Season 2 "Like life, only better!"
2.5 "Queeg"
Holly, never the best at keeping order, is replaced by the Red Dwarf backup computer, Queeg 500, and things begin to look very different on board the Jupiter Mining Corporation ship! Things actually
work! But order has its price, and none of the "little understandings" that the crew have with Holly are honoured by the new computer. Under Queeg's regime, Rimmer's body is taken control of by the backup computer, and he is forced to exercise, revise and other things he doesn't ever do. As Queeg says when Rimmer says that he can't take control of his body whenever he likes, "The Company is paying for your hologrammatic survival, and out here in space, I
am the Company!"
Queeg tells the crew that Holly's IQ is not 6,000, but 6, and that he can't navigate them back to Earth: they have been going round in circles for fourteen months. Holly is relegated to nightwatchman duties, and Queeg's regime includes making the crew work for their food. Eventually Holly is prevailed upon to challenge Queeg for mastery of Red Dwarf, and he tells him to choose the game he wants to base the challenge on. The winner will get control of Red Dwarf, the loser will be erased. Queeg chooses chess, and the two do battle. Holly loses the game, and is sentenced to be erased.
Making his farewells, Holly reminds them that things were not so bad under his regime, and then he is erased. However, it turns out that Queeg is Holly: he set the whole thing up in order to show the crew how much worse things could be with another computer in charge. As he says: "Appreciate what you've got, 'cause basically, I'm fantastic!"
QUOTES
Damage report, Mister Holly!
LISTER: “Is there any damage?”
HOLLY: “I don't know. The damage-report machine's been damaged.”
RIMMER (to Holly): “You're about as much use as a condom machine in the Vatican.”
Keep your hair (or legs) on...
RIMMER (After his hologrammatic legs have been temporarily separated from his body) : “What does this mean?”
HOLLY: “It's probably not serious, don't panic”.
RIMMER: “Well, when it's not serious when your genitals can go wandering off on their own, I wonder what is?”
RIMMER: “You are a total, total... a word has yet to be invented to describe how totally whatever-it-is you are, but you are one. And a total, total one at that.”
HOLLY: “Alright, keep your hair on.”
RIMMER: “I'm lucky if I can keep my legs on with you in charge!”
HOLLY (Having been relieved of duty by Queeg): “This is mutiny, Mr. Queeg. I'll see you swing from the highest yard-arm in Titan Docking Port for this day's work.”
A load of old what?
HOLLY: “A load of Tottenham, that is. A steaming pile of Hotspur!”
Smart shoes
RIMMER: “Look, Lister, no point feeling sorry about Holly. It's a kindness. Like a blind old incontinent sheepdog, he's had his day. Take him out to the barn with a double-barreled shotgun and blow the mother away. And I'm only saying that because I'm so fond of him.”
LISTER: “Just think how Holly feels!?”
RIMMER: “Feels? He never feels anything, Lister. He's a computer”.
LISTER: “He still feels. In fact, sometimes I think it's cruel giving machines a personality. My mate Petersen once brought a pair of shoes with artificial intelligence. Smart Shoes, they were called. It was a neat idea. No matter how blind drunk you were, they would always get you home. Then he got ratted one night in Oslo, and woke up the next morning in Burma! See, the shoes got bored just going from his local to the flat. They wanted to see the world, man, y'know? He had a helluva job getting rid of them. No matter who he sold them to, they'd show up again the next day! He tried to shut them out, but they just kicked the door down, y'know?”
RIMMER: “Is this true?”
LISTER: “Yeah! Last thing he heard, they'd sort of, erm, robbed a car and drove it into a canal. They couldn't steer, y'see.”
RIMMER: “Really?!”
LISTER: “Yeah. Petersen was really, really blown away by it. He went to see a priest. The priest told him, he said, it was alright, and all that, and the shoes were happy, and they'd gone to heaven. Y'see, it turns out shoes have soles…”
CAT: “I can't believe I'm doin' this! Look at me, I'm disgusting! I look like you in your best clothes!”
CAT: “Aw, look at my hands! I had lovely hands!”
LISTER: “Well, wear the smegging gloves!”
CAT: “Marigold with blue? Are you crazy?”
A pea on toast
LISTER: “He's taking the smeg!”
RIMMER: “Who is?”
LISTER: “Queeg. Look at what he's given me for dinner: a pea on toast. One pea. I tell you, I'm that far from cracking. (Goes to squish the pea; it snaps away.) I've lost me pea! Oh, that's it! I've cracked.”
RIMMER: “He's just doing this to destroy your morale.”
LISTER: “Is he? Well, I want me pea back. It's my pea. I earned that pea! Where is it? I don't care if it's on the floor, if it's covered in fluff, even under the bed with my toenail clippings, I don't care where it is -- it's my pea, I earned it, I'm going to eat it no matter what!”
RIMMER: “It flew off into your dirty-sock basket.”
LISTER: “I'll just have the toast.”
Just another day at the space scouts camp
RIMMER: “We were each given a Swiss army knife. You only ate what you killed yourself. I remember ten of the boys got together and decided to eat me. They tied me to a stake, lit a fire, and poured barbecue sauce all over me. I remember thinking as I went round and round, "Porky will save me, he's my best friend." It turned out Porky was the ringleader and had actually baggsied my right buttock. If it hadn't been for Yakka-Takka-Tulla, the Space Mistress, I honestly believe they would have eaten me.”
Designing the future
Although the story about the smart shoes is probably made up --- or at least, embellished by Lister --- it’s getting to the point now where things that have no business doing so have artificial intelligence chips. TVs. Mobile phones. How long before the idea of shoes that can use an inbuilt satnav to get you to your destination without you having to think about it are in the shops? Well, not during my lifetime probably, but then that’s just as well: I don’t want to wake up one morning in the Burmese jungle!
Things not to think about when you’re three million years into deep space
They’re mundane concerns, that are really relegated to very much a lower place when taken beside such immediate worries as what that strange orange swirly thing is, where your legs have run off to and how to get the vending machines to serve you vindaloo toast, but they do crop up from time to time, adding to the realism --- if such can be said of such a series --- of this show.
When Rimmer tells Queeg he can’t just take control of his body, the AI responds by reminding the hologram that it is the Jupiter Mining Corporation who pays for his resurrection as a hologram, and although the JMC, along with all of its staff and probably home planet, are far behind and long turned to dust now, Queeg declares that “out here in space, I AM the Company!” Red Dwarf is presumably self-sufficient, probably sucking in debris from space to turn into fuel, and Holly would appear to have all of that under control, but it is a ship owned by a private company, and someone has to have paid for all the food, drink, even the oxygen they breathe. Luckily, nobody will be turning up any time soon with a bill! Although we’ve seen in “Better Than Life” that the Outland Revenue take such things as the extinction of humanity in their stride, and a piffling little detail like a debt being three million years overdue will not stay their hand!