Black Box- The Tale of the New Red Dwarf.
Created | Updated Jul 14, 2003
Imagine a spaceship the size of a small city. Next Imagine that ship in the blackness of space 3 million years from earth. The emptiness surounds it, engulfing the ship in darkness. Somewhere, someone says "Smeg..................!"
Deep inside the depths of AJ Rimmer's cabin a table lamp has turned into a five foot polymorph1.....
The battle with this strange creature lasted forever...and ever...and ever...until most of the crew got rather bored with the idea and began to ignore the beast and hoped it would go away. But the beast never did. It lay there, waiting for the right moment...
The next fruitless attack on the ship was an asteroid, but nobody even noticed it hitting the ship, since everyone was too busy trying to remember how many different versions of Lister there were.
For some reason2 a rather large dinosaur was then found lurking around the ship. After many arguments between the inhabitants of the ship, it was decided that the dinosaur was NOT cute at all and that having it nibbling on people's arms was NOT appealing and that the dinosaur had to be gotten rid of. In a flash of genius, a certain elevator remembered where she had last seen a time control device, and used it to turn the offending dino into two small birds before everybody was killed by dinosaur diarrhoea3
Amid this madness, nobody had noticed that killer chickens and ducks4 were set to take over the ship. After the first couple of attacks, the polymorph came out of its dormacy and, angry that it's sleep had been disturbed5 started joining in with the attack.
The crew in general decided that being killed by chickens was really rather pathetic and that if they were going to die, they'd do it in style....
In yet another moment of madness, they found the time wand and decided that they would go into the past and kill themselves before they could be killed by the chickens in the future7. When the crew killed themselves, it became impossible for their past selves to become them in the future and return in time to kill themselves in the past, even though it was the present. 8.
In a mad attempt to save some kind of sanity, the crew decided to move forward in time a few series to the point at which the nanobots had remade the Red Dwarf ship without all those budget cutbacks.
And this is the legacy of the Red Dwarf ship.
7Because time paradoxes sell better that killer chickens. Killer chickens? Who came up with that one, anyway?8Which just gave everybody a bad headache
