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I guess you can rationalise that McGann wasn’t literally playing the Eighth Doctor in PotD, but like a memory/recreation.

Either way, Paul McGann is great in the role and he should get to come back if he wants to and there’s a good opportunity. I don’t think we need to preserve the specialness of the one half-decent TV movie and the one great prequel short he got to do. He deserves the chance to break 2 hours of screen time.

Come to think of it, David Tennant has had more screen time specifically playing the Fourteenth Doctor than Paul McGann has had playing the Doctor at all. That’s pretty sad.

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Honestly though, given how much of a shitshow this Disney/Bad Wolf era has been production and planning wise, and they’re trying to claw their way out of it, I’m fully fine with letting them hit the “EMERGENCY FAN SERVICE” button one more time in between anniversaries. Especially as they have to come back from a 19 month hiatus with no established incumbent Doctor to work with.

If it were for this year’s Christmas special or a full Series 16 in 2026, then I’d say they should keep their hands well away from the button.

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I see no issue with them bringing back old Doctors for one-off events (especially if they go for inspired choices like Paul McGann over safe and obvious ones like David Tennant). It only becomes an issue when they persistently do it instead of moving forward.

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It’s because he knew Lister was going to be put into stasis that day, because he’d just reported Frankenstein. 😏

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First time I’ve heard The Two Doctors described as a cheesy sitcom.

That’s My Two Doctors. The Two Doctors is a sketch show.

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I am now thinking about ways you could update the endings to episodes so that they had the stereotypical cheesy/ironic sitcom send off.

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So cheap that they could only afford one eyebrow for Rimmer. 

And no H.

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Me when Rushy expends significant effort defending a controversial one-off vending machine character and then glosses over the episode containing the greatest one-off vending machine character of them all:

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Because Jambone is a treasure and must be protected at all costs.

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No because Krysis is the one where Kryten has a mid-life crisis and Siliconia is the one that has Siliconia in it. Maybe I’m just built different.

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10/11/2025 

1/5 🟩

Pleased with my ability to judge that a Dave era frame with a shot of clouds has a high chance of being Twentica.

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Yeah, you can argue that Doug had non-racist (or even anti-racist) intent, and I agree, but that only refutes the suggestion that Fathers & Suns is racist if everyone agrees with the “intent is everything” maxim. You can absolutely be racist by accident.

I think maybe there’s an instinct to be extra defensive about Taiwan Tony if he personally didn’t bother you that much, because people tend not to want to openly approve of racism. But these things don’t need to be that black and white (forgive the phrasing).

But honestly we’re doing a disservice to Kerry Shale’s work by focusing so much on Taiwan Tony. Medi-Bot is almost as bad and he managed that without racism, which is impressive.

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“Intent is everything” doesn’t work for a couple of reasons.

1 – Good intent doesn’t actually prevent harm.

2 – Anyone can just lie about what their intent is. (Or say nothing and let people assume.)

When it comes to Taiwan Tony, you can have all the good intentions about doing a subversive commentary on a white actor doing a stereotypical Chinese accent for laughs, but when it comes down to it, the main thing you’re doing is having a white actor do a stereotypical Chinese accent for laughs. It’s possible to thread the needle of doing that while making the intent clear enough to stop it being racist, but Fathers & Suns doesn’t.

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The fact that to think this Fergus isn’t just filling in a blank, but actively ignoring the multiple points where it’s unambiguously confirmed to not be the case, and the fact that neither of the other 2 correct him. New frontiers in false memory crafting.

It could be an idea for a future twist though – Rimmer secretly knew about Frankenstein, and gave Hollister a tip to scrutinise the photos in the lab. I mean I’d hate it, but it has some dramatic potential.

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I’ve just been listening to the recent “Series 1-6 Roundup and Quiz” episode, where they go through favourite episodes per series with Gemma Arrowsmith, and they casually drop this gem of an interaction while talking about Justice:

Fergus: [Rimmer] genuinely believes that he is a murderer of over a thousand people. That’s great, ’cause he’s not. And if that was true- we didn’t talk about this on Justice, this is a secret thing I’ve had for a while now, but maybe I haven’t said it out loud because I’m not sure it actually makes sense:

If Rimmer finds himself culpable for the death of all those people, surely in reporting Lister’s cat Frankenstein, he’s saved Lister’s life by having Lister imprisoned at the right time. This could work in Rimmer’s contorted logic, right? He actually saved Lister’s life, and therefore saved humanity.

John: Yes! Or at least gave it a slight reprieve.

Gemma: It’s a really good point.

Incredible. I know that every time I share something like this from the podcast, it just reaffirms people’s choices to stop listening or to never even start, but you’ve got it all wrong. This is high art you’re missing out on.

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Because a beef vindaloo would involve a cow being carefully butchered to use specific cuts of meat. In this case they literally just dropped an entire cow into the sauce.

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The Creator should’ve been played by Doug Naylor.

Would have probably been a bit too on the nose, and arguably disrespectful to Rob Grant to depict Doug Naylor as the singular creator of Red Dwarf.

Also, there’s the whole “Doug Naylor isn’t an actor” snag.

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I do agree that the core plot of Cassandra doesn’t really hold together – not because it’s a stable time loop, but because the drama of it still treats Cassandra as if she’s capable of making choices.

But the episode is saved by both McEwan’s performance and by it actually feeling like a Red Dwarf episode, where the whole posse investigate a ship where some sci-fi hijinks are occurring and get into a predicament. Cassandra gave a glimpse of how the Series VIII cast could have gelled.

Granted these positives don’t sum to that much. I only gave it a 4 in the Coral Canvass. But that’s still head and shoulders above the rest of Series VIII.

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Actually, Pree is just an abbreviation of her full name:

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I’ll take it, but if Rob really wants Lister, Rimmer, The Cat and Kryten to all be in his new Red Dwarf story… I can think of some less convoluted ways to do that?

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A rewatch may be in order. 

Hang on a minute. The whole idea of this thread series is that you rewatch the episodes before giving your thoughts. (Unless you’re saying you’re so on the fence about White Hole that you need to rewatch it again despite just rewatching it.)

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I don’t like the idea of removing Rimmer’s culpability in the accident
(never mind how unrealistic it may be), and basically dedicating the
whole episode to that is a little annoying.

This is just me reiterating myself from 3 years ago on this very page, but my favoured interpretation is that the episode isn’t actually retconning Rimmer’s culpability in general, only in the eyes of the Justice Computer. Kryten basically clues into a well known plot hole – why would Rimmer of all people be trusted with such a critical job? – and uses it to create reasonable doubt. But that doubt is just for the sake of Rimmer’s defence; he still did misrepair the drive plate.

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Very cool to learn that the Czech translations of all 4 novels now have unabridged audiobooks narrated by Kamil Halbich. Outdoing the UK effort yet again (even if it took a few decades).

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I don’t think it’s even fair to say that Future Echoes isn’t about Lister and Rimmer’s relationship. The whole setup with them planning to go into stasis explores how Lister doesn’t consider Rimmer’s perspective on things, and is pretty dismissive and unsympathetic about the whole “being dead” situation. And Rimmer shows his lack of trust and friendship with Lister with his anxiety about not being switched back on when stasis is over. He chooses to stay switched on even if it means going mad with loneliness because he doesn’t want to be at Lister’s mercy.

Granted, this conflict gets kind of interrupted by the future echo shenanigans, but it’s still a major part of the episode. It’s not just filler until timey wimey stuff starts happening. By contrast, Balance of Power has Lister and Rimmer’s relationship as a central focus, but it’s really just Lister vs. Rimmer there.

But even if Balance of Power is more your taste, Future Echoes is still better than Dear Dave. That’s just science.

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The Dog’s bollocks?

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03/11/2025 

3/5 

Funny how despite this being an image from Series VI, I immediately gravitated towards Series VII. I guess the red makes me think of Kochanski’s outfits.

(Blue, Beyond a Joke)

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OK I’m starting to get the impression G&T users are quite timid based on the threshold at which Red Dwarf frames allegedly become threatening.

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Fun stuff. I got so many wrong answers because I kept trying to answer for segments that hadn’t had all their clues revealed yet (plus a couple instances of me using synonyms rather than the actual words). I got through the whole quiz without understanding the order I was supposed to answer things, but that’s my fault for never playing the quiz format this was based on. Final score: 33.

I got embarassingly stuck on the penultimate clue of

[@’s [average [“nivello” is Esperanto for “_”] of cruelty]ing]

because I just wasn’t expecting cryptic clues.

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I also thought Nick was being sarcastic (given how Mark Gatiss being a massive nerd is one of the key facts about him), but I wasn’t confident enough to intervene. I am weak.

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I like how Craig is doing a proto- “Too Weird For Words” face.

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I mean we still discuss new episodes of Futurama in a thread that was started to discuss the announcement of the first Comedy Central season in 2009. I think we’re good.

Although I can’t deny that the probability of Davies announcing that the next series will be called “Season One” again is not zero.

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Damn, they changed the cover.

Also, does it bother anyone else that the background star field makes it so there’s a star in between the two ‘I’s of “Volume II”, so it looks like an apostrophe?

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Good news. I was broadly confident that the BBC weren’t lying when they said the show would continue with or without Disney… but I was starting to worry. And it was getting close to slipping to 2027, so not the worst outcome.

I wonder how long it will be until if we find out if Billie Piper is actually playing The Doctor. I guess if she’s not going to be the permanent lead then surely we’ll learn that well before Christmas 2026. Either way it’s going to take a hell of a lot to convince me the twist of her appearance in The Reality War was anything other than a desperate stunt with no concrete story idea backing it.

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You can reboot Red Dwarf with a new cast and still guarantee a “red dwarf lister” image search will only show pictures of Craig. Red Dwarf USA managed it.

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Probably his hologram uniform is just an old regular Space Corps/JMC uniform and they had one in Lister’s size in storage.

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The answer is 99 pennycents, if you assume that the 48 pennycent and 3 pennycent coins exist.

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They both did watch it in the 90s, in fact! But the memory cheats I guess.

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Oh goddamnit. The boys have mostly been keeping their noses clean in these Series VI podcasts, but in the most recent episode (Rimmerworld), John again repeats the misinformation that Series VII was on BBC 1. Come. On.

I know that “any BBC 2 sitcom which is sufficiently successful should be moved to BBC 1” is how the BBC operate nowadays, but that doesn’t mean they did it that way in the 90s.

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22/10/2025 

X/5 

Well that could have gone better.

(Every bubble series except for the correct one, the order and episode choice essentially arbitrary.)

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OK, I admit, my Out of Time / Gunmen mash up gif is 81.7MB, and I had to stitch together 3 separate Smega-Drive gifs to make it. But you can’t compromise on art!

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Oh yeah, Kevin Jon Davies. I got his previous Hitchhiker’s book as a gift, and I thought it was really good. I was looking forward to the TV script book (though I didn’t pledge to it), so here’s hoping he finds another publisher for it.

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Yes Warbodog, this thread is for individual frames, it’s no place for your multi-frame witchcraft.

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Then the article you read wasn’t comprehensive enough Quinn. Unbound recklessly spent and lost money that was owed to their authors, fully stopped paying them their share of book sales while continuing to sell copies, became virtually radio silent when pressed for explanation, and then they tried “”starting a new company”” (Boundless) as a way of keeping the publishing rights for the books while dodging their obligations to pay debts and royalties.

If the business was failing so hard, the right thing to do would have been to pay the authors their dues as a top priority, and then go into administration promptly so that the publishing rights of all their books reverted to the authors and they could look for new publishers. Instead they chose to fuck authors over for as long as they could get away with so they could take whatever money the company had left for themselves. The former bosses of Unbound are cunts.

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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

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McIntyre is dead, Cat says two suits is dead, and Rimmer has just been told he’ll be here until the day he dies. Is that anything?

Rimmer is also dead, so you don’t need the context to make this connection, just Rimmer.

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