Dave

[Dave]

“Or macguffins! We don’t like macguffins round here.”

[Dave]

I suspect the final episode of XII takes place inside a giant cloche.

[Dave]

Yeah, you’re right. Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.

[Dave]

Those corridors look very grey, don’t they. Very reminiscent of the first series.

And the Level/Nivelo sign is a nice throwback. Very reminiscent of the first series.

Hmmmmmm.

[Dave]

I’ve always wanted to know what the hell is actually filling the ship. It’s so absurdly big, what else is going on in there?

Probably some kind of top-secret prison filled with hardened criminals.

[Dave]

There’s definitely nothing Freudian about that first dream. No. Definitely not.

[Dave]

But yeah, it’s probably going to end up being Alfred or something.

[Dave]

Stevens.

[Dave]

Careful, you’ll get Rob and Doug hounded for Outland Revenue.

[Dave]

Looks fun. I think the ridiculousness is part of the appeal.

[Dave]

Yeah, it’s the shot with Cat that was used in that series’ intro, isn’t it.

[Dave]

Limitless would definitely be my choice.

[Dave]

Kryten’s immediate jump to believing that Lister is a droid is driven by a sense of righteous outrage that he’s been forced to serve him all these years. This takes a significant amount of rationality out of his thought – all he can focus on is “Lister is a droid! The nerve!” rather than thinking about whether or not it’s true. Ironically, the fact that Lister has broken Kryten’s programming, meaning that he’s capable of emotion, helps in this; whereas if it hadn’t happened, you’d assume that logic would have overridden it.

I think this is definitely all part of the humour of that part of the episode, but not really part of the explanation, which is pretty simple: the unreality bubble prevents him from remembering anything that contradicts the ‘Lister is a droid’ story (just like it prevents the crew from knowing about the Cat a little later).

[Dave]

No dwarves in it neither.

Not according to Hilary Kingsley.

[Dave]

To be honest, quite a lot of the stuff in the unreality bubbles doesn’t line up with the show’s established reality. What a plot hole! You would have thought someone would catch it at the script stage.

[Dave]

The End: Re-Re-Mastered, featuring Peter Kay as Captain Hollister and Holly Walsh as Kochanski.

[Dave]

“Oh boy oh boy” leads me to suspect it’ll be a Quantum Leap crossover.

[Dave]

it’s just the whole “repulsive creep” vibe JFK gives off in that quote.

Well he ends up dead by the end of the episode, if it’s any consolation.

Mind you Paul McCartney sang at age 22 about a girl who was “only 17” (i,e. freshly at the age of consent)

Maybe that’s where Lister got the idea for the jailbait ballgirl.

[Dave]

Given that Tikka directly follows an episode in which it’s established that the crew could (under the right circumstances) become friendly with the Hitlers, I think it would be a bit out-of-character for them to then be shown getting so morally uptight about obscure letters written by historical figures.

[Dave]

Thanks!

(They might want to correct that typo with the date in the intro.)

[Dave]

It was pretty clearly a joke, wasn’t it?

‘Pervanoids’ is great though, even better than the Brittas gag.

[Dave]

Mmmmmm, canned tomato.

[Dave]

That’s a good point. Something like Give & Take isn’t a million miles away in concept, it just has added plot complications and action where Thanks For The Memory had more in-depth character work.

It would be lovely to see the show get back to those ‘quieter’ moments but I think that time has passed.

[Dave]

To be fair we also would never have got an episode like The End in series III.

(Am I doing this right?)

[Dave]

“Crap” is not even harsh enough to be considered a swear word where I live and this list ranks it equal to “goddamn”, which if you said it on an American television show would get you a TV-MA rating (equivalent to the high end of a UK 15, I believe). “Pissed off” is pretty socially acceptable, though not child-friendly, and here it’s listed in the Medium section on par with all sorts of swear words including “shit”, which is another word that’ll get you rated TV-MA.

I feel like my normal everyday speech would get be jailed for public indecency if I traveled to the UK.

I think you might have it the wrong way around – I think the list is more an indication that those words that you say are considered harsh in the US are considered as less offensive here, rather than indicating that the likes of ‘crap’ and ‘pissed off’ are taboo in the UK.

‘Crap’ is in the lowest possible category, and the fact that it’s ranked equal to ‘goddamn’ is an indication that in the UK ‘goddamn’ is seen as a fairly inoffensive word. As with the inclusion of ‘Jesus Christ’, it’s a reflection of the fact that religious-oriented swearwords aren’t seen as a particularly big deal in the UK (whereas they are mores in the US, as you say).

‘Pissed off’ and ‘shit’ are also in a fairly low category – I would say that all the words in that group are unsuitable for very polite conversation, but are still fairly mild, and wouldn’t raise many eyebrows if used in adult exchanges.

[Dave]

So escort boots have souls?

[Dave]

A great woman who was still doing interesting stuff all the way to the end. I loved her in Catastrophe – watching her final performance in that is going to be bittersweet.

[Dave]

We might as well do a thread-by-thread this-doesn’t-make-sense thread.

[Dave]

Obviously, the Polymorph turned into a hologrammatic Polymorph.

Just like the hologrammatic radio that Rimmer operates in Marooned.

[Dave]

Maybe the machine was working fine all along, and Rimmer and Lister were just being given pointless busywork to keep them occupied.

[Dave]

You know that thing when an ‘r’ and an ‘n’ right next to each other can look like an ‘m’?

[Dave]

Does it not just fall on the floor both times?

[Dave]

Sort of a toupbee, you mean? Oh come on, it’s nearly Christmas!

Most bees make honey, but this one makes a syrup!

[Dave]

Is Ace Rimmer’s wig part of his hologram? It doesn’t really explain how it can be passed on from one Ace to the next.

Is it a real wig that’s just being worn by a hard-light hologram? Or is it a hologrammatic wig with its own individual light bee?

[Dave]

How about if a real person eats hard-light hologrammatic food?

It would presumably be virtually indestructible, so it would have to be something small, like peas.

[Dave]

Come to think of it, why are hardlight holograms clothed at all? They could just wear real clothes.

[Dave]

Although given that there are few restrictions on when he can use hard light, it doesn’t really seem that necessary to stick to just one hard-light colour.

Besides, wasn’t yellow future-Rimmer in Out Of Time hard light too?

[Dave]

I thought it was not quite as bad as the red but worse than the blue. Sort of a mauve.

[Dave]

“Cloche”

[Dave]

Folder: Bay City Rollers
Contents: “Bye Bye Baby”

[Dave]

So maybe when Rimmer was volunteering for Samaritans, everyone that rang up got told his dads phrase of “Shiny clean boots and a spanking, short haircut and you can cope with anything”…. and then they all, rather unfortunately, committed suicide.

And one of them had a donor card in their wallet and ended up donating their appendix to Lister.

[Dave]

Also:

What if Rob and Doug never split up?

[Dave]

People have suggested that Rob had some kind of mental breakdown that prevented him from working with Doug

[citation needed]

[Dave]

Doesn’t really work, does it.

[Dave]

Wait, really? I thought this was a Teletubbies fan site that I was just giving a break from its normal forum material.

I suppose Po could be considered a red dwarf.

[Dave]

Complaining about fans dissecting Red Dwarf on a Red Dwarf fansite forum, there.

[Dave]

Return Of The King was frequently criticised for having a succession of overlong, drawn-out endings, which probably disqualifies it from being a metaphor for anything in series XI.

[Dave]

Has Seb started reacting too sensitively to Jawscvmcdia starting annoying threads based around negatively-leading questions?

[Dave]

Well, “where I’ll succeed” rhymes with “time warp speed” and “velocity” doesn’t.

“I’m all alone” doesn’t rhyme with “more or less” either. Nor does “drinking fresh” rhyme with “mango juice”.

[Dave]

This might be the time to mention that my best mate at school was *convinced* that the closing theme began:

“It’s cold outside, there’s snow hanging off the sphere…”

[Author]

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