8:49 Part of Rimmer's issues do stem from the fact that his brothers routinely bullied him and were almost never punished for it but went to become officers and one married a model. That's enough to make anyone feel a bit shit about themselves.
In the novel, it describes that his brothers actually got to be so intelligent and successful because their parents paid for them to have implants that allow them to take in knowledge far faster than those without Rimmer didn't get one because they ran out of money when it was his turn
I think it's just the fact he's used to get the shits and giggles for times when they need the views as well as to advance the story, but that's who I see it. :P
This is without doubt the high water mark for red dwarf. This is the best episode they ever did. An episode so good that professor Stephen Hawking cites it as his favourite episode. Yes he watches red dwarf. Yes I find that awesome.
Gotta love Rimmer's scorn in his voice after the cop tells them how great Lister is for "purifying" things. Rimmer's got more issues than Boys Life, but casual murder isn't high on his list.
2:59 For people who don't know who that is or do but can't remember, his name is Timothy Spall. A well known British actor best known for his roles as: Winston Churchill (The King's Speech) and playing Peter Pettigrew (Harry Potter).
Thanks, I loved him in this scene, but I hadn't seen him in anything else that I could recall. And it's interesting that another Red Dwarf actor was in Harry Potter.
Apparently they meant to film the car chase and you'd only find out about the hallucination when Holly talks them out of it, but they couldn't afford to film it
The funny thing about the comparisons between Duane Dibbley and Urkel is that a year after this episode, Steve Urkel would get his own alter ego in the form of Stefan Urquelle. It’s a weird sort of dichotomy - the Cat, normally stylish and suave, got a complete dork of an alter ego, while Urkel, a poster-child for dorkdom, got his own cool alter ego.
I find myself wondering if Robert Llewellyn intentionally modeled Kryten's laughter after Herman Munster or if that's just an association I made because I recently saw a clip of The Munsters that put the comparison at the forefront of my brain.
This series included three episodes that found a way to give Rimmer a physical presence, shows how the character was heading towards getting a real body in the next series. It had to happen really, there's only so much can be done with an entirely intangible character. x
@@optimisticwhovian1726 well apparently the original plan for the end of Series 1 was that Lister's attempt to generate Hologram Kochanski was going to work, and she would've been a full time character in Series 2. I imagine, in that version of the show, holograms being intangible would've been a much more prominent and necessary plot point (recurring tension around Lister only being able to talk to her and never touch her, etc.). When they went away from that, getting around holograms being non-physical became more and more of an obstacle until they finally decided on a permanent workaround.
I kinda always wanted to hear Rimmer ask Kryten to remind him to check his swimming certificates when they got back. Just to ad a bit of question to the things in the TIV being real about them.
Bizarrely, back in 2022, I made the mistake of watching Back to Earth, not knowing that it was a surprise miniseries-long sequel to this episode. Because of this, I knew going in to this one that the characters were experiencing their first despair squid hallucination. *AND IT WAS STILL ONE OF THE GREATEST EPISODES IN ANY SITCOM EVER.* Keep in mind: I had the munchies and was making a tomato sandwich on homemade sourdough bread, so I didn't catch the initial shot of Kryten holding the crossbow/speargun in real reality. So when I went back to the TV screen and saw the signature scene of Lister and co. hallucinating that they're in an intense dystopian car chase in "reality", acting like kids sitting on four chairs each and bouncing around with intense machismo, I BAWLED OUT LAUGHING. That is how you reveal everything to be hallucinogenic IMO, and the episode in general is an entertaining, hilarious look at how our lives could be so much worse.
"Why would a haddock kill itself? Why am I even asking that question?" 🤣🤣 I'm with you about Dwayne Dibberly. Fantastic and hilarious the first time, but was then massively overdone.
Craig Charles is mixed race. His mother was Irish and his father was mixed-race Guyanese with Chinese and African origins. He's pretty proud of it too, as stated a few times in Robert Llewellyn's excellent autobiography "The Man in the Rubber Mask". It's an excellent book, I might add, and the whole of the audiobook was uploaded in parts by a channel called Ace Rimmer a far while back. It gives a really interesting insight into various aspects of the show, particularly the trouble Grant and Naylor had with trying to get Red Dwarf USA off the ground.
I guess I was assuming too much when I said "bi-racial"--I probably should have said "mixed race" or "multi-racial", but I was going by memory and didn't double-check my facts.
6:29 "Vote Fascist for a 3rd glorious decade of total law enforcement". This is a joke about the the Conservative Party, which under Maggie Thatcher had won 3 elections, and then in 1992 they won a 4th with John Major.
As much a failure as Rimmer is, he never fell so low as to become a hobo, so I can see why he couldn't stand that life. Even if he was a low-ranker officer on Red Dwarf, hey that was something, and he managed to stay with that company for all those years. To have stable employment was at least some small measure of success that the despair squid took away from him, so I can see how that could just stab deep at his inferiority complex.
Well it's stated clearly at the end that the despair squid took away from him his ability to blame his inferiority and failure on his parents and upbringing, as he shares parentage with Lister's hallucinatory character, a success in life. That's what would induce suicidal despair in a man like Rimmmer.
From videos I've seen of the cast they generally seem to have believed this to be the last episode of Red Dwarf as they were aware that Red Dwarf USA was going to happen and believed their show was over.
Fun act: the actor who played the cop whom Kryten shoots played as one of the baddies in Home Alone 3. It's my favorite behind 1 and 2. He only gets the hell beaten out of him by Alex, not shot lol.
I think this and Out of Time are two of the best episodes the show ever produced. The latter in particular is one of the ballsiest ways to end a series since Blake 7.
There is a subtle giveaway that this wasn't reality in the car park scene. If you look at Lister's car, you notice that the steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car for the UK.
Next episodes sounds really interesting. I never thought that you would even touch Red Dwarf USA. Of if you were, it would be far in the future after all available episodes. Just you're really going for the whole retrospective thing.
Depending on how in-depth you end up going with your RD USA Vlog, I have some videos you might want to look at. Red Dwarf USA Documentary: (Part 1) ua-cam.com/video/R5B9iycpd08/v-deo.html (Part 2) ua-cam.com/video/Y9apCtxHXJ4/v-deo.html Craig Bierko Interview: ua-cam.com/video/jnWxdbW9tXY/v-deo.html
I'm surprised you didn't point out the logic flaw of how the despair squid poison could be affecting Rimmer and Kryten since they're both machines. It is a classic episode and the car chase scene is the best bit (as well as being a sneaky way for the production crew to skip having to do an actual car chase) but the convoluted nature of their hallucination does seem a stretch for an animal wanting to kill them immediately apart from the fact if theyre in the water why would it need to give them all that when drowning them would be a lot simpler than creating complex metaphorical back stories for each of them. But like you I don't see why there has to be so much fan hysteria about Dwayne Dibley other than he represents a nerd and I spose RD fans are nerds so it's kind of fan service I guess. But him coming back in Polymorph quickly becomes grating.
Rimmer’s light bee can clearly create his normal emotions, so it isn’t much of a stretch that those emotions can be influenced by the despair squid the same way as the others, and kryten states in DNA that is brain is part organic and in the inquisitor lister says that he taught kryten how to feel emotions and have a life.
a common occurrence in low budget sci fi is that you film spaceship interiors in factories or other industrial facilities that often have brick walls or windows with sunlight coming in.
My best friend in High School had a bootleg VHS (of very poor quality) of the US Red Dwarf pilot. Neither of us was especially pleased or impressed. Definitely worth a watch for the curiosity factor, though. And because the man who plays US Cat always reminded me of Ben Vereen.
He still would have survived the real life shot, the point of the hallucinations is to drive the victim to kill themselves for real. That's like a dream trying to get me to shoot myself with a Nerf gun, even if the gun in my dream is "real", the foam dart in the real one still wouldn't hurt. Granted he's be left the only survivor, but still.
I see, I thought you were questioning why they were doing it. Yah, unless it somehow hit his light bee, he would have survived, which is pretty messed up.
He might be physically (for want of a better word) fine, but it might cause a form of psychological death, like if you experienced an illusion of death so strongly that your brain was convinced it was real and shuts down in response, which at worst would kill you and at best leave you a drooling vegetable
I don't think it's that sophisticated. The despair ink mainly works on biological lifeforms because they can be driven to despair. It's an instinctive mechanism for the squid to use it. It's not like a squid thought this all through. It's sort of like when skunks spray moving cars they see as a threat, despite the fact that cars don't have sinuses or eyes. The skunk just doesn't know.
I've always felt that this marked the end of the solid run that Red Dwarf had been on for several years. The seasons after this felt like they started grasping at ways to keep the show interesting and the revival is fine but it's clear that time has passed and things can't quite be a sharp as they were back then. I'm not sure how much longer Red Dwarf is gonna go on, but I at least hope they can end it well this time around (or maybe they'll just cliffhanger us again, that wouldn't be out of the question for them).
i do think rimmer reason of despair should of been that lister was that lister was more successful that was one thing he always held over lister because he could order him about and they showed what him being better then lister meant in season 12 where he had everything he ever wanted but lister was more successful so he didnt stay in that universe
Edit: I got some words mixed up here. Aren't atheist and pantheist mutually exclusive? I always thought they were, the former requiring not believeing in any gods, and the latter requiring believing in several (it's right there in the names).
I think you're confusing pantheist with polytheist. A pantheist believes that everything is divine. Where being an atheist means you don't believe in god. It seems to me that you could be a pantheist without believing in god. I'm obviously not an expert or anything, that's just the impression I get from what they both mean.
atheist means lack of belief. pantheist means you think the universe is god but often a god who is impersonal hence you don't believe in the power of prayer or that god looks after you because well why would god care what you did or believe?
By the time I got to the Cat videos, I worked out that he's something of a British Steve Urkel (tho frankly, I don't even understand why Urkel got as popular as he did, despite having witnessed it at the time).
My mum told me she genuinely thought this was the last episode until the end of it, and that is great! They did a good job.
I remember watching this and thinking oh no this looks like they're ending the show with this reveal.
8:49 Part of Rimmer's issues do stem from the fact that his brothers routinely bullied him and were almost never punished for it but went to become officers and one married a model. That's enough to make anyone feel a bit shit about themselves.
Wasn't he only their half brothers because his Mum was having an affair with the dim gardener?
@@kb9072 He didn't know that at the time.
In the novel, it describes that his brothers actually got to be so intelligent and successful because their parents paid for them to have implants that allow them to take in knowledge far faster than those without
Rimmer didn't get one because they ran out of money when it was his turn
Also I love how Kryten’s mid digit wilts as Rimmer refutes his hardass persona.
Dwayne Dibbley is so popular is how well Danny John-Jules played him so well and the fact he's so likeable and the polar opposite of The Cat!
Don't get me wrong, I DO think he's funny--I just didn't see the need for him to return like four times =P
I think it's just the fact he's used to get the shits and giggles for times when they need the views as well as to advance the story, but that's who I see it. :P
Most shows make 'one time' characters return to please to viewers, and Dwayne Dibbley is the same.
@@Cyborcat five if you count the music video for tongue tied(album single)
This is without doubt the high water mark for red dwarf. This is the best episode they ever did. An episode so good that professor Stephen Hawking cites it as his favourite episode. Yes he watches red dwarf. Yes I find that awesome.
Wow, It's mine too. I must have good taste.
Gotta love Rimmer's scorn in his voice after the cop tells them how great Lister is for "purifying" things. Rimmer's got more issues than Boys Life, but casual murder isn't high on his list.
The song playing as Lister watches "Red Dwarf USA" (😂) is what I'm gonna have play at my wedding ceremony as we walk down the aisle together. 🖤🤘🏻🖤
2:59 For people who don't know who that is or do but can't remember, his name is Timothy Spall. A well known British actor best known for his roles as: Winston Churchill (The King's Speech) and playing Peter Pettigrew (Harry Potter).
Thanks, I loved him in this scene, but I hadn't seen him in anything else that I could recall. And it's interesting that another Red Dwarf actor was in Harry Potter.
Petersen !
He was also a recurring minor character in The Last Samurai and the Beedle in the film adaptation of Sweeney Todd.
Don't forget this episode also starred little finger from game of thrones as the police officer
error..... aidan gillen is littlefinger not the gestapo guy.*face-palm*
Another one of my all time favorite Red Dwarf episodes!
Still can't stop watching this series by your lovely self
Thanks, glad you like it ^.^
The episode is excellent in that it gets you thinking of how to appreciate your own life. Cyborcat, your critique of the episode is fabulous!
Apparently they meant to film the car chase and you'd only find out about the hallucination when Holly talks them out of it, but they couldn't afford to film it
I hadn't heard about that, that's awesome XD
Chiggins _
It actually makes it better honestly.
Rimmer wouldn’t have died; the arrow would simply have passed straight through him.
Maybe when Rimmer is in high emotional states his light bee shoots up to his head. It would explain how the polymorph as able to suck out his anger.
The funny thing about the comparisons between Duane Dibbley and Urkel is that a year after this episode, Steve Urkel would get his own alter ego in the form of Stefan Urquelle.
It’s a weird sort of dichotomy - the Cat, normally stylish and suave, got a complete dork of an alter ego, while Urkel, a poster-child for dorkdom, got his own cool alter ego.
That's a good point. I hadn't thought that deeply about it.
Snap back to reality
Oh-there goes gravity
Oh-there goes Cat and he
Choked on MOM'S SPAGHETTI-
TheHeroOfTomorrow
Nice one.
I find myself wondering if Robert Llewellyn intentionally modeled Kryten's laughter after Herman Munster or if that's just an association I made because I recently saw a clip of The Munsters that put the comparison at the forefront of my brain.
Oh yeah, I hadn't seen the Munsters in so long I didn't make that connection.
It is deliberate, if you buy the DVDs with the commentary from the cast they all make note of his Munster laugh.
This series included three episodes that found a way to give Rimmer a physical presence, shows how the character was heading towards getting a real body in the next series. It had to happen really, there's only so much can be done with an entirely intangible character. x
I duno why rob and doug didn't have the foresight to make him tangible in the first place really.
@@optimisticwhovian1726 well apparently the original plan for the end of Series 1 was that Lister's attempt to generate Hologram Kochanski was going to work, and she would've been a full time character in Series 2. I imagine, in that version of the show, holograms being intangible would've been a much more prominent and necessary plot point (recurring tension around Lister only being able to talk to her and never touch her, etc.).
When they went away from that, getting around holograms being non-physical became more and more of an obstacle until they finally decided on a permanent workaround.
I kinda always wanted to hear Rimmer ask Kryten to remind him to check his swimming certificates when they got back. Just to ad a bit of question to the things in the TIV being real about them.
Heh! That would have been a nice touch ^.^
Bizarrely, back in 2022, I made the mistake of watching Back to Earth, not knowing that it was a surprise miniseries-long sequel to this episode. Because of this, I knew going in to this one that the characters were experiencing their first despair squid hallucination. *AND IT WAS STILL ONE OF THE GREATEST EPISODES IN ANY SITCOM EVER.*
Keep in mind: I had the munchies and was making a tomato sandwich on homemade sourdough bread, so I didn't catch the initial shot of Kryten holding the crossbow/speargun in real reality. So when I went back to the TV screen and saw the signature scene of Lister and co. hallucinating that they're in an intense dystopian car chase in "reality", acting like kids sitting on four chairs each and bouncing around with intense machismo, I BAWLED OUT LAUGHING. That is how you reveal everything to be hallucinogenic IMO, and the episode in general is an entertaining, hilarious look at how our lives could be so much worse.
"Why would a haddock kill itself? Why am I even asking that question?" 🤣🤣
I'm with you about Dwayne Dibberly. Fantastic and hilarious the first time, but was then massively overdone.
Craig Charles is mixed race. His mother was Irish and his father was mixed-race Guyanese with Chinese and African origins. He's pretty proud of it too, as stated a few times in Robert Llewellyn's excellent autobiography "The Man in the Rubber Mask". It's an excellent book, I might add, and the whole of the audiobook was uploaded in parts by a channel called Ace Rimmer a far while back. It gives a really interesting insight into various aspects of the show, particularly the trouble Grant and Naylor had with trying to get Red Dwarf USA off the ground.
I guess I was assuming too much when I said "bi-racial"--I probably should have said "mixed race" or "multi-racial", but I was going by memory and didn't double-check my facts.
Quite a heritage mix
The action scene is such a troll acting out the most expensive parts.🤣
6:29 "Vote Fascist for a 3rd glorious decade of total law enforcement". This is a joke about the the Conservative Party, which under Maggie Thatcher had won 3 elections, and then in 1992 they won a 4th with John Major.
7:09 Best car chase scene ever!
End of season budget. :( on the flip side, it managed to work despite it.
As much a failure as Rimmer is, he never fell so low as to become a hobo, so I can see why he couldn't stand that life. Even if he was a low-ranker officer on Red Dwarf, hey that was something, and he managed to stay with that company for all those years. To have stable employment was at least some small measure of success that the despair squid took away from him, so I can see how that could just stab deep at his inferiority complex.
Well it's stated clearly at the end that the despair squid took away from him his ability to blame his inferiority and failure on his parents and upbringing, as he shares parentage with Lister's hallucinatory character, a success in life.
That's what would induce suicidal despair in a man like Rimmmer.
Sometimes the boys from the Dwarf can be complete and total twonks...
We're all complete and total twonks 😅
From videos I've seen of the cast they generally seem to have believed this to be the last episode of Red Dwarf as they were aware that Red Dwarf USA was going to happen and believed their show was over.
One of my favourite episodes
This is one of my fav ep
Fun act: the actor who played the cop whom Kryten shoots played as one of the baddies in Home Alone 3. It's my favorite behind 1 and 2. He only gets the hell beaten out of him by Alex, not shot lol.
I think this and Out of Time are two of the best episodes the show ever produced. The latter in particular is one of the ballsiest ways to end a series since Blake 7.
yeh too bad doug always fucked up his own cliffhangers with anti climactic cop outs in the subsequent season.
3:39 To be fair, they only scored 4% so getting Lister's religious outlook wrong is likely par for the course.
Don't do it watching either of the two pilots toRed Dwarf (USA) is like being exposed to a despair squid
Meh, I've seen it before. It's not great, but it's not painful.
Cyborcat
I personally agree.
I don't know why, but for some reason seeing Kryten's bare feet just feels weird. But man does Lister look good with that suit and hair. :P
It "Jumped The Shark",to use a Television saying! It almost caused Career suicide!
There is a subtle giveaway that this wasn't reality in the car park scene. If you look at Lister's car, you notice that the steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car for the UK.
1:34 Cat is only smart when he's made out of plasticine
Next episodes sounds really interesting. I never thought that you would even touch Red Dwarf USA. Of if you were, it would be far in the future after all available episodes. Just you're really going for the whole retrospective thing.
got to love macho kryten
Fun fact: Even though Craig Charles was born in England, his mum and dad were from Ireland and Guyana respectively.
Depending on how in-depth you end up going with your RD USA Vlog, I have some videos you might want to look at.
Red Dwarf USA Documentary:
(Part 1) ua-cam.com/video/R5B9iycpd08/v-deo.html
(Part 2) ua-cam.com/video/Y9apCtxHXJ4/v-deo.html
Craig Bierko Interview:
ua-cam.com/video/jnWxdbW9tXY/v-deo.html
I'm surprised you didn't point out the logic flaw of how the despair squid poison could be affecting Rimmer and Kryten since they're both machines. It is a classic episode and the car chase scene is the best bit (as well as being a sneaky way for the production crew to skip having to do an actual car chase) but the convoluted nature of their hallucination does seem a stretch for an animal wanting to kill them immediately apart from the fact if theyre in the water why would it need to give them all that when drowning them would be a lot simpler than creating complex metaphorical back stories for each of them. But like you I don't see why there has to be so much fan hysteria about Dwayne Dibley other than he represents a nerd and I spose RD fans are nerds so it's kind of fan service I guess. But him coming back in Polymorph quickly becomes grating.
Rimmer’s light bee can clearly create his normal emotions, so it isn’t much of a stretch that those emotions can be influenced by the despair squid the same way as the others, and kryten states in DNA that is brain is part organic and in the inquisitor lister says that he taught kryten how to feel emotions and have a life.
At 1:45 they are supposed to be in a spaceship/submarine but there is a brick wall in the background?
a common occurrence in low budget sci fi is that you film spaceship interiors in factories or other industrial facilities that often have brick walls or windows with sunlight coming in.
you can soon explain that away as just being an aesthetic of the sub or spaceship especially in this show
Dwane Dibley must have been the inspiration for Doofus Rick
My best friend in High School had a bootleg VHS (of very poor quality) of the US Red Dwarf pilot. Neither of us was especially pleased or impressed. Definitely worth a watch for the curiosity factor, though. And because the man who plays US Cat always reminded me of Ben Vereen.
Wouldn't Rimmer survive the suicide by bullet if Kryten had fired the shot? He's just a hologram!
He wasn't a hologram in the hallucination.
He still would have survived the real life shot, the point of the hallucinations is to drive the victim to kill themselves for real. That's like a dream trying to get me to shoot myself with a Nerf gun, even if the gun in my dream is "real", the foam dart in the real one still wouldn't hurt.
Granted he's be left the only survivor, but still.
I see, I thought you were questioning why they were doing it. Yah, unless it somehow hit his light bee, he would have survived, which is pretty messed up.
He might be physically (for want of a better word) fine, but it might cause a form of psychological death, like if you experienced an illusion of death so strongly that your brain was convinced it was real and shuts down in response, which at worst would kill you and at best leave you a drooling vegetable
I don't think it's that sophisticated. The despair ink mainly works on biological lifeforms because they can be driven to despair. It's an instinctive mechanism for the squid to use it. It's not like a squid thought this all through.
It's sort of like when skunks spray moving cars they see as a threat, despite the fact that cars don't have sinuses or eyes. The skunk just doesn't know.
I've always felt that this marked the end of the solid run that Red Dwarf had been on for several years. The seasons after this felt like they started grasping at ways to keep the show interesting and the revival is fine but it's clear that time has passed and things can't quite be a sharp as they were back then. I'm not sure how much longer Red Dwarf is gonna go on, but I at least hope they can end it well this time around (or maybe they'll just cliffhanger us again, that wouldn't be out of the question for them).
No way. Six was the best and tilted the balance back towards comedy over sci-fi.
i do think rimmer reason of despair should of been that lister was that lister was more successful that was one thing he always held over lister because he could order him about and they showed what him being better then lister meant in season 12 where he had everything he ever wanted but lister was more successful so he didnt stay in that universe
Theres a lot of callbacks to this episode later on
Oh there goes gravity!
Barry Taylor!!!!
you forgot to mention the cameo by timothy spall (aka peter pettigrew) of harry potter fame
I didn't forget, I'm not a Harry Potter fan and don't know who that is.
Hi
good luck with Red Dwarf USA they did 2 attempts. both notably different
So Kryters was in traffic control, so why issue him, a half-mech a gun? What kind of agency is it? lol
A fascist one. Total law enforcement.
Be interesting to see your thoughts on Back to Earth
me too
Would it be chronological if you did Red Dwarf USA next?
I'm about 90% sure that it was filmed between Seasons 5 and 6, so it should be.
Cyborcat
I look forward to it.
Both of them?
I dunno why but your vids stop showing in my subscription feed (not really sure how to call it in English O.O sorry).
Edit: I got some words mixed up here.
Aren't atheist and pantheist mutually exclusive? I always thought they were, the former requiring not believeing in any gods, and the latter requiring believing in several (it's right there in the names).
I think you're confusing pantheist with polytheist. A pantheist believes that everything is divine. Where being an atheist means you don't believe in god. It seems to me that you could be a pantheist without believing in god. I'm obviously not an expert or anything, that's just the impression I get from what they both mean.
Oh thanks, I think I've been confusing those words all along then! Very helpful, I stand corrected. :)
No prob ^.^
atheist means lack of belief. pantheist means you think the universe is god but often a god who is impersonal hence you don't believe in the power of prayer or that god looks after you because well why would god care what you did or believe?
Oh and about why you don't understand why we go bananas over Dwayne....it's kinda cultural thing.
By the time I got to the Cat videos, I worked out that he's something of a British Steve Urkel (tho frankly, I don't even understand why Urkel got as popular as he did, despite having witnessed it at the time).
@@Cyborcat indeed
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