Red Dwarf

Kryten - S2-E1

Question: When Holly is saying about how he has changed music he says that because of the 2 new notes he's made instruments would be bigger. "Triangles will have four sides. Piano keyboards the length of zebra crossings. Course, women will have to be banned from playing the cello." I don't understand the joke about the cello part. Could someone please tell me what he means?

Answer: The cello is a large four-stringed instrument, which, when it is played, stands vertically on the floor between the player's legs (assuming they are seated). If it is to grow as large as the other instuments mentioned will, it would require a rather unseemly lack of femininity to be able to encompass it with the legs.

Rooster of Doom

Meltdown - S4-E6

Question: When Kryten and Rimmer were doing the roster of their ranks, Why did Kryten skip the old woman in the black dress with the white shoulder sash between Dali Lama and Mr. Noel Coward?

Answer: It's Queen Victoria, someone any Englishman would recognize, and needed no introduction.

Answer: Presumably he does, but it's never been used in any material related to the show. He is the only Cat left (as shown in Series 1), so even if he had once had a name, nobody would know it.

Moose

Answer: In the book, the Cat finds the concept of a name confusing, as he's convinced he's the center of the universe and the idea that someone wouldn't know who he was is baffling.

Brian Katcher

Chosen answer: In-universe, after leaving Red Dwarf after his first appearance, Kryten managed to crash Lister's space-bike into an asteroid. Lister found his remains and decided to rebuild him, however, due to the high level of damage and Lister's questionable repair skills, he was unable to recreate Kryten exactly, leading to changes in appearance, personality and accent. In reality, the original actor wasn't available, coupled with presumably practical concerns about one-off makeup as opposed to makeup for a regular cast member, so some visual changes were made.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: He never strictly gives up, he just realises the practicalities of the situation, that it took Red Dwarf three million years to get to where it is, so it would take the same length of time to return. While he originally plans to go back into stasis for the long journey, the "Future Echoes" that he sees while travelling at light speed convince him that he should stay active on board the ship instead and look for alternative ways to get back, something that influences the plot of several subsequent episodes.

Tailkinker

Parallel Universe - S2-E6

Question: At The End of this episode Lister, Rimmer and the Cat are finding out whether Lister is pregnant or not. When Rimmer reads the pregnancy test he says "Oh excellent news, I'm going to be an uncle." Why does he say this if he is to of no relation with Lister? (as far as I know).

Answer: It's quite common for male friends of the family to be referred to as "uncle" by the children, even if they're not actually related in any way - I have at least three old friends of my parents who I refer to in these terms. Rimmer may be stretching the point with the 'friend' thing, but that's what he's referring to.

Tailkinker

Answer: It's him singing (and dancing), as singing/dancing is what he was primarily known as doing before he began acting (usually backup singing). He is, for example, in Little Shop Of Horrors (for all of 2 seconds), singing backup. Danny actually re-recorded the song and released it as a single, which reached No. 17 in the UK charts.

Gary O'Reilly

Chosen answer: It can, but that doesn't mean that it's supposed to. At the time of the episode, Red Dwarf's thrusters have been firing continuously for millions of years, accelerating the ship until, in this episode, it finally achieves light speed. This is not a speed that the Dwarf was ever intended to attain, hence the need to slow it down again before the stresses tear it apart. If they wanted to hit light speed again, it would take the same sort of length of time to accelerate back up to that speed. Technically possible, but not exactly practical.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: Their bodies have simply decayed to dust over the intervening three million years.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: The details are never made particularly clear, except that the ship was, at some unspecified point, stolen by Kryten's rogue nanobots while the crew were away from the ship on Starbug. A short online comic produced by the BBC suggests that this happened directly after the events of the fifth series' final episode "Back To Reality", that the crew returned from their encounter with the despair squid to find Red Dwarf missing, although events in the recent revival, "Back to Earth" appear to contradict that.

Tailkinker

Answer: He had to use the toilet, but since they were in the Backward World, whatever he excreted would already be there, and go back INSIDE his body, which would be very disturbing.

Xofer

Chosen answer: He brought Rimmer back because he's the person that Lister had the most interaction with during his time on Red Dwarf and also because all Lister ever did with his friends was get very drunk. Lister may not like Rimmer, but bringing him back probably has the best chance of keeping him relatively sane.

Tailkinker

Answer: Rimmer hid all the other personality chips apparently, so he was the only one that could be a hologram.

Rimmer did not hide the other discs until after he was revived as a hologram. He would not have had the authority to do so before he was the most senior officer on board.

Season 9 generally

Question: I'm just dying to know why they refer to issues from a non existent "season 9" during the 3 part episode. If Red Dwarf ended at season 8, continued with season 9 with "back to earth", how is it they keep referencing a season that never happened?

darthmonkey2004

Chosen answer: In the fictional version of the real world that the crew visit in "Back To Earth", apparently a season nine did happen.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: Starbug took 200 years to catch up with Red Dwarf, so Lister and Cat went into suspended animation while Kryten piloted Starbug after the ship.

Captain Defenestrator

Answer: It's not explicitly said in the episode but a good guess would be that Cat used Rimmer's wardrobe as a toilet.

White Hole - S4-E4

Question: In this episode, Rimmer says how the Eskimos had the right idea by taking the sick and old out into the snow, and then leaving them to it. Then he says 'that's why there is no Eskimo word for Eastbourne'. I don't get the joke. What does he mean?

Answer: Eastborne is a coastal resort town in Sussex in southern England. A lot of people go to live there after they retire, hence the joke.

J I Cohen

Parallel Universe - S2-E6

Question: When Lister, Rimmer, and the Cat are waiting for the pregnancy test to change color, and Rimmer wants it to turn red, he cheers it on saying, "Come on you reds." Is this a cultural reference?

Answer: Sort of. A common colour for football teams in the U.K is Red (or blue). "Come on you reds!" is a chant sometimes shouted at football games in support of whatever team is wearing red at the time, although nowadays it's more of a "generic football chant" rather than something used heartily by fans of a certain team. Rimmer is just indicating he's hoping for a positive on the test, but pretending he's cheering for a football team (to break the joke down).

Gary O'Reilly

Answer: The Reds are a nickname for Liverpool FC, which of course is where Lister hails from, so there's a certain irony in Rimmer's line there.

Back in the Red (1) - S8-E1

Question: When Hollister enquires about what a female of Cat's species is like he responds that she's good in bed and then adds 'especially if you play the piano'. How does the piano reference figure into the joke?

Answer: A cat has six nipples. The joke is that rubbing/feeling them all would be similar to playing a piano.

Gary O'Reilly

Answer: They do occasionally specify Starbug 1, but it has also been destroyed multiple times and the interior changed. They either rebuild the ship or change the designation of one of the other Starbugs.

Only The Good... - S8-E8

Question: What happened to the rest of the crew at The End of season 8? During Back to Earth there were a few memorials and pictures of people, including Kochanski - is one to assume that was the whole crew?

Answer: The crew abandoned ship at The End of Series VIII when they thought the ship was doomed. Little is known about what happened between then and the revamped series. All that is known is the ship survived, Rimmer is now dead again and Kochanski left.

M-Corp - S12-E5

Other mistake: When Cat picks up the can of Leopard lager which is invisible to Lister, he shakes it, pops the cap and sprays Lister with foam. The foam is visible but the can remains invisible, and that makes no sense. If we are seeing the scene from Cat's point of view the can and foam should both be visible, and if it is from Lister's then neither should be.

More mistakes in Red Dwarf

White Hole - S4-E4

Rimmer: The thing about Captain Oates... The thing you have to remember about Captain Oates... Captain Oates... Captain Oates was a prat.

More quotes from Red Dwarf

Trivia: The actor who plays the original Kryten, in 'Kryten', also turns up later as the voice of Talkie Toaster.

More trivia for Red Dwarf

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