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Well you won’t hear it from me. Good concept, well executed. Easily the best episode of the 3 so far.

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He’ll continue to cover them, but just say “Look, I know the CEO is problematic, but Tesla cars were my whole childhood, OK? I will donate 5% of the profits from Tesla videos to a pro-democracy charity.”

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This is the same guy who fed and dressed 3 literal corpses for millions of years, and Twitter is now too dead for him.

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His lack of outfit “IS” his outfit, I’d say. Like the Cat, there’s a consistent personality in the fashion, so it’s not like he’s alternating between Colin Baker and Christopher Eccleston (although there’s definite overlap with both, so maybe bad example). There’s lots of orange and a retro 60’s flair to several of his outfits. Also, I imagine that after having spent a lifetime with Donna Noble as the 14th Doctor, she probably finally instilled into him that it’s weird to have only one set of clothes, like she called him out on in Partners in Crime.
His variety of outfits is fine. The sonic screwdriver is weird though. It’s cool that it has the Rwandan saying engraved into it, but that’s a remote control shape, not a screwdriver shape. Even Capaldi’s ridiculous latter-era blue penis screwdriver was at least screwdriver shaped.

I personally do find the inconsistency a bit annoying, even if Gatwa does naturally come across as a fashionable person who would change outfits a lot. But his “main” outfit for marketing purposes, the brown leather coat/stripy top/blue trousers, is plenty Doctor-ish enough I think. Hopefully he wears that more in upcoming series. I think he only wore it in The Church on Ruby Road so far, which is bizarre.

Quite enjoying the new batch of novelisations, the Space Babies one even reminds me a bit of the Dwarf ones

That’s cool to hear. Seems like a bit of a missed opportunity though, as Space Babies and 73 Yards were already in the better half of RTD Series 14 scripts. The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death were the ones that could most stand to benefit from being heavily rewritten by someone other than Russell T Davies.

I wonder, does the 73 Yards novelisation offer any explanation for what happens in the episode?

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Still, if you died from people on the internet seeing your face, you could come back as a hologram and make the cosplay even more authentic.

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Can I shock you? I preferred last week’s episode to this one. I feel like people’s major aversion to The One Amigo was that they found the dated topicality of NFTs cringeworthy, and Quids Game doesn’t have that drawback (the Squid Game parody aspect being much more broad), but as the NFT thing didn’t bother me personally, I just found that episode funnier and more engaging.

This one was still decent, and it had a great core concept, but it had some major limitations:

– As soon as half of the characters got killed off, it was obvious that this whole episode would be undone or revealed as a dream (even if they weren’t the regulars who were killed first, clearly the writers are still not going to commit to that), so there were essentially no stakes from that point. It would have worked better if it had been redshirts getting picked off one by one rather than Futurama’s full supporting cast getting killed en masse. I know you can say “don’t you always know that the main characters will survive?”, but it’s different. It just is.

– The emotional impact of the Fry flashbacks just didn’t really land for me. Fry being upset to be reminded of a traumatic childhood birthday worked (less so him suddenly having a Marty McFly-esque revelation about how his lifelong fear is being seen as a cheater), and I liked some of the details (like the backstory of how his elementary school best friend became his high school rival), but it’s hard to be gut-punched by the revelation that his parents were cheating for him, when it was completely obvious that was what was happening for the entire episode. My reaction to the end of the episode was “… is that it?”.

– I’ve seen this put on the Jurassic Bark side of the Fry flashback episodes, because the final “revelation” is just given to the audience and not to Fry, making it more sad. But honestly I think this episode would have really benefited from the other approach, where Fry finds out via the alien recreation of his birthday party that his mom had been cheating for him. As it is, there’s no real resolution to the character arc, it just… ends. Sure, it’s nice and all that everyone assured Fry they don’t think he’s a cheater and gave him a big hug, but none of them thought that before either, so what’s the journey?

– Leela in this episode felt off, in a way I’m still not sure I can fully explain. Her begging Fry to cheat for her and save her life (and therefore sacrifice himself) was understandable, but it just didn’t seem like Leela. Fry agreeing to it was genuinely affecting though. (Even if it was a bit weird how he seemed more hung up on the cheating aspect than the murder/suicide aspect. Leela dies, and even after that he’s still worried about being accused of cheating, in a death tournament they were forced to play against their will. Come on, dude.)

Still, it was undeniably fun to have so many characters thrown in the mix, and especially that Hattie McDoogal inexplicably won the whole thing.

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Not too shabby.

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50 day streak! 🥳

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It was funnier to imagine Snacky entirely replacing Metal Sonic, I thought.

I mean I can’t disagree. Snacky is such a fully defined character, it’s more like a secondary personality than a mere acting role. Like Alan Partridge.

But the remaining question is, who should Kerry Shale play?

I’ll just put him down for James Marsden.

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Not Mark Quartley, of course. Snacky.

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Well, the campaign for Craig Charles to play Peter Parker in Insomniac’s next Spider-Man game starts now.

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Chris Barrie -> Simon the Sorcerer

Danny John-Jules -> Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko

Robert Llewellyn -> The Feeble Files, Discworld Noir

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So, why wasn’t Craig in any video games in the 1990s, eh?

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I don’t think so honestly. Doug has been enigmatic about the rationale behind “Series X”, but he’s pretty much made it known that it isn’t because he considers BtE to be Series IX. More that he considers “Series IX” to be a hypothetical series that would have taken place at some point between 1999 and 2009, if it had happened. That’s not too big a mystery, what is a big mystery is why he would choose to torment us with such postmodern wankery.

(Of course I am personally on the “Back to Earth is Series IX” side of the argument, but that’s pure Death of the Author.)

So if anything, in the parallel universe where Back to Earth was explicitly non-canon, Doug’s resolve to call the first full Dave series “Series X” would have only been stronger, because more of the story would have been skipped over, in his mind. Maybe it would have been Series IX if it had picked up with the Only the Good… cliffhanger, and had Kochanski and nano-Rimmer and Holly in it.

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Appropriate, because that’s also my reaction when anyone complains about the Series 1 sets being too grey.

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Between this and the “Everybody is Dead Dave” podcast, evidence is mounting that Series VIII and Back to Earth have inverted appeal for new fans compared to long time fans.

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Dave not confident that the new special(s) will come to fruition before 2028.

I just popped to 2028 to check. There were actually 2 new specials before the Ruby Reckoning, but G&T leadership made the controversial decision to rank the combined DVD versions of Back in the Red, Pete and Back to Earth instead of the broadcast episodes. They also decided to include Can’t Smeg Won’t Smeg, Stellar Rescue and Smart Rescue in the ranking.

Apparently these actions were taken due to the insistence of the fourth G&T Admin, Frank Ackerman, who joined in early 2026 and was allegedly also behind the decision to put the Smegazine Rack and Re-Disc-overy podcast series on hold in favour of recording commentaries for every episode of Coronation Street that Craig Charles appeared in.

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It can’t have, though, because Rimmer wasn’t a part of the “group” that was originally exposed. He was on Starbug.

It can have, because the group hallucination doesn’t need to start at the same time for everyone (and logically it couldn’t anyway, because of how unlikely it is that even Lister, Cat and Kryten would be exposed at the same time and have the same tolerance levels). Rimmer doesn’t notice that the others are hallucinating because early on the hallucination was only slightly different from reality, and by the time he would notice, he’s been exposed to the despair ink too.

Overall the basic concept of a shared hallucination is a lot less believable than the timeline for it starting. Maybe the squid ink temporarily gives them telepathy or something.

Although perhaps I shouldn’t defend the episode like this, because it would be quite exciting for it not to win the Ruby Reckoning.

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They use the mood stabilising gas as soon as they get back on Starbug and before the group hallucination, though.

The implication is that the group hallucination had already started by the time they thought they used the mood stabilisers.

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Oh hey, the new season, it’s here!

Pretty good opener. It being about NFTs was surprisingly non-annoying. Maybe because of how unambiguous it was regarding them being total bullshit? The topicality of NFTs has passed now, of course, but hindsight hasn’t made the commentary obsolete, and it’s not like it’s ancient history. The time the episode took to animate and release turned it into a victory lap, but it was still fun, and NFT discussion didn’t overwhelm things.

The dialogue was also on form – it felt a lot snappier and more natural than the Season 11 opener. And regardless of what anyone thinks of this episode, at the very least it’s not the worst Eric Horsted episode – Yo Leela Leela remains unchallenged. Yo Leela Leela didn’t even have Danny Trejo in it, as far as I remember.

The major controversy from “The One Amigo” isn’t the NFT subject matter, it’s the production code – 9ACV01??? Futurama season numbering weirdness will never end.

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Of course all “which version of Rimmer is it in the Dave era” theories are valid, but which ones are good, is the question.

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I don’t think there’s any good reason for nano-Rimmer’s memories to be “patched in” to Rimmer Prime. In universe, it would be pointless at best and destructive to his psyche at worst to try and integrate incongruent memories (as Thanks for the Memory demonstrated); out of universe, why the hell would I want Rimmer to remember the events of Krytie TV. I’d prefer not to have any memory of it myself.

The rationale behind erasing his Ace memories I can understand a bit more, just because it feels weird that Rimmer seems the same as ever despite having gone through these hypothetically transformative experiences, but in my opinion it’s just too convoluted. Again there’s no reason in universe for them to remove those memories, either. It’s easier to assume he just never managed to do much as Ace Rimmer and came back with his tail between his legs.

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26/07/2024 

1/6 🟩

“Queeg Heil”

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25/07/2024 

1/6 🟩

I’m glad I listened to my gut on this one.

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What if Hattie plays Holly, and Norman plays the greatest and most prolific lover who ever lived?

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My take is that there’s no major contradiction in the ways that T1 and T2 treat the timeline, at least plot wise. They have different results – T1 is about them protecting the timeline, while T2 is about them changing it – but that doesn’t mean the outcomes that occurred were the only ones possible.

In T1, it wasn’t fate that the Terminator would fail. It genuinely could have killed Sarah and sculpted the best version of history for Skynet, but thanks to the efforts of Kyle and Sarah it failed. You end up with no real changes to the timeline, but still have genuine stakes.

It is true that the attitudes about it change, and maybe John Connor believes that only stable time loops are possible, but at the very least Reese and Skynet act as if history can be changed.

It may seem contradictory that sometimes going back in time leads only to you making history proceed exactly as it was recorded, and sometimes it leads to you changing the future and creating all manner of paradoxes, but that’s often the case for series which utilise time travel. Red Dwarf has done it and Doctor Who has done it.

The final T2 timeline is the Terminator version of Dimension Jump in a way. The Lister there – Spanners – only exists because a time traveling version of him from an alternate future dropped him off. We know that only a fraction of timelines/universes will have a Lister who actually grows up to father himself, and yet that doesn’t stop all these other divergent timelines with Listers from existing. If Arnie had won in The Terminator, it would have just created such a divergent timeline – failure wasn’t an inevitability.

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I see where you’re coming from, but I wholeheartedly disagree with the framing. The first 2 films were about a specific future apocalypse, and by the end of film 2 that apocalypse is definitively averted. Sure, it was “left wide open” for a different future apocalypse to still occur, in the same way that Independence Day leaves things wide open for a second group of aliens to try to conquer Earth. But in both cases the story actually being told is over.

Of course Terminator 1 wasn’t unresolved either, but once you’ve upgraded from 1’s pyrrhic “the world still ends but it’ll get better eventually” victory to 2’s total “OK, the world doesn’t actually need to end in the first place” victory, there’s nothing left to wrap up. So the sequels had to either undo the resolution or create new conflicts.

Which is fine, it just doesn’t come across that T2 was written with that in mind. If it wanted to leave it open narratively, it would have done so explicitly, not just in the broad “well the future isn’t set in stone, so I guess anything could still happen?” sense.

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Can’t argue, sometimes that low hanging fruit is just too tempting to pass up.

But it wasn’t about the later films being disliked – from what I hear Rise of the Machines and Dark Fate were quite well received? – it’s about them continuing past the point of a pretty definitive ending.

Because the analogy was for Lister’s happy ending with Kochanski getting endlessly pushed back. If Red Dwarf actually progressed like the Terminator franchise, then the Lister/Kochanski plot would have been fully resolved at the end of Series 2 (whether they got together, or it was confirmed they never would), but then Series III would have de-resolved it after a long hiatus.

So I’m just giving Terminator 2 due credit. It didn’t kick the Judgment Day can down the road for the sake of making more sequels, even though the first movie set it up perfectly to do so. It committed to give the story a satisfying conclusion and was all the better for it.

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What do you mean? They outright prevented Judgment Day, and that’s that.

Of course, if they ever made a third Terminator movie that could change.

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If you pay for Twitter BlueX Premium, your character limit is 25,000, but otherwise it’s still 280.

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Well we didn’t call it the UKTV era before, and the actual channel is called “U&Dave”, right?

So it will be called “the U&Dave era”.

Or, “the Dave era” for short.

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18/07/2024 

1/6 🟩

Nice, an ace as I hit day 30 of my streak.

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Yes, and she looks like a Star Wars hologram for some reason.

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Last night I had a dream that G&T put out a major update for Smegle.

For the Casual Continuous, they made it so that instead of it giving you one puzzle to solve, it gave you a grid of 4 puzzles which had been pre-solved by a bot. The idea was that they would be used as part of a “four truths and a lie” game. You would describe the 4 game results to someone else, along with a 5th one you made up yourself, and they would try and guess which one you made up.

For the Difficult Daily, it was changed so that if you failed the first guess, it would immediately tell you the correct answer, but it wouldn’t count it as a fail and you could keep guessing beyond that.

I tried my best to be polite and constructive in my feedback for this update.

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It seems the time is now. And oh hey they remembered Red Dwarf, that’s nice.

https://x.com/i/status/1813088742066037158

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Not to be a buzzkill, but could we at least acknowledge how unfortunate it is that people died there yesterday?

People always died yesterday, but I rarely see people acknowledging it on the Ganymede & Titan forum.

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If you dig around on the right areas of the web you can find the apk files for them. (Which is obviously only a help for Android, but at least the games aren’t lost.)

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Well, I think The End would feature quite heavily – Lister going into and out of stasis, Rimmer’s first appearance as a hologram and him phasing through something, their first meeting with the Cat. Awkward that all the relevant footage about Kryten would be David Ross, though.

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Honestly there’s a good chance my PS5 has spent more time playing movie/TV Blu-rays than it has playing game discs.

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Apparently it is possible, but it’s a pain. You need to add in a bunch of extra libraries and plugins and codecs and shit, including a way to circumvent the DRM protection on the disc.

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Makes me feel grateful that I’m able to rely on a classic Blu ray Player + TV set up.

For what it’s worth though, playing Blu rays on Windows isn’t exactly a picnic. I tried to do it some years ago, and I had to hunt for way too long to find a free media player software that was able to play Blu rays successfully, and even the one I found was pretty dodgy with it. Maybe the landscape has changed since, but it seemed like PC users generally weren’t expected to want direct Blu ray playback.

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I’ve noticed that too, but as it’s only a minor inconvenience it hasn’t occurred to me to mention it anywhere.

As you say, it’s probably due to First Reply /= First Post, and there may an assumption that if you’ve never read a thread you’ll use a non-“oldest unread reply” link. But on G&T, using the “Recent Forum Posts” sidebar section is more convenient than going to the general Forum page first, even if you need to scroll up by 1 post when you arrive at the thread.

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Is she a psychopath?

Surely if she were, her all time favourite episode would be Cured.

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Hey, just because we didn’t see TV equipment lying around, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. After all, by their very nature those sets are designed to be shot in without those shots picking up other TV equipment.

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Right, fair enough.

Would people just losing interest in something from the 2000s for long enough be sufficient to count it as “gone away”, or would it need to become genuinely difficult to access, like a TV show that was never released on DVD or streaming?

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Yeah, Harry Potter is still huge, sadly. The projects following the conclusion of the main film series have shown its limitations though. Cursed Child has done incredibly well (despite its annoying Part 1/Part 2 structure and generally crap story), and so did Fantastic Beasts 1. But each successive Fantastic Beasts movie took like $200 million less than the last, and now they’re not even going to bother finishing the series. They tried to re-brand as “Wizarding World” and were clearly expecting anything set in the same universe to do Harry Potter money. Yet the impression seems to be that if it isn’t literally Harry Potter himself or Hogwarts, people largely don’t give that much of a shit.

Still, it’s stark that despite Rowling trying her best to poison the well and queer people/allies trying hard to get people not to drink from it, Hogwarts Legacy became the most successful game of 2023, selling an eye watering 22 million copies. The game supposedly wasn’t even that good; it was mid. IT WAS MID.

Although, financial success is a very different thing to cultural relevance. A new Harry Potter thing hasn’t felt like a noteworthy event in popular culture for a very long time. And with the only major thing on the horizon being a simple re-adaptation of the books for TV (which given the speed of TV production nowadays, will probably either fizzle out after 4 seasons or finish in 30 years), I can’t see that changing. Harry Potter doesn’t have the reference power it once did.

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I mean, fair, but like, I contest the premise of the question that this world should make sense.

I think it should make sense, to an extent. While the eventual “it’s all just a dream” context means that nothing strange or unexplained happening in it would be an outright plot hole, at that stage we as the audience are meant to see it as “the real world, except the characters from Red Dwarf have somehow come to life”. Maybe they could have got away with some extra details being weird – such as the Coronation Street shop being more like an real shop than a shop set – without giving the game away early, but there isn’t a benefit to doing that either. It wouldn’t drive the plot, or work as a clue.

As tombow says, it’s not fully realistic for all of the interior sets to just be the insides of the exterior locations, but it’s believable enough that you could imagine them doing it that way for a legitmate biopic about Simon Gregson or something.

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I don’t think the shop is “open and staffed”. Michelle Keegan just happens to be in there, going over her script.

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Nope.

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Red Dwarf Regular Cast Member Be Normal Online Challenge

Difficulty Level: Impossible

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