Dave

[Dave]

SNACK IN THE RED: PART ONE

Snacky is asked if he wants to appear in Red Dwarf VIII Remastered. Traumatised by this invitation, he waits at the bottom of a lift shaft to be crushed to death.

[Dave]

SNACK TO EARTH

Snacky, having recovered from the effects of the Despair Squid, inadvertently opens a portal to Earth, where he finds out that he is a fictional character who is laughed at because he has a spatula on his head. Traumatised by this revelation, he tracks down his creator and pushes him down a lift shaft.

[Dave]

SNACK TO REALITY

Snacky is killed by the despair squid and wakes up to realise that his life as a snack-dispensing droid was all an elaborate total-immersion videogame. In real life, he is in fact Asclepius, a deranged medical droid. Traumatised by this realisation, he attempts to kill himself by jumping down a lift shaft. But it turns out he is on the bottom floor so he only falls down a couple of feet and feels a bit foolish afterwards.

[Dave]

FRANKS FOR THE MEMORY

Hollister and Todhunter (played by R’ ‘st) go for a pint with one of Rimmer’s brothers, Rimmer’s uncle and Lister’s cat. The group soon finds itself musing on why there are so many people called Frank in the Red Dwarf universe.

[Dave]

YO TODHUNTER, GET DOWN!

Saturday-night light-entertainment dancing show hosted by Frank Todhunter (played by Rob ‘hurst) in which the crew of Red Dwarf are paired off and forced to dance in a variety of different styles, with the losing team being put to death.

[Dave]

OFFICER TODHUNTER

Spinoff set during Series VIII in which Todhunter (played by Rob Bathurst) tries to get a load of tedious HR work done in his office while a dinosaur runs past his door and the walls start melting due to a corrosive micro-organism and Blue Midget accidentally dances into his desk and he suddenly finds himself wanting to have sex with Rimmer and so on.

The episode ends with him suddenly having a massive extra load of paperwork to take care of due to an incident in which female occupants of the ship have been victims of a vile voyeuristic pay-TV scheme run by a deranged reprogrammed droid.

[Dave]

CHUN LI THE GOOD

When the annual Red Dwarf Street Fighter II tournament kicks off, Kryten stuns the rest of the crew by trouncing them all with the titular Chinese female. Yatta!

[Dave]

i wonder what he was up to during Series 8?

Probably filming Cold Feet.

[Dave]

What the fuck was Todhunter’s job, anyway?

He never did catch Tod.

[Dave]

ONLY TEA, GOOD

Rimmer bans coffee.

[Dave]

OUR ROB OR ROTH

Complications ensue when the crew of Red Dwarf accidentally travel back in time and inadvertently replace baby Lister under the pool table with a three-month-old David Lee Roth. As a result, Kryten, Rimmer and Cat now find themselves trapped three million years in the future with only the tedious former Van Halen frontman for company.

(Alternative title: DON’TMENTION ‘JUMP’)

[Dave]

ANALS AND DUODENUMS

Like Angels & Demons, except… oh, you get the idea.

[Dave]

HOL-LISTER

Dismayed by the ineffectiveness of the ship’s crew, the Skutters decide that Red Dwarf needs a proper Captain. However, due to their misunderstanding of the English language, their attempt to replace Captain Hollister consists of a hybrid clone of Holly and Lister, which (due to the show’s budget limitations) is depicted as Craig Charles walking around with a big old-fashioned CRT monitor on his head that displays Norman Lovett’s face, and Lovett also does a shit Liverpudlian accent. He turns out to be an excellent Captain, however, so the rest of the crew decide that they’re happy to keep him on. The episode ends with him being told he can share living quarters with Snacky and he is never mentioned again.

[Dave]

POLYMORK

The crew of Red Dwarf encounter a deadly shape-shifting lifeform that can take the appearance of any character played by Robin Williams.

[Dave]

POLOSHIP

The crew of Red Dwarf encounter a derelict full of circular mints with holes in the middle.

[Dave]

Someone said “30th anniversary” but Dave thought they said “spit on a wrist”.

[Dave]

I thought that was one of the worst offenders – it looked tiny.

[Dave]

That Starbug looks great Paul.

[Dave]

BACK TO REAL-H.P.

When the despair squid suddenly finds himself running low on ink despite having just installed a new cartridge, he decides to switch back to genuine Hewlett Packard cartridges rather than the cheap knock-offs that he bought from some guy in Singapore.

[Dave]

The weird thing is that there is that brief shot of the enforcement drone where it isn’t a weird 2D flipping effect, and it looks pretty good.

I think the effects in VI are largely great, although Legion’s face always seems a bit crap. But I think that’s maybe just ill-conceived rather than poorly-executed.

[Dave]

I hear this one in sci-fi stuff all the time. I’m sure it’s been in Red Dwarf (although right now I’m struggling to remember where).

I most associate it with the Doom 2 Icon of Sin.

[Dave]

COMFY DENCH AND PANORAMA

Dame Judi Dench sits down on her favourite sofa to catch up with the BBC’s flagship investigative journalism programme on iplayer.

[Dave]

CONFER DENTS ON PAIR O’ “NOYER”

Rimmer finds a Frenchman in a stasis booth, who immediately upon being resurrected demands to be served two walnuts, which he refers to in his native tongue. However, Rimmer is embarrassed when he finds himself unable to crack the walnuts open, only succeeding in making small indentations on their outer shells.

Once again the crew suspect that the entire situation may have been contrived to make an incredibly tortuous pun that only the pun-maker will find amusing anyway.

[Dave]

(played by Robert Llewellyn)

[Dave]

I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to any other adults about it so I don’t have that context of it being overrated.

I’ve seen so many Sonic cartoons over the years, and the bad ones have outweighed the good to such an extent that seeing a half-decent one like Sonic Boom is welcome.

[Dave]

I liked it. It wasn’t what I was expecting but it worked for me. Some good gags in there too, some which would have been quite at home in Red Dwarf.

[Dave]

The DNA ship has always been a mild niggle for me. Everything about it seems very distinctly alien.

I always understood that it was an Earth ship that had been transformed beyond recognition by the unbridled and irresponsible use of the DNA-altering machine.

[Dave]

BACK TO LANYARDITY

The crew of Red Dwarf are killed. They subsequently wake up and realise that their life on Red Dwarf was just a total-immersion videogame, and they are all in reality very different characters. Cat is a geeky lanyard enthusiast; Kryten a policeman who specialises in counterfeit lanyards; Rimmer a hapless bum whose addiction to lanyards has left him destitute; and Lister is the Lanyard Colonel, who works at the Ministry of Alteration, purifying society by converting broken lanyards into functional lanyards that can once again hang around a person’s neck for the purposes of displaying status-related information.

[Dave]

CONFIT DENSE AND PEAR ANNOY ‘ER

Kochanski is visibly distressed when, after asking Kryten to prepare a Duck Confit, she bites into it and finds it is nowhere near as light and delicate as she expected. Putting the plate to one side, she instead decides to eat a pear, only to find that it is rotten.

[Dave]

PALANCE OF BOWER

Using mutated film-development fluid, the crew of Red Dwarf somehow manage to resurrect Hollywood actor Jack Palance. Unfortunately he is trapped in a timeloop and believes he is perpetually taking a curtain call, leading him to be able to do nothing but bow. The Boys From The Dwarf begin to wonder whether the entire situation has been contrived for the purposes of an extremely weak pun.

[Dave]

FLATULENCE AND PARANOIA

Lister does a quiet trump and then worries that everyone else can smell it but are too polite to say anything.

[Dave]

Although they do completely forget that Cat ever existed.

[Dave]

My kids quite like Sonic Boom. I think maybe it works better as a kids’ show than a show for adult Sonic fans. They find it quite funny, and from the bits that I’ve seen I like that it’s prepared to be silly and comedic rather than taking itself too seriously (see: Sonic Underground).

I agree with you on the Forces level design anyway. There’s not much to it and the levels are very short and simple.

Mania coming out this year has made Forces appear worse than it might have otherwise. It’s still an ok game but Mania is the kind of Sonic game that I always hoped for, while Forces is the kind of Sonic game that I always expect.

[Dave]

KRILL STACY

The crew of Red Dwarf meet a small crustacean with an unlikely name.

[Dave]

Yes, Bob is brilliant on WILTY. His most recent appearance was great.

[Dave]

KILIK CRAZY

The crew have a Soul Calibur tournament. Everyone favours the character with the long staff.

[Dave]

I actually found it slightly disappointing. There were a few funny bits but it often felt quite lacking in laughs (and I say that as someone who loves Vic & Bob usually), and it was all a bit low-energy. Maybe that’s to be expected as they get older.

It was fun to see the return of old favourites like Graham Lister, and I’ll always like silly gags like the wig stuff, but it didn’t really capture the spirit of the old Big Night Out stuff for me, somehow.

[Dave]

CASS-LAN-DRA

A computer that predicts the future tells Lister that he is destined to get more lanyards than Rimmer, but only if Kochanski ends up sleeping with Kryten. But it turns out it was all a lie. Cat figured it out.

[Dave]

LANARCHY

When Rimmer shows off his collection of lanyards, Lister becomes jealous and decides to try and put together his own collection of Red Dwarf lanyards to compete with his crewmate. Luckily he finds an online shop to cater for just such an eventuality.

[Dave]

BACK IN THE RUDOLPH: PART ONE

When a dying Kryten insists that his last wish is to watch a Christmas pantomime, it’s up to Lister and Rimmer to play the front end and the back end (respectively) of the titular reindeer.

[Dave]

BACK TO VEALITY

Lister is embroiled in a moral scandal when he asks Kryten to prepare him the meat of a young calf for dinner. Meanwhile, Cat has the venison.

[Dave]

BAMBISWAP

Lister has his brain transferred into the body of a small cartoon deer.

Meanwhile, Bambi is surprised at the size of Lister’s cock.

[Dave]

GUNMEN OF THE ELKPOCALYPSE

When a dying Simulant crew infects Starbug with a computer virus, the crew must use the AR machine to join Kryten in battling it. Unfortunately, instead of choosing Streets Of Laredo they accidentally boot up Deer Simulator instead.

[Dave]

OUT HOOF TIME

After traversing the reality bubbles, Cat realises that he actually quite liked being transformed into a deer.

[Dave]

Yeah, there ‘s lots of fun to be had fiddling about with the character creator if you like that kind of thing.

[Dave]

THE ELKQUISITDEER

Red Dwarf is visited by an immortal simulant who, after millions of years alone, finally reaches the conclusion that there is no god, no afterlife, and the only purpose of existence is to determine the worthiness of the lives lived by the universe’s ungulates.

[Dave]

TROUT OF TIME

Cat unwittingly creates an unstable paradox in the space-time continuum by travelling through the Stasis Leak and eating all the Trout A La Creme on board, before the accident happens that wipes out Red Dwarf’s crew.

As a result, his earlier self is never able to eat it and develop a taste for it, and so he never goes back through the Stasis Leak to search for more.

[Dave]

DEMONS AND ANTLERS

Sequel.

[Dave]

DEER DAVE

As a Christmas prank, the crew use the DNA ship that is still attached to Red Dwarf to turn Lister into a reindeer. He is then required to pull Kryten’s spacebike around while Rimmer, dressed as Santa Claus, sits on the back and dispenses presents to the Skutters.

[Dave]

Oh, incidentally, it wasn’t until mid-December that I finally fully cracked Mania (ie. getting complete save files with Sonic, Knuckles and Tails, each with the full seven chaos emeralds, as well as completing all the Blue Sphere levels), so that game ended up providing a huge amount of value for money.

[Author]

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