I don't have my DVDs to listen to it again, but for whatever reason he pronounced the R just gets lost. I still have a hard time believing that the line is judge and jury. I always thought it was some sort of cultural reference that hadn't made it to the US.

It's one of those things where unless you know the sound is supposed to be there you don't necessarily hear it. My roomate from Birmingham, England couldn't tell the difference between route, root and rut when I pronounced them, the root and rut sounded exactly the same. Which from my PoV is kind of mind boggling. There's a difference between rough and roof, but for some people they can't hear the difference.

What do you mean Red Dwarf "has" a massive continuity hole? The entire show is a massive continuity hole. (Not that I mind - I still love it to bits.)

I think that they added continuity to the show somewhere around series 7, whenever it was that Grant left the Grant Naylor partnership.

With that second episode of season 10 they do seem to be referencing some of that continuity silliness but are still completely ignoring the miniseries. But, yeah, the show itself never had much continuity to it in the first place. That didn't come until much later. There was some continuity at times, but I can't imagine how much less it could have had. For the most part you can watch any episode and anytime and get it fairly quickly.

But, watching the first episode or two first, really helps a lot.

Well root and route are genuine homophones here, whereas as far as I know route is pronounced with a diphthong in US English, as in 'ow'. Does that go for all accents?

I had a Canadian friend for whom marry, merry and Mary were homophones and that always amused me because they have very distinct vowel sounds here.
My favourite is still the opening text of the first episode of series 3.

I don't want to derail things any further. But in general, it depends what the meaning of the word is how you pronounce it. Sometimes you have that ow sound in the middle and that's typically the route you take in getting somewhere or when the football team demolishes the opponents. The oo as in boot is for things like route 66 and AFAICT you hear both of them fairly regularly in the US.

The third one which comes between those two seems to cause people trouble for whatever reason. I'm not sure why as it's the same sound that you find in foot.

Your Canadian friend was probably using standard American English, where American should probably be thought of as North American as it's common in Canada as well as the US. I usually use SAE for most things, but I'm capable of communicating in both African American Vernacular English and the regional accent that folks where my parents were born speak. It sounds a bit like how southerners speak, but not quite.

It's an interesting aspect of the language. There's a lot of things you hear in various regional UK accents which don't exist at all over there. My accent has changed somewhat since I left the US, I've picked up a bit of a New England accent. Which I will eliminate when I go back to the US permanently. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's just not the image that I want to give people.

As for the series, it's going to be interesting whether they get Holly or Hilly or somebody else in future episodes.

That's not really the point, they were written by Red Dwarf scriptwriters, so I think it's fair to assume they're closest to how Red Dwarf was originally envisioned (I even remember reading this somewhere, heck if I remember where tho)

The books weren't tie-ins, they were an alternative Red Dwarf.

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers starts off with Lister joining the Jupiter Mining Corporation and then does the whole Lister in stasis whilst the crew are killed by a reactor failure.

So far, so good, but from there on it separates from the TV series. There are similarities, yes, such as a second Rimmer hologram (but done by using the Nova 5's hologram generator and not the way it happened in the series - Confidence and Paranoia) and finding Kryten, but then there are very big differences too, such as using the Nova 5 to get back to Earth, but then that entire event turning out to be Better Than Life.

The second book, Better Than Life, is much the same kind of thing with similarities to plot events in the series, but done differently. For instance, Lister is dead at one point, and his body sent to Backwards world, which causes him to return to life. He lives there for thirty years (he is elderly and lives with an elderly Kochanski) and then when thirty years have passed and he is younger again his crewmates return for him.

As for Last Human and Backwards, they are two alternative sequels to Better Than Life.

So yes, the books are an alternative, and yes I really enjoyed reading them. :)

Have you seen the alternative ending to series 8? It was on the DVD.

It's been some years since I read any of those books, I probably should see about finding my copy. Tie in was probably a poor choice of words, they were written because of the show and for that audience, but they were as far as I can recall not canon. And not in keeping with the original intent of the series.

IIRC the DVD box set of the series before the miniseries indicated as much. Plus the series itself IIRC was a take off on sketches done for a comedy show.

Yes, sort of. Red Dwarf was based on a series of radio comedy sketches - Dave Hollins: Space Cadet. Here's the Wikipedia article.

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Hollins:_Space_Cadet]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Hollins:_Space_Cadet[/url]
Here is the alternative ending.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQDQ2EbnK1E

And it would explain why the rest of the crew is once again no longer on Red Dwarf.

They are though...

EDIT: Sorry, misread. Yes, the rest of the crew.

Potentially, what happened after Rimmer kicked death in the nuts at the end of series 8 might be revealed in the last episode of Red Dwarf X. Only a rumour, however.