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I was assuming that other spacecraft can still board Red Dwarf for this premise, but I don’t consider the Nova 5 a good example because the fact that it’s crashed is too fundamental.

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OK, I assume we’re not just discounting every episode with Kryten in it on the basis that the episode where they met Kryten (and the off-screen rescue of him) couldn’t happen under this framework. Each episode is an independent creation.

So,

Backwards – no.

Marooned – no.

Polymorph – yes.

Bodyswap – yes overall, but you’d need to rework the final act.

Timeslides – no if you’re banning all travel off Red Dwarf, yes if you’re only banning travel by shuttlecraft.

The Last Day – yes.

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Kind of, but I really mean plots that are actively progressed from episode to episode, or are at least mentioned. I’m not going to count the twins being established in Future Echoes and being explained in Parallel Universe (and then getting a too-fast-to-actually-read “so that happened, but don’t think about it” in Backwards) as an overarching plot for Series 1 and 2.

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They may have “got on great” because Young Lister didn’t realise he was being made fun of, but Rimmer was absolutely being sarcastic.

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I didn’t understand the Confidence & Paranoia joke about Murder on the Orient Express. I assumed Holly was just bad at working out the culprits in mystery novels.

I had no idea what “don’t go and see run for your wife” was supposed to mean. But then, no one else had heard of that film either.

You may still, because the joke was about the play!

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Yeah, I think people have explained it clearly enough? Series VI episodes adhere to a stricter formula. The plot always kicks off with the 4 regulars gathered in the cockpit, they run through somewhat interchangeable banter (Rimmer and Kryten’s space corps directive thing, Cat doing a “we’re deader than [fashion choice]” bit), and then whatever hijinks follow is going to be a relatively more focused on gags than character exploration.

Plus Series VI has an actual overarching plot, which otherwise only Series 1, VII and VIII have. (And for Series 1 and VII, the plot doesn’t even cover the whole series like it did with Series VI.)

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The frame rate was a little better in Remastered.

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Railway infrastructure designed to convey passengers rather than freight.

Unless I’ve missed an obscure joke.

The joke was that Moonlight was exaggerating how bad passenger rail is in the US by pretending that she’d never even encountered it. 😉

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I am offended by the implication that AI is necessary to give Ace Rimmer a sexy aura.

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3512/C… ? “Members may not approach Danny Stephenson in person unless they have posted in the ‘Sonic Mania’ thread at least once in the last 8 months”? I agree it’s an important rule, sir, but I’m just not sure how it applies to this discussion.

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Sorry gerrydelasel, but this thread is for actual Red Dwarf frames with threatening auras and pictures of that one beige pug, not AI generated images.

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Got it in one, but Bluesky is down so I can’t brag about it to my millions of adoring fans. 😭

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I just want to say I am 100% okay with this particular thread derailment.

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OK, it does seem to be fixed now! Hugely appreciated, thank you Mr. Capps.

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19th best of all time, according to this possibly nationalist T-shirt website:

https://anglotees.com/top-25-british-comedies-of-all-time/

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With this subtle change, Rimmer is either seriously confused, or is trying out a pet name for Kryten at a really weird moment.

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In a similar vein to people thinking that audience sitcoms “tell you when to laugh”, I really hate that one YouTube video that edited the audience reactions out of a scene in The Big Bang Theory. Otherwise intelligent people shared that video around like wildfire, smugly claiming “see? If you edit out the audience laughter it’s just awkward and not funny. This proves how bad The Big Bang Theory is!”. No, it proves that adding multiple seconds of silence in between each line of dialogue makes the comedy worse. Not exactly a mind-blowing insight.

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You simply don’t get to the “mass exodus” stage without doing things disastrously wrong as a business. “Internal politics” does not get you that far.

Even allowing for the likelihood that people opportunistically put exaggerated or false claims into the exposé document, or that some people just left because everyone else was doing it, a majority of the contributors still ended up agreeing that the situation was untenable. At the time of the event, it was still hugely beneficial to both the contributors’ profiles and their purses to not rock the boat and remain on the site, so if things were even halfway acceptable it would not have happened. And the fact that contributors who left the site years prior gave their own testimonies, for no real benefit to themselves, is a pretty solid sign that the problems were real.

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Thanks, Cappsy. 🙂

The issue doesn’t seem to be fixed (and FWIW I did do a cache clear and a new login), but I believe in positive reinforcement.

And it hasn’t got worse, so that’s good.

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Uhhh… the “(ON MONITOR)” part should be before the colon? Yeah, that’s arguably an error, why not.

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I used to quite enjoy the NC, but I went off it definitively when the Walkers and Mike Michaud were so catastrophically shit at managing their site that they pushed almost every other contributor to leave it in protest.

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Nobody has said that, “the only way to include Kochanski in Series VIII plots was to make her a victim of criminal perversion.”

Totally fair. I was just reasoning out from “I guess this episode was another way of trying to include her.” that the only way of justifying the plot of Krytie TV as an extra way of including Kochanski is if there were literally no other options.

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Whoa there, please don’t put words in my mouth.

I didn’t! That’s why I used the word “implicit”. But if your comment is very much suggesting that Lister’s actions in Krytie TV are at least slightly less of a stretch because Lister watched porn once, I’m not sure how else to take your meaning. Obviously the important context is that you don’t think Krytie TV reflects nearly as badly on Lister as I do, but I’m just disagreeing with the notion that watching hot oil wrestling is problematic in and of itself.

I can completely get that people would say Lister should have stopped
watching immediately. I just don’t think that Doug (or anyone upon first
viewing) thought, “Lister is complicit in a nonconsensual pornography
scheme.”

Doug and many first time viewers may well have thought that, but they’re wrong. This is the literal plot of the episode. Not walking out immediately is a debatable aspect, but watching for the entire evening and not reporting it or otherwise trying to stop it and waiting so long to tell Kochanski about it? That is textbook complicity. Granted, Lister is better than Rimmer and all the other male prisoners because he did tell Kochanski eventually, but that is a low bar. It’s clear from the way it plays out that if Kryten hadn’t made “shower night live” a recurring event and belittled Kochanski further with the pogo stick idea – or if none of the female prisoners had a personal connection with Lister – then he never would have told anyone about it.

What’s more interesting to me is why Doug took those choices. Kryten was
classified as a woman because Doug needed to pair someone up with
Kochanski. I guess this episode was another way of trying to include
her. I certainly don’t consider it great writing or particularly
imaginative, but if you have a men’s and women’s prison in a show, the
men trying to spy on or get close to the women is a likely storyline.

I have serious doubts that the only way to include Kochanski in Series VIII plots was to make her a victim of criminal perversion (for a start, she’s in the Canaries with everyone else), but if it’s true then it’s just another reason not to do this prison storyline in the first place. Doug’s hand wasn’t forced here. Every major aspect of Series VIII was his decision.

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Obviously, it has gone down in people’s estimations since, but I don’t
feel as strongly about it as some do. Rimmer and the Cat have never
shown any respect for women and Lister has sometimes been portrayed as
imperfect in that regard (eg.hot oil wrestling).

OK, but there’s a pretty massive difference between being casually sexist/objectifying about women and being actively complicit in a nonconsensual pornography scheme. There’s basically no precedent for Lister and Rimmer behaving so abominably, and if there were then I likely wouldn’t be a fan of Red Dwarf to begin with.

The closest thing for Rimmer is him sleeping with Yvonne McGruder when she was possibly concussed, but that is at least ambiguous (both in the possibility that she was actually fine and Lister just says that to wind Rimmer up, and in the possibility that Rimmer himself didn’t know at the time).

And the closest thing for Lister is the bit about him putting mirrors on his shoes so he could look up women’s skirts, which I absolutely hated too, for the same core reason I hate how he is in Krytie TV.

Also, I am a little concerned by your implicit suggestion that men who enjoy watching softcore porn are more believable as people who’d sexually exploit women. I’m pretty sure we’re a few waves of feminism beyond the point where consent was a non-factor in these judgements.

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I’m a traditionalist on this, so to me “jumping the shark” isn’t just when the quality declines, and it’s not when a show changes in a major way, it’s when it’s so thoroughly out of ideas that they resort to writing attention grabbing but nonsensical plots that don’t fit with the usual tone/genre. In this regard Series VIII was definitely the time if it didn’t happen earlier, and no way was it Series III.

SMaC seems like a good shout, because while Ace was already established and was pretty over the top to begin with, his antics in that opening are just a full on cartoon.

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To go into probably unnecessary detail, the issue is with the navigation to a thread from the “Recent Forum Posts” section – or if you click an “[X] new” button from the main Forum page. If the current number of replies (not posts) is an exact multiple of 50, then the website thinks that the most recent reply is the first of a new page, when it’s actually the last of the last page. So clicking the link takes you to a page which does not yet exist, which shows as just the forum heading with no posts and no navigation buttons. You need to manually correct the page number in the address bar to fix it, or navigate back to the first post via the main Forum page… or just make another reply to stop the issue from happening in the first place.

This also causes a secondary issue, where even if the bug isn’t currently active, if the last reply you saw in a thread was the second to last of a page, clicking to see new posts will cause you to miss the last reply of the page – because it still thinks that reply is on the wrong page.

The reason this seems to happen is that the site is counting the OP as a reply, when it isn’t one. Page 1 of a thread contains 51 posts in total, but when it looks for where the newest post should be, it assumes that Page 1 will only contain 50 posts.

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Oh so that’s what you’ve all been referencing.

Now I know, I might actually miss the utter bafflement I experienced every time somebody made a new post.

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My theory about Holly undermining Rimmer is that Rimmer is a prick and undermining him is funny.

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Why don’t I remember any of this Birdman backstory? Is there some kind of expanded universe lore I’ve missed here?

https://www.ganymede.tv/forums/topic/your-unpopular-red-dwarf-opinions/page/24/#post-318211

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Maybe it’s “Engineering in Astro-Navigation” specifically, and they just abbreviate it inconsistently. Or it’s a dual discipline.

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We also know they had equipment for inseminating cows on board.

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I don’t think Warbo’s suggesting that Birdman would have been a candidate for being hologram-ized.

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Me in theory: All opinions on Red Dwarf are valid even if I disagree with them. They at least can provoke interesting discussion.

Me in practice: Is it possible to get Frank Smeghammer banned from the site?

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My dear mother endured the Hartnell marathon until this story… then no more.

Fortunately, she has been willing to see random stories from all the
later Doctors and has seen about half of New Who, but never again was
she willing to binge the classics.

Was the Classic Who-athon attempted before or after the Red Dwarf-athon? Because if it was after, you should have already known the correct play was to skip immediately to Castrovalva.

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When saying that, I’d forgotten that I have an “ironic” Birdman avatar. I wasn’t saying I’m not part of the problem.

I appreciate your honesty in using quotation marks. You know in your heart that your love for Birdman was never fully ironic.

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In fact here is an interview with them confirming that they cut out us “nuking Antarctica” (to release trapped methane and water vapour into the atmosphere – an idea that sounds even more Dwarf!) because they didn’t have the screen time for that plot point: 

Ah, well that settles that I guess! Funny that the first comment on that article is some dummy saying “good, global warming is too political”, so point proven on it being divisive in some quarters at least.

Apparently an early cut of the film was nearly 4 hours long, so if we don’t get a decent number of deleted scenes it’s not due to a lack of suitable material.

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The difference between that element and the other stuff that got axed
for time is that those are whole sequences/complicated plot devices
whereas this is just passing comments made by characters in scenes that
still exist in the movie, which is why I feel that way. But hey ho,
could be wrong. 

I see what you mean, but there’s another reason to cut it than for time or for political cowardice – and I think it’s more likely than both. It’s just such a huge revelation to casually mention in dialogue, and the flashback scenes are otherwise devoid of confirmation that massively destructive sacrifices like that are already being made. It makes sense that it would happen, but it also makes sense to focus on Project Hail Mary itself, and keep the mass tragedies in the future they’re trying to prevent.

And ultimately I’m just not convinced that it’s a big enough conservative talking point at the moment for it to galvanise executives to intervene like this. Compared to the many recent movies and TV shows where execs have openly confirmed that queer characters were nixed because they didn’t want to be “political” or “adult”, I haven’t really heard of climate change mentions being censored as a trend. (Plus if they’d wanted to still include the plot point, it would have been really easy to do so without acknowledging it as being related to previous man-made climate change.)

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I saw this on Saturday and thought it was fantastic! But come on now, a man is awakened by the voice of a computer after years of being unconscious to find that his crewmates are dead? Blatant Red Dwarf rip off! Blatant.

I presume they cut that out to avoid being labelled as having a “climate change” agenda, which is a shame.

I think this presumption isn’t really fair. Occam’s razor is that they just didn’t have time to cover those extra details, and kept things focused on Grace’s story. The movie is still over 2 and a half hours long. And I’m hoping that we haven’t regressed so much as a society that simply acknowledging the existence of climate change in a movie is now effectively not allowed.

It’s been interesting reading the reactions, because it seems like people who read the book first are more negative on it due to how many extra backstory details and scientific explanations they didn’t include, whereas movie-first people basically proved that those parts weren’t necessary to tell the story well. I’m intrigued to read the book now and learn all that juicy extra context.

And hey, maybe the Blu-ray release will contain a deleted scene where Gosling turns to the camera and gives an hour long lecture about how Astrophage really works.

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Not with that attitude.

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I love Oliver & Hardy as a kid for some reason, probably because my parents did. I went to the museum and had several DVDs.

On first pass I read these two sentences as completely unrelated to each other.

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OK, did you get it one go, or did you guess Justice? … or did you say “Justice” because you felt it was justice to get it in one go?

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Well you don’t need to tell us that one of those two is Biggins.

I did think better of Winnie the Pooh, though.

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Dissociative Identity Disorder is a hell of a thing.

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That’s the risk you take when you try and put substance into your reply instead of just being fast.

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Marooned.

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