Nick R

[Nick R]

5. In Meltdown, there are too many unrecognizable celebrities and historical figures nobody born this century will know (Stan Laurel, Noel Coward, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Abraham Lincoln, etc.), so we must CGI them out for AI recreations of modern stars. I leave the new choices to the whims of the director.

7. Cut out Mr Flibble he’s not funny, make him a Mr Blobby hand puppet instead because I know what that is which makes it funny.

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Doctor Who does Blade Runner meets Coronation Street

Dimensions in Time 2: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Corrie

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although it wouldn’t be the first time they equated spaceship mechanics with car mechanics for a gag. 

It’s technically early in the morning in the UK, so I’ll give you some Star Trek crap:

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“What’s your first?”

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Of course I don’t like any of Doctor Who. I’m a Doctor Who fan.

Footage of two Doctor Who fans having a discussion: 

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Something that really stuck out for me with The Devil’s Chord, at the time, was the incredibly ham-fisted contrivance Davies came up with to make a nineteen year old girl from 2020s London a Beatles fan. It felt like a pure, dated pop culture reference from a middle aged boomer.

The first Eleventh Doctor adventure game began with a trip to 1963 and Amy asking to meet John Lennon (but not Ringo):

https://youtu.be/nKFieaO1H8w

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Imagine there’s no Doctor Who

It’s so easy you don’t even have to try

No Beast Below us

Above us only Sky Silvestry

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@Doomitron

and Fugitive who never got anything to do besides appear randomly on the odd occasion whereas War at least had proper buildup and an entire special to build his myths with. We still don’t know where she is in the lineup because Chibnall ducked out of making her pre-Hartnell when everyone took up arms over it.

What did Chibnall do that went back on when the Fugitive Doctor fits in the Doctor’s timeline? From what I remember, she was introduced, then we got the Timeless Child revelation that seemed to neatly explain that she fits in pre-Hartnell. (Well, except for the minor inconvenient detail that her TARDIS was already a police box.)

After that, what did Chibnall do to change about her placement?

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Yeah I’m more interested in watching The Clone Wars, Rebels, Mandalorian, stuff like that. Andor too, apparently. I’m not passionate enough about Star Wars to the level I’ll read its tie-in books. Ask me again later, though idk

I haven’t watched any of the live-action Disney+ stuff, or the CG Clone Wars series (only the older Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars).

The only Star Wars thing I’ve watched on Disney+ is Star Wars: Visions. The anime seasons 1 and 3 are hit and miss, but season 2 contains three absolute standout shorts: Cartoon Saloon’s “Screecher’s Reach”, Aardman’s “I am Your Mother”, and Studio La Cachette’s “The Spy Dancer”. Those three are probably my favourite Star Wars things, in any medium, released since The Empire Strikes Back.

So I recommend those.

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Is this the first time neither Doctor Who or Star Trek were in production for television? Or have I missed something?

Well there was that brief period between 13.8 billion years ago and 1963…

There are still the upcoming final seasons of Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy in production and yet to get broadcast, and the BBC’s announcement of the Doctor Who Christmas special’s cancellation confirms that the CBeebies cartoon spin-off is still planned. So it depends whether you count those as extending “in production for television” for a little longer.

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Exclusive sneak peek at the first frame of the next episode:

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milk fiction

Is that like pulp fiction, but runnier?

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What if they’d had Holly on Kryten’s chest monitor thing, but atomically fused them as human beings

Like some sort of… gestalt entity?

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The biggest problem with Mechocracy is that the title is so close to M-Corp that I have to constantly make sure I’m talking about the right episode.
I still have to remind myself that Mechocracy isn’t TOWEK.

The Only Way [is] Everyone’s Kryten?

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I mean, yeah, but what you’re describing would be the Red Dwarf version of Itchy and Scratchy Land. I kind of want to see that just for how weird it would be.

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Filtering a more standard sitcom trope … through a sci-fi lens

Better Than Life: The characters take up a new hobby, but one of them turns out to be bad at it.

Meltdown: The characters visit a theme park.

Holoship: One of the characters gets a new girlfriend but is insecure about her career.

Krytie TV: The characters start their own TV show.

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I wonder if Chris Barrie’s next website update will include his thoughts on the recently-announced electric Ferrari?

Apparently it’s been a bit controversial among motoring enthusiasts.

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If you get that one, please let me know, so that I know my effort in making this stupid joke didn’t go to waste.

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Yeah, I imported the Blu-ray of Superman & Lois Season 2 from America, and when I opened the package the case literally fell to pieces in my hands. I couldn’t believe it.

Are you sure you didn’t just discover you have Kryptonian super strength?

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Actually, there should be way more animated Doctor Who stuff than there is. 

The CBeebies animated series still seems to be going ahead! The funny thing is, that announcement of the animation studio has probably given us firmer details* about that cartoon spin-off than we currently have about the future of the main Doctor Who series…

* Not to be confused with sexy details.

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I didn’t notice until waiting for gifs to load how the overlaid sparks go over the edge of the frame at the top.

Red Dwarf beat Ang Lee to it!

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Was he one of those toxic right wing weirdos who goes on about everything being woke? 

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Why was Kryten in such a hurry? Did Rimmer also give him a time table to get all these assignments done?

He didn’t want to obstruct Holly’s vision for long. Holly needs to see where he’s piloting the spaceship.

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I was born when the first few DVDs were being released,

Most of the people here: 

Professor Flibble:

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Are you sure you’ve exhausted absolutely all of your possibilities before you gleefully go for the “murder cat” option, you prick?

As much as they look and sound alike, Emohawk’d Rimmer is not Ace Rimmer!

Arnold has had certain negative emotions/personality traits completely removed by the Emohawk. Whereas Ace would still have access to those emotions, he just doesn’t act on them.

So we can’t look at what Arnold does in E:PII and assume that Ace would behave the same!

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May have been done.

The repetition of “You’re programmed not to kill” reminded me of this compilation: “And I’ve certainly never used it to take a life…”

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I don’t get his point about it being hard to explain to a child why ‘smeg’ is funny. It’s just a funny-sounding and distinctive insult that the characters use when exasperated, I don’t think it needs the smegma coating, so to speak, unless a parent really wants to go there. Did Jon Petrie know what it meant when he was 10?

I think he was probably making a joke, rather than genuinely feeling that it was awkward and necessary to explain its meaning.

But I agree with your point – you can enjoy Red Dwarf without knowing that “smeg” is short for a longer word with a rude meaning. You don’t need to know its origins any more than you need to know that the word “berk” has a rhyming slang link to a much stronger swear word.

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The BBC’s head of comedy is no longer interested in the sort of awkward children’s questions that Red Dwarf used to attract.

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Giv & Tāk

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OK, that’s enough of that. Let’s move on to shortened episode titles now: 

Apocalypse’s Gunmen

Cassie

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Universe Challenge, a Special Red Dwarf-Themed Episode of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s University Challenge, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’s Version of the American Quiz Show College Bowl

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Thanks for the Memory. Themory.

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That’s not very nice to say about Tracey Eddon.

She has an interesting list of credits! Star Wars, Bond, Mission: Impossible, Superman, Batman, MCU… and Red Dwarf and Doctor Who and The Brittas Empire and Waiting for God (the sitcom not the episode):
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0248866/

She was a stunt double for Carrie Fisher on Return of the Jedi. Now there’s a nepo baby!

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I can’t do this as a screenshot because it’s not from an episode. You know that bit in the Red Dwarf Night version of Smeg Ups, where Lister says the outtakes need to be hidden somewhere no one will ever see them, and Kryten suggests putting them on Channel 5 at the end of the 20th century?

Well, an updated version of that would be: “Suggest we place them on My5, sir, early in the 21st century.”

At least, that would have been an updated version a few years ago. Since then, Channel 5 have done a Channel 4 and given their streaming service the same name as the channel. So the latest updated version would be:

“Suggest we place them on 5, sir, early in the 21st century.”

… And that just sounds silly.

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Red Dwarf: Titan (Presumably Referring to the Largest Moon of Saturn, Not to the Figures from Greek Mythology)

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Me Raised to the Power of Two

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Peter: Part 2

Dear David

Kryten TV

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Sontaran Kryten?

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It’s already on there: https://smegadrive.ganymede.tv/episodes/61 

So it is!

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Lemons has all the silliness of a series VIII episode. Like the travelling to India joke, which you could contrast with the trips to Earth in Backwards and Back to Earth: both of those made jokes about the crew’s method of travel, but neither of them got quite as ridiculous as a time skip that glosses over walking thousands of miles.

The difference is that Lemons is like a series VIII episode done well. It has a similar kind of silliness, but IMO it’s funny enough to get away with it.

And even if it’s not necessarily much better than the average series VIII episode, it gets extra goodwill because it comes in a series that has the whole premise of going back to basics of “traditional” Red Dwarf, instead of one that made radical changes to the cast and setting like VIII did. So I give Lemons some benefit of the doubt that I don’t give to, say, Only the Good.

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IV was the most shuffled series and would make more sense in production order generally, especially with Kryten’s Meltdown subservience coming first.

There’s an idea for a full series rewatch: watch the episodes in the order in which they were originally recorded. Via John Hoare’s old episode orders article (https://www.ganymede.tv/2005/12/episode-orders-2/), and the unofficial archive for the Dave episodes:

The End
Balance of Power
Waiting for God
Future Echoes
Confidence and Paranoia
Me2

BTL
Thanks for the Memory
Stasis Leak
Kryten
Parallel Universe
Queeg

Marooned
Timeslides
Backwards
Bodyswap
Polymorph
The Last Day

Justice
Dimension Jump
Meltdown
Camille
White Hole
DNA

Here’s a mundane observation: if you go by recording dates, DNA is directly followed by D&A:

Demons & Angels
The Inquisitor
Holoship
Terrorform
Quarantine
Back to Reality

Psirens
Legion
Rimmerworld
Gunmen
Emohawk
Out of Time

And then for series VII, we could use recent revelations in the audience screening thread to try watching them in the order in which all the episodes were first presented for laughter recording. We know that the first three were:

Stoke
Ouroboros
Blue

… but beyond that, we’re not yet sure about all the others!

Then an appropriately chaotic order for VIII:

BITR 1
BITR 2
Cassandra
Pete 1
Only the Good
Krytie TV
Pete 2
BITR 3

Series X: as broadcast

Give & Take
Can of Worms
Krysis
Officer Rimmer
Samsara
Twentica

Siliconia
Timewave
Cured
Mechocracy
M-Corp
Skipper

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https://langui.sh/2026/05/04/ten-years-of-frinkiac/

Frinkiac and Morbotron have been updated with the help of AI (uh-oh) to add some useful things that all the cool TV series gif makers already had as basic features, like an episode browser by season, and fewer limitations on gif lengths.

However they’ve also increased the screenshot resolution and changed the behaviour of text sizes so that new Frinkiac captions don’t look the same as old ones. I haven’t tried it on PC yet, but on mobile, the new UI seems cluttered and maybe slightly overcomplicated.

But the result is that you can now use the sites to create horrifying monstrosities like these:

Imagine the sheer power that we would command if similar features were added to the Smega-Drive! It is probably fortunate for everyone that such a thing will surely never happen.

[Nick R]

[Author]

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