Thoughts on Jim & Bexley

[felineranger.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this a bit recently and wondered something. What do other people imagine happening to the twins in the future in show/book canon? We know Bexley dies in one reality from Future Echoes but other than that it's very open-ended, and actually kinda depressing. In any reality where the twins are born on Red Dwarf after the accident, surely a time will come when Lister and Cat have died, Rimmer and Kryten have burned out, and they'll be left alone. Even more so than Lister. What would they do? Go into stasis in the hopes of getting back to Earth? Find a planet with a GELF population and make the best of it?
Even at the end of Last Human, Kochanski tells Lister that they're about to make the first of many children. But what's going to happen to those children? Are they going to encourage them to breed incestuously to restart the human race? If they have a daughter are they going to encourage her to have sex with McGruder, the only other human man left, in order to widen the gene pool a bit?

It seems like whatever happens, Lister having kids ultimately puts those kids in a pretty shite position. Any thoughts?

Comments

[lordvalerymimes.livejournal.com]

I think Jim and Bexley were probably ill-conceived to begin with, which is why their whole timeline and pretty much any mention of their existence (with the exception of Demons and Angels) was excised with little explanation once series III started. I honestly think that Rob and Doug probably just didn't really think it through when they had the idea of Lister getting pregnant and then having two babies. If they had Lister keep the twins, that would have meant they'd have to try to film the show with either babies or children, and that would have made production so much more difficult. Apart from the technical difficulties of adding babies to a television show, I don't think they thought much about how Jim and Bexley's lives would unfold in such a dismal future. Maybe I'm not giving Rob & Doug enough credit, but my guess is that they didn't think much further than, "Wouldn't it be funny, if this guy thinks he's going to have sons in the future, but he doesn't realize that he's going to be the one actually GIVING BIRTH to them?"

Did we ever find out if Deb and Arlene's dimension was in the exact same state as Lister and Rimmer's? I've always assumed that yes, they were also 3 million years away from earth in a human-less universe, but maybe they weren't? I haven't watched Parallel Universe in a while, so my memory is a bit foggy. Maybe poor Jim and Bexley had some chance at a more normal life in Deb and Arlene's universe?

It makes me sad to think of Cat and Lister dying and Rimmer and Kryten being left to their own devices while they wait to burn out. I know there's a theory out there that the Inquisitor is actually Kryten, and I'll admit that I do find that concept intriguing.