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Yeah for me what we see in OOT was always future Starbug getting destroyed by timey wimey shenanigans caused by Rimmers heroics in destroying the drive. In my head that’s why there was no debris left behind – it’s not a ship being destroyed by a laser cannon, it’s a ship literally being exploded out of existence (or, indeed, time)

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I don’t think I’ve ever used them as a commentary personally – as Dave says the familiarity with the material means it’s not really necessary. The pips synchronisation is completely wasted on me! 

DwarfCasts on old DwarfCasts would be good – also I’d be up for revisiting the commentaries themselves, you’ve had 20 years to develop new thoughts on some of them! 

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I don’t believe that is the same skill as is involved with being an artist – I see it as more like coding 

I do get where you’re coming from, but speaking as someone from the software development industry I’d just like to clarify that the architecture, design, and development of good software requires a hell of a lot more knowledge, skill and, dare I say it, creativity than prompting AI does!

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I find it varies hugely by region/franchise.

Most of my train travel is either in and around South Wales or travelling to London for work. In Wales it’s predominantly using relatively new Transport for Wales trains which are really nice comfy seats, working power sockets and generally a very smooth ride! When I’m going to London it’s GWR Class 800 trains which are also really good (even if they do have the tendency to put the heating on too high for my liking!)

But on the odd occasions where I’ve made other trips around the country the quality of train has varied much more – I went on a Cross Country train to Birmingham recently and it was absolutely trash – dirty, slow, uncomfortable and generally felt like being back in about 1982! 

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I’ve never got the “it looks like a football score” thing. Loads of stuff is titled “Something #: Other Thing” and it’s never caused confusion 

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The Polymorph shows up a lot earlier than that, though. 

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Lack of audience doesn’t help VII for sure, especially when it doesn’t feel like it was properly made to accommodate that change. And I can fully understand how it has an impact on the casts performances – which I think is then exacerbated by the time jump since VI. There’s a world where you go straight from VI to VII and the cast handle it better because they’re still fresh off the back of playing those characters 6 years in a row – the absence of an audience would still have an impact but I’d imagine not as much as what we got in the end. (Not the episode)

Going back to the Emohawk discussion – I’ve always enjoyed the fan service of this more than many seem to. I don’t think revisiting old ideas necessarily screams “you’re out of ideas!” as much as some seem to – I think they use the call backs pretty well and that sequence of the episode still has enough good jokes for me to let any potential repetition slide. Ace preparing to snap Duane’s neck will never not be hilariously pitched to me. I’m a big fan of the opening ship crash and GELF sections of the episode so I’m carrying a lot of good will forward which helps. Also for the sake of accuracy – Duane doesn’t show up until minute 20 of a 28 minute episode so it’s not “half of the episode is just callbacks!!!” It’s not even a third! 

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Then in Metropolis Zone I start killing them all because every badnik in that level is a miserable fucking bastard and probably blindsided me the moment they came on screen.

Absolute state of the hit boxes on these pricks 😡

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“it’s just a pity he didn’t stay naturally healthy”

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Always really liked that Cat ship design, it’s much nicer than what we saw in The Promised Land. 

TPL is a goofiness that I can get behind, this is just too much for me. It’s up there with the US book cover for “interpreting something too directly” territory!

Overall though these have always been neat, something quite timeless about the art style that suits the show well

Was anything at all created for the planned remasters of IV and beyond or did it never get beyond the “vague plan” stage?

They might have backed themselves into a bit of a DVD cover style corner by committing to an idea that they then need to keep up longer than it has legs. I guess they’ve got more freedom to illustrate things beyond ship interiors/exteriors here and it doesn’t just have to show places that are home to the Dwarfers – series IV could have Ace’s ship and Justice world for example

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Valid, although IMO that is easier to suspend disbelief as it’s serving a joke that I enjoy, isn’t integral to the plot, and with some stretch you can argue a case for why they might have that outfit. Duane is a suppressed part of Cat’s personality, something that he has been trying desperately all his life to get away from, some part of him may have held on to those clothes. (okay, it’s not a great case but it’s something!)

In Stoke it’s a key plot point that Lister dresses up as a Knight to trick Rimmer into gaining confidence, the whole story relies on it happening so I think it’s not unreasonable to hold it to greater scrutiny!

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What annoys me really about Stoke is it relies on them somehow having a whole set of knight’s armour on board for Lister to play dress up in

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Not sure if it’s already been mentioned in here, but worth getting on this if you haven’t already: https://sonicmegamixmania.github.io/

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Chris’ Norm Holly impression is getting more accurate than ever

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Pfft, forget all that nonsense, get yourself some legitimate sci-fi “action”:


“The year is 2280. The Pink Dwarf stripclub is in orbit around Mimas, one of the moons of Saturn. The crew are all exotic dancers and we meet Deb Lister, who is caught by her Manager, Reginald Rimmer sucking off customers in the private booths! She’s sent to stasis for the rest of the ship’s tour without pay.
Three Million years later and Lister emerges from stasis and finds all the girls and the whole crew dead and Pink Dwarf adrift in deep deep deep space. Rimmer has been brought back as a hologram and there’s a mysterious lifeform on board.
After investigating they find Cat; a gorgeous feline humanoid who evolved from the ship’s pet. She seems overly friendly but that doesn’t worry Lister but as they start to get close, Lister discovers that Cat is hiding a very special secret between her legs.”

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Like Queeg 500, the Terminator numbers make them sound charmingly like they’re Amiga computers. The A500/600 were good for games, but for serious shit you’d want the A1200/4000.
Unless it’s just from cars or something.
Also, why wasn’t the second film called Terminators ffs?

We had an A1200 and whilst it was clearly a step up from the 500 it’s still a stretch to say it was what you wanted for serious shit. That thing (and the AGA chipset and later Amiga hardware in general)  was such a compromise compared to what Commodore originally billed it as being and was a large factor in why they fell behind from being in such a commanding position a few years earlier

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Maybe the cast listings are always this bad and I’ve just not be paying attention but there’s all kinds of fuck ups in there – Shend gets a double mention as Knot and Ackerman is so good he’s listed three times!

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I guess you could argue that the “Core Core” of Lister, Cat, Rimmer, Kryten is a significant part of 3 of those breakdowns which totals up at over three quarters of the entire run, so probably fair to say that the “boys from the Dwarf” have earned their status as “Core Cast”.

Additionally I think its important to consider the impact or involvement of those “beyond the core” in each setup. Hattie’s Holly remains my favourite iteration, but she was so poorly served for stretches of her run – there’s episodes where you could argue removing her and transferring the dialogue elsewhere would have negligible impact and therefore question whether she was truly “Core” to those experiences. I mean I haven’t looked into it but there’s probably episodes of VIII where someone like fucking Baxter or Kill Crazy has more lines in an episode than Hattie’s Holly does in some of her outings! 😢 (side note – looking at the TOS cast list of Series VIII has Baxter listed twice as Ricky Grover and Ricki Grover – I’ve never noticed before, was that a genuine fuck up in the show credits that they’ve maintained for authenticity or just a TOS fuck up?) You could say the same for other breakdowns too – Cat does fuck all in VIII, Kochanski is often on the periphery as well – you could argue that they aren’t “Core” at times

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Also, clearly it’s a “triple fried egg”, as in an egg that has been fried three times ala triple cooked chips 

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It’s 100% supposed to be about vomit, this is a hill I am very prepared to die on

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These must have been a fairly recent release then because I was in that store only a few weeks ago and don’t remember spotting them!

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I wouldn’t mind getting blipped if it meant missing all of series VIII to be fair

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Yeah, Ace’s ship locks on to holo Rimmer as a valid version of Rimmer in that universe, not his living self in the past.
The mechanics of Ace’s dimension jumping get weirder the more you think about them. The Wildfire can obviously time-travel as well as jump realities, and yet it chooses to take him three million years into the future where his counterpart in our reality is long dead and represented by a hologram, rather than to a much closer point in his timeline when he’s still alive.

I was thinking about the mechanics of the dimension jumping just the other day (yes I do live that much of a crazy, fun-packed life!) and yeah it definitely is weird in many ways. When we first see a jump in DJ it clearly fully “locks on” to Rimmer – the Wildfire appears to be trying to deliver Ace to the exact co-ordinates in space and time that our Rimmer is occupying, to the point where it completely crashes into Starbug. What would have happened if Rimmer just happened to be out for a stroll when Ace jumped in? Presumably the ship would have just squashed him flat! I wonder how many alternate Rimmer’s Ace just pancaked – probably explains why there were so many orbiting that planet, it wasn’t a long line of heroic Ace’s who had nobly sacrificed themselves, just a whole bunch of poor suckers that Ace wiped out!

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Why does a rejuvenation shower need a “returner remote”?

In case you didn’t like the rejuvenation.

Seems a stretch, surely you’d just use the interface on the shower itself, rather than needing some way to do it remotely? 

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Why does a rejuvenation shower need a “returner remote”?

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Her full name is actually Frank Pree

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Joking aside I love finding old receipts like this and having a record of a little moment in time, especially when it recalls a bygone era like Woolworths or Our Price or (now) WH Smith.
I always used to keep receipts, tickets etc. in my CDs, books, VHSs, DVDs, partly for that reason. Another reason to love physical media. Having an email receipt isn’t the same.

I love using receipts as bookmarks that I leave in a book when I’m done with it – then when some time I come back and read it again I get a little memory bite or whatever I was doing last time I read it! 

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Beggs the question what you’re going to make of similar creatures in a later series…

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Yeah whilst it gets away with it to an extent because the bit crap joke is actually one of the best bits of BtE, the prop is a joke. It’s just a laser range finder that they’ve made essentially zero effort to disguise! 

But yeah, what Lister whips out in Backwards does look suspiciously talcum powder-esque. I’ve always generously assumed it’s meant to be some kind of particle counter hence the aperture for material to enter it. Quite why he’d be using that to locate the others is anyone’s guess! 

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I actually think the brain scanner thing looks fine, at least compared to the TIV headsets.

To be fair yes it’s definitely not as bad as the TIV headset, but it’s still a bit clunky – I think it’s the little metal grill thing dangling off the front that really harms it for me – what the hell is that supposed to be for?!

Another one that pops into my head now is the series VII bazookoid:

It’s not necessarily shit in terms of the quality of it – there’s clearly a lot of love that has gone into it – but it just feels so crap compared to the series III “Mk 1” version

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Future Echoes is close to being the best of Series 1, only narrowly pipped by Me² in my view. A clever concept that is executed really well and milked for both its sci-fi potential as well as comedy *chef’s kiss*

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I don’t think it’s as deep as implying he’s the stuffing inside the chicken, I always just took it as “here’s a funny name related to chicken dinner that I can think of”

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I mean they were his milk rations so I think it’s reasonable that he has milk in the fridge – it’s not like it was contraband or something!

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So that’s clearly not a fridge that Lister is getting the milk out of to give to Frankenstein, so presumably he’s giving her UHT? Cats shouldn’t be given cow’s milk (or even dog’s presumably!) and so I’m fairly sure that UHT is definitely a no-no!

In fact, looking at the later shot of him giving the Krispies to Cat that’s clearly a fucking office cabinet acting as a wardrobe that he’s getting things out of!

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No, it’s Danny John-Jules who was playing some kind of a Dracula

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I think the inference is supposed to be that Kryten thinks Lister is playing around, doing a prank on him kind of thing.

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Do we have much clarity over whether it really was “Grant Naylor” in the back half of V? I’ve always assumed it was more Doug than Rob who got hist hands dirty with some early directing efforts, whilst Rob stood there chain-smoking and thinking about more ways to abuse and/or mutilate his characters.

I don’t think there’s ever really been a truly bad period for Dwarf when it comes to directing. Even though they chose to move on from her early there’s some beautiful stuff shot by Juliet May. Doug’s early work is definitely a bit rough – but then we know that BtE wasn’t what he wanted to be making and had so many compromises that it’s hard to be too critical of it – same with X really, Doug having to deal with the shit show that was in the background can probably help forgive any occasions where the directing felt weaker!

Ed was obviously incredible with what he achieved in the early days, though I think it’s fair to say his later stuff doesn’t really stand out as much – but then when the material was getting as weak as Krytie TV it’s hard to think of how a director could save it!

Not much you can say about De Emmony other than that he came in and did great work on VI – a consistently great looking series that gets excellent performances out of everyone and has some impressive technical achievements behind it as well

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That money is just resting in their account 

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Do we get clarification behind Lister’s designation in series 1 – “Lister RD 52169”?

“169” was obviously his crew registration, being the lowest ranked on the ship – which in itself is kind of weird when you think about it. Did everyone have to get a new number every time they ranked up? And those they overtook would need to get bumped down a number? Feel like that would get annoying! Or maybe you just get stuck with your initial ranking number as your registration for your whole time on board?

“Lister” is obviously pretty self explanatory.

But the RD and 52 bits seem the most curious to me. Most logical assumption for RD is that it’s just indicating the ship “Red Dwarf”, but I guess at a stretch it could be his initials? Maybe Dave isn’t actually his first name but his middle name and he just prefers to use it as his given name over whatever R stands for? (Hey, maybe he really was a Rob or Ros?!) Annoyingly he’s not identified as “Lister FD” as then he could be another Frank.

“52” seems most likely to be his date of birth? Pretty sure the accident happened in 2077 and he’s established as 25 years old so that would put his birthday as reasonably being in 2052? Before they retcon everything to 2 centuries later of course!

But then it seems slightly odd that if 52 is his date of birth and RD is the ship, why does it come in the order “Lister RD 52” – surely your date of birth is more relevant identifying information that the name of the ship you are currently registered crew on? Perhaps “RD 52” is the ship registration then?

Maybe I’m just bored and thinking about it too much!

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