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MELTDOWN:
To appeal to Japanese viewers, the dinosaur sequence is gratuitously extended with new footage of Ed Bye in a Godzilla costume stomping around Bekonscot Model Village.

Anything that features Bekonscot is great in my book. I am hoping it will also be great in the book I forgot I ordered even if I didn’t fancy paying £300 to go to Bekonscot with Actual Kryten.

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The blurb and the author profile worry me that there might be a few too many underscores dotted about the text for readability… _Lister_ and _Rimmer_ enjoy their space adventures on _Red Dwarf_ and _ _ encounter no aliens at all.

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Is the first series of Endeavour better than the first series of Sherlock though? I mean this is the sort of topic I come to a Red Dwarf site to find out about.

I would rank the Oxford adjacent series Lewis (if you look past the obvious), then Morse, then Endeavour. I watched Endeavour but I was thinking of Lewis.

But if you didn’t watch Morse with your parents and came to Endeavour without any real history of what went before, maybe that’s a whole different thing?

I agree that Red Dwarf as we know it probably was a big as it could have been in the 90s. In the days before every meme could be custom printed on a t-shirt you were limited to what HMV wanted to flog and you saw people wearing Red Dwarf t-shirts. 

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How has Kryten got a photo of her looking like a mechanoid? She ought to appear as a green blob.

Actually, what happens if you photograph Camille? Does she appear as the blob or does her image adapt to the person viewing the photograph?
If she appears as a blob, but you put that image into the Timeslides fluid, does she change when you enter the photo?

Does the orientation of the camera (if it’s a smart camera) matter? Maybe you get a picture of whatever the camera finds sexy.

Or maybe this question is answered by the episode itself… if you didn’t see the blob as the blob was being perceived by the other people in the room HOW DID THEY EVEN FILM THE EPISODE? Is Red Dwarf not even real and some kind of fictional setup?

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One of the tricky aspects of parenting… holding off on all the nostalgic stuff from your childhood and hoping it interests the kids when you do show them… I’m trying to hold off on Dwarf until at least 10 I think, because that must be about the age I was when I last saw it (I have an enduring memory of Lister being thrown over the console by an explosion in Queeg at a fairly young age). A lot depends on how developed the kids’ sense of humour are though, my son is currently 7 and still very much at the slapstick stage.

Queeg seems like it is probably a fairly safe and well contained episode though so maybe I was lucky with that…

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Jack Charles, tragically born with two first names.

Isn’t that mandatory around these parts? I mean the 4 primary cast members don’t have a surname between them…

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Has a new series ever felt more unlikely?
Apparently it’s already been greenlit, but progress has been halted by a legal battle over exactly how Robert will be credited.

Red Dwarf, Created By Doug Naylor and Bobby Grant

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I suspect it’s a comment on how menial the job is.
That, or it’s a jab at a very specific postal employee one or both of them had a bad experience with.

Very prescient comment on the people who covered up the post office Horizon scandal 

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Which only goes to show that ActualKryten understands the character of Kryten and what makes him funny less than AI. Unless of course it’s because Kryten is AI himself that Chat GPT knows better how to think like him…

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So I find it weird whenever people headcanon the novel stasis plan into the TV show, because to me that’s just making the story and character worse on purpose.

In my defence I am not headcanoning anything, I genuinely just forget that it isn’t in the show because Infinity Welcomes.. is as much “old Red Dwarf” as old telly Red Dwarf is to me, having read them both when I was younger. I would guess I’ve probably read the book more times than I’ve seen ‘The End’, too, so it’s just imprinted on my mind. 

It being better or worse is highly subjective but I’ve always considered the first book to be the best version of Red Dwarf that exists, Stasis reasoning included. 

I agree, I read the book so many times as a teenager it feels like the main event, and it never even really occurred to me that The End’s Lister was any different, just thought that they didn’t have time to shove all that in the episode. 

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Book doesn’t seem to feature sanitation mechanoids though! Something feels a bit odd about using GNP’s character as his internet voice…

The thing that made me most interested in the book was that it has some link to / inspiration from Bekonscot model village which is brilliant – was there just last weekend. Not sure I would go there for £300 though!

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Was it ever really explained why original Red Dwarf was equipped with exactly two stasis booths? Since it presumably wasn’t for interstellar travel, but it seems unlikely they’d have that along just for punishment? Sounds extremely expensive to equip a ship with that in case someone misbehaves. Surely they’ve got a prison cell or two if you’ve just been a little nasty and can space you if you’ve been rea0 naughty. “Stasis” is a genuinely bizarre punishment (and may be an indication that Hollister never actually knew what he was doing as captain).

Perhaps there was a special on stasis booths when the JMC bought RD and they threw them in just in case. Corporate procurement incompetence (that looks shiny, who cares if we need it?) can explain lots.

Suspect the real answer is “how can we get someone to be stranded 3 million years in the future” and working backwards from there

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(I agree with them)

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Most of Krysis – OK.

The bit where the universe is a sentient being? By some considerable distance the worst thing that has ever happened in Red Dwarf. 

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For me the first episode hit my expectations for BTE at the time – basically not as funny as I used to find Red Dwarf (and maybe a bit too childish? even though on rewatching for this exercise I can see that some of these tendencies were always there…)

I quite enjoyed the second part in the main, I felt that was quite well done and I for one liked Rimmer’s “mind the bus what bus splat” hologram murder after explicitly confirming it was at best not immoral. And the ridiculous photo enhancement was good stuff. But from the ‘nose guy’ onwards… no thanks. 

The third episode then was just a bit meh. The chase sequence looks absolutely fantastic and dramatic. But the comedy isn’t that great, and I too wish Doug had been the creator (though maybe he thought it would offend the other creator as really it needed the gestalt entity). I also never understood how Lister got out of Carbug so quickly at the end, or why he decided he had to leave after all. 

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Krytie TV is the tipping point. BitR was dodgy, Cassandra gave a glint of hope, Krytie TV is the point where I watched the rest of the series because it was ‘Red Dwarf’ but it was a chore rather than something to look forward to. As a few others have noted the whole premise was offensive (and I think it was dodgy even back before we all got woked) rather than just tonally broad compared to what had come before.

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Cassandra is the good episode in comparison to the others… at least the antagonist is a good concept that could have been fun without all the canaries and the Rimmer / Kochanski bits…

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Well I like Tikka To Ride. I agree with almost all of the criticisms here about the curry obsessions, and rebuilding Starbug, and yet… I think it’s the silliness of the conspiracy theory explanation that did it. Even if, as was pointed out earlier, this means that actually the end of Out Of Time might not make as much sense.

Compared to what was to come, it’s pretty good – I never went back to it like I did the first 6 series but I was ready with the opinion that there was at least one episode worth watching after Out Of Time. No one ever asked for that opinion but I was ready with it. So here it is!

. 

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So here’s my question on rewatching… was Lister’s future at the end of series six an intentional callback to the “things that go in jars” conversation in these early episodes? 

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I enjoyed Series XIII. I’m impressed the AI wrote a proper joke in the Lister / Kryten general bit which very much fitted the “There are no sounds to hear” mould…

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IDEA FOR A SHED

Arthur Jackson mentions to a friend he is considering getting a second shed leading to an embarrassing nickname. But can’t we just talk about the music?

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IDEA FOR A BREAD

In which Talkie Toaster tries to persuade other readers that they are interested in heated bready products.

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Ditto… I always thought it was meant to be “Only one man” and the line had come out wrong and no-one had noticed until it was too late. So it’s good that there is a sensible answer!

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THE DUSTBIN BOILS

Kryten conducts an experiment to see how long it takes to evaporate the contents a small wastepaper basket full of despair squid ink with a bunsen burner.

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I always felt a little disappointed when the new series/special chatter said “HOLLY IS BACK” and then it wasn’t Hattie Hayridge…

I also thought that was just me until I read the above few comments.

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My instant reaction was a not very detailed “This actually breaks my heart a bit.” I’ve never put myself through a rewatch to get more details, but it felt like a steep step down from the several episodes from those years that were merely pretty rubbish.

On the bright side, it gave us Richie & Eddie Watch “Timewave”.

Well Timewave was very nearly worth it for that. It still wasn’t though, was it?

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Apparently reading the last few posts my unpopular opinion is that I didn’t like Mr Rat all that much, and preferred the first half of the episode to the second half.

I share the opinion that Emohawk is great. This may be because I saw it before Polymorph, or Dimension Jump, or Back to Reality, but anyway I like it.

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Looks like they also tried to sell it (or something similar) to ITV the first time around as “The Oo-ee-oO Dimension” (Smegazine Nov 1992). And Thursday Man was maybe a film script. No wonder they didn’t get around to writing The Last Human.

Thursday Man lurks on Amazon as a book allegedly published in 2015 with an ISBN and everything. The blurb sounds pretty topical in these pandemic times…

I check the page optimistically every so often to see if it ever actually becomes a thing rather than a data glitch!

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I remember finding the smeg ups and smeg outs videos a bit of a slog at the time and not finding them as funny as I had thought I would – except when Kenneth Rimmerams was periodically unleashed by Chris Barrie.

Did it stop me buying them again for my portable playstation when they were released on whatever that odd format was? Of course not.

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The shirt I always wanted, that I saw advertised in the Smegazine but (surprise) never got, was one with an ill-over Starbug print.

That shirt sounds sick.

(I assume the cool kidz still say things like that)

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I had the Let’s Get Out There And Twat It one, which had one slight drawback – the abbreviation was LGOTATI which didn’t make sense and wasn’t funny.

I am tempted by this thread to go and buy some bootleg merchandise. Unless an official shop reopens quickly!

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IDEA FOR OM EPISODE

Smeg and the heads stage a comeback tour.

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IT’S NOT JAILBAIT

Its the 16th page!

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He youthed me!

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https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/125/12564/red-dwarf/9780241988060.html

That release date is a bit further in the future than I expect to be alive but I guess I should think about a pre-order so I know my copy is secure…

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NO TIMEWAVE TOULOUSE

French town becomes inexplicably popular with Red Dwarf fans.

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TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

“Do you know why we can’t hear anything? Because there are no sounds to hear”
“Kryten s right! All through the ship, not a creature is stirring not even a mouse. Or a space weevil”

It’s a very short episode.

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It’s behind you!

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Red Dwarf / Sonic crossover? Surely that’s missing the obvious open goal of a Red Dwarf / Mario crossover? I mean, just imagine: Princess Peach whacking those green pipes with various turtles and complaining if they make a sound out of sequence. Hilarity would doubtless ensue.

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Dwarves are Red
Midgets are Blue
Given the universe is infinite
Toast for you?

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Is this an appropriate place to complain that I can’t buy IWCD for my kindle in English but apparently can in Spanish or German? No? Ok I won’t then.

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STELLA RES CUE

Lister is way beyond nicely drunk. He is completely pished. He is no longer Cinzano Bianco. He is not the Prince of the Planet Potters.

Too much Belgian lager means he can barely even see the table, balls and cue. They’ve gone all fuzzy and out of focus.

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STELLAR RES CUE

Lister watches the snooker at the Crucible on his new super HD TV and is amazed, the resolution is so high he can even make out the grain on the wood of the cue.

“That resolution is stellar” he exclaims, pushing home the joke that everyone had got and ignored already.

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DICKY TICKER TO HIDE

Lister is ashamed of his complete series collection of Allo Allo and has to make sure the crew doesn’t find it.

Meanwhile Kryten adopts a French accent, Rimmer keeps shouting “you stupid woman” at Kochanski and Cat does something that makes this funny.

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TICKER TO HIDE

Finally! It’s Rimmer’s retirement party! But where will the others keep the gold clock until they present it to him?

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Luke! You are your father!

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I watched a Red Dwarf / Coronation Street crossover…

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