Season 4

Ace Rimmer arrives from an alternate dimension, Kryten falls in love and Lister's curry tries to kill him in six more slices of classic Red Dwarf chaos.

Episodes:

• Camille
• DNA
• Justice
• White Hole
• Dimension Jump
• Meltdown

On The DVD (Buy The DVD)

• Cast Commentary
• "Built to Last" Original Documentary
• Deleted Scenes
• Smeg Ups
• Ace Rimmer - a Life in Lamé
• "Lurve" Featurette
• Can't Smeg Won't Smeg Special
• Trailers
• Raw FX Footage
• Isolated Music Cues
• Talking Book Chapters
• Photo Gallery
• Weblink
• PLUS Hidden Easter Eggs
• And Collector's Booklet

Meltdown

Kryten discovers a matter transporter in the research lab, which Holly informs them will home in on any atmosphere-bearing planet within 500,000 light years (Presumably this limitation is to stop the crew simply warping back to Earth, 3 million light years away). The crew is sent 200,000 light-years to Wax-World, a Wax-Droid theme park that has been abandoned for millions of years, during which time the droids have broken their programming and now the inhabitants of Villain World are waging war against Hero World.

Rimmer sets himself up as commander of the Hero World droids (a motley crew led by Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Stan Laurel and Father Christmas), seeing this as his chance to pit his tactical wits against the greatest military minds of the past. However, he is hampered by the fact that his army is made up of pacifists, holy men, celebrities, intellectuals and philosophers, whilst his enemy's force is made up of tyrants, psychopaths, brilliant generals and sadists.

Meanwhile the Cat and Lister are captured by Adolf Hitler ("They're tying someone to the stake ... It's Winnie-the-Pooh!"). Rimmer 'saves' the day when he sacrifices all the Hero World droids in an assault on the Villains, but manages to assassinate the leaders (with some help from Queen Victoria) and all the other villain droids by turning up the temperature and melting them. In the end, Rimmer gets what he deserves as Lister swallows his light bee.


List of Wax Droids

Hero Droids

• Mahatma Gandhi (Charles Reynolds)
• Dalai Lama (Leonard Ten-Pow)
• Elvis Presley (Clayton Mark)
• Pope Gregory (Michael Burrell)
• Stan Laurel (Forbes Masson)
• Noel Coward (Roger Blake)
• Marilyn Monroe (Pauline Bailey)
• Father Christmas (Sam Avent)
• St. Francis of Assisi (Ray Chaney)
• Queen Victoria (Alice De Mallet De Donas)
• Mother Teresa (Loraine Farraro)
• Albert Einstein (Martin Friend)
• Pythagoras (Stephen Tiller)
• Abraham Lincoln (Jack Klaff)
• Jean-Paul Sartre

Villain Droids

• Adolf Hitler (Kenneth Hadley)
• Caligula (Tony Hawks)
• Joseph Goebbels (Raymond Martin)
• Rasputin (Stephen Micalef)

Trivia

• This should have been the first episode of the fourth series to air, but due to the Gulf War conflict it was pushed back in the schedule. This explains why Kryten still has to obey Rimmer although his programming was supposedly broken in the earlier episode Camille.
• The monsters Kryten and Rimmer flee from when they first arrive on the planet are taken from scenes from the 1967 film Gappa.
• The original actor to play Mahatma Gandhi was approximately 90 years old. Filming of his scenes were to be done outdoors on a freezing cold day, and the actor was to wear nothing but a loincloth. Due to the concerns of costume designer Howard Burden that the actor may not survive the day's shooting, he was sent home with pay and the part of Gandhi was recast.
• This is the second episode after Dimension Jump, with an alternate end song. This time it is sung by "Elvis Presley".
• This is the first episode where we are introduced to Rimmer's "light bee", which is used or mentioned in episodes afterwards. Interestingly, Rimmer survives being swallowed by Lister at the end of this episode.

Dimension Jump

In a parallel universe, Lister is a gifted engineer nicknamed "Spanners" and Rimmer is dashing, heroic, universally beloved test pilot Arnold J. "Ace" Rimmer. Ace pilots a ship equipped with the new Wildfire drive, which can exceed the speed of reality and propel him into a different dimension. He arrives in the Red Dwarf universe, where the rest of the crew soon take a liking to him; Rimmer, however, becomes bitterly jealous of this "better" version of himself. Ace, disgusted with his alternate self, soon decides to leave, but not before revealing to Lister the 'break' that he got in his life that Rimmer was denied. The break, in fact, was that Ace was held back a year in school, while Rimmer progressed a year like everyone else. Ace Rimmer, humiliated, forced himself to buckle down and work harder to improve himself, while Arnold Rimmer continued to make excuses throughout his life.


Episode notes

• This episode contained the first alternative version of the end credits theme with the skutters' rendition on the Hammond organ.
• This is the first appearance of "Ace" Rimmer. Chris Barrie had lobbied for a cooler character because he was suffering "git overload" due to the type of characters he was playing.
• Although the character "Ace" returns in other episodes ("Emohawk: Polymorph II" and "Stoke Me a Clipper") it is revealed they are in fact "alternate" Ace Rimmers — in fact, in "Emohawk" Ace is merely the character of Rimmer with his bitterness removed. The new Ace in "Stoke Me a Clipper" was the latest in a long line of Aces, the original Ace having "caught the business end of a neutron tank in Dimension 165".
• When Ace Rimmer came into the "Red Dwarf" universe, he's also somehow been sent three million years into the future. Technically, he should have appeared in the time period he left and encountered rimmer when he was still alive. The explanation could be that he had a tracker to find Rimmer.

White Hole

Holly's mental condition has degenerated to the point where she cannot count without banging her head on her screen. Kryten develops an intelligence-compression technique that could restore Holly's IQ of 6,000 at the expense of some run-time. The technique works too well, leaving her with an IQ of more than 12,000 but a lifespan of three minutes. She shuts herself down and leaves the ship on emergency backup systems. As if that is not bad enough, Red Dwarf is running into a white hole, which spews time and matter into the universe. The ship will be destroyed by the hole unless they can plug it. Holly is switched back on and quickly concocts an audacious plan that involves playing pool with planets. Lister rejects Holly's shot, replacing it with his own trick shot. The white hole is plugged, reversing all time ejected from it. This means that the timeline in which the episode took place is to become redundant, sending Holly and the Red Dwarf crew back to their previous state.


Cast notes

• David Ross returns to Red Dwarf after being the actor to originally play Kryten in the episode of the same name. His new part is decidedly more minor, as he provides the part for the Talkie Toaster, who is edited back out of continuity at the end of the episode.

Production

• Director Ed Bye was stricken with food poisoning prior to filming this episode, so producer Paul Jackson stepped in instead. Danny John-Jules, infamous for being late, thought it was a joke by crew members when he was told that Paul Jackson was directing, since Paul was known for his short temper and insistence on being punctual. He still turned up late, and as expected, enraged Jackson.
• According to Chris Barrie in the DVD commentaries, Paul Jackson's presence alone caused the crew to suddenly double in size. Robert Llewellyn even commented on a soundman walking precariously along the gantry above the set, "risking life and limb," and various other crew members removing nails with their teeth and hammering in other nails with their heads, a humourous reference to the fear that Paul Jackson struck into the hearts of the crew.

Continuity

• In the episode "Demons and Angels" Lister mentions that he played pool with planets but he shouldn't be able to remember it because the events in "White Hole" got wiped from history.

Justice

While Lister is down with a bout of space mumps, Red Dwarf picks up an escape pod from a prison ship that was transporting dangerous criminals to their final trial, sentence and incarceration on Justice World. The crew head to Justice World themselves in Starbug, hoping to discover whether the pod contains a guard named Barbara Bellini or a homicidal maniac. The Justice Computer puts a spanner in the works when it scans the crews' minds for signs of guilt and convicts Rimmer on 1,167 counts of second-degree murder, a consequence of his faulty drive-plate repair that killed the crew of the JMC vessel Red Dwarf. Kryten proves to the Judge that Rimmer's immense guilt stems from his own inflated sense of importance; a man as incompetent and insignificant as Rimmer, he argues, would never be given tasks that might put the whole crew in danger. Although Rimmer, deeply offended, tries to object to his own defense attorney, he is found not guilty. However, a psychopathic droid emerges from the pod that initiated their trip to Justice World, and tries to hunt them down. He is defeated after a unique trait to Justice World is exploited, namely that anyone who tries to perpetrate a crime on someone else has the effect put on them (i.e., attempting to hurt another person results in you feeling the pain instead).


Trivia

• The industrial prison complex was filmed in Sunbury Pumphouse, a disused water pumping plant that was later used for the ‘oil rig’ set on the second season of the Channel 4 games show GamesMaster.

Continuity

• This episode marked the first appearance of a Rogue Simulant, the villainous androids who would remain recurring antagonists to the "Dwarfers" until Series VII.
• This episode is subject to a large continuity issue. It is stated that the number of crew aboard the Red Dwarf prior to the radiation leak that killed them was 1,169 (The charge is 1,167 counts of murder but the computer does not count Lister who didn't die, or Rimmer, who effectively killed himself). This was an inexplicable increase from the mere 169 crew members mentioned in the first series of the show. The continuity error appears to be have noticed however in the following series, as in the episode "The Inquisitor" the pre-accident crew complement was implicitly reverted to 169. Curiously, in the Red Dwarf novels, the ship had had a complement of 11,169 prior to the accident, suggesting that the increase in crew complement was a deliberate retcon rather than a continuity error. This would mean that Lister's registration code in "Inquisitor" was either a mistake or was not calculated solely based on his rank. One other suggestion states that 169 refers to members of the Space Corps and the additional 1000 were miners of the Jupiter Mining Corporation. Or prisoners.
• In series 1, Rimmer's responsibility for the drive plate malfunction is established several times; we even see a film clip of Hollister berating Rimmer for failing to fix it properly.
• Rimmer's sentence is wrong, as each count of second degree murder carries 8 years penal servitude, and 1,167 times 8 is 9,336 years, however he is only sentenced 9,328 years.
• Coincidentally, the pod that the crew find has the name 'Barbara' is mis-spelt 'Barbra'.

DNA

Red Dwarf encounters a drifting spacecraft and the crew investigate, finding a DNA modifier. The Cat fiddles with it and manages to change Lister into a chicken, then a hamster, and back to human.

In trying to replicate his actions the Cat traps Kryten in the DNA modifier and he turns him into a human. Life as a human, though, is less interesting to Kryten than aspiring to be human ("I have located what I presume to be the recharging socket, but for some strange reason it doesn't appear to have the standard three-pin adaptation. Now, do I have to use some kind of special adaptor? Because no matter what I do, the lead just keeps falling out.") and he asks to be returned to his original self.

Meanwhile whilst repairing the damages to the machine Holly suggests they try the device on a test subject this job is given to Lister's mutton vindaloo dish, however the team inadvertently create a "mutton vindaloo beast". It seems indestructible and they have little choice but to use the machine to change Lister into a "super human — man plus". It nearly works as he becomes a Lister-Robocop hybrid but he is also shrunk to about one foot in size.

In a scene that heavily parodies the film Jaws, Lister finishes off the monster by throwing a can of Leopard Lager into its mouth and shooting the can. The monster then explodes and Lister reflects "Of course — lager, the only thing that can kill a Vindaloo!"


Continuity

• When the episode ends, Kryten is still in human form. He is in android form at the beginning of the next episode. His reverse transformation is never shown on screen.

Trivia

• The computer game TimeSplitters Future Perfect parodies the final scene of this episode, in the levels set in The Mansion. The boss in this level is very similar to the Mutton Vindaloo Beast, even up to the fact that the mission is to shoot a barrel stuck in the monster's mouth.
• The script for this episode reveals that DNA in this instance stands for "Do Not Alter".
• The photograph Kryten shows to Lister of his genitals was a real photograph of a film crew member's penis. This was ostensibly done to "get the proper reaction" out of the actors.
• Contrary to previous episodes, it is revealed that Lister dated Kochanski. This was a deliberate retcon by the writers, who felt that Lister was feeling way too strongly for a woman that he'd never gone out with. This is in line with the Red Dwarf novels, where Lister and Kochanski dated for a few weeks before she dumped him and returned to her ex-boyfriend.

Camille

Lister begins to try and break Kryten's programming in order to make him able to lie, cheat and be insulting. Kryten then takes Rimmer asteroid-spotting in Starbug, and when they receive a distress call from a doomed ship Lister's insubordination training allows Kryten to go and search for survivors despite Rimmer's order to keep a safe distance away. He finds Camille, who appears to him to be a female 4000 GTi mechanoid: "You’ve got all those little extras like realistic toes and a slide back sun-roof head!" The two fall instantly in love. When all four crew members see different people, and all fall in love, the truth outs: she is a Pleasure GELF, designed to be everyone's perfect mate. She reverts to her real appearance (a big green blob), but Kryten still takes her out on a date. The relationship is put in jeopardy when Camille's partner Hector arrives. In a pastiche of the end of Casablanca (one of the movies Lister made him watch to see how lying can be noble), Kryten convinces Camille to be with her partner, then laments that Lister taught him how to lie so effectively.


Cast notes

• The droid version of the GELF was played by Judy Pascoe, Robert Llewellyn's then girlfriend (they have since married). She was also the voice of the blob version. Robert has often joked how he use to complain to Judy about the amount of make-up he has to endure, and yet when Judy wore it she had no complaints.

Broadcast

• This episode was originally planned to be transmitted as the third episode of the fourth series, and indeed was transmitted as so in repeat runs in both 1992 and 1994, but on the series' original transmission it was felt more appropriate to run the episode on Valentine's Day and so it went out first. Further changes to the series' running order came about because of the outbreak of the Gulf War and the subject matter of some of the other episodes.

Continuity

• Kryten first lied in the previous episode "The Last Day" when he told the droid there was no Silicon Heaven, even though in this episode, Lister taught him how to lie.
• Lister's love of the movie Casablanca was first revealed in "Better Than Life". At the time, however, he considered the (fictional) remake starring Peter Beardsley and Myra Binglebat to be the definitive version.