Flap Jack

[Flap Jack]

I’d say that the characters in AR are never implied to be fully sapient in the way that mechanoids, Holly, skutters, vending machines, holograms etc. are, and therefore Kryten would not consider it possible to genuinely hurt or kill them. If they really were sapient, then shutting down the simulation for tea would be murder just as much as blowing them up with a virtual tank.

[Flap Jack]

Hey, I published some more mods! 4 audio-related mods – a mod quad, if you will – this time for a beloved 3D platformer from the 90s. I think you all know which series I mean… !

Clue: It’s not Sonic. All Sonic the Hedgehog games are already perfect, and as such attempting to mod one is both futile and sacrilegious.

https://gamebanana.com/sounds/89152

https://gamebanana.com/sounds/89154

https://gamebanana.com/sounds/89155

https://gamebanana.com/sounds/89156

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Rimmerworld is like Terrorform except it’s daytime and it… hang on, that gives me an idea.

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Die Hard is great, but it’s not my favourite thing from 1988 that features a character called Holly and has a connection to Alan Rickman.

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Being unable to kill isn’t something inherent about Kryten, it’s just something that requires him to break his programming to subvert. Low Kryten just broke his programming to evil ends.

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Out of the Red can still happen, damn it, but only if we believe in it.

[Flap Jack]

15/05/2026 

X/5 

Jesus Christ, I think I would have had a better chance of getting this one by just choosing Red Dwarf episodes purely at random than by actually trying to understand what I was looking at. I would have got the same result if it were a Casual Continuous.

[Flap Jack]

Have emojis broken for anybody else?

They look fine to me…

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In terms of aesthetics and cast, Series 2 is undeniably more of a piece with Series 1 than Series III, but in terms of the way the core trio are characterised and in terms of plotting, it’s much more of a Series III prologue than a Series 1 epilogue. They were completely wrong about it being actively embarrassing or bad, but there’s a reason Rob and Doug were so reluctant to let Series 1 be repeated, and didn’t extend the same restriction to Series 2 – and I don’t think it was because Series 1 didn’t have an inflatable banana in the bunk room.

Like I can’t imagine Series 1 Cat just willingly going on the time travel excursion in Stasis Leak, or the quest to find the black box recorder in Thanks for the Memory, or the trip down to the hologram projection suite in Queeg. (Or at least not without being given extra incentive, anyway.) Even if he’s not quite at the “consoling Lister over Rimmer and Kryten’s presumed deaths” level yet.

Also, I think you’re being a bit harsh about the Captain Emerald outfit. It absolutely still communicates that Rimmer sees himself as a serious high ranking professional compared to Lister who’s always dressed casually. It just does so with a more overt sci-fi aesthetic.

[Flap Jack]

Somewhat reductive, yes. Series 2 did a great job of softening Rimmer and Cat so the 3 of them felt more like a gang, but doing that only gets you so far.

I guess Series 2 was like a bridging series between the Series 1 style of Red Dwarf where the stories are built off the main characters either doing their own thing or being in direct conflict, and the Series III+ style where the stories are more about them being a team who go on adventures together (most commonly at least). It’s a transition, and a key step in that transition just happens to be “Put a Kryten in it”.

[Flap Jack]

I mean I guess this is why it’s a debate, but to me the only downside of adding Kryten was how it diminished Holly’s role. In terms of the overall character dynamics it was an absolute win, and it made clear how imperfect the Series 1-2 setup actually was.

Not that the Series 1-2 character dynamics were bad, but they were imperfect in terms of variety. Rimmer was adversarial with Lister, Cat was aloof with him, and Holly was mainly there for them to get annoyed with. All funny, but throwing in someone who is extremely intelligent and compassionate but also deferential and respectful to Lister – meaning he would be both a different personality to bounce off of and someone who would naturally clash with Rimmer – just added so much more mileage. 

[Flap Jack]

That’s a shame, because when I first saw Parallel Universe, them singing a refrain of “reproductive system, baby” while doing pelvic thrusts was one of the funniest bits of the song to me.

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Did you just note them down yourself for posterity, or is there some way of checking what you voted on G&T? I’ve done some searching, but no luck.

I just took some screencaps of the submission page before I was finished.

I actually assumed that G&T would email people copies of their submissions like they did with the Pearl Poll, but I did it just in case, and it turned out to be a good idea.

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It’s definitely not unheard of for Series VI to be considered the first “bad” series. I remember watching the SF Debris review videos for Red Dwarf way back when (I’m not sure the videos are still available, because they were in the Blip.tv era of video reviews), and he proclaimed that Series VI was when the show went downhill like it was a widely agreed upon fact. I was SHOCKED.

Out of curiosity, I looked back over my Coral Canvass scores, and Series VI had my second lowest average score of the bubble, above only Series 2, so if my opinion of Stasis Leak were more typical then VI would be the worst of the bubble. It is still absolutely in the bubble though. Series 1-VI all got 7-9 averages, Series VII a mid 4, Series VIII a mid 1, and even the best Dave series only got a high 6.

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The Beginning brought back the character of Young Rimmer from Dimension Jump.

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I’m probably unimaginative, but I can’t conceive of there being more
series of bubble quality anyway. The partnership already seemed to be
running out of steam in VI and they would have needed a break before
trying again. A gestalt of late 90s Grant and late 90s Naylor isn’t
catching either of them at their best.

Well, it seems likely the reason they were running out of steam is also a big part of why they broke up. So anyone imagining hypothetical extra Grant/Naylor series may as well also imagine that they’d get a second wind.

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What the fuck is Footquark?!

Leg => Foot

ion => quark

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Not going to derail, but

“Not going to derail”… ? Bringing up The Last Jedi unprompted in a thread that has absolutely nothing to do with Star Wars can only have 2 possible outcomes – either the thread is derailed, or everyone ignores you. So why would you do it? WHY. Find an old thread that your Star Wars opinions would be relevant to or start a new one for the love of god.

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Krynine

Parallel Galaxy

Monomorph

The Last Hour

Cakillometre

White Part

Dimension Step

Holodeck

Terrorthreem

Footquark

Rimmerland

Fathers & Planets

The Begover

Tenica

Timenod

C-Corp

Hopper

The Promised City

[Flap Jack]

I would never sell AI-generated art of David Attenborough, but Jake Wood.

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I got it in one as well, and the thought was just “Yellow… Canaries?”.

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Marvin Humes

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Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg

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I like Cured a lot, but it’s not even in the top half of Series XII for me, so it is a little surprising to see it described as bubble-worthy.

Then again, there are episodes in the actual bubble that I like less than Cured, so technically?

It being anyone’s favourite episode of all time is harder to compute, but as someone who also has an uncommon favourite, I can respect it.

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Lemons is a good episode. All respect to Red Dwarf’s only female writer, Many Ampersand Symbols.

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I am slightly tempted by the multiple text areas idea but I’m also very sleepy

Hey, no problem, we can wait until tomorrow.

Although despite all the improvements to Frinkiac, the Smega-Drive still has the edge because Frinkiac only has a standard boring “Random” button and not one which gives random images random captions. Amateurs.

Plus the GIF maker doesn’t seem to have an option to combine multiple GIFs into one?

[Flap Jack]

They can’t sue just for opinions. Including opinion makes it more legally defensible, if anything. It’s only defamation if you spread untrue facts.

So,

“Pot Noodles are disgusting garbage, I would personally rather eat a metric tonne of literal dog shit than take a single bite of Pot Noodle.” <- fine.

“Pot Noodles are disgusting because they’re made using ground up cockroaches.” <- not fine.

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The movie was always on there, though IIRC there was a quirk which made it hard to get to.

But yes, now it’s there as an option in the episode navigator (under “Season 0”) as well as a filter in the search.

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Would the final line thing make The End and The Beginning, The Slime’s Coming Home part 1 and 2

It wouldn’t.

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Yeah, definitely. I wonder why they went the way they did.

Probably because they wanted the gag of Lister and Cat being too stupid to work out they’re on a backwards Earth, and if they’d had Holly with them she would have told them.

[Flap Jack]

But when they kept using the Holly watch i think it reduced the amount
of times he could appear as you had to keep cutting away to the watch.

I don’t think this is a substantial enough reason on its own. The watch is an excuse for Holly to be visually in the scene so that cutting to him speaking makes sense, but that doesn’t mean the character wearing the watch needs to stop and look at their wrist every time he speaks. Practically it should work just like a regular scene with Holly on the ship, just without him featuring in the wide shots.

Obviously the Holly watch is bad, but for me it’s because it feels wrong for Holly to be quite so compact and portable.

[Flap Jack]

If Blake’s 7 found room for both Zen and Orac at the same time, I don’t see why Red Dwarf can’t do the same.

That’s a big “if”. They did kind of make it work by making Orac the one who would actually do advanced science stuff, while Zen would mainly just follow ship control requests, but IMO it never stopped feeling weird that they had 2 voice only computer characters. There was no practical reason it couldn’t have just been Orac doing both.

Although personally I would have picked Zen, because Zen is generally pleasant while Orac is kind of a prick, to put it mildly.

In Red Dwarf’s case, I don’t think dividing Kryten and Holly up by “one is a maintenance droid, one is an advanced supercomputer” really works. In theory it makes sense, but in practice the science and exposition aspects of Kryten were the dominant part of his characterisation from Series III onwards (e.g. he’s the one to suggest and administer the mind swap in Bodyswap). I know that Kryten’s status as a toilet cleaning robot got emphasised as a joke more and more as the show went on, but he was always a proactive and equal member of the gang. If you took away his science stuff and handed it to Holly, he would be effectively reduced to a tag-along who just offers quips about how much enjoys washing pants. It would be a betrayal of the character as we know him.

I do think it is possible to include both Kryten and Holly and give them both enough to do, but I just don’t think that would be the way to do it.

[Flap Jack]

That’s not true, we see the time drive explode when Rimmer shoots it.

Good point! I suppose what I mean is, the shot of the time drive exploding is so brief and the cut away is so fast that you don’t fully take it in. Or at least I didn’t. Maybe this is my equivalent to not noticing the laser fire before Starbug explodes.

But whether the cut is mid explosion or prior to it, it cuts away mid action. The explosion of the time drive isn’t finished, and it is superseded by the explosion of Starbug, which creates the clear implication that Rimmer was too slow.

Sure it can, you just have biased expectations from years of watching other time travel shows. Have you ever seen a causality paradox resolve itself in real life? I sure haven’t.

I wasn’t saying that it can’t, I was saying that it wouldn’t. At least, it wouldn’t if the creators involved actually wanted to give the audience any inkling that’s what was going on.

I’m not fully discounting the possibility of Rob and Doug pulling some “man you thought was dead was actually just sleeping motionlessly in a pool of someone else’s blood” bullshit, I’m just acknowledging that if they did that, it would be bullshit.

Also it’s not just other time travel shows but Red Dwarf itself, in Timeslides, The Inquisitor, and Tikka to Ride afterwards too. Although admittedly it would have been funnier if Kennedy had finished assassinating his younger self and then instead of solemnly fading away, erupted into a giant fiery explosion. Preferably mid sentence.

[Flap Jack]

Red Dwarf is not obscure.

[Flap Jack]

I never interpreted that explosion as being ambiguous at all. It was definitely Starbug Prime. Considering the set up is that we see Rimmer trying to blow up the time drive, but then it cuts away before impact to show (a) Starbug exploding, the cinematic language is very clear. Technically they could have revealed that it was actually the future Starbug that happened to, but it would have been a flagrant cheat and I’m not sure I would have liked it.

Also, come on, “being erased from time by causality” is not going to be visualised as a laser beam impact followed be an extremely tangible explosion. It just isn’t. Maybe they could pull it off if it wasn’t them being erased, but a third ship coming in to save the younger Starbug by shooting at the older one. Ace Rimmer, maybe? Actually that could have worked as a resolution – Rimmer is still fully heroic by destroying the time drive and bringing the others back to life, but everyone just celebrates Ace destroying future Starbug instead.

Overall though, what makes the Out of Time ending uniquely good is that it becomes properly serious and then never undercuts it. So even though the Tikka to Ride explanation was lacklustre, I’m glad we got that instead of the urine recyc ending in the episode itself.

(Also, how did I not realise the extra added shot of future Starbug firing in Tikka to Ride until now. WTF.)

[Flap Jack]

Presumably the AI just has images from Red Dwarf in its dataset and so did associate the image of the officer’s quarters with the show. Totally within the expected behaviour of these things.

If the mug, say, had the name of a departed relative you never mentioned, above the words “They’re in hell now, and you’re next”, then you could be concerned.

[Flap Jack]

29/04/2026 

X/5 

Hate it when this happens.

[Flap Jack]

And you didn’t even count Krytie TV or Only the Good…

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I just realised that despite initially replying here about my Binding of Isaac mods, I never posted about the remarkable fact that mere months later I became the first ever person to upload a mod for Doctor Who: The Adventure Games to Nexus Mods. And I’ve even amassed 3 unique downloads!

The game itself may be niche and delisted, but if you’re one of those who play it, trust me – you won’t want to play it unmodded again now you know this exists.

https://www.nexusmods.com/doctorwhotheadventuregames/mods/1

[Flap Jack]

Maybe one of them wasn’t technically “bestselling”?

Or she’s just pretending that Last Human doesn’t exist. I understand completely.

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Why wouldn’t the ones he co-wrote with Rob Grant count?

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To be honest, although I obviously agree Rimmer wasn’t being sincere about liking Lister’s music, I never saw it as an actual counter-scheme. It’s the silly, relaxed way he delivers his praise, it just comes across as Rimmer enjoying fucking with both Listers. If Rimmer were truly trying to convince Young Lister to stick with music, he would have been more direct and serious I think.

Plus it wouldn’t even make sense as an attempt to thwart Lister. In the prime timeline Lister does give up on the band, and in the alternate timeline Lister’s tension sheet success is what allows him to continue funding his own music career – so Rimmer would be pushing for the exact opposite of what he wants. If Rimmer was actually trying to ruin Present Lister’s plan, he should have been telling Young Lister that both his music and red packing paper suck shit, and the real road to fulfilment is to become a low ranking technician in the Space Corps.

[Flap Jack]

I always go the Download route, because even though I know that Smega-Drive gifs are set to not expire if they’re linked to on G&T, I’m paranoid that one I post will slip through the net somehow.

[Flap Jack]

1. Use red and white arrows to remove and add frames from and to selection.

2. Click “Make GIF” button, and wait for it to load.

3. Click “Download” button.

4. To combine multiple GIFs into one, use Timeline feature as you have already been doing with individual frames.

[Flap Jack]

But will this movie do what Red Dwarf didn’t, and interrogate the fact that the matriarchal alternate reality makes the women masculine and the men feminine?

[Flap Jack]

I have mixed at best feelings about AI overall, but this use seems more or less fine, especially as it’s siloed to its own dedicated thread. Gerry doesn’t seem to be selling these images as anything other than they are. Hopefully they don’t end up getting spread around as actual HD set shots…

They’re probably being a bit too ambitious in trying to recreate full model shots though. I mean you need 25 sequential images just to get a second of footage.

[Flap Jack]

While the setup wouldn’t be totally infeasible with Kryten coming to them rather than the other way around, I still think it would be too major a change. If the Nova 5 has no issues boarding Red Dwarf, what’s the distress? And wouldn’t Kryten have to be the one flying it, despite him personally believing that the crewmembers who should be doing that are still alive? It would also make it weirder in my opinion for the Dwarfers to board the Nova 5 instead of just expecting Kryten and the others to immediately meet them in the landing bay.

But I guess we never clarified how much of an episode we’re allowed to rewrite in order to make the “no Starbug or Blue Midget” restriction work. Maybe I was too hasty in suggesting a rework of the Bodyswap finale.

I think it’s fine if the use of shuttlecraft doesn’t really contribute anything (like in The Inquisitor), but if it is a significant part of the plot then it becomes more debatable. Are we asking which episodes already 99% work without Starbug, or are we asking which episodes can be made to work without Starbug if we permit ourselves to rewrite everything except for the core premises? Sure, maybe the Despair Squid could just be a space-faring creature that directly attacks Red Dwarf and the main plot could still technically still happen, but we’d be losing virtually the whole first act.

[Author]

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