Flap Jack

[Flap Jack]

Yes – so the time wand briefly turning Kochanski into Clare Grogan would have been a fun cameo, but it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense (and the resurrected Kochanski-Prime would have been a second Chloe, not a Clare).

What would have been a cool way to do something similar is if the Holly they found on the planetoid was Hattie, but the one on the rebuilt Red Dwarf was Norman. I know Holly can change their appearance, voice and pronouns at will, but at least this would have provided a reason – and be a better way of distinguishing them than the whole conehead thing!

OK, OK, Norman would never agree to be the lesser Holly, so here’s a compromise: Both Hollys are Norman, but Planetoid Watch Holly has the Series 2 look, and Loyal to Hollister Holly has the Series 1 video filter applied.

[Flap Jack]

The libdvdcss library is included with the Windows installer of VLC by default. Because the project is based in France they feel immune to any legal repercussions.

That does not change the fact that the end user is still violating copyright and patent law by using it in their own countries depending on the jurisdiction. Especially for someone like myself living in Canada as the mere act of breaking a digital lock is specific crime here.

So essentially, it is totally legal for VideoLAN to distribute it (even if it isn’t legal for Linux to distribute it), and some countries’ copyright laws are written broadly enough to make using it ambiguously legal in theory but in practice never challenge anyone.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty much OK really. Not nearly as amusing as the hype suggests!

[Flap Jack]

Ah, OK, let’s revise that to just Kochanski then.

[Flap Jack]

No Kochanski or not. None of the crew should have been able to be reconstructed because nanobots need the material to make the crew surely? The material which was put in the kilner jars and flushed into space 10 years previous. Unless they made it them from another source, which would mean something would be missing elsewhere.

As that happened in a deleted scene, I’m willing to accept that canonically the urns were not fired into space, and were stored somewhere on the ship instead, which is why the nanobots were able to resurrect them.

Wait… that’s it! What if Lister held full funerals for just Kochanski and Petersen, and shot their ashes into space, but never got round to doing anyone else, and that’s why they didn’t get resurrected? OK, this is definitely my headcanon now.

But unfortunately this doesn’t resolve the broader problem with the lack of a second Kochanski – that Kochanski’s parallel universe origins are not referenced or acknowledged once in the whole of Series 8 despite being a crucial part of her character in Series 7 – or the broader problem with the nanobots – that they’re so powerful that they completely trivialize the concept of death or serious harm in Red Dwarf.

Also,Kochanski not being brought back is about as justifiable as Lister not being brought back.

… no it isn’t?

[Flap Jack]

but it’s established in Back In The Red Part 3 that the crew were only brought back because Holly made a second set of nanobots so they could resurrect the ship’s crew to “keep Dave sane”.

WHAT.

Please don’t motivate me to rewatch Back in the Red…

I do like the idea that Holly would bring the entire crew back to life as a secondary task for keeping Lister sane, and not as a prime directive.

In any case, Kochanski-1 should definitely be there. No real reason for either Holly or the nanobots to exclude her from the necromancy.

[Flap Jack]

So the nanobots decided that because a version of Kochanski had by chance been brought over from a parallel universe, that Kochanski-Prime was the sole crew member who deserved to stay dead? How arbitrarily cruel of them.

Although, I always assumed the crew resurrection was a mistaken overcorrection on their part, that they just indiscriminately reconstructed everything without realising the crew weren’t there before…

[Flap Jack]

I’d say being three million years into deep space is a bit of a background detail for quite a lot of episodes in more than just VIII. At least it’s made somewhat of a do out of in Back in the Red.

Well, when I say “background detail” I don’t mean that it’s irrelevant to the plot, I mean that it’s irrelevant to everything, to the point where (after Back in the Red) everyone just behaves as if it’s 3 million years ago and the radiation leak never happened – anachronistic presence of The Cat and Kryten aside. It feels more like a time travel or “What if… ?” alternate premise for the series than it does a “The crew have come back to life – what do we now?” story:

– The entire crew just go back to their old jobs with absolutely nobody questioning or disrupting the old schedules or hierarchy, despite being millions of years past any of it having a point.

– There’s no reflection on the fact the crew of Red Dwarf have the new burden of planning the survival of the entire human race (or not).

– The fact that there must be 2 Kochanskis is never brought up.

– Nobody worries about what the ship’s living crew growing from 3 to over 1000 will do for everyone’s long term survival prospects, considering the requirements for food, water, oxygen etc.

Obviously I never would have expected them to dwell on all of these depressing details, but the utter lack of any acknowledgement is such a wasted opportunity, and ultimately it just doesn’t feel like Red Dwarf.

However, I do kind of like the bit in Back in the Red Part 3 where they lead you into thinking they’re pivoting back to a Starbug-based “Series 7 + alive Rimmer” status quo, and then go “lol nope, fuck you, this resurrected crew setting is really happening, deal with it”. For all of Series 8’s faults, it’s not short on chutzpah.

[Flap Jack]

Reminds me of how films run faster on UK DVDs than in the cinema, due to the difference in frame rate.

I only realised this a few years ago, and it’s like learning the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist.

[Flap Jack]

The difference is that White Hole would play that mundanity for a joke, Pete… doesn’t.

This basically encompasses two of the biggest problems with Series VIII for me – the high concentration of magic-level sci-fi concepts, and the relegation of the “3 million years into deep space” setting to an unimportant background detail.

[Flap Jack]

It’s kind of funny that Lister had the ability to go anywhere in time and space, but only used it to look for curry, and in this episode Kryten gained the ability to bend reality to his will, and his first thought was “Ooh, we could skip to the end of our prison sentence!”. Where’s the AMBITION?

Also, this isn’t strictly on topic, but I just reminded myself that Pete opens with Ackerman having been drugged with ~truth serum~. The actual hell?!

[Flap Jack]

Have to say, I completely disagree on the gay panic idea. It’s not gay panic. It’s Rimmer panic. I think if you’ve never seen the show before then yes, it could come off as “This man is disgusted that he’s just imagined kissing another man”. But if you know anything about Lister and Rimmer and their pre-existing dynamic, then there’s surely nothing to it than “Oh my God, I just kissed Rimmer”.

Well it probably is Rimmer panic. It sounds like it.

I certainly can’t argue that disgust isn’t a perfectly reasonable reaction to the idea of snogging Rimmer! I just feel that regardless of in-universe logic, depicting a gay kiss as a horrible nightmare inevitably contributes to the gay panic trend. Only a little bit, though. (I really like the scene, I swear!)

Of course, Blue is small potatoes compared to Duct Soup, the episode where Lister has a literal gay panic. ^_^

[Flap Jack]

If there are any new special features at all, then they’ll likely just be some token additions rather than substantial ones (a featurette marking the 30th anniversary, perhaps?), BUT if we’re talking wish lists…

– All of the special features from The Bodysnatcher Collection (excluding Re-Dwarf and the Remastered episodes themselves).
– Full versions of both American pilots.
– All of the links and other unreleased original content from Red Dwarf Night (Universe Challenge being the main thing here).
– New Writer/Director commentaries on as many episodes as humanly possible.
– Smeg Ups/Smeg Outs in their originally edited form (all Kryten links preserved).
– Weblink.
– Unabridged audiobook of ‘The Log: A Dwarfer’s Guide to Everything’, read by Stephen Fry.
– Holly digitally recast with Hattie Hayridge in Series 1 and 2 (and Hilly recast with Rebecca Blackstone).

[Flap Jack]

Nowadays, just one new commentary by Doug alone would be quite the treat. Even if it was for Krytie TV.

[Flap Jack]

Well this is certainly not something I expected to ever happen…

Will there be any new special features, I wonder? (Or features imported from Bodysnatcher?) I’m assuming it won’t be a “Just The Shows”-style release, given that it’s 16 discs.

Maybe some new, less lengthy menu transitions?

Will Series I-III controversially be the Remastered versions? (“Well, they’re already film-look, so they’re obviously more suited to HD!” – Ed Bye or somebody.)

If nothing else, this is great news for people who were disappointed they couldn’t marathon Series 8 without disc swapping. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Unless this doesn’t actually happen, which is still likely.

[Flap Jack]

Tikka to Ride is a weird one for me, because intellectually I know that the changing functionality of the time drive – and the fact that nobody tries to use it to go back to Earth properly – shouldn’t be a big deal, it’s just a comedy etc. etc. But it ALWAYS bothers me, as well as the in-episode inconsistency about how time paradoxes work. I’ve happily accepted continuity in Red Dwarf as flexible, but “don’t directly contradict the very last episode to air before this one” seems like a low bar to clear.

Lister’s obsession with curry is also way too exaggerated, like that one episode of latter-era Simpsons where Homer’s whole subplot is to get doughnuts. Curry-obsession is just a quirk Lister has, it’s not supposed to be his entire character. Besides, in the context of series VII he only needs to find Red Dwarf to get more. Why not use the time drive for that, eh?

It’s still the best episode of its series, though. ;)

[Flap Jack]

I agree, which is why I like the scene (and why I said that Lister’s disgust is only half due to the gay aspect, not wholly), but the conformation to the gay panic joke format is still there, so it does have a small impact on my enjoyment.

[Flap Jack]

I don’t think you have to read any gay panic undertones into the idea that kissing Rimmer is disgusting.

I certainly don’t have to… but I do. :P

Because half of the reason why Lister finds kissing Rimmer disgusting is that Rimmer is a man and Lister is hetero. If Lister had dreamt about kissing a hypothetical female colleague who he wasn’t attracted to, his emotional reaction would have been more like “Huh, that was weird”, not the classic horrified-waking-up-from-a-nightmare-in-a-cold-sweat reaction.

Sure, you might not read that into the scene on its own merits, but as part of a comedy trend of gay panic jokes, it’s pretty clear.

It’s also plays into the whole ‘if you feel any affection towards another man you must be gay for him lol’ cliche, but that’s less of an issue for me because that’s probably just Lister’s insecurity rather than a message the show is imparting.

… wait, how did I end up attacking a scene I was trying to praise??? To be clear, I do only consider the gay panic element a minor detraction.

[Flap Jack]

There are definitely a lot of things in series 7 to enjoy. The opening of Stoke Me A Clipper and the Rimmer Munchkin Song are so good that they almost redeem the series all on their own.

Other good stuff that sticks out:

– The Lister/Rimmer kiss (‘gay panic’ undertones aside).
– The Rimmer funeral scene (although it does leave me wondering why his post-posthumous promotion doesn’t count when he comes back… or how a hologram can even die, given that surely they could just restore his backups to a new light bee?).
– Kochanski beating the crap out of Kryten with a spanner.
– The Cat managing to say the least helpful things imaginable to Lister when he’s emotionally sensitive in both Duct Soup and Nanarchy.
– The way Kryten catches the nanobots and reprimands them by aggressively tapping the jar they’re in.
– The plan Kochanski executes to save Lister from the Epideme virus.
– A lot of Tikka to Ride, as a whole.
– Lister saving Kochanski from oblivion by harpooning her in the leg.
– Kryten turning up in a tank to pull everyone out of the Jane Austen VR game in Beyond A Joke. (“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I said: supper is ready!”)

[Flap Jack]

I’m fine with the Grim Reaper appearing in that scene, because it was in EPISODE 8 of Series VIII, so I had fully given up on Red Dwarf’s connection to reality by that point.

Though for what it’s worth, Rimmer being conscious doesn’t stop him from hallucinating.

[Flap Jack]

If Red Dwarf goes back to the BBC, will Lister stop being able to see or hear all of the Dave-era plot elements?

[Flap Jack]

I liked the bit where Rimmer kneed Death in the balls.

I hated “THE END? THE SMEG IT IS.” Not because it was bad (it was) but because it told me a show I loved ended on a sodding cliffhanger, and it did so 8 years beforehand, so there was almost no chance of another series.

[Flap Jack]

The bit where Anakin cuts down defenseless women and children with his lightsaber while screaming “Die, Space Arabs, die!”.

[Flap Jack]

Beyond A Joke: “The Dwarfers spend some time in virtual reality, and… uh… something happens with other Krytens? I don’t know, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it. I think there’s like a green, dumber Kryten in it?”

[Flap Jack]

Radiation basically being magic in sci-fi is a good potential explanation for a fair few of the problems.

So, you could say that the background radiation over thousands/millions of years was enough to make the cat race immune to it, which is what allowed them to break out and go to other parts of the ship without dying long before Lister could be woken up from stasis.

I used to have a theory to explain both the food access and the evolution, which is that the hold contained some sort of super advanced terraforming device, which Frankenstein or one of her kittens accidentally triggered, and the hold was converted into a full ecosystem filled with plants and other animal species. But that is one hell of a stretch, let’s be honest.

[Flap Jack]

I loved the stuff in IWCD about the cats, but it only covered a small fraction of the questions.

Honestly, an entire race of cat-like humanoids evolving from a single pregnant cat is more of a spiritual or symbolic plot point than a scientific one, so the correct course of action is to treat it as such and not think too hard about it, BUT I CAN’T HELP IT.

[Flap Jack]

I always thought the radiation leak <i>poisoned</i> the crew rather than, say, disintegrating them. After all, it was a leak, not an explosion. I know Skipper at least implicitly contradicts this, but eh.

This doesn’t explain why the clothes worn by the crew would decompose over 3 million years but the clothes in wardrobes wouldn’t, though.

My vague assumption was that the hold is lead-lined and full of the ship’s insecure reserve supplies, and that Lister snuck Frankenstein in there before going into stasis, hoping that she’d be able to keep herself alive and nobody else would go looking in there.

The more pressing questions for me were:

– How did the cats get into food and water that would have been packaged specifically for humans, especially as Lister wouldn’t have planned for more than his stasis term?

– Who cleaned up all of their poo while they were in there?

– How did the cat race evolve without any natural predators?

– How did they gain the resources and infrastructure to form a fully functional society, have civil wars etc.?

– How does every cat other than The Cat and the priest flee the ship without leaving the hold and exposing themselves to lethal radiation?

– How do the cats flee without taking all of the shuttles?

– How does The Cat know to break into the main part of the ship only when the radiation levels are safe?

– Has Holly been communicating with the cats? If not, why not?

– Isn’t it an absurd coincidence that it was safe to wake up Lister when there was just 1 cat (or 2) on the ship, when just 50-100 years later and there’d be none?

– Why wasn’t Hollister immediately revived as a hologram so he could instruct Holly to stop Red Dwarf from drifting further away from civilisation for 3 million years?

I have some head-canon ideas for a few of these, but man that’s a lot of gaps that almost exclusively concern The Cat.

[Flap Jack]

The sheer weirdness of having the Dwarfers turn up in the “real” world and interrogate their roles as fictional characters is just too much fun for me to have much of a problem with it! If it was a regular episode, it would have been quite irritating, but as a one off special to celebrate the show after being off the air for a decade or more? I dig it.

The problem is that this only feels fully formed for the middle third. The first episode is just a long slog to get to the actual plot punctuated by jarring mourning scenes, and the third episode follows up the second fairly well, but falls apart as it tries to explain everything going on and make it dramatically satisfying.

So BtE is a Dwarf story I hugely appreciate, even if on the whole it’s only OK.

Those lines at the end where they say “I bet anyone watching our shared dream on television would think we really WERE fictional – what a crazy thought!” are shit, though.

[Flap Jack]

The 3-part version is the one I saw first and the one that debuted on TV, so that’s the true, original version in my eyes.

Of course, if Back to Earth is definitively 1 episode then so is Back in the Red…

[Flap Jack]

That’s a fine shelf you have there, Si. Mine goes Series I-VIII, Beat the Geek, Bodysnatcher, Back to Earth, Series X-XII (i.e. strict release order). I figured that BtE already screwed up the spine continuity, so why not?

On the subject of BtE, if Doug wanted the name of the first full Dave series to complete the joke of there being missing series, he should have called Series X “Series XI”. But he lost his bottle!

Of course if the first Dave series was Series IX, then we would have all been happy to regard Back to Earth as a wholly non-numbered special. But that isn’t what happened.

Yes, this is definitely important enough to warrant lengthy discussion.

[Flap Jack]

I liked Back to Earth at the time, because I was just so happy to see more Red Dwarf, and to have the then-current ending of the show not be the terrible Only The Good… cliffhanger.

Plus, the fact that it even got made on a budget of about 72p is hugely impressive, and we probably wouldn’t have had the last 3 series without it, so I’m grateful for that.

But yeah, the story makes little sense and it’s pretty low on laughs outside of episode 2. At least I can appreciate episode 3 a bit more after watching Blade Runner for the first time ever last month!

[Flap Jack]

Back to Earth being the only main series DVD spine that doesn’t match is a constant, very mild annoyance, but I still prefer to use the reversible covers over the standard ones. And I can’t countenance putting Back to Earth at the beginning or the end of the row – it’s just not chronological!

In theory I agree with the “Back to Earth isn’t a proper series” idea, but in practice Dave/GNP insisted on calling the next series of Red Dwarf “Series X” so there’s no good in trying to argue that BtE isn’t Series 9.

Random thought: for those of you who have it, where do you put The Bodysnatcher Collection on your DVD shelf?

[Flap Jack]

The Bodysnatcher Collection is amazing, and even though I waited too late and had to pay through the nose for it – around £40 IIRC – it was worth it.

I regret that in 2007 I was completely oblivious to the online Dwarf fandom despite being super into Red Dwarf itself, so I had no idea the Red Dwarf Remastered project or Bodysnatcher even existed. So even though I saw the set many times in HMV, I just assumed it was a compilation of the individual Series I-III releases, that “Remastered” just referred to it being at DVD picture quality, and that “Bodysnatcher” was just a random, quirky name choice.

I wonder how many other less-news-following fans passed over The Bodysnatcher Collection like I did?

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