Be Excellent To Each Other

Saving lives is a serious business, young man.
/

This is okay so far.

The time-traveling guy in the ad break who is trying to save the world from Dave in the future is my mate Henry from school.

Yoks to obscure US Civil War in-joke from Kern, there.

As for Red Dwarf, I'm not going to bother watching it. It's tired. And I hate the fans.

Red Dwarf is to sci-fi comedy what Last of the Summer Wine is to Alan Bennet.

Far more enjoyable than I thought it would be - more please!

The star field over the end credits was very pretty.
That wasn't bad at all.

Re: Grant and Naylor

Yeah one of them lost interest but still went on to write his own continuation of the story when he couldn't make a living elsewhere.

I sometimes think I get different programs beamed into my TV to other people.

Fuck! He's onto us again!

I thought the humour was quite light for an opening episode considering the obvious pressure on it to be a return to former glories. If they've got better stuff under their belt I'd have preferred they'd put their best foot forward.

The story wasn't that great either what with the reveal that the mechanoid had killed the other crew with very little foreshadowing.

Plus, I didn't understand the relevance of the green tube thing. There was a suggestion that they could zoom light years across the galaxy with it and that was probably what happened when Rimmer reinserted it but no one said anything after the black out to the effect that that was what had happened or why the Red Dwarf would have been towed along with it.

Unless I missed summats. Which wouldn't be the first time that's happened.

I believe the implication was that Howard's ship was zoomed across the galaxy to their ship, although that makes little sense either.

Howard zoomed to Rimmer, I figured.

I often think this when Dr Who is on.

I was a bit confuddled about where they are now. Are they still in deep space, millions of years from anything? If so, how could they receive a letter from Space Corps? Or order a Stirmaster?

Y'see, maybe I wasn't listening intently to the science. I thought the green rod pulled the ship places not visa versa. I'd watch the science speech again but I've deleted it now. Tch.

Why are people expecting a level of internal logic from Red Dwarf X that was never present before? It's no more consistent than the various versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy are. It's always been that way, so I see no need to berate the new series for more of the same.

Edit -- for example, the huge break in continuity between S1-2 and S3, explained via timey-wimey stuff: http://www.reviewsbygavrielle.com/dwarf3.shtml

Because it's a sit-com set in outer space.

A sit-com where the 'sit' is four misfits lost in space. Or a meringue?

a sit com where the company that made Kryten was able to send a replacement, where the electric company was able to track down lister to give him a bill.

If you want to be picky, the telesales thing was manned by driods, and they mentioned that a few times.

We've already seen that droids can last a very long time in the dwarf universe, so it's ok.

Malc

Both the Kryten Replacement and the leccy bill (in a mail pod) were explicitly stated to have been tracking Red Dwarf for a long time. The stirmaster was less annoying that the letter from Space Corps.

It just bothers me that if they're going to abandon the basic framework of a show that I have loved, they could at least handwave it quickly.

I thought it came from the space corp computer (internal mail)

Malc

I hope it did. I must have missed that.

Phew, all is right in the world.

And to be fair, they've done that sort of thing a bunch of times.

I think the changes is setting could (and, somewhere, were) by them deciding as the entire ship was now theirs, they could move into the officers' quarters instead of the enlisted quarters where the first two series were.

The other personality changes... well, Rimmer became noticeably less smeggy from start to finish of Series 1 and continued in Series 2. He was initially still trying to assert himself over Lister but without the officers to back up his authoritah I think he gradually realized the fruitlessness of it all and instead dedicated himself to maintaining order and discipline indirectly. Lister likewise accepts that they're on an adventure (with reaching Earth the overall goal not the obsession) and without Rimmer riding him constantly can mellow out. And the Cat.... well, the Cat was raised almost in isolation, so finally being part of a proper social group has allowed him to develop emotionally.

I'm not sure about Kryten having a 'Canadian' accent, unless he's meant to be from some isolated island off Newfoundland or something.





Hang on, they used the electric company joke again (remember the NorWeb Federation?) only this time it was real? The mail pods cropped up several times in series 1 and 2 as the ship slowed down/turned around and the pods finally caught up.

I'm writing to inform you that your father is dad. Er, well of course he is?

It was a tax bill, not a leccy bill, IIRC

Lister ends S2 pregnant. He starts S3 not pregnant. Kryten has left the ship but randomly re-appears. I'd like to see you retcon that one away with this sort of logic.

(Explanation is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dad_(Red_Dwarf) but the more meaningful explanation is because Red Dwarf has never given a toss about continuity.)

No, it was an electric bill. Lister left a few dollarpounds in his bank account and thanks to compound interest now owns 98% of the world's wealth. The other 2% were owned by the NorWeb Federation because he left a light on in the bathroom. They were coming to obtain payment for the bill and also get Lister for his crimes against humanity (he left two half-eaten German sausages on a plate in his kitchen which now covered much of the Earth's surface)

The tax bill was delivered in the mail pod that brought them Better Than Life, and Rimmer's 'issues' caused him to fantasize about a tax collector coming to get him in the game.



You're so determined to be contrary you're dismissing the official explanation given at the start of the episode as being unreasonable! In a show where they crossed into a parallel universe, met female versions of themselves and Lister became pregnant by his female counterpart! Where mutated disease cause Lister's fever dreams to come to life! Where a single pregnant cat provided a viable breeding stock for an entire species over three million years!

I thought he lived in a luggage locker - how could he have had a kitchen?

I believe this simply proves my point, which is that Red Dwarf has regularly fucked about with its continuity with only the barest of hand waved explanations. I remind you the official explanation scrolls past (deliberately) too fast to be read, so viewers are actually totally in the dark as to why Lister is no longer pregnant or Kryten has reappeared. There's no continuity errors in this new show even half as jarring as that.

Lest we forget, continuity is so bad in Red Dwarf that it gave rise to The Red Dwarf Plot Inconsistencies Project.

Didn't an episode of Futurama end with Fry having been fired from his delivery boy job by his own great great (&c) nephew and had been dropped out of the ship to his death via trap door, and yet in the next episode was back working for Planet Express as if nothing had happened?

Not unlike the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons where Itchy ripped out Scratchy's lungs yet in the next scene Scratchy was shown breathing, or where Itchy played Scratchy's lungs like a xylophone striking the same rib twice yet producing two clearly distinct notes.

Meats, you've started arguing on one side, then have somehow segued onto the other but you're still arguing.

I'm trying to work out to what degree of consistency DocG holds his sci-fi comedy serieseseseseseseses.

I don't care about it, and I don't think anyone else should either.

The leccy bill was a joke by Holly and never really existed. And the tax bill was Rimmer's anyway.

Shut up.

I thought it was surprisingly good. Not as funny as 'Modern Family', which we watched beforehand, but far, far better than I expected.

I particularly liked the moose question.

So, this is what the Doctor Who thread looks like to people who don't watch or like Dr. Who. Crikey.

Has anyone read the books? Or listened to the Audio tapes? They explain a few things too. Although they're like a parallel universe too.

EDIT: although the last time I heard them it was 17 years ago or something so I might be mistaken.

I quite enjoyed it. That's all.

Yeah, the books are off on their own tangent, with numerous differences from the TV series. Then, just to confuse things further, Grant & Naylor wrote completely different, separate Red Dwarf novels following on from their last joint one after they split.

I have the tapes somewhere, it's quite jarring hearing Chris Barrie doing all the voices.

I'd image he does them quite well. Are the tapes just him reading the books?

Yeah, I have the tapes (somewhere!) and Barrie's impersonations are spot on.

The first Red Dwarf novel I still really, really like. It's great. Really fleshes out the RD universe (or at least a universe based on series 1 and 2 of the TV show, but in its own separate continuity). The second book's quite good in parts, but really nosedives during the last third of the book, with too much dialogue and events taken from episode scripts only minutely changed.

I thought the first episode of the new series was great, but I'm not sure how much of that was due to my expectations being so very low.

I had low expectations for the Blade Runner thing, and yet I was still shocked by just how bad it was.

I thought this was entertaining/10. Would watch again.

I hated Back to Earth the first time I saw it, but I watched it again the other week and found it to be quite entertaining. I think it's because the first time around I was expecting more Red Dwarf, whereas this time I came to it after completely forgetting what it was all about.

Much better 2nd episode.

Yep that was pretty fun.

I'm quite astonished by saying this but thus far, this is the best series of red dwarf for about half its run.

Well that's odd.