This is the second discussion I`ve created. The title is a reference to "Polymorph", which many people have associated with the film "Alien" (I haven`t actually seen "Alien", but from what I heard about it it sounds similar!) The board is for discussing the fact that there are no aliens. Whether you think it`s good or bad, or any times when you think the creators have defied that "rule".

So basically you believe Earth is the only planet in the galaxy with intelligent life (debatable)?

Not me. The creators (Rob Grant and Doug Naylor) have a rule not to include aliens. Here`s a quick brushover:

Waiting for God- It was a garbage pod (obvious)
Polymorph- It was genetically engineered on Earth
Justice- It was a droid
Camille- Another GELF
Back to Reality- A terran ship introduced the life forms to the planet.
Psirens- Hmmm.... they`re REFERRED TO as GELFs...
Emohawk- Hmmm.... see last one

Of course, there are small one-line references to other "aliens" but, as Phil says, I`ll leave that to you other nitpickers!

I've only seen the first three seasons, but I know that there weren't any aliens. I assumed it was irony from Grant Naylor. A sci-fi show w/o aliens. To seek out new life & not find any. Note how Rimmer believes that there are aliens; its almost his religion. I heard someone once say that the reason NASA hasn't been as popular recently because we made it to the moon it didn't find any Klingons.

The Inquisitor's origin is somewhat uncertain. He's described as a droid, but supposedly aliens are as capable of making droids as humans.

What about Space Weevils? Mutated Earth insects or alien insectoid?
Or is this discussion only for intelligent aliens?

Or what about the liquid beast from the Mogerdon cluster (Spelling unknown!) which is mentioned in Out Of Time? I presume this is a GELF.

Wasn't there a pan-dimensional being mentioned in the same episode? Or was that the same creature?

Lister's socks are from Earth, or at least from a place colonised by Earthlings, therefore they can not be an alien, even if they are a new lifeform. It's like the Cat who is descended from an ordinary housecat, so he is not an alien.

What's the definition of an alien, anyway? Life that evolved somewhere other than Earth, perhaps? Just curious...

Alien means anything different. Illegal aliens, are illegal immigrants from another country. By that definaition, the Cat would be an alien (unless other Cats also evolved, as was implied in 'Holoship'). If Lister's socks became a wierd new life form, they would also be aliens.

So going by the definition of alien as Edje describes above, Red Dwarf does have aliens.
Other Cats did evolve - the Cat recounts the story in The End and there was also the episode that had the Cat priest, who talks of the stupidd Cat and the cripples Cat who gave birth to the Cat we all know.
Would all those cloned Rimmers on Rimmerworld count as aliens?

I think for the purposes of this board we're talking about life forms that evolved from an entirely different primordial soup than Earth's.

Yes I realise that, I just think that alien then is perhaps the wrong word. And how do we know that Earth's primordial soup didn't come from elsewhere?

What would be the right word then?

I don't think there is any one word that would fit. Unless you wanted a term like Extraterrestrial Lifeforms Whose Evolution Has Not Been Altered By Earthlings, or ELWEHNBABE for short.

One of the definitions of Alien in my dictionary is 'belonging to another' which could refer to my previously posted definition.

Do you believe in intergalactic soup merchants? ;-)

Actually, people who study meteorites and information sent back by probes of other planets find unique properties in their makeup, so even if there is an 'interplanetary primordial soup stock', the unique properties of each planet would create wildly varying soups.

Don't worry, I was just being pedantic...

Found this on the web, thought I'd throw it into the melting pot:

THERE ARE NO ALIENS IN RED DWARF
http://skynet.ul.ie/~colm/red/noaliens.html
Not ONE alien exists in the Red Dwarf universe. Not even an alienlet!
1) THE CONCISE ANSWER.
Grant Naylor have stated in interviews, and in the books and show, that there are NO aliens in Red Dwarf!

Rob Grant said in September 1996 (personal communication): "There are no aliens in Red Dwarf...the idea is that all life originated on Earth."


2) THE DEFINITION OF 'ALIEN'.
The definition of 'alien', as used by Grant Naylor, can *not* be used interchangeably with the definitions for the word 'foreign' or the word 'different'.

Let us now be absolutely certain of what GN mean by the term 'alien'. Red Dwarf contains NO life forms, or things constructed by life forms, that do not owe their existence in some way to the planet Earth. The terms 'alien' and 'Earthling' are NOT interchangeable -- just because something wasn't actually born on Earth, does NOT make it an alien. The Cat, born on Red Dwarf three million years into deep space, is not an alien because his feline ancestors originally came from Earth. In the Red Dwarf universe, if there had never been a planet Earth, then this universe would be totally devoid of all life.

In other words, everything (or its ancestors) or its creators (or their ancestors) comes from Earth, one way or the other. I know that the Boyz find many things in their travels that they initially think/hope to be aliens, but these things invariably turn out to be Earth-derived, or at the very least, cannot be proved to be alien (and so with the Grant-Naylor made constraint "no aliens" must, by definition, NOT be aliens).


3) THE "NO ALIENS" CASES IN POINT.

a} From the episode "Waiting For God"...
LISTER:
Rimmer, there's nothing out there, you know. There's nobody out there. No alien monsters, no Zargon warships, no beautiful blondes with beehive hairdos who say, "Show me some more of this Earth thing called kissing." There's just you, me, the Cat, and a lot of floating smegging rocks. That's it. Finito.

b} From the novel "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" (part 1, chapter 14)...

For a period, ships full of astros in stasis booths were hurled out of our solar system, and interstellar travel enjoyed its golden age. The big hope, of course, was that they'd contact intelligent life. They didn't. Not even a moderately intelligent plant. Not even a stupidd plant. Nothing. And it was surmised correctly, though it was not confirmed for a further two thousand years, that Mankind was completely and totally and inexplicably alone. In all of the universe. In all of the universe, the planet Earth was the only planet with any life forms. That's all there was.

c} Rob Grant -- portion of a comment about the plot constraints of writing for Red Dwarf (unpublished introductions for the script book "Son Of Soup", 1995)...

"...we have a strict no-aliens policy, so there's no chance a vowel-less-named beast from the planet with no consonants can drop in and jolly things up a bit..."
Note that the point of all this is not

i) How it was proved that there were no aliens;
or
ii) How any of the life forms arose or ended up so far from Earth.

Neither of these things changes the *fact* that the Red Dwarf universe was *created* by Grant Naylor, who have NOT GIVEN IT ANY ALIENS. Lack of explanation does not constitute evidence of alienness -- *how* the non-aliens came to be does not change the fact that they *are* non-aliens.


4) SPECIFIC EXAMPLES.

SPACE WEEVILS, PSIRENS AND GELFS...
Quote from Rob Grant (personal communication, September 1996) --

"...there are no aliens in Red Dwarf...the idea is that all life originated on Earth - the Psirens as part of the GELF project, and the Space Weevils are simply Weevils who adapted to vacuum conditions, carried on Earth- originated vessels."

POLYMORPHS...
If we are talking about the creature from the Series III episode "Polymorph", then a careful rewatching of this episode, and noting especially --


CAT:
What is it? Some kind of alien?
HOLLY:
No, it's from Earth -- man made. I checked out its DNA profile. Some kind of genetic experiment that went wrong.

-- will show that polymorphs are also not aliens.

As for the GELF Kinitawowis' pet Emohawk, it is said to be a polymorph, the origins of which we have had explained to us previously.


THE 'ALIEN' SHIP IN "D.N.A."...
The Boyz at first do think this ship is truly alien, but later on in the episode (after they've had time to make a proper investigation) it is obvious that the ship is not alien, as evidenced by --

RIMMER:
Oh, here we go. Typical knee-jerk techno-fear reaction. That machine is the greatest single technological advancement mankind has ever made. Greater than fire, greater than the wheel.

CAT:
What about the dude with three heads?

RIMMER:
Well, he abused it.


The point is, however, that explanations for everything are not necessary. We already know what they *aren't*, which is aliens -- it's a bonus if we're told what they *are*! The 'no aliens' stance is the default for Red Dwarf, therefore everything encountered *must* be assumed to be non-alien, unless it is *proven* otherwise, and this proof has *never* been forthcoming.
It is not enough that the individual *sounds* alien, eg:


THE PAN-DIMENSIONAL LIQUID BEAST FROM THE MOGADON CLUSTER...
This creature obviously makes its home in the Mogadon Cluster, and may even have been 'born' there, but *by definition*, must have had some connection to Earth at some point -- either its evolutionary ancestors were from Earth, like the Cat's were, or, like --


LEGION...
-- who was originally created by human scientists, the liquid beast's creators or their ancestors must have come from Earth (this explanation also does just as well for other strange-sounding things such as the Vidal Beast of Sharmutt II).


SIMULANTS, WAXDROIDS, ANDROIDS, AND OTHER HUMAN CREATIONS...
'Nuff said, really. Human creations, therefore not aliens.


LISTER'S SOCKS, MR FLIBBLE, AND PROGRESSIVE FOLK DUOS..!
I can't believe I'm including these, but -- the first is a 'life form' derived from clothing of an Earth-derived person, the second is a creation of a creation of Earth-derived humans, and the third is an 'evolution' of Earth-derived food. Wow, always Earth!

The point is, that nothing the Boyz have encountered in their travels is an 'alien' in the sense that Grant Naylor have defined aliens. Without the planet Earth, the Red Dwarf universe would ultimately contain no life forms and no creations of life forms. Simple as that.


5) THE PROBLEM WITH NON-ALIENS.
People are ready to believe in Red Dwarf aliens, despite all the evidence to the contrary, for two simple reasons:

a) They are not aware of how 'alien' is defined for Red Dwarf,

b) They think that stating 'no aliens' and then mentioning 'space weevil' is a contradiction in terms. This is where many people make their mistake, in thinking that this issue is one of inconsistency, when it's simply that people have trouble grasping a certain concept -- that of there being nothing in the universe that isn't somehow Earth-derived, no matter how much it may look or sound not to be. In "Confidence And Paranoia", Lister says that he never even asked Kochanski out, yet in "Psirens", Kryten says that Lister and Kochanski dated for three weeks. *That's* an inconsistency. That's a case of Grant Naylor saying something, and then contradicting themselves. What people don't seem to realise is that stating "no aliens" and then mentioning 'space weevil' does NOT constitute a contradiction! Up until such point as *proof* is forthcoming that the space weevil is something that would have come into existence *without* the planet Earth, the space weevil is *by definition* NOT an alien.
That said, should *proven* aliens turn up in future Red Dwarf ('proof' will have to constitute something a *lot* stronger than a strange name; plus, lack of explanation of origins is not proof, as there is no rebuttal of the no-aliens *default*), then that *will* be a contradiction and will deservedly have its title of the mother of all errors. But there is NO WAY, at this juncture, that this is the case.


6) STILL DON'T GET IT?
Reread this FAQ, have a think, and above all consider that if this is the way the writers want it, and with the absence of contradictory proof, that "no aliens" is simply the way it *is*.

Annette McIntosh -- October 1996 - May 1997.

THE PAN-DIMENSIONAL LIQUID BEAST FROM THE MOGADON CLUSTER...

since it exists in more than one dimension, it could come from a dimension where aliens *do* exist.

So he replaced aliens with Gelfs and called it a day? Po.tay.to po.tah.to.

At least this means the show avoided the usual clichés involving aliens.

There's a classic SF story in which the first interstellar ship arrives at its destination, after a journey taking centuries, to find a thriving human colony whose inhabitants had leapfrogged over them and which welcomes them as heroes.

It's not surprising that the Dwarfers keep finding relics of human civilization in Deep Space.

Of course, the humans themselves were long dead by then.

I think Francois is right in that the Simulants and the GELFS are too similar with Grant Naylor making them both "Kill All Humans!".

Humans should have thought things through before creating these creatures.

Thinking things through doesn't seem to be a very human trait. ;-)

Yeah, I guess not. I mean let's make a bunch of killer cyborgs that hate us. What could possibly go wrong?

Duhhhhhhhh...