International Debris

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It turned into a jacket…?

The pencil sharpener in The Beginning.

Dinosaur bowel movement frequency tables.

Everything we’re saying is- bananas.

You’re finished.

Most of the cuts in the first half of Skipper.

And killed himself, twice. 

The cut-out guitar reveal in Fathers and Suns. 

Maaargh.

Divide your mass by your weight. 

Ainsley Hitler 

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The religion basically teaches cats to be like Lister who, at that point, had no real cares for how he dressed. 

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Why’s everyone feeding the troll?

For me: Yes, God? is a plus. The gap is a very weird moment without it.

Perhaps less controversially, the extended ending of Stasis Leak. It doesn’t reach quite the same crescendo in the original and that’s a shame.

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Personally I’d have stayed. It’s not a prison if you’re willingly staying there, and they’d have had a way better time than they would back on Red Dwarf.

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I mean if it was real, and the Cat still thought what happened with the Polymorph was normal sex…

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That’ll be because it’s written by Moonlight.

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The last episode I particularly enjoyed was the first post-Maddy one, Satan’s Chimney or something? Could not get into anything beyond that, and it felt like Renwick was out of ideas. Even the third series has some very out there concepts.

But those first three I do love. 

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I think one of the big reasons the more modern tech in the Dave era jars so much is the gap. If the show had gradually evolved over the space of 30 years, it wouldn’t have been such an issue, but there’s basically one particular version of the show, then a gap, then a very different looking version that’s come along after a number of huge changes in technology, so they end up feeling totally at odds with each other.

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Just in case the point hadn’t been made.

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If it’s not actively taking money away from the original artists, and the people doing it aren’t taking in a massive profit, and the quality is good, I have no ethical issues with it.

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Beat me to it.

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One of my favourite Red Dwarf jokes is from Last Human, when Lister is accidentally sent to someone else’s torture chamber in Cyberia – which for him is a paradise – and then receives an earnest apology from the GELF government before he’s redirected to his own. 

Dunno if this would be unpopular, but I agree, it’s the one part of the book that’s always really stuck with me. I found the idea utterly fascinating and absolutely hilarious.

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First time I watched VIII, “ok I’ll do it,” was the point I realised something was wrong.

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C’mon KT, get with it.

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Series VI: space weevil for dinner

Series VII: oh no, we haven’t got the right foil to roast a chicken. 

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I do think Stoke is a nice farewell for Rimmer, giving him the opportunity to become a better person. 

I also hate the whole Ace Rimmer, multiverse-travelling superhero thing so much. I don’t like Red Dwarf being an epic space opera, I don’t like the characters being anything other than just people who were unfortunate enough to end up their situation. So superhero Rimmer and Ouroboros Lister don’t appeal.

So I have complicated feelings about Stoke.

One thing I do know is that it’s a hundred times better than Tikka, which does not belong on a good episodes list.

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I think he should appear in Doctor Who and the Draculas.

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Let’s get this one out of the way first, shall we?

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How do you feel about the equivalent section of the book? Just curious

Doesn’t bother me as much because the tone of the books is very different. When I’m reading them I’m there for this bigger, darker version of Red Dwarf, whereas when I’m watching series 1, I miss the subtle camaraderie of the later series.

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I’m not sure whether the Big Meat one or plug-nose-Kryten is the scariest, but I am sure both are going to be in my nightmares tonight.

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For me, the bleakness of the first series is part of why it ranks slightly lower for me. I know a lot of people love that, and I do get it, but the antagonism between Lister and Rimmer, and Cat barely even being part of the plot, it’s so fucking cold that it just lies slightly outside what I love Red Dwarf for. I find the characters of Confidence and Paranoia give that episode a weirdly queasy feeling that makes it my least favourite of the first series, even if it’s definitely very creative with a lot of great gags.

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We’ve got terrible AI Lister and Holly II now, I wonder if we can complete the set by the end of the year.

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I mean, there’s also Bodysnatcher.

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It’s a very quick, handy way to change the story, especially in the Smegadrive. 

Part of me thinks it would have been quite a fun way to do it, bring back the plot from the first half. I think if it’d been done in 1993, people wouldn’t have been too upset. 

Especially if they’d found Red Dwarf in the centre of the stellar fog.

And then series 7 had been an eight part mystery series about who took the ship and why they surrounded it with unreality bubbles. Turns out it was Holly, who was annoyed at being almost entirely ignored for the previous year or so. 

Sorry, I’m getting carried away now.

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As someone who is both a beer and wine nerd, I tire of people with the “I’ve only ever drunk terrible stuff that tastes terrible, therefore anyone who claims to like it is pretending,” line. I would not spend this much time and money on stuff I didn’t actually like.

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Birmingham city centre was full of obnoxiously loud Villa fans this afternoon, it wasn’t fun.

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Most of them I haven’t seen, I really need to get around to watching Stath Lets Flats, been hearing good things for ages. I adore Derry Girls and think Inside No. 9 might genuinely be the best series the BBC has ever produced. Not my favourite, but in terms of maintaining an incredible quality over such a long time, covering such a huge range of styles and settings and ideas, it’s absolutely phenomenal. 

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Fantastic.

I think the general memes thread is probably the best home for anything that doesn’t suit a particular topic.

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I hear the breastfeeding was particularly dangerous.

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Hello, youngster, welcome aboard. 

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Looking forward to the first #notallmen, which is due any day.

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Every day’s a school day.

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Not necessarily – people do get treated differently based on their appearance. But yeah, the Inquisitor is definitely going for a nature over nurture perspective.

Maybe he’s just going to go and judge all the replacements once he’s done all the originals. “David Lister 2.0… fuck’s sake man, you’re still on Red Dwarf in deep space.”

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The wormhole time dilation is only relevant when one ship is on one side and one is on the other. When both ships are on the same side there’s no difference, but for the moments when they’re separate, it’s significant. If it’s a second on one side for a year on the other then even a few minutes is dramatic.

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Yeah, it’s interesting to ponder how far that idea got before being abandoned. It’s possible the idea was kept in in Gunmen as a way of reminding audiences, what with it coming directly after Legion and still being such a new idea.

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Pink Floyd after Dark Side of the Moon

Not uncommon. Dark Side is the last time they functioned fully as an equal band without everything becoming either Roger-led or Dave-led. When I was first getting into them I noticed there was something about the tone of the late ’70s albums that just felt a bit less like a unified band (I think it’s been commented on by at least one band member, too).

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VI tends to be seen as a high point or a low point of the bubble, I find. It’s definitely a low point for me. I still like it, there are lots of great gags and a few interesting ideas, but the running gags, the space action adventure format, the relative lack of character-led plots, the lack of pathos, it just doesn’t hold up in the way the earlier series do for me. 

Interestingly, the first time I showed my partner Red Dwarf, she assumed VI was the series after Rob had left because she thought it felt incredibly different and unfunny.

fwiw, it was the first series I taped and the one I watched most as a kid, but that’s not enough to stop it just feeling a bit… slight.

Doug Dwarf doesn’t have many sequels, but it has a lot of callbacks. Not that the bubble never referenced the show’s past, but it was very rare and usually just for a one-off gag. Doug Dwarf brings back/references:

The time drive, Ace, Kochanski, the Kinitowawi (twice), simulants (three times), the ocean moon with the Esperanto, Selby, Chen, Petersen, Hollister, the original bunk room (twice), the luck and sexual magnetism viruses, Duane Dibbley, future echoes, the Om Song, hallucinogenic squids, Rimmer failing his astro-navs, precognitive ship’s computers, Lister being his own dad, the post pod, Rimmer catching Lister “having sex with” a mechanical object, Justice World, multiple Rimmer’s being a bad idea, the Nova 5, Polymorph, Hitler being a character, Rimmer’s first kiss, Talkie Toaster, the opening scene of The End, everybody’s dead Dave, Hollister (again), and the Cat arks.

Not saying that every one of those is bad, but Doug’s era does it significantly more than the bubble era.

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Good Lord can we take the flimsy space fantasy franchise chat to a dedicated thread, I’m here to talk about good fiction like Pete Part 2 and Timewave.

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As someone who isn’t a huge fan of VI, I tend to agree with the idea that the breakup isn’t as simple as “if only Rob stayed and wrote VII it would have been great”. It’s certainly possible that they might have both shifted away from the monster of the week, running gag, low character focus / pathos route like Doug attempted with VII, but I do think all of that was at least partly because they felt writing to a formula was easier, which is definitely a sign of creative fatigue. If I had to make a guess based on absolutely nothing at all, I think their VII would have been better than Doug’s, but noticeably weaker than the rest, would have been the final series, and would be broadly remembered as one of those “they went on for one series too many” final series’, like One Foot in the Grave, 2point4 Children, Bottom, and a bunch of other ‘90s sitcoms are often accused of having (not inherently agreeing or disagreeing with those, just an observation).  

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What the fuck is Footquark?!

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Ta for the Memory

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Star Knot, For Some Reason

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The End of the Lives of Everyone on the Mining Ship Red Dwarf, Apart from David Lister, Who Was in Suspended Animation at the Time of the Accident

Kryten 2X4B 523P

A Leak, Right, in Stasis

Backwards Earth

The Last Day of Kryten 2X4B 523P’s Service

Peter: Part One

Fathers & Sons & Suns

Quantum Entangled

Kryten 2X4B 523P’s Mid-Life Crisis

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The difference between Run for Your Wife / Ishtar and FIFA / Murdoch is the former are mocking naff pop culture while the latter feel like they’re trying to make slightly more serious points. Saying a crap product is crap explains itself, even if you don’t know the product, but controversial events can lead the viewer to think “wait, what happened?” or “what did they do?”

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Dear Dave is a bit like Duct Soup for me, in that it’s going for character-led but ends up utterly dull. 

That said, it has my favourite joke in X, “it turned into a jacket?” so I can’t hate it like some do.

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