Flap Jack

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The Simpsons Movie was some of the best new Simpsons produced in its decade. So I’d give it a solid 3 stars.

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I did just mean in general, to be clear. In that particular Back in the Red scene I think Robert genuinely would always have gone as ham as physically possible. I’m sure it would have been twice as funny if he wasn’t constricted by the mask, as the DD shows!

_{0 x 2 = 0}

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I think that’s a bit of a backwards way of looking at it, because Robert is only pulling such extreme faces to show emotions that he could convey more subtly if he weren’t wearing the mask. He isn’t just trying to go as big as possible and then being held back by prosthetics. He’s getting the outcome he’s aiming for.

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Yeah most of my knowledge of 2010s and onwards Simpsons comes via TheRealJims (and The Simpsons Theory) too to be fair.

By the way, I went to the Simpsons fandom wiki to grab those pictures (which I didn’t realise at the time were completely different sizes for some reason), and Shauna’s page opens with this gem:

If this was like an intentional meta joke made within the show itself, don’t tell me. It’s funnier to read this as unironic.

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The general impression is that The Simpsons is still nowhere near golden era quality but it has significantly rallied compared to the doldrums it was in from its late teen to late 20s seasons. Al Jean finally stepping back to let Matt Selman be the “main” showrunner in Season 33 (although still not fully quitting, as he really ought to) was a turning point, and it coincided with the era where Carolyn Omine was at her peak influence on the show, so people give her a lot of the credit for the upswing.

Speaking of Carolyn Omine, if you haven’t watched “A Mid-Childhood Night’s Dream”, you should correct that. It was a really good one.

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We know Kryten was at risk from the wavelet on account of the fact that he was shut down by the wavelet. And had to be rebooted like a car battery that ran out of juice. 

Ah ha, OK, my memory of Twentica clearly isn’t so hot.

I’m personally going to chalk it up to a difference between Kryten being out of power generally, and his battery being damaged such that it can’t be recharged when it hits 0. Holly just spoke too generally, and it’s only Kryten in his current state that needed to be kept charged up in order to stay alive.

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I guess by default the electron wavelet is more focused and so just hits Starbug. But when they convert it into an EMP to take out the Expanoids, it covers the whole area at once, so Kryten is at risk. And we know he is, because it’s a plot point.

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Gil Gunderson might be the best of the Season 9 intake.

I’m surprised Manjula stumped you because she was pretty early in the grand scheme of things. Try identifying these recurring characters:

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Because he didn’t get hit with an EMP in Twentica… ?

And the specifics of how long his power lasts without a service doesn’t really make a difference, but presumably it’s decades.

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Another sandwich related uncertainty – is it a triple fried egg chilli chutney sandwich because it has 3 eggs, or 3 slices of bread?

(By the way, it was the recent food focused episode of Better Than Life The Podcast which drew my attention to these things.)

I’d always assumed it was 3 eggs, even though you can see he has 3 slices there, and you wouldn’t be able to evenly distribute 3 eggs between 3 slices.

My logic is that a standard sandwich is 2 slices, therefore mathematically if the whole sandwich were tripled it would be 6 slices, not 3.

Or alternatively 4 slices if you were arguing it was the spaces for filling that were tripled. But still not 3.

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There were three seasons of shorts before that, but I don’t know if anyone except me counts those as proper.

They’re canon, but they’re part of The Tracy Ullman Show, not The Simpsons. If you count the originating show as part of the spin off, then you could just as well put “The Sarah Jane Adventures – Sarah Jane Smith” on the list.

But yeah, they cast the net way too wide. Best Post-Season 1 Regulars / Major Recurrings would be a much more interesting list. I immediately thought of Chris Traeger from Parks & Rec, not Ewan Roy from Succession, a character who was intended to be a recurring character from the very beginning of the show but just happened not to turn up until a few episodes in. And Doctor Who should be exempt from consideration just due to the nature of it.

Although maybe The Master could be a legitimate example? Completely absent from the first 7 seasons, then was a full regular for Season 8, then never permanently went away. He represents a genuine paradigm shift.

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I liked it when he punched Rimmer in the balls.

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Why is Holly concerned about a hologrammatic sandwich messing up the floor? Is he stupid?

OK, my actual question is, is Holly’s hypothetical objection to the sandwich that egg yolk and chutney will drip onto the floor, or that whoever eats it will throw it up?

(By the way, the Smega-Drive was missing the “a” so I had to type it in myself, like a common caveman.)

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I’m showing my brother series VIII for the first time soon. Pray for him.

I like how you’re framing this as if you simply have no choice but to do this to him. You could end the cycle of violence. You could.

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03/12/2025 

1/5 

Day 3 of the Marooned Advent Calendar was a bit of a letdown.

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Maybe we all have our own threshold for how stupid Lister can be and have it feel in character, but my personal one is definitely below “being unable to spell the days of the week”. I also think Lister should be able to identify all the basic 2D shapes by sight, remember the order of the colours of the rainbow, and know what sounds are typically made by various common farm animals.

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For the record, I checked the script book for the Gideon’s Bible bit, and it does say “Lister is being a fucking idiot.”

OK it doesn’t really, but it doesn’t say he’s doing it as a wind-up either.

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Wow, Marooned has fewer frames than I remember.

Although to be fair the last time I experienced it, it had 0.

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It wasn’t a colour by numbers, it was a dot-to-dot. I guess it must be Misremembering Puzzles Completed By Lister Week.

I think you can rationalise some of Lister’s stupid Series VIII moments as just him messing with Rimmer, but there are so many of them it’s hard to believe they’re all like that. Plus after Back in the Red they become pretty chummy.

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Yeah, that’s a bad moment too. But in Series 1 Naylor and Grant had the excuse that they were still figuring out Lister’s character. They don’t have that excuse in Series VI.

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Ironically Lister re-proved he pronounces Thursday correctly in a later scene which was about an entirely different way he was stupid/careless.

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Maybe he put a T but just had poor handwriting… ?

It is one of those annoyingly basic “Lister is stupid and/or careless” gags that crept in during Series VI.

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Clearly there needs to be a service where you can order custom tees based on cherry picked moments from the Smega-Drive. Any filthy casual knows “Better Smeg Than Dead (sic)”, but only a hardcore fan would stroll into the club wearing one of these on their chest:

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Omnismegles

Smegregious errors

Stop smegging around and do the smegging scene already, for the love of smeg

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Clustersmegs

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Lister’s arm was made by Kryten’s nanos though. Maybe it’s just the creations of Holly’s nanos that degrade.

Missed opportunity to have Series VIII end like Avengers: Infinity War.

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I guess as they’re on probation in Only the Good…, at least a good chunk of their sentences must have passed.

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Is this anything?

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You may have to tweak the theory to account for the fact that Yvonne McGruder was on board Red Dwarf during Series VIII, tombow.

Actually now that I think about it, that was only confirmed to be true in a simulation, but Rimmer at least believed that she was.

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As a warden, was Knot technically a Canary himself? Presumably he was, but if not then Rimmer actually sacrificed the one guy on the mission that Cassandra hadn’t already prophesied to either die or survive. That would add an extra layer of darkness to the whole proceedings.

Either way though, the idea that Knot was going to die anyway (in theory – obviously it was almost all bollocks in the end) was clearly not part of Rimmer’s reasoning, because otherwise he would have realised the twist that someone else dying as “Rimmer” wouldn’t save him.

It is perfectly in character for Rimmer (and especially nano-Rimmer) to do this, of course, it’s just the complete absence of even the hint of hesitation that makes it kind of chilling.

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I mean Kryten is clearly suggesting Knot as the one to die.

I took it more as an accidental implication Kryten was making by acknowledging Knot at that moment. But either way, Rimmer was the one to actually start setting up Knot to die.

So I’m just counting the “marked for death” moment as when Rimmer silently agrees to target Knot, not when Kryten gives him the idea. Although if Kryten did intend to suggest Knot as the sacrifice, that’s obviously still pretty dark for him too.

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I’m happy just to take it as a coincidence. As issues with Back to Earth go, “why do they hallucinate locations that are currently available for filming in real life?” is low down on the list for me.

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He doesn’t mark Knot, Kryten did. Rimmer just spoke of someone taking his place in theory.

All Kryten does is point out that Knot has entered the room. Rimmer is the one who decides that the first person he comes across who hasn’t already been introduced to Cassandra should take his place. He even marks Knot in the literal sense by giving him his jacket.

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I’ve been thinking about Cassandra again, and I’m kind of surprised that my reappraisal here didn’t make any mention of how dark it is that Rimmer so casually marks Knot for death. Like “you can save your life, but only if you make someone take your place” is a moral dilemma from a horror film. That’s The Ring. That’s It Follows. Yet this plan doesn’t even give Rimmer a microsecond of pause. I know the wardens aren’t meant to be particularly likeable, but still, Rimmer as good as murdered a man.

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Profit.

Titillation.

Intellectually, imbalance.

Crest, profiterole.

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A warm welcome to you, FutureEchoes. As with everyone else, I’ll try my best not to hold your fondness for the blue spiny one against you.

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I once went to Todaycon, the convention for fans of the Today programme, but I accidentally let slip that I’d only listened to all the episodes going back to 12 years before I was born, and I got thrown out for being a filthy casual.

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You could go for Sesame Street instead. That might only take you 14 or 15 years.

I did once have an idea for a blog where you’d watch Coronation Street episodes and Sesame Street episodes that aired in the same respective weeks as each other and compare them. But the only major reason for doing it would be so you could call it “The Grover’s Return”.

Random fact: Sesame Street debuted in the same month that Corrie switched to colour.

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21/11/2025 

X/5 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛

Even worse! I’m actually glad I didn’t get yesterday’s now, because today would have been day 30, and that would have been especially annoying.

And I’m still not sure what I’m looking at even with the frame fully revealed.

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Well, he did say over 60 billion miles away. He didn’t specify exactly how much over.

I knew someone would say this! The classic get out for writers fudging the maths in their scripts.

I refuse to be generous. They are making 17 of these things a year for 97 years.

Either way it’s pretty perfect that they’re making more Friday the 13th movies per year than there are Friday the 13ths.

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2 numerical ones from Better Than Life.

Even if we generously assume that Lister is a 23rd century guy, and word of Red Dwarf’s radiation leak got back to Earth in 2299, they would need to make 5 or 6 new Friday the 13th movies on average every year from 1989 onwards to reach this number.

This is an extremely short minimum estimated distance away. It’s only 0.24% of the distance between Earth and Proxima Centauri.

If we take this to mean that Earth (or at least where it used to be) is 60 billion miles away from Red Dwarf, and we assume that Red Dwarf was travelling in a straight line away from Earth for Lister’s whole stay in stasis, this means that Red Dwarf’s average speed was around 2.28mph. That’s lower than human walking speed.

And even if you assume that there was a Berni Inn on Neptune, but Red Dwarf was close to Earth at the time of the radiation leak, that only increases the average speed to 2.45mph.

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OK, I have taken the hit of buying these soundtracks, so if there’s anything secretly awesome about them, you’ll find out in due course.

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Yep, I failed today too. I got the correct series for the last 2 guesses, both the Petes. Kind of disappointing as I was getting tantalisingly close to my first ever post-Queeg 30 streak! One day…

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Maybe he just assumed it was a soap opera because the theme tune was such an obvious rip-off of Neighbours.

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Exercise prompt – Eleanor Rigby’s Revenge.

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Can it just be a spiritual successor a la Samsara, or does the plot need to directly connect?

Because like RunawayTrain my least favourite episode is Krytie TV, and if it’s the latter then the only credible sequel I can imagine is that all the male prisoners get given new sentences for their sex crimes.

[Author]

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