Your Unpopular Red Dwarf Opinions

[GlenTokyo]

Red Dwarf is too precious to end. There’s so much shite on TV now, even this version of Red Dwarf which is a bit of a diet version is still vastly superior (mostly) than many alternatives. Even though Doug doesnae give 2 shits about the universe he created with Rob when it comes to continuity, it’s actually a really interesting one, maybe have a series where there’s an arc over the entire thing, like the xindi series of Enterprise. Try something different, maybe introduce some new characters that aren’t Dave sitcom characters that could be translated easily into Zzaped or whatever it’s called, or an episode of My Hero haha.. if it’s successful get a spin-off going. Maybe they get a signal about the fate of a human colony and they hunt for it, meeting some challenges, an asteroid belt, some none comedy simulants, Gelfs that aren’t inexplicably called Garbage Gobblers.

[bloodteller]

>X is better than XI and XII.

i agree with this, i liked X much more than XI/XII.

>Red Dwarf is too precious to end.

i feel the opposite honestly- it’s too precious not to end. i’ve been watching these characters for most of my life, at the end of it all i do want to see them succeed and finally get back to Earth. i don’t feel like i’d be happy if the last ever episode was just them continuing to be stuck in space forever and ever and ever, unless it was done like the Backwards novel, where Lister realises he belongs with Kryten and Rimmer and Cat-they’re his family, and Red Dwarf is his home. because that was really quite a fantastic ending, i thought.

[flanl3]

Getting back to earth and there being any people there (and earth being real, of course) as a series finale would be worse than any bad episode.

[GlenTokyo]

By too precious to end, obviously it will end in it’s current form – Robert the poor sod is almost a pensioner and at some point it’s just cruel to keep making him wear the Kryten costume, I just hope it doesn’t end full stop. The seam is still there to be mined with Red Dwarf, lots of unexplored avenues, different media, Red Dwarf Extended Universe sort of cross over business would be great. Old man Cat telling us the story of the cat race would be amazing with a budget.

[besbvesdy]

Krytie TV is my favourite episode of 8

Dear Dave is my favourite episode of 10

They’ve both got problematic bits for sure but the show is riddled with them, and for that matter so are most people. The difference with Timewave is that it’s a shit episode in the first place with some genuine ugliness thrown in to make it worse

Never understood why Waiting For God gets so slated – great episode among great episodes

[bloodteller]

>Krytie TV is my favourite episode of 8

i prefer Cassandra myself, but i do also think Krytie TV is a great episode. all the elements established at the beginning tie up in a funny and interesting way- the appeal, ackerman’s date, kryten’s tv station, they all come together at the end of the episode and i really liked that. most XI/XII episodes didn’t have that- they ended with a lot of plot threads left hanging, stuff that was completely unexplored, unsatisfing endings.

it’s also just a really funny episode. “A breakup is very much like a bereavement…it’s usually followed by a cremation and some sandwiches” was a particularly funny line i thought, but the whole episode is filled with stuff that makes me laugh anyway so it’s hard to pick.

[Hamish]

> all the elements established at the beginning tie up in a funny and interesting way … they all come together at the end of the episode and i really liked that.

Strangely enough that is the exact reason why Cured is my favourite episode from XII, even though Krytie TV itself was placed as my second worst episode in the Pearl Poll.

[bloodteller]

opinion- Cured would have been approximately 996% funnier if they’d used Toto’s Africa in the jamming scene as originally intended, rather than The Happy Wanderer. would’ve just made for a much more amusing scene, imo.

[Ben Saunders]

>A breakup is very much like a bereavement…it’s usually followed by a cremation and some sandwiches
Wrong thread but what the fuck do you cremate after a breakup? Pictures? What do sandwiches have to do with it? What the fuck does this line mean?

[bloodteller]

the joke is that Holly is talking bollocks, no? the line starts off as if it’s going to be some sort of actual analogy on the similarities between breakups and bereavements…only for Holly to make a remark that is utter nonsense and shows that the two aren’t at all alike. lister calls him out on this “You haven’t got a clue what you’re on about, have you?”

[MANI506]

I think Epideme is an excellent episode and the line about coat hangers is a great Cat gag.

[Pete Part Three]

>What the fuck does this line mean?

It’s a shittier version of the Olivia Newton-John line from Stasis Leak.

[Hamish]

Which was already a fairly shit line anyway, if only because it is not really funny if you do not know who Olivia Newton John is.

[bloodteller]

>I think Epideme is an excellent episode and the line about coat hangers is a great Cat gag.

i don’t think Epideme is excellent (it’s not bad though) but yeah, that is a good line. in general i think Cat gets the funniest lines in VII

[RickLee84]

Most of VIII was rather meh. Anything after VIII has been mainly rubbish. BTE was shite. X had a strong start with Trojan and the rest, bar The Beginning, was crap. XI was OK in parts but mainly awful. Same with XII. The acting/characterisation is all over the shop, the plots are weak, the jokes are bad, Doug is destroying the show by being the only one in charge and has lots of yes men at the production company who will let him do whatever he wants. But hey, it wins the odd comedy award so lets just keep flogging this dead horse another few years, eh?

Having said all that, I’ll still watch any new episodes. Perhaps that’s the problem…?

[besbvesdy]

i think you might be looking for the ‘things everyone agrees about’ thread

[Ben Saunders]

Epideme would probably be an excellent episode if the virus itself didn’t make me feel like I was physically ill

[International Debris]

That’s generally what viruses do.

[Toxteth O-Grady]

The BTE bunkroom looked way better than the X/XI/XII bunkroom.

[bloodteller]

>The acting/characterisation is all over the shop, the plots are weak, the jokes are bad

i agree with this to be honest. i’m really not a fan of the Dave era, and at least for me the majority of the new episodes simply aren’t very funny. and i do think Red Dwarf needs to be funny to be good- the humour has always been a key part of the show for me. so it definitely feels rather disappointing when a show that, for the first 8 series was consistently funny and made me laugh in every episode, has turned into a show where i can go through a whole episode and not laugh at all.

to go from brilliant stuff like “They’re tying ’em to the stake…it’s Winnie The Pooh!” to “SpitOnHerWrist” is a pretty fucking steep step down.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Unpopular opinion: I think this thread has more popular opinions than unpopular ones

[Ben Saunders]

>That’s generally what viruses do.
That’s what I was going for, you see

[Flap Jack]

Series VIII is better and funnier than Series VII, and is truer to the spirit of Red Dwarf, which is meant to be a TV sitcom, not a cinematic comedy-drama.

I don’t actually hold this opinion, by the way. I just figured I’d save John the trouble of posting it.

[Dave]

My unpopular opinion is that Chris Barrie doesn’t actually play Rimmer, it’s been another actor all along. You wouldn’t believe how unpopular this opinion is, which obviously makes it really interesting and valuable.

[Taiwan Tony]

Feels good to get it off your chest though, doesn’t it.

[Ben Saunders]

Good, Flap Jack, because otherwise I’d have to fight you

[Pete Part Three]

Series VII isn’t comedy drama. The gag quotient is just as regular as most of the earlier series, they just don’t land as often and there’s no studio audience to bounce off.

Absolutely no Red Dwarf story has benefited from being longer than 29 minutes, and even the recent ones which people said “could have done with another 10 minutes”, would have just had 10 extra minutes of padding.

None of the space corps directives are funny, and should be put out to pasture along with jokes about Cat thinking more about his clothes than his health, remarks about the long list of Rimmer’s negative attributes, and shitty old similes.

Hogey the Roguey was crap.

99% of the original strips in the Smegazine were rubbish.

Tongue Tied is crap, is shoe-horned into an episode to which it has no relevance, and is utterly bizarre to watch with someone who’s never seen the episode before.

[Dave]

When my daughter started watching Red Dwarf about a year ago she loved Tongue Tied, and probably asks to watch that bit more than any other.

Maybe you have to see it when you’re young to like it.

[Pete Part Three]

First future echo:
the mirror I stare into
shows my father’s face.

[Dave]

I’m not personally a huge fan of Tongue Tied, especially these days, although I think it has its moments.

It’s actually been interesting how different we are in terms of the bits she finds funny. Cat is the absolute standout character of the show for her by miles.

(Thanks for introducing me to that haiku though, I like it.)

[bloodteller]

>None of the space corps directives are funny

i liked the one in White Hole where Rimmer goes “Yes, but Rimmer Directive 435 states just as clearly- No chance, you metal bastard”. but outside of that they weren’t at all funny, imo. especially in VI where the exact same gag of Rimmer getting it wrong and Kryten correcting him is repeated ad nauseum- it’s just crap, and it’s the same thing repeated with almost no change to it.

same goes for Cat’s “We’re deader than [clothing item” gags, they can fuck off too.

[Ben Saunders]

Deader than tank tops is the only one that lands for me, but I do find that particular one absolutely fucking hilarious and one of my all-time favourite Cat lines, alongside the two-month waiting list for birds to appear every time he is near. The fact that the other deader-than lines are shit doesn’t mar the good one, imo.

[Warbodog]

I like them, but both running gags peak early in Legion (“oral sex in zero gravity” and tank tops followed up with the enjoyably specific “A-line flares with pockets in the knees”). That whole Legion opening is just so good (space weevil/raw carrot, verrucas/mint imperial, Thursday with an F, blue alert, including Welsh/sorry bye sorry, and my personal favourite, stop your blathering and get in the damn tube).

[GlenTokyo]

Lemons is fucking awful despite Jeff Lynne doing well to get a Middle Eastern market set halfway to convincing with budget restraints.

The Dave episodes have only had one good guest character, Pree, the rest are at best pretty forgettable even though they’ve managed to get a couple of well respected guest actors on board, and no I haven’t forgotten Mark Dexter. I just don’t get why everyone raves about his performance.

Robert’s issues with remembering lines needs to be accounted for because it’s affecting the quality of the shows. Whenever he gives a techno babble speech, it always sounds like he’s panicked or like he’s reading it off something he can’t quite see.

[flanl3]

The space corps directives not being particularly funny is another thing wrong with Timewave.

Is that unpopular? Probably not.

But it might be unpopular for me to say that Timewave is the only bad episode of Red Dwarf.

[curtis]

Backwards is better than Last Human.

Danny John-Jules is the most consistent performer and the best thing about the Dave era.

Continuity does matter

Mr Rat is probably the show’s funniest moment full stop

Hard light made Rimmer less interesting.

[Pete Part Three]

>i liked the one in White Hole where Rimmer goes “Yes, but Rimmer Directive 435 states just as clearly- No chance, you metal bastard”.

Yes, nothing wrong with the one and only Rimmer directive. But after Quarantine, they should have done one joke of Rimmer getting it wrong, being corrected by Kryten….AND THEN STOPPED FOREVER.

The fact that they’re so interchangeable and, unless you’re a Red Dwarf mastermind, you’d have no idea which one is from which episode, makes me think that Rob and Doug just got together at the beginning of the series and rattled out a bunch of them and then picked them out of a pot as they wrote each episode.

[Piplup2003]

>the one and only Rimmer directive

What about the Rimmer Directive that clearly states Never tangle with something that has more teeth than the entire Osmond Family?

[bloodteller]

>Pete is probably one of my favourite episodes.

not trying to be a dick or anything, but why? i mean, i don’t dislike Pete myself- it’s a very funny set of episodes and there’s always something in every scene that makes me laugh- but i wouldn’t be putting it in my Top 10 or anything.

[Ben Saunders]

>Lemons is fucking awful
Thank you

[bloodteller]

i liked the bit in Lemons with the fruit merchant- “this one here? is it famous?” and “you walked halfway across the known world…for eight lemons.” but the episode just kind of falls apart after Jesus shows up.

[bloodteller]

i suppose him being amazed by bags and other relatively simple things that we take for granted in the modern world was rather funny-but that bit where he goes back and takes the piss out of the Ten Commandments is just dire. it’s not clever or original and it’s not funny. lots of comedians have done routines on religion before that were actually comedic and this wasn’t one of them.

[GlenTokyo]

The thing about those jokes is, while amusing, are standard sitcom jokes not really Red Dwarf jokes. If those jokes were in an episode of Not Going Out they wouldn’t be out of place, that’s not to cast aspersions on Not Going Out, it’s not necessarily my thing but I’m sure it’s fine, but I feel like Red Dwarf and Not Going Out shouldn’t have interchangeable lines. I feel like Doug doesn’t want to write a sci-fi show, he wants to write jokes and satire and more traditional sitcom setups and I’m not so keen on that, and his satire is a bit World According to Clarkson occasionally unfortunately.

I feel like he needs what him and Rob were when they went to America, he needs a wave of negativity because I think he’s surrounded by the equivalent of the fake laughing executive types.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I really like Lemon’s for what (few IMO) faults it has. I really like the twist that it isn’t actually Jesus … in fact first time seeing that made up for the fact the biggest gag, Lister “jesus!” Jesus “Yes?” was given away in trailers.

The one area I think it falls down a little is bringing Jesus back to Red Dwarf. I know it’s somewhat necessary for him to see a bit of the future, find out about Christianity etc … but with a little creativity they could have done that with the crew still stuck in the past.

The kidney stone operation is funny up to a point but definitely the weakest bit IMO, and once you remember it isn’t actually Jesus, just seems a bit silly. Especially as there are less intrusive ways to remove kidney stones even now, you’d think in the future they’d have advanced a little on that front

But overall I like it. That’s my 2 cents.

For another actually unpopular opinion. I think Kryten’s costume (Series 2 aside) progressively gets worse as the series goes on. I prefer the really industrial, advanced yet a bit scrap heap look of series 3. As they try to make it look better, (and especially once they hit series 7) it starts to look cheap and more like a man in a cosply robot costume of Kryten then it looks like Kryten.

And whilst we’re on costumes, I said higher up I think Siliconia is shit. They definitely shouldn’t have made that episode unless they could suit up enough people in enough proper outfits, and not black underalls with a mask and a chest piece etc

Imagine Camille but with future Mrs Bobby in a similar suit. It wouldn’t have worked.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I say we all go on Twitter and cyberbully Doug so he can write better episodes

[GlenTokyo]

He needs a writer that knows the show to say no occasionally, not bullying, but if you think taking the piss because his hair’s nearly completely fucked off will get us another Back to Reality then maybe it’s worth a try haha

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Its a risk I’m willing to take

[Ben Saunders]

Jesus himself was utterly shit, which I think qualifies as an unpopular opinion given what I’ve read here. And the whole IKEA flatpack time machine thing felt a bit obvious and silly. The whole episode felt a bit obvious and silly. Walking the incredibly long distance they did just to realise they need something from back where they came is pretty funny, the set is quite impressive, etc, but most of the jokes are a bit eh. I’d rather re-watch Dear Dave.

[Ben Saunders]

There are a few “traditional sitcom jokes” (read: lazy jokes) in Dave Dwarf, yeah. Smaller than the salad section in a Scottish supermarket may have some nice alliteration to it, but it’s the kind of joke you’d expect from post-Boyle Mock the Week, not Red Dwarf.

[Flap Jack]

OK, I may have another one:

The Red Dwarf interior in Series X is the best it’s ever looked.

[Author]

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