Dear Johnny Fanboy,

In the Red Dwarf episode Back to Reality (in Series 5), the crew have been immersed in the virtual reality game Red Dwarf for the last four years.

All the characters wake up wearing dirty overalls and even Billy Doyle (AKA Rimmer) has very dirty feet. Yet they don't show four years' worth of hair growth - why? You can't claim that maybe they had someone cut their hair for them while they were sleeping, because in that case surely they would also have had someone wash their feet!

Ricardo Ferreira

Johnny Fanboy replies:

My immediate response is that this was all just a hallucination anyway, so those events were not real.

However, since the Despair Squid-inspired nightmare was so detailed, you could argue that this was a major oversight that the Dwarfers should have seen through fairly quickly. In which case I would argue that, in the context of the hallucination, the characters could have been treated with a hair-repressing drug or lotion before they began their game.

Such a lotion has been suggested as a future invention in certain Star Trek novels. (To which Lister would probably say, "Don't gimme any of that Star Trek crap...!")

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