Characters
We're on a mining ship, 3 million years into deep space. Can someone explain to me where the smeg I got this traffic cone?
— Lister · Red Dwarf
Behind the line May contain spoilers.
Our reading
An editorial interpretation.
Lister names the immense distance from ordinary life before asking about an aggressively ordinary object. A traffic cone seems out of place on that scale, and his inability to explain its presence becomes the mystery. The question makes the setting stranger through the small thing it contains.
Context reviewed