Ben Saunders

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 16/06/2025 

Quarantine, Back in the Red 3, Back to Earth 2

[Ben Saunders]

Some of the black and white stories are the unrestored VHS versions instead of the DVD quality versions, for no apparent reason

I e-mailed them about this and they said nothing could be done about it and they use the highest quality sources available or whatever, which clearly isn’t true.

BBC iPlayer is really low quality generally and I try to avoid using it, but it’s so unbelievably convenient to have every episode at a click of a button, especially on your phone.

no stories have had their 4K versions retrospectively added to iPlayer.

With the low bitrate of iPlayer would it even be better for it to be in 4K? Just more quality to lose.

[Ben Saunders]

Day of the Daleks on the iPlayer is unfortunately the shite special edition with the horrendous “city shots” that look like the CG intro to an early-00s digital cartoon on CBBC. I wonder what other stories they do that for, because they don’t do it for Revenge of the Cybermen which I know has a special edition.

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 15/06/2025 

M-Corp, Siliconia.

My streak reset for some reason but it’s 5, honest

[Ben Saunders]

⬆ The face you make when trying to get the last few crumbs out of a now upside down bag of crisps.

⬇ When you eat too many Skittles at once:

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 14/06/2025 

Give & Take, M-Corp, Timewave, Skipper

4

[Ben Saunders]

Media is always concerned with how going to “the past” could change “the present”, but once you’ve seen the future, anything before that is “the past” relative to “the present”. But they’re biased because they only view it as their present and their future, ignoring the very real lives of other people in their futures. And if you have the attitude that one tiny little change in the past could affect your present, doesn’t it stand to reason that any such small change in the present could alter the future in an equally big way? Much to think about.

Also, when travelling such immense distances across spacetime, how do you define when “now” is in multiple locations lightyears apart?

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 13/06/2025 

Gunmen

[Ben Saunders]

Blue Midget redesign kinda cute tbh

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 12/06/2025 

Nanarchy, Stasis Leak

2

[Ben Saunders]

All you really need to know is that these people went on adventures at some point and Ahsoka was Anakin’s apprentice, the rest is fairly self-explanatory. I don’t really know who the fuck Ezra Bridger is so didn’t really care about his rescue, but anyone with their ear even slightly towards extended universe stuff will know about Thrawn (not a Filoni creation). I just liked the tone and the sideways expansion of the universe and yes, the fanservice. And on a surface level there are some very attractive people on that show.

I think it’s fine to have a show like Andor that requires absolutely no foreknowledge AND a show like Ahsoka which benefits from it, one does not detract from the other, and both can be really cool. The Mandalorian becoming something it never was is a different problem than two different shows existing side by side, they shouldn’t have done that.

[Ben Saunders]

I’m giving you a big, wet snog with oodles of Tommy Tongue.

I love it when Kryten puts unnecessary sauce on his lines, ie “it’s insane”, “blood-chilling terror”, “there are no sounds to hear”. He didn’t need to do all that.

[Ben Saunders]

It was a fantasy hallucination, and boy was it a good one.

[Ben Saunders]

I’ve just realised Holly is a de-transitioner

Did he make the decision or was it forced upon him by the nanobots? 

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 11/06/2025 

Stasis Leak, Backwards

[Ben Saunders]

That would be their “scalie” agenda, actually.

[Ben Saunders]

I doubt I’ll watch it, no matter how sexy they make the fish lady

[Ben Saunders]

I’ll get to Andor eventually, but being asked to watch another Star Wars show after the pathetic Obi-Wan disaster is like getting punched in the face and being asked if you’d like to be punched in the face again.

Edit: This also applies to any hypothetical Series 3 of RTD2

[Ben Saunders]

It would be like an entire Red Dwarf episode being written to explain the origins of Lister’s double appendix.

What a splendid idea.

[Ben Saunders]

Something went terribly wrong with the formatting at some point during that post.

[Ben Saunders]

Does that partly mean that, like Red Dwarf, Star Wars fans have a love for the actors playing the characters, as opposed to just the characters existing? 

We’ll see the answer to this soon I guess, since Mark Hamill has stepped down as Luke Skywalker permanently now (if we believe what he says). When Luke showed up on the streaming shows Hamill would perform the scene, then some young actor, then they’d edit together some Frankenstein of the two performances with a healthy dose of CGI to make him look like Mark Hamill in 1983 or whatever. It… looked good as far as de-ageing goes, and it was nice to see such a spot-on ROTJ-Luke in that Mandalorian finale, honestly. It pulled at my nostalgia exactly the way they wanted it to. But then they did the same technique again for season three and I gather the response to that was sort of, well you’ve already done your nostalgia bait and should probably just recast the character at this point.

Solo was… just fine. A bit redundant, like a checklist of shit we already sort of knew about from dialogue in the movies or extended universe material, it really methodically paints his backstory in a way that’s hard to care about. Especially when they feel the need to give even his damn NAME a backstory. We see him meeting Chewie, winning the Falcon in a game of cards from Lando and doing the famed Kessel Run, which yes is now OFFICIALLY able to be done in “less than twelve parsecs” because you can fly closer to the black holes to reduce the distance. This was previously a fan theory and sort-of Word of God from the DVD commentary, but George Lucas loves to just say shit and it seems the real intention of the original script was that Han was simply bluffing and didn’t know what he was talking about. Obi-Wan even rolls his eyes.

As for the performance of Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo, he wasn’t distractingly bad. There are reports that he had to get an acting coach in midway through production and there are people who criticise him, but for me he did just fine.

That movie also has its own behind the scenes drama, the original directors were “let go” or “left” (they were fired) at some point and the whole thing had to be retooled from a comedy into something quite serious.

Solo was OK, but my main memory of it was that the cinematography was just so dark – so dark that I couldn’t make out facial expressions in some scenes

It was bizarrely dark. Distractingly dark. I’ve never seen something so damn dark. And so few people seemed to talk about it. It’s like they forgot to light it.

[Ben Saunders]

but very much for adults.

[Ben Saunders]

Hey man, other people have guessed the wrong series after getting a yellow, it’s not that insane!

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 10/06/2025 

Parallel Universe, Nanarchy, Bodyswap, White Hole (I know), The Last Day

I honestly don’t recognise that set. Where is he? The medi-bay?

[Ben Saunders]

The main thing is they planned to make like a billion movies all interconnected like the MCU but after a divisive response to Episode 8 and a largely disinterested response to Solo they abandoned movies almost entirely in favour of ludicrously expensive streaming shows. Half the audience hated 8, nobody cared about Solo and Episode 9 was a shocking mess of trying to please everybody and in the end pleasing nobody. Episode 9 is one of those rare moments like the final season of Game of Thrones where it seems like basically everybody thinks it’s shit. Usually it’s 50/50 or there’s a very vocal group of fans who defend it to the death, and obviously there are still a small number of those who do, but the overwhelming response just seemed to be “what the fuck?”

Most people seem to dislike the Obi Wan show which feels poorly made especially for the amount of money dumped into it, and they managed to fuck up The Mandalorian by turning it into something it never was. Season 3 of The Mandalorian and that Book of Boba Fett show all got pretty negative responses. It seems like people didn’t like the Ashoka show either, but I did, you bastards. And I never even watched Rebels.

Sure on the surface SW content still makes a lot of money, but it was clear to everybody with a brain that there was no direction behind the sequel trilogy, and them completely bowing out of movies so quickly is a clear sign it didn’t go as well as they planned. 

Andor is a big success, which is annoying because by the time they started making it I couldn’t give two fucks about a spin-off show about a secondary character from a just-OK movie I barely remember anything about. The Obi-Wan show eviscerated any faith I had left in the Star Wars IP, completely bungling the return of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to give us some of the most bland, uninteresting storylines, embarrassing action and like a couple good moments. It was supposed to be a movie but they changed it to a streaming show at one point and then they filmed it all on that big screen but did it so badly. 

I don’t pay attention to MCU stuff but they do seem to currently be in the desperately bringing back a beloved old face to convince people to bother with their new installment phase just like Who.

[Ben Saunders]

Really, really odd way to run something.

This is from the company who managed to bungle Star Wars, one of the most profitable media franchises ever to exist, to the point that they stopped making movies after a whopping five entries. Regardless of your opinions on the output, their management does seem truly bizarre at times. But then I’m not a multi-billion dollar shareholder and maybe if I was I’d be worse at it.

[Ben Saunders]

I watched the first episode of The Strangerers a few years ago. Some men I recognise walk around.

[Ben Saunders]

I’m watching Season Twelve (Ark in Space, Sontaran Experiement, Genesis of the Daleks), and I forgot just how horrible a lot of this stuff is. These characters are NOT having a good time. Sarah Jane would need some serious therapy after all this shit. Surviving WW1-era artillery fire, diving into a trench and having to rip the gas masks off of dead soldiers to survive is horrible. But it’s so underplayed on the screen.

Another memorably horrible moment is Seeds of Death when that one guy gets mulched. Yikes!

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 09/06/2025 

Back in the Red 3, White Hole

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 07/06/2025 

Opened the site and my brain screamed tension sheet.

9

[Ben Saunders]

[Ben Saunders]

Is it me or did somebody (likely The Doctor) say something along these lines in the past like four episodes

[Ben Saunders]

Watching the first two series, it feels like there only are two stasis booths. Which for a crew of 100 is fine, but for a crew of 1000 and eventually a crew of 1000 + a bunch of prisoners doesn’t seem enough. They go into “deep sleep” in Starbug which is functionally the same thing, you’d just have to pop out for a quick shave and nail clipping every hundred or so years.

[Ben Saunders]

the bell tolls

ancient non-Smega Drive image, i just like that it’s in black and white. it conveys the pain more

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 06/06/2025 

not Trojan

8

[Ben Saunders]

lol

[Ben Saunders]

[Ben Saunders]

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 05/06/2025 

Timeslides, Better Than Life

7

[Ben Saunders]

I think about “bit crap” all the time, very funny. I also like the “ask the psi-scan, it knows everything doesn’t it” – “who coincidentally has a very small penis” bit. I like “there appears to be something bigger than God heading straight for you.”

[Ben Saunders]

I notice that because The Reality War had a couple very BIG things to talk about, nobody is really talking about the smaller moments. Like Ncuti pronouncing Omega differently throughout the episode, a symptom of rushed production/reshoots or did he just not know or care how to say it until somebody told him?

Everybody going “eugh, you’re disgusting” when The Rani outs herself as a eugenicist was a bit off to me because we’re talking about an actual, genuine alien race here with its own biological makeup and all that jazz, human eugenics is bad because the differences between our “races” are all made up, but the differences between Humans and Time Lords are real and far-reaching, of course she wants to bring back pure Time Lords rather than half-ass it.

Mel rides into UNIT HQ command room on her motorised scooter, the command room being on like the 60th floor. Did she take the elevator while on that thing?

The Doctor is an asshole with how he treats Ruby at the end, she’s clearly in distress and could very easily be telling the truth and the Doctor’s like shut it honey, you’re hallucinating. He winks at her as if to reassure her that he knows Poppy is real but then the rest of the scene plays as if he didn’t do that, it’s just really strange that he would dismiss her so completely. You could say he’s just doing it to protect Belinda’s feelings but the way the scene is staged just makes him come off like a huge asshole.

Not only is Omega being blasted away 15 minutes in pathetic, but so is the whole “vindicators are actually laser guns for some reason” reveal, it feels like it comes out of nowhere and they just say “this is happening now so that we can get on with the Poppy shite.”

The Doctor being suddenly saved from his death by a magic door is SHIT even if The Rani references how shit it is out loud, fuck you.

[Ben Saunders]

It’s good. I like it. No audience is weird but it allows the direction to be a little less restricted and the drama to be a little heightened. The performances are more grounded since they aren’t playing to the audience. I think it looks great and is shot well, even without the “under the circumstances” caveat. Doug’s direction on this is lightyears ahead of what he attempts with an audience. (For the most part anyway).

[Ben Saunders]

Well the Three scene was chosen because it has One and Two on the screen behind them as well as just having Daleks in it. It is funny when they use Classic Who stock footage in New Who because while it is fun fan service, the video quality difference is just insurmountable.

A lot of Classic Who just looks like utter dogshit because of the format they shot it on, and I don’t think it will ever look better. 

[Ben Saunders]

Because I watched all of this shit for the first time at a very young age I can’t really remember if it ever made me cry. Kochanski in Back to Earth, maybe. I felt quite emotional when Rimmer switched to soft-light in Entangled. I would have gotten emotional during Rimmer’s speech in Siliconia if it wasn’t for Cat ruining the scene with his shit jokes. The Moonlight bit maybe but I can’t remember.

Obviously I can still get emotional at Rimmer’s dad dying, Camille or Holoship, and it’s difficult not to feel empowered by Rimmer’s badassery at the end of Out of Time, but I doubt I’m full on crying.

[Ben Saunders]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 04/06/2025 

DNA, Emohawk

6

[Ben Saunders]

I meant Matt Smith lol. Time of the Doctor has to wrap up a whole lot of shit because he decided to go make Terminator Genisys.

[Ben Saunders]

But the Silence arc was so seamlessly executed tho

Silence arc was also cut a season short by the lead actor suddenly deciding to leave a series early.

[Ben Saunders]

It was a genuine question lol, I see now.

[Ben Saunders]

Some of you are on the “bargaining” phase, I see.

[Ben Saunders]

Who the hell is that blonde woman?

 – Guy who skipped from Queeg to Marooned

[Author]

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