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Yeah, count me as part of the “Krytie TV is the nadir” gang. Pete is inexcusably terrible, but it isn’t morally reprehensible. Although to defend Krytie TV just a little, I’m pretty sure the transphobia was just the leftover “Kryten is wrongly categorised as a woman” set up from Back in the Red. In which case Pete is guilty of that too because of the Archie stuff.

Honestly Pete doesn’t lose me until a little while into part 2 when the story gives up.

To me the story gave up as soon as “as punishment, I sentence you to play a basketball game” happened.

But I guess one major issue with Pete is that Lister and Rimmer barely have a plot at all. They’re mostly just fucking around until they can provide a convoluted way for the time wand to be aimed at a sparrow. They could have achieved that plot development just by making Birdman a quirky prisoner in the canteen and having Cat mess around with the wand and zap Pete by accident.

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Did somebody turn over a page when the next page didn’t have anything on it yet?!

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Yeah, I knew about that, and as soon as the first one was revealed I thought “well that’s going to be awkward when they get to Seasons 4 and 21”.

But still, a season is a season, whether you call it “Peter Davison Season Three” or “Colin Baker Season One”.

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If they ever do a Season 3 set…

I believe people involved with the range have confirmed that the plan is to do a set for all 26 classic seasons, and the blurbs saying things like “build your archive” support this.

For any episodes that are still lost and haven’t been animated by the time the Season 3 set happens, they’ll just include telesnap reconstructions. Season 3 is still worth doing for the episodes that do survive.

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Understandable reasons generally, though I’m not sure I fully buy the blackface reason. They still released the surviving episodes after all, and in an animation they could just animate the character as actually Black rather than a white person in blackface. The animations have taken plenty of other creative liberties.

But I still hold out hope they might animate the story in the future, because the scope for the animated reconstructions has broadened quite a lot since the original DVD range.

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They really should have just included The Twin Dilemma as a bonus on the Season 22 set. Still include it on 21 for obvious reasons, but it is ridiculous we had to wait YEARS to get the final bit of ol’ Sixy, and had McCoy beat him to being the first complete run on disc (unless you count McGann, which I don’t, given the Bluray is an upscale because they couldn’t get the original film print).

Oh, I strongly disagree with this. Season 21 is Season 21 and Season 22 is Season 22! It’s weird that they decided to switch Doctors in the middle of a season, but they did. A serial being in the wrong box set and being in multiple ones would just annoy me. Plus the extra disc would take up extra shelf space. I don’t think it’s worth breaking the logic of these sets just to appease the presumably massive “loves The Twin Dilemma but hates The Caves of Androzani” crowd. Plus it would set a precedent for including The Smugglers and The Tenth Planet on the Season 3 set.

I will however be willing to make an exception for the times they simply uncover or create content too late. Principally, if they eventually get around to animating the missing episodes of The Crusade, they should include that on a different Hartnell set. Also they should put the new omnibus version of The Sea Devils onto the Season 11 set.

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Me²: 

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They actually forced Petersen to sober up before doing the personality recording, because attempting to do it while drunk kept failing. So therefore his hologram would have had a hangover when he was activated, assuming his bodily state at the time of recording was being accurately simulated.

And yes, of course Holly could tweak things for Holo-Petersen (Holaf?) so he didn’t feel hungover, but it is still funny that hungover would be his hologram’s default state.

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Sorry Technopeasant, I tried to bring the topic back to Classic Who but I wasn’t strong enough.

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In other news, the 5th and 6th Doctor’s eras are now complete on Blu-ray with the release of the Season 21 Collection (disappointingly though they didn’t ditch the crap AI upscaling for it).

I’ve actually never seen Warriors of the Deep before, so I’m tempted to make the new special edition my first experience of it.

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When all is said and done Ian Levine’s contributions to Doctor Who in the past (as exaggerated and not fully verified as they may be) will hopefully outweigh his more recent bad behaviour, but doing good things doesn’t entitle you to be a shit.

Right now his position in the missing episodes preservation community is basically this:

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That rationalisation makes Lister even more pathetic, really. 2 days ago he was on team “I don’t care what luxuries we can gain with the time drive, it’s not worth the cost” and now he’s like “No curry, which has been situation normal for ages? I’d sooner split the space time continuum in two or kill myself than live like that!”.

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I’ll reserve judgement until I see Mavic Selby.

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Haha, yes, I saw this too. Apparently there’s been a newer version of Levine’s recon since this one, but still, the difference is so stark it’s laughable that he would try to sell it as a 1:1 recreation.

The lighting, the positioning, the movement… it would be extremely generous to say the AI recon even has direction. Just the one shot where the Doctor says “Daleks!” says it all. The original has a dramatic pan right from the daleks to The Doctor hidden in the darkened foreground as he quickly turns away from them; the recon has a hard cut to The Doctor brightly lit and in the dead centre of the frame with no visual indication of where he is in relation to them. The real Doctor looks legitimately shocked, the AI Doctor looks like “daleks” is just something he exclaimed in mild frustration while trying to squeeze out a particularly stubborn turd.

Of course it’s not fair to expect a recon to perfectly match the real episode when it was made without the real episode as reference (or at least it wouldn’t be if Levine didn’t suggest that it would), but animated efforts both official and unofficial try their best to actually recreate the staging, direction and cinematography. It’s sad that IL would convince himself that this way was better just because it technically has a live-action look to it. As an upgrade to basic telesnap recons the output is genuinely pretty decent (if you can get over the uncanny quality to the facial expression and mouth movement), but I’m pretty sure even the maligned Web of Fear Episode 3 animation runs rings around this.

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I definitely subscribe to that explanation, but it’s effectively just a fan theory.

Either way it’s still quite a contrast to go from him lying easily to lying being a major difficulty for him in the very next episode.

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Levine is clearly deluded if he thinks that anyone is going to do a side by side comparison between his AI recons and the real broadcast episodes and conclude “wow, they’re almost perfect!”.

Even if his recons genuinely were that good, somehow, him acting like the return of the real episodes is only mildly exciting because he and his small clique of paying sycophants already have access to recons they’re satisfied with is nauseatingly selfish. He can pretend his reconstructions are perfect replacements or he can keep them to himself, but not both.

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I was so psyched to wake up to this news!

And no Technopeasant, it’s now at 5/12 episodes recovered. We already had episodes 2, 5 and 10, and now we have 1 and 3. Animating 7 episodes for a release would be a big ask, but they did do it for The Evil of the Daleks, so maybe? It would be a bit different though because for most animation releases they animated every episode including ones that didn’t need it, just for consistency.

Honestly I was optimistically assuming they’d animate all missing episodes eventually anyway, but this definitely helps things.

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It makes sense to me – or at least I can see how it made sense to Rimmer – because while Lister definitely got frustrated with Rimmer bossing him around and restricting his cigarette access and such, the fact that he refused to let him see Kochanski was the thing that pushed him into taking action.

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He was just going to keep it up long enough to convince Lister that Kochanski wasn’t into him, so he would give up on gaining the power to keep her switched on. Then “she” would willingly switch herself back out for Rimmer.

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This morning they released a 14 minute Rob Grant tribute episode, and the host added on 4 minutes of ads. Very classy.

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Damn. Well, as long as they included the part where Sonic collects blue spheres.

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Right. Of course the key question is whether they’ll be able to adapt Sonic the Hedgehog 4 as just one film. Video games are longer than films, so I reckon a 2 part game would need a 4 or 5 part movie to do the story justice.

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Fuck my last ring we’re on the 17th page

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Of course not! But I’m not talking about Shadow the Hedgehog, I’m talking about Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3.

It would make some sense to make to make a Shadow movie first, but there are already so many games they’re skipping over to go straight to 4 – Adventure, Heroes, Unleashed etc. – so if they’re going to skip so many main entries that actually have Sonic in them, then they’re obviously going to skip spin-offs too.

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Finally, they’ve got through all that Mega Drive era crap and are adapting everyone’s favourite Sonic game.

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For what it’s worth I don’t think you did anything wrong, FE. When the thread was started we decided after a brief discussion that it would not be spoiler-free, and that people should not come here until they’ve completed the Difficult Daily for the current day. Even if people don’t tend to post the solution, it is allowed, and many people do post all their incorrect guesses, which would still give a huge advantage to anyone seeing them before playing. Ben just messed up by looking at the thread.

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The OG Simulants who were fully subservient to humans? Like what Sim Crawford was pretending to be.

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Pretty spooky that you got that image by clicking the Random button on the Smega-Drive, complete with Google Gemini logo and everything.

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The idea is that she’s gullible enough to take him at his word, but there’s a good chance she’s just playing along with the lie.

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I guess there was also the element of the High crew needing to be kind of annoying, so we didn’t feel too bad when they all got murdered – and we didn’t generally feel conflicted about our crew not trying to save them to begin with.

So it would have been harder to achieve that while giving them more unique personalities, but I still would have liked to have seen it attempted.

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“intensions”

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I feel like it’s a parody of the Buddhist idea of transcendence, everyone becoming part of a “unified field”. A lot of what makes us who we are is based on earthly concerns: obsessions with material things, worrying about being embarrassed, the various little neuroses we have.

Oh, it undeniably is. The issue isn’t that it doesn’t make sense as a joke, it’s that it’s just one generic joke rather than 5 separate ones that are more character specific, like with the Low crew.

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The most convincing solution I’ve heard on that is the branching timeline theory. Basically, a Lister from a “prime” timeline delivers his baby self, and then that timeline branches off into some timelines that loop, and some that don’t. For the ones that don’t, Baby Lister was effectively dropped off by Lister from a parallel universe.

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So?

If I’m created through a corruption of the timeline, then I wasn’t meant to exist.

Except this ideology contains a serious flaw – it requires you to believe in the concept of fate and also not believe in it. You can say “whatever happened is what was meant to happen”, but where do you draw the line? Because “whatever happened” includes the bit where you gained access to a time machine and the bit where you used the time machine – and depending on how time travel works in the story, it may already include all of your time traveling activity in the past.

History is a relative concept. If you have free will, then you’ll change the course of history regardless of whether you’ve time traveled at any point. And if you don’t have free will, the impact of your time travel is as pre-determined as anything else.

The reason why time travelers tend to have a bigger impact is because they have future knowledge which puts them at an advantage over everyone else – but the BftD are no-nothing buffoons (except for Kryten, who as a mechanoid could just lock down or erase his knowledge of future history for safety).

So there should be no reason it would be more perilous to the unfolding timeline to settle down in their original time (or just a few hundred years later) than it would be to settle down in the present.

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I’m sorry… ?!

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Yeah, this moment really annoys me. “We can’t risk fucking up the future” is only a real concern if they actually intend to return to it.

The biggest risk is that they do something which undoes their own existence, but (A) the events of Dallas pretty much proved that wouldn’t happen, and (B) going back to after Kryten left Earth would further ensure that couldn’t happen.

Of course there’s always a chance they could go back to their own time and accidentally save or kill some major political figure and put the timeline on a dark path, but that’s a risk just from living in a society with no time travel at all.

And the kicker is that they “address” the idea of using the time drive to go back to Earth but don’t address the idea of using it to FIND RED DWARF.

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Personally I think the original run’s reluctance to include overt prejudice by the Federation is a flaw, not something that should be unfailingly preserved in a reboot. Depicting a future society that is basically a social utopia except for it being totalitarian is just cowardice and/or laziness. It’s simply not how any fascist regime operates – the reason they feel entitled to power in the first place is because of prejudice, and the way they keep that power in place is by convincing the population to hate each other more than them. Of course you can achieve this world building with invented alien races instead of just the regular human ones, but no racism at all? That’s more of a fantasy than faster than light travel.

(Incidentally, if anyone reading this hasn’t watched Andor, please consider it.)

Saying that Blake’s 7 is about Blake and Avon and their relationship is generally fair, but there’s no reason it has to be about only that. Blake’s 7 can be multi-layered, and as far as I’m concerned it always was. At the very least it should be about the other characters too, or you and Sally are clearly at odds on the “new Blake’s 7 should give women more of a role” point. After all, Red Dwarf is about Lister and Rimmer, yes, but the show would be far worse if every episode was Balance of Power or Marooned or Bodyswap.

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I mean you’re arguing with a ghost here Rushy. Nobody is suggesting that Blake’s 7 should patronise its audience, and Knyvette gave no indication that “patronising the audience” is what “too woke” means to her. The proper definition of “woke” is “to be aware of systemic oppression and injustice” and the reactionary right wing definition of it is “when people express that they’re more liberal than I personally am, or when people who belong to minority groups have the temerity to exist where I can see and hear them”. Whichever definition you take, it’s not something it’s possible to have too much of in a story about fighting a fascist regime.

Even the “patronising” point is a matter of perspective. Blake’s 7 is a show all about revolutionaries, who would be naturally inclined to argue people over to their cause. One person’s “Avon’s speech about the rights of man was so epic!” is another’s “Oh my god we get it, slavery bad, jeez, just shut the fuck up already”.

It’s funny that Alien is your example too, because I’m convinced that if it had come out in the 2020s but with no other changes, YouTube would be filled with videos titled things like “WOKE DISASTER? Ridley Scott sells out to the feminazis!”.

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