“What If…?”

[Podey]

Just seen news that Star Wars may be getting its own “What if…?” series. I’m sure there are probably threads amounting to the same already, but if you could pitch episodes for a Red Dwarf version, what plot points would you spin off in a different direction? Take it as read that “What if the crew survived” and “What if series 8 wasn’t shit” are already signed off. 

Ep 1: What if Lister, Cat and Kryten didn’t find the luck virus in Quarantine?

Unable to escape from their enclosure, Lister and Cat suffocate to death during 2 hours WOO and Rimmer eventually expires from the virus leaving Kryten stuck alone in bay 47, where he eventually goes insane and succumbs to droid rot several hundred years later. 

Note: there is a non-zero chance series is cancelled after one episode.

Topic

[Flap Jack]

What If… Rimmer was kept down a year in school?

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

[loadoftottnumb]

Episode 1 sounds hilarious 

Episode 2: What if they hadn’t travelled back in time and put Lister under the pool table? Would they just have 2 Listers? One 30 odd years younger than the other? Would they cease to exist at some point? Would it be cruel to the baby Lister? Would he still develop a scouse accent? 

[Dave]

What if the crew rescued Butler instead of Kryten?

(With the upshot that Lister, Rimmer and Cat lead happy and fulfilled lives and achieve self-actualisation.)

[International Debris]

What if series 7 wasn’t shit?

[Moonlight]

What if Series 2 was shit?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Ep 1: What if Lister, Cat and Kryten didn’t find the luck virus in Quarantine?
Unable to escape from their enclosure, Lister and Cat suffocate to death during 2 hours WOO and Rimmer eventually expires from the virus leaving Kryten stuck alone in bay 47, where he eventually goes insane and succumbs to droid rot several hundred years later.  

To be a party pooper, the luck virus only exists as a way of aiding their escape later on. It offers a bit of a gag at the start but ultimately it’s Rob and Doug writing their escape.  Had they not found the luck virus, another way out would have been written

what if I wasn’t such a cunt?

[Podey]

I don’t think that post is a sign of cuntyness…! 😁

And yeah that’s why I picked the luck virus to remove from the existing story, because it is only there for that reason later on. 

[Renegade Rob]

The fact that they had the luck virus was lucky in and of itself so it being there is a byproduct of their own future luck (as is the fact that Rimmer neglected to check their bags when they entered quarantine, as I don’t know much about Space Corps Directives, but one imagines that when you’re put in quarantine you’re not supposed to be allowed to bring in literal concentrated virus doses in with you). 

What if… the past Hollister and Holly got wise to the fact that the future Dwarfers were on board during the events of Stasis Leak?

What if… the alternate Dave from Ouroboros became twisted and bitter at losing Kochanski and essentially became the Evil Lister from Last Human?

What if… Holly didn’t feel the need to switch off George McIntyre after the accident and Lister wakes up and it’s George there instead of Rimmer?

What if… the resurrected Red Dwarf crew took their 3-million-years-in-deep-space plight seriously, didn’t imprison the Dwarfers, remembered that Kochanski was a competent navigation officer, and actually worked with them more to establish a more harmonious and sensible working relationship in terms of exploring deep space and reaching Earth?

What if… the Dwarfers just stayed with Legion at his space station? Let’s be honest, that place was awesome, and almost certainly had more to offer them than a gigantic red trash can with three million years on the clock. 

What if… that convenient plinth wasn’t already there in the Blue Midget cockpit for Rimmer to put his dad’s hologram on to play in The Beginning?

[Podey]

What if series 7 wasn’t shit?

We are already in this reality! 

#hill #dieon

[Flap Jack]

What If… the Smega-Drive subtitled all of the audience reactions?

[Captain Bollocks]

What if Cappsy, Danny and Ian had all grown up to be big Hancock’s Half Hour obsessives instead, and the rest of us just had to make do with Facebook pages full of Smeg toasters, series VIII praise, and replies of “Just enjoy the show!!!!!!” when you raise reasonable discussion points about the consequences of changing history in Stasis Leak? 

[cwickham]

What if we fall in love? What if we can’t get out? What if we’re in too deep? What if doesn’t last? What if the road gets rough?

[Warbodog]

What if Hudzen hadn’t gone insane and had replaced Kryten? Would some plots have been resolved more efficiently with his fast maths, ray gun eyes and super strong groinal appendage (presumably with a range of attachments)? Krytie TV wouldn’t have happened, for a start.

[Dave]

Krytie TV wouldn’t have happened, for a start.

[Ian Symes]

What if the fireball is real and this time the radar read-out’s the illusion?

[Dave]

[Warbodog]

[Ridley]

What if Cat found his singing tie pin?

[International Debris]

Ok, more seriously this time…

What if the cat race had never left Red Dwarf, and Lister had awoken to find them populating the ship? 

[Unrumble]

What if Rob had left earlier than he did e.g. after Series IV? How would the humour/stories/lines have evolved differently…

[Dave]

Ok, more seriously this time…
What if the cat race had never left Red Dwarf, and Lister had awoken to find them populating the ship? 

Well, they would still be in the hold, presumably, as Holly didn’t unseal it until the radiation had died down to a safe level, the same reason he let Lister out. So it’d be the same as The End but with multiple cays instead of one.

Either way, I do wonder whether there was scope for the show to have looked at the remnants of Cat civilisation on Red Dwarf in more detail. Outside of Waiting For God we never really see any. The novel has some great descriptions if what it was like.

[Nick R]

What if… in Ouroboros, our Lister got trapped in Kochanski’s dimension, while her Hologram Lister got trapped in ours?

What if… Queeg was real, and not just an April Fool joke? Under his strict leadership, would the ship get back to Earth? With Rimmer being forced to study and revise, would he finally pass his exams and become an officer?

[Flap Jack]

What If… instead of resigning his post on the Enlightenment to save Nirvanah Crane, Rimmer had negotiated for her to become Red Dwarf’s hologram instead?

Imagining a Red Dwarf crew with Hudzen instead of Kryten, Queeg instead of Holly, and Crane instead of Rimmer.

[Warbodog]

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

[Dave]

Justice And Lister’s Thrusting Groin

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

> What if… the Dwarfers just stayed with Legion at his space station? Let’s be honest, that place was awesome, and almost certainly had more to offer them than a gigantic red trash can with three million years on the clock. 

This is basically “would you rather live in the Matrix” type of question. Surely it’s better to live in a simulation, like BTL, when your actual life is terrible. 

As Lister points out, they are still technically prisoners. They lack freedom.

whilst the idea of the perfectly simulated life sounds bliss, it’s not real. Legion offers them the illusion of a better life. What he lacks is a future. He lacks a hope that whilst slim, Lister and crew thrive on. 

Humanity needs hope. It needs a positive future. That’s why people so hopelessly cling onto the smallest glimmers of hope in life than just accept defeat.  

[Podey]

I’ve just realised this is essentially the episode “Skipper”, isn’t it…

[Renegade Rob]

I wasn’t even thinking about the simulation park in Legion, just the facilities and all that. Like, let’s say that they’re able to switch off Legion after defeating him just as they do at the end of the original episode and then have the run of the station. They probably have a better chance of reaching Earth with the tech and info they find at that station than they do trying to get back to Red Dwarf, if that’s their goal. There’s just more stuff and resources for them to work with on the station, almost like being able to keep the High Red Dwarf from Demons and Angels (though presumably stationary). 

[Formica]

What if Ace Rimmer’s first Dimension Jump had taken him to the Mr. Rat universe?

[Podey]

I think Ace and Mr Rat would have gotten along fabulously. 

[Dave]

He would have never left.

[Podey]

This may be explained in the ep and I’ve just forgotten, but what are we to believe happened to all the Rimmers in those universes that our Rimmer jumped to? Were they each just off-screen? Does Arnie jump into the “bodies” of those alternate universe hims ala Quantum Leap? 

[Dave]

I rewatched it just the other day, and while it never explains it explicitly, there’s a suggestion that he somehow displaces that universe’s Rimmer, Quantum Leap style.

As for whether this is recognised by other people in the universe or not, I think they just see him as their Rimmer because he’s taken on his form. In the first universe with Holly, Hollister etc., nobody seems to notice the difference. Although in the Rativerse, while Kryten seems to think he’s their Rimmer initially, he then seems quite comfortable with the idea that he’s a new Rimmer who has replaced their version, as though this kind of thing happens quite often.

[Formica]

By the end, Captain Lister seems to know from the jump (weyyyyyyyy) that Rimmer is a visitor, no?

[Podey]

Maybe this could explain the problem some people have with Rimmer losing his obsession with aliens, or basically *any* perceived unexplained character change…. ours was displaced by a Rimmer from an even smeggier universe who chose to stay.

[Dave]

Maybe this is why we suddenly got a hologram Rimmer again from BTE onwards, an alternative version jumped in and replaced Series VIII Rimmer.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

Maybe this is why we suddenly got a hologram Rimmer again from BTE onwards, an alternative version jumped in and replaced Series VIII Rimmer.

But then wouldn’t he still have the Quantum Skipper he arrived with and thus not need to use the one Kryten found on the research station? Come to think of it, couldn’t he have skipped out at pretty much any time if he’d had his own Quantum Skipper?

[Podey]

He wouldn’t have necessarily needed to have used the exact seems means as our Rimmer did in Skipper.

[Warbodog]

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I think Ace and Mr Rat would have gotten along fabulously. 

Someone contact Big Finish, post haste 

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

[Nick R]

Hey, we live in that universe already!

But then, it’s not really surprising that we can’t trust the musical opinions of a computer who once tried to decimalise music.

[Renegade Rob]

What if…. there hadn’t been boxes of explosives recklessly left about for Rimmer to blow himself up with at the end of Timeslides, and he just stayed alive from that point onwards?

What if… there wasn’t a white hole reset button to conveniently undo the catastrophic results of Holly’s intelligence compression low-power debacle and the Dwarfers had to actually deal with that situation fully?

What if… holocrews we’re less legendarily arrogant such that during the events of Holoship, the Dwarfers and Enlightenment had some sort of communication along the lines of… “So, um… seeing as you’re not just ruined remnants of humanity but seemingly a continuation of Earth society as a going concern… any update about the status of the human race at this late stage? Also, we got turned around a bit, so like… coordinates to Earth or the nearest civilized sector would be cool. Floating that out there.”

What if… Rimmer didn’t resign his post on the Enlightenment and just left with them? 

What if they were able to install Legion tech on Starbug and actually bring Legion with them as a new member of the crew as they previously discussed?

What if… instead of just abandoning Waxworld, they collected the melted wax droids and made an effort to reassemble them and bring them back in some form, since that’s what the evil side was basically doing anyway?

What if… Ace Rimmer landed on a psi-moon? What would it look like when it terraformed? Would it be the most happening place in the multiverse?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

What if…. there hadn’t been boxes of explosives recklessly left about for Rimmer to blow himself up with at the end of Timeslides, and he just stayed alive from that point onwards? 

I think it would only affect Holoship (couldn’t happen) and Leigon (but only so far as there’d be no hard light drive.

that would then mean all holograms they meet would likely be soft light, unless they found another way to introduce the concept. 

[Dave]

I think it would only affect Holoship (couldn’t happen) and Leigon (but only so far as there’d be no hard light drive.

Quarantine would end up a bit different too, given that he couldn’t get a holo-virus.

And he couldn’t live for hundreds of years in Rimmerworld.

[clem]

Maybe this is why we suddenly got a hologram Rimmer again from BTE onwards, an alternative version jumped in and replaced Series VIII Rimmer.

When Rimmer skips into the last universe he visits, the one where he’s successful, he’s no longer a hologram, so presumably the same would be true of a hologram Rimmer who took the place of nano-Rimmer. 

[Formica]

Look, I don’t know how well done it would be, but you couldn’t have Red Dwarf: What If…? without What if Back to Reality wasn’t just a hallucination?

The most obvious story for this would be something derailing the group suicide, the gang then return to their previous lives for some stretch of time, eventually either orchestrating a secret escape or joining in with some sort of resistance.

[Renegade Rob]

Every hallucination becomes its own new dimension, that’s Multiverse 101, so there’s gotta be a dimension where Back to Reality is real. Although maybe, what if… the Red Dwarf dimension as we know it is the dimension formed by the dimension where Back to Reality is real, with the Red Dwarf game being played and the simulation being a hallucination/dream of sorts, thus spawning a new reality? 

Of course that gets into the whole infinite dimensions debate of, if there are infinite dimensions, is there even such a thing as dreaming and imagining or are we always just glimpsing visions into a universe where what we’re dreaming and imagining is real, or is that a distinction without a difference?

Also, what if…. the Dwarfers are made to hallucinate in Back to Reality due to the hallucinogenic ink, but at the same time, one of all of them has contracted the evolved pneumonia from Confidence & Paranoia? Would the entire Back to Reality world become solid around them? Or would they eventually snap out of it thanks to the lithium carbonate and find that they manifested Duane Dibbley into existence?

Also, random additional bonus ‘what if’ because I just thought of it. What if… the positive viruses Rimmer finds in the ruins of Starbug in Back in the Red aren’t Luck and Sexual Magnetism, but the other two that Kryten mentioned, Inspiration and Charisma?

Additional additional: what if… it had been any of the other Dwarfers who escaped in the seeding pod in Rimmerworld, presumably setting the stage for Listerworld or Catworld or Krytenworld (and for the sake of argument let’s say they launched the pod in such a way that strands them on a different planet, one that doesn’t take Starbug as long to reach them, but long enough for the clones to form a society)?

[Author]

Replies