Flap Jack

[Flap Jack]

I can’t see how there is anything offensive about the use of the word dwarf or midget, as far as this show is concerned.

1. “Midget” is just a slur against a minority group.
2. Using slurs is bad, or at the very least, awkward.

That’s really all there is to it.

[Flap Jack]

Blue Midget’s just a pun on Red Dwarf, “dwarf” also being an ableist slur, it was the 80s, and now that it’s the 2010s there is still no issue with calling a small blue ship Blue Midget, imo.

“Dwarf” is indeed ableist too, BUT:

A. It’s not nearly ableist as “midget”, and is even sometimes considered to be a politically correct term – though admittedly less so as time goes on.

B. “Dwarf” only has the strictly ableist connotation if you make it clear you’re alluding to a little person and not just the concept of a thing being small in general, which the addition of Blue Midget does, retrospectively.

And as I’ve already explained, there were plenty of options for making “a pun on Red Dwarf” that would have avoided using a word like that, so that’s no excuse. “It was the 80s” is not any kind of excuse either, but even if it were, that doesn’t justify its usage in Series VIII (1999) or Series X (2012). Just because you introduce that Blue Midget exists, it doesn’t mean you’re obliged to keep using it in stories.

Maybe we can assume dwarfism has been cured by whatever century the Dwarfers come from, hence making it no longer a concern to anybody.

That’s irrelevant. Red Dwarf is not a documentary that’s been sent back in time to us, it’s a fictional show made for an audience which almost definitely includes little people who have been tormented by people shouting that word at them while demeaning them and/or showing aggression towards them for much of their lives. The problem with Blue Midget’s name is not a lack of an in-universe explanation, the problem is that casually using a word like that in a sitcom normalises it. (The idea that little people just straight up don’t exist in the future opens up a whole different Can of Worms, too, but this reply is long enough already.)

Anyway, Blue Midget is obviously just a small detail in the show and I’m not accusing Rob or Doug of being prejudiced or deliberately hurtful or anything like that, just that they didn’t think over the name properly, and it’s odd how it never really gets discussed.

[Flap Jack]

OK, seeing as this thread is clearly DOA, can I just point out how weird it is that a staple of the series is named after an ableist slur, and how little this gets mentioned?

Like, sure, “Red Dwarf” is named for uses of the word “dwarf” in astronomy, and Rob/Doug wanted to give the shuttle crafts names with the same theme, but why the hell would they choose “derogatory terms for little people” instead of “fantasy races”? They could have used Elf, Sprite, Pixie, Orc, Goblin, Gnome, Fairy etc. but NOPE, “midget” it is.

[Flap Jack]

Genuinely took a second to process that you meant “eighth”, and I’m now slightly disappointed they didn’t actually film 48 new episodes in one go.

I’ve never watched Still Game, but good on The Other Craig for keeping food on the table.

[Flap Jack]

To be fair, is there any particular reason why Kryten could not have just tinkered with the rejuvenation shower to alter what time period it sent you to?

Yeah, this is why I said it was “believable” that they wouldn’t be able to use the other time travel methods to get back to Earth, rather than, say, “made clear”.

Take the rejuvenation shower. Its intended function isn’t time travel, and even with effort they’re only able to go back and forth between 23 AD Earth and present day Red Dwarf. They may not actually explain that they can’t reverse engineer the shower to take them back to Earth in the correct time period, but it’s not too difficult to assume that.

With the time drive, they actually straight up show us that they can use it to get to anywhere in the universe at any point in time, and then they also show us that they can direct it perfectly. That’s why the time drive (in Series 7 at least) is the laziest time travel plot device.

Also, can I just apologise for helping completely derail this decade old thread about misheard dialogue? I’m so sorry.

[Flap Jack]

That’s interesting. The bit about washing the computer is daft, but I think it works with the novel version of Kryten, the first two novels anyway. In my head he’s much more like David Ross’s Kryten than Bobby Llew’s, and doesn’t become the de facto science officer/ know-it-all exposition machine to nearly the same extent as in the series, so doing something so ridiculous doesn’t seem as far fetched.

It’s kind of hard to feel the David Ross vibe in the audiobook when Chris Barrie is doing a near-perfect Bobby impression throughout. =P

But my main problem isn’t that Kryten should be a super expert in all things scientific like he is in the show, it’s that his entire job is CLEANING on a SPACESHIP, yet he somehow doesn’t know that he shouldn’t just clog all the electrical equipment with soapy water. This is meant to be his one area of expertise!

I think I’m right in saying that was a change made for the Omnibus, and in the original version of Infinity… it’s by Kevin Keegan as per the TV show.

Wait… WAIT. They changed things between the solo edition of Infinity and the omnibus/audiobook?! How many things did they change? And why? Did they really need to do “Remastered” for the books as well as the episodes?

[Flap Jack]

i think it was more along the lines of “we fucked up the entire future of the Earth from 1963 onwards four seconds after we arrived, if we went back to Earth our time we’d probably fuck everything up so badly that civilization would collapse” so i guess the main characters just all see themselves as being really destructive and clumsy morons now.

it’s not about time paradoxes, it’s about travelling back and accidentally bumming another gunman out of a window

But then that’s not an argument against going back in time, that’s an argument against existing in society at all. Any of us could inadvertently do something like that which ends up shaping history in a bad way, but it’s not particularly likely, and I’m not going to go live in deep space just in case.

Sure, Lister and co. could – and by definition, would, at least a little bit – “change history” by going back to their time of origin and living their lives, but there are very few changes they could make deliberately (and therefore trigger a paradox), because they only know very few details about how human history develops, and for accidental changes they’d have no idea how it was any different.

Essentially, if it’s not a paradox, it’s not a time travel problem, it’s just a regular, everyday problem.

… can we at least agree that they should have used the time drive to check if Earth was still there in the present day?

[Flap Jack]

they explain in Tikka Xtended that they can’t use the time drive to go back to Earth 3 million years ago as they might end up causing another paradox or messing up history, with Lister promising to Rimmer that his timejump to 3 weeks ago to get the ship’s curry back will be the last time they use it.

Ah ha ha, that’s such a bad excuse! Given they show they can operate the time drive perfectly, the only paradoxes they could feasibly create by going back to THEIR OWN TIME would be:

1. Bringing back Kryten to before the technology which made him existed, therefore potentially changing the circumstances of Kryten’s creation and eventual meeting with the RD crew – Solution: either part ways with Kryten, or return to live in Kryten’s time period instead.
2. Deliberately trying to stop the Red Dwarf radiation leak from happening, or trying to rescue Lister from the ship millions of years early – Solution: don’t do that.
3. Um… something to do with The Cat, maybe? – Solution: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nothing else they could do in the post-accident 3-million-years-ago past would impact their own history on Red Dwarf, because Red Dwarf basically just drifted into space for all that time, doing its own thing.

But sure, I guess that’s a good enough reason to casually dismiss the idea of seeing loved ones, your home planet, or any other people again.

[Flap Jack]

In series six they have both a time drive and a teleporter, which begs the question why they can’t just use one after the other to end up in a specific time and place, again. I remember thinking this during the “we’re in deep space in the 12th century thing” – you have a teleporter!

I mean, my inference was that any teleport they had could only transport them a limited range/back to Starbug – Blake’s 7 style – not to any location in the entire universe.

[Flap Jack]

I can see why some people don’t like it, but I think it’s quite a clever way of giving humanity some kind of happy ending while maintaining the premise of Lister being the last human and humanity destined to become extinct as soon as he dies.

It’s all in how you interpret it. You/Doug say “He fathers himself, which means infinite Listers, forever!” while I say “No, there’s just one Lister total, who’s stuck in a stable time loop, and said time loop makes no difference to how many humans there are, or how long Lister lives, or anything at all. All Lister does is ensure that his life occurs in the way it always did. Lister still dies, humanity still dies, nothing matters any more than it did before, goodnight.”

It begs the question of why they don’t use the Time Drive to find Red Dwarf. Or go back to Earth three million years ago, or now. Or maybe it doesn’t and I’m talking shite

You definitely aren’t talking shite. The time drive in Tikka To Ride/Ouroboros is one of the most glaring plot holes (for want of a better term) in all of Red Dwarf. No fan theory or headcanon can possibly explain why they don’t even try to use it to get back to Earth. Out of Time dodged this problem expertly, but Tikka… didn’t.

I’m reminded of Ed Bye making light of people complaining about the time drive on the DVD documentary, essentially amounting to “Geez, calm down guys, the time drive was just a thing we made up!”, which is a perfectly valid defense if you don’t think making your TV show’s overall story cohesive is important.

So many episodes managed to use time travel to tell a particular story while making it believable that it was very limited in use – Future Echoes, Stasis Leak, Timeslides, The Inquisitor, Out of Time, Lemons, Twentica, Give & Take, and even … *sigh* … Timewave – but oh no, there’s just no way they could have done their “oops we accidentally saved JFK” plot without giving the crew unlimited space-time traveling capabilities.

[Flap Jack]

Good to know! Perhaps I’ll consider those versions next time I want to re-listen to the novels, but it probably makes more sense to go unabridged if you’ve never read the novels before.

[Flap Jack]

I read a fan fic once where Rimmer was over two Listers

The ‘H’ Stands For ‘Horny’: A Red Dwarf Fan Fiction.

“So good it converted me from softlight to hardlight.” – The Guardian

[Flap Jack]

Well… at least it’s something. One for the money-rich/time-poor among us, I suppose.

[Flap Jack]

Okay so I’ve never read the books as I presumed they were essentially novelizations of the shows.

But skimming this thread has me horrified enough to pique my interest.

Oh, now I feel bad for this thread containing so many plot details.

Despite my complaints, I do definitely recommend the first 2 novels, because no matter how good or bad things are in the moment, the divergences from the TV series are always interesting.

FWIW, it’s not too much of a financial risk to try them out. The books are all super cheap used, and the unabridged Chris Barrie audiobooks are pretty reasonably priced on both iTunes and Audible.

By the way, does anyone know what the difference is between the unabridged audiobook versions of IWCD/BTL and the “Radio Show” versions? They seem to be a lot shorter, but cost 2-3 times as much. If they’re just abridged versions, then that’s seriously terrible value for money.

[Flap Jack]

i think the point of the scene is he’s putting himself under the pool table so that he can become the last human being alive in the future- he’s basically made it his own “destiny” to wind up 3 million years in the future on a shit spaceship, because otherwise the human race would be wholly extinct.

No, because the quote is “With us going round and round in time, the human race can never become extinct.”

That’s never become extinct, not “the human race can only become extinct thousands/millions of years after it would do otherwise” – and “round and round in time” part refers to the human race “continuing” through Lister in the past, because if it’s just about Lister surviving an extra 3 million years, then the fact that it’s a time loop wouldn’t make a difference.

[Flap Jack]

Well, it’s not really. In Infinity, the explanation is that there is a real town by this name (believable) where fans of the film live and honour the fiilm It’s basically a Capra-convention. Lister goes by the pseudonym “George Bailey” (although this seems to be abandoned in the second novel) and the other residents treat it as an in-joke.

OK, I guess my attempts to look for wholly rational reasons not to like the Bedford Falls fantasy didn’t go to plan. My only remaining rationale is that Bedford Falls requires an extra level of fakery. Better Than Life has constructed the fantasy, but Lister has constructed a fantasy within the fantasy.

[Flap Jack]

Exactly.

Lister’s life may not have one point of origin, but it definitely will have one point of conclusion.

(Ouroboros is kind of bad, folks. I don’t know if you’d heard.)

[Flap Jack]

Clearly Holly was struggling to maintain 2 Rimmer holograms at once. :D

Really good spot. I never would have caught that.

[Flap Jack]

IAWL is seeded early in the novel as being the favourite film of both him and Kochanksi. (Were you listening to the abridged versions?, as maybe it’s not in that). Lister’s annoyance when he discovers that they are in BTL and he could have dreamt a little bigger comes up, but it’s indicated that the game is trying to conceal itself by going relatively subtle (being a far more devious type of game than the TV episode’s version of a genie lamp. Plus, Lister craves a simple life (in contrast to Rimmer and The Cat).

Ah, I wasn’t listening to the abridged versions, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t just forget that detail. Fair enough!

I can’t exactly pinpoint why Lister’s fantasy feels off to me, because it does make sense for Lister to want a simple, calm life like that.

Maybe it’s that everyone else’s fantasies are original settings, while Lister’s is literally just It’s A Wonderful Life. With the other fantasies, you can kind of buy that Earth might just be like that in the distant future, but Lister’s fantasy makes the artifice immediately obvious.

Surely if the game was trying to stop Lister realising it wasn’t real, it would put him in a scenario that was like Bedford Falls, but not literally Bedford Falls. If it’s his favourite ever movie, then Lister of all people should have recognised it as a fiction straight away.

[Flap Jack]

I’ve only listened to the audiobook versions of the first 2 novels, but nonetheless.

1. 24.

2. ALL OF IT – except for Series XII because that hadn’t been broadcast yet.

3. Wow, OK, that’s a broad question. I’ll try to break my reaction to the novels into points:

• I really liked a lot of the back-story expansion and pre-accident story stuff, especially the details about the development of the cat race, Lister’s first meeting with Rimmer and induction to Red Dwarf, Rimmer’s whole exam ordeal, and his stasis habit too.
• However, I hated any major detail which contradicted the TV version. Lister got himself sentenced to time in stasis on purpose? Hate it. Kryten was directly responsible for getting the crew killed due to inexplicably being crap at his only job? Hate it. “Zero-Gee Football: It’s A Funny Old Game by Joe Klump”? HATE. IT. They got it backwards; Lister is meant to be kind of thick (at least in the beginning) and Kryten is supposed to be smart. Yes, yes, I know, skeletons, but the show makes it clear that’s the exception, not the rule.
• Compared to the TV version, there was a definite shift towards drama, which made for some really good set pieces, but on the whole really wasn’t that funny to me. Classic dialogue exchanges fall a bit flat when it’s just multiple Chris Barries with no audience..
• So… Better Than Life The Book was really one made for Talkie Toaster fans, eh?
• There’s so much bitterness and bleakness in these books. The 2 Rimmers are both around for much longer and torture each other way more, Holly revives Talkie out of pure loneliness and they end up hating each other too, Lister and Rimmer basically just straight up loathe each other even more than on TV, everyone is almost killed by Better Than Life, Lister spends several decades just barely managing to survive all alone on Garbage World before dying of a heart attack… there’s no everyday life on Red Dwarf here to make it feel like a sitcom, just constant danger and sadness.
• The concept of the black hole causing time to move at different speeds in different parts of the ship is brilliant, and I’m surprised the show itself didn’t copy the idea back (not that I’d replace the time trickery we did get in White Hole!). I actually finished listening to Better Than Life less than a week before the Doctor Who episode “World Enough And Time” aired, which was a fun coincidence for me.
• Something felt… off about Lister’s fantasy being It’s A Wonderful Life. Not just the fact that we never got any indication that this was a fixation for him before this, but the fact that it’s so specific and limited. Surely a Lister fantasy would be more inventive than just “Lister, in one specific part of It’s A Wonderful Life” – and definitely involve a farm on Fiji? As with so many Marilyn Monroe mentions, it felt more like Doug and Rob were the George Bailey fanboys, not Lister.
• The structure is still very episodic despite the format, which unfortunately prevents either book from feeling like it has a proper overarching story. Hitchhiker’s Guide has this problem too, of course, but Hitchhiker’s has a style and humour that better suits it. Also, I can confirm that ending a book on a cliffhanger is just as annoying as ending a series on one.
• Garbage World as a concept is great. It was the one part that felt truly Adamsian in its view of the future, and could have been a genuine direction the TV show could have gone in, if they wanted to be a bit darker.
• The Cat’s BTL fantasy was perfect; Rimmer’s was good, especially with how bizarre the Trixie stuff got, but the amount of complexity involved with his multiple marriages and such seemed a bit needless. I don’t even remember Kryten’s fantasy; something about doing a nice bit of ironing?
• Chris Barrie’s reading is just spot on for so much of these audiobooks. I think I would have listened to the remaining 2 novels by now if he’d done those as well.

Phew. Anyway, on the whole, I’d say that Red Dwarf (affectionately known as “Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers”) and Better Than Life are… fine. Yep.

[Flap Jack]

I’m happy to accept the vague notion that there are other second and third technicians on the ship, but they’re in different sub-departments to Rimmer and Lister, so it’s just that their section of the hierarchy is considered lower down than others, i.e. a third technician in another department might not have direct authority over Rimmer, but would consider themselves “more important”.

[Flap Jack]

There are 2 major possibilities I can think of.

1. All other technicians were sick/unavailable.
2. It was a combination of Rimmer massively talking up his abilities to management in his latest attempt to climb the ladder, and management not realising how crucial the drive plate repair was, so they assigned it to Rimmer on pretty much a whim.

[Flap Jack]

So that’s it? What, we some kinda… red dwarf?

[Flap Jack]

I always thought that Todhunter was the First Technician, even though he’s clearly an Exam Invigilator / Stasis Explainer.

Rimmer being First Technician in the novels is definitely one of those “different for the sake of different” changes to me. Rimmer managing to actually attain a high-ranking position in any department just feels… unRimmerish. Even if it is just there to demonstrate how terrible he is at leadership.

I also assume that there are other technicians than Rimmer and Lister (maybe all the others are Firsts?), because their assessment of themselves as the lowest ranking people on the ship is based on the fact that their responsibilities (USUALLY) are just to do basic routine maintenance on food dispensing machines, which at least suggests that there are other technicians or engineers who do the more taxing, higher skilled work of making sure the ship keeps moving, the mining equipment keeps working etc.

[Flap Jack]

What about things like draining Rimmer’s negativity in Trojan, or loading in his Charisma etc in Psirens? If you can delete negativity can you delete schizophrenia?

Personality tuck machine in Can of Worms.

These seem like pretty good examples of how mental illnesses could be virtually treated, but not necessarily removed outright.

IMO, they should only be able to treat mental illnesses in holograms to the extent that they theoretically could treat them in living human beings, so mood alterations or experimental personality shifts are doable, but you can’t just move BodyDysmorphicDisorder.exe to the Recycle Bin.

[Flap Jack]

I think the reference is a bit too obscure to be worth it, and the oddness of it would probably be too distracting, unless it was very brief.

[Flap Jack]

My take is that they would be able to fix a hologram’s pre-mortem physical disabilities if they desired but not their mental illnesses, what with brains being inordinately complex and holograms’ minds just being wholesale copies of them.

I assume that holograms could be given virtual treatments, at least.

Also, it’s pretty strange that physical disabilities haven’t been cured in the Red Dwarf universe, because apparently even cleaning robots come with nanobots which are capable not only of rebuilding missing limbs, but of invoking the power of Satan to bring people from ancient history back to life.

[Flap Jack]

They don’t charge you until the thing actually ships so there would be no harm in pre-ordering it, I think

It’s not so much that I’m worried about not being able to cancel, it just feels weird to pledge to buy something we know so little about. Plus, the pre-order price is unlikely to rise, so there doesn’t seem to be much advantage to being so prepared.

[Flap Jack]

So, what, do you have other people round, give ’em a sherry, and invite them to watch you snuff it?

[Flap Jack]

so this has just popped up on amazon. blu-ray of 1-8 coming on October 1st i guess

Yeah, that Amazon listing has been there a while. Still weird to have a release date – even if it’s just a placeholder – before the thing has even been announced. Can’t say I’m leaping to pre-order a product that might not even exist!

[Flap Jack]

Is Lister’s mind (the backup they use to restore his memories after M-Corp) stored in the same place as Officer Brown’s was? Is that on holodisk, or just on a shipwide backup?

I’d guess so. It seems like each crew member gets their own external hard drive, and sometimes those hard drives remain constantly connected to the central computer for quick access and blending of hologrammatic assets, and sometimes Rimmer unplugs them and hides them in a cupboard to be a prick.

It could be that the holo-data is not stored on the main computer at all and the holo-disks are the only copies, but it could also be that holo-data is stored on both the main computer and in disk-based backups, and Rimmer deleted some/all of the original hologram data in Confidence & Paranoia, because he is a prick.

[Flap Jack]

If Holoship isn’t enough evidence that they still have the holo-disks, then there’s also Bodyswap.

The copy of Officer Brown’s mind they put into Lister’s body is surely from the same source as the holograms, and the fact they can put Rimmer’s mind inside Lister’s body too pretty much proves it.

Although… now a question about Bodyswap occurs to me: why do they make Lister’s mind inhabit a Rimmer hologram when they could just put him in a Lister hologram (similar to how Rimmer could become Kochanski in Balance of Power)? I think the ‘H’ and the outfit choice would be enough to tell them apart…

OK, forgetting that point, let’s say: some of the holo-disks were destroyed after Me-2, including all of the obvious people they would choose first to resurrect but leaving enough people to interview in Holoship, then the rest of the holo-disks were accidentally destroyed later, at some point between Only The Good… and Back to Earth (Or before Psirens, assuming that everyone in Series VIII was too stupid to make new backups while the crew were alive again).

[Flap Jack]

Do you honestly think I’d put Kochanski’s disk in Kochanski’s box where any munchkin could find it?

[Flap Jack]

It’s probably best we don’t bring up how Rimmer can be sustained for 6 months without a recharge, because if that’s true then there’s absolutely no reason not to revive other members of the crew as holograms too.

Seriously, I can understand them not doing that because Rimmer refuses to be switched off or because doing it would significantly impair Red Dwarf’s performance, but once it was established in Series VI that Rimmer could be maintained by Starbug alone – before he got his hardlight upgrade, even – those excuses went out the window.

I’m so surprised that Doug/Rob never put in a throwaway line about all of the other holo-disks being destroyed, that I’m wondering if they actually did and I’m just not remembering it.

[Flap Jack]

Well, I can’t say I’m totally shocked; you’ll bonk anything, won’t you, Lister?

[Flap Jack]

I mean, I said “I bet” but only like, £2.50.

I’ll just spitball some other possible reasons to use a self-destruct, that JMC would definitely prepare for for some reason:

1. The ship’s navigation systems have been irreparably damaged and it’s on a crash course for a major population centre, but there’s a window of opportunity to blow up the ship while it’s still in the outer atmosphere and minimise the total number of deaths.
2. A Xenomorph is loose on the ship.
3. In case of interstellar war breaking out, Red Dwarf could be repurposed as a warship and used in a Kamikaze attack.
4. The thing what I said before, but as a safer implosiony type self-destruction that might be possible in the technologically advanced future.
5. To jumpstart the second big bang. Well, that’s the final irony, isn’t it? Lister, the ultimate atheist, tur- oh, you already did this one.

[Flap Jack]

You say “in I-V they’re trying to get back to Earth”, but are they? Past Series 2 I’m not sure they do any work to achieve this goal, and even in Series 1 and 2 it’s maybe only half the episodes that make any kind of focus out of it.

In Series III-V, getting back to Earth is barely mentioned, and their goal seems to pretty much be just to carry on with their lives. In that regard, Series XI-XII is most like the best era of the show!

Also, “gotta find Kochanski” isn’t really a major goal in Series X AFAIC. They only mention it once an episode, and they never actively look for her. Lister and Rimmer’s attempts to better themselves professionally were closer to being a series-wide goal. Even “get an automatic tea-stirrer” was a higher priority.

[Flap Jack]

I bet if Lister hadn’t survived the radiation leak, Holly’s protocol would have been to trigger the self-destruct, to ensure that no other people would try to approach the ship and die from exposure to the radiation.

[Flap Jack]

What, you mean like persuade Dustin Hoffman not to make Ishtar?

[Flap Jack]

The Theory of Relativity is… what is the Theory of Relativity?

[Flap Jack]

And that not all series take place in the same universe as one-another.

*spits out Leopard Lager*

WHAT?!?!

[Flap Jack]

I consider Lister’s happiness with eating carb-less curry meals to be a contrived plothole deus ex machina, and so hereby disavow Red Dwarf as a naturalistic nutrition-based docu-drama.

[Flap Jack]

The Bexley plot in Future Echoes has already been summed up in the wonderful ‘Homecoming’ fan-fic:

Ooh, I didn’t know about this. Thanks!

And it’s by Karnie as well. :'(

[Flap Jack]

Right, fine, lesson learned: thoroughly rewatch episodes before proposing fan theories about them. (The 15 years thing doesn’t directly contradict my second hastily thought up explanation, though!)

However, I think you may just be jumping to conclusions regarding the whole “Lister becomes a brain in a jar tomorrow” idea. I always read it as “Kryten doesn’t know when and how a tragic incident befalls Lister, but the knowledge that it’s going to happen upsets him and makes him want Lister to cherish his body while he still has it”.

[Flap Jack]

I suppose Hattie might have had Series V in mind when she was asked that question, and could consider the idea more if the scripts actually gave her things to do.

At least, one can dream.

Someone should ask her again at Dimension Jump this year, and by “someone” I mean Doug Naylor.

[Flap Jack]

Stasis Leak might work, but Future Echoes Lister isn’t a brain in a jar.

I may have been operating under the assumption that Out Of Time took place later than Future Echoes.

But then why does Future Echoes Lister look so much older than Out Of Time Cat?

Erm… very good question! Well… uh… maybe felis sapiens age slower than humans, or maybe Future Echoes Lister experienced an M-Corp/Better Than Life (novel)-style aging event without it being reversed? Yeah, let’s go with that!

OK, OK, I’m obviously floundering here, but I think I had a good crack at it. =D

[Flap Jack]

No-one ever seems to consider Hattie and I’ve no idea if she even has any appetite for it.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I always consider Hattie returning over Norman!

Though I’m also lazy, so I’m just going to quote my own comment I made here a few months ago:

I love both the Lovett and Hayridge versions of Holly, but if Doug does want to bring Holly back as a regular, then I’d definitely choose Hattie over Norman (or both).

1. The aforementioned point about Hattie being a nicer, humbler person than Norman.
2. The Red Dwarf cast is already 4 men, so it’s obviously way better to make the 5th regular a woman.
3. Hattie’s Holly is already established to have a good group dynamic with Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten all together (though Series VIII probably isn’t Norman’s fault, to be fair).
4. Norman has already appeared in more episodes than Hattie so far.
5. Hattie never got to be in a Holly-focused episode as Norman did with Queeg (White Hole is really only half-focused on Holly).
6. Female Holly has better dramatic range than male Holly. Holly showed believable concern for the crew in episodes like Back to Reality, but Series I-II Holly is pretty much stuck in sarcastic mode.

Tell me I’m wrong. ;-)

[Flap Jack]

• There will be exactly one Rimmer-focused episode and one Kryten-focused episode.
• The current status of Kochanski will either be the basis of an entire episode, or be mentioned 0 times.
• Snacky will make an appearance.
• The episodes will continue to go up on UKTV Play a week early, half-ruining the experience of their release.
• Either Starbug or Red Dwarf will be exploded.
• Holly will become a regular character again.

[Flap Jack]

Wow, OK, I guess I just kept assuming that the scrolling text mentioned Bexley’s death, but it doesn’t, does it?

I’ve never rated Future Echoes as highly as the G&T surveys (44th compared to 11th in the Pearl Poll), and I think that Lister’s jarringly happy reaction to hearing that he’ll have a son who will die at age 25 is the cause. Doug and Rob were setting themselves up for a guaranteed fall when they established this plot point. In fact, they tried to improve it in IWCD by changing “Bexley” to “Bexley’s son” and made it so Lister wasn’t quite as chilled out about it, but ultimately it had the same problems and probably made even less sense.

Right! So my modified fan theory is that the “Out Of Time” future crew were able to adapt the technology of the time drive to retrieve Bexley from the parallel universe and stop his rapid aging. They then arrogantly assumed they would use time travel to stop his death, but were unable to, and the tragedy of his passing helped put them on the dark path.

… you know, I’ve never thought about this until now, but presumably Jim and Bexley were unable to speak, walk or toilet when they left the universe as fully grown adults. Just in case anyone wanted to imagine what “Dad” might have ended up being like.

[Flap Jack]

He also doesn’t seem too affected by having to abandon… himself. Which is obviously a very emotionally confusing situation, but he still had to abandon his baby. Though, at least in Ouroboros he gives a heartfelt speech about it before it’s never acknowledged again (except for Fathers & Suns, of course).

Ah, and I was just reminded that Lister actually does directly reference giving birth to twins in Demons & Angels, which doesn’t exactly support the “it never happened to him” theory, BUT he also says he played pool with planets, which in-story never happened and so shouldn’t be remembered.

Clearly Lister just has supernatural powers which allow him to remember alternate timelines whenever he eats a Pot Noodle.

[Author]

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