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TAIWAN PHONY

Controversy erupts aboard the Dwarf when it turns out Kerry Shale isn’t even a bit Chinese-y.

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CELLULAR TIMEWAVE CAKE, WITH MINCING FROSTING

In 2045, a very old Doug Naylor decides to finally release the Red Dwarf Movie script but accidentally publishes an unfinished draft of a Series XII Cookbook instead.

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BACH TOO REAL, QUALITY

Due to a mishap with the AR machine, a perfect replica of Johann Sebastian Bach becomes part of the crew. Teaming up with Rimmer, he puts on the first good organ recital night the ship has ever had. Meanwhile, Lister and the Cat form a competing act called the Curried Pussies.

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#RedDwarf #Smegle 16/01/2026 

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#RedDwarf #Smegle 15/01/2026 

I was fairly sure it was Series III given the sweaty Kryten hand and a bit of Cat’s jacket but I just took a wild guess to get another square.

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#RedDwarf #Smegle 14/01/2026 

Having a few easy ones in a row is giving me that sinking feeling that I’d always get when you’re playing Doom and you find an area with loads of ammo and medikits just in front of a path leading to a big doorway.

Or in an old JRPG when you’ve been in the dungeon for a while and then you find a really big door with a save point in front of it. Yes, I need to save, but you’d only let me if I’m about to be clobbered by a boss.

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G&T is gay now? Finally, I can stop pretending the short haircut I tried last year was the result of a fire.

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I can’t be sure but Polymorph is the first episode I have a vivid memory of so I’m going to assume it’s the first one I saw in its entirety. It was also my favorite for many years.

I bought 1-VII and Smeg Ups / Outs on VHS back around 2018 and while I haven’t pulled them out a bunch it is very comforting to put the show on on tape. I never grew up with it that way but I did for plenty of other shows.

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I’m younger than all of you and American so my exposure was my dad renting through the entire series on Netflix back when they were only DVDs, circa summer 2007 (he’d first read the novels in the mid 90s without realizing they were based on a TV show and then caught a few episodes on PBS over the years). I vaguely remember seeing the “Hol rock” bit from Series II but at some point in Series III, definitely by Polymorph, I started actively watching with him and I got really into it. I don’t remember which episodes I saw and didn’t see the first go around but I know I missed some here or there. I went and stuck Series 1 on the queue after we got through VIII and then my dad decided to just start getting me the DVDs rather than have my clog up the Netflix queue renting the entire show a second time. I first got Series 1 and IV together. I don’t remember the overall order but the last one I got was VII, which had achieved a sort of mythical status in my brain as a result of having to wait for it. I had also missed Duct Soup the first time around, making it the last original BBC episode for me to watch.

I went through a phase where VII and VIII were my favorites for which I apologize. I also got a copy of Bodysnatcher before they all burst into flames. I feel like I was watching just those original 52 shows with no sign of a return for years but realistically Back to Earth was airing within a year of me having collected all eight original series. 

I feel like I “grew up” with the Dave era in a deeper sense than I did with the BBC shows just because I got those in essentially one big block while I got to see new episodes airing every few years from age 13 to 24. Every cycle I was following or participating in the online discourse at G&T which made it all the more exciting. I’m more attached the original BBC episodes obviously but the Dave episodes have a special place in my heart because the online space here was such a big part of my life while they were on.

Come on, GNP. You gotta manage one more special. I wanna ride the hype train one more time.

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#RedDwarf #Smegle 13/01/2026 

This really needs to go in the threatening frames thread after the day is over.

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I asked Grok to write an episode of Red Dwarf and it began generating illegal pornography en masse, interspersed with diatribes about white genocide. 

I’m kidding but I think we are well past the point where “I asked AI to write something and look at the crazy results” is still fun. Using it for a joke is still using it.

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There is a Corgi Blue Midget (VIII style) under my bed in its original packaging. It’s like 6 inches tall.

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Was posting on Bluesky about how Erich von Däniken (who just died, and co-wrote the ur-text of ancient aliens, Chariots of the Gods?, with a literal card-carrying Nazi propagandist) and the entire resulting ancient astronauts community are foundationally cryptofascist and now I can’t stop thinking about the quote. You know the one.

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Chris Barrie looks like he’s wearing a mask of his own face.

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I once lived with someone who showered once a week and ended up with a literal pile of dirt around the chair he always sat in

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I mean, to be fair, Infinity has that whole passage about how he actually started taking care of himself while she was dating him.

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It’s weird existing in fandom spaces online for decades and watching the ebb and flow of different eras of a franchise fall in and out and possibly back into favor over the years.

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In a few months we’ll be further from Back to Earth than Back to Earth was from Series V. I’m having a midlife crisis over turning 30 in March so I don’t see why anyone else should be having a good time.

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Expecting me to remember Series VII quotes is cheating.

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I feel like Series X isn’t subtle enough to not basically turn the whole thing into a multiple Rimmers episode if that was the intention. 

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I think Polymorph would be in the running for weirdest episode if VIII and Timewave didn’t exist.

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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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I’ve posted older WIP versions of this meme on the forum before but I finally got around to publishing the version I decided was the final cut. Make sure if you use the player here to turn the video quality up because it’ll default to 360p and nuke the framerate.

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Season 2 had a lot of cool stuff but it took absolutely fucking forever for the plot to move.

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And exactly zero of those appearances are the actress in the picture.

If you’re just going to collage random Google Image results, maybe save yourself the Photoshopping and just use this:

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Why is Kryten not there but Kochanski is?

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I also used to really love 24 as a teenager, and on recently rewatching the first two seasons I found that the show holds up significantly worse than The X-Files once you get further than about the first 13 episodes. But I’d almost guessed that just based on my memory of it. They have one strong, cohesive 13 episode season and then get picked up for 11 more episodes to complete the season at which point the show starts forever spinning its wheels to pad to the required episode count.

Season 2 felt like in many episodes basically nothing important happened and then suddenly they cliffhanger-bait you right at the end with a missile hitting Jack’s plane or something so you HAVE to tune in to the next one to see what happens. It takes like thirteen or fourteen episodes to build up to the best episode of the entire show, but even given that it is the best one it doesn’t feel worth the padding I had to sit through to get there.

I started season 3, got bored during the first episode and stopped watching. It didn’t feel worth the time investment even for nostalgia. There are better thriller shows I could be watching.

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Do you have the same affinity for 2010s X-Files, or is that just too mediocre?

There are a couple really fantastic episodes in the revival, but a fair bit was middling and basically everything Chris Carter wrote – over a third of the entire revival – was absolutely irredeemable garbage (but I will defend Mulder tripping on mushrooms because I was high the first time I watched the episode and therefore very receptive to a trip sequence).

Darin Morgan and James Wong seem like the obvious MVPs of both seasons. The robots and the ageless mediocre TV star organ harvesting episodes were also very good. I especially resent James Wong writing a good mythology ep in the middle of season 11 to bridge the absolutely abysmal Carter-penned My Struggle III & IV, because it made me care enough about the story arc again to be disappointed by the finale after I completely checked out coming off the premiere. Season 10 had caught me at the last possible time I could’ve unironically embraced bad Chris Carter writing (I was 19), especially when fueled by excitement for the show’s return, and I’d grown up a little by time 11 came out.

Then when I started rewatching the show in full in 2022 with a friend who’d never seen it (we finished a few weeks ago, thanks for asking), I started to notice a lot of the pretentious, melodramatic, convoluted qualities that pissed me off about My Struggle III and IV on first viewing were present throughout the series’ myth arc, even early on. It’s just that they were in far better crafted episodes.

I also noticed Fox Mulder is a fucking maniac.

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Yeah, Lost was a kind of one-off cultural event, everybody had strong opinions on it even if they hadn’t seen it. One of the reasons I’d never recommend it to people is that, by missing out on that stuff, they’d be losing half of the fun. My dislike of the ending is absolutely proportional to how much I loved watching it as it aired. Sharing theories online, the insane excitement every week as you downloaded it in the early hours of the morning to watch it the second it went out in the US, the official podcast, the whole ARG they built around it in the earlier seasons, knowing the season is going to end on a ridiculous cliffhanger and still getting enraged by it. I’ve never had so much fun watching a TV show, even though there are plenty of objectively better shows that I’ve watched. 

Varying degrees of flawed as the run was, this sort of reasoning is a lot of why Dave era Dwarf means so much to me. The BBC series ended when I was a toddler but I was there, online, for the whole revival. Headfuck Monday, the completely unexpected announcement of two new series, the opening titles shot-by-shot analyses, the debate over whether Chris’s awful Series X wig was a wig, the crippling disappointment at Timewave. There was arguably more to the experience of getting new episodes in the build-up and discussion than there was in literally watching them.

Having experienced the original eight series pretty much in one big block before I was in really active in any online Red Dwarf spaces, a big bag of 52 shows that had seemingly always been there, I feel like I “grew up” with Dave Dwarf in a sense that I didn’t with BBC Dwarf. I don’t feel more attached to it than BBC Dwarf, but I feel attached in a different way.

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I would make the argument it would be easier to sell Red Dwarf as a nostalgic franchise to resurrect in 2026 if it hadn’t been producing episodes throughout the past two decades that wore down the initial novelty of getting new material.

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Another thing I don’t get about the Lost hate (and I’m not referencing anything said by any particular person in this thread, just in general) is the idea that there’s anything wrong with making it up as you go along, regardless of whether those storylines resolve in a satisfying way or not (and there were certainly some strands that were just outright abandoned). 

Since I brought this up, I want to clarify that I was more referring to something that feels like the writer is just making it up without any idea where it’s going, as opposed to the literal way it was written. Because I don’t think stuff that’s more discovered in the actual process of writing than meticulously planned ahead is going to inherently feel like that kind of narrative bullshitting. I’ve seen this style of writer described as a “pantser” (as in, “writing by the seat of your pants”, an expression I can only assume does not translate for any of you), and I would very much say I fit that mold myself.

I think the X-Files is very good at pantsing its lore in the early seasons. I never saw Lost but if I watched it in the early 2010s on Netflix or something like I did The X-Files I probably would have become a diehard fan.

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Back to Earth feels a lot better in a full series rewatch because you just sat through VII and VIII.

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The rebel aliens and Scully’s kid two parters from season 5 are some of the best myth arc stuff, I decided upon rewatching the show in the last couple years.

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Ignoring that those are some of the best episodes of the show (unless you meant the bad ones specifically). I see it as a different enough show after the movie that I don’t let its sins tarnish the earlier stuff, as with Red Dwarf.

I was more meaning that early on it seems like it’s building up all the pieces of this grand mystery that will all come together when the truth is finally revealed and it’ll blow your mind, but then you slowly realize the further you get into the show that they’ve just been tossing random cool ideas at the wall with no plan.

But that’s also me speaking as someone who first watched the show when I was a teenager and hadn’t much experience with serialized drama or mystery box shows before. I took this show start to finish dead seriously when I first watched through it, but now I appreciate the intrinsic cheesiness it can have alongside the genuinely good stuff.

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I still don’t forgive morwen for editing the deleted scenes back into Krytie TV and then making me watch it. Somehow, the bits that go on way too long are actually edited down in the broadcast episode.

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Every time I hear people talk about Lost they make the show sound like what would’ve happened if The X-Files was just the wanky convoluted lore episodes that half the fanbase encourages newcomers to not even bother with.

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Quinn, you are hereby stripped of your Clochebusters World Champion title. Please return your sash.

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We just hit 1500 posts on this thread, which I feel speaks volumes.

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Yeah, eat shit, Utah. You’re only good for the floatiest water in America and test driving rocket cars.

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This is the new Cinzano Bianco isn’t it?

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This thread is more for complaining about doors.

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No, that’s adding extra steps after delivering a non-ambiguous punchline. Give me some credit here.

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