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I definitely don’t count the potential endings as actual endings, so by my reckoning it’s 3 endings and 2 cancellations. That’s still quite a lot!

I guess Ben and phillipjfry105 are kindred spirits when it comes to this new season.

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The most interesting of those was Reincarnation and that was the first of them.

It was the second, but maybe that just further emphasises how uninteresting the first one was.

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I’m a bit more optimistic, as for me Season 11/8a/9/9a was like 2 bad, 2 great, 6 decent. I’m hoping for big improvements but I won’t go home hungry if it’s just a steady continuation.

Reasons for pessimism:

– More unavoidably out of date topicality, like the NFT episode.

– Not a great sign if such weak jokes as “Nobody panic!” / “You heard her! Start panicking!” not only make the trailer but open the trailer.

– One of the episodes is another non-Of Interest anthology episode, so based on their track record is near guaranteed to be underwhelming. (Psst, writers, you only have 20 episodes per production season. You don’t actually have to waste 2 of them. You can just make 20 Futurama episodes. That’s a free tip!)

Reasons for optimism:

– “Otherwise” was written as a potential series finale by Ken Keeler (pseudonym or not), so in theory should at least feel consequential and get the characters right.

– 2 of the episodes are credited to Bill Odenkirk and Kristin Gore, neither of whom have written for the show since the Fox era, and have exclusively written banger episodes.

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Nice, just a few weeks away! Until then I will lie awake wondering whether UK reckoning would make this “Season 10” or “Season 9 (Part 2)”.

Also, did this YouTube commenter – whose account name is a Futurama reference – just completely miss the season from last year, or do they think that every time there’s a significant gap between new episodes of a TV show, it’s been cancelled?

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But then, if that’s the case then the ending of the episode doesn’t quite work – when he becomes Kryten, he must also have a bit of that essence-of-Legion mixed in too. Although maybe that’s not enough to override the Kryten aspects that compel him to help the crew.

I think the pure Legion “essence” contains his knowledge and memories, but it doesn’t inherently have a personality or a sense of identity.

It’s like a database, but only when others are present – and Legion becomes sentient – does that data gain personal meaning.

What actually drives Legion to trap the Dwarfers with him is the human (or human-esque) sense of self-preservation that he gets from Lister, Cat and Rimmer. Kryten has this drive too, but his drive to save his friends and generally put others first overrides it when Legion has his personality only.

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Our streaks are in sync.

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08/07/2024 

1/6 🟩

Noice. And on the same day I hit a 20 streak too. They said it couldn’t be done.

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I remember being gutted that the Alternative Vote referendum failed. It wouldn’t have been as good as PR, and ultimately it would have just fed better results into FPTP, but it would have eliminated the need for tactical voting overnight. Of course the AV would have made things harder for the biggest parties, especially the ones who have more consolidated support in their part of the political spectrum, but that’s a good thing. In terms of the effects on voters, the only real downside was that votes would take longer to be counted. But of course the Tories flooded the media with a bunch of bullshit about how AV would make people’s votes unequal, and it died.

In a way it’s understandable, though. The UK public would never want to risk making such a big change to the way the country works with a referendum.

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Well, now you’ve put me on the spot, I’m less sure. I was definitely under the impression the more standard approach for crime series is 45 minute or hour long episodes with 6-8 episode series, but I haven’t done the research.

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It is a masterpiece to be fair

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OK, that’s fair enough! I guess Sherlock being so huge compared to Endeavour is due to how ingrained Holmes is in global popular culture compared to Morse who is more Britain specific, and also Sherlock being a modern reinvention while Endeavour is a period accurate reinvention. Also Sherlock had international superstars Tim From The Office and Martin From Cabin Pressure in it.

Slightly ashamed to admit I didn’t realise that Endeavour had the same format as Sherlock (feature length episodes, only a few episodes per series) until looking it up just now. That gives extra reason to compare them, even if Endeavour had more series in total and released them more frequently.

I wonder if Endeavour being a TV series has scuppered all those people who liked to trot out “Do you know what Inspector Morse’s first name was?” as a fun fact to act slightly smug about knowing.

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I wondered if RunawayTrain meant to say Elementary (which also started in 2012)? Valid to compare with Endeavour just for both being detective shows, but comparing the 2 “Sherlock Holmes in the modern day” shows is more obvious.

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04/07/2024 

4/6 ⬛🟨🟨🟩

Kind of embarrassed it took me 4 guesses, given that they’re now known to sometimes select the frame to be appropriate for the date.

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Easiest one yet

Right. *cracks knuckles*

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To be fair, Carrie Fisher was still alive for Rogue One, and Helen Slater was (and still is) alive for The Flash, so it’s not just about bringing back dead people, it’s also about youthify-ing inconveniently aged people.

Hmm, actually that might be worse. I’ll need to think on it.

At least with Rogue One they still got actors to play those roles and just used CG to change the way they looked, I guess.

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This does draw attention to the whole “how exactly do holograms receive visual input from where their eyes are being projected?” question.

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And the Rimmer who entered Better Than Life wasn’t even the original Rimmer hologram. The original Rimmer was erased by Lister in Me².

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No, the real Lister died off screen after the end of Polymorph. He was killed and replaced by the second polymorph.

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Heck, even without hologram technology you can receive a letter from someone telling you they’ve died. It doesn’t tend to be funny though.

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Even if it was a skutter or a crewmate who actually put ink to paper, I think it’s fair to say the person dictating would still be the one the letter was “from”.

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“Died? Do you think he’d write and tell you?” would work a lot better in a show where people coming back as holograms after dying wasn’t a major part of the premise.

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If they do end up using this cover, people will owe the Red Dwarf I-VIII Blu ray art an apology.

Why did they dislocate his shoulder?

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Just twigged that today is my 10th success in a row. I feel like I should break out the champagne.

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I’m with Ben on this one. K-9 is innocent and a certified good boy.

Given there were 2 dogs on the TARDIS at the same time, maybe Sutekh got sick of K-9 muscling in on his turf, so he used his powers to manipulate K-9 into the water in The Leisure Hive.

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Actually, as I mentioned George McIntyre, isn’t it convenient that we never find out if they re-enabled him in Series VIII?

Holly making the decision on his own to switch him off in favour of Rimmer in the 3 million year gap is one thing, but if he was left behind after the evacuations in Only the Good… and they decided to effectively kill him for a third time so that holo-Rimmer could return (presumably after a good while with him as the 5th or 6th Dwarfer) that would be pretty dark.

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Why didn’t the nanobots recreate Kochanski?

For years I thought this was a major issue, but I realised there are 2 pretty plausible explanations:

1 – Lister gave Kochanski in particular a funeral (similar to the deleted scene) and flushed her remains into space, so she – and George McIntyre – didn’t have remains on the ship to be recreated from.

2 – The nanobots are intelligent, so they just saw that they already had a Kochanski, and thus decided that recreating Kochanski would be pointless.

Ultimately the lack of a second Kochanski isn’t a plot hole, but the fact no characters even mention the possibility is symptomatic of the larger issue of the writers acting like Kochanski being stranded away from her home universe is irrelevant in Series VIII.

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OK, reading that back, I realise how weird it sounded to say that they’re playing the same character when those characters are from different universes to each other. The show does treat them that way a lot of the time though.

I guess the last thing New Kochanski did was walk into a mirror, and the last thing Old Kochanski did was either direct Lister to the Captain’s office, or walk into Lister and Rimmer’s quarters on future Lister’s arm while wearing a big hat (depending on whether you’re going from Kochanski’s perspective or the audience’s).

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Ouroboros is still later than Stoke, so the spirit of your reply was valid.

But whether Kochanski’s played by Grogan or Annett, that’s still meant to be the same character, while the Psirens and Back to Earth appearances specifically are not.

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Technically her final “scene” would be Kryten’s revelation of her “breaking up” with Lister and doing a runner in BtE, I think, albeit off-screen.

Even accounting for the quotes, I really don’t think off-screen events count as scenes.

Where her story was left is another discussion, but Only the Good… remains her last impact on the show as a present person and not just an idea or a memory.

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All these quandaries will be sorted out when Bobby’s ‘The Ghost Camera’ comes out, I’m sure of it.

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Well, no, because your mind’s eye isn’t the same as a camera.

That’s why I said “effectively”. It’s different, but it’s the same in the ways that matter for this. You’re still making a record of your experiences.

Would secretly filming someone with a camera become ethical if only certain stretches of footage are saved and some parts are edited in ways you’re not aware of?

Fundamentally, if someone tells you something in confidence, it’s typically regarded as unethical if you share that information with others without their permission. So it stands to reason that sharing your literal memory of the conversation would be unethical for the exact same reason.

Of course in TftM it’s a moot point because the person in question has been dead for millions of years, but the technology still has the ethically dubious potential.

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I mean if memories can be easily copied into computers, shown on screen as video, and put into other people’s brains, then that makes looking at someone effectively the same as filming them, doesn’t it? Or much worse.

Fair to say the ethical breach occurs when you choose to extract the memories though, not just because you looked at and spoke to someone without warning them that memory extraction technology might one day become available to you.

Privacy is only part of the issue as well. The way Lister so easily edits his memories, combined with memories not being reliable anyway, creates a libel/defamation minefield. Current deep fake tech seems quaint by comparison.

And that’s without the complication of people also making digital copies of their dreams (seemingly automatically, in the case of the Dwarfers) and mixing dreams in with memories.

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To be fair to them, the BBFC did bump Marooned up to a 15 just because it didn’t have a shot of Starbug after the credits.

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Doctor Who Fans: “I can’t believe they retconned it so that a villain secretly came on board the ship off screen during a fan favourite story from decades ago before the show was cancelled and revived, and that villain has only just now gathered enough strength to try to kill everyone.”

Red Dwarf Fans:

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Ah ha, for a second I thought this was going to be a complaint about the price.

Off topic, but the Australian DVD ratings labels are such an eyesore. Like I know the UK ones maybe aren’t amazing either compared to the virtually clean US DVD covers, but I don’t know why Australia decided the labels needed to be quite that large.

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Oh definitely. I’d forget Pete Part 1 in its entirety if I could.

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All the ones we don’t actually see play out are suspect, for sure. But at the very least Knot’s death and the dialogue based predictions in her first scene were for real.

What makes my head hurt is the “no free will” interpretation of Cassandra, where she genuinely can’t see anything other than her own personal future, and she only has answers to people’s questions because she’s had visions of herself giving those answers. That she didn’t – and couldn’t – plan to trick Lister. That she knows that Kryten will realise her key prediction is wrong, and that she will die.

With that interpretation in mind, it doesn’t matter whether she deduces that Arnold is Rimmer or not. She’s compelled to troll him with the false and self-contradictory prophecy but then act like she believes Knot is Rimmer regardless.

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Well also all the Canaries don’t die anyway, we see them again in the
next episode. Unless they were all replacements, I don’t want to watch
Cassandra again, despite it being probably the best of Series 8 (very low bar), to check.

Right, the “Canaries are all going to die, including Arnold” bit is definitely a lie, that’s just the text of the plot. But Knot’s death – and Cassandra’s belief that he’s Rimmer – is never doubted as a legitimate foretelling by any of the characters. So relative to what is confirmed in the episode, I’m only doubting that she really believed Knot to be Rimmer.

just the one flaw?

Hey now, I wield the indefinite article with careful precision.

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There is that.

It is a flaw of the episode that they hinge so much on this “hang on, does she actually know that I’m Rimmer?” revelation, but aren’t willing to compromise the laughs in the earlier scene to make it truly fit. Sure, on paper she didn’t experience anyone directly say that he was Rimmer, but being real, how could she not know?

Not helped of course by the wild leap of logic that Cassandra’s only visions of Rimmer were of times when he was physically in the same room as her, which is based on nothing.

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Well, if it was rounding she would have said “All the Canaries will die in one hour, except for Rimmer, who will die in 20 minutes.” Saying “within” explicitly avoids rounding by making it a range.

If she had no intention to screw with Rimmer with the way she said it (and it’s not like it’s out of character, we know the Canaries all dying aspect was just a lie to manipulate Lister), then she could have said “All the Canaries will be dead within one hour, and Rimmer will be dead within 20 minutes.” No reason other than trolling to throw an incorrect “except for” in there.

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Well I’m shocked if Red Dwarf doesn’t have “box set” status for UKTV, but if it’s true, “UKTV specifically chose not to repeat Series XI for long enough that it alone dropped off UKTV Play” is not any less weird to me than “UKTV Play specifically chose to remove Series XI from UKTV Play”.

Maybe they just took it off so that they can claim it as a “U&Dave Exclusive” when they launch that.

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Realised this while posting in the other thread.

Cassandra says “All the Canaries will be dead within one hour, except for Rimmer, who will be dead in 20 minutes.”

But 20 minutes is within an hour, so this means she made a self-contradictory prediction purely to fuck with Rimmer, in spite of the fact that as far as she’s concerned (supposedly), Rimmer isn’t in the room and can’t hear her say this.

So I’m counting this is as proof that Cassandra knew full well that Arnold was the real Rimmer, but she just played along with (and effectively seeded) the Knot/Rimmer ruse in order to further mess with them.

It explains why she isn’t confused by Arnold’s delighted reaction to hearing that “Rimmer” might survive, given she must have foreseen him being totally nonchalant as Knot-Rimmer dies right in front of him. The contradiction could even be how Kryten legendarily figured out that Cassandra could and would lie.

Of course, like all Cassandra motivation theories, you have to assume that she still has effective free will somehow.

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There will be no justice until EVERY episode with an ampersand in its title is free.

Including The Promised L&.

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lol, I feel so conflicted about this finale. I was swept up in the emotions and the spectacle of it, but I can’t deny the actual plotting and mystery resolution was a confusing and often unsatisfactory mess. It’s like I experienced both Ben and Dave’s reactions simultaneously.

Up front though, I want to make a formal apology to Morris. I rewatched the last episode first (because I saw it in the cinema) and realised it was The Doctor who made the moronic “wrong anagram” comment, not him. Sorry, dude.

– As others have said, The Doctor crying about killing Sutekh – a being who only exists to murder everyone in the universe – felt very forced. It was silly enough for him to get so emotional about the Bogeyman, but this is like if he reacted the same way after getting confirmation the Bogeyman had already killed and eaten literally all of the Space Babies.

– A bit frustrating to have the Mrs. Flood mystery can kicked down the road, but I knew it would be that way as soon as she got dusted. I was amused to learn that one of the Flood theories is that she’s Clara, which is apparently just because her outfit is very similar to one that Clara wore, and I was obviously dismissive of it, but then she called The Doctor a “clever boy” and I was like “NO FUCKING WAY”.

– The idea of Ruby’s bio mum not being anyone notable or special is a good enough idea for a subversion, but if you’re going to make that the conclusion to a whole series of build up, you’ve got to tread carefully. RTD did not tread carefully. Sutekh becoming randomly obsessed with a woman just because he couldn’t see her face or learn her name (which I guess is the only time that’s ever happened to him, somehow?) is stupid. Bio mum dramatically pointing at a sign to name her child (when she wasn’t even really being captured on camera) instead of just leaving a name tag is stupid, especially when The Doctor and the TARDIS get in the way and she acts like she doesn’t even see them. Also, hints that time was changing around the event and altering The Doctor’s memory turned out to be meaningless. What good is a mystery if some of the clues aren’t just red herrings but outright lies?

– I really am tired of this story arc approach to series. At least in the RTD1 era the story arcs were mostly just memetic words or phrases cropping up, but RTD2 seems to have adopted the Moffat approach of setting it up so that if the finale is a let down it retrospectively tarnishes many of the stories before it, when they were meant to be standalone. Doctor Who is at its strongest with stories that stand on their own, and the strongest standalone stories are often multi-parters, yet it seems like modern showrunners are allergic to both.

– It’s interesting how once you make the stakes high enough, they effectively become low again. When Kate died, I was like “oh shit, they’re going there!”, but when everyone else died it became “oh. OK, so this is all definitely getting undone and none of it matters. Great.”

– I don’t think it makes any sense plot wise, but I did enjoy the Memory TARDIS and the implicit canonising of the Tales of the TARDIS series. I wasn’t expecting it, and it was neat.

– Rose was such a letdown. I thought surely if she did nothing in the last episode, she would have a big role to play in this one? NOPE, she was immediately put into the “temporarily dead” zone along with everyone else. Brilliant. Why even bother having her here. (Also, in the TLoRS rewatch, I caught how silly it was for Rose to be “essential staff” when she’s effectively an apprentice they have doing busywork like investigating shoplifting. They may have said “essential staff” but what they meant was “staff who have names and lines in the script”.)

– I feel vindicated by the fact that the many Susan Twists and the naming of them was totally pointless in the end, just 100% a false tease for the audience and nothing else. Sure, Sutekh wanted “agents” to spread his death plague throughout time (though I’m not sure how an ambulance and a portrait do that), that’s fine, but there was no reason for them all to be copies of the same woman, no reason to tie anything in to the Triad software announcement event thing, and no benefit to leaving The Doctor clues or making him think Susan Triad is his granddaughter. Sutekh was just randomly jerking around I guess. Ironically it was actually self-defeating for him to do this, because Sutekh’s secondary goal was finding out who Ruby’s mum is, and he wanted The Doctor to find it out for him, yet he actively undermined the investigation by making this Susan Triad red herring. Idiot.

– The bigeneration is feeling more and more short sighted all the time. Not only is Fourteen completely ignored when an apocalyptic crisis is happening in London (including a bit where The Doctor actively wants to be in 2 places at once), but Sutekh possessing the TARDIS has serious implications for Fourteen’s duplicate TARDIS that aren’t even mentioned.

– When The Doctor was listing off planets that had been restored back to life at the end, for a second I was thinking he would say “Gallifrey” as a convenient and low-key way to bring the Time Lords back. Kind of a shame he didn’t.

– Genuinely unexpected that Sutekh has been possessing the TARDIS since Pyramids of Mars. So why have Susan Twists only started appearing since Wild Blue Yonder? Because shut up, that’s why. It is funny to think about Sutekh just chilling in the background of all these stories though.

– It was so bizarre for Ruby to leave the TARDIS permanently just because she wanted to meet her bio dad. It’s a time machine??? Just come back later!

– The cinema screening included a “special message”, but it was so nothing they probably shouldn’t have bothered. The person I was with was hoping for Tom Baker, but in the end it was just Millie saying “hey thanks for coming. Hope you enjoy!”. The Strax cinema introductions to Day of the Doctor and Deep Breath set a high bar that this didn’t even seem to know it was in competition with.

– Biggest disappointment: after all the teasing, there’s no Susan Foreman and no Carole Ann Ford, and I’m genuinely irritated by this; any other complaints I have about the episode are nothing in comparison. I kept up hope throughout that maybe she would appear at the end – why mention her so many times and even show a clip of her if she has no actual relevance to the plot whatsoever?, I thought, like an imbecile – but then The Doctor just says “ooh, you’ve changed me, Ruby. So maybe I will go looking for Susan, eventually”. Fuck all the way off, Russell. If Susan is going to be in Season 2 or 3, wait until then to bring her up. If she isn’t going to appear at all, don’t waste my time and raise my hopes by talking about her at all. Fuck.

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22/06/2024 

2/6 ⬛🟩

No idea why I wouldn’t guess TPL first when I could see the Wolverine claws, but what’s done is done.

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And Series XI missing from UKTV Play. (Let’s not fuck about discussing UKTV Play and Back To Earth.)
What’s all that about, then?

Whoa, really???

So in 2016, UKTV Play gave us ‘Give & Take’, and now it’s taken it away. Maybe they lost all of their copies of Series XI before they were first due to upload it, and they had to travel to the future to steal it and take it back to the past.

Strangely, the last episode I fully watched on iPlayer was Back to Earth, and the last episode I fully watched on UKTV Play was Officer Rimmer, so I can’t help but feel I’m being targeted here.

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Oh man, it would be kind of a shame to have just 1 year of all of Red Dwarf being on iPlayer. Especially as for Back to Earth that means it had like 10 months of being available to stream for free, in total.

Let’s just hope it’s not too late to edit the “X% of Red Dwarf on BBC iPlayer” G&T article again.

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