The Story of the Skutters

The Skutters are the maintenance robots on the Red Dwarf.

Hopelessly drifting through space. Energy resources of the minimally sized escape pod depleted. Backup energy resources handed over to evil, unmentionable, beings to save their lifes. All John Wayne tapes worn out; VCR broken anyway. And worse of all: the pod doesn't seem to have any kind of vacuum cleaner to get rid of all the dust that has collected over all those years.

Not that it matters: the pod's tendency to take a right-hand turn, combined with the fact that the engines are off, suggests that they are quickly accelerating into the gravity well of that nicely looking planet they can just see through the pod's windscreen. Nicely looking indeed, lots of trees, water, beaches and cinema's, but what good's that going to be if you die on impact?

Approximately four years ago, our skutters, Cheecie and Weecie, were working on the Red Dwarf. Bringing tea, coffee, popcorn and beer-milkshakes to the people 'on board', doing simple repairs and any other things certain crew members told them to do. They even had on screen parts in the first season, but were written off for the remainder of the series.

Then, when six seasons had been recorded and the set had been empty for a long time, Cheecie said he was no longer cleaning up this smeg and Weecie vowed to stop toilet cleaning forever. They devised a plan to get away. The escape pod, still on the set after recording Rimmerworld, was boarded and launched, through the window, into deep space.

After one year being totally bored inside the escape pod, something finally happened. They managed to fly precisely through that very small window to the opposite reality. The opposite reality is a reality in which everything happens opposite to ours. When you turn left, your opposite counterpart turns right. When you say no, the other one says yes. Even Magaret Thatcher, former PM of the UK, was known there as the velvet-lady, because of her gentle policies. Or even more unimaginable: the US did say yes to Lubbers as Nato-secretary.

Cheecie and Weecie never really entered that opposite reality, though. At the exact same time they flew through the window, their counterparts did so too in the opposite direction. A gigantic collision was the inevitable result. For the four years between season six and seven they were stuck exactly between those two opposite realities; a place where nothing happened, because nothing could happen. Both realities nullified each other. Absolute boredom. It was only when preparations for recording season seven started, that the gravity from the Red Dwarf-model on the set started to pull them back.

Meanwhile all kinds of evil beings were generated from the writers' brains. Our duo had the misfortune to prematurely catch up with them on their way back and was suffering like in hell. And if the suspense has now risen to bursting levels, if you really want to know what happened to them, then I can just say: 'Sorry, I can't tell you. It would be a spoiler for season seven.' (All: 'You goit!')

About that planet they were accelerating towards: it was earth of course and their impact was broken by a nice catch from Lister (CC), not only a master at pool, but now also a baseball-champ.

The writer says sorry to all those that now feel they've wasted their time reading all this.