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

[Dave]

They should audition for where’s my fruit.

[Renegade Rob]

If they worked half as hard to get more strawberries as they did to get some fucking lemons, I’d say obtaining any fruit is within their power.

[Moonlight]

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

I don’t think “This is the last strawberry we’re aware of onboard this ship that is the Red Dwarf mining ship the Red Dwarf” is a very good opening line, and not just because I had a stroke halfway through typing it.

[Renegade Rob]

There aren’t a lot of episodes that wouldn’t have been improved by an opening SOS Holly narration laying out their current fruit supply situation. Not too much to ask for.

Also something I never was clear on: Were the vending machines it was their job to repair meant to be some version of a replicator? They could comprehend custom milkshake orders but also just dictate what the fish of the day was. So was the food molecularly assembled each time or was there actual food stuff being conveyed throughout the ship? Chicken soup nozzles were clogged after all, which struck me as weird since why wouldn’t they be more generalized nozzles for any kind of food? If the food was premade, how did it last 3 million years, even if it had been dehydrated like in Back to the Future 2? Because if it’s replicated then really there’s theoretically infinite fruit, but probably with the problem of finite generalized “food matter” reserves to assemble the food from, so a triplicator would still help.

As a side note, I’ve been using the lockdown as an opportunity to watch the original Star Trek, which I had never seen properly before, and in the episode Tomorrow is Yesterday, the teleporter operator impresses their onboard guest who’s from the 1960’s by using the food machine to instantly summon chicken soup when the guest requests it. I wonder if this very episode inspired that aspect of Red Dwarf, because of all the foods, they both used chicken soup (a food I’ve never actually seen in vending machines in modern times).

[Ben Saunders]

I’m making this up, fair warning, but we see in Series 1 that they have standard vending machines with clogged chicken soup nozzles. Then, we see that in the drive room we they have a vending machine which can spit out entire meals, and dictate the fish of the day. Then, in Series III, we see Lister throwing a bunch of ingredients into a microwave and instantly producing a full, cooked meal. So perhaps the officers have access to better food vending/replication systems than the lower ranks. Or maybe I’m talking shite.

I had soup out of a swimming pool vending machine a few years ago. It was as terrible as one would imagine.

[Dave]

a swimming pool vending machine

That must have been fucking massive.

[Dave]

If the food was premade, how did it last 3 million years

Stasis.

[Ben Saunders]

That must have been fucking massive.

[ROUND OF APPLAUSE]

[GlenTokyo]

Yeah they probably have canteen tier vending machines in the corridors, they’ll give you chicken soup, pies etc, and maybe tools and equipment, one spat out a bucket.

And then in the drive room and officer areas they have proper meals and flavour synthesis systems or something if not some form of replicator.

[By Jove its holmes]

Well, given that only Lister and the Cat require food, perhaps they felt they were overstocked with food.

[Renegade Rob]

Here’s one that I have a personal answer to but it’s not spelled out per se in the episode proper: In White Hole when 12,000 IQ Holly gives them the pool-with-planets plan that Lister chucks in the bin in favor of his own pool shot, was that the intention all along? In other words, did 12,000 IQ Holly in all her geniusness give them intentionally flawed plans knowing that Lister would reject them for his ultimately successful shot? Or was Holly’s plan real and Lister rejected it anyway and just got lucky? Or were both plans valid? (I tend to think it was all Holly’s plan, much like how the Oracle in the Matrix bullshits Neo by telling him he isn’t the One so as to mentally get him where he needs to be.)

In addition, how fucked would they have been in their no-power situation had they not happened to drift near a White Hole? And what’s to stop them from trying the IQ compression again if they (mostly) don’t remember the timeline? Or was one of 12,000 IQ Holly’s last actions before powering off to direct Red Dwarf in some way in the direction of a White Hole (through Holly Hop or otherwise) so as to act as a reset button for the crisis? Not sure if that reasoning works considering the implication is that they were operating in the White Hole’s time influence even before that start of the episode, though 12,000 IQ Holly could have done some timey-wimey stuff to affect the ship in the past to ensure that it found its way to a White Hole. But that’s a stretch.

Also, and most importantly, if a White Hole is the opposite of a Black Hole, what with its spewing of matter and energy and time back into the universe, wouldn’t there be an opposite event horizon that’s impossible to enter because it just pushes everything out including light and time, etc. such that nothing in the universe could push past that point? And if so, how do you fill a White Hole with a planet, if theoretically it would just bounce off the event horizon?

Also, what IS a White Hole?

[tombow]

I still wonder why Holly had Rimmer activated in the “Lister gets rich with the tension sheet” timeline of Timeslides.

And…I know nothing about spaceship (or any ship) mechanics, but if Dwarf needed multiple technicians and a navigation crew to fly safely before the accident, why is that not an issue in the show? Who fixes the drive plates now?

And the valid question from Justice, why were they responsible for the drive plates? What were they, lowly soup machine maintainers or people with the whole crew’s life in their hands?

[bloodteller]

maybe nobody else on the ship could be bothered to fix the drive plate, so they gave the job to a nobody technician. its a common thing to be asked to do something because nobody else wants to. maybe repairing a drive plate is a really menial boring task as well as incredibly easy, so they figured they could palm it off to rimmer

[Dave]

I like to imagine Rimmer was tasked with a very low-level job with no real plausible risk of anything dangerous happening, but through his own incompetence and lack of technical understanding he managed to do something so wrong that it caused the accident.

[Hamish]

From Rimmer’s Death Video:
HOLLISTER: Look, it was your job to fix it, Rimmer! You can’t do sloppy work on the drive plate!

It sounds like they knew it could be a big deal.

[Pete Part Three]

RIMMER: I’m concerned over some of the safety procedures on board, sir. There’s a potentially lethal scenario concerning drive plates, sir. Obviously, anyone who mis-repaired one of these plates would have to have a brain the size of a leprechaun’s testicle, nevertheless, sir, like German tourists, the stupid are everywhere.

Yeah, I quote Series VIII now.

Anyway, I think Justice is a deliberate retcon and attempts to tinker with the history (much like DNA does with the Kochanski stuff) to align things with Infinity. In this new history, Rimmer is not responsible for the crew dying,he just likes to think he is as that would involve responsibility. So the question in Justice is moot. Z shift (introduced in the novels, not mentioned in the show before or since) were *not* responsible for anything of any significance.

Obviously, this didn’t stick for Back in the Red and then it went back to Rimmer being responsible for the drive plate, and thus the deaths of the crew.

[Bezzy]

In Psirens Rimmers light bee is on battery backup but by Rimmerworld it survives at least 600 years …

While in Promised land it indicates that light bees can be charged with an AC like socket . If that’s the case why is it a worry when Lister is going through the list of Starbug issues due to them losing the Dwarf?

[Ben Saunders]

Lemons, also, he lasts for ages

[Hamish]

I am sure there is a joke in there somewhere.

[Dave]

In Psirens Rimmers light bee is on battery backup but by Rimmerworld it survives at least 600 years …

While in Promised land it indicates that light bees can be charged with an AC like socket . If that’s the case why is it a worry when Lister is going through the list of Starbug issues due to them losing the Dwarf?

They upgraded his light bee in Legion. They probably gave him a recharge off-screen too.

[Dave]

I still wonder why Holly had Rimmer activated in the “Lister gets rich with the tension sheet” timeline of Timeslides.

The whole ship should disappear really, there’s no reason it would be out there three million years away from Earth. The accident would probably never have happened. Holly would never have swapped heads and taken the face of Hilly. And even if all of this did happen without Lister, Kryten would never have discovered the mutated developing fluid so Rimmer wouldn’t have any way of going back and changing things again. But nor would Lister so he wouldn’t have been able to give himself the tension sheet in the first place. So that whole timeline exists in some weird limbo that could never have happened.

They really should have used up ten minutes of the episode to explain all this.

[tombow]

maybe only organic/alive beings are affected by timeslides changing the past. Maybe as the place where the timeslides were kept on, the ship and it’s parts (including Rimmer and Holly) were left unchanged. Although there’s no reason to *keep* him on – “so it’s just you and me?” “well without Lister here there’s no reason to keep you around” *blip*

as for drive plate, maybe there was an atmosphere of negligence. Maybe Jupiter was just a really badly run company…maybe the Captain really was a donut chef who had gotten friendly with the right people, just scraped through the exams into being captain and didn’t really understand how important the drive plates were, or everyone just thought someone else was in charge of them and didn’t think about Rimmer not being able to handle them. Maybe Rimmer pushed himself into taking charge of them to feel important.

[Dave]

Maybe there was no accident and the entire series is taking place in Lister’s mind in the milliseconds before stasis kicks in.

[Renegade Rob]

The whole series is just an unreality bubble inside a despair squid hallucination inside a Red Dwarf snowglobe on Hollister’s desk.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

<

Maybe there was no accident and the entire series is taking place in Lister’s mind in the milliseconds before stasis kicks in.

No no no, the entire series is taking place in Rimmer’s dream that he is having on the train on the way to interview for a technicians job with the JMC.

[clem]

You’re all wrong. In the last ever episode Lister will be knocked unconscious, and then Captain Butler will wake up in bed having dreamed all of Red Dwarf, and tell Sanjeev Bhaskar he really ought to wear an H on his forehead.

[International Debris]

Why, in Back to Reality, is Rimmer driven to despair by the fact that he can’t blame his parents for his uselessness because he has a successful brother? He has (at this point) three successful brothers and still blames his parents for his uselessness.

[Renegade Rob]

Why does taking a life drive Kryten to suicide when he’s already killed the crew of the Nova 5 without provocation?

[Ben Saunders]

I’d say the effects of the suicide squid aren’t just what happens in the hallucinations specifically, but also a general feeling of despair, like it pumps the chemicals that cause despair directly into your brain. Therefore, anything that happens in the hallucination would affect you more deeply than the same situation in the real world.

[Flap Jack]

In a way the Rimmer brother thing is the only real fumble in Back to Reality, but thinking about it, the only issue with it is the way other characters recognise it.

Because it isn’t really “oh, Rimmer’s worst nightmare: he can’t blame his failure on his parents, because his brother is more successful than him, unlike in reality”, it’s “not only does Rimmer have a more successful brother, but the brother is massively more successful than any of his real brothers and he is massively more of a failure than his real self, and the brother has the visage of LISTER, one of the few people in his life that he convinced himself he was superior to, literally the only person in his career that he outranks”.

The Despair Squid didn’t need to invent an entirely new depressing scenario for Rimmer, it just had to exaggerate his existing circumstances. It highlights how much Rimmer already hated himself.

[Dave]

Yeah, I always thought it was the idea of Lister being more successful than Rimmer (as well as actually being related to him) which really wound him up. I think Kryten just reads it slightly wrong when he summarises all the reasons at the end.

[Ian Symes]

Why does taking a life drive Kryten to suicide when he’s already killed the crew of the Nova 5 without provocation?

There is quite the difference between causing an accident through well-intended actions, and shooting someone down with a big gun. Besides which, Kryten was pretty damn depressed when he realised the Nova 5 crew were dead, in both TV and book depictions.

[Plastic Percy]

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).

My theory is that the Future Lister and Rimmer from ‘Stasis Leak’ are the younger versions of the 15 Year Later Lister and Rimmer from ‘Out of Time’.

Presumably, they found a stardrive they were able to combine with the timedrive, and Lister decided to go back and rescue Kochanski. They already seem to be enjoying the life of luxury they grow accustomed to, given Lister’s expensive looking suit and ability to rent the Honeymoon Suite in a fairly expensive looking hotel.

When Lister had his accident, Kochanski dumped him – having become as shallow and selfish as the others.

[Renegade Rob]

That actually makes a lot of sense. I bet Future Kryten is actually hanging around the background of Stasis Leak, but no one can tell because his toupee is just that good.

So here’s another question: How does the table in the drive room eject canisters of ashes so quickly? You’d think they’d shoot it out an airlock or something, not a table in the center of a room. The whoosh sound happens immediately, which might just be the vacuum of space as it’s released into the ramscoop, but still.

[Dave]

I reckon there’s just a recorded Whoosh sound that plays when they press the button.

[International Debris]

The more important question: why is there a chute to eject things into space in the middle of the drive room? And how much stationery got lost down there over the years?

[Dave]

It’s for Hollister to shit into.

[Ian Symes]

I can’t stress this strongly enough: the stargate is not a bin.

[By Jove its holmes]

Doctor Who: In Spearhead from Space, what use will the Facsimilies of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.that are seen on-screen be to the Nestene invasion?

[Ben Saunders]

Plastic in general is useful to them, that’s just two more to their numbers. (Although aren’t those mad of wax? lol)
Maybe their intel on Earth is just a little out of date and they think they’re still alive

[By Jove its holmes]

I’;m just curious how Kennedy and MLK Jr were going to fit into the invasion plans

Jacqueline Kennedy: “Jack! I thought you were dead!”

Nestene Facsimile JFK: “I was!”

[Hamish]

Nestene JFK was the actual shooter Lister put behind the grassy knoll.

[Unrumble]

Plastic in general is useful to them, that’s just two more to their numbers. (Although aren’t those mad of wax? lol)
Maybe their intel on Earth is just a little out of date and they think they’re still alive

There’s a scene where it’s explained that the plastics factory have been hired to make plastic ‘waxworks’, using some kind of new process/technique.

[International Debris]

Why does Lister sign everyone up for the Canaries, going so far as to fake all their signatures, instead of just asking them if they want to join?

[International Debris]

Why is Rimmer getting a skutter to put the picture up at the start of IX when he’s hard light?

[si]

Why is Rimmer getting a skutter to put the picture up at the start of IX when he’s hard light?

BECAUSE HE CAN.

[Ben Saunders]

Why is Rimmer getting a skutter to put the picture up at the start of IX when he’s hard light?
Fuck me I had never thought about that. He’s probably just flexing his authority on the one thing he has control over, which would be a very Rimmer thing to do. Plus, that would make sense as a re-introduction to the character, since that’s the purpose of the scene it’s found in.

[Ben Saunders]

oh eww does doing > make you actually quote things now
i don’t like this

[Renegade Rob]

In Stoke Me a Clipper, is the dimension with the planet with the ring of Ace Rimmer coffins implied to be Ace’s home dimension from Dimension Jump since theoretically he’s the “first Ace?”

Also, do hard-light holograms really need major orthopedic surgery?

In addition, I’m a bit fuzzy on the succession of Ace’s. I remember the deleted scene where the Ace in Stoke Me a Clipper explains in the medibay that he was originally a Series VI-era Rimmer in his dimension who abandoned his crew and was tracked down by his predecessor, but when he said “I took over from him,” he was talking about the Ace from Dimension Jump. So was that shorthand for, “your Ace was a thousand Ace’s ago and I took over the lineage” or did he really take over directly from the Ace from Dimension Jump, which would imply that the Dimension Jump Ace isn’t actually the first Ace either?

Also, what happens if an Ace is killed instantly and doesn’t have a chance to pass on the lineage, instead of limping to the nearest Rimmer mortally wounded (ex: being instantly vaporized by a neutron tank in Dimension 165, which makes zero sense if there are infinite dimensions, like why even bother numbering them?).

Why were Ace’s wig and shades real but the rest of him was part of the hologram?

Since it’s implied (and even explicitly stated in Backwards) that the Wildfire can and does time-travel when dimension-jumping, why would it hone in on Series IV-era Rimmer when a) Rimmer’s dead and the hologram is a simulated consciousness, and b) both earlier and later in that dimension’s timeline there are actual living Rimmers?

[Dave]

In Stoke Me a Clipper, is the dimension with the planet with the ring of Ace Rimmer coffins implied to be Ace’s home dimension from Dimension Jump since theoretically he’s the “first Ace?”

Given that in Dimension Jump he’s told he won’t ever be able to return to his own dimension, presumably it’s anywhere but.

[Author]

Replies