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[well, at least there’s no need to debate their choice of a Young Ones episode…]

going season by season the best/most representative episode candidates would, I think, be:

1: Future Echoes/Balance Of Power

2: Queeg
3: Polymorph/The Last Day

4: Justice/White Hole
5: Quarantine

6: Psirens

7: haha, no, really, stop

8: taking the smeg

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Quarantine, Holoship, then the console lights gave me the scene. Watching it only yesterday probably helped! 

13/10/2022 

Given that it’s not only among my favorite Rimmer one-liners, but one of the all time sarcastic rejoinders I cite as Reasons Why I Love British Humor In General, a bit surprising it actually took me 3 guesses

even after correctly IDing the season in 1

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This does raise the question of how Kryten knows anything at all about the Doyle boys childhood, and whether it could have really been all that normal of a childhood if one boy ended up a homeless junkie and the other a fascist dictator.

Well, that’s the clue, isn’t it. “Bleedin’ clue, you twonks!” as guest star Timothy Spahl might say.

That’s the hint that the “it was all just a game” sequence is the hallucination.  They still really are who they are, not the “players” they think they are, and Kryten is still the infodumper who understands the situation, and they accept his explanation of it.

Dream logic doesn’t fall apart while you’re in the dream, you keep rolling with it.

Like the premise of Back To Reality, and love to cling to the idea of their Character Objectives in the game being meta-commentary on, or promise of, what they’ll strive for in future seasons and how their stories will conclude when Red Dwarf does it’s final farewell episode/special.  Don’t like that it’s FemHolly’s swan song, but at least she saves everyone’s butt one last time before riding into the sunset.

[Holly’s also a highlight in Demons & Angels, with the Rude Alert sequence and her blink-and-you’ll miss-it Siouxsieesque Low Form]

Back half of 5 is among my favorite bytes, even before Quarantine — ESPECIALLY that line where Cat’s the astute one and immediately recognizes the threat posed by cabin fever — started hitting real different in the last couple years.  “The Luck Virus” feels like a clever parody of the way heroes in every show always manage to get the lucky break that lets them escape the trap and save the day at the end, leaning into Magic Bullshit by openly copping to it.

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Why haven’t they started with Petersen, Chen, Selby, Kochanski, even Hollister?? Harrison feels like a prototype VII Kochanski.

Well, presumably there’s still that second copy of Rimmer where Kochanski is supposed to be.  Perhaps Holly still can’t [won’t?] find where Rimmer hid the Kochanski disk/file, nor will Rimmer ever surrender leverage by divulging where he stashed her

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I always got the impression that McIntyre’s rank/position was something to do with manifests (since he has an archive of all the times Rimmer’s reported Lister) so he might have been able to requisition the holowhip directly and not go through Todhunter and/or the Captain at all.

Yeah, Lister’s threat in Holoship implies the holowhip is something more or less like a lightsaber, a “real” handle for a human to hold onto and a hologramatic whip tail that holograms could touch and be touched by.  Though the one we actually see in Demons & Angels would have to have the reverse polarity of that in order for Low Rimmer to wield it against Lister.  [Again, having to write around “Rimmer can’t touch anything” must’ve really been becoming a pain in their ass by this point].  I guess there’s either two variations of the tool that both bear the same name, or there is some way to switch modes

[Stabbim]

All in all, today’s been a bit of a bummer, hasn’t it sir?

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Holly becomes less and less of a factor as Kryten takes over the exposition role over time, so it’s nice that White Hole was about Holly (also, the one and only time Holly calls Rimmer a Smeghead)

Adore the Bondian “Take My Breath Away” knockoff, it’s by far the superior Ace Rimmer theme.

Noel Coward’s reaction to being shot just always gets me.  I don’t know why.

Yeah, this is a strong Best Byte contender to be sure.

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– Taj Mahal, Elephant Man, Ripleys’ Believe It Or Not, Iranian Jird… that’s a lot of references from the Cat. I can buy him chilling out and binging some Flinstones, a Tales Of the Riverbank boxset perhaps, but some of them are a little incongruous. Guess it’s a case of “we really like this joke we’ve written, it will sound funniest coming from Cat (or we need to give Danny some more lines)”. The idea of him watching enough American football to reference specific teams though…

– “that has been accounted for” I guess if it works for BTL, sure, why not. Handwave City.

Well, Cat skewing American is only natural given the original character concept is more or less rooted in a James Brown impression.  And after all, the show is full of little background hints that it’s set in a future the UK and US are a much more culturally cohesive entity; at minimum there’s formal economic union (the “Dollarpound” currency), Lister’s Zero-G Football posters strongly suggest it’s a hybrid sport, Red Dwarf itself having an American captain and a predominantly British crew.

I only recently caught/remembered that Cat also references the American legal code in Justice:  when Lister’s on the stand and Kryten asks him under oath if he considers Rimmer a friend, Cat shouts encouragement to “take the 5th”

[It helps that Danny John-Jules’ American voice is completely convincing even to a native ear.  Hugh Laurie on House, for example, is good but I can still tell he’s a British actor doing an American voice. I would have believed John-Jules was an American until I first heard him in interviews and out of the Cat character.]

as for “That has been accounted for!” Well, LOL.  At this point you can really tell that Rimmer’s intangible nature was becoming more and more of an albatross in the writing room.  Destined to happen, really, the further the show got away from its original set up, and particularly the abandoned Plan A of Holo-Kochanski coming online (wherein you’d figure Lister’s inability to touch her would’ve been the crucial dramatic and comedic cog for Series 2).  It’s a bit remarkable they were able to hold off on giving Rimmer a de facto body until Series 6.

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I forever love the ridiculousness of the bit in Justice where the simulant first gets loose, hears Holly on the monitor, shoots at her, and Holly ducks.

Even though she doesn’t need to and shouldn’t really be able to.

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oh, and since I mentioned in the Refresh For The Memory thread about Stasis Leak:

the reason why the Stasis Leak future never happened is because: as much as Lister wants to reunite with Kochanski and return to earth, over time he is increasingly unwilling to consign Cat (and now Kryten as well) to oblivion to do it. Especially Cat, since Lister already feels guilty about the suffering Felis Sapiens has endured on his account [the Holy Wars over hat color, etc].  You will notice, after all, 3 Listers and 3 Rimmers show up at the very end, but only one Cat and one [Stagehand] Kochanski.

Yes, even though Cat and Kryten are acceptable collateral damage for Lister in Timeslides.

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the concept of “canon”, with all the religiosity it implies, was a terrible development for fandom.

and one of the reasons I like Red Dwarf so much it’s tradition of having a healthy disdain for that sort of thing, unafraid to change the details of the backstory when a better idea emerges and generally telling continuity to Sit Down And Shut Up when there’s a really good joke to be told.

That being said…

The process by which JMC crewmembers are added to the hologromatic archive allows their files to be constantly updated and “refreshed” — the Dream Recorder may be involved, or it may just be a similarly functioning system — so that any crew member who has to be revived as a hologram can pick up right where they left off.  Original Holo-Rimmer, for instance, seems to remember his own death first hand.  So the program’s running all the time, on everyone. THUS, when Rimmer leaves as “Ace” in Series 7, his file updates to whatever truncated version of the Hologram Projection machine is running on Starbug, until “Ace” hops dimensions or travels out of ping range to the machine and can no longer send updates.  So, BTE and onward Rimmer is a “new” Hologram but at some point the files for 1-7 Holo-Rimmer and the file for Series 8 living Rimmer were patched into the “new” hologram — a process that would be relatively easy as implied by the memory patch in Thanks For The Memory. Rimmer’s died 3 times (The End, Timeslides, Only The Good) but all the files are merged into One Rimmer going forward.

Annett-Kochanski got back to her original dimension somehow. 

Is the nanobot-resurrected crew officially listed as dead in BTE (haven’t seen it) or are they just written out?  Because the escape pods they fled in don’t really have much point in being there in the first place unless they had some “automatically take you to the nearest S-3 atmosphere” feature that escape pods in other episodes have, and thus have the ability to actually “save” the fleeing crew instead of just merely forestall the inevitable.  So I’d like to think they eventually relaunched the human race on some random breathable planet 3 million years in the future and, since, since it was Lister (through Kryten)  who brought them back to life in the first place, this means Lister is once again accidental Creator-God to a species.

Or maybe BTE explains the pods were crap and they’re all dead again, because Lister is supposed to be “the last human being in the universe” after all. [But Lister rebooting humanity and “turning out to be God” as prophesied by Timothy Spahl in Back To Reality is funny.]

Speaking of which, I want their “win conditions” in the Red Dwarf Game from Back To Reality to be a hint/spoiler of how they really end up whenever Red Dwarf does it’s final final episode.

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What’s Lister on about here? 

He’s trying to draw her attention away from the registry so he can get Kochanski’s booking info himself, possibly even nick the registry so he can search for it at his own pace.

He’s trying to distract the receptionist by shouting about an amazing sight.  This wouldn’t have been too long after the most recent sighting of Haley’s Comet, so “hey! Look! Haley’s Comet!” jokes would’ve still been a thing that was somewhat fresh in their minds. Presumably, on Ganymede a good glimpse of the sun itself would perhaps be a relatively rare/special enough thing to work the same way.

Watch the way he points up at the sky/away from the desk.

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Polymorph is the first time the four of them gang on up on a common enemy, but it’s kinda anti-climatic and the team effort only begins near the end of the episode.

The Last Day is the first of the “Boys From The Dwarf” type episode that we’ll eventually see so much of in Series 6 where they feel like they’re teaming up as much by choice as by being required to by circumstance.

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  – Is the common distaste for Ruby Wax’s bit based on her wider career or personality, like the James Corden episodes of Doctor Who? I don’t see the problem.

no problem with her, I’m just eternally said it couldn’t have been Graham Chapman in that role like they originally wanted.

like the BTL novel says, there’s seven parallel universes, and ours is the crap one.

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Backwards
I was never too fond of this one, coming to it a while after the more satisfying novel(s) treatment

Oh, my fingers remain ever crossed that the End end of Red Dwarf as a television show, if it is to be a happy ending, will borrow heavily from the bit on Backwards Earth at end of Better Than Life

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– Holly’s farewell statement to Rimmer about his unrealistic goals for happiness feels particularly incisive, but his comment to Lister of “I hope things work out between you and Kochanski” is a bit strange. Like yes I know there’s the meta “eventually find a way to travel back in time and save her” plot going on in theory, but still, she’s dead and Holly actively chose not to bring her back as a hologram. So it doesn’t feel quite right.

well, as you say, it’s a windup.  Holly knows what emotional buttons to press to get the boys to feel rather than think and, thus examine the logical holes that they could (and several posters here have) punched in the premise of where and when Queeg asserts control over the ship and why and, thus, cease to be taken in by his “jape of the decade”.  Similar to the Psirens:  there is no possible way Kochanski could’ve ended up on one of those derelicts, especially with Jim & Bexley.  And when Lister “tunes into Sanity FM” and actually stops to think about it he realizes this.  But first there is that purely emotional gut reaction. Lister hears it, sees it, and the Psirens so tap in to what he wants, and give it to him, that he starts to bite on it anyway.  Mention Krissy and the logical part of Lister’s brain is going to switch off and the emotional part is in the driver’s seat.

The whole premise of the episode is that Holly is willing to mess with their heads.  Invoking the ghost of Kochanski isn’t that much more manipulative than pretending to be Queeg, really.

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I always take it that Cat has been added to the roster in at least some minimal/provisional way that allows him to access the vending machines and, as we’ll see next episode, the dream recorder.  He’s in the database now (hence him being one of the impressions Rimmer goes through while malfunctioning in Queeg).

[Any connection between how the dream recorder works and how frequently/constantly each crewmember’s file in the hologramatic archive is updated is purely speculative on my part, but I assume they’re related somehow.]

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Lister’s a fundamentally decent guy, plus he clearly misses the Petersen-Selby-Chen drinking crew; he might not succeed in saving anyone else but as long as he’s going back in time to rescue Kochanski anyway he might as well try.

I also enjoy the irony of Rimmer’s craven selfishness actually being the correct choice in terms of saving the most {human} lives.

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for me, at least, they did a nice job of not overdoing the flashbacks in the early episodes, giving me just enough glimpses of life aboard ship pre-radiation leak and the people living it, to “miss them” in the same way Lister would have.  “Always leave the audience wanting more” etc.  Sure enough, for me it was just enough to want/hope they’d eventually do a finale where Lister somehow managed to go back in time/open an alternate universe/etc. and restore the crew.

So on paper I liked the premise of Series 8 very much, though it eventually became a case of “getting what you want until you don’t want it anymore.”

Rimmer talking his past self into a stasis pod and thus accidentally saving the ship because with Lister and Rimmer both in stasis pods, drive plate repair would have to fall to someone more competent who ended up repairing it properly?  Feels like a classic Red Dwarf gag of which I am so fond, a scenario in which their flaws and incompetence back into saving the day (Rimmer’s self-loathing breaking Better Than Life, Lister’s delusions about his guitar skill exposing the Psiren, etc)

Of course, preventing the accident stops Felis Sapiens from ever existing.  And that’s my going fan-theory for why the future “promised” at the end of Stasis Leak never comes to be in future episodes:  as much as Lister does want to return to Earth and/or find & marry Kochanski, he’s unwilling to consign the cats to non-existence to do it, being fond of Cat personally and feeling responsible [guilty] for the holy wars suffered in his name.  So he undid that marriage, brought the cats back, and resolved to keep looking for a way to save both.  If/when he does, that will be the conclusion of Red Dwarf.

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one of those ways in which it is never quite clear where the Jupiter Mining Corporation ends and the Space Corps begins, or what the difference between the two even is. (and of course the line shifts from series to series).

Presumably Capt. Hollister would be the one setting local policy in practice either way, as the the most direct local authority aboard the Red Dwarf.  And he does seem to exude a more pragmatic “I don’t care as long as you get the work done” attitude.  i.e. more JMC/corporate style, where Rimmer wishes things were run more military/Space Corps style

[Stabbim]

Well, early on, they probably at least tried to get along before realizing/admitting just how much they don’t.  Going to be bunking together, going to be working together, going to be seeing a lot of each other, might as well try to get on, right?

I can see Lister immediately recognizing Rimmer’s an awkward loner without knowing him well enough to realize why and trying to involve him socially before repeated instances of Rimmer being a smeghead got him fed up enough to give up.  After all, Lister’s new and doesn’t really know anybody, Rimmer’s gonna be his bunkmate anyway, might as well try.  And Rimmer, for his part, does try to be liked, he doesn’t really want to be such an unpopular prat, he just can’t help but fail.

And they get fed up, and stop trying, and by the time the show starts they’ve realized how much they can’t stand each other.

[Stabbim]

Lister doesn’t seem to get any sex in BTL, unlike the others, which is odd.

well, he’s had more of it IRL than the others.  Cat’s a virgin and Rimmer’s only ever been with one person for one time.  Sure, 3 million years into deep space they’re all desperately lonely now, but at least Lister has his memories of Lise Yates et al.  Cat and Rimmer just have What Ifs.

BTL’s programming probably read their minds as being more desperate to experience it, and thus provided them with partners more immediately.  Lister probably would have eventually dreamed up a supermodel, or Kochanski, or Pete Tranter’s Sister, but they stopped playing BTL before the game could get around to it.  His fantasy prioritized things he’d never done, like eat something as “classy” as a caviar vindaloo.

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Why are fried egg, chilli sauce and chutney “wrong” on an individual level? They’re perfectly good ingredients/foods. It’s just the combination of the three which you expect to be bad but it isn’t.
You’re talking bollocks, Rimmer.

Rimmer’s a little higher up the social chain than Lister (not as much as he’d like to be), I just assumed this was just supposed to be a reflection of some [food] snobbery on Rimmer’s part.  He does invoke the sandwich as a metaphor for Lister, after all.

There’s nothing wrong with those ingredients, they’re just “lower class” from where Rimmer’s [wishing he was] sitting

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I do find it interesting, in retrospect, that Kochanski doesn’t appear in Better Than Life. Given how thematically important Lister’s fixation on her is to the show as a whole, and how indulgent/addictive BTL is supposed to be (especially in the novel), it makes so much sense for her to be a key part of the game’s trap for Lister.  [After all, the game constructs McGruder for Rimmer; her one and only appearance.]

Guess the show depicts the early “boring” non-addictive version of the game referenced in the novel.

Well, I suppose they eventually covered that ground with the Psirens and the Euphoria(?) Squid in Back To Earth.

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Explanation 2 is that Holly is able to permanently store the data for 1
or 2 holograms in his digital memory, such that he only needs the disk
to actually be physically present when initialising the hologram, kind
of like installing a program from a CD-ROM. Then if he needs to access
hologramic data from other crewmembers (either while the first hologram
is running or not) he can load up other disks. (e.g. In Balance of Power
Holly is able to generate Kochanski’s body but with Rimmer’s
personality and memories; surely if he needed Rimmer’s disc in place to
generate Rimmer, then this wouldn’t have been possible – especially as
Rimmer describes his and Kochanski’s disks as being swapped.)
I’m imagining the holo-disks for most everyone were in there like
records in a jukebox, to be automatically moved around by Holly, until
Rimmer had them removed and hidden in the solar panel.

Holly can access bits and pieces from all the hologram files any time he wants, as he often demonstrates (to Rimmer’s chagrin) in early episodes.  The beehive haircut, Petersen’s arm, Kochanski’s body and voice, a series of crew members’ voices and mannerisms in Queeg.

It’s not the physical image that creates the drain on Holly’s processing power which limits him to “maintaining” one hologram, nor does he need the specific disk installed to do it.  Whatever “hard drive space” for lack of a better term on Holly it takes to store the record of any (and all) given crew member(s) physical appearance, voice tone, mannerisms and “personality” seems pretty trivial.  “Patching” bits and pieces from multiple crew members is no big deal.

“Holly can only sustain one hologram” seems to mean, then, that Holly can only generate and maintain one hologram and have it act effectively “alive”.  That’s the drain on the processing power and/or what requires physically loading a specific disk into the projection unit.  Hologram Rimmer doesn’t just retrace Rimmer’s steps, or “act like Rimmer” based exclusively on old information.  Hologram Rimmer remembers new information, retains experiences and memories from its hologram existence and merges those with it’s record of living Rimmer.  It’s not static, nor does it just spit out the reaction it’s algorithm says Rimmer would have; it grows and changes as it operates.  The Rimmer Hologram “lives”, ironically enough.  Thus, in Me^2, even though the two Rimmers are copies of the same file, they act differently from each other.  The post-generation “lived” experience makes them different.  It’s providing that spark of “life” that seems to be where Holly’s processing power/RAM/etc. is limited.

Where does the new memory/experience gained in the hologramatic post-life go in the case of a shut down?  Does it get saved to the file in case it’s rebooted later?  Doesn’t seem to happen with Me^2 Rimmer’s brief “life”; it doesn’t get added to Rimmer that we can tell, it’s just gone.  Does taking the disk out restore that hologramatic “person” to the factory settings of what their backup file was at death/the last time they saved/updated, wiping out everything the hologram “lived” through?  If so, then switching a hologram on or off isn’t just shutting down a program, it is “killing” a “living” thing. All the more reason for Rimmer to refuse to step aside for Holokochanski for a date even Lister isn’t sure she’d want to go on.

[Stabbim]

count me as another person who misses the worldbuilding gags like the voice-activated AI toilet seen in Balance of Power.

Part of Red Dwarf’s charm for me is the way the future it predicts is neither utopian or dystopian (as is all too popular with science fiction), but “dumb” and sub-optimal in a way that is so recognizable from our real world.  Kitschy shit like the talking toaster.  AI doesn’t malfunction and become evil, it malfunctions and becomes neurotic.  Petersen’s smart shoes keep coming back to him.  The toaster can’t deal with you not wanting a bagel.  The vending machines flirt with you because they’re lonely and can’t move around.  And the toilet — why does a toilet need to talk? it doesn’t, it’s not “logical” to make a talking toilet, but it’s the sort of thing some programmer would do anyway, for the memes/lulz, so it exists — is desperate to not miss it’s cue.  The skutters are something that should have been programmed with voice capability, but weren’t; the sort of oversight or omission often brought about by trying to save money, or just not thinking things through (that and their having claw heads that are perfectly suited for flipping people off).

Even the anticlimax of Rimmer’s “aliens” turning out to be one of The Red Dwarf’s old garbage pods that it’s caught up with after turning around.

Red Dwarf happened to come along such that it was the first thing I ever saw/read/etc. that did that element so well, and I have a strong personal bias towards the episodes in those first two series when ranking my favorite episodes.

The 1 & 2 opening titles will always be my
preferred of the two. I love how epic it is, really adds to the lost in
deep space concept.

I think, as a little kid, on some level I thought that it implied Lister still was somehow obligated to do all the mundane (and dangerous) busywork/punishment detail he always was stuck with, even after he was the sole survivor and there was no captain/officer corps to actually make him.  Clean the toilets, peel the potatoes, paint the ship, pointless as those tasks now were. And I must’ve found that utterly hilarious.

and I love the forlorn music (though the “action” theme from Series 3 onward fits the new tone of the show perfectly)

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glad this came up, naturally (points to username)

well, you could argue being a toxic emotional influence IS, in fact, hurting anyone.  Imagine an alternate take on the episode where Paranoia kills off Confidence and gradually encourages Lister to sink deeper into a defeatist hole “for his own good” starting with “don’t bother with Kochanski’s disk, she barely knew you, do you really want to bring her back only to have her say no?” and progressing from there.

Despite Goalpost Head’s lack of medical expertise, I do like the idea that he is correct in diagnosing C&P as an active obstacle to Lister’s recovery; i.e. the 3 million years of mutation has caused pneumonia to develop this extra resiliance/resistance to treatment where it manifests hallucinations that persuade the host against getting cured (i.e. killing the pneumonia).  In the same spirit as the smart viruses referenced later in the show (and ultimately depicted in the Epideme episode).  The big problem with this, however, is that by this logic it makes no sense for Confidence to kill Paranoia; despite all appearances and playing of their roles, they’d work in concert to keep Lister from getting over it/them.

[Unless of course it’s another classic Red Dwarf gag where the team is saved by their own flaws, like the Psiren copying Lister’s delusion of guitar talent, or Rimmer’s self-loathing breaking Better Than Life’s paradise trap.]

[Stabbim]

It is interesting to ponder what the second series would have looked like with that outcome. Presumably either way it’d be short-lived and we’d get a resolution to the cliffhanger and a return to the core dynamic soon enough.

Or maybe the second hologram would stick around and you’d get a Series VII type awkwardness where Kochanski isn’t interested in Lister after all.

Well, presumably at first they didn’t necessarily know they would ever get picked up for a 3rd series and beyond.  Only being contractually certain of having the first 2 series’ to tell all the story they wanted to tell, resolving Lister’s goal to still fulfill his “plan” within those 12 episodes becomes more urgent.  So Holochanski gets revived at the end of Confidence & Paranoia (now the ending of S1) and S2 becomes about the (hilarious) struggle to have a relationship around her lack of physical form, and that ends however it ends in the series (and show) finale.

Once they knew there’d be a 3rd (and 4th, and 5th) Series, that resolution could be deferred, even forgotten about.  Possibly even needed to be delayed if it was meant to be an end-of-show moment for Lister (his “objective for the game, you twonk!” to quote the game attendant in Back To Reality). 

Of course, if that was the plan, that changed, too (S7).

[Stabbim]

The original plan was for holo-Kochanski? I should really re-watch those behind the scenes docs at some point..
I guess the real world reason for light bees and the implication that there’s no longer a one hologram limit is known, but the in-universe explanation, that is my heart’s true desire.

yes, IIRC there was a strike at the BBC in 1988 that stalled production of Series 1, during which time they came up with the ME2 episode idea, which they liked so much they changed course to accommodate it. (among other things it was a lot funnier, in their estimation, than the episode premise they scrapped to make room for it)

[Stabbim]

all the hologram limitations became a lot less important, and probably more cumbersome for them to write around, once they abandoned their original plan of having Lister successfully boot up Hologram Kochanski at the end of Series 1.  Holochanski being unable to touch anything (Lister, first and foremost) would’ve likely been a significant narrative device through out the second series, possibly resolved at the end if Series 2 was to be the final series. Holo-Rimmer being unable to physically interact with stuff or having an operational range limited to the ship just got in the way, especially when Series 3 started and the show’s tone shifted from “The Odd Couple, In Space” to “Star Trek, But Ridiculous”.

In retrospect it’s a bit of a wonder that the “hard light” thing wasn’t officially introduced until Series 6 given that Rimmer’s light was selectively hard as early as the ejection seat gag in “Backwards”

[Stabbim]

In Bodyswap, why didn’t Lister just have a hologram body of Lister while Rimmer was in his real body? Why stick with Rimmer’s hologram?

They agreed to a bodyswap.  Lister generally keeps to his word, even if Rimmer almost never does.  I accept that Lister would honor the spirit of his agreement and not just be Hologram Lister.

Yeah maybe so. Just feels like holo-Lister is an underused concept in the show. Does it even happen outside Ouroboros?

there’s a deleted bit from the interview scene in Holoship, [after Harrison decides she’d rather stay dead than live in an atmosphere of perpetual curry farts] where they mention that Lister’s hologram is thus far the only one that’s actually wanted to come online

I think that’s as close as we get.

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exactly.

sometimes people who are trying to quit smoking or drinking fall off the wagon and have a drink or smoke anyway.

sometimes [when it’s funny for him to] Kryten has bad days where he relapses into not being able to lie and/or to tell Goalpost Head to smeg off.

it’s not inconsistent.  it’s just not developing in a straight line.  which people don’t do anyway.

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“dickhead” is kinda whatever you need it to be in context.  “Smeghead” simulates and substitutes for it nicely, in fact.

as for the Skutters, that’s what makes them funny, at least to me.  All the things that voice technology is wasted on:  the vending machines, the toaster, even the toilet Lister accidentally activates early in S1, and it wasn’t given to the one thing that would actually benefit from it.  It’s the sort of mismanagement we’d recognize in our present persisting into the future in spite of the advance of science, because that’s kinda how humans have always been. The future shown in Red Dwarf isn’t dystopian, just recognizably, plausibly sub-optimal.  It’s one of the things I’ve always really liked about the show (and maybe something a comedy is best poised to depict).

I think it’s great that Hayridge has been such an active part of representing Red Dwarf in panels on the Convention circuit in recent years even in spite of not having been on the show in so long, and have come to miss her take on Holly as much as I had missed Lovett’s original Holly back when she first replaced him.  I suppose I can always keep fingers crossed that in the next Red Dwarf special it will finally be her turn again, if she wants one.

[Stabbim]

Rimmer kneeing Death in the groin with a battle cry of “only the good die young” will never not amuse me.

and the early episodes did a good enough job of making me miss the dead crew/empathize with Lister missing them that the idea of them being revived was potentially interesting.  All those years of Kochanski being Lister’s white whale only to have her just not like him that much/dump him due to him being smeggy is pretty funny. Fun subversive anticlimax to the “romance” of S1 and S2.  The idea, if not necessarily the execution thereof, feels like a very Red Dwarf thing to do.

There’s bits of it I like but, yeah, over time, it’s been the series I rewatch the least for a reason.  It’s tough to watch what was done without thinking about what could’ve potentially been done better.  And not surprising that every change it introduced got undone for Back To Earth and beyond.

“And yeah, there is potential in the crew returning. Rimmer would be Lister’s actual superior again, Cat might be quarantined because of being an unknown species, Kochanski would have to get used to an alternative version of the crew, but then the Captain would call on them for their deep space expertise any time they came across something unusual, which would really annoy Rimmer as Lister would basically be going over his head, but it would also frustrate Lister as he’d be of major importance, yet still be stuck as third technician. There’s loads of interesting stuff there, but instead we got what we got.”

yeah, the captain/crew having to reckon with the fact that they were actually 3 million years into the future/deep space from where they remembered being, and/or the fact that they had all died and were reconstructions of themselves, could’ve been fun.  And perhaps forced Capt. Hollister to rely on the core Red Dwarf cast as a salvage team (functionally equal to The Canaries that we got) because they know deep space.

Oh well.  Instead we got what we got, indeed.  At least Chris Barrie was back as Rimmer.

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