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OK, I am now concerned about how many ships you’ve shot missiles at.

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Sweet.

And yes, I realise now it’s not clear, but I interpreted Image 2 as being when Cat says “2 suits???” rather than when Lister says it.

Anyway, back to ruminating on the previous puzzle I guess.

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Lister is the only one not saying the number of the current episode.

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Maybe they would put on more black if George were dead dead, but he’s still here, isn’t he?

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Yeah, it’s more understandable to make mistakes when talking about episodes the current podcast isn’t directly about, but I still don’t excuse it, because you shouldn’t confidently share trivia like that if you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.

Honestly it was kind of a weird choice to do a mini review of every Series VI episode at the end anyway, because it naturally prompted them to discuss things that surely they’d rather keep back until the dedicated podcasts.

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Hey, so this came back! Actually it’s been back for almost a month, but… you know.

The Psirens discussion was solid, and I thankfully didn’t spot any big mistakes. Obviously John and Fergus’s memories are still poor, but that’s fine. It’s only annoying when they’re confidently wrong about things.

The only blips were after the main discussion, where Fergus casually mentioned that Red Dwarf now has “73 episodes”, and in their briefer discussion of Series VI in general, guest Tom Neenan asserted that Gunmen of the Apocalypse cheaped out in a similar way to Back to Reality – that it kept cutting back to Starbug to avoid showing what would be some expensive or impossible to film action in the Western simulation. No it didn’t???

Anyway, I’m part way through the Legion episode now, and it started off well with a pretty incredible behind the scenes story from Phil Ellis.

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That is pretty clearly a Brain Slug. It’s a cutting commentary on what easy access to ChatGPT does to some people.

Or it’s just calculated that Red Dwarf ought to have its own equivalent to the Cosmic Cutie.

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A DRM-free download IS effectively owning, even if that is rare for film and TV.

Right, I just considered it so rare that it can’t really be a factor when deciding how you want to access media. Unless the only movies and TV shows you want to (legally) own in HD all just so happen to be in a specific subset of independent productions, you need to embrace the Blu-ray disc as your saviour.

And as much as I understand Ben’s position, it’s not really an argument against Blu-ray as a format, more an argument against the basic concept of paying for things. It is hard to compete with free, admittedly.

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Cheaper and no more bulky than a Blu-Ray

Of couse, but we’re talking about enthusiast consumers in particular, so the small extra expense seems like a pretty fair trade off for the huge bump in quality (not to mention how much more scratch resistant the discs are). Plus while I’m just speaking for the UK, if you’re patient enough the price difference between a new movie DVD and a Blu-ray of the same movie collapses to, like, £1.

Also for what it’s worth DVDs sometimes are more bulky than Blu-rays (as well as being taller). The thinner cases are becoming much more commonplace nowadays, while DVD cases remain the same thickness, and TV Blu-ray box sets are often smaller than their DVD equivalents due to needing fewer discs.

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To me it is a bit weird, at least among those who are fanatic about TV, movies and/or video games, because Blu-rays have been around for over 15 years, the players are much more affordable now (and they’ve been built in to the last 3 PlayStations and the last 2 Xboxes), and Blu-ray is the only way to properly own HD media.

However, consciously I understand that DVD was and is “good enough” quality wise for a lot of people, and that for many who would have switched over eventually, streaming came along and was the next level of “good enough”. Several years after DVD was introduced, VHS was fully dead, but even now DVD is a more popular format than Blu-ray.

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Wow, OK, that’s going to feel a bit weird.

What are the odds that Red Dwarf inexplicably does huge numbers on Channel 4, and they commission a new series?

No need to answer, just let me dream.

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Oh yeah, the variable frame rate is definitely weird. I wonder if that made Back to Earth harder to feed into the Smega-Drive than the other series?

But interlaced in general should be OK because Blu-ray players are meant to deinterlace the image for you (unless you tell them not to), so it’s progressive when you watch it.

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Ian’s review should focus exclusively on whether the entire Dave era is
now progressive scan and if there are 5.1 mixes on episodes that didn’t
have them on the original Blu-ray (X is 5.1 but XI/XII aren’t which is
odd).

OK, wait, are you hoping it has been made progressive, or do you want reassurance that it hasn’t? Because my understanding is that interlaced HD is the authentic way to present UK TV on Blu-ray, so it would be odd for them to go out of their way to change it if it’s already in that format.

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Personally I’m expecting absolutely 0 changes to any of the discs compared to when they last released, and hadn’t even considered that they might fix the “Thanks for the Memories” thing until Stephen mentioned it. Prove me wrong, BBC, but I will be shocked if e.g. the Back to Earth disc doesn’t still have the now-quaint Blu-ray set up guide menu option.

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The whole of G&T loves The End Background Crew Member, an unassuming crew member who wears a hat and sports a thick moustache! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the crew member is racist

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According to the booklet, it’s the latter

I wouldn’t expect the booklet to mirror the mistake, if it wasn’t fixed.

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Back to random…

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Not quite, because Series VIII was in the spring of 1999 not the autumn, so that pushes the milestone into next year.

Thankfully 21st May 2026* is AGES away, so we will never need to feel old.

(*If calculated BitR1-to-Trojan and Trojan-to-now. OtG-to-Trojan and Beginning-to-now will be 10th May 2026.)

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But would Joe react so positively to his extramarital affair being publicly revealed and joked about? And is Cinzano Bianco even known for staining?

I prefer to believe that they wouldn’t visually mark people for adultery. It’s just an efficient way for people into ethical nonmonogamy to find each other.

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Oh, of course – the blue uniform is specifically for Red Dwarf’s cuckold employees.

Someone ask Doug at The Official Convention™ if the blue uniform is general purpose or if it’s specifically just for the employees being cuckolded by George McIntyre.

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They’re not as fascinating as Moustache-Hat Guy, but I’d also like to know what these two’s stories are:

Like what does the blue outfit signify? Does it mean he’s a contractor rather than a full time employee? Does he do different kind of work to the beige-shirts?

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Of course. Like 50% of the discourse on this site is about exactly how and why Series VIII is shit. Why mess with tradition?

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No, if the text says “the JMC does things this way”, & there’s
nothing modifying that, then that’s all it’s said. You’ve conjured
“works perfectly” out of thin air.

I think where we’re having issues is that you see the show not commenting on something as meaning that it’s saying “it could be good, it could be bad, who knows”, while I see it as saying “this is unremarkable because it’s normal, and normal is good”. You’ve maybe heard the adage about how taking a neutral stance is in fact siding with the status quo? That.

But the context makes it clearer in my opinion. The whole joke is that the JMC are applying human standards to a mechanoid (which doesn’t fully make sense given that “RESET TO FACTORY SETTINGS” is not an option for humans, but anyway). If Doug understood that segregating people based on their genitals was also oppressive and unscientific for humans, then he either wouldn’t have included this because it undermines the gag, or he would have explicitly worked that angle in.

Just to cite another similar example, in Krytie TV Kryten is made to shower, and the joke is once again that this is nonsensical because he’s a robot. Do you take it that this is the show taking a fully neutral stance on whether showering is good or not? That because it’s the incompetent and corrupt JMC orchestrating these shower sessions, that it’s open to interpretation whether or not washing yourself with soap and water is unscientific and dangerous? Is Doug actively distancing himself from revealing whether he’s pro germ theory or anti?

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Does it?

Not just that it’s the standard applied by the JMC, but that it works? Perfectly?

… yes? If the text is “the JMC does things this way”, but there’s no commentary or jokes undercutting the idea actually in the show, then ultimately it’s just presenting it as something completely neutral and normal. As I mentioned, it’s just like all the other medical tests Kryten goes through. Just because the JMC are the ones testing urine samples, it doesn’t mean the show is subtly criticising the general practice of testing urine samples. I’d go as far as to say the show isn’t criticising prisoners wearing lilac and sleeping in bunk beds either.

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I’ll save Todhunter, just to respect his mother’s Gazpacho and Champagne producing capabilities.

The Trout Dispenser 

The Cat Priest

Paranoia

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But if the joke is about robots & doesn’t say anything about humans either way

And if extrapolating the concept to humans leads you to an implication that’s good & correct

Then at what point did series VIII actually take a dodgy position on it?

But it does say something about humans, that’s my point. It says “this penis based system of gender classification works perfectly when applied to humans”.

Remember that Kryten being classified as a woman is just the punchline to him being made to do a series of medical tests which only apply to human biology. The joke isn’t that giving urine samples is silly, it’s that specifically trying to get a robot to give a urine sample is silly.

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Is that actually series VIII logic though, or is it the in-fiction
bureaucratic logic that’s clearly understood by the characters &
audience to be so farcical that it doesn’t even merit much discussion?
Like at what point does literally anyone endorse it or take it seriously
as an idea?

It is open to interpretation, but in my opinion, yes it is the Series VIII logic.

Because the joke isn’t that it’s absurd to define someone’s gender by the presence or absence of a penis in general, the joke is that it’s absurd to apply this logic to a robot. It’s that the JMC are too stupid / rigidly bureaucratic to adjust their systems for androids, not that the systems also don’t make sense for humans.

The plot point does set up a more progressive implication – if we and the regular characters can plainly understand that Kryten is a man regardless of his lack of genitals, then why would the genitals be important for recognising the gender of human characters? – but to me that doesn’t feel intentional.

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I was willing to save a second character if you declared another go-round, but admittedly I don’t feel extremely passionate about the current line up.

Young Kochanski, for the record. The way she says “vimto” is cute. That’s something.

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This maybe muddies the water by making
gender seem like an active choice, though, rather than something that is
inherently felt as part of your identity – as opposed to just choosing a
colour because you have a preference for it.

You choose a favourite colour, but you don’t choose your preferences, you just have them.

It’s far from a 1:1 with gender, but it is an example of an aspect of one’s personality which is both self-determined and not based on some kind of universal logic. People don’t just say “my favourite colour is whichever one the colour experts say matches best with the natural colour of my hair and eyes, I’ll look it up later”.

I do understand people feeling genuinely confused about this, because
while for a long time sex and gender were used somewhat interchangeably
they’ve now become largely treated as more separate things, with added
confusion generated when the ideas converge again – for example in
conversations about whether gender should determine rights of access to
spaces that have historically been defined on the basis of sex (to bring
it back to the Kryten example).

The thing is that if gender and sex were used interchangeably, then rights to access to spaces weren’t specifically determined on the basis of sex. And even by the “sex is physiological, gender is mental” definition, they were absolutely determined based on gender. As much as the current government are trying to make it happen, at no point in the past were leisure centres sex-testing you to decide which changing room you should use.

The irony is that the divergence of sex and gender in language is being driven largely by transphobes, because they want to force a way for trans women to be “technically male” and trans men to be “technically female”. Even though in practice they use these categorisations in the social, gender sense, they pretend they don’t.

The reality is that sex is defined by a wide variety of physical characteristics, characteristics which can and do change. And a not insignificant part of transition is changing your sex! People will swap out a majority of their sex characteristics, but the gender criticals will still insist that their “true” sex is what those characteristics were in the past, or what they “ought” to be, or what they would have otherwise been. This could well be the most widely believed pseudoscience out there.

I’ve always been huefluid between blue and purple, I don’t limit myself.

Fun fact: there’s a webcomic by a trans artist which legitimately uses colour as analogy for gender. Just in case folks get the impression I’m being uniquely weird with this.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Webcomic/PillsThatMakeYouGreen

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Yeah, as I said, I respect that people have their gender identities and I
won’t argue them on it because it’s important to them. It’s just the
purpose that eludes me.

OK, I think this is the nub of why your take comes across as more declarative than curious. Because you set it up so that an explanation isn’t sufficient unless it involves some kind of logical purpose. Well, there isn’t really a logical purpose to gender. But regardless society is divided down these lines, and people innately feel which group they best belong to.

The fact is that many aspects of the human personality lack a “purpose” without their validity being doubted like this. What’s the purpose of having a favourite colour? Of course there are plenty of people who don’t have any colour preferences at all and make their clothing choices purely based on comfort and price, but you don’t tend to hear these people being baffled by the very concept.

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All I did was ask for clarification, and I made it clear that I am not
even confident in the statement that I made. You can say “your ideas are
dead wrong and here’s why-” and I’d be fine with that. 

Well, if you’re genuinely curious then that’s good, but there are a couple of reasons why it comes across otherwise.

The first is that you frame your perspective as being the straightforward and logical one, which means it reads less as “if I’m wrong, tell me why” and more as “how is it that other people end up being so wrong about it?”.

The other is that Gender Studies is an entire field of education, and the internet is full of people who have written about if free of charge, trans people especially. So if you are fascinated by this topic then it would be natural to look up this information and not use the “hope to be corrected on a Red Dwarf forum” method.

I would be curious to see how I respond in pressure. The Estonian
language is not gendered. I guess it would depend on why people would be
misgendering me. If it was a derogatory thing (for example “you’ve got
the muscles of a girl”), I’d be annoyed, but more so for the insult than
the actual misgendering. But if it was just because, I don’t think I
would care too much. 

If it really wouldn’t bother you at all, then it’s at least possible you’re nonbinary in some way… ? But the important thing to know is just that your feelings about your own gender are valid, but a lot of other people – cis and trans alike – feel much more strongly aligned with their gender identities, and it’s no less valid.

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I’m not trying to be offensive, I’m just genuinely confused by this. 

Your confusion may be genuine, but it doesn’t sound like you want to become un-confused or to learn about the rich tapestry that is the human experience of gender, it sounds like you just want to be validated. Well, denied, sorry. You’re entitled to have these opinions, but we’re not obliged to pretend that they’re borne of anything other than ignorance.

But I’d be curious to know if your “I don’t have a gender, I just know what bits I’ve got” perspective would hold if put under any kind of pressure. E.g. if you’d be unbothered by being persistently misgendered on sight.

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OK, you got 3-years-ago me. It isn’t literally true that Lister never gets called “Dave”.

But these are rare exceptions, and it doesn’t contradict my main point, which is that Kryten is one character who genuinely never calls him that.

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Got curious if Cool Banana had posted any more RD videos in the past month, and it did post one a couple of days later, but none more since then. The answers were mostly normal but there were still a few good ones.

However,

Screw you, Waffles T Squirrel, if that even is your real name. Don’t help the AI slop machine! The fact that these quizzes are crap is the only good thing about them!

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An audacious misrepresentation of the data! Was it worth it, Dave? Maths is inconsolable right now.

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Simon the Sorcerer traded a lot on the fact it had Chris Barrie doing
the voice. From what I remember it was utter dogshit as an actual game!

According to Wikipedia it was critically acclaimed! The lowest critic score referenced was Amiga Power’s 57%, with all the other scores being equivalent to 70% or higher. Plus quite a few of these scores were for the base Amiga version which didn’t even have the voice acting.

Of course, good by the adventure game standards of the time doesn’t necessarily mean the game will feel good to play in a post Telltale world.

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My only exposure to any of Pratchett’s work is the Discworld II: Missing
Presumed? game, which I had on the Playstation. Not even played the
first one.

Shame that the Discworld game you played wasn’t the one with a Red Dwarf connection!

I’m sure I’ve said it before, but in a universe where free time was at a surplus, discussion of the video games that Dwarf alum have been in could be an interesting G&T feature. Even if it would only be like 5 games total.

However, Simon the Sorcerer Origins does release at the end of next month, featuring Chris Barrie’s first return to the title role since the original game. So that makes it 6.

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Every Red Dwarf episode is horror when you think about it:

The End – The horror of waking up and finding that everyone you’ve ever known is dead.

Future Echoes – The horror of finding out that your son is doomed to die.

Balance of Power – The horror of your boss being a fucking prick while simultaneously being impossible to beat up.

Waiting for God – The horror of learning that you inadvertantly caused generations of needless war and bloodshed.

Confidence & Paranoia – The horror of your fragile innermost thoughts being put on display for all to see, and also witnessing a man explode.

Me² – The horror of being replaced.

Kryten – The horror of discovering that you’ve lost your ability to discern reality from fantasy.

Better Than Life – The horror of having your dad call you a total smeghead, being stuck with a family life you hate, losing all your money, being buried up to your head in the sand, smeared with jam and set upon by killer ants, and having your hand smashed in by a tax collector.

Thanks for the Memory – The horror of learning the love that people have for you has actually always been a lie.

Stasis Leak – The horror of watching a sci-fi comedy where time travel is introduced but extremely poorly utilised.

Queeg – The horror of having a choreographer shout at you to complete menial tasks.

Parallel Universe – The horrors of sexual harassment and unexpected pregnancy.

Backwards – The horror of having no true free will / having to suck shit into your arse.

Marooned – The horror of slowly starving to death and being unable to save yourself.

Bodyswap – The horror of having control of your body taken away from you.

Timeslides – The horror of being able to directly witness your younger self and irrefutably comfirm that he’s cringe.

The Last Day – The horror of being hunted down by a deranged homicidal android.

Camille – The horror of you and your mate both fancying the same girl.

White Hole – The horror of needing to depend on an arrogant drunk to save your life.

Dimension Jump – The horror of learning that your failings in life are scientifically pretty much entirely your fault.

Meltdown – The horror… of WAR.

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As I’m in a Futurama-ish mood I decided to finally watch this popular Futurama ‘making of’ video that YouTube likes to relentlessly recommend to me. It’s pretty solid overall, but my eye did twitch when the narrator said “Seeing as how science fiction comedies didn’t really exist at the time, Groening and Cohen were mostly inspired by the low budget productions of old sci-fi television, like Doctor Who and Lost in Space”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNKdfvpFvgA

I know that technically Red Dwarf was in its Series VI/VII gap for the period of Futurama’s early development being described, but if they were able to base it on old non-comedic sci-fi, then why not old sci-fi comedies as well? If they didn’t, them not existing is obviously not the reason.

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Excluding Hollister seems fair, but what’s the reasoning for removing Young Cat and Young Kochanski? Just because it would be too mean to judge child actors like that?

The characters may not be VIII exclusive but the actors are, so I think otherwise they count.

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Huh, alright then. I’ll get in early for an easy time – Cassandra. No other guest performance in Series VIII was good enough to base a whole episode around. Her dry delivery is realistically what tricks people into thinking Cassandra is a good episode rather than just an OK one.

—

MP Thornton
Doc Newton
Dr McClaren
Doctor
Panel Woman Officer
Second Woman Officer
Last Woman Officer
First Ground Controller
Second Ground Controller
Ackerman
Guard (Cassandra)
Kill Crazy
Warden Knot
Man in Film
Woman in Film
Mex
Young Kochanski
Young Cat
Baxter
Birdman
Talia
Dispensing Machine
Big Meat

—

Also, is Hollister officially a regular despite not appearing in every episode?

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Sodding Future Echoes on the list, it’s a travesty. It’s so tepid it could be in series 7. 

Haha, I think if you helped deliver Balance of Power to the throne and celebrated its victory, you shouldn’t complain.

“I didn’t think an unconventional pick I disliked would win the episode selection game!” sobs person who voted for the Unconventional Picks Winning Episode Selection Games Party.

Just to do another CC comparison, but this time by their episode position rank:

* Kryten – 4th Highest Episode 1

* Future Echoes – 5th Highest Episode 2

* Balance of Power – 8th Highest Episode 3

* White Hole – 2nd Highest Episode 4

* Queeg – Highest Episode 5

* The Last Day – 4th Highest Episode 6

In addition to Balance of Power being the only winner outside of the Top 36, it’s also the only one that was beaten by Dave era episodes in the Coral Canvass – both for its episode position and just generally.

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DOG IS TRYING HIS BEST

OK, Holly, give me Meltdown’s light bee. Love the episode and it is underrated, but considering how over the top evil Rimmer gets with flimsy justification, the unconvincing use of stock footage, and the aforementioned rapist, it’s not quite Top 4 material.

Me2

The Last Day

Back to Reality

Out of Time

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I had a theory that holograms experience a kind of “virtual waiting room” in the moments or minutes before they’re first switched on, where Holly brings them up to speed and acclimatises them to their post-death existence, so when they are switched on they don’t freak out.

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OK, I’ll send Ace Rimmer off to a different dimension, but I’ll smoke some kippers just in case he comes back for breakfast. Dimension Jump is a great episode, but despite its strong ideas and characterisation, it doesn’t really cohere into much of story to me. Somewhat overrated.

* Queeg *

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Quarantine, one of the best episodes not just of Red Dwarf but TV in general, eliminated because Series VIII and certain Smegazine comic strips are bad?

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The credit is all yours, Podey. Otherwise I’d have to credit some folks in the ‘Most Disliked Episode 1’ thread for “Anarchy”.

[Author]

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