Moonlight

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I’d like there to be six good episodes instead of five good episodes and one crap episode.

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Why do they keep offering actual dates, only to give us the same couple quotes about how they’d love to do more? Every single time.

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“Brylcreem it’s called” was funny to me in 2001 because my brother had a tub of Brylcreem on his desk at the time. But that was the last time I ever saw a tub of the stuff so I wonder how many people watching for the first time today will get the joke.

The real question is why they choose to follow up the line by explaining the joke for the audience, in case they didn’t get it.

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Butter chicken with rice and naan is fucking delicious, and you need it all in your mouth at once.

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I bet if Lister hadn’t survived the radiation leak, Holly’s protocol would have been to trigger the self-destruct, to ensure that no other people would try to approach the ship and die from exposure to the radiation.

Explode the ship, sending radioactive material flying in every direction instead of keeping it contained in one spot. How safe.

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BACK TO BIRTH

Lister is pregnant again! Can Rimmer perform the C-section while drunk off his arse? Meanwhile, Cat and Kryten go head to head in a tap danceathon to the death.

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I’m almost tempted to say I’d like to see more CGI than models in XIII, given how iffy the models have often been in XI/XII and how fantastic the CG has been.

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No, that’s a significant piece of evidence to support the fact that we have absolutely no idea what a Red Dwarf multi-parter would be like if it was developed and written with the intent of running two episodes, and was produced as those two episodes without any absurd limitations (i.e. Back to Earth) or artificial extension necessitating painful padding (i.e. Back in the Red and Pete).

Red Dwarf’s multi-parters have been historically subject to ridiculous production problems that did major damage to the quality of the final product. You cannot tell me that you know a two-part Red Dwarf story that didn’t suffer any of those problems would automatically be terrible just because it runs for longer, ESPECIALLY considering how some of the best Dave era episodes suffered from having too many good ideas to adequately explore in 28 minutes.

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I never said it was a good idea, I said it would be a fun novelty.

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So it was a gay polymorph? That should’ve been the plot of Timewave.

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well the multipart stories we had so far haven’t been great.

I’ve never found the common “Red Dwarf doesn’t do multi-parters well” argument to be very fair, considering that Red Dwarf has never done a multi-parter that was intended to run the number of episodes that it ended up running.

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Actually I would love to see that, if for nothing else than the novelty.

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Dave is no longer interested in the audience Red Dwarf used to attract, but is incredibly interested in the audience Red Dwarf currently attracts.

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Is there any good reason why we can’t just show things in their original framerate at this point? The whole speeding up and slowing down is ridiculous, and the fact that they don’t even lock the audio pitch is downright pathetic.

Besides, if you’re altering from 25 to 24 fps, wouldn’t it make far more sense to just chop out the extra frame instead of screwing around with the speed? The loss of a single frame per second is a negligible difference.

But again, why not just use the goddamn original video?

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Anyone who still thinks “Saddlesore Galactica” is the worst episode ever clearly stopped watching after “Saddlesore Galactica”.

Or the non-Halloween episode with Kodos and Kang.

This one wins the money for the worst ever episode, in my opinion. Not even the wackiest excesses of Season 12 were as divorced from every single principle the show was built on.

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I like it when the vampire talks about clothes.

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The BTE set used frame blending, which is a crime.

I may be talking out of my ass, but wasn’t BtE back during first generation Blu-Rays, which were all interlaced because the first generation players weren’t powerful enough to do 1080 progressive?

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I _thought_ the show’s theme music sounded weirdly low pitched.

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I said Starbug like five times in that post and I feel like I need to apologize.

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I’m bothered by the idea that the wind tunnel is inside Starbug. I don’t care how much Starbug has expanded, it could still fit inside that tunnel. And why would Starbug have that stuff on its inside?

Really, VII treats Starbug as being Red Dwarf and Starbug at the same time.

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DIRE DAVE

After a Polymorph sucks out his taste, Dave claims that season six of 24 isn’t the show’s nadir. Can he be saved by an emergency dose of season 2 with Kim Bauer edited out? Meanwhile, Si decries the thread for devolving beyond what he thought previously possible.

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I just saw “Can of Worms IV: White Hole III: Rimmerworld Squared” recorded at Pinewood.

It…

Uh…

I enjoyed the lighting gantry above the studio. Very metallic.

The Dave era Smeg Ups special is something I’ve wanted for ages. Seems such an open goal!

You mean we could get more than five minutes of them?

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Because half of the reason why Lister finds kissing Rimmer disgusting is that Rimmer is a man and Lister is hetero. If Lister had dreamt about kissing a hypothetical female colleague who he wasn’t attracted to, his emotional reaction would have been more like “Huh, that was weird”, not the classic horrified-waking-up-from-a-nightmare-in-a-cold-sweat reaction.

But Rimmer is not just a colleague Lister isn’t attracted to. Rimmer is Rimmer. If Lister was a woman, you’d expect an identical reaction from dreaming of kissing Rimmer. Them both being men definitely affects the viewer reaction to the scene, but the humor inherent in giving those two specific characters a kiss exists independently of it.

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– The Lister/Rimmer kiss (‘gay panic’ undertones aside).

I don’t think you have to read any gay panic undertones into the idea that kissing Rimmer is disgusting.

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XIII

It’s all CG now. Yeah, seems like we should’ve done that three years ago. Live and learn.

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IDENTITY WHIPPIN’

Low Rimmer stars in his very own episode! A naughty waiter must be shown the error of his ways when he delivers the tomato soup cold, so Low Rimmer kidnaps the waiter and chains him in a dungeon to whip him within an inch of his life. Hilarity ensues when it turns out that’s not all he was planning to do.

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Me3

After responding to “me too” with “me three”, Lister is beaten to death with police batons.

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Did none of you read the back of the case? Obviously Series X was the last series before BtE and the Dave era.

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BLADE TO EARTH

A bunch of G&Ters insist you can’t follow Back to Earth without watching Blade Runner first, even though the only difference it makes is being able to spot which bits are also homages to the film.

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ACE HOLE

Ace Rimmer competes against Snacky in a game of miniature golf for the title of King of Space. Meanwhile, Lister writes his senior thesis on Rimmer’s twatitude.

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That’s it, I’m going to find Ed Bye at Dimension Jump and tell him I’m never listening to DwarfCast again!

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I would actually consider buying Red Dwarf on Blu-Ray, but only because I’ve managed to lose disc 1 for Series I and V.

If they crop it into 16:9, I’m going to set myself on fire outside GNP.

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YOU KNOW THE QUESTION, HE KNOWS THE QUESTION, WE ALL KNOW THE QUESTION

Was Chris Barrie wearing a wig?

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I think they should hire Chris Veale to recreate Series I in CGI.

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What the fuck was Todhunter’s job, anyway?

Being gay?

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BEST GUESS

Kryten figured it out.

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Just seems unlikely than the engine intake would be half as long as the ship, fictional spaceship or not.

Based on what?

If the intake of hydrogen is the fuel source for the ship, seems to me you’d want the ramscoop as big as you can possibly build it.

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The color grade will either make it look basically fine, or absolutely horrific. Unfortunately the latter is the standard nowadays.

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TIMESLAVE

Lister gets into bondage.

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The cone maybe could work being that big if the ram scoop was smaller. It was never so massive on the OG Dwarf, maybe a scale down (Doug can fire up his 3D printer) would bring some balance back.

Who needs balance in space? I encourage spaceships to distribute their weight weirdly instead of looking like planes or boats.

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KRYTIE QVC

Rimmer stays up all night ordering necklaces on the telephone.

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It’s the nose cone that looks ridiculous, it’s like half the length of the rest of the ship.

Personally, I adore this. It gives the ship a wonky vibe that doesn’t look like anything else, whereas the full Remastered ship is just Red Dwarf made to look like a generic sci-fi spaceship.

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The lighting still gives it away as obvious CG, although simply dulling the red and having some light reflection in the surface elevates it far above Remastered’s oversaturated, completely matte textures.

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He’d probably be all “THA BLEEEW MIJIT IS LODED.”

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Grob Dougler.

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Because it can’t be erased from memory and it’s existence has repercussions for the rest of it.

But how is the show not better off just ignoring it and moving on? Series VIII dug the show into a hole, so what would be gained from actually watching it climb back out that isn’t already accomplished by just skipping ahead to when it’s already there?

I mean new fans could literally skip over the worst season of the show and miss nothing important. That’s kind of wonderful.

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and from the bits that I’ve seen I like that it’s prepared to be silly and comedic rather than taking itself too seriously (see: Sonic Underground).

There is a huge middle ground between being too serious and being so focused on silliness that you don’t even try to write decent plots or characterization.

I think maybe it works better as a kids’ show than a show for adult Sonic fans.

The writers of the show have made it very clear they feel it’s a sophisticated cartoon for all ages, and that’s why I’m so harsh about it. It gets very unearned high praise, and because I know so many people in the fandom I was always stuck on the periphery of a circlejerk of adults in their late ’20s touting it as one of the smartest cartoons on TV. People who are WAY too old to be impressed by base-level meta humor that was already being far outdone by shows like Animaniacs when they were little kids. And Animaniacs never explained the punchline to you.

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I decided I didn’t want fans of my work being able to hunt down everything I do online.

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VIII should be erased from existence and memory

Then why are you frustrated that the show is pretending it never happened?

[Author]

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