Back To Reality

The Red Dwarf crew takes Starbug on a recon mission where they discover the wreckage of the SSS Esperanto, a ship conducting marine seeding experiments at the bottom of an ocean-covered moon. It appears that all life on board the Esperanto committed suicide, right down to a haddock which closed its gills and suffocated itself. The crew discovers their deaths are due to severe depression caused by a hallucinogenic nerve toxin. Upon returning to Starbug the crew is attacked by a giant squid that releases the toxin. The crew crashes Starbug while trying to escape, resulting in destruction of Starbug and its crew. The message "GAME OVER" shows on the screen.

The crew then awakens in their chairs, having just spent four years playing the total-immersion video game Red Dwarf. They retire to the recuperation lounge to give time for their memories to return, where they discover artifacts from their prior lives. In 'reality', each character was their moral opposite. Kryten is half-human Cybernautics Division Detective (traffic officer) Jake Bullet. Cat is dorky Duane Dibbley. Lister is Sebastian Doyle, the head of the secret police in a fascist state, and Rimmer is Billy Doyle, Lister's half brother and a tramp. After Kryten shoots a Gestapo-like police officer, the crew become involved in a high-speed car chase with the police. Devastated by the implications of their "true" selves, the crew is about to commit group suicide when Holly finally manages to awaken them, revealing that Starbug's crash and 'reality' were just a group hallucination brought on by the despair squid's ink.


Trivia

• Along with "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", this episode has been voted "best Red Dwarf episode" by fans numerous times over the years. It scored the award on BBC2's "10th Red Dwarf anniversary evening" in 1998.
• Much of the set in the arcade scene where the crew awoke was the re-used set from the earlier episode "Holoship".
• Cat becomes Duane Dibbley for the first time in this episode.
• At the time of filming, Grant and Naylor were involved in the development of the American version of Red Dwarf; a running joke on set was that the UK version would come to an end through the crew discovering it really was all a computer game. However, the US pilot never got off the ground and Red Dwarf VI was commissioned.
• This is Hattie Hayridge's last appearance as Holly. It is later taken over again by Norman Lovett, who originally played the role.
• This episode is reportedly Stephen Hawking's favourite episode of Red Dwarf.
• This is also the last appearance of the Red Dwarf ship until the end of Season VII.

Production Error

• When the men are talking in the room, Bill Doyle (Rimmer) calls Officer Jake Bullet (Kryten) Kryten, even though they have new names. Although for Continuity, they would have been so used to calling each other by their previous names that they'd not care of the new or just were so used it they did it out of force of habit.

Demons & Angels

Kryten has a new invention, derived from the Matter Paddle, which he hopes will solve any supply problems that might arise on Red Dwarf. It is called a triplicator, and can create two copies of anything placed within its field. The prototype machine soon manifests several flaws. Firstly, the copies have a lifespan of exactly one hour. Secondly, while one copy exhibits all the best qualities of its original, the other has all the worst. Finally, when Kryten tries to reverse the procedure, Red Dwarf explodes, although this is explained by the mistake Kryten made by reversing the field of the beam, capturing the rest of Red Dwarf.

Lister, Cat, Kryten and Rimmer escape in Starbug, where they discover that the triplicator field has been projected outward, generating two copies of the ship. Kryten proposes to restore Red Dwarf by using the triplicator to amalgamate the two copies. They go first to the 'high' copy, where everything works perfectly and the crew – clad in monastic robes – are kindly, helpful, and spiritually enlightened. However, the 'low' ship, which holds the other half of the triplicator components Kryten needs to restore Red Dwarf, is a derelict crewed by perverted psychopaths. The most interesting of these is a fishnet-clad transvestite version of Rimmer, who promises to 'have' Lister after he is done torturing him.


Trivia

• The working title for this episode was "High and Low".
• For the making of this episode, the visual effects department blew up their only model of the Red Dwarf ship.
• The "Matter Paddle" from which the triplicator was adapted is the device discovered by Kryten in "Meltdown". It is also possibly combined with the time drive in "Tikka to Ride".
• There appears to be a continuity error in this episode. Lister recalls at one point how he has played pool with planets (a reference to the episode "White Hole" from Series IV), but this took place during a timeline which ceased to exist when the white hole was blocked. This should, according to Kryten, have left the crew with no memory of these events.
• This is the final episode to feature the Red Dwarf ship until the end of series VII five years later.

Quarantine

Red Dwarf receives a distress call from the hologram Dr. Hildegarde Lanstrom. Lanstrom had been working on a theory that viruses can be negative or positive and had isolated several positive viruses, including ones that grant whoever contracts it extreme good luck. However, when the crew (minus Rimmer) arrive at Lanstrom's lab she proves to have contracted a holo-virus that causes her to become insane. She passes this virus on to Rimmer before dying, resulting in Rimmer imprisoning his shipmates in quarantine (in compliance with Space Corps Directive 595) and then appearing before them, completely mad, clad in a red-and-white checked gingham dress and army boots and with Mr. Flibble, a penguin hand puppet. Lister, Cat, and Kryten defeat the insane Rimmer and then sentence him to just punishment, which is to be locked in quarantine with only the three of them, dressed in the red-and-white gingham dress, to entertain him.


Trivia

• Rimmer gets his first look at the Space Corps Directive manual.
• This is the only on screen appearance of Mr Flibble, Rimmer's evil penguin glove puppet. Mr Flibble became a cult character with Red Dwarf fans, has his own column on the official website and is also now available as an officially licensed toy puppet (minus his "hex vision").
• When Kryten and the Cat argue and lock heads in the quarantine suite, some of Danny John-Jules's makeup ends up on Robert Llewellyn's mask. This disappears just before he says "Okay".
• It is reported that Chris Barrie only agreed to wear the gingham dress, if the others did the same. After that, the last scene with Lister, The Cat and Kryten in dresses was included.

Terrorform

Rimmer and Kryten have a rather nasty accident while moon-hopping: Kryten is left in pieces among the wreckage of Starbug and Rimmer is gone. When Lister and Cat arrive, they find themselves on a psi-moon, a planetoid which terraforms itself to match the psyche of anyone who lands on it. The psi-moon takes on the formation of Rimmer's psyche and he is subsequently captured by his Inner Demons and set to be sacrificed to the manifestation of his Self-Loathing. The crew rescues him, and themselves, by boosting Rimmer's self-esteem to overcome his doubts and fears.


Trivia

• According to this episode, Lister's greatest fear is for a tarantula to crawl up his leg. However in "Polymorph" in Series III, he reveals that the Polymorph form that leaps out of the bin to be his "All time worst fear", although he probably only said this on impulse, given the situation.
• On the psi-moon Rimmer has a physical presence. Thus, Lister is able to touch Rimmer's leg, and they also have a group hug.
• The title is a pun on the word 'terror' and 'terraform'.

The Inquisitor

Starbug is captured by a being called The Inquisitor and returned to Red Dwarf. The Inquisitor is a self-repairing simulant who survived until the end of time and, coming to the conclusion that there is no God and no afterlife, decided that the only point of life was to live a worthwhile life. He is on a journey through time, seeking out the worthless and erasing them from existence, allowing a different person to exist in their place — the person who would have been conceived had a different sperm reached the ovum first. Kryten and Lister are judged unworthy (seemingly because they question the Inquisitor and refuse to justify their existence) and are sentenced to time erasure, but with some time-jumping manoeuvres, they trick the Inquisitor into erasing himself from time instead. Lister, whose intellect Rimmer routinely disparages, proves his native intelligence by devising the ruse.


Quotes

On the way back to Red Dwarf, Kryten is explaining the legend of The Inquisitor. His summary sentence is laden with heavy emphases.

Kryten: That is the Inquisitor: he prunes away the wastrels, expunges the wretched, and deletes the worthless.

Rimmer: [matter-of-factly] We're in big trouble.


Episode notes

• At the start of the episode, Kryten observes that Lister is reading a comic-book version of Virgil’s Aeneid. He describes it as “the epic tale of Agamemnon’s pursuit of Helen of Troy", and "the most classic work by the greatest Latin poet who ever put quill to parchment.” There are a couple of inaccuracies in these statements. Firstly, although the Trojan horse is referred to in the Aeneid, the work as a whole is not about Agamemnon or Helen (who both feature more prominently in Homer's Iliad). Secondly, and more trivially, the quill pen post-dates Virgil by several hundred years.
• When The Inquisitor wipes Lister from time, he finds Cat and Rimmer don't know him. In fact, neither character should be there at all — the Cat was descended from a pet smuggled aboard by Lister and Rimmer was revived as a hologram to keep Lister company. It must therefore be assumed that the new Lister followed an almost identical path to the old one. (This wouldn't be surprising considering the new Lister seems very similar in personality to the old one.)
• The episode originally featured a scene in which the Inquisitor removes his mask to reveal his true face. This was refilmed after writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor decided not to reveal his face after all. The original scene can be viewed in the DVD release of Series V.
• A robot entered into the BBC2 series Robot Wars (presented by Craig Charles) was named after this episode of Red Dwarf.
• Inquisitor actor John Docherty became better known as Jack Docherty, the host of a long-running chat show on Channel 5. He would also go on to star in Rob Grant's later sci-fi sitcom The Strangerers.
• Lister tells Rimmer that he (Lister) knows that Rimmer's middle name is Judas even though Rimmer tells everyone it is Jonathan. Co-incidentally, Chris Barrie's middle name is Jonathan.
• In the episode Legion Rimmer mentions The Inquisitor but he shouldn't be able to remember The Inquisitor as his time gauntlet backfired and he got erased from history

Holoship

Rimmer disappears from Red Dwarf and re-materialises on the holo-ship Enlightenment, a ship made out of light and crewed entirely by holograms who can eat, drink, touch, feel, and taste anything on the ship, as light can touch light. The crew is also required to have sex at least twice a day for their own sanity. Rimmer takes advantage of this with Commander Nirvana Crane. They begin to fall in love, but the ship is crewed by the hologramatic cream of the Space Corps and the only way to gain a place on the ship is to defeat one of its crew in an intelligence test. Rimmer decides that as he has a 96% chance of failure, the only option left open to him is to cheat like the feeble-minded Judas that he is, but he does not know that in the challenge, he will compete against Nirvana. Nirvana finds out how much it means for Rimmer to join the crew and sacrifices herself for him. Going against his earlier statement that career would come before love, Rimmer resigns his new commission and returns to Red Dwarf, so that Nirvana can live again on the Enlightenment.


Quotes

Rimmer is trying to say goodbye to his crewmates after being accepted aboard the Holoship.

Rimmer: Over the years... I have come to regard you... as people... I met.


Trivia

• "Holoship" overran by eight minutes and lots of the shots of the ship were cut.
• When a member of the Enlightenment's crew boards Red Dwarf to survey it, he recognizes the Cat as a Felis sapiens. This suggests, if continuity is followed (a big if in this series), that the holoship had previously encountered the second cat ark mentioned in the first series. However, it could be that the scanner came up with the name of the species in order to fully identify the crew members, as in Series III's last episode "The Last Day" where Hudzen 10 describes The Cat as Felix Sapiens--both could therefore be self-made conclusions with the aid of electronic devices.
• It could also be all earth cats eventually involved into humanoid form, not just the ones aboard Red Dwarf.
• In Series I, it is clearly stated that Holly can only maintain one hologram at once, but Rimmer and another hologram are on Red Dwarf at the same time briefly in this episode. This may be explained in 3 ways:

1: Rimmer was being generated by the holoship for the test.

2: In "Confidence and Paranoia" it is shown Holly can generate a second hologram if useless electrical systems are shut down; presumably at the end of "Me²" after the second Rimmer was shut down, Holly never bothered reactivating those systems, keeping the ability to generate the second hologram.

3: Rimmer is under light bee power whereas the second hologram is under supportive computer power.

Season 5

Mr Flibble is very cross. The Red Dwarf crew run in terror through six more adventures, encountering love, death, existential erasure...and a killer glove puppet.

Episodes:

• Holoship
• The Inquisitor
• Terrorform
• Quarantine
• Demons & Angels
• Back to Reality

On The DVD (Buy The DVD)

• Cast Commentary
• Fan Commentary - Back to Reality
• "Heavy Science" Original Documentary
• Deleted Scenes
• Smeg Ups
• "Dwarfing USA"
• - Documentary on the making of the US Pilot
• "Bad Guys" Featurette
• The SFX of Red Dwarf V
• Trailers, Idents and Episode Intro
• Raw FX Footage
• Isolated Music Cues
• "Dave Hollins" Radio Sketch
• Photo Gallery
• Weblink
• PLUS Hidden Easter Eggs
• And Collector's Booklet