Red Dwarf rewatch

[JamesTC]

as shit as it was, ignoring the series 8 cliffhanger was ridiculous. if you're going to reboot it or retcon things, just fucking say, you coward. don't just ignore it

Hard disagree. Back to Earth addressed it perfectly with "Nine Years Later" as it acknowledged that something happened but didn't feel beholden to spend the opening five minutes on it. Then The Beginning turned it into a meta joke on the fans who would ask Naylor if it would ever be resolved.

[Replies From View]

Even the unfilmed ending with Ace Rimmer returning to save the day was better than donning Ed Bye up as Death.

This is another case in point though.

Did it even occur to Naylor that Ace Rimmer turning up would have been our Rimmer turning up?  Not another fan-service revisiting of ACE RIMMER LOL but the original series 1-7 Rimmer?


I'm sure it didn't, as if it had been written and filmed that way nobody would have been talking about four abandoned endings and a shitty cliffhanger.

[Replies From View]

Hard disagree. Back to Earth addressed it perfectly with "Nine Years Later" as it acknowledged that something happened but didn't feel beholden to spend the opening five minutes on it. Then The Beginning turned it into a meta joke on the fans who would ask Naylor if it would ever be resolved.

I agree with you, here.  Addressing the series 8 cliffhanger in Back to Earth would have been like having 20 minutes of Sylvester McCoy in a TV Movie designed to kickstart a new era of Doctor Who.  Fine in principle but not the way to move a fresh story forward.

Plus everyone with a brain, body and soul wants series 8 to be shrunk in an oven and converted into a special keyring for wiping arses.

[Lemming]

S04E06 Meltdown

"We attack tomorrow, under cover of daylight!"

Best way to review this one is probably just a good/bad approach.

GOOD:
The Risk campaign book scene at the start is top-notch. Unusually, the episode splits the gang up to have two plots running concurrently, which works really well - especially considering the show is only about 26 minutes long. The absolutely shit dinosaur-bird model, and the subsequent explanation for why it's so shit, is a clever meta joke, or whatever you call it. Lister and Cat teleporting around the Nazi war room is one of the scenes I remember most from watching these as a kid, and it's funny as fuck. Same for the prison scene later on. Pretty much all of the famous people impersonators do great work, and the final battle has a ton of memorable visuals if nothing else. Marilyn Monroe running into a landmine gets a laugh.

BAD:
All the good elements are basically scenes/lines that are funny on their own, but the episode didn't really work as a whole for me. The plot doesn't make a great deal of sense, nor do I think it's meant to. It almost felt like watching 20 minutes of decent ideas and bits of dialogue that have been kind of stuck together.

Another amazing boon to the crew, the paddle, is never mentioned again, despite apparently being a fucking Stargate that lets you go just about anywhere. Kryten even mentions that it's been retrieved from Caligula, as if they were setting it up to be a plot point in series 5, but nope.

Mentioned it earlier in the thread, but it still pissed me off on the rewatch: Lister bites into the light bee like an idiot, and, according to Kryten, that's why Rimmer ends up going batshit. This irritates me far beyond what is reasonable. I'll paste the Kryten line here:

He's been acting strangely ever since we landed here, sir. I think it might have affected his mind when you chewed his light bee.

The line from Kryten winds me up so much. If we assume it's true, (which I think we're meant to given the deranged scream Rimmer does immediately after the line and the way he acts completely insane from the point they first meet the "good" droids), Rimmer is absolved of all culpability over what happens. That's extremely boring and it renders the episode virtually meaningless on a character level since it just boils down to "oh yeah, he was malfunctioning, don't worry about it". Even more annoyingly, though, the line suggests that the entire saga is indirectly Lister's fault... and then the script completely refuses to blame him, and not only lets him get off scot-free, but even gives him a whiny moralising speech about war (which Cat inexplicably joins in with). Then he chews the fucking light bee again. Dogshit ending.

Logic complaints: Not a logic complaint as such, but what's going on with waxworld? The lack of any humans maintaining it suggests that humans were literally wiped out across the entire colonised universe, somehow. Either that or the planet is a rogue planet that's been drifting away from humanity for "millions of years", which is how long the "good" droids say they've been alone for.

That's series 4 done. I thought this one was largely a step down from series 3. Camille and Meltdown are both relatively weak notes to start and end the season on. Dimension Jump is alright. Justice and DNA are both good. White Hole is the highlight for sure.

Overall, the characters feel far more broad than they did even in series 3, now defined largely by a couple of traits each (except Cat who's all over the place), and a few jokes and themes are starting to repeat. Still fun to watch but the quality is tangibly slipping for me. There's at least three episodes I remember liking in series 5, though, including Demons & Angels which I somehow thought was a series 4 episode, so...

Also, probably says as much about me as it does about anything else, but all the characters are getting on my tits to some extent now. Cat is just randomly hostile to everyone in a way that no longer resembles a cat, Rimmer is completely pathetic now, and Lister is now a multi-talented philosopher who is also in a grouchy mood about 60% of the time. Kryten is beginning his transformation into an exposition delivery machine, though mercifully the series 7 loud-screeching-crying version of the character is some ways off yet. Holly is alright but she gets shoved to the side in every plot except White Hole, where she still ends up offline for the bulk of the episode.

[Evian Mousemat]

I never thought you were meant to take that light bee line seriously. Rimmer's acting out his militaristic fantasies because he perceives there to be no consequences ("They're only wax droids"), ignoring the fact that they've broken their programming and are essentially sentient, because he's a prick. He gets carried away and demonstrates why he was completely psychologically unsuitable for ever achieving his dreams of command, but I don't think the implication is he's gone literally insane.

It's not a great episode though, Risk journal and prison scenes aside. And the bizarre little musical stings between scenes are shit.

[DrGreggles]

I like Meltdown. Loads of good gags and lines + the Winnie the Pooh and Caligula bits.

"Don't eyeball me, Ghandi."

[frajer]

I like Meltdown. Loads of good gags and lines + the Winnie the Pooh and Caligula bits.

"Don't eyeball me, Ghandi."

Yeah Craig Charles describing Pooh being readied for execution is one of my favourite bits in all of Dwarf. "He's refusing the blindfold," said in utter earnestness pops into my mind a lot.

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Sorry, but the bit where Ghandi explodes is funny as fuck.


The cast give endless respect and lolz to the Elvis impersonator during the episode commentary.  HAHAHAA HE IS SO GOOD INNNEEE

no he is shite.  objectively the worst part of the whole episode and you love it

[the]

Meltdown has some great bits it and plenty of gags, but the overall setting feels a bit too silly, too un-space-like, and a bit too much like an excuse to shoehorn a load of famous figures in. It's a bit like a Spitting Image crossover episode.

That said, I do like central examination of 'what would happen if someone like Rimmer was given a chance to act out their little Risk campaign fantasies for real?'.

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That said, I do like central examination of 'what would happen if someone like Rimmer was given a chance to act out their little Risk campaign fantasies for real?'.

This is what it has always been for me.  Before this thread I never considered that his actions were actually a consequence of Lister chewing his light bee.  It was always a character piece:  here's what Rimmer would do when given a real army to play with, if he didn't think the lives of those soldiers mattered.  And it shows what he's like as a leader, as well.

[Gulftastic]

Is this the one with great outtake about the 'stone' chimney?

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Is this the one with great outtake about the 'stone' chimney?

Yeah

[Captain Z]

My main gripe is that the wax world was mostly populated by famous people from a narrow field of years before 1990. Surely they could have added at least one or two imagined characters from the hundreds/thousands of years of history before the planet was populated.

[idunnosomename]

You could say the same thing about Futurama's heads in jars and why there is no one from 22nd to 31st century

[Hey Kidz]

They need to do the old Star Trek technique of having two real historical figures and a made up future one. "My philosophy algorithm is based on the works of such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and T'poo of Vulcan."

[the]

In all cases, the device is there to implant real people into the fiction. What you propose would just be implanting more fictional people into the fiction. The element of recognition would be gone and the device would be redundant.

You could get one gag out out of the unfamiliarity/incongruity but that would be it.

[idunnosomename]

They at least did one token made up future history character in the new Bill and Ted

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My main gripe is that the wax world was mostly populated by famous people from a narrow field of years before 1990. Surely they could have added at least one or two imagined characters from the hundreds/thousands of years of history before the planet was populated.

I'm happy to assume that was the point of this particular wax world.  Maybe there were loads of them, and this happened to be the one populated by the narrow category of Hitler, Winnie the Pooh and Pythagoras.

[DrGreggles]

Sorry, but the bit where Ghandi explodes is funny as fuck.


The cast give endless respect and lolz to the Elvis impersonator during the episode commentary.  HAHAHAA HE IS SO GOOD INNNEEE

no he is shite.  objectively the worst part of the whole episode and you love it

I think that Elvis guy is great.
Probably not the most accurate impersonation out there, but definitely big* and ridiculous - which is what was needed.

_{*as in a big performance, not a fat Elvis}

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Just not my kind of thing, really.  Maybe it's because I always ask the question "would I like this person to come into where I live and behave like this between 11pm and 3am" and if the answer is no they are therefore shit in every other context.

[DrGreggles]

That's because 11pm to 3am is the universal wanking window!

_{[changes 'widow' to 'window' before anyone notices]}

[Lemming]

Kryten's explanation about the light bee just makes the most sense to me - Rimmer is domineering and enjoys having (perceived or real) control over people and is a military-history-obsessed wanker, sure, but he never comes close to acting anything like he does in this episode at any point before or after. Plus Barrie's performance is so wild and broad, with the nasal shrieking and mad eyes during the drill scene, in a way that I don't remember the character ever being played at any other point.

The Kryten line was really strange to include in the script, especially if it's not meant to be taken as true. It's not a joke in itself, nor is it really the setup to one, so it serves no purpose outside just being an odd line that has the potential to change the whole episode if you accept Kryten's analysis. Even if it's just supposition, you'd think Lister might stop for at least half a second and think "ooh shit" but the episode just plows straight past it.

[A Hat Like That]

Yeah Craig Charles describing Pooh being readied for execution is one of my favourite bits in all of Dwarf. "He's refusing the blindfold," said in utter earnestness pops into my mind a lot.

I rewatched recently, that entire Winnie the Pooh bit is wonderful.

[JamesTC]

When I was a kid, I had no idea who Rasputin was and thought he was a guy called Rice Pudding.

[NurseNugent]

I rewatched recently, that entire Winnie the Pooh bit is wonderful.

I love that bit. I like Tony Hawks as Caligula too. I have a  small quibble though, Holly calling Rimmer 'matey' seems very out of character, especially as we know from Dimension Jump that she doesn't like him either.

[BeardFaceMan]

When I was a kid, I had no idea who Rasputin was and thought he was a guy called Rice Pudding.

Thank fuck I'm not the only one.

[vainsharpdad]

When I was a kid, I had no idea who Rasputin was and thought he was a guy called Rice Pudding.

You'd have been great fun at a Boney M Gig.

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You'd have been great fun at a Boney M Gig.

Which pudding sounds like Boney M?

[idunnosomename]

I have a  small quibble though, Holly calling Rimmer 'matey' seems very out of character, especially as we know from Dimension Jump that she doesn't like him either.

isn't "matey" always passive aggressive in Red Dwarf dialogue? I don't remember the bit but maybe Hattie read it wrong.

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isn't "matey" always passive aggressive in Red Dwarf dialogue?

I don't remember it coming up very often.  M'laddio is what I think of.