- Lister's claim of having turned 28 in Series VII, having been in space for 4 years in Series VI, would support this.
- Also, in the episode that introduces the Holoship in Episode 1 of Series 5, Binks states that Lister was chronologically in his mid-20s while physically being 47.
- "Psirens", at least, confirms this to an extent, as Lister and The Cat have spent the last 200 years in stasis while chasing Red Dwarf.
- Technically that's neither here nor there; they were forced into it because the Starbug had limited supplies, whereas the Dwarf had enough to last them the rest of their lives.Nerd annotation
- His low is very different from the other anthropomorphic personifications of his subconscious; and also mentions 'thinking horrible things' (violent and sexual thoughts are very common with intrusive thoughts.)
- He mentions 'voices' in Rimmerworld as a symptom of his anxiety (intrusive thoughts can sound like your own internal monologue and can be confused or described as voices)
- It would make a lot of sense that he'd have something like that after what he's gone through (might be a side-effect of his self-deprecation and abusive family), and would also go hand in hand with his borderline obsessive compulsive behaviour.
- So the Cat priest was right: Lister is Jesus In Purgatory.
- Alternatively....
- In fact, the first episodes of series 7 can be considered a final judgement for them: "Tikka to Ride" was Lister's, tempted by the time machine, "Stoke me a Clipper" was Rimmer's, as he overcame his cowardice, "Duct Soup" was Kryten's, since he lied to humans and betrayed his programming, and the unaired Cat episode was Cat's.
- Droid Rot would naturally follow from being left on for 3 million years. The head's Northern English (possibly Lancastrian) accent is a deterioration of his original Received Pronunciation English one.
- Alternatively, Spare Head 3 has gotten that accent from talking to Lister.
- How do you know that the protozoa died? Perhaps they lived and evolved into sentient multi-cellular organisms that gathered into small hunter-gatherer tribes and raided the Rimmers for food and metal tools. The Rimmers then started a campaign to exterminate them, fighting a bitter war for two centuries before they finally gave up and reluctantly allowed the natives to live so long as they stayed away and did not pollute the genetic purity of the Rimmer race.
- The native hunter-gatherers would eventually dominate. The Rimmers might be more advanced, but a race whose hat is "asshat" would be too internally riven to beat them down forever.
- Most of the Rimmers' technology comes from the colony pod that the Original Rimmer came down in. The Rimmers would use this technology to defeat the hunter-gatherers; but when they ran out of power sources, the natives would take their revenge and enslave them, becoming the masters of the planet for eternity.
- The native hunter-gatherers would eventually dominate. The Rimmers might be more advanced, but a race whose hat is "asshat" would be too internally riven to beat them down forever.
- Maybe there wasn't any "basic single-celled protozoa" on the planet. Remember that Rimmer is convinced that aliens exist; he'd assume that, if there is no visible life on the planet, it must be there in invisible form.
- "The only lifeforms are single-celled protozoa and me" - given he's on a capsule with terraforming equipment, it's not a stretch that it would have scanning capabilities to determine any prior lifeforms.
- The planet appears to be inhabitable, if a tad deserty, before Rimmer fires up the accelerators. There might have been some native life.
- The single-celled protozoa was the the native life, and the eco-accelerators advanced it to to create the Earth-like environment and the Rimmers.
- Has no one considered that the protozoa had stowed away in Rimmer's pod, and are therefore Earth natives?
- Alternatively, it's an old human planet that's gone over desertification in 3 million years. The protozoa are the only things left.
- The first retcon may be due to Married!Lister from "Stasis Leak" telling Our!Lister to not see Run For Your Wife on the 1989 Earth. Because of this, the timeline is changed so that Our!Lister doesn't go on and marry Kochanski. note
- The events of "Timeslides" cause Pre-Accident!Rimmer to be more receptive to his future self in "Stasis Leak" - after all, he's already been visited by his future self as a child. This makes him listen to his own warnings instead of thinking he's hallucinating. He manages to get put into stasis with Lister during "The End", and is thus alive at the end of "Timeslides"...for a few seconds.
- In the same episode, Rimmer tells Lister about their future selves and Lister's quest to get Kochanski. Realising he needs to Carpe that Diem, Past!Lister asks Kochanski out, leading to their romance before the Radiation Leak. It is now, ironically, Past!Rimmer's forewarned attempt to prevent the Radiation Leak that causes the drive plate damage which goes on to wipe out the crew. Realising he can't do anything to prevent the leak, he characteristically runs for the hills, taking responsibility for the damage to the plate, but only so he can go into stasis, as seen above.
- (This one's a bit of a stretch, but bear with us) With the Tension Sheet invented several years earlier, thanks to Lister and Rimmer's meddlings, Thickie Holden (a lifelong fanboy of The Space Corps Test Pilot squad), funds a pet project. Not realising what is meant by a ship that travels at "Glacial speeds", he pours billions of Dollarpounds into the revamping of Red Dwarf, allowing the JMC to hire on a thousand extra crew by the time Lister and Rimmer come aboard, bringing the ship's complement to 1,169 instead of 169. Once Holden discovers that Red Dwarf is a clapped out old mining ship, he pulls any further funding and has his name expunged from the project in embarrassment.
- This minor change also spurs Rimmer's father on to push his sons toward greatness, retconning his suicide. After all, if Thickie can make it big, why not our Arnold?
Over the next three million years, AM amused himself by manipulating the development of the Cats and causing the occasional holy war. When Lister left stasis, he began the torture in earnest by resurrecting Rimmer as a hologram. Everything bad that has happened to the crew from seasons one to eight has been another subtle torture by AM, who was using his godlike power to create the enemies and monsters they encountered and excusing his actions with his apparent senility.
- Better yet, the present Red Dwarf crew are the original five playthings: Lister is Gorrister, Kochanski is Ellen, The Cat is Benny, Rimmer is Nimdok, and Kryten is Ted. Anything else?
- What about when they had lost Red Dwarf and they were stuck on Starbug? How could AM keep toying with them?
- Well, considering that this theory is based on AM being behind everything, it means that AM copied himself onto Starbug's computer and is still playing silly buggers with them. Alternatively, he set up the creatures and monsters of Series Six and Seven before getting hijacked by Kryten's nanobots; once he's recovered in the form of the Holly Watch and regains control of Red Dwarf, he commands the nanobots to recreate the crew and kick off the events of Series Eight.
- What about when they had lost Red Dwarf and they were stuck on Starbug? How could AM keep toying with them?
- That's disturbing....
- I've got the cure for that! A few minutes after AM awoke Lister, Lister accidentally poured some lager on the bridge's control panel, which caused AM to malfunction; allowing Holly, who was hiding in a data bank that AM had overlooked, to mount a digital assault on AM's core program using the personalities stored in the hologram library, including a version of Rimmer with certain attributes extrapolated to create a being quite like ACE RIMMER!!!!!! And Holly deleted AM, undoing his horrific deeds, all to a truly epic version of the theme music. However the battle did damage to Holly's artificial intelligence causing a condition mistaken for computer senility.
- Well, if it undid all his horrific deeds, then why the hell does the series even happen? Remember, the theory states that AM creates every horrible thing that the crew encounter: without AM, the crew should have no problems, especially since Rimmer can't even be incarnated as a hologram with the Ace hologram taking up most of the ship's allotment to hologram power. Plus, why and how could Holly do anything suggested? He hasn't even met Ace Rimmer yet, Ace's most important attributes don't even exist in Rimmer at the beginning of the series, and a hologram wouldn't be worth a damn against a godlike supercomputer that only goes down with the assistance of two of AM's multiple personalities and a Villainous Breakdown. Also, Holly has been deleted within the theory: he is dead as a doornail, his personality emptied onto a surplus hard-drive and flushed into space. And if he did manage to hide away in a single console, it would mean that he's been doing that for the better part of three million years: unlike AM, he doesn't have the evolution of the Cats to entertain him, so Holly is not only suffering from Computer Senility, but terminal paranoia and an utter inability to control the ship due to having no access to anything besides the screensaver.
- As a matter of fact, if you wanted to resolve the Poison Oak Epileptic Tree in an ideal way that works with the continuity of both the series and the theory, just look at Back To Earth: Holly is offline due to Lister accidentally flooding the ship, which means that AM is confined to his own damaged hard-drive and only capable of controlling a single terminal, which is stuck typing "I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM," over and over again.
- Which Arnold stumbled upon, read the story (with some additions detailing his subtle torture of the crew) and frantically deleted AM's hard drive. And if the first counter theory is true, Holly could have been planning his revenge or working on his holly rock plan.
- Since when did the story come into play here? He's typing the words "I have no mouth and I must scream," not the whole damn story.
- I've got the cure for that! A few minutes after AM awoke Lister, Lister accidentally poured some lager on the bridge's control panel, which caused AM to malfunction; allowing Holly, who was hiding in a data bank that AM had overlooked, to mount a digital assault on AM's core program using the personalities stored in the hologram library, including a version of Rimmer with certain attributes extrapolated to create a being quite like ACE RIMMER!!!!!! And Holly deleted AM, undoing his horrific deeds, all to a truly epic version of the theme music. However the battle did damage to Holly's artificial intelligence causing a condition mistaken for computer senility.
It explains all of the science going on that the characters admitted was impossible within the context of the show's universe, especially how a cat with at most six kittens could parent and feed an entire race of eventually human-sized (English-speaking, clothing-wearing) beings without ever leaving the storeroom.
- To be fair, the storeroom is a couple of cubic miles in volume.
- This theory is actually used in the ending of the first novel and for a good portion of the second. The problem with applying it to the TV show is that Better Than Life did not arrive on board until the titular episode in the second series.
- But is it not also stated in the books that those playing Better Than Life forget they're playing a game? And what better way to forget about something than to not acknowledge that it even exists? If the doctors/programmers are trying to remove him from the game slowly, surely the best way to do it would be to allow him to come to the realisation himself? Thus they "mail" new information to his subconscious, letting him know about the games existence. In later series, they cook up the despair squid and simulation units - to reinforce the idea that reality can be subjective - as well as subtly suggesting he is the lynchpin of the entire universe (which a lot of the time travel episodes suggest) and then finally, in Back To Earth, flatly stating that he is an entirely fictional character.
- The Portal Gun was reverse engineered and upgraded from Hogey's gun.
Also, consider this: both future selves of Rimmer have moustaches.
So presumably, some time after the events of "Stasis Leak", Future Lister suffers an "accident" that leaves him as a brain in a jar (and the same accident kills Kochanski), and the Dwarfers start using the Time Drive again (and abusing it) around that time.
Also, remember that by the end of "Back to Earth," it has been about fifteen years (subjectively) since Lister emerged from stasis: the future events from "Stasis Leak" should have come to pass already, but didn't. If this theory is accurate, this discrepancy would make sense because the "Stasis Leak" future selves would have been erased from the timeline just like the future selves were erased at the end of "Out of Time").
- It's more like two years between Stasis Leak and Out of Time, meaning Future Lister would have met Cassandra by Stasis Leak, so he could have known of the encounter ahead of time. And Kochanski could have been 'Rimmer', leading Future Lister to get into a fight with real Rimmer and consequently end up as a dreadlocks and a brain. Or perhaps Holly did it.
- It's not "more like two years", it's five years. In "Out of Time" Kryten says he's been part of the crew (and doing Lister's laundry) for "four long years", and Kryten came back to Red Dwarf soon after Lister's twins were born. So the episode "Parallel Universe" (two episodes after "Stasis Leak") happens between nine and ten months before Kryten comes back. That rounds off to five years.
- What the hell is that supposed to mean? (The "Kochanski could have been 'Rimmer' [...] Or perhaps Holly did it" bit.) I've read it and re-read it multiple times and I can't make any sense of it. Kochanski could have been Rimmer? Holly did what? I'm incredibly confused right now.
- In season 8 they meet an accurate future predicting computer called Cassandra, one of the things that happens is it says Rimmer is going to die, so he gives his jacket with name badge to another prisoner, and that 'Rimmer' dies. If he'd given it to Kochanski, she dies, Lister fights him, and so on.
- I agree with this WMG 100%. I think that the events of Stasis Leak with Lister going back and marrying Kochanski was the start of the future Dwarfers abuse of the Time Drive.
- This makes so much sense now that I've heard the theory it's pretty hard NOT to believe it. Having been in love with Kochanski for so long, it's pretty hard to think that if Lister had access to the ability to travel anywhere in time and space that he wouldn't eventually go back to see her. Of course, being Lister he's not just going to accept that he could only be with her until the radiation leak kills off the crew. All we know about what happened to him was that there was some kind of accident. Perhaps Lister's attempts to prevent the radiation leak actually exposed him to radiation and destroyed his body. With Lister no longer able to act, the group's morality was largely in the hands of the Cat and Rimmer who may have quickly disabled Kryten's behaviour protocols (and anti-toupee safeguards) thereby leading them on the path they'd eventually take.
- Alternatively, Rimmer is a direct descendant of Brittas.
- Or maybe Brittas is one of his clones from Rimmerworld, who somehow managed to escape and go back in time.
- Wouldn't the hypothetical Dracula (presumably named for the famous Countess Dracula) be a pregnant male dog, since that's the universe where males get pregnant?
- ^ It must have been a male dog, and being named after Hemo Erotic Countess Dracula sounds logical. BTW, I've always loved that Lister named his cat Frankenstein. A cool name for a cat.
- Technically, Frankenstein and Dracula are both surnames, thus non-gendered.
- That's actually in the series. Rimmer has on at least one occasion woken up from a dream shouting "Yes, mummy, I'm just packing my satchel!" and has been shown dreaming he's singing a musical number in the hologram simulation suite.
- The original script states that George McIntyre was killed by the original fault in the drive plate.
- Or, that wasn't the real Rimmer at all, just a simulation of him that the game created because the crew found themselves missing him despite everything.
- In the Red Dwarf novels, Better Than Life actually makes you forget you're playing it so they wouldn't know. It has the unfortunate side effect of slowly killing you, though.
- During the battle, you can see a "unreality jolt" effect. Shortly afterwards, Rimmer is manipulated into destroying the Time Drive, which is exactly what the bubbles are designed to do (stop looters from taking and using the Drive). In fact the whole Future Selves thing was to convince the Dwarfers not to use time travel (again, to dissuade them from using the Drive), as was Tikka to Ride (showing them the consequences of time travel abuse and convincing them not to do it.)
- Rimmer being heroic? That's unreality if I've ever seen it.
- Considering the amount of
continuity errorschanges in history that occur (the number of crew originally aboard Red Dwarf, the century the accident happened etc.) this isn't too far fetched, especially considering that they travelled through time before Timeslides.- Ok, here's what I reckon. A young Lister gives in and listens to his Red Dwarf self, and goes to sell the tension sheet idea. Only to discover that Thickie Holden had already beaten him to it. But simply the act of being able to let go of the mindsets he allows himself to be caught up over, that hold him back from achieving things, allows him to abandon too much overthinking and just to go for things. In this case, being overzealously anti-capitalist just for the sake of a youth identity gimmick prevented him from being opportunist and seizing the moment in certain cases. So now that he has broken the barrier, and taken that leap, he disregarded his radical identity much easier, and could now seize the moment easier without worrying about what would go wrong after. Thus, was able to ask Kochanski out easier, and succeeded. They dated 3 months till she dumped him for a catering officer.
- So, does that make Lister a subjectivist?
The first Kochanski (Clare Grogan) and the second Kochanski (Chloë Annett) are not only physically different (explained due to Grogan giving up acting and being replaced by Annett), but they're very different personality wise too.
This is because they're from different realities, and like with Arnold and 'Ace' Rimmer, there was a specific point in their lives that would branch off to create the two different Kochanskis.
The first Kochanski's parents divorced, and she was raised in Scotland by her father. This not only explains the accent, but also her easy going nature, and the fact she's a bit of a Lad-ette.
The second Kochanski's parents decided to stay together, and raised Kochanski in England. She grew up a little spoilt due to her parents overcompensating for their failing marriage, and clearly is used to the finer things in life. She's also more refined and lady like, even though she still has that Action Girl streak.
- Nope. The episode "Duct Soup" establishes that the second Kochanski was raised in Glasgow. (And although the first Kochanski does appear to be friendlier, she really isn't a "ladette". In fact, her personality appears very feminine.)
- In "Duct Soup" The second Kochanski makes reference to her having attended Cyber School, surrounded by computer recreated characters of important historical figures, and CG friends, likely experiencing a lot of Received Pronunciation. I'm presuming the differences between the two Kochanskis is that the first one (Grogan) never experienced Cyber School, but instead went to a more rough and tumble Glaswegian state school. These different experiences would make for very different people.
- Jossed. According to the books, its normal cruising speed is 20000 miles per hour.
- Grogan!Kochanski appears once in series 6, after the deletion of the Inquisitor. Perhaps the crew's memories of her didn't shift until they actually encountered a flesh-and-blood version to make them shift?
- I wouldn't even go that far. It's simply that the series seven version that Chloë Annett plays is from an alternative universe that the Inquisitor had not yet reached.
- But the Inquisitor was destroyed by his own gauntlet, meaning every action he had ever done had been undone. It wouldn't make a difference what universes he did or didn't visit.
- This makes sense when you consider that the Kochanski in series six was not actually the real Kochanski though, it was only a psiren impersonating her, through reading Lister's memory of her. It makes sense that Lister would remember the series 1-2 Clare Grogan incarnation of her, if that's the memory he has, even if the Inquisitor's erasure had restored her back to the series 7-8 Chloe Annett incarnation instead. Remember that Lister and Kryten were originally set to be erased before they outwitted the Inquisitor, and were then sent to a timeline they had never actually lived. While they were able to restore the timeline itself back, they still had the same memories of all the events that had happened to them, which Rimmer and the Cat lacked (and thus, in Lister's case, he would remember the series one replacement Kochanski when the series six psiren read his mind).
- I've always wondered why they didn't do that! But then again, how would they explain Kryten? He won't be built for a few hundred years, they could say that Cat is an alien they picked up.
- The X-tended version of Tikka To Ride states that they've decided against using time travel to go home, in no small part due to the havoc they've already caused on the space/time continuum.
- This is lampshaded a bit actually in Back To Earth, where it's implied that the specials actually take place AFTER a hypothetical series nine on the show, but it's just one that happened to be off screen. The fan in the shop exclaims that series nine was the best series yet. And with the cliffhanger of series eight unsolved, it's entirely possible that series nine is simply whatever the fans choose to make of it in their own imagination.
- Or the Back To Earth specials actually DO make part of series nine, but only towards the end. Kinda like how Back In The Red made three out of the eight total episodes of series eight, but were not the whole series by itself. Let's just say, for hypothetical sake, that series nine would have six episodes. That would be three episodes that help tie up the cliffhanger transition from Red Dwarf 8 to Back To Earth, and then you have the three last episodes being Back To Earth itself. Maybe when the fan in the shop was talking about series nine being the best yet, he was talking about it in a present tense, as in it hadn't finished yet, or was still airing. Mainly because the shop had all the DVDs from series 1-8, but not nine. Obviously series nine doesn't exist of course, so there wouldn't be a DVD for it, but it's just a bit of an explanation to explain the otherwise unexplainable.
- Or that series nine was SO AMAZING, the shop didn't have any DVDs of it because it was sold out already.
- We have material to go on to explain a few things, to tie up that continuity gap between Series 8 and Back To Earth thankfully. An unfilmed ending of series eight suggested the original hologram series 1-7 Rimmer came back from his Ace Rimmer travels to try and save his series 8 self. Likely given how much of a screwup Rimmer generally is, he failed to save his own alternative self's life, so ended up taking his place back with the Dwarfers, and that's how we have a hard light hologram Rimmer in Back To Earth. I mean even if the series 8 Rimmer died and was resurrected to the Rimmer seen in Back To Earth and series 10, he would be SOFT LIGHT instead? If Red Dwarf had the ability to resurrect hard light holograms, why not just do it before back on series 1? Also, the same alternative series eight ending shows the Dwarfers having full control of Red Dwarf again, when the rest of the crew (including Captain Hollister) evacuated in all the Blue Midgets and Starbugs. This explains the lack of crew in Back To Earth. Also, Kochanski was said to have taken a space craft, and dumped Lister before the events of Back To Earth (Kryten lied, and said to Lister when he was in the bath that she had died via being sucked out of an airlock), hence her absence too. And we know Holly isn't there because, while Lister had the same bath, he left the tap on, and a leak damaged Holly's circuits.
- I'm not sure Back To Earth is series nine. The first thing we see in the first episode of Back To Earth is the on screen text saying 'nine years later'. And given that, from series five onwards to series eight, the timeline had been very consistent with an evolving story arc, where one season cliffhanger led onto the next (as opposed to the more episodic sit-com feel of series one-four). It stands to reason that series eight's final episode would led straight onto the first episode of a hypothetical series nine, especially with the way series eight ended. NINE YEARS between series eight and Back To Earth, alot would have happened. That's your series nine, but as an above troper stated, it's left up to your imagination.
- Series eight aired in 1999, Back To Earth aired in 2009 (ten years gap, which would easily justify the 'nine years later' on screen text, with just one year out). Well what people don't seem to be remembering is the shelved Red Dwarf movie, the one which had to stall it's production. It was written, storyboards were created, and the cast even got together for read throughs back in 2001. Filming was actually intended to happen in Australia in 2005. But the movie fell short because Doug Naylor didn't have enough funding. It's storyline involving a race of evolved Homo sapienoids exterminating all humans, with Red Dwarf being the last in its chain of victims, was to serve as a sequel to series eight. It featured what appears to be the hard light hologram Rimmer up to Series VII (rather than the alive one from Series VIII), however Series VIII's Chloë Annett's Kochanski, Norman Lovett's Holly, and Captain Hollister appear in the cast list. Likely it would give the 1999-2009 continuity gap an explanation, and serve as a pseudo series nine. Or at least, itself and Back To Earth together would achieve something near to it.
- Or it's just a case of lost episodes. I mean Identity Within of series seven, and Dad of series three, were never aired, but we still KNOW they happened.
- Or this.
- If they ever do get round to making the movie, its likely it will serve as a Series 8-Back To Earth bridge, and a prequel to Back To Earth and Series 10.
- The Rimmer from Back To Earth/Series X is a Composite Character of his original self and his series VIII self thanks to a combination of personality disks.
- The X in Red Dwarf X is not the Roman numeral for 10, but the letter X, as used in mathematics to denote an unknown quantity.
- If we look at the alternative flip cover for the Series 10 DVD, it seems to have the same sort of maroon colour as the Series 6 DVD. And if we take into account that Back To Earth (as a Series 9) was a continuation of the Back To Reality story from Series 5, then it's as if Red Dwarf X (as a Series 10) is just a retelling of what Series 6 COULD HAVE been, if Doug Naylor listened to the fans when they said they wanted more episodes away from Starbug and aboard Red Dwarf more. Since Series 6 was the point where Red Dwarf started to take a different direction before, that ended up altering the status quo.
- Rimmer's middle name is Judas. And as suggested in Rimmerworld, Rimmer's bloodline suffers from heart and chest pains, Rimmer himself inheriting the flaw. In the recent Series X episode Lemons, the Jesus for most of the story suffers similar pains. Now, later on, we realize that this wasn't the same Jesus as the Jesus Christ who appeared later. Nethertheless, it seems interesting that Doug Naylor threw those 'chest pain' lines in, as if to suggest to us that this Jesus was actually Rimmer's ancestor, with the real Jesus Christ being an aversion.
- Uh, if you've watched Lemons, it's explicitly stated that Jesus's pains are abdominal and caused by an impacted kidney stone. Rimmer's genetic fault is a tendency towards stress-related nervous disorders, which tend to manifest as strokes and heart attacks.
- It is implied that like the Cat race, Kryten watched so many old American movies (in particular Rebel Without A Cause) that he broke his programming, and that the personality is contained within the head itself (with Kryten's spare heads in a later episode showing a difference to him). However, the theory holds plausibility in that even as early as Series 1, Talkie Toaster appears to have a level of AI far above his requirements, causing him to want to perform tasks other than that of a toaster but being depressed due to his inability to move. So it's entirely possible that when renovating up Talkie Toaster, Kryten may have used the programming language he was most familiar with - his own, thus making it rather like his original self (note that in Series 8, when reset to his factory settings, Kryten acts like the David Ross incarnation).
- It may be that they can't choose a particular time period to go back to, for whatever reason.
- 1) Hologram Lister, Cat and Kryten lose Kochanski to the other dimension (our timeline) containing Cat and Kryten, and Lister as a human.
- 2) Human Lister and his Cat and Kryten try to return Kochanski to her native dimension, but unfortunately the dimensional rift is damaged again, and Kochanski is lost to the other dimension again.
- 3) Hologram Lister, Cat and Kryten have to accept the realization that they have lost Kochanski, and live out their Series 7 without her.
- 4) Duct Soup would be redundant, since they would have no new crew member to have to adjust to, and the plot point of that episode consisted of our Kryten being jealous of Kochanski trying to steal Lister. It wouldn't apply in the Hologram Lister's dimension. Instead, Identity Within may take place.
- 5) Instead of Blue, we'd have an episode consisting of Hologram Lister missing Kochanski.
- 6) There's no reason why Beyond A Joke wouldn't happen, but the way it happened might be a bit altered. Kryten may be feeling less insecure about himself, as the jealous Kryten was in our dimension of trying to compete with Kochanski, so this Kryten may have been less harsh on Able. Able joins the crew as the new 4th member, to replace Kochanski. Cat and Lister adopt Kochanski's expertise (as she performed in our timeline), because they had been conditioned by her influence beforehand.
- 7) Epideme might occur, with Cat as a victim instead, who ends up armless. Kryten fills up Kochanski's role as well as Listers, as mentioned they benefitted from her presence before and became more sophisticated/competent.
- 8) Nanarchy likely exists pretty much as it did.
- 9) Series 8 is similar, except without nano Rimmer joining the gang as it would be pointless, as the Lister, Kryten and Cat of this timeline would have never experienced him in their adventures. Kochanski is, however, resurrected along with the crew. So with Able maintaining his role as Kochanski's replacement (as Kochanski did as Rimmer's replacement in our Series 8), the original Kochanski is resurrected to take the role that Nano Rimmer did for ours (and like that Rimmer, she doesn't have the memories of Series 1-7 either). Stories are pretty much the same.
- 10) Hologram Lister does not have the same relationship with Nano Kochanski, as he did with the Stasis Kochanski, due to not having the same experiences and adventures together. As such, there is conflict, alienation, and divergence. Kochanski goes into the mirror universe in Only The Good, and dies when she comes back to the Red Dwarf that slowly corroding.
- 11) The Kochanski they knew and interacted with for their Series 1-7 (that was lost to our dimension in Oroboros), returns to them for their version of Back To Earth, and Series 10. This is because in our timeline, Kochanski left our dwarfers on a Blue Midget, for some undisclosed reason found a dimension hopper (or returned to the point where she originally entered our dimension in the dimensional gateway), and returns to her native dimension to be reunited with her crew. In exactly the same fashion to how in our dimension, the Hologram Rimmer that left in Series 7, came back to be with his original crew.
- The problem with this is that in Kochanski's timeline the nanobots never stole Red Dwarf. (It's never stated outright — there was a line in "Ouroboros" but it was cut — but it's very heavily implied, with how they give our Dwarfers all those supplies before the linkway is broken, and how Kochanski is so miserable at being stuck on a small crappy ship like Starbug.)
Meaning that that the reason there is no bridge between VIII and BTE/Series X, is because there doesn't need to be. Series 8 was very unpopular, so it's likely that the ninth series hinted at in BTE follows straight from VII's Nanarchy, and that VIII's Back In The Red never happened. I say this, because they specifically mention in Series X that the reason the crew isn't there is because they were wiped out (which was the case Series 1-VII), so the original reason remains. If Series VIII happened, then the crew would have been resurrected, meaning they'd still be there in BTE and Series X, but they aren't. The nanos didn't resurrect them, and they remain dead due to the radiation leak, just as planned. Series 7 still happens, to explain why Kochanski existed enough before she took a Blue Midget and left on her own (explained in show), obviously following Nanarchy explains they they return to Red Dwarf, but the nano's not being over enthusiastic in their restoration explains why Red Dwarf didn't change to the long remastered model (and why it still has it's short stocky shape in BTE and Series X), and why they didn't resurrect the crew. Series 6 still happened, to explain why Rimmer is a hard light. As to how or why Rimmer came back, who knows. Maybe him failing as Ace, was part of his character's comical presence, as the most hopeless incarnation of any Rimmer. And he returned to the Dwarf to make sure the futures of Stasis Leak and Out Of Time come true. In terms of what happened to the 'Ace Rimmer legacy', who knows.
- Or... not. Series 10 has now made reference to the corrosive microbe from Series 8, meaning it happened.
- The event itself may have happened, but probably not how Series 8 literally portrayed it. Red Dwarf is still in tall and stocky size in Series 9/10, whereas Series 8 has it long and thin.
- Conceivably, Series X is supposed to follow on from Series 6 if you handwave all the continuity that happened between the series, which is pretty much what people who don't like 7, 8 or Back To Earth would do.
Holly and Kryten are both advanced machines that give a convincing impression of sentience, but do not in fact experience anything. Rimmer is merely a simulation, with none of the consciousness that a real human being would have. The Cat is a cat, and hasn't evolved any greater awareness of the world in the last 3 million years.
The only reason Lister hasn't gone insane is that he is too stupid to have realized this.
- Rimmer is very conscious in fact, he is shown to get frustrated when he can't eat proper food or punch Lister. When he becomes a hard light hologram and later is resurrected, he achieves this.
The chameleonic microbes being wiped out by a radiation leak because somebody forgot to fix the drive plate.
- Which makes Rimmer's claim in The Beginning that he saved the day all the more credible.
- As much as I would like to accept this as true, that the nanobots recreated the ship so well that it also recreated the original radiation leak that killed the crew in the first place, it took 3 million years for the radiation levels to die down, after the original accident, which was why it took so long for Holly to release Lister from stasis. So after the events of VIII, what would Lister, Cat, Kryten, Kochanski and Rimmer be doing for 3 million years? Obviously they'd have to be in stasis, or they'd be dead. So if they were brought out of stasis when the radiation levels died down, Lister is probably 6 million years away from Earth now.
- The evacuation fleet encountered a Negative Space Wedgie of the time travel variety. Lister and Co. are now in the year 6 million. Everybody else got to go home.
That is, Series VIII Rimmer died at some point in the nine years between "Only the Good..." and "Back to Earth", and he was revived as a hologram. The new hologram Rimmer had all the memories of Series VIII Rimmer, but was also given the memories of the original Rimmer from Series I-VII. Perhaps these memories were only up-to-date until Red Dwarf was stolen by the nanobots; perhaps they were up-to-date up to the point the original Rimmer became Ace and departed. Either way, Rimmer is now effectively a combination of both his previous incarnations. This is why he has the memories of both the Despair Squid incident (referenced in "Back to Earth") and the chameleonic virus incident (referenced in "The Beginning"), even though they happened to different Rimmers.
How else would he Take A Level In Badass?
- Look at Ace Rimmer. That's the same Rimmer minus his neuroses and a lifetime of having already overcome those neuroses. The capacity for awesome is there. There's simply the lack of will.
- The neuroses could be corrupted/erased from the disc.
The microbe spreads to the Starbugs and Blue Midgets before the ship is abandoned. The crew doesn't find this out until they leave Red Dwarf. Lister, Kochanski, the Cat and Kryten return to find the prisoners all dead as well. Rimmer's hologram has been switched on and he explains the information he gets from the vending machine and gets Kryten to transpose the formula. This explains why he takes credit for saving the ship, while Kryten disputes it.
Possibly caused by exposure to radiation over the course of their evolution aboard Red Dwarf. This would explain the frequent references to Cat "smelling" something - such as a Negative Space Wedgie or enemy ship - which he couldn't possibly be actually physically smelling. As smell is the most important sense to the cat race (as evidenced by the fact that their written language was based on smells), this is the terminology that they use to describe what they are sensing.
- Pretty much confirmed in the Series X finale, where the Cat senses that Rimmer is haunted by the memory of his overbearing father.
It has never been explained what happened to him, but it is clear from Back to Earth that he has his memories from series 1-7 (remembering the encounter with the Despair Squid). In series 10, he comments that he "saved the day" in series 8 - but this is Rimmer we are talking about. Even if that was not actually him, he would take the credit for it. Besides, do we honestly believe he would have been able to be the hero that is Ace Rimmer? He probably crashed the ship into Jupiter.In regards to Red Dwarf, in BTE the boys comment that the timeslides and Holly Hop Drive are on Red Dwarf - things that would not exist in the resurrected ship.
- Holograms are just really advanced AI run by the ship's computer. This could easily be a third Rimmer with memories from the original Rimmer, the first holographic Rimmer, and the resurrected Rimmer from season VIII who died in the interim.
Looking at the inquisition scene, it's notable that the Cat and Rimmer play by the Inquisitor's rules and are polite to him — Rimmer's being his usual toadying self and the Cat is downright friendly. However, Kryten and Lister aren't playing along; they both refuse to justify themselves. In addition, Kryten questions the Inqusitor's methods and says it's not his place to judge the humans, and Lister is just being sullen, rude and insulting. Is it any wonder the Inquisitor chooses them for deletion?
His "you could have been so much more" speech doesn't fit at all with his previous operation modus, so I'm calling it: It's just a rather feeble justification he thought up on the spot to hide that the real reason was "I don't like you."
- Perhaps Hollister was looking to humiliate Rimmer for jamming a pencil up his nose, so he assigned Rimmer a trivial task that he coudn't do but whatever subordinate he had would show him up, but Hollister forgot he hadn't yet assigned Rimmer a replacement for Lister, and the rest of Z-Shift transferred out.
- It's implied to be a trivially easy task in Series VIII, so that's plausible.
- He can't be. The flashback in "Ouroboros" took place in Kochanski's universe, and we saw that both Rimmer and Lister were much the same as in the Dwarfers' own timeline — very different to Ace and Spanners as seen in "Dimension Jump".
- Plus, Spanners married Kochanski in Ace's universe.
- Except that he is stated to have given birth offscreen.
- The explanatory text might have been made up by Holly in his capacity as narrator, to screw with the audience. Not entirely out of character for him.
- It's called the Westermarck Effect. Also, they're the only humans within 3 million years, so desperation.
- The gender reversed alter ego thing could be understandable (we've evolved with a natural aversion to having sex with our brothers and sisters because that would cause serious genetic complications for offspring; we haven't actually had any reasons to evolve a natural attitude one way or another to meeting a gender reversed version of ourselves from a parallel universe). Of course, Lister explicitly points out in Ouroboros that Kochanski is technically his mother and that doesn't seem to bother him that much. Also, in Rimmerworld when faced with the dilemma that a female clone would technically be his sister, Rimmer's attitude was that he simply wouldn't tell her. So you may be onto something.
- Impossible. Aliens don't exist in the 'Dwarf verse.
- That would make sense with Holly being offline. S/He probably used to manage, and was able to override or ignore, many of the individual systems' dictats. Without Holly, these systems now report directly to the crew with no filter, and without a sentient computer to control them, their output doesn't always make sense.
- 1) Originally, Kochanski was the Chloë Annett version.
- 2) In "Out of Time" the crew discovers the time drive.
- 3) The crew eventually finds an ability to travel through space as well as time.
- 4) Lister, being in love with Kochanski, decides to travel back in time so he can be with her. He can only be with her a short while before the radiation leak kills off the crew, but he can keep travelling back and being with her again (he just has to ensure he doesn’t encounter himself, or to somehow eliminate his past self from the equation).
- 5) He goes back and he's with her again, but he starts to get sick of her. He's idealised her in his head, but he really wants to be with a woman more like him. Due to the time drive’s corrupting influence, he decides he has a right to "fix her".
- 6) Lister travels back in time and arranges for Kochanski’s father to have a nice working-class job in Scotland hoping to change her upbringing. Instead, her mother leaves him, hence explaining why when he does have a daughter and name her Christine (and she does pursue the dream he always wanted for his daughter of being a navigation officer on a mining ship) she doesn’t look the same.
- 7) Lister ends up having a romance with this Kochanski (both the local Lister to her time period, who ends up being the Lister throughout the show, and the Lister from the future). History again plays out up until “Out of Time” (except this time with Clare Grogan Kochanski) and eventually the two versions of Lister encounter each other (when the Lister using the time drive, now a brain in a jar, has to travel to the future).
- 8) The time drive is destroyed, thereby erasing the changes it caused, including the changes to Kochanski and causing Lister to forget that he’d seen the different Kochanski.
- 9) When Lister encounters Kochanski next she’s from a parallel universe. In that universe, Lister never had access to the time drive and hence Kochanski was never changed. Therefore, this version of Kochanski was always the Annett version.
The Inquisitor judges Lister (or rather he judges himself) and he’s found unworthy. He’s then replaced by an alternate version of himself who never got a chance at life. This raises some fridge logic if you consider the fact that Lister is his own father. If Lister had never been born then neither would Lister’s father. Therefore, if Lister had never been born then logically neither would any alternate siblings. More fundamentally though, If Lister the son is the same as Lister the father then that must mean he has only his father’s DNA and by extension only his grandfather’s DNA and only his great grandfather’s DNA and by extension all his ancestral DNA is identical to his own. So Lister’s effectively a perfect clone of himself and there shouldn’t be any alternate version of him in the mix.
So where would the DNA for an alternate version of Lister come from? Yes, in theory Lister’s DNA could have been modified to produce someone different, but that’s not really the Inquisitor’s way of working.
The alternative explanation is that, before the loop began, Lister did actually have parents. Lister had a mother and father. They had a child. For some reason, either Lister himself, his parents or someone else entirely decided to leave a baby Lister in a box in a pub (given Lister seems to view it as a way to ensure humanity can never die out, it’s possible he did it himself and left the ourobourous message so he would know what to do when he reached the proper age). The very first version of Lister left in that pub may have been the first Lister or he may have been the first Lister’s son. Either way, once a Lister had been left there the loop had begun and the Listers were set in motion to grow up, travel back in time and leave themselves there (therefore completing the loop).
This way, when the Inquisitor encountered Lister he could have replaced that first Lister (the one who had parents) with an alternative version and this alternative version would have then done the same thing (creating the loop again) therefore resolving the apparent contradiction.
- One entry earlier in the page talked about how the change between Clare Grogan and Chloë Annett's Kochanski existed in universe because of the Inquisitor's meddling. So the cosmetic 'differences' between the Lister in one timeline and that of another could somehow be explained as one having one Kochanski's genes, and the other with the other. Assuming Annett's Kochanski was the original one, who then got replaced with Grogan's by the Inquisitor, Lister as he is then was still born from Annett's genes. When the Inquisitor finally got round to judging David Lister, he 'corrected it' by replacing him with that of a Lister born of Grogan's genes... thus the different appearance. Two questions arise though. Why would changing Annett to Grogan in the first place not affect Lister's appearance right away? And secondly, what actually is the extent of the Inquisitor's powers in changing every last person in time and space, when you take into account that by changing one person you effectively screw up the existence of literally all of their descendants. Does he judge one person independently and override the cosmetic appearance of their descendants? But that would be absurd because then genetics would be completely moot. Or does he see into his own future, and know that he's already going to deem certain of those descendants unworthy, and thus doesn't bother to modify their appearance in line with their ancestor as they'll be changed eventually anyway? The extent of his skillbase is never really expanded on. Either way, Red Dwarf timefucks aside, I like to assume that the alternate Lister is the son of Grogan's Kochanski, and the one we know is that of Annett's. It just makes sense, to me.
- Taking this thought on a stage, the Clare Grogan Kochanski of that universe had, for whatever reason, failed an encounter with that universe's Inquisitor, and was wiped for history. The Chloë Annett version was the "sperm-in-law" she was replaced by.
- Fridge Logic, the Chloe Annett version is actually the original who was replaced by Grogan's version by the Inquisitor. When Lister tricked The Inquisitor and all his work had been undone, she was then restored to Chloe Annett's original version. The Grogan verison the psiren transformed into in Series 6 was just because Lister remembered her like that, and his mind was unaffected by the timeline restoring itself. Mind blown yet?
- I once imagined an episode with Kryten trying to be helpful by installing a cheap female hologram in Talkie Toaster, the intention being that it would become slightly more human, just as he had done. Unfortunately, as with many of Kryten's attempts to be helpful, it backfired, and Talkie Toaster got no better, using its human appearance to try and emotionally extort the eating of toast out of the crew - sobbing hysterics, suicide threats (which obviously mean nothing coming from a toaster's hologram) and even offering holographic sex to Rimmer in exchange for the eating of toast. Of course Rimmer can't eat toast, so TT would start insulting his sexuality for turning it down.Talkie: "I can take two at a time, y'know." (imagined line)
Even if Rimmer died, Red Dwarf may have been saved. Given they rebuilt the ship once, Kryten's nanobots could presumably fix the damage once the virus was stopped.
As for what happened then, Lister, Kryten, Kochanski and the Cat would all have been in the mirror universe. However, if they learnt Rimmer had returned to the collapsing ship, they would probably have come back to try to get him (Kryten could presumably rebuild the prism laser in the other universe). Rimmer would be dead, hence being brought back as a hologram, but our heroes would have Red Dwarf to themselves again (and the crew may have all been killed off anyway, if the microbe travelled with them to their escape crafts).
- It's likely that he wouldn't consider it to be a proper officer. In "Balance Of Power", he specifically states that the rank of Catering Officer, essentially a commissioned chef and the rank that Olaf Petersen held, is not a real officer. For Rimmer, it's engineering, navigation, or nothing. However, this WMG does fit in with the implication during the books that he does have a certain talent for graphic design.
- The "mutated" developing fluid from "Timeslides" was really the potion wizards develop photos in, which causes them to come to life. (I mean, what makes more sense — that normal, physical developing fluid could "mutate" to the point that it develops properties which blatantly defy the laws of physics, or A Wizard Did It?)
- Similarly, Kryten's Techno Babble explanation for how the Matter Paddle worked was nonsense; it's actually a computerized Portkey. (He claimed it transmits you as light beams, but then they use it to travel 200,000 light years in a matter of moments. If it did indeed transmit you as light, Lister and Cat would have had to wait 400,000 years for Kryten to send the thing back.) Indeed, this would also explain why splitting the signal in "Demons and Angels" produced duplicates with the "good" and "bad" attributes of the original; the original spell simply wasn't intended to copy the travel subject that way, and Lister and Kryten — meddling in forces they don't understand — accidentally trigger unintended side-effects, much like when Hermione drank Polyjuice Potion containing what turned out to be a cat hair.
- The virus from "Confidence and Paranoia" was actually magically created, most likely a failed experiment intended to trigger latent magical abilities in Muggles (probably for the same reason as Magneto's mutation machine in X-Men).
Rimmer wants to be female but can't conciously bring himself to even think about it. Only when he can justify it to himself somehow out of neccisity does allow this element to surface. This is also part of Rimmer's extreme dislike against the overtly hypermasculine Ace Rimmer (who himself may be aggressively overcompensating.)