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Me watching the thread like

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Stasis Leak. It knows what it did.

—

Waiting for God

White Hole

Quarantine

Cassandra

Mechocracy

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Me checking in to discover that Balance of Power has been selected as the best of all the Episode 3s.

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OK, I’ve watched the whole season now, and my impression is that once you get over the hump of the first 2 episodes, the rest of the batch is the strongest the Hulu era has been. Maybe not Fox era funny, but the feel was right. And despite my earlier snark, they did actually manage to go a whole season without doing either an anthology episode or an alternate universe episode. I’m proud of them.

And appropriately, “The White Hole” is the Dwarfiest episode of the bunch, but in a different way than expected.

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Sorry to say that clem already called out the flatter droopy titties on page 1!

… well, not that sorry. The thrill of correcting others is my reward for going through the whole thread again before doing my new post.

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Anarchy.

Relatedly, this one has: anarchist, (neo-)Marxist, nihilistic, and bassist. A quad!

And related to that but not quite as impressive – bass and ambassador respectively.

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Back to Earth Part 3 beating Polymorph and Thanks for the Memory is absolutely wild.

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I appreciate part of what Ouroboros was going for and I like Kochanski, but still, the twist about Lister’s parentage and the whole “with us going round and round in time, the human race can never become extinct” thing will never not be overly self-serious wank, the very kind they actively mocked in 1991.

Balance of Power

Thanks for the Memory

Polymorph

Justice

Terrorform

Gunmen of the Apocalypse

Back to Earth, Part 3

Give & Take

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I’ll assassinate Tikka to Ride, for the good of the timeline. It’s an impressive production with some good gags, but its curry-obsessed Flanderisation of Lister, its lack of consistent time travel logic (fine to do that across the series, but not within the same episode) and failure to follow up the Out of Time cliffhanger satisfyingly will always get on my nerves.

The End

Kryten

Backwards

Camille

Holoship

Psirens

Trojan

Cured

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I think she means that Kryten wouldn’t attack Rimmer maliciously, only as part of a plan of escape that he consented to.

Although I disagree for a different reason. Rimmer wouldn’t attack someone because he’s a coward and he’d be worried about getting attacked back, not for any moral reason. Rimmer absolutely would attack someone if failing to attack means he would be guaranteed to die, and that’s exactly the situation Legion is in.

The best I can suggest as explanation for Legion just standing there while Kryten tried knocking Rimmer out is (A) his empathetic Kryten side and self-preservationist Rimmer side were at stalemate, meaning he couldn’t bring himself to either help them or stop them, and/or (B) thanks to his extra knowledge of how hardlight holograms work (which must have been knowledge from the station database, not the Dwarfers’ brains), he knew that Kryten couldn’t knock Rimmer out with physical violence, and so thought he was safe to just be entertained by their futile attempts for a while – but didn’t count on them figuring out that Rimmer could still disable his own light bee.

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Series VIII got off easy. If we were just going by my Coral Canvass scores, only Cassandra would have escaped. (Which is funny because I literally just called the decision to save BitR 3 over Timewave “correct”. Timewave dislike is so ritual that I forgot my own actual opinions. There’s not exactly a lot in it though.)

Although Series VIII once again got a bigger kicking from G&T (or rather a small subset of it) than the wider fanbase, because the Coral Canvass as a whole would have produced this result:

Back to Earth, Part 1

Back to Earth, Part 2

Timewave

Duct Soup

Krytie TV

Pete, Part 1

Pete, Part 2

Only the Good…

Take out the 1v1s and it’s more non-Series VIII than Series VIII!

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International Debris spared BITR 3.

Ah, right, sorry. I was clearly too distracted by the ongoing episode 4 discussions.

Shame that we couldn’t find a new person to decide that one! As correct as the decision was.

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Do you reckon we should do a most disliked series? If we are, I’m saving II. 

Well… I guess that explains the username.

We just need a preferably fresh voter to definitively decide between
Pete Part 1 vs Can of Worms and anyone at all to choose between Nanarchy
vs Only the Good…, then we can move on with our lives.

Don’t forget Back in the Red, Part 3 vs. Timewave. I for one did not consent to that being declared a tie. 

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Kind of wishing I’d held off saving a 6th episode, because to me this matchup isn’t even close.

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I’ll save Skipper. It has its flaws but is overall a really fun and nostalgia-tugging episode, which somehow manages to pull off having a different sci-fi concept for each half. All hail Mr. Rat.

Parallel Universe
Beyond a Joke
Pete Part 1
The Beginning
Can of Worms

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I’ll come right back in and save Queeg. Fantastic Holly showcase episode with a captivating guest performance by Charles Augins and a brilliant twist that you can barely believe was thought up so late. Genuinely, when I was first watching the show, Queeg was one of the key episodes to cement my fandom.

Confidence & Paranoia

Timeslides

Demons & Angels

Rimmerworld

Blue

Krytie TV

Dear Dave

Krysis

M-Corp

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I’ll save Mechocracy, because that episode is good the whole way through and Entangled is only good for part of it.

* Entangled *

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Thanks for confirming. I thought maybe they would have got over that gimmick now they’re onto the second episode order, but I guess not.

And hey, Futurama has been… coincidentally similar to Red Dwarf since it’s started, so this is continuation of that great tradition.

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I’ll save Lemons, because I love heresy and jokes about bags and flat pack furniture I guess. Funny that 3 of the 4 episodes left involve time travel. Lemons is definitely the strongest.

Ouroboros

Back in the Red, Part 3

Timewave

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Looks like the era of production codes starting with the season number is over. AACV, not 10ACV? They’ll regret that when they get to Season 36 / 39!

Only watched the first episode so far, and yeah, while I’m personally happy with Futurama at this level, I can see why if you were “meh” on the Hulu era previously, this wasn’t going to turn you around. The episode was fun, and I enjoyed seeing the Robot Devil, but the premise was pretty thin (… or short?). Plus it’s basically an in-canon redo of that one Anthology of Interest segment. And yet they still won’t bring that back, despite how much the writers seem to love both anthology episodes and alternate universe stories!

By the way, does the Hulu version of the show still do the “HULURAMA” thing in the intro?

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I assumed that given they were able to fit the Nova 5 entirely inside Red Dwarf for repair, that it wouldn’t be big enough in its own right to have Starbugs.

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I’ll save Samsara. It was a generally well executed Justice sequel concept with a unique flashback structure to it, and the formica scene isn’t quite as unbearable as everyone says.

Back in the Red, Part 2

Back to Earth, Part 2

Siliconia

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I’ve been getting into Discworld for the first time over the past year via the new audiobooks, and I’ve been hugely enjoying it. I’m going in release order (because my brain won’t accept doing it any other way) but thankfully I wasn’t put off by The Colour of Magic! I’m up to Guards! Guards! now, and out of the 7 I’ve read I would actually rank Equal Rites and Pyramids below TCoM.

Pratchett’s prose definitely has an Adams-ian quality to it.

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I’ll save The End. Respect for the one that started it all! It’s not the best episode and it’s very different in structure and feel to what Red Dwarf would become, but the storytelling and character set up for Lister and Rimmer was close to immaculate.

(I also choose not to copy the background colour from the list of episodes, if that’s OK.)

Backwards

Psirens

Back in the Red, Part 1

Back to Earth, Part 1

Twentica

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Yeah, I think it’s fair to also not bring that to a Douglas Adams forum. Generally if the prompt is “What are your unpopular opinions on this creator/franchise, the one we’re all gathered here specifically to celebrate?”, the response they’re looking for usually isn’t “I think this creator/franchise is shit”.

Maybe on a general sci-fi or comedy forum though, anti-Adams sentiment would go down ever so slightly easier.

Also, City of Death fucks.

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When you’re 7 prompts into your attempt to get AI to generate a picture of young Dave Lister

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When I moved to Bluesky most everyone I was following on Twitter was already there, so it was basically just having Twitter again but pre-Musk rot.

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I wonder if guessing the same wrong series 3 times in the same game is a record?

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Some people have aspect ratio blindness.

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They did Eighth Doctor live shows last year, and have a series of
sitcom pilots releasing this autumn which will lead to a full series of
one of them, so it’s not something they’re completely inexperienced in.

That said, BF should still be the second choice behind Radio 4, if
only for the fact that they’d bring in only a fraction of the
listeners

Oh, interesting. I knew about The Stuff of Legend, but I didn’t realise they’d changed their mind about recording and releasing the live show version. Still not a comedy of course, and a theatre recording is definitely quite a bit different to a studio recording. The sitcom pilots seem cool, but I would be (pleasantly) surprised to learn they recorded any of them in front of an audience.

Either way, a BBC production would not only be more mainstream, it would also be free to listen to, which is a nice bonus.

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Well they are long books with a lot of details and backstory. I suppose
you would have to assume that a new novel wouldn’t at all risk
retconning anything by accident.

Kind of, but also not really? The 3 books are under 300 pages each on average, and there is a good amount of character backstory/lore/worlbuilding in them, but it’s not actually that dense. They’re pretty light reads with lots of dialogue, and realistically tons of the lore is of the “introduced to justify one particular episode’s plot and then never mentioned again” flavour. Unless his new story specifically involves those elements, Rob wouldn’t need to remember all the details about Better Than Life or Agonoids any more than someone writing a new TV episode would need to remember everything about the Enlightenment and ERRA.

Although… thinking about it some more, it might be even easier than that. As long as Rob remembers how he ended Backwards, he can get away with so many retcons/continuity mistakes.

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Id guess Rob doesn’t really remember the novels well enough to do a
continuation from backwards. He probably would have to read the books as
a catch up.

You make this sound like it would be an unusually burdensome amount of research to do for a novel.

Not sure whether I’d rather get it than a novel but I’d want a radio
show to be a proper sitcom, recorded in front of an audience.

100% on the audience. If we’re losing the visuals, we should preserve as much of the audio element as possible. This is why it should be a BBC thing. Big Finish have never recorded a sitcom in front of a studio audience… or recorded a sitcom at all, as far as I know.

Also – they should bring back Howard Goodall. Apologise for Series XII and The Promised Land on their hands and knees if they have to.

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I wonder if it’d work in an audio with some kind of AI 80s-cast voices (or can you de-age voice?)

You probably could modulate the voices to sound younger (with or without AI, preferably without), but I don’t think the cast’s voices sound different enough that it would make sense to do that. For my money they should either find another way to indicate which version of a character is speaking, or let the ambiguity be part of it, or just don’t bother.

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Fascinating! (And depressing.) So assuming Doug is telling the truth, the expensiveness of de-aging VFX was a moot point, because UKTV shut the whole thing down before they could even get into those details. I know we’ve discussed how the British TV industry is in a dire state, but it’s still stark to have it confirmed that yes, even Dave’s most popular scripted comedy of all time wouldn’t be profitable for them to make more of.

New novels would be great, so it’s nice to see Doug show enthusiasm for that! If I had access to a genie who exclusively granted wishes related to Red Dwarf novels – who was also incapable of reuniting the Grant Naylor partnership – I would wish for Doug to write novels set in the TV continuity and for Rob to write novels set in his branch of the IWCD/BTL continuity. (Because regardless of how you feel about Last Human, it didn’t exactly leave a workable status quo in place like Backwards did.)

If I had access to a genie with slightly fewer restrictions, I would ask for a radio series over novels. So much of what makes Red Dwarf Red Dwarf is the performances of the cast.

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Slightly annoying that the set will have 33 discs, but they’re still putting one of them in a cardboard sleeve instead of a dedicated disc slot. That was the most annoying aspect of the Series I-VIII Blu-ray set packaging already.

Also, the news update says “the Red Dwarf Audible Collection Series I-VIII“? None of the listings call it that, it makes it sound like it’s all one release instead of two, and it isn’t even exclusive to Audible. (Plus the link goes to Amazon instead of Audible itself – an important distinction in my opinion).

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Ah, those were the days, when the cock ups were bespoke and human made. Now we’re just living in Fathers & Suns, including the racism.

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It’s not the banana’s fault if the questions are wrong. He was in the sleeping quarters the whole time, so he missed a lot.

By the way, one of the videos is a Jeopardy style quiz, and they somehow fail to format the answers as questions. While having the phrase “60s Bands” in the corner of the screen.

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OK, so they gave the Cool Banana (or rather “Cool Baana”) a completely different mouth when he’s talking, and just overlaid this animated mouth over the static image, but would it have killed them to position the mouth correctly?

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A search on the channel reveals 7 more Red Dwarf videos, so you could probably edit down these questions into a “Best Of” that’s a mix between only the most stupid and most sensible ones.

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When running this quiz for fun, I would not include the clues for sure – except maybe as a lifeline that you can use on just 1 question.

And I see that same channel has a second Red Dwarf quiz video of the same calibre!

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OK, this is brilliantly bad. Request for Danny and Cappsy not to watch this video, so the questions can be used as a 1-v-1 quiz in a future DwarfCast?

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OK, if Ian is resorting to smirk gifs, then I must post my result, which was achieved with pure skill and was not a fluke:

28/08/2025 

2/5 

Terrorform.

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Thanks Quinn!

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Well of course there’s nothing wrong with letting input mistakes slide if you’re not that bothered about it. I just prefer my scores to be an accurate representation of my guesses. I definitely don’t pressure myself either, in general – I’m lucky if I get more than a 10 streak nowadays!

In fact I failed today’s and I was only on a streak of 2. Cat’s injuries should have been iconic to me, but I’m getting rusty.

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I’ve said it before, but if ever guess something I didn’t mean to due to a misclick, I reset the game without shame, and recreate my prior guesses for the new attempt.

Unless the unintended guess reveals information I wouldn’t know otherwise, like confirming which series it is or eliminating a still possible series/episode (‘possible’ being the key word; eliminating a 16:9 series when the frame is 4:3 doesn’t count) – then I’ll stick. Quinn’s Epideme example would have been a valid reset IMO.

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Why did they bother?

Because at least for a time, there were a lot of DVD player owners who didn’t have a way to play video games. And even amongst those who did, DVD games were cheaper. Browser-based Flash games were an alternative when it came to the simple gameplay offered by DVD games, but TV/living room based games have more of a family appeal, and web browsers couldn’t reliably offer that sweet 480p video content. I believe YouTube didn’t even support 360p until 2008. So as janky and limited as DVD games were, they did fill a niche. Admittedly though, the better ones didn’t bite off more than they could chew and just stuck to quizzes.

I always thought the “Scene It” range was a pretty good application of the tech. We had a Doctor Who one that only covered Series 1-3 and I was impossible to beat. We also had a Friends one that covered all 10 seasons and I was extremely easy to beat.

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I thought I’d found Ian’s house, but there was no-one there. Just a cardboard box.

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It’s gold, you twonks

Yes, gold as a daffodil.

[Author]

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