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A Diskful of Dollars

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The One Where Everyone’s Inside Kryten

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Gunmen of the Apocalypse better be a reference to Gunmen of the Rio Grande, or I’m afraid I’m going to have to petition for its Emmy to be retracted on the basis of bad titling.

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Can’t agree more with the Hattie Holly appreciation.

I understand that in terms of plotting Kryten usurps the role of exposition courier, and so heavily involving both Holly and Kryten is tricky, but Kryten is very different in terms of jokes (principally, Kryten knows what he’s talking about), so Holly’s absence is felt.

And of course Hattie Holly is better than Norman Holly just in general, I think that’s been well established.

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“Come on, I just said I was selling ‘an early draft of the next A Song of Ice and Fire book’, I never said anything about George R.R. Martin! Checkmate, your honour.”

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The law does technically mean you can’t do this. No one goes after it because it’d be too much fucking work, (and because the market developed at a time it wasn’t possible to police – but if a copyright holder wanted to, they could file claims against the resale of goods on eBay I’m sure) and I’m sure second hand markets are good for the overall product and franchise in the long run etc.

No, the opposite. The law actively permits you to resell the products you buy. It’s the right of first sale. (Obviously in the case of the hypothetical script it would have been more of a gift than a sale, and they likely would have signed extra agreements about it as you say, but still.)

Digital only goods have been an exception to the rule that has emerged in recent decades, due to companies sneakily making it so you’re not truly buying the thing in the first place, just renting or licensing it on generous terms. And also because sending someone a digital good is unavoidably making a copy, so a fair resale system would be very difficult to enforce. Even then, it hasn’t stopped the EU from trying to do just that with Steam.

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You can report an item that infringes upon copyright, which this clearly would. Someone has Doug’s intellectual property in their possession that, even if obtained legitimately at the time, they don’t have the permission to resell.

Is that true, though? I know that IP/copyright law would prevent the seller from making, well, copies, and selling those – but just selling the single, original script that legally belongs to you is allowed, surely?

The instinct that copyright would prevent the sale of this movie script (were it real and not stolen and also the seller didn’t originally sign some sort of binding agreement where they committed to never sell the script) is because its contents aren’t public knowledge, but that shouldn’t affect how copyright works. If Doug had the power to demand this hypothetical legitimate script posting be taken down, then that would mean he could also demand you not resell your old Red Dwarf DVDs or your copy of Last Human. But he couldn’t.

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I think Doug could still get it taken down if it was fake. It’s obviously not good if someone is trying to scam fans of his by selling something they’re pretending was written by him.

You might argue Doug would be more motivated to do that if it were real, but at the same time, if it were real there wouldn’t be as legitimate a justification for reporting it (unless it was literally stolen property).

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What would be worse: if we came so close to getting implicitly bisexual Kryten and missed out, or if implicitly bisexual Kryten was never even in consideration?

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I was about to point out the obvious fakeness, but then I checked the posting and realised that Dax was the one who abbreviated “boy-friend” to “bf”, not Doug.

For a glorious moment I was imagining a full Red Dwarf movie where all of the characters spoke like millennial teens.

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KRYDENTITY WITHIN

The crew finally come across a colony of series 4000 mechanoids, and Kryten immediately begins a quest to lose his robo-virginity, and uh, he ends up fighting one of the other horny mechanoids? Idk I only saw Identity Within once, I don’t really remember the details. It wouldn’t be a mop-off like in Siliconia though. Brutal fisticuffs, tearing the wires out of each other, ripping off heads etc. Full Robot Wars. Craig Charles semi-drops character to commentate the proceedings.

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HOT TODDYSNATCHER

Lister (age 86) is dismayed to discover that Red Dwarf is out of honey and whisky, meaning Kryten is no longer able to prepare him any of his beloved Hot Toddy. To solve this tragedy, the gang build a time drive and head back in time to 21st century Earth to order some.

Unfortunately, due to various mishaps on the way, they accidentally prevent the breakup of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, which ultimately changes the course of history and leaves the planet in ruins, meaning they need to go back in time again to set things right.

For some reason they recruit new timeline Angelina herself to help with this, and she’s become a violent mercenary or something, and wears an eyepatch for purely cosmetic reasons.

They ultimately succeed in having a hot toddy party, but Rimmer embarrasses himself to the waiting staff when he asks for his hot toddy to be brought back cold.

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MATHS IN THE RED PART EIGHTY-THREE

Lister takes Rimmer’s bronze swimming certificate (printed on an ordinary sheet of paper) and tears it into two pieces of equal size. He then stacks the two halves together and tears them in half, giving him four pieces. Then he stacks the four pieces together and tears them in half, giving him eight pieces, and so on until he’s done this 52 times. Approximately how high would the pile of paper Lister now has rise?

4.5 quadrillion sheets.

Assuming of course that the laws of reality actually permit him to do this.

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I buy that Wildfire could track Red Dwarf (in the alternate timeline where Red Dwarf was still in an identifiable form), but not that it could catch up to it in time.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if STARDISbug had a hologram projection suite of its own if the plot demanded it (or even if it didn’t).

Even as far back as Psirens Kryten is shown being able to boot up Rimmer from Starbug’s computer.

I did remember Psirens as I was typing, but I figured that the ability to boot Rimmer using Starbug wouldn’t necessarily extend to being able to manage a database of multiple people and set up light bees from scratch. And you’d think that if they were able to do that, Rimmer might have suggested it after Ace confessed his hologram status and fatal injury.

Alternatively, maybe they could have done it in theory but the damage to Ace’s light bee made it impossible to back up from, like its USB port was busted. That’s Occam’s razor, but just going with that and calling it a day is no fun.

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So in SMaC, Ace’s light bee is damaged, and that’s why he’s re-dying. But does this mean that light bees are just too rare in the RD universe for him to have a spare, or that Ace no longer has access to a computer that has a backup of his identity and would be able to restore him to a new light bee? I guess it makes sense that the Ace Rimmer ship wouldn’t have the same hologram capabilities as Red Dwarf, but given he must have had that tech available when he took over for Ace1, you’d think he would have tried to bring it with him.

Related to that, something else just occurred to me… what if the reason Ace2 tracked down the Dwarfers wasn’t to recruit Rimmer as his successor at first? He would have been expecting them to be on Red Dwarf, right, so he might have been hoping to use the holo-suite and a spare light bee to save his own life. But when he realised that not only were they in Starbug, but Red Dwarf was lost, he had to quickly come to terms with his oncoming 2nd death, and change tack to trying to continue the Ace Rimmer legacy.

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Would installing a covering that is half the surface area necessarily also take half the time, though? It’s not certain it would. The only 100% consistent explanation is that one contractor may have been trying to scam JMC on the brief, but ALL of them were intending to use slave labour.

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MATHS IN THE RED PART EIGHTY AND THREE QUARTERS

Rimmer’s psychologically scared of water and won’t enter it even though he knows it’s safe, or he’s worried of getting his light bee wet or something then

OK, OK, so I guess it being Rimmer and Kryten specifically in this scenario is just arbitrary, and the solution isn’t going to revolve around Kryten detatching his head or anything like that. I’m also going to take this as confirmation that the lake isn’t covered by ice like it would be on the actual ocean moon of Europa.

Solution 1 – Kryten throws one end of the cable to Rimmer while holding onto the other end (30m max is a throwable distance, right? He can do a run up, also it’s a moon so it probably has lower gravity than Earth), Rimmer ties his end to the tree, Kryten ties his end… somewhere, and then Rimmer climbs up onto the cable and traverses it over to where Kryten is.

Solution 2 – Kryten lowers the cable down to Rimmer and uses it to lift him up into Starbug, because you didn’t specify where Kryten actually was, just that he was around. Not sure why in that scenario he uses the cable rather than just landing the ship, but as long as Rimmer is safe that’s all that matters. (This also assumes that Starbug doesn’t count as “materials”, but surely nobody would describe it that way.)

There, no chance I’ve got it wrong this time lads.

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MATHS IN THE RED PART EIGHTY

Rimmer is stranded on an island in the middle of a lake on an ocean moon, and only Kryten is around to help him. Neither of them can swim. The lake on which the island sits is 60 metres in diameter and 3 metres deep. The only materials Kryten has on hand is 65 metres of cable. How can Kryten rescue Rimmer?

MATHS IN THE RED PART EIGHTY AND A HALF

G&T User remembers that in this scenario there’s a tree on the island but there’s no way to point that out now without it looking conspicuous.

No cable, tree or ability to swim necessary. Rimmer can’t drown, so he can just walk along the bottom of the lake to escape. And if the physics of the water still give him trouble, he can just switch to softlight mode. Easy peasy.

“Ah ha, but wait!”, I hear you respond, “The question wasn’t how can Rimmer escape, it was how can Kryten rescue Rimmer”. A minor complication only. Kryten rescues Rimmer by shouting “Mr. Rimmer! Just walk along the bottom of the lake!” in his direction, thereby rescuing him from his own stupidity. Which is all that was really stranding him there… when you think about it.

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I mentioned this before, but going by his “so if you’re more crucial to the mission than me and you die, I’ll kill ya!” line, it seems likely McIntyre would have been switched off in favour of a higher ranking crewmember (probably either Hollister or the most proficient tech person) automatically after the accident.

Although… if post-accident the ship’s mission just becomes “keep Lister alive and well” and all potential hologrammic crewmembers are equally useless to that mission for the next 3 million years, then maybe McIntyre was left on and allowed to choose his fate after all.

But either way, the part where he has to witness everyone dying must have still happened.

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On the subject of Ace (yet again for this thread), was it explained why he acts like he already knows the Dwarfers (“I told you I’d be back for breakfast” etc.) even though it’s later made clear that he’s not the same man they met in Dimension Jump?

I could check this for myself, but, you know, Stoke Me A Clipper.

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“Sirs – the altercation with our future selves caused dimensional anomalies which have expanded the cargo deck by 212%! We should ascertain that the new structure is stable.”

“Oh, right, the dimensional anomalies! Are those also why the Kochanski in my memory is now played by Chloe Annett?”

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STEAK ME A CHEAPER

If Rimmer asks for 18 steaks, then neither he nor the butcher is choosing them technically, which would make the special “you choose the steaks = $£6 each, I choose the steaks = $£4 each” deal off the table. In this case, most likely all 18 steaks would be sold at their “worth” value – averaging $£5 each, or $£90 total.

THEREFORE, the true solution is for Rimmer to ask for 17 steaks and let the butcher choose. Then he’ll get 9 low quality steaks and 8 high quality steaks for $£4 each, $£68 total.

After this, he can come back and buy the 1 remaining steak at its “worth” price of $£6, and pay $£74 in total (aka. $£4.11 average). A $£16 saving compared to what he’d actually spend if he bought all of the steaks in one transaction.

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MATHS IN THE RED PART SEVENTY-THREE

There is only one bottle of lager left on board Starbug, and Lister is trying to ration it by working out exactly how much lager is left in it.
The bottom 3/4 of the bottle’s total height is cylindrical in shape, and the upper 1/4 of the total height is irregular in shape. Keeping the bottle closed and using just a ruler, how can Lister tell what percentage of the total volume of the bottle is filled with lager?

Assuming the bottle is more than 3/4 full, he can turn it upside down, measure what fraction of the 3/4 section is filled, multiply the number by 3/4, and then add that number to 1/4… and then convert the final number to a percentage.

Kind of disappointed the solution at no point requires you to work out πr² tbh.

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That’s only if you accept that the divergent point is Kochanski going into stasis. Which I don’t as there’s too many other differences.

It still works as an answer, as long as the point of divergence is after Lister was found as a baby. (Though I am on the side of thinking that the other, earlier differences are just production details or retcons, not indications of earlier divergence.)

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My thought about Rimmer’s outfit is the same as Pete’s, that the ship’s computer had an archive of all the uniforms used by Space Corp and/or JMC employees throughout the organisation’s history, allowing Rimmer to choose which one he wanted. The Series 3 and onward outfits may have even been added to the database post-radiation leak.

Given that in alt-Kochanski’s reality presumably no-one ever goes back in time and leaves a baby Lister under a grav-pool table, presumably *that* moment must have caused the timelines to diverge earlier than the Kochanski/Frankenstein decision even though it’s that decision that makes the earlier appearance of baby Lister possible.
Talking of which, who are Lister’s parents in alt-Kochanski’s dimension?

This was a serious bugbear for me for ages, but an answer was relayed to me on here a while ago which I found satisfactory enough.

The answer is: a baby Lister was left under the pub pool table in Kochanski’s universe, because prior to the divergent point (whether it’s Lister or Kochanski who goes into stasis) they were the same universe – literally.

That doesn’t explain every other parallel Lister of course (specifically the ones where the timeline is different before baby Lister is found, or where Lister looks different – the Rule63Verse being the obvious example), but I guess we can assume that those Listers achieved the stable time loop independently of ours, with or without cross-dimensional breeding. Not every Lister needs to do it even, just 1 per each infinitely large cluster of alternate timelines that share the same root.

It’s simple, really.

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MATHS IN THE RED PART SIXTY-ONE

100 new vending machines are installed on board Red Dwarf, and Lister has to paint the numbers 1 to 100 on the side of them. How many times will he have to paint the number nine?

Option A: None – every time he needs to paint a 9, he can just paint a 6 and then rotate it 180 degrees.

Option B: None – “the numbers 1 to 100” does not have any 9s in it.

Option C: 20 times.

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Yeah, I could see that being good fodder for a pre-accident or alt-Series VIII story. Maybe Rimmer’s bungling even caused the most qualified technicians to leave, leading to the drive plate being damaged and Rimmer being the only one around to fix it.

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Amazing work. It makes me wonder how easily you could do this in the other direction.

They do accidentally name The Seeds of Death as The Seeds of Doom, but they make up for it several times over by including Shada.

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TOMORROW’S PARALLEL WORLD

To mark the return of Hilly to the regular cast of Red Dwarf after the character was played by Norman Lovett for 3 series and absent for 2 more, Hattie Hayridge boogies on down to the Tomorrow’s World set to make an in-character appearance and participate in a demonstration of the Turing Test (named for the famous lesbian computer scientist and wartime codebreaker, Alanis Turing).

She makes uncomfortable, sexist comments to the presenter, Philip Forrester, in a way that gender-flips the sexist power structures and prejudices of our own world but otherwise does not meaningfully satirise them.

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ONLY THE SNOOD… ?

When The Cat is told he has to choose a limited wardrobe to take into stasis with him (because apparently changing clothes while being frozen in time is totally a thing), he experiences a major emotional crisis. After much soul-searching, he decides on a single item to not have immediately accessible.

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APRIL GIMBOID’S DAY

To mark April 1st, regular frequenters of the “Idea for an episode.” thread decide to shake up the formula by posting jokes.

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THE GARBAGE POD 2: POD GARBAGER

The Kickstarter campaign for the sequel to Ganymede & Titan’s hit book, Garbage Pod, becomes the most successful crowdfunding campaign in history.

£25+ backers are dismayed when they receive their early copies and discover that the content of the book is just the “Idea for an episode.” forum thread printed out in full, but are generally pleased with Ian Symes’ moving foreword, cwickham’s new book-exclusive “MATHS IN THE RED” puzzle, and the backer-only “FUCK MY ARSE! ETC.” fridge magnet.

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PARALLEL UNIVERSE II – BRITTY REBOOT

The Dwarfers accidentally open a portal to a parallel Red Dwarf where their counterparts all look and sound different except for Kryten, and are American except for Kryten (with Bierko, Eigeman, Battle, Llewellyn reprising/debuting their roles).

They soon discover that this alternate Dwarf is not in deep space, and is in fact in orbit around the Earth, which the USian crew managed to find, terraform and repopulate into a futuristic utopia over the last 30 years.

Individually their counterparts are all wildly successful.

Rimmer discovered a wide variety of real alien species and established diplomatic relations with them. Red Dwarf is now used as an interstellar embassy/parliament of sorts, which is why the 4 of them are all still on it.

Lister managed to use time travel to rescue all of his pre-accident friends, the Morehead Kochanski from his universe, and also the Annett Kochanski who was a refugee in the prime universe. Both Kochanskis only wanted to be friends with him ultimately, but he’d matured so much as a character by that point that he was totally chill about it, and the three of them regularly get together to get drunk and play Mario Kart. He also somehow did sell his baseball cards for a fortune.

The Cat tracked down the scattered pockets of Felis Sapiens, and ended the religious war for good by showing Rodon an outfit that looked SO good, the feral cats immediately introduced church reforms. He also had sex with some attractive cats and it wasn’t even a big deal or anything, really.

Kryten did a long stint as The Inquisitor, but all of his Inquiries were just about whether the various denizens of history needed some ironing doing. Many of them did and he had a great time.

Learning all this, the prime crew become very insecure about their own major shortcomings compared to the Americans, and insist that they come to visit the prime universe and help them make their own lives into similar successes.

As the American crew pass through the portal, however, it starts to glitch out and then collapses in on itself, due to the prime universe rejecting versions of the characters that are only somewhat funny. American Kryten manages to get through, but the other 3 end up stranded in another universe entirely – the Mr. Rat universe from ‘Skipper’.

So yeah, there are 2 Krytens now.

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“Fixed points” is a new series fudge, yeah. But it’s not really a coherent idea so much as an in-universe handwave for why The Doctor can’t mess with the real historical events that the companions or the audience know about, but generally can mess with invented historical events in our present or future, or on other planets.

Oh, so you can’t let Queen Victoria get eaten by a werewolf because it would screw up history, but bringing down the Harriet Jones government years early is fine? OK, Doc, sure.

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WELL IT PROBABLY IS DOCTOR WHO, IT SOUNDS LIKE IT

Lister finds some unlabelled home VHS recordings of Blake’s 7, but all of the opening titles and closing credits have been cut off. He asks Rimmer to confirm his suspicions about what show it is.

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How long do you think they would wait to decide which of the people born in 2044 was the best Fat Bastard? What if they awarded it to Hollister in 2074 but then an even better Fat Bastard who was born in that year rose to prominence in 2075? The committee would be kicking themselves.

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I don’t think much about the sound design of Red Dwarf… so it must be pretty good.

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Yes, if your primary method of watching new series Doctor Who is via digital versions on Amazon or iTunes, that is pain.

Then again, even the DVD range fucks you around from time to time. Christmas specials are only included on the next full series box set if they share a Doctor, but for Time of the Doctor they force you to either double dip on 3 other Matt Smith Christmas specials or double dip on the series 7 finale. Still irritated about that.

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It’s not just the US releases that make this mistake either. The UK DVD/Blu ray release of Back to Earth didn’t have “The Complete Ninth Series” on its cover, as we all know it should.

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The real question is why Red Dwarf was consistently travelling away from Earth for the whole 3 million year gap, implicitly at top speed?

It’s probable this exact question has already been asked and discussed – maybe even by me – on earlier pages, but I’m too lazy to check.

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Welcome, Lee Bee. Always glad to have more people on the pro-Hattie Holly team!

Not going to offer counterpoints for all of your opinions I don’t share, but just to choose one: Bringing Kochanski back as a main character but having her mainly fill a passive, mission control type role would be really bad. Arguably more sexist than just not having her there at all.

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The Book of Resurrection: Chapter Two: Echoes from the Future

Yeah, I’ve never seen IASIP, so as far as I know it’s 90% Danny DeVito offering people an egg in this trying time, and 10% playing both sides in order to always come out on top.

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Spare Head 1 has the virus.

OK, that’s enough work for one day.

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MATHS IN THE RED PART THIRTY-EIGHT

Dave Lister was born with 1 appendix. He gets 1 removed at an indeterminate point before he joined Red Dwarf, and he gets 1 removed roughly 3 million years later by the entity known as Legion. How many appendices does he have left?

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When Lister changes the past, he, the, Cat, and Kryten disappear (because without Lister on RD, there would be no Cat Race and Kryten was never rescued).

Well, Rimmer should have disappeared too, because, without Lister, Holly would have had no reason to activate him.
And Holly should have had no memories of the Dwarfers, since they never existed in this timeline.
Of course, had that happened, that would have meant the end of the series.

It’s not exactly uncommon in time travel stories for people to successfully change their own pasts but still keep their original memories, at least temporarily. So that’s what happens, which is why Holly chooses to activate Rimmer at this moment (as well as assume her Hilly/Hayridge form, presumably).

Kryten says at the end of the Inquisitor that the timeline is sorting itself out. It’s not intentional at all, but it can be headcanon’d that there is a period of time where events are in flux and memories don’t alter. We don’t see how long it is until the timeline is restored at the end of the Inquisitor, so it could be the same amount of time it takes Rimmer to fuck everything up at the end of Timeslides.

Oh wait, this doesn’t work at all. Fuck.

It actually feels fine to me that these 2 episodes don’t portray consistent visions of using time travel to change history, because they use very different methods. The Inquisitor has admin rights over time – he can rewrite the code from the ground up. While in Timeslides the Dwarfers are essentially running the program as normal users, just with access to a few cheat codes.

That doesn’t necessarily explain inconsistencies with other uses of time travel in the show like Out of Time, Tikka to Ride and Twentica, but oh well.

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ONLY THE NICE…

Red Dwarf finds itself infested with a chameleonic mistletoe that socially compels many a crewmember into quite the awkward situation. With every other major character stuck in permanent smooch thanks to their overriding impulse to respect tradition, it’s up to Kill Crazy to save Christmas.

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THE LAST SLEIGH

Santa Kryten discovers that he is now obsolete, and a replacement robot Santa Claus is on its way to kill him. To commiserate, he is determined to make his final outing in his space sleigh – Blue Elf – the best Christmas yet.

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THE SKUTTER CHRISTMAS CAROL

Adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens novella ‘A Christmas Carol’ in which most roles are played by Skutters, with only a few key roles played by non-Skutters.

Chris Barrie as Arnold Rimmer as Ebenezer Scrooge
Craig Charles as David Lister as Fred
Chloë Annett as Kristine Kochanski as Clara
Jane Horrocks as Nirvanah Crane as Belle
Danny John-Jules as The Cat as The Ghost of Christmas Past
Robert Llewellyn as Kryten as The Ghost of Christmas Present
David Ross as Talkie Toaster as The Toast of Christmas Future

Among the Skutter roles, Bob the Skutter fought hard to play the role of Bob Cratchit (“my name is literally Bob already, come on!”), but was not deemed a good enough actor and was cast as an extra instead.

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92 degrees? Well that’s not quite right.

[Author]

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