This is my favorite episode! Can't quite tell why... I just loved it!

BTW, I think I saw a special on PBS where Steven Hawkings named this his favorite episode as well.

Surely there should have been a spoiler alert. Seriously though, whoever posted this has a good sense of humour.

Yeah, I've moved the script off this page though, and given the posting it's own page in this section.

If Phil has no problems with it, I'm happy to allow postings of scripts into this board, however I don't want to be breaking any copyright laws. To be honest, I have the scripts already, and if you want I'll put them all up so they can be got at straight away.

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Worth noting: The day after I posted my message (or techinally the same day because I stayed up past midnight before posting) the local PBS ran a Red Dwarf marathon, which included a video they put together that featured Steven Hawkings' comments that I mentioned.

A few things:

Firstly, the title to this episode is displayed in a different way to the rest of the season; for the other episodes the title 'scrolls' along the screen, in this episode it fades in and out.

Secondly, and correct me if it can be explained, while Lister is 'driving' the limo, we never see him change gears. Does this mean they were escaping from the Nazi police, driving through barriers and jumping over bridges in first gear?

Apart from that, this has to be one of the - if not THE - best episode of Red Dwarf.

Couldn't Lister have been driving an automatic car?

One word I have for this season: WEIRD! All six episodes were quite bizarre. Note that I'm not saying they were bad (I particularly liked Inquisitor and Quarantine) but this series was very unusual. I hope for next season Rimmer has a better looking uniform then the one he had this season.

Did anybody notice while miming the limo chase the crew unlock the Limo's door with the locking buttons, wouldn't a Limo have central locking? For cross-series Sci-Fi fans: You can spot the triangular walls in this episode, which have also turned up in Dr Who & Blake's 7.

If the despair squid is really the size of New Mexico, then how is it able to move so fast, and why hasn't it starved to death? Kryten's comment seems to indicate that the oceans are very sparsely populated.

I should think that waking up after four years, they would have terrible bed sores and very weak muscles, but no one not even Kryten, I mean, Jake Bullet, seems to question this.
Also Dwayne and Sebastian's hair doesn't seem to have grown despite 4 years without haircuts. Again, no one questions this. (Ditto with beards and fingernails.)

If the "bio-feedback catheters" are what I think they are, why don't we see any evidence of anyone having lowered their pants to remove, or insert, them?

If Billy & Sebastian Doyle are only related by mother, then why do they have the same last name, and why would this information be on someone's ID?

Sebastian looks into a viewer to see a game in progress. Well, that's an interesting idea. Play a game where anyone can just look in and see whatever you might be doing in the game. I wonder if the person viewing has to stick coins in when someone is on the planet of the nymphomaniacs?

In the new game the New Rimmer has the circle H hologram that we saw in Holoship.

Another 47. The car is parked in Bay 47.

Has anyone noticed a certain amount of repitition in this series' episodes. Rimmer's red-eyed nightmare creatures in Terrorform, then in Quarantine, Rimmer himself becomes red-eyed. In Quarantine Kryten gets a fire axe in the back, in Demons And Angels he gets hit on the head with a fire axe. In Quarantine, Starbug has to land in Bay 47, in this episode, Sebastian's limo is parked in Bay 47.

If Kryten, a mechanoid, and Rimmer, a hologram, can be affected by the despair squid ink, then why wasn't Holly affected?

I thought that the ocean was sparsely populated because the Despair Squid ate everything in it. Maybe the squid has slow metabolism, and thus can go years between meals. Or maybe the squid was in hibernation. These are possibilities.

I have no problem with the Despair Squid eating all or most of the fish, but how long did it take?
In DNA they discover a human ship which they don't recognize as human, and the crew appears inhuman. The Esperanto has a human appearing crew and Lister refers to it very simply as a "class D Space Corps seeding ship" indicating that he is familiar with the type, except that the ships he is familiar with are 3 million years out of date. This is part of the problem I have, the time factor.
The second problem is the haddock which suffocated itself because of the venom. Why don't all the living fish on the ocean world commit suicide when this thing squirts its venom. Assuming it squirted it's venom around 3 million years ago and the venom would expand outward eventually contaminating every corner of the ocean, and considering that the Dwarfers were affected by a 3 million year old sample of ink... Basically all the fish in the world would have killed themselves shortly after the first time the Despair Squid started squirting its ink, so that there would be very little living things for it too eat.
Do you see what I'm getting at?

Re everyone waking up without hair growth, bed sores etc...
They all wake up shell-shocked at the revelations so maybe they just don't think about it or part of them assume if they are to be part of some continual game, then someone is maintaining their bodies in the meantime.
Who's to say they haven't cured bed sores in the future? Or that they weren't injected with fingernail and hair growth suppressant?
As for Holly not being affected - I always thought it was because her mainframe was up in Red Dwarf and she was just on relay to the others, so the squid couldn't affect her.

The Cat says, "That's right, superficial _is_ my middle name."
So this means Cat's full name is 'The Superficial Cat'?

This was brought in the now-defunct Red Dwarf Smegazine which had its own nits section - and simply speaking, the Cat is just using an expression without thinking about its true implications. Like when people say they're so hungry they could eat a horse, yet very rarely do they ever proceed to do so.

Should I have put a little smiley face after my comment, to let people know it was meant as a joke? ;-)

Probably, given your posts always seem quite serious in their tone.

I get that in real life too. I guess I'll have to start carrying a sign with the word 'Joke' printed on it.

When they ask Andy, the game operator, where they should go after coming out of the game, he says "The re-cup-eration lounge, I keep telling you!"
Not really - he's only told them once before this point, when he walked in.

Who's to say they haven't cured bed sores in the future? Or that they weren't injected with fingernail and hair growth suppressant?

Well, based on Lister's appearance in Psirens I think we can rule out the growth suppressant. I just figured that maybe the lack of physical duress from something like this is just a clue that it's all a hallucination.

There are a couple of things I found odd, though; I can understand Kryten being affected by the ink because his brain is partly organic, but how can it affect a totally electronic being like Rimmer?

Also (and in advance I admit this might be another subconscious hint like what I just speculated on), when Lister/Sebastian is viewing the other Red Dwarf game, he sees that game's Kochanski badgering that game's Lister. The thing is, she looks nothing like either of the real Kochanskis, and the recuperation scene made it pretty clear she's not a playable character, so what's the deal here?

There might be a random element to keep each session of the game different. Or it could be that the production team couldn't get CP Grogan for the part, or just forgot.

Come to think of it, another possibility that crossed my mind (though Richard's theories all sound pretty likely); maybe the rationale was that Kochanski's appearance would be based on someone "Lister" really knew, to help him feel such a major attraction to the person.

I just realized, imagine that as a real pisser if you manage to beat the game and get Kochanski under those circumstances -- you just get the love of your life, get ready to settle down (or whatever) and it turns out she never existed at all! Jeez, I'd be inclined to grab Kryten/Bullet's gun under those circumstances too!

Re: Well, based on Lister's appearance in Psirens I think we can rule out the growth suppressant.

Not necessarily - it just might mean that no supplies of it were available on Red Dwarf or Starbug.

Now that you mention it, yeah -- God knows they barely have anything else.

--I just realized, imagine that as a real pisser if you manage to beat the game and get Kochanski under those circumstances -- you just get the love of your life, get ready to settle down (or whatever) and it turns out she never existed at all! Jeez, I'd be inclined to grab Kryten/Bullet's gun under those circumstances too!--

I get the implication that it isn't normal for players to forget who they are when they play the game, and that they're supposed to always be conscious of the fact that they're just playing a game.

True, but yeesh that would be a real jolt to your system -- especially if you're like the hallucenated motley crew and don't have much else to live for.

In the alternate reality, Why doesn't the game operator recognize Lister as the "Voter Colonel" and keep calling him a "Twonk" ? If I were him, I'd be afraid of the Voter Colonel regaining his memory, and "adjust" me ;)

Something that always bugged me about that episode. Since they are exploring that ocean in a sealed spacecraft, how could the venom of the despair squid reach them and affect them?

Yeah, that was odd, wasn't it.