stole it (more amusing than nanobots) and the time drive would have had a sensible purpose.

Too busy going back and stealing curry supplies from themselves … and assassinating themselves, and *then* a POTUS. So ya know, busy lads. Probably had planned to use it to get Red Dwarf back and just forgot.

[Flap Jack]

I’m still ride-or-die for the “the future crew from Stasis Leak are the same future crew from Out of Time” theory. It just makes too much sense.

[Renegade Rob]

Oh snap… I never even thought of that! You’ve convinced me. Thanks!

[si]

I’m still ride-or-die for the “the future crew from Stasis Leak are the same future crew from Out of Time” theory. It just makes too much sense.

Rimmer’s got a moustache, for a start.

[Ben Saunders]

and an H on his forehead.

[pendo86]

On the topic of Stasis Leak. Why does stepping into a leaky stasis booth bring them out into a shower room? Is the shower room directly behind the stasis booth? How has the stasis field leaked into the shower room? And why does it allow them to walk through walls?

As the stasis leak preserves whatever it’s leaked into, presumably every time they step through the “rent in the space-time continuum” they should always appear at the same date and time (22nd March 2077) so why do they not bump into themselves and appear there at the exact same time as other versions?

They travel to just before Lister has been put into stasis so why doesn’t he do as Rimmer tries to do and save himself? Why doesn’t he warn Hollister about the faulty drive plate and get them to evacuate the ship whilst stationed on Ganymede?

[International Debris]

I suppose causality stops that from happening: if he hadn’t survived the accident, he wouldn’t have been able to go back and warn them. Also, he’s told in five years time they find another way to go back in time, although admittedly he finds that out a long time after he could have warned Hollister.

Didn’t they mention in the recent Dwarfcast that someone did a list or Twitter thread or something where they had every time Lister could actually have gone back to Earth?

[International Debris]

Why is there a raw sprout in Starbug in Marooned?

[Ian Symes]

Didn’t they mention in the recent Dwarfcast that someone did a list or Twitter thread or something where they had every time Lister could actually have gone back to Earth?

Yarp, this tweet and the replies: https://twitter.com/ganymedetitan/status/1254812028188966914

The universal explanation for why something predicted in one episode didn’t transpire in a future episode is that they’ve fucked around with their timeline so much (Timeslides, Out of Time, Tikka, Ouroboros) that the predicted futures have been rewritten.

An even more universal explanation for anything you can’t reconcile is that Series III onwards takes place in a parallel universe to Series 1&2. It’s Multiverse 101.

[International Debris]

ffs, it was two months ago and I even replied to one of the responses. What’s become of my memory?

[Renegade Rob]

Yeah, the Fucked Up Timeline Theory (or FUTT). That actually makes perfect sense, and I remember hearing about that years ago, and on some level I’ve actually subscribed to a version of that, which best explains the changing centuries of their “present day” as well as the fluctuating Red Dwarf original crew count, Lister’s history with Kochanski being retooled, and why Lister had his appendix out twice (although that could’ve also been reconstituted in D.N.A.). The Infinite Temporal Flux abides.

Mind you, that can actually explain any discrepancy the more I think about it.

Not sure how I feel about Series III onward being a separate continuity from I and II, seeing as they do explain the progression of events in the Backwards crawl.

I think the more important question is: Did Rimmer always know damn well that sprouts make Lister chuck, or did he learn that by watching Lister trying to eat the raw sprout in Marooned?

Also, we already know there’s a botanical garden on Red Dwarf, so why would they eat the last strawberry in the universe instead of just trying to plant it?

[GlenTokyo]

@Renegade Rob, on the Marooned cockpit shot looking cack, it’s simple.

Ed goes “Right chaps, what we’re going to do here is blue screen over there, and then have a lovely handheld shot moving from the midsection to the cockpit, and we’ll put the landing bay in the background. Ok? Lovely.”

Then the shot it and remembered it was 1989 and they couldn’t track in a background plate on a handheld shot, or any shot. They’d have had to have done it motion control.

Also there’s a lot of blue spill so it would likely have been atrocious even if they could have done it.

A locked off shot could’ve worked but I don’t know whether the landing bay model would have been detailed enough to look to scale.

It’s long been my ambition to actually attempt to fix that scene with various 3D modelling and video editing software, one day. I was hoping they’d do it for the Blu-ray but nah.

As for the post crash. I don’t think it’s implied the cockpit is crushed, but to show the cockpit from most angles, they would have had to have shown snow against the windows of Starbug, and the set has no actual windows, just holes, so it’s cheaper to just stay in the midsection.

[Dave]

Also, we already know there’s a botanical garden on Red Dwarf, so why would they eat the last strawberry in the universe instead of just trying to plant it?

When they get that strawberry out in Demons & Angels, it always makes me think how wasteful Lister and Kryten were by chucking all those fresh strawberries in the bin in The Last Day.

They seem to have gone from blasé disregard for fresh strawberries to hushed reverence very quickly.

[Hamish]

And the moral of the story is: Appreciate what you’ve got, because basically, Strawberries are fantastic.

[By Jove its holmes]

I can picture Rimmer force-feeding Lister strawberries

[bloodteller]

why do they say its the last strawberry in the universe? surely all they know for sure is that its the last strawberry on the ship, unless they frequently fly around in some sort of fruit-detector shuttle

[Author]

Replies