We at The Red Dwarf Online Museum can also present this world-first exclusive- an in depth fan analysis on the script, written by some smeg head whose opinions really mean very little. My own. Enjoy.

I've always found Doug Naylor's writing is very focused on the humanity of the characters, the emotions, the relationships, their personal arcs and evolving motivation. Rob Grant was all about the jokes, the horror, the bleakness of it all. Rob really got the dark and twisted nature of being the last people alive in a hostile and pointless universe. I do love Grant's black humour, and what he did here was so incredibly dark, and so incredibly funny.

At the start of series VII, when Lister is doing that speech to the camera, he mentions that the time paradox that occurred when Rimmer destroyed the time-drive caused reality to split into two. The series VII reality managed to stabilise thanks to a few anomalies taking place, like the expansion of the Bug's cargo decks and stuff, and we are meant to assume that the reality we are watching, series VII onwards, is the real reality. We assume it is the same reality, with the same crew, that followed on from the end of series VI.

But with this script, Rob Grant has retconned it so that the "primary reality" canon is not series VII onwards, but this new story. And in this story, the Red Dwarf crew from series I to VI all die and turn into grey gloop. Doug's reality in series VII onwards may have been the universe that managed to stabilise and survive, but Rob made it so that everything from that point onwards- the stuff that he wasn't involved in writing- was actually the splinter reality, a secondary reality branch that contain a different set of crew. And in Lister's own words in Into The Gloop, the branch off crew, Doug's crew, are "not exactly us, but they’re almost the same... no way as cool, no way as good. But they’ve got almost our memories."

Rob is brutal!