Cultural References
The title is a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The plot of a drunken sheriff defending his town against an incoming gang of cowboys parodies Rio Bravo. The artificial reality and wild west plot also shows similarities to the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Spectre of the Gun", and to the Star Trek: The Next Generation's episode "A Fistful of Datas".
The episode also has references to the 1971 film Gumshoe which the AR game is based on and "Butch Accountant and the Yuppie Kid" references the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The name of Rimmer's video game character likely references the 1907 poem The Shooting of Dan McGrew, in which the title character is repeatedly referred to as "Dangerous Dan McGrew".
Howard Goodall's soundtrack for this episode is inspired by Ennio Morricone's distinctive style of music in the Dollars Trilogy.
Read more about this topic: Gunmen Of The Apocalypse
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)