As an example of interfering with a fixed point in time done right, Red Dwarf shows us JFK's assassination. I can't help but compare the quality of the writing and handling of the plot points. And a half-hour comedy sci-fi show from the nineties, frankly, comes out on top.
Maybe it's just early days yet with 13. Maybe I'm not the target audience for that episode. But, maybe, it was just poorly written. Discuss.
Posted Oct 24, 2018, 12:13 AM UTC
One is an episode of a very good drama & one is an episode of a very good comedy, both with pretty different aims, or are we to just compare the way they handle time travel plotting? Can you see how the way Red Dwarf handles the JFK assassination may not have been appropriate for a Doctor Who episode about Rosa Parks, race, & the civil rights movement?
You can't just say this shows quality of writing without backing up your argument.
I can say Tommy Wiseau's The Room has better writing and directing than the Godfather. That doesn't make it true or explain why I think it's true.
Could you give a summary of the Red Dwarf episode? Not as many here aren't going to be familiar with it as the most recent Doctor Who episode.
Basically, a crew of people on a spaceship millions of years in the future time travel back to America and force the gunman to move to another room. This puts the gunshot out of alignment and JFK is grazed not killed.
This changes the future but they're still there and they try a few times to put it right but end up >!time travelling again and talking JFK into time travelling and being another gunman, plot twist - he is the man who shoots himself. Everything goes back to normal.!<
As u/KITTvsKARR says except the plot twist specifically is that [Spoiler for episode](#s "the "man behind the grassy knoll" theory is "true" and was in fact JFK himself.")
Bloody love Red Dwarf!
I don't know that the quality argument is tilted the way you think it is. "Rosa" goes to great lengths to respect the historical Rosa Parks and her choices. "Tikka to Ride" offers up a fanciful scenario in which the Catholic John Fitzgerald Kennedy carries out his own suicide.