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Red Dwarf rewatch

Started by Lemming, September 12, 2020, 07:09:51 PM

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Replies From View

What surprises me is that they knew they'd need to remount on a different day because the chimp actor could only work for so many hours, but they didn't get the chimp actor back again and film the planned ending, albeit without an audience.  It's really not clear why the situation necessitated rewriting rather than just filming it in two blocks.


Also, I do wonder what the chimp actor goes through as a performer beneath that mask and costume that doesn't also apply to Robert Llewellyn under all that rubber.  Red Dwarf may have never progressed beyond series 2 if someone had been checking the rules and regulations properly (although they have probably changed since 1989, to be fair).

bgmnts

Quote from: Replies From View on January 24, 2021, 10:13:12 PM
What surprises me is that they knew they'd need to remount on a different day because the chimp actor could only work for so many hours, but they didn't get the chimp actor back again and film the planned ending, albeit without an audience.  It's really not clear why the situation necessitated rewriting rather than just filming it in two blocks.


Also, I do wonder what the chimp actor goes through as a performer beneath that mask and costume that doesn't also apply to Robert Llewellyn under all that rubber.  Red Dwarf may have never progressed beyond series 2 if someone had been checking the rules and regulations properly (although they have probably changed since 1989, to be fair).

I'm assuming if someone brought up any regs during those days, Paul Jackson would have laid the nut on them and kicked them out the window.

Johnny Textface

Are there any genuinely good behind the scenes docs for Red Dwarf?

DrGreggles

I recall enjoying the ones on the 'good' series DVDs.

McDead

Quote from: Johnny Textface on January 24, 2021, 11:25:35 PM
Are there any genuinely good behind the scenes docs for Red Dwarf?

Yeah, if you do a search for "Red Dwarf documentary" on YouTube, the docs covering series one and two are in-depth and interesting.

Avril Lavigne

Quote from: Replies From View on January 24, 2021, 10:13:12 PM
Also, I do wonder what the chimp actor goes through as a performer beneath that mask and costume that doesn't also apply to Robert Llewellyn under all that rubber.

I guess it's the physical demands, Bobby at least has the benefit of playing a character who moves around more or less like a human, whereas the chimp actor is bending into an uncomfortable chimp-crouch balanced on just their tiptoes & fake longer forearms whenever the cameras are rolling, and having to bound about the set in that pose like an excited chimp would.

Quote from: Johnny Textface on January 24, 2021, 11:25:35 PM
Are there any genuinely good behind the scenes docs for Red Dwarf?

The DVD sets have excellent individual feature-length documentaries for each series, going into full details on the making of each episode as well as more general background info on the show's production with all kinds of interesting stories from the cast and crew. It's a shame these docs weren't continued for the later series.

JamesTC

Quote from: Johnny Textface on January 24, 2021, 11:25:35 PM
Are there any genuinely good behind the scenes docs for Red Dwarf?

The Series X documentary is a two-hour-long masterpiece. Anything that can go wrong does go wrong. It is incredibly honest about how badly the production ends up going.

Replies From View

Quote from: Johnny Textface on January 24, 2021, 11:25:35 PM
Are there any genuinely good behind the scenes docs for Red Dwarf?

Yeah.  All of them apart from the series 8 one.


FYI in terms of DVD release, the series documentaries didn't start appearing until series 3.  This is because the series 1 and 2 DVDs had a lower budget, and while they had some interviews and things they hadn't yet begun the in-depth documentaries these releases would become known for.

So for the BBC DVD releases, series 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 came with documentaries, and then the Bodysnatcher Collection (containing the remastered series 1-3) was an opportunity to provide series 1 and 2 with documentaries.

JamesTC

The Series I and II documentaries are the highlights from the original run. I particularly love when they get behind the scenes footage and sound. Doug and DJJ moaning about how Danny wants to do the spray and Doug agreeing that it is a "comedy spray", so he should do it.

bgmnts

It's quite endearing how honest DJJ and Charles were about being quite unprofessional during shooting and getting pissed up in the Hacienda a lot. Craig Charles literally hangover farting into Ronnie Corbett's face.

Johnny Textface

Quote from: JamesTC on January 24, 2021, 11:40:52 PM
The Series X documentary is a two-hour-long masterpiece. Anything that can go wrong does go wrong. It is incredibly honest about how badly the production ends up going.

Is that on the dvd release or was it just a Dave thing?

JamesTC

Quote from: Johnny Textface on January 25, 2021, 12:00:41 AM
Is that on the dvd release or was it just a Dave thing?

It is on the DVD/BR. They wouldn't air it on TV, I imagine it was a wee bit too honest for Dave's liking.

St_Eddie

Quote from: markburgle on January 23, 2021, 05:59:12 PM
Yeah with my mate I go "Jesus" and he goes "Gary'll do". Every. Damn. Time

Legend Gary.

Quote from: Polymorphia on January 24, 2021, 02:22:02 AM
Given the Red Dwarf discussion about its discussions on religion, just thought I'd drop this scene from S202 Better than Life:

Though after writing that, I realised that most of Red Dwarf is essentially totally hostile to religion: Parts of S03E06 The Last Day (ignoring the 7th Day Advent Hoppists with this) with Kryten being essentially controlled by his "silicon heaven"... and going back to  "Waiting for God" with the laundry list... Lemons is basically business as usual for RD, and probably a bit more considerate that it used to be

Lister: They're just using religion as an excuse to be extremely crappy towards each other.

Talkie Toaster: So, what else is new?

Quote from: Lemming on January 24, 2021, 11:42:01 AM
Meanwhile, Cat's roaming around the ship as usual when he bumps into Kryten, who's experimenting with the crystals he got from the quantum rod (in Trojan, nice bit of continuity).

The original plan for series X was to have the quantum rod be the McGuffin which led to each of the episodes' plot.  The reference to the quantum rod in Entangled is a holdover from that original plan.

Quote from: Lemming on January 24, 2021, 11:42:01 AMThe crew head down to the BEGG encampment where Rimmer pretends to be senile and useless in the hopes that the BEGGs will accept an alternate trade. The next part is so bizarre that I think it might be some of the worst writing Doug's ever done. Completely batshit: Lister manages to convince the BEGGs into a final decisive poker game, and says that they're gonna "choke". They then start literally choking to death, simultaneously, all three of them. They die, leaving the crew with no way to shut off Lister's knacker-attacker.

What happened? I honestly don't get it.

Indeed.  It's completely nonsensical.  it doesn't make a lick of sense, both in terms of real world science, nor in terms of the episode's own internal logic.  Absolute waffle.

Quote from: Lemming on January 24, 2021, 11:42:01 AM
He opens the stasis pod to discover that the scientist, Professor Edgington, has turned into a monkey due to a failed experiment. "Can't be Kochanski, she went for me groin" made me laugh.

It was originally going to be Kochanski, but that plan got scrapped for (possible budgetary) reasons.

Quote from: Lemming on January 24, 2021, 11:42:01 AM
Cut to a bit later and Edgington and Rimmer are getting on fantastically - and get this, she's going to have SEX with him!!! But oh no, a bunch of Airlock Risk Assessment Reports have been left by the airlock, and she trips on them and falls in!!! And since she's wrong about everything, she hits the open airlock button and vents herself into space! Tee hee hee! Lister even makes a joke about it! Roll credits.

Urgh.  Such a tone deaf scene.  A human being dies and Lister is blasé about it.  Awful.

Quote from: Replies From View on January 24, 2021, 12:11:29 PM
And yes - not enough has been observed about how Irene dies and Lister and Rimmer are just like "ah well, anyway loads of paperwork".


No attempt to leap out of the airlock and save her?  Just going to assume that's it, are you?  That was an actual human there.  You know?  Like you were craving throughout series 1-6?  Remember being alone and stuff?  Remember leaping out of the airlock quite swiftly in the previous episode and rescuing your guitar?

No?  Ok then, never mind.  Paperwork it is.

Psychotic is the word.

Spot on.

Quote from: markburgle on January 24, 2021, 02:11:35 PM
That thread gave me the my one big laugh of the episode - after Kryten's big explanation of the idea of the station:
Spoiler alert
Cat: Did it work??
Kryten: No.
[close]

Robert Llewellyn's perfectly dismissive tone there just got me.

Agreed.  That's a gag which happily could have come from the classic era of I-VI.

Quote from: Replies From View on January 24, 2021, 02:27:48 PM
He revisits critics doesn't he in 'Timewave'.

Seems to have a beef one way or the other; not sure exactly what it is or why.

Series VIII.

Quote from: Lemming on January 24, 2021, 03:33:08 PM
Funnily enough, on that note, I see that the next episode - Dear Dave - does actually involve a mail pod arriving, which sounds hugely promising.

Oh, you poor naive fool slag.

Quote from: Johnny Textface on January 24, 2021, 11:25:35 PM
Are there any genuinely good behind the scenes docs for Red Dwarf?

Oh my days!  Check out the documentaries on the DVDs.  They are superb; right up there with the Blu-Ray Alien and Blade Runner making of documentaries.  'Sublime' is the descriptor I'd use.

Quote from: Avril Lavigne on January 24, 2021, 11:36:00 PM
I guess it's the physical demands, Bobby at least has the benefit of playing a character who moves around more or less like a human, whereas the chimp actor is bending into an uncomfortable chimp-crouch balanced on just their tiptoes & fake longer forearms whenever the cameras are rolling, and having to bound about the set in that pose like an excited chimp would.

The chimp actor, like Herbie before him, went bananas.

Quote from: JamesTC on January 24, 2021, 11:48:01 PM
Doug and DJJ moaning about how Danny wants to do the spray and Doug agreeing that it is a "comedy spray", so he should do it.

I never fully understood this.  "Dona wants to do it."  That would be assistant floor manager Dona DiStefano, presumably.  In what conceivable scenario would Dona ever be doing the comedy spray?  I don't get it at all.  Cat is the character who sprays the lady.  Why would Dona suddenly appear in the show and do it?  She's not an established character, much less an actress (though she did stand in for Clare Grogan in 'Stasis Leak').

Replies From View

I'm guessing the elderly woman in the scene wasn't happy about Danny doing it, thought he'd be too rough and Dona took pity on her and they all thought it would be okay.  When Danny did do it, she looked like sour chewing gum that had been sandblasted from a pavement.  She was gasping like she was about to drown.  Good!

Only Dona's hands would have been in shot, by the way - no explanation would have been needed as if she was a new character suddenly being brought in.  From a production point of view I consider it having the logic of a close-up shot, where it doesn't really matter who's doing the thing and the main actors may be needed for something else at the same time.  But as Doug can be heard saying, she was too low.  Nobody can be heard pointing out that she also had the wrong colour hands.  And Danny was right there complaining that he wasn't doing it, not busy filming a different scene.

Very odd situation.

thr0b

Quote from: JamesTC on January 25, 2021, 12:02:50 AM
It is on the DVD/BR. They wouldn't air it on TV, I imagine it was a wee bit too honest for Dave's liking.

It's also purchasable on iTunes. And presumably other streaming services as well.

rue the polywhirl

Interesting to learn of all the script changes to Entangled. I reckon the second half does have its moments. 'In your own time... don't mind the lift... take the stairs.... one at a time'. I don't find the GELFs or BEGGs things entertaining so pretty good that they are just choked out of the story soon after they appear. The Lemons episode was ok except for the Jesus actor and the Fathers and Sons episode was massively let down by its racist vending machine plot line and is the weakest one so far.

willbo

I'll have to dig out my RD X dvd from wherever I've left it. I remember watching a docu extra on it at the time, but I don't remember how raw and honest it was. The main thing I remember from it was the deleted joke from Trojan where Cat and Lister are running along the outside of a corridor with some sort of fake backdrop to stop Howard's crew seeing what's out the window for some reason.

Lemming

#1637
S10E05 Dear Dave

Lister's missing humanity, and tormenting himself by reading an old magazine. "I'm just looking at some old pictures of them. Look, there's them going to work".

Perhaps controversially, I think this is something of a mistake. Part of Series X's success thus far has been due to it having the courage to willfully abandon Red Dwarf's original premise, and switch it for "we're looking for Kochanski while having space adventures". The crew haven't really been trapped in deep space ever since Stasis Leak gave them an easy and reliable way to return to the past, and it's only been compounded many times over since then - the photos in Timeslides, the Timedrive, etc, not to mention the countless trips to populated areas and/or meetings with other sapient life (Backwards, Camille, Dimension Jump, Meltdown, Holoship, almost every episode of Series 6, and so on). Every time the show's tried to harken back to the original premise, where Lister and Rimmer truly were trapped alone in an empty universe, it's felt totally insincere to me, the show trying to have its cake and eat it too.

And this is no exception. Lister just met tons of people not long ago in Lemons, not to mention characters like Edgington and Howard Rimmer. Series X's best decision was to make him a willing, if reluctant, space nomad. Having him be depressed again just feels cheap at this point. If he's missing humanity that much, he can give up looking for Kochanski and use the timedrive to head home. Hell, he can even use the timedrive to go on a short holiday to any period and any place he wants, and then just hop back. Problem solved. The Kochanski excuse has worked very well for Series X so far* and it's a big misstep to try and claim the crew are still here against their will at this point.

*for example. in Lemons, Cat suggests they could stay on Earth and Lister instantly dismisses it by saying "nah, we have to get back to the Dwarf and find Kochanski," and everyone else seems to agree. It gives us a very easy and widely applicable excuse to the eternal "why don't they just stay here/go back to the past/etc" question, and works with Series X's breezier and more lighthearted tone.

I started singing "Nothing Compares 2 U" about half a second before Lister did. I'm on Doug's wavelength. Horrifying.

Enter plot thread #2: Lister goes to chat with one of the AI vending machines to cheer himself up. It's got a rather creepy stalker-y crush on him.

Enter plot thread #3: We cut to Rimmer. Kryten arrives with news: the JMC onboard computer is penalising Rimmer for not reporting for duty in over 3 million years, and he's got 24 hours to present a rebuttal or he'll be demoted to Third Technician, putting him on par with Lister. This whole scene is great, and it's followed by another pretty good scene where Rimmer tries to cheer Lister up in his usual bullheaded way. Scene tapers off into talk about "moves", which is less fun than the first half of the scene.

Lister heads off to talk to another vending machine, one with a French accent. It accuses Lister of flirting and "PUTTING YOUR 'AND ON MY LOGO". Got a laugh out of this scene, not least thanks to the voice actor's delivery of the word "logo". LOH-GOH. There's a weird instinctive "oh god no" reaction whenever the AI vending machines show up - maybe due to Only The Good, maybe due to the Taiwan Tony shit, I don't know - but they've been a thing since the first series and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be brought back as long as Doug can think of some good material for them, ie. not Taiwan Tony.

Enter plot thread #4: Kryten's devised a plan to help Rimmer - bribe the computer by requisitioning all the toilet paper on the ship. Don't really get it, but let's move on.

Cat's "bad news" scene is a laugh. "WHAT? BLACK HOLE. WE'RE BEING SUCKED INTO A BLACK HOLE." Enter plot thread #5: A mail pod's arrived. This plot is exciting on the face of it, since there really should have been more mail pods arriving ever since they were introduced in Better Than Life. There's so many story ideas you could get out of this, and this episode has a fantastic one conceptually - Hayley Summers, someone Lister used to go out with, writes to tell him that she's pregnant, and the baby is either his or some guy called Roy's. The letter competition between Rimmer and Lister is brilliant, it's exactly the kind of pointless shit you'd come up with after years alone in deep space. "It's a parking fine. Still something to read, addressed to me."

The idea here has me really really enthusiastic - there's a lot of emotion for a skilled writer to tap into with this kind of storyline. It makes sense that, after Red Dwarf was declared lost, relatives of the crew might continue to send letters to the ship in the hopes that someone survived, or even just for catharsis. You could get so much out of this - imagine an episode where, I dunno, Lister receives a steady stream of letters from Lise Yates which she continued to write long into her old age, believing that Lister was still alive and would receive them one day. Or perhaps Rimmer's brothers writing to him. Or even something crazy like one of them has a great grandniece/nephew who becomes obsessed with the historic Red Dwarf disaster centuries after it happened, and decides to send some kind of tracker with a message to the ship. Or some kind of anti-JMC activists who uncover the truth that there was a crewmember stuck in stasis when the ship was declared lost, and send some kind of aid package. Endless possibilities, and the pregnancy idea here is an absolutely superb one, and faces Lister with the prospect of having three million years' worth of descendants.

Hayley may have written a follow-up letter detailing the results of the baby's DNA test, so Lister enlists Rimmer's help to sift through the mountain of mail to find it. Meanwhile, the stalker vending machine is pissed at Lister for talking to the French vending machine, and drama ensues.

Kryten's removed all the toilet paper from the ship and given it to the medibot, which refused the bribe or something, I honestly lost the plot a bit here. Anyway, Rimmer's new hope is to prove that he's Lister's caretaker - for this, he'll need to prove that Lister is clinically insane.

Scene where Kryten tries to convince Lister to live in the present rather than hanging onto a world that no longer exists. I definitely appreciate what Doug's trying to do with a lot of this episode, but as mentioned at the start, IMO we're way too late in the game for any "Lister misses Earth" stuff. Nonetheless, the scene, taken in isolation, is a good one. Lister decides to apologise to the stalker vending machine, and grants it its ultimate wish - to be moved around the corner of the corridor. He accidentally knocks it over, and tries to pick it up, and it looks like he's humping it. Rimmer walks over and excitedly notes down "humps vending machines" as proof of Lister's insanity. Meanwhile, Cat has walked three miles with shit stuck up his arse due to the toilet paper shortage. Yep. Lot going on here.

Anyway, Cat's found Hayley's next letter. As he prepares to open it, Lister dreams of what his descendants might have achieved, and is sure that, no matter what, Hayley would have been a fantastic mother. He opens it - "what an absolute slag."

Well. As with Entangled, there's just way too much going on. There's another heroic attempt to tie all the plot threads together into one big conclusion, but it doesn't really work. The best plot here by far is Lister's letter, and everything else feels like it's detracting from that. Not a huge fan of the vending machine stuff. Rimmer's demotion feels like it could have worked nicely as its own episode, if Doug could come up with something better than "Kryten's removed all the toilet paper". Everything just turns into a frantic muddled mess, and the plots aren't really tonally consistent with each other, so we get Lister's hope that he had a descendant mixed together with Cat walking around with shit stuck to his hole.

You can see the outline of a really good episode here as you watch, but it's just zipping between too many different things and no plotline gets the focus it deserves. As with much of Series X, the joke rate is high and the joke hit rate is fairly solid, so at least the episode can be fun even as it's baffling you with vending machine humping.

If I had to really praise the episode for something, I'd praise it for having no sci-fi plot. Considering that we've been stuck in "monster/anomaly/planet of the week" mode for such a long time, it's courageous to have an episode where absolutely nothing happens other than the characters wandering around talking to each other. Even Duct Soup, which appealed for similar reasons, had the ventilation system posing a lethal threat. Here, it's just the crew milling around dealing with relatively low-stakes stuff, very similar to Series 1 (albeit wildly different in tone and themes).

Also, I actually like the "what an absolute slag" punchline, just for the idea that after all the excitement and drama, it all came to nothing. I also like that the joke is clearly on Lister rather than Hayley - she was sound enough to admit her affair up-front in the letters, and Lister was characteristically forgiving and magnanimous right up until the instant his hopes were dashed, at which point he instantly reverted to nasty childish whinging. It's another reversal joke of the kind Doug writes a lot of (character says something firmly and assuredly then contradicts themselves in the very next line) but I thought it was funny, and a reminder that Lister's not always as mature and worldly as he aspires to be.

The JMC computer passing judgement on Rimmer is an interesting plot device. This is the kind of thing Holly would have been good for if the original S1/2 style had contined - while he's mostly benevolent and mate-y, he's also ultimately a sociopathic AI who won't hesitate to torment and fuck with the crew (a la Queeg), and he was built and programmed by JMC, a corporation which is strongly implied to be amoral or even downright evil. Having this big unseen JMC computer is a way to sort of return that unsettling and threatening presence to the show, though again, there's so much happening here that the plot doesn't get the treatment it deserves.

So, overall, plenty to like but it doesn't come together. It almost feels like Doug wasn't anywhere near as interested in the mail plot as I think most viewers will be, so he saw fit to supplement it with a lot of zany goings-on to fill out the runtime.

JamesTC

I only like it when the vampire needs a poo

JamesTC

Dear Dave was an absolute shit show of a production. They went in with half a script and then had to write around it in the pickups week to make a full episode. Even then they had to have a further few hours of filming in front of green screen to pick up a couple more scenes to get it to time.

Over the last nine years it has gone from my least favourite episode to up a few places. Not just because Timewave has stormed into last place but also because I've gained an appreciation for what they managed to pull off.

If you haven't seen it Lemming then I would HIGHLY recommend the Series X documentary after you finish this series.

markburgle

This whole "find Kochanski" thing is confusing me. They have no reason to think she's alive, right? All they have to go on that two kids said their "fan theory" is that she ran off in a Blue Midget - everything else points to her having been killed, isn't that it?

Also I don't know why everyone else is going along with it. They could stay on planet Earth or as Lemming said do any number of things or go to any number of places - but Lister says "no we need to find Kochanski", and his crewmates' unspoken reaction seems to be "yes, we all must help him do that". Who the hell are these people again? They don't give a shit about Kochanski and they don't really give a shit about Lister either, but suddenly they're going to to put any possible lives of their own on hold to help him look for her anyway? It's doubly confusing given that - other than not refusing him outright - they aren't actually helping. They all just get on with their own business. Maybe I missed something, I didn't actually watch Back to Earth after all.

Anyway, Dear Dave - I was relieved Lister didn't actually have sex with the vending machine, which we'd been led upthread to believe would happen. That's all I have to add.

JamesTC

They should have had Lister's pants get caught on the vending machine. As it is, Lister is trying to lift the vending machine in the most stupid way possible.

McDead

Quote from: markburgle on January 25, 2021, 03:36:24 PM
This whole "find Kochanski" thing is confusing me. They have no reason to think she's alive, right? All they have to go on that two kids said their "fan theory" is that she ran off in a Blue Midget - everything else points to her having been killed, isn't that it.

She's not dead, Kryten confirms as much in Back to Earth. That doesn't mean that the Kochanski maguffin isn't a load of woolly irrelevant shit though, that no one in the show (either fictional or behind the scenes) seems to really give a toss about.

Lemming

Quote from: JamesTC on January 25, 2021, 03:31:20 PMIf you haven't seen it Lemming then I would HIGHLY recommend the Series X documentary after you finish this series.

Definitely gonna check it out, the production side of this series seems really interesting. You can actually feel the behind-the-scenes chaos in parts.

Quote from: markburgle on January 25, 2021, 03:36:24 PM
This whole "find Kochanski" thing is confusing me. They have no reason to think she's alive, right? All they have to go on that two kids said their "fan theory" is that she ran off in a Blue Midget - everything else points to her having been killed, isn't that it?

Also I don't know why everyone else is going along with it. They could stay on planet Earth or as Lemming said do any number of things or go to any number of places - but Lister says "no we need to find Kochanski", and his crewmates' unspoken reaction seems to be "yes, we all must help him do that". Who the hell are these people again? They don't give a shit about Kochanski and they don't really give a shit about Lister either, but suddenly they're going to to put any possible lives of their own on hold to help him look for her anyway? It's doubly confusing given that - other than not refusing him outright - they aren't actually helping. They all just get on with their own business. Maybe I missed something, I didn't actually watch Back to Earth after all.

Back To Earth confirms that Kochanski is alive, and that she's out there somewhere, but even still there's the problem that she explicitly said she was leaving because she didn't want to see Lister again, so he's got no reason to chase after her regardless.

It's very shaky, but it just about holds together as a paper-thin justification for Lister choosing to remain on the ship. As for the rest, Cat never knew anything other than the ship so I can buy that he doesn't really care about going to Earth. Kryten enjoys looking after Lister, so he'd stay too. Rimmer's by far the most interesting case - there's probably a really good episode to be made in investigating his secret reasons for staying on board Red Dwarf. Maybe it's his quasi-friendship with Lister that's keeping him there, maybe it's the fact that, when his world only consists of three other people, he doesn't have to confront his failure to fit in with society.

Replies From View

That vending machine humping scene is transparently an attempt to evoke the shrinking underpants scene from Polymorph.  Depressingly, you can easily picture Doug thinking he was striking gold as he wrote it.

mjwilson

If Rimmer is concerned with going out in the quarterfinals of the Subbuteo, that means that there are 4 players on the ship who are better than him.


St_Eddie

#1646
Am I the only one who can't stand Lister's "what an absolute slag" comment?  It just feels out of character to me and it paints Lister in a bad light, to the point of unlikeability.  There's a slight whiff of misogyny about it, given the traditionally gender exclusivity of the insult.

For me, it's also another case of the audience having a negative impact on the show.  The original line, as scripted and filmed was "what an absolute trollop".  Still a gender exclusive insult, but not as harsh as "slag".  However, Doug was umming and ahing about the possibility of using "slag", preciously because he feared to might be too harsh of a word, so he filmed an alternate to gauge the audience reaction compared to "trollop".  The audience laughed a lot more at "slag", so Doug decided to use that take in the edit.  Thanks, audience.

I don't know; I just think that the word "hussy" would have been more befitting of Lister to use.  Then again, I'd rather that Doug had just come up with a better ending and ultimately episode entirely.  I honestly consider 'Dear Dave' to be one of the absolute worst episodes of Red Dwarf.  Right up there with series VIII.  The cat walking around with a protruding turd in his sphincter is a return to the immature, base humour of the likes of "Boiiiing" spiked drinks giving a team of basketball players massive hard ons.

Quote from: Replies From View on January 25, 2021, 03:49:52 PM
That vending machine humping scene is transparently an attempt to evoke the shrinking underpants scene from Polymorph.  Depressingly, you can easily picture Doug thinking he was striking gold as he wrote it.

That constitutes so much of latter day Red Dwarf; transparently reused material, executed much worse than the original gag.  Diminishing returns.

St_Eddie

Quote from: mjwilson on January 25, 2021, 07:07:40 PM
If Rimmer is concerned with going out in the quarterfinals of the Subbuteo, that means that there are 4 players on the ship who are better than him.

Lister, Cat, Kryten and... Stir-Master Crawford?

JamesTC

Quote from: St_Eddie on January 25, 2021, 07:19:05 PM
Am I the only one who can't stand Lister's "what an absolute slag" comment?  It just feels out of character to me and it paints Lister in a bad light, to the point of unlikeability.  There's a slight whiff of misogyny about it, given the engendered nature of the insult.

For me, it's also another case of the audience having a negative impact on the show.  The original line, as scripted and filmed was "what an absolute trollop".  Still an engendered insult, but not as harsh as "slag".  However, Doug was umming and ahing about the possibility of using "slag", preciously because he feared to might be too harsh of a word, so he filmed an alternate to gauge the audience reaction compared to "trollop".  The audience laughed a lot more at "slag", so Doug decided to use that take in the edit.  Thanks, audience.

The alternative was "trollop" and "slag" was the original. I imagine if they had recorded them the other way around then "trollop" would have gotten the big reaction and "slag" wouldn't have been as strong as the ending would already be known.

I think the ending needed to have been re-written as neither word is without misogyny. Maybe they could have written a line calling back to the finger wetting machine.

Lemming

Quote from: St_Eddie on January 25, 2021, 07:19:05 PM
Am I the only one who can't stand Lister's "what an absolute slag" comment?  It just feels out of character to me and it paints Lister in a bad light, to the point of unlikeability.  There's a slight whiff of misogyny about it, given the engendered nature of the insult.  For me, it's also another case of the audience having a negative impact on the show.

The line is misogynistic, but I felt like the joke was criticising that kind of misogyny. Lister is portrayed as hypocritical and fragile, while Hayley is portrayed in a fairly positive light from what little we know about her - she's shown as having the courage to confess her affair, she's got enough moral integrity to respect Lister's right to know about the pregnancy, and she admits she doesn't know who the father is. Even right before the slag line, Lister's giving a soliloquy about how great she is and what a fantastic parent she'll undoubtedly be - all of which he undermines the instant his hopes are dashed. And he does it in a very nasty and infantile way, no less.

So I got the impression that we're meant to be laughing firmly at at Lister with the "slag" line, rather than laughing with him at Hayley. I'm always conscious of giving Doug "I Wrote Krytie TV" Naylor too much credit when it comes to this kind of thing, but I can't read the intent of the joke as being anything other than to take the piss out of Lister's attitudes.

It's got echoes of Parallel Universe, where Lister spends the whole episode (rightly) attacking Rimmer's sexism, and then ends up having to confront his own more insidious sexism when his own double gives him the awful "birth control is the man's responsibility, anyway relax, maybe you'll get lucky" treatment when he thinks he's pregnant.