Would you consider the Boys from the Dwarf as 'heroes'?

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Looking at just the main four and their actions over the past 12 television series; would you consider them heroes?

Obviously, they aren’t the Justice League or Avengers, but do you consider them as self-serving or do you regard them as merely unconventional in their heroism?

Topic

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Self-serving definitely. They don’t do anything to protect the universe or anyone in it. They have never rescued anyone with maybe the exception of Irene E and they were more than happy to see her flushed out the airlock.

Kryten did rescue Camille I suppose, then gave her up.

Presumably the resurrected crew are out there somewhere, yet they stopped the microbe somehow, took Red Dwarf for themselves and left hundreds of people stranded in space on little transport ships.

Everyone else they have met have basically tried to kill them in some way, so they have in return, killed them to save themselves.

[bloodteller]

They saved billions of lives by defeating the Inquisitor and erasing all of his work, that’s gotta count for something surely. Although it’s never really brought up in the episode, they are effectively bringing a lot of innocent people back to life by killing him

[bloodteller]

Rimmer also revives Nirvana Crane’s hologram by resigning from the holoship, which is a rather sweet thing to do. Not heroic maybe, but if he hadn’t, she would have spent the rest of eternity turned off

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

They only killed the Inquisitor for their own gain though. Its self serving with positive side effects.

[Dave]

Well, Lister’s pretty cool, he doesn’t take any smeg, and even though he’s disgusting, sometimes he can be quite brave.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Allow me to throw my hat in to just add some ‘heroic’ moments from the Boys that didn’t pertain to them saving their own skin:

The Last Day – Though it pertains to Kryten getting harmed from Hudzen-10, the rest of the crew are unaware Hudzen-10 is also out for their blood as well and they team up to save him from termination

Back to Reality – While under the Despair Squid’s hallucination, of which they are still unaware of, the crew attempt to save a kid from being killed by the fascist cop

Twentica – While unsuccessful, Lister attempted to save the smugglers from being killed by the cops

Can of Worms – The crew only board the Mercenoid ship when they discover there’s a prisoner onboard; Lister then attempts to negotiate a trade to no luck

[Bargain Bin Holly]

They have never rescued anyone with maybe the exception of Irene E

Kryten and Snacky beg to differ

[bloodteller]

They chose to abandon their prison escape to warn the crew about the chameleonic microbe, which is pretty nice of them.

Them trying to bring Pete the sparrow back to life was a pretty selfless act too-they had nothing to gain by doing it, they just wanted to make Birdman happy again.

[Dave]

Lister has a pretty strong moral code, which is a big part of heroism I think. He’s willing to act altruistically and also unwilling to benefit himself in immoral ways (well, sometimes – Timeslides and Tikka might beg to differ).

I like the way Justice plays with this strong morality by having his unwillingness to shoot the simulant in the back ultimately save his life.

[International Debris]

Lister and Kryten are both decent, altruistic individuals who are willing to help others out for the most part.
Rimmer has occasional moments of decency but is generally self-centred.
Cat is completely self-centred.

In their desperate situation, they have had to go to extreme lengths to look after themselves, but there are definitely heroic actions in some episodes. Basically, they’re like most people.

[Pete Part Three]

Kryten’s altruism seems to extend no further than his programming and is restricted to those he’s supposed to obey. When dealing with other droids (Camille, Lister in Out of Time, the nanobots), his own prejudices come into play.

Fuck Kryten. Wanker.

(Sorry, just rewatched Series VII, VIII and BTE and I currently hate him).

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I don’t remember Kryten being particularly bad in BTE, thought he was quite fine really. Granted I also think he was one of the better parts of VII, but with that I know its an unpopular opinion.

[flanl3]

Rimmer also revives Nirvana Crane’s hologram by resigning from the holoship, which is a rather sweet thing to do. Not heroic maybe, but if he hadn’t, she would have spent the rest of eternity turned off

To be fair, with Rimmer gone, she was never turned on quite the same for the rest of eternity either.

[Hamish]

> They saved billions of lives by defeating the Inquisitor and erasing all of his work, that’s gotta count for something surely. Although it’s never really brought up in the episode, they are effectively bringing a lot of innocent people back to life by killing him

And probably a bunch of nasty people too. Would the Inquisitor have found Hitler to have lived a life of worthy of merit I wonder?

[bloodteller]

>And probably a bunch of nasty people too. Would the Inquisitor have found Hitler to have lived a life of worthy of merit I wonder?

The Inquisitor gets you to judge yourself, so as long as Hitler thought he was doing well for himself, he’d be allowed to live

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Well Cat’s a psychopath and he deemed himself worthy, imagine all the pyschopathes the Inquisitor spared cause they had a great ass

[Plastic Percy]

Maybe the Hitler we got was the ‘better’ Hitler. Perhaps when the Inquisitor met him, he was a hopeless old man who had perservered with art despite being crap and had wasted his life painting.

There’s a comic strip in the Smegazine of interest. The Inquisitor arrives aboard a small boat to judge an elderly Czech man, Jan Hoch. Despite Jan having raised a loving family and been a pillar of the community, the Inquisitor judges him unworthy as he failed to use the natural cunning, guile and brains he had to do something with his life other than being a simple fisherman.

The Inquisitor then erases him and generates the new Jan Hoch, who is now aboard a luxury yacht. He then discovers that this new Jan Hoch took all the opportunities he could in life and became Robert Maxwell, the corrupt newspaper magnate.

The Inquisitor promptly pushes him overboard.

[Lily]

If the Inquisitor replaces people with versions that made better choices in their lives, why are the replacement Lister and Kryten still on Red Dwarf? Surely it should be like Timeslides where they vanish, cause they’re somewhere else living a better life. Which would effectively kill Lister as he wouldn’t have ever gone into stasis and died millennia ago.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Maybe they were flukes, who says every sperm is going to be the next Einstein or Rockefeller?

[Dave]

As long as you got a new Lister and Kryten who had a higher opinion of themselves, it wouldn’t matter whether they did exactly the same things as our Lister and Kryten.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

If the Inquisitor only judged people based off their opinion of themselves, he’s probably just going to fill the world with giant pompous asses. I don’t think his plan is that thought out.

[Dave]

No, it’s a shit system.

If he ever inquisited himself I think he’d realise that, deep down, he knows he’s wasted his life.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Don’t think he’d be able to admit that, he is a sniveling prick as we see when he tries to kill Lister at the end of the episode.

[Flap Jack]

It’s probably easier to assume that The Inquisitor hadn’t got round to inquisiting Hitler (or most of the people in history) by the time he got to Red Dwarf.

Although that does raise the question of what Inqy does if he ends of replacing the parent of someone he’s already replaced. He has to redo the child, I guess.

2 ofher thoughts:

– The Inquisitor is very definitely deluded about the importance of nature over nature. Deep down he knows that someone’s environment is far more crucial in making them the person they are than their genes, which is why he doesn’t replace Rimmer when he makes that argument, but he’d never admit it. He could have replaced Hitler and changed nothing.

– The judgement is clearly not done according to how good or moral a person you are, but your sense of personal achievement, which basically makes The Inquisitor Ayn Rand. The Inquisitor would erase Nelson Mandela for being humble about the massive ways he changed the world for the better, but leave Hitler alone for how much he “achieved” making his genocidal ideals a reality. That’s what makes The Inquisitor such a great villain. He genuinely believes he’s doing the universe a favour with his judgements, but he’s inherently too much of an arsehole to come up with a system that is genuinely fair, and ends up killing countless innocents.

[Flap Jack]

Uh, I meant to say “nature over nurture”, obvs.

[Dave]

The Inquisitor would have made for a great chat-show spinoff. Get a few celebrities in to plug whatever movies or TV shows they’ve got coming out that week, then interrogate them on their own sense of self-worth and decide whether they deserve to live.

[International Debris]

The Inquisitor would erase Nelson Mandela for being humble about the massive ways he changed the world for the better, but leave Hitler alone for how much he “achieved” making his genocidal ideals a reality.

I think Nelson Mandela would probably consider himself to have lead a worthwhile life, no matter how humble he was.

I think there is merit to The Inquisitor’s perspective – that the idea of a worthwhile life is not as simple as fulfilling the targets set by society – but it can’t be applied as a black-and-white form of judgement. I don’t think he’s quite the same as Ayn Rand though – I do believe it’s possible to live a simple, humble life and pass his test, as long as you are personally happy with that. The issue is he doesn’t account for mistakes or guilt. Lister is erased because he knows he could have done more with his life, and on a subconscious level, he’s angry with himself about it (see also: Fathers & Suns). But The Inquisitor doesn’t allow for those mistakes to be rectified. It could be argued that Lister only truly becomes aware of his potential after the accident, when he realises how much he’s lost. He’s not given the opportunity to ever make something of his life after that.

I like the way he says “by their own low standards they have acquitted themselves”, it always made me think he knows that his judgements are unfair and stupid, but he’s done so many by this point that he has to carry on. He sounds so sick of his job.

The only logical way for him to do it, really, would be to judge everybody in order of birth, at their point of death. That way he could avoid the parent issue, as mentioned above, and also give everybody the chance to live their lives to the full rather than just wading in half way through. It still wouldn’t get round the issue of different moral compasses for people with psychopathy, sociopathy, narcissism, etc., but if you’re going to do a job, you might as well do it properly.

[Dave]

Not for the first time, a G&T thread has prompted me to reread The Last Temptation Of Kryten.

[Flap Jack]

Judging them at the point of death wouldn’t avoid the parent issue, because regardless of when the judgement takes place, The Inquisitor still erases their entire life, and therefore erases any children they had.

Children who The Inquisitor may have already judged worthy, or replaced.

Because even if the new person still has a child, still has them at the same time, and has them with the same person, the fact that the parent is a different person guarantees the child will also be a different person.

[Dave]

I think we’ve had this conversation a few times, but judging everyone in history in chronological order of birth would help with that.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

How does the Inquisitor pick at which point in someones life to judge? Someone at 26 may not feel they have lived a worth while life, but give them another 10 or 20 years they might have done.

Why isn’t it at the moment of death that he judges you.

Inquisitor is just a prick really isn’t he!

[Dave]

Inquisiturd, more like.

[Flap Jack]

It would indeed. Though if Inquo actually did it that way, that means he must have judged every human in history – and hundreds of generations of cat people – before he got to the Dwarfers.

If that were true, the effects of undoing all of his replacements would be unimaginable. Even keeping in mind nurture over nature, no way would the exact circumstances that caused the crew to exist in the first place, let alone end up in this exact same 3-million-years-away-from-Earth scenario, still happen.

[Flap Jack]

^ re the chronological order idea.

[International Debris]

Yes, just to clarify, this:

The only logical way for him to do it, really, would be to judge everybody in order of birth, at their point of death.

was in reference to a) efficiency and b) fairness, respectively.

And yeah, the fact that the main characters seemed to be the same after The Inquisitor had been removed from history suggested that he can’t actually have made much difference. Maybe he’s actually really crap at it, and ends up giving life to new people who look different but end up making exactly the same decisions, hence Lister and Kryten still being onboard, and hence no dramatic changes happening after his entire life’s work was undone.

It would also explain Kochanski.

[Dave]

Or maybe he didn’t do it all chronologically and Red Dwarf was only the second group of people he ever visited.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

He seems to have been around a while for Kryten to have heard the myths about him.

[Dave]

Which is a bit of a mystery in itself. He must have been sloppy for anyone to have even heard of him.

[Flap Jack]

Maybe the replacement process is flawed, so that some people remember the previous versions of their Inquisited friends and family, or they recall glimpses of The Inquisitor’s physical appearances. Or perhaps the removals cause time anomalies sometimes, like the child of a replaced person continuing to exist.

There’s probably a subreddit in the Red Dwarf universe called r/TheInquisitorEffect.

[Dave]

Or maybe he deliberately puts the stories out to encourage people to live better lives.

Do that enough and he wouldn’t have to delete anybody.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

So what you’re saying is that he is Jesus?

[Dave]

No, he deleted the original Jesus because he was a lemon thief.

[Plastic Percy]

Also, why does the Inquisitor decide to judge Rimmer when he’s dead?

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Holograms are basically reincarnated humans in the Red Dwarf world

[Hamish]

> Maybe the replacement process is flawed, so that some people remember the previous versions of their Inquisited friends and family, or they recall glimpses of The Inquisitor’s physical appearances. Or perhaps the removals cause time anomalies sometimes, like the child of a replaced person continuing to exist.

Remember that in the opening of the episode the new Thomas Allman is around long enough to see his predecessor zapped out of existence and for the The Inquisitor to apologize to him about the disturbance.

[Ben Saunders]

That’s one you really shouldn’t think about too hard

[Author]

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