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I find myself agreeing with most of it (although saying things like “The Doctor does not have a character” feels needlessly provocative), but I definitely disagree with his point about there needing to be an authority figure like the Time Lords acting as a check on The Doctor, and the one about it being bad if “aimless wandering” is the only thing connecting the stories. As far as I’m concerned the show is at its best when the stories are standalone, and throwing in Time Lords seems like treating the symptom instead of the disease.

It’s all a bit like Graham Williams in 1977. He was worried that the Doctor’s status as a free agent made him morally ambiguous, so he decided to give the Doctor a boss and a job.

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“OK, which one of your chimpanzees did this?!”

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It’s his script for the 2026 Christmas special.

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I’ve considered getting into the X-Files, mainly for Duchovny who I really enjoyed on Twin Peaks. Any Peaks or David Lynch fans here?

The first season of The X Files in particular bears quite a strong Twin Peaks influence. Can’t say whether that’s a positive or a negative.

I’ve always pitched The X-Files to friends as ‘Dale Cooper and Clarice Starling look for UFOs’.

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The X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen
Just remembered I also saw Dean “Langly” Haglund do his ‘X-Files Improv’ audience-participation stand-up show at the Edinburgh Fringe around the time I Want to Believe came out, and it proved to be the better TXF event that year, even if it was just themed Whose Line Is It Anyway.

Amazingly, was talking to my manager about this today. Do you remember him stopping the show halfway through to pitch an icepack designed for keeping laptops cool?

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Sophie Aldred was 25 if it makes you feel even a little better.

And was Les Dennis’ mistress during her time on the show, to make it worse again.

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To add to the confusion, Rimmer – the church-going atheist, who considers believing in God to be preposterous, but also feels that everyone is entitled to their beliefs – also owns at least two Christian Rock albums.

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or “Lister is so gross even a Kryten is grossed out”
speaking of which, has Lister’s grossness ever genuinely made any of you feel sick? I don’t like that sneeze ironing thing he does in BTE and I hate that whole stuff with his teeth and the floss in Ouroboros.

The amount of times we see Lister sleeping not only in his clothes, but with his shoes still on.

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Well, that’s Ganymede & Titan out of the will.

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I prefer the funkier music Cat saunters out of the bunk room to, in Confidence & Paranoia.

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I actually think City of Death is the worst place to start. It’s often considered the best story ever (not by me, I don’t like it at all, but that’s for another time), and so it can set unrealistic expectations for what the rest of the series will be like.

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If they’re looking for theme tunes ideas…..

Surely they’ve just nicked the idea from Robbie’s Robot Carer in Viz.

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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.

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I always felt that The Clue of the Savant’s Thumb had such a whiplash with the character of Jonathan. That it felt sort of unbelievable that in his late forties, Jonathan would just give up on his life-long passion of devising magic tricks, sell off the windmill, and instantly become some high-powered businessman in Canary Wharf without any qualifications. They didn’t even give him a haircut to show he’d given in to middle-aged conformity, and it’s hard to imagine him brokering business deals with the company’s business partners in Hong Kong with his unruly hippie locks.

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It’s been rather interesting to me how similar Russell T. Davies’ statement is to Peter Cregeen’s press release about Doctor Who’s future in 1990:

We are looking for a format to keep Doctor Who on
our screens for the next ten years. This could mean using an independent
production company but as yet no tendering process has been instigated,
although several interested parties have come forward with their own proposals.

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I think as the years go by it gets funnier to see the Holly TV Cart (Or “Holly on a Trolley” if you like) in Series 2
It looks so silly that he has to be portrayed on a screen and that they have this rubbish little CRT TV on wheels in the 23rd Century. I’m just imagining out of shot there being a massive trail of extension cables behind.
It gets more charming the further away we drift from that era of tech

I can never not notice it when the cable pops up in Queeg.

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As much as they look and sound alike, Emohawk’d Rimmer is not Ace Rimmer!
Yes, but the Emohawk has turned him into an Ace even if he’s not the Ace. If Emohawk Ace doesn’t count, then neither should Stoke Ace.

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Just seen painted versions of those Cozmic Scale Models from the other year and I’m not sure they’re any better tbh.
(good paint job by ‘It’s An Ashton’ on FB)

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I didn’t get Ackerman’s “who fancies a kebab?” gotcha to Rimmer and Lister in Only the Good until I was old enough to go out drinking and understand the mouth-watering deliciousness of a greasy kebab bought from a grotty takeaway that’s still open at 1am.

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I’m wondering how well any of the other final lines to an episode would work as the title.

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“Doug has also written three best selling novels”
What’s the third one, besides Last Human and Sin Bin Island?

Half of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, and half of Better Than Life, adds up to one, I suppose.

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But how does that Rimmer even know of it? Rimmer clearly first heard it after he died.

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In the first two series he’s basically there to fill a gap, to stop it just being Rimmer and Lister bickering.

I’ve always like that Cat is at his most cat-like in these series. That he’s off happily doing his own thing, only turning up to interact with Lister or Rimmer when he wants food, attention or somebody to play with.

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When Lister is talking about his vibrator-using teacher in Queeg, I thought he was saying they went on a camping trip to ‘The Ganymede’ rather than ‘Deganwy’.

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What famous people have *you* annoyed?

Mitch Benn exploded at me on Twitter when I tweeted about never voting Liberal Democrat again after 2010.

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Who the fuck is called Nuke anyway

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I donated a load of old BTLs, think the first fifteen or so, to the fan club about ten years ago. Glad they were made available.

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When was the last time we saw Lister smoke a cigarette? I’m thinking The Inquisitor. If that’s the case, that’s a point in his favour for looking after himself better.

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I might be forgetting dozens of really obvious examples, but I feel like for all they make jokes that Lister doesn’t bathe and wears his underpants for six weeks at a time, they don’t really make jokes that directly state that he smells bad. Well, they sort of do, but it’s pretty much always about his used socks, and on like two occasions his breath. I seem to recall the reaction of Rimmer getting a whiff of armpit funk in Bodyswap but I can’t remember what scene it was and that’s the only moment I can think of that actually implies Lister smells bad and not just his socks or orange moon boots. I just got home and I have a bunch of free booze from work and that feels like a better use of my time than tracking down that scene in the SmegaDrive.

My main point is you’d think, as a 90s comedy for the lads, they’d make more jokes about Lister stinking up the joint that aren’t just about his socks.

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Outside of Red Dwarf, on Sin Bin Island he sounds keen on a TV or movie adaptation and said he would be disappointed if it doesn’t happen.

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I dunno, the smoke monster seemed to react specifically to individual characters’ memories. And he also almost killed Locke at first. Coupled with the fact that for the first few series  he was referred to as Cerberus and the island’s security system and things, as well as Ben revealing he can summon it, it feels like the generic villain he turned into later was totally different. I honestly believe the original idea was for there to be another big bad and the smoke monster would have played a more ambiguous role, but that changed somewhere down the line.

To be fair, the idea of the monster being a security system comes from Danielle Rousseau in Exodus, who isn’t playing with a full deck of cards, and has only her observations of the monster’s behaviour to base things on.

Ben does say later on in What They Died For that he believed now that the monster responding to his summons in The Shape of Things to Come was another manipulation tactic by the monster to trick him. Part of Ben’s character arc is that he wants to believe he is something special, when really he’s nothing of the sort. The monster feeds his ego by acting as his attack dog, meaning he’s susceptible to his command later on in Dead Is Dead to follow Locke’s orders, as penance for getting his daughter Alex killed.

What Ben doesn’t know at this point is that Locke and the monster are one and the same now, as he’s still under the impression Locke returned from the dead in Whatever Happened, Happened thanks to another miracle performed by the Island.

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Battlestar Galactica (’03) had a much-criticised but perfect ending.

Another example of the writers making it up on the fly. The opening titles teasing the Cylons having some grand plan was something thrown in by one of the producers as a dramatic hook, with no idea where it was leading. Same with the plotline with Helo and Boomer on Caprica. The intent in the miniseries is that Helo would have died after giving up his seat to Baltar, but a positive audience response to the character saw him return.

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It’s about spillage, and it has three eggs on it. No I will not reference the show to check.

And Holly was right to worry, given some egg yolk or sauce spills out and runs down Chris Barrie’s hand onto the floor.

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