My Scintillating Theory on the Recording Order of the Second Series of Red Dwarf

The first series of Red Dwarf was recorded in the same order it was intended to be broadcast. However, the originally intended fourth episode, "Future Echoes", turned out so well that it was decided to bump it up to second in the broadcast order to try and keep viewers' attention.

I think that the second series was also recorded in the order it was meant to be shown, with one exception born out of necessity. Let me explain.

The six episodes of Red Dwarf's second series were recorded in front of a live studio audience weekly between the 29th May and the 3rd July 1988, in the following order: "Better Than Life", "Thanks for the Memory", "Stasis Leak", "Kryten", "Parallel Universe", "Queeg".

When the series was broadcast in September and October of that year, "Kryten" had moved up from fourth to first, and "Parallel Universe" and "Queeg" had swapped positions, when compared to the recording order.

Let's look at "Better Than Life" first. Isn't it quite easy to imagine this as the series opener? The arrival of the mail pod, and the material around Rimmer's dad, re-establishes the concept of "stranded in deep space, three million years from Earth" quite well, does it not? And then it opens up into the series' first ever location filming, demonstrating the increased scope of the second series. Before the crew enter the titular video game, it looks like the second series is going to be confined entirely to Red Dwarf, as the first series was... and then the show pulls the rug out from under the audience's feet.

Furthermore: Said location filming requires the weather to be absolutely perfect, being set as it is in paradise. And the second series was recorded between May and July. If the episodes were not being filmed in the order they were intended to be shown in, would it not make sense to push "Better Than Life" later into the production order and hence into the summer, maximising the chances of the required good weather? As it is, the scene set on the golf course was originally meant to be set on a tropical beach, but the scene had to be abandoned because it was so cold the cast could barely speak through their chattering teeth, and the scene was re-written and remounted later on. (The abandoned version of the scene can be seen on The Bodysnatcher Collection boxset, and the recent Blu-ray release of Series I-VIII.)

"Kryten" became the new opener, likely because it came out so well - on the making-of documentary of the series on The Bodysnatcher Collection, "It's Cold Outside", the cast and crew talk about how good David Ross was with the live audience, and the reveal that the crew of the Nova 5 had been dead for centuries is often described as the moment the show really clicked. "Kryten" moving from fourth to first seems strikingly similar to what happened with the first series' "Future Echoes", in fact, the only difference being that that obviously couldn't come first!

And then we come to the switching of "Parallel Universe" and "Queeg". Now, as broadcast, "Parallel Universe" obviously has to come last, because it ends on the cliffhanger of Lister discovering he's pregnant. So "Queeg" may have been filmed last because of a production problem - Rob Grant and Doug Naylor have admitted that they were having trouble coming up with an ending, so the script may not have been ready to be filmed fifth. Or maybe it was a casting thing - maybe some of the guest cast for "Parallel Universe" were only available for the fifth recording slot, or maybe Queeg hadn't been cast yet, given Charles Augins was only offered the part when he came in to choreograph the "Tongue Tied" sequence for "Parallel". But for whatever reason, those two had to be swapped in the production order despite it always being the intention to show them the other way round.

One other thing worth considering is the image at the top of this article. That comes from a curious clip taken from the rushes at the end of "It's Cold Outside" - an 'improvised alternate ending' where it turns out that Lister isn't actually pregnant, and Rimmer was just joshing. As John Hoare (whose piece on Ganymede & Titan here, as well as my subsequent bothering of on Twitter, partly inspired this post) points out, this is a rubbish and highly slapdash ending, so presumably it was thought of on the day of the audience recording. There are two reasons I can think of for this:

1. The writers wanted to leave themselves some leeway with the cliffhanger. (Note that they started writing an episode about Lister giving birth to his son, "Dad", but abandoned it after only a third had been written because Rob Grant couldn't relate to parenthood.)
2. They suddenly thought that they might not show the episodes in the originally intended order (maybe they remembered moving "Future Echoes" about, or they were already thinking of moving "Kryten" up into the premiere slot), and this was hurriedly improvised in case they decided not to show "Parallel Universe" last after all.

If all this is the case, perhaps it led to the end of the practice of shooting Red Dwarf in its intended broadcast order - for the third series, "Marooned" was shot first, and whilst that's rightly considered one of the greatest episodes of the show, it would sit a little oddly as a premiere, given three of the five regulars - two of whom were new to the show that series - are absent for most of it. Indeed, for the third series the episodes were broadcast in this order compared to recording: 3-1-5-4-2-6, with only "The Last Day" matching up - only one change was made for the first two series, but for the third series "Backwards" was moved up to first, then "Polymorph" and "Timeslides" were swapped over. So it seems unlikely that later series were filmed with any expectation that they'd be shown in the same order (barring a couple of specific cases in later series where certain episodes have to be shown at certain points in the series).