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BLEAKER TO RIDE- lister and kryten use the timedrive to go back in time on a curry hunt, only for kryten to inexplicably miscalculate the settings and transport them back to Earth, 74 million years in the past. there is no vegetation, no animals, no life. lister sits in the dirt and awaits his grisly fate. kryten is forced to watch him slowly waste away, and is powerless to help him.

meanwhile, cat and rimmer pop on some jodhpurs and go horse riding. cat is quite good at it.

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BACK TO BIRTH- kryten is inexplicably turned into a baby. in a subversion of the status quo, it’s now up to the dwarfers to take care of him. however things take a turn for the worst when he shits the bed and splashes mashed apricot pudding all over the drive room’s walls.

meanwhile, rimmer becomes really upset after cat makes one too many “kill yourself rimmer” jokes

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i came to appreciate Back To Earth a bit more after listening to doug naylor’s commentary on it on the DVD. it made me realize certain things about it that i hadn’t really picked up on before- apparently it’s also meant to be about the dwarfers having drifted apart over the years, and towards the end of it coming back together and working as a team again.

i still don’t like BtE that much, but it’s a nice extra layer of detail to the story.

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HOLOSHAQ- the dwarfers are finally sick of rimmer being such an unbearable little shit that they turn off his hologram. while searching for a new hologram to resurrect, they find the personality disc of famous basketball player Shaquille O’ Neal and decide to boot him up. everyone gets along with him and they all have a lovely time playing basketball and thoroughly enjoy having him around.

meanwhile, rimmer’s terminated hologram is left floating in an empty meaningless timeless void for all eternity. he can think and feel nothing. the entirety of his existence is no more…

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you’re right i suppose- the way i have my DVDs lined up means the Red Dwarf logo is off to the left, which will only look even more weird once XII’s dvd comes out

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i don’t think anybody knows the reason, no

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quiz problem: usually, each level has 5 questions. when you get one or more wrong, the quiz ends and you’re shown which answers you got wrong on the game over screen.

however, on quiz levels with more than 5 questions, if you get an answer wrong, it will only show your results for the first 5 questions of that level, making it impossible to know which of the others you got wrong.

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ooh so depending on what character i was playing as, the location the level took place in changed. that’s a neat feature

e.g. I was playing as Ziggy and so the level was on the Enconium, but when playing as the Listerbot i was on the Vespasian.

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no he doesn’t

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where’d you get the US Pilot dvd?

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they spelt “Bryceman” wrong in Ziggy’s name i think?

oh bollocks who cares about him anyway

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okay so i just watched the video, and although that doesn’t reaallyyyy look as good as the XI game, it looks to be at least worth playing

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i think so

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THE SHEND- the dwarfers come across the man who played Warden Knot in VIII, and are all reminded of that lovely time he crushed rimmer’s testicles with his bare hands.

meanwhile, the cat disembowels someone.

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>Back to Earth being the only main series DVD spine that doesn’t match is a constant, very mild annoyance, but I still prefer to use the reversible covers over the standard ones. And I can’t countenance putting Back to Earth at the beginning or the end of the row – it’s just not chronological!

just bung it on the other end of your shelf, maybe?

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i’d love to see you do one of these on Series II

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i’m excited!!

that’s how you do it, flanl

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well Back To Earth isn’t really a full series, is it? so it wouldn’t have the normal cover to match all the others.

what i usually do to get around it is have my I-VIII and X-XI DVDs on my shelf all neatly next to each other in a row, and then i just chuck Back to Earth elsewhere on the shelf, usually sandwiched between Ghostbusters and Bottom Live 5.

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what if jawscvmcdia had never asked any pointless questions on the G&T forum? how would that have impacted the site, do you think?

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when you think about it from the perspective of the characters, they must really be wondering why whenever they say something mildly amusing, they all just stand there for fucking ages as if waiting for some sort of audience laughter to die down

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thank you

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back to earth didn’t have just Rimming and Fister on the DVD cover

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yeah

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grilled, with cheese

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the “cargo bay” where the dinosaur wanders around was REALLY poor. it’s clearly just a regular warehouse, except all the boxes have A4 sheets of paper with the Red Dwarf logo stuck onto them.

compare it to Polymorph and Demons & Angels, where 10 boxes and a staircase/lift makes for a convincing storage bay on a spaceship.

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apparently they postponed the XI game updates so they could work on the XII game or something

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they already did that, it had a midsection and stairs and everything in XII

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honestly XI and XII do a pretty decent job at showing some scale to the ship. we get to see places like the diesel decks, the garbage hold, the officer’s club, the debate room in mechocracy.

it does feel like the ship finally has some scale to it again, unlike X where it was entirely limited to 2 rooms and a corridor

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BEAT THE GREEK- the dwarfers beat him to death

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CRETE PART 2- the dwarfers make a greek man eat a vindaloo and he shits everywhere

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LORRYMORPH- lister comes across a polymorph that has taken the shape of an Eddie Stobart lorry. it is kind to him. he slashes its tyres and leaves it for dead anyway. humans are the real monsters…

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all the sets are lit weirdly though so you never feel like they’re actually on a spaceship

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rimmer doing roll call in the utterly empty refectory is still hilarious, imo

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>It’s cack. Fortunately the preceding 22 minutes are pretty good.

i think you could say the same about Dimension Jump. it’s a good episode until Ace leaves, at which point you see Rimmer planning to drop a net of kippers onto him (but it’s never really clear that they ARE kippers so you just wonder what the hell he’s doing) whereupon Ace fucks off, then there’s some Star Wars scrolling text (for some reason) and then out of nowhere it cuts to Rimmer practising Hammond Organ with the Skutters.

i think DNA and Dimension Jump are both right up there alongside Officer Rimmer with really dodgy endings- not that it makes any of the episodes any worse, but it does go to show that the older episodes sometimes have the same imperfections that XI and XII do

even Justice has a bit of a weird ending, doesn’t it? why did they lock Lister into that big open manhole that just happened to be in the corridor?

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> Sucking up curry sauce through a napkin is fucking disgusting, though.

it’s a bread roll if you look closely. he just doesn’t unwrap it properly so it looks like he’s eating the paper wrapping of it rather than the actual bread

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the commentary on The End: The Original Assembly is truly where it’s at, featuring such highlights as-

ROB GRANT (miming Todhunter): There are five people on this ship, Rimmer…

DOUG- the audience was full of old ladies who thought they were watching A Question of Sport

ROB GRANT: do we really believe this is the Drive Room of a ship 3 miles long… it’s one step away from just having a bloody steering wheel.

the other commentaries on the Bodysnatcher Collection were quite good too tbh

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MANCS FOR THE MEMORY- the crew decide to use the time drive to go on a lovely vacation to manchester. unfortunately, once they’re there they realize it’s a bit of a shithole. to make matters worse, they’ve already paid for a full week’s stay at the hotel. now it’s up to the dwarfers to survive a week in manchester

once they get back they erase their memories of the horrible experience

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PLANKS FOR THE MEMORY- Lister and Rimmer are doing some DIY, when suddenly Lister accidentally drops a wooden plank onto Rimmer. It hits his head and he loses the memory of ever doing the DIY. When Rimmer wakes up, Lister feels so bad about dropping the plank on him that he lies and says Rimmer just tripped over.

However, Rimmer soon becomes suspicious when he notices that the DIY job Lister and him had been planning for ages is suddenly finished, and that Lister’s got small wood splinters on his hands. Furthermore, Lister seems increasingly uncomfortable whenever Rimmer mentions the bruise on his head…will Lister have to come clean and own up to dropping the plank?

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weren’t the commentaries mostly “oooh chris, ham and cheese” “lunchbox HAM” and other things such as that? i haven’t actually listened to many of them so i don’t really know if they’re all like that.

i do remember one Series VII commentary where everyone was unsure if the 2D shitty CGI starbug was a model or not, though

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sending Kryten to the doctor’s for a checkup would be like going down to the garage and getting an MOT done on yourself, it’s just ridiculous and illogical

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maybe they all watched TimeSlides and thought it was Timewave, that’d explain it

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were we watching the same episode as them?

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>They don’t need to be an hour, Doug just needs to manage time better and not put so much in like in the early days.

the ‘early days’ had episodes packed full of stuff too. especially DNA, which had an ending even less conclusive than anything from XI or XII. i dont really think its entirely accurate to say the older episodes had less stuff put in them. look at almost any episode from V, for example. they’re packed to the brim with things going on

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HOLLYMORPH- holly returns to the ship, but keeps switching between his male and female versions. they have both become independent from one another and are fighting for control. the episode ends when jane leeves’s holly overpowers and murders both of them

meanwhile rimmer does some gardening

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>Series I is a lot more… boring than I remember it being when I was young

honestly Series I is one of my favourite ones to rewatch, it’s basically “everyday life on a spaceship” and that appeals to me a lot more than “the crew go on a big adventure in space”.

also, during my rewatch i noticed that Series III is one of the only series (aside from I) where they don’t come across any derelicts or other ships. that was interesting.

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what about Jimmy Nail

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no i think he means The Sixth Sense

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whenever my mum watches new Red Dwarf, she either falls asleep or complains they’re “trying too hard”.

my dad laughed quite a lot at M-Corp though

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WHITE HYPERBOLE- lister plays pool with planets! but actually he just plays regular pool

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WAITING FOR TOD: lister waits for todhunter to appear in an episode that isn’t The End.

some say he’s still waiting to this very day…

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