Trivia / Red Dwarf Season I "The End"

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• Creator Backlash: Rob Grant and Doug Naylor hated George McIntyre's speech at his funeral, feeling that it was unfunny, out of place, and made the episode drag. As a result, the Remastered edition deletes all of McIntyre's dialogue except for his pointing out that Holly can only sustain one hologram at a time.
• Deleted Scene:
  • During Z Shift, Rimmer "unscrews rivets and burns circuits" whilst Lister merely pushes the trolley, watching on and bored stiff. Lister begs Rimmer to let him do something, but Rimmer refuses, reminding Lister that he outranks him, and Lister should just push the trolley and nothing more. He winds Lister up, telling him that "unscrewing rivets is a divine feeling". The scene was excised because it was filmed without a studio audience unlike the rest of the episode and the show.
  • A slight extension to McIntyre's funeral scene, with Kochanski discreetly kicking one of the skutters for looking around while the song is playing, and then Hollister suggesting that they all get a sherry after the song finishes.
  • An alternate take in the sleeping quarters where Lister mocks Rimmer for failing his astro-navigation exams so many times and failing to become an officer after so many years in the Space Corps.
  • An extended scene with Lister and navigation officer Kristine Kochanski flirting in the Drive Room as Lister is on the way to the captain's office. Lister plays with the controls to her chair, dropping her down. The scene was excised due to the actors not feeling it was genuine-feeling and even "embarrassing" and "nauseating".
  • An alternate take of the Everybody's Dead, Dave sequence, with Holly only appearing as a voice, and Lister initially treating the situation as a joke before slowly realizing that Holly's being serious. This version also has Holly state that McIntyre was killed by a smaller radiation leak which Rimmer failed to properly fix, leading to the accident which killed the crew. Rimmer is also shown as more outright angry at Lister in this version, and the scene ends with him trying to punch a lei that Lister had taken into stasis with him, only for his fist to pass through it.
  • Lister holds a funeral for the dead crewmembers (which includes Fourth Engineer Grace Allender, Mineral Geologist First Class Jeremy Black, and Drive Officer Russel Farnworth), gathering up their dust and putting them into canisters, firing them off from the Drive Room in much the same way George McIntyre was. His eulogies consist of "I never knew you, sorry you are dead". Rimmer complains that Lister is taking too long over everyone. When Lister gets to Rimmer's ashes, Rimmer decides to give his own eulogy, deludedly claiming that everybody on the ship liked him, and calling himself a "prince among men". Rimmer recalls a time in the Refectory when he "elbow tipped" or brushed up against Officer Lovell's breast, getting a sharp verbal response and a punch. Rimmer then poured an entire jug of custard over her, and ran away, saying "what a guy" about himself. After Rimmer's eulogy, he walks away with melancholy, and Lister shoots the ashes off. Lister then gets out the ashes for First Console Officer Kristine Kochanski, saying that he was sorry he never told her he loved her or got to live out his plan with her. After shooting her ashes off, the Cat appears for the first time, playing with Holly's wiring in the Drive Room like it is string.
  • With the crew's funeral scene removed from the broadcast episode, the Cat's appearance was moved to a later scene in the corridor, where he tries to make himself "look big", hissing. Although a pivotal scene, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor decided to excise the funeral scene for a number of reasons, mainly the "disastrous swing-top bin" effect of the pneumatic tube which shoots off the canisters.
  • An alternate take of the final scene, with Rimmer saying that he wants the Cat shot and dissected, and Cat using a spoon to eat his crispies instead of lapping them up, before going into the story of Frankenstein.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: Filming a scene with the Frankenstein cat caused problems when it came to trying to get the right shot. The cat would not stay still long enough, would not look at the photo of Fiji, and kept scratching Craig Charles' leg and running away. Charles' genitals were also visible in some takes; Grant and Naylor later considered digitally editing them out, but went for an inferior take instead.
• Throw It In!: Craig Charles' spilling milk all over the floor while feeding Frankenstein wasn't scripted, but the production team decided to keep it, reasoning that it fit in well with Lister's slovenly nature — and from a more practical standpoint, it was still the best take they had.
• Troubled Production: The first recording of this episode went so badly that the production team decided to record it again at the end of the series (there were 7 filming slots, enabling this to happen, and they ended up only delivering 6 episodes to the BBC). The remounted version only featured the regulars plus Robert Bathurst, meaning several scenes they would have probably liked to have re-filmed (most notably Lister's flirting with Kochanski) couldn't be; the version of The End as broadcast features some material from the original shoot, but is predominantly from the remount. The Bodysnatcher Collection features an assembly of the episode using only footage from the first attempt, showing what the episode might be like had it not been re-filmed.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the original script, George McIntyre's funeral song was "Heaven was Ten Zillion Light Years Away" by Stevie Wonder rather than the final version's "See Ya Later, Alligator".
  • George McIntyre was intended to be Australian to fit into the idea that the ship was international, but the actor, Robert McCulley had problems with the accent and decided to make the character Welsh instead.

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