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She doesn’t say anything about earnestness though, so I think for that interpretation she’d have to believe that people who are “woke” past a certain level – or outspoken on certain topics – are being inherently performative and do not genuinely believe what they’re saying.

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Knyvette wanted to be “careful”, but unfortunately this lead to her not actually explaining what she means by “too woke” or “soapbox for lots of different ideologies”. So I’m afraid I can only assume she means “Up the women, but keep the queers out of it, yeah?”.

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Yes, them both being 100% Lister seems opposite to them both being 100% Kochanski, but if one is 100% the other, then there is no longer any difference between Lister and Kochanski to begin with, regardless of which way round it is.

They are both 100% Listchanski.

Although really Dave’s maths says that Lister is 99.99999…% Kochanski, not 100%.

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I don’t think it’s that inexplicable. It’s because they wanted Kryten to look good. If your character is a robot, it’s better – and much funnier – if they look like a robot. Yes, in many sci-fi stories there are ultra realistic androids that just look like people, but this is a comedy. You want your robot character to stick out and look weird.

Also, it’s not as simple as Robert’s experience with the prosthetics getting worse and worse over the years. The experience was really at its worst at the very beginning, and over time it was improved. So because Robert has always been game to put up with it (while still complaining of course), they didn’t have much reason to consider getting rid of it. It was only in the most recent episodes that it risked becoming too much for him.

I do feel guilty about the fact that every time someone suggests getting Robert out of the prosthetics as Kryten permanently, my immediate reaction is “yes, they could, but that would be shit.” Ultimately I trust that if it is too much of an issue in a hypothetical future Dwarf project, Bobby and the production team will sort something out.

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Needed a scene where Lister and Rimmer are marched into Hollister’s office.

“Seriously? You sat and watched as all of the female prisoners were sexually violated by Kill Crazy and Kryten? That’s it, you’ve gone too far this time! I sentence you to a men versus women baseball game!”

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OK, good. I needed to be sure you didn’t mean “they go out in search of alternate versions of their own parents to shag”.

But still, without incest the human race is doomed. The chance of them finding anyone out there is astronomically (literally) small, and even if they manage it, it only delays either the incest or the dying out by a single generation.

The only other way out is if they find a huge colony of surviving humans, in which case the Lister/Kochanski family would not be the lynchpin in the human race’s survival anyway.

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Hollister isn’t in the core cast for Series VIII, as much as it feels like he is. He wasn’t in Krytie TV!

Ackerman has even less of a case. He wasn’t in Back in the Red Parts I and II, or Pete Part II.

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What do you mean “their own Lister and Kochanski”… ?

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I’ve always liked pot noodles, and they were – in stereotypical fashion – a university staple for me. So all the jokes at their expense made me think that they must have improved the recipe in the 90s or 00s. Or they just occupied The Disgusting Food Chair because they were so cheap and basic.

Super Noodles and other packet based instant noodles are still better in every way, though.

Loosely related at best, but this reminds me I came up with a TV advert concept for Pot Noodle once.

The premise is simple – a visibly hungry person is perched at their kitchen counter, Pot Noodle cup open and kettle mid-boil. They’re fidgeting because of how excited they are, reflexively putting their hand out at every random noise the kettle makes in the hope that it’s finished boiling. Then when the kettle is done, they shriek “YESSSSS!” and grab the kettle lightning fast. They immediately pour the water into the noodles, and without even bothering to put the kettle down and in the span of 1 second, they grab the cup with their other hand, crane their neck back, open their mouth, and throw the whole contents of the cup directly into their face. Boiled water and fragments of unmixed noodles go all over their face and onto the floor as well as in their mouth. The kettle drops onto the floor with a crash but their other arm still holds the empty cup rigid. They’re now screaming at the top of the lungs in an equal mixture of agony and ecstacy, as their face is scalded bright red, their skin peels and their eyes bleed. Then, we cut to a new shot behind them as the noise becomes muffled, but the screaming is still audible. The logo and tagline appear, and a narrator reads them out in a lightly admonishing but bemused tone:

“Pot Noodle – Wait for the broth to cool… !”

Unfortunately I have no connection to the company or the world of advertising so was not able to pitch this idea that they definitely would have said yes to.

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it only just hit me that we’re (possibly) getting new Blake’s 7 and Paul Darrow will have nothing to do with it.

Also Gareth Thomas, Terry Nation, Jacqueline Pearce, David Maloney, Vere Lorrimer, Chris Boucher, Peter Tuddenham, David Jackson, Stephen Greif, and Dudley Simpson.

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Well Meteo, I took your advice and tried all 3 Casual Continuouses myself – I also got them first try! 😲 Bet you’re impressed by my impeccable short term memory.

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If I were pitching a Blake’s 7 reboot, I’d make “This time there’ll actually be 7 crew members without counting either Zen or Orac” my opening line. Commissioned instantly.

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I refuse to believe a Blake’s 7 reboot is happening until I see it in the TV schedules. This news story has happened too many times now.

Maybe the BBC will buy it, and it’ll air on the same night as Red Dwarf: Titan and Lazarus.

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Hang on, are you saying that Pete Part Two is a good episode, or just that if it were a good episode, if would still be a bad first episode because it’s a “Part Two”?

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I guess it’s not that Back to Reality is a bad introduction to Dwarf, just that the enjoyment of Back to Reality itself is much enhanced if you’re already well familiar with the characters and general premise.

I don’t suppose anyone here had The Caves of Androzani as their first Doctor Who story?

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Why aren’t your squares yellow… ?

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I also asked Grok to write an episode of Red Dwarf, and this is what it gave me. Suspiciously similar to a scene in an existing episode.

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Same website, different page.

https://www.lulu.com/shop/-ganymede-titan/the-garbage-pod/ebook/product-16q7n8d7.html?page=1&pageSize=4

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G&T is gay now?

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Yeah, the trend towards positive reinforcement at all costs can get pretty creepy!

No need to be sorry tombow (just speaking for myself). The post was a mild annoyance at worst, and mostly just because it reminded people they hate AI. I think if you’re mindful/moderate about how you use these chatbots and don’t get lost in them, and you keep Red Dwarf related AI responses to the dedicated threads like “AIdea for an episode”, then it’s fine.

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Suggesting the world is split between petty edgelords and Gavin and Stacey enjoyers is a truly cursed thought to just throw out there into the world.

Well I didn’t intend to! The real binary is between people who believe liking things that are modern and/or have mainstream popularity is bad on principle, and people who don’t believe that.

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Personally I’m not an anti-AI absolutist, but asking it to simulate creativity is one of the shakiest use cases out of a lot of shaky use cases. For the obvious reason that taking a good writing prompt and just automatically generating something from it instead of being inspired to apply actual creativity is kind of a depressing instinct, but also for the current quality of the output.

A few years ago you could get decent fun from AI writing because there was a high chance of it just throwing in some truly out there nonsense, but now it’s “better”, which means it usually doesn’t do that and just gives you what you asked for in a dull and derivative manner. I’m pretty sure “I did kill him, you know” couldn’t happen with current LLMs.

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Wow, I’d never even heard of this forum until now. This must be what German football fans feel like when they learn that English fans consider Germany to be their arch-rival.

It is funny to read a thread of people “coming out” as Red Dwarf fans though. Of a time I get it might have been embarrassing to admit it in general company, but in a space specifically for comedy fans? Maybe if the Cook’d and Bomb’d community matures that bit more, people there might even get brave enough to confess they like Gavin & Stacey.

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Doug you filthy bastard.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vimto&defid=14792413

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It’s weird to see Dave era Cat alongside Series 1 Rimmer too.

Not even just Series 1 Rimmer – The End, pre-accident Rimmer. It’s not exactly a great representation of the series as a whole to show a version of Rimmer who was in half of one episode. They might as well have used future Rimmer from Out of Time.

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Oof, frustrating. Got down to the last guess before even recognising the series, thought “oh, it’s the scene where Kryten starts imagining bad things about himself!” but put in Beyond a Joke instead of Duct Soup.

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I mean I can only assume you have him physically restrained.

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Am I the only one who wishes it was a grounded survival drama then?

Maybe not, but given how overtly it wasn’t that from episode 1, you might as well wish that Red Dwarf was about a short bearded fantasy creature with a bad sunburn.

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The impression from the TV version is that Ace is just so universally adored that he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

In the novel version there was the whole thing about how the one way trip would be financially worth it for time travel but not for parallel universes, so Ace, Spanners and Bongo had to launch the mission illicitly before the higher ups shut the whole project down.

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Pfft, that’s their responsibility.

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Turns out a third felis sapiens was left behind. He was secretly on Starbug during Series VI and VII, and they just ran him over.

Good spot, clem!

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It was the latter, but it did occur to me afterwards it could count for both.

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Excellent. 👏

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Apu too. In the show his hair is grey but in merchandise, comics etc. it’s always black.

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I mean, I got the vibe it was commenting on social media to the extent that some people on it are extremely hostile to criticism. But if the commentary is “people on social media are just pretending to be camp because they’re childish and insecure” then that’s really bad! Portraying these differences as both harmful and fake is bad!!!

And even if dressing in elaborate pink costumes were genuinely just a way for people to hide their insecurities and pointing this out were insightful commentary, it’s a pretty big leap from “not being open about who you truly are” to “gets yourself and all of your peers killed”.

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Hmm, OK, I think I understand what you were saying now Rushy. I thought you were saying you preferred to interpret it as a retcon because that made the episode better. But actually you were saying it being a retcon is bad, but you just can’t see it any other way.

All I know is that I watched the episode quite a few times and not once did it occur to me they were retconning Rimmer’s literal role in the radiation leak. It probably never would have, if not for this site.

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The problem there is that the episode does directly portray them hurting people. The collision course is set to get everyone killed. So in that sense, Lister’s reaction is the correct one and the episode invites us to laugh at Ziggy’s crew without feeling bad about it.

This makes it sound like you wouldn’t have objected to Lemons’ commentary on Christianity if they had directly shown Christians hurting people on religious grounds, instead of just mentioning that it historically did happen. I’m… not sure I can believe that.

The problem is that you acknowledge the hand of the author for Lemons, but not for Timewave. The Enconium crew didn’t just already exist for Doug to make moral deductions about (like Christianity actually does). Doug himself was the one to construct this causal link between free, queer-coded expression and societal suicide.

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OK, so are you just seeing Justice as housecleaning for continuity? Because if Rimmer’s guilt doesn’t connect with you anyway, then it shouldn’t be worse to just cast reasonable doubt over his culpability than to outright prove he didn’t even touch the drive plate. The retcon doesn’t benefit the episode, it just benefits overall series continuity (if you happen not to like that particular aspect of the setup).

To me it gels pretty perfectly that Rimmer would deflect blame for the radiation leak on a conscious level, but deep down feel that it was his fault. It’s all part of Rimmer’s particular brand of self-hate. With the exams too, he makes excuses for his failures and probably half-believes them, but inside he knows they’re his own fault. The twist is that his excuses are legitimate in the case of the radiation leak.

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Lol, I should have known I’d be beaten to the punch.

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Lister just made a mistake. He didn’t have any reason to expect that (someone who he thought was) Jesus Christ himself would be so fragile. Lister clearly does believe in the positives of Christianity, because:

We also have Jesus pedantically taking the piss out of the Ten Commandments to spite Christianity, as if they’re not a perfectly reasonable set of guidelines (don’t lie, don’t kill etc) worth following independently of religion.

Except that’s just straight up false, isn’t it? 4 out of the 10 are about worship. Worship Me and Only Me, Don’t Worship Idols, Don’t Blaspheme, Dedicate This Particular Day of the Week to Worship. You think people should follow those commandments independently of religion?

And pretty much those are the ones Jesus is being pedantic about. He doesn’t say there’s anything wrong with “thou shalt not kill” or even “thou shalt not covet”, he just suggests that God ought to follow them Himself not just tell everyone else to follow them. Controversial!!!

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Well firstly, I’m not sure why the episode needs to include a retcon in order to justify its existence. If it’s cool for Kryten to get out of The Last Day (your favourite episode and mine) alive by just lying to Hudzen and tricking him into shutting down, then so too can Justice semi-conclude with them tricking the Justice computer in order to let them go.

Secondly, the lack of a hard retcon doesn’t reduce the episode to pure plot. It’s still a showcase of the guilt Rimmer felt for the deaths of his crewmates. Kryten’s defence doesn’t absolve him of the literal act of misrepairing the drive plate (although it allows the Justice computer to make that inference), but from Rimmer’s point of view it does absolve him of being truly to blame – while thoroughly insulting him, of course – because it was unreasonable for him to be given that job in the first place. Justice re-examines the circumstances that led to the radiation leak, and gives Rimmer a jumping off point to move past his repressed guilt.

If Justice was truly written to hard retcon the radiation leak so that Rimmer had no involvement at all, then what it would actually be revealing is that Rimmer had lost his mind and imagined an event which did not happen. That Rimmer had mentioned at various points that he caused the accident, but for some reason Holly never corrected him or considered this serious delusion a problem. That would be extremely stupid, and it would also be extremely out of character for Rimmer to take the blame for something that he had no hand in.

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