Only The Good...

The episode begins with a brief few lines of text explaining that a deep space starship, the SS Hermes, has been devoured from the inside out by a synthetic, highly corrosive micro-organism. An escape pod from this wrecked vessel carries a lone survivor, Talia Garrett. The pod and the woman are picked up by Red Dwarf, but is also revealed that the destructive microbe has also been brought on board when part of the empty escape pod dissolves away.

Now some time into their prison sentence in the The Tank, the Dwarfers have been put on probation for good behaviour. The episode begins with Arnold Rimmer attending to Captain Frank Hollister as he recovers from Yellow Fever. After giving him some hot lemon drink, Hollister notices in the directives that Rimmer tried to slip in a form pardoning him from all crimes. The hopeless Rimmer goes on to explain his ambition to become an accomplished officer someday, perhaps even a Captain.

Hollister tells him he is not officer material and dismisses him as an attractive blonde woman, Talia Garret, enters. This is the woman who was rescued from the escape pod of the SS Hermes, and it seems that the Captain and Talia both know each other in some way from the past. Rimmer, disgusted at what he sees as the Captain's apparent virility and his own failure to get a woman leaves. In the corridor he attempts to steal some chocolate by putting in a coin which is tied to a piece of string and then pulling the coin back out with the string - only for the AI of the dispensing machine to berate him. The dispenser says to Rimmer: "You are my nemesis... one day, our paths will cross again, and I - I will *destroy* you...". Rimmer replies with "...And on that day, I will be the Captain of this ship."

Meanwhile, back in The Tank, Kryten comments to Lister on how he is changing Miss Kochanski's calendar, Lister realises what is going on and instructs Kryten secretly on how to behave. Kochanski comes into her cell later and discovers Kryten has attempted to celebrate her period with a banner that reads 'Have A Fantastic Period'. After telling him what's really happened they hatch a plan to get Lister back. Later, in Lister and Rimmer's cell, they discover that Kryten has placed Baxter's illegal moonshine hooch into their cell, just before Holly informs them of a cell inspection. With the water tank full they have no choice but to drink the hooch. Warden Aackerman is able to figure they are drunk by offering them a kebab, which they readily accept.

When Baxter finds out, believing his hooch was stolen by Rimmer and Lister, he threatens to finish off the two, now in sickbay, sleeping off the stomach pump. The two quickly resolve to deciding they need to escape. Kryten and Kochanski pretend to be ill to land in sickbay, while the Cat disguises himself as a nurse, from where they plan their escape.

However as as the Dwarfers escape they find that the particularly nasty chameleonic microbe is eating away at the ship after having being brought on board in the pod from the SS Hermes.

Captain Frank Hollister and the rest of the Red Dwarf crew contemplate escape on board a fleet of Starbugs and Blue Midgets; leaving Rimmer, Lister, the Cat, Kryten and Kris alone and trapped on board a rapidly disintegrating Red Dwarf, without the relevant knowledge needed to cancel out and nullify the destructive microbe.

Kryten and Kochanski devise a plan which involves entering a mirror universe where everything is opposite; negative becomes positive and a virus becomes an antidote. Travelling to a mirror universe may provide an antidote that will neutralise the microbe. Kryten manufactures a perfect prism laser and directs it at a mirror to create a dimensional gateway to a mirror universe. Rimmer crosses over first, only for the prism to break and trap Rimmer in the mirror universe. He realises he is not a failure in this universe but is indeed Captain, and berates the alternative Hollister, now a 2nd Technician, for being useless. When Talia comes in, Rimmer, thinking she is his lover, snogs her, only to be told she is his spiritual advisor. After making a fool of himself yet again Rimmer quickly goes to the science lab to talk to the professor, the alternative Cat, and gets the antidote (Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidrexidroxhide).

However when Rimmer crosses back to his universe he finds himself alone, as it transpires the other Dwarfers repaired the prism and followed him into the mirror universe shortly after he crossed over. However the prism is now fried and burnt out, so Rimmer is trapped, and Red Dwarf is a flaming inferno and falling apart. Even worse, the chemical formula for the antidote, written in the mirror universe, has now become the mirror opposite - it has turned into the chemical formula for the microbe itself. After exchanging insults with the same dispensing machine whom he stole from, a flying can knocks Rimmer unconscious. "Every dog has his day", states the dispensing machine.

In what may be either a hallucination or reality, the Grim Reaper, played by series director Ed Bye, comes to claim Rimmer. Rimmer kicks Death in the crotch and runs off down the flaming corridor, claiming that "only the good die young." as Death winces "That's never happened before..." The episode ends with an ominous "The End" caption, but is soon refuted with its sudden erasure and replacement with "THE SMEG IT IS".


The alternate ending

The ending of this episode, in which Rimmer's death is seemingly imminent, Red Dwarf is on fire and falling apart, and the fate of the other crewmembers is also uncertain, was not popular with a large number of fans. Writer Doug Naylor recalls on the series VIII bonus features that this ending was filmed at the last minute due to a late re-write, and even his own kids gave him hell for it.

An alternate ending where the Dwarfers clearly survive, and indeed even find themselves in a similar situation to the earlier series of Red Dwarf, was scripted and filmed but strangely cut at the at the last minute. However it is available for viewing on the series VIII DVD special features. In this version of the episode, the bumbling Arnold Rimmer successfully remembers the antidote to the microbe that is eating the ship. It takes him over two hours to memorise the name of the antidote, as he has to alternate between the mirror universe and back to read the name of the antidote (which becomes the chemical name of the microbe in our universe as the opposite of the antidote.) However Rimmer memorises the antidote just in time for Kryten to make up some of the chemical antidote up and use it to destroy the microbe.

Red Dwarf having been saved from destruction, and Arnold Rimmer once again being the highest ranking member on board, Rimmer dresses himself in the uniform of the space corps admiralty with various military decorations. Lister, Cat, and Kris party and celebrate at having survived, and due to the fact they are no longer imprisoned in The Tank and once again have free run of the vessel. Kryten resumes his ironing duties. It is not explained why Rimmer would be the highest ranking crew member in this ending, as Kochanski is an officer and should outrank him.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Red Dwarf crew such as Captain Frank Hollister and the rest of the flight officers, look on Red Dwarf helplessly from their fleet of Starbugs and Blue Midgets with which they escaped the disintegrating mothership. Kryten peeks through a porthole at the fleet and guiltily suggests to Rimmer that they should perhaps slow down Red Dwarf, so that the rest of the crew can dock in the hangar bay and come aboard. Rimmer, reminiscent of Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 (in accordance with his military fantasies), replies "I see no ships"!

The alternative ending concludes with Rimmer finally paying the money he owes to the dispensing machine he stole from earlier. The machine still fires a can at Rimmers head though, knocking him unconscious


Trivia

• The formula for the antidote is: Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidrexidroxhide (as spelt in the Series VIII collectors handbook), while the formula for the virus is: Zogothoniumeliumoxiixiexiphulmifhidikalidrihide.
• This episode had a notorious production, having gone through numerous re-writes and re-shoots. In production it had three different working titles: firstly Mirror, Mirror, then Mirror/rorriM and finally Every Dog.
• One proposed ending was to feature Arnold Rimmer's dashing and heroic alter-ego Ace Rimmer returning to save the day (in reality, the "original" Arnold Rimmer). However this ending was not filmed.
• Yet another ending was to have the Dwarfers finally making it back to Earth at the end of the episode. This, too, was not filmed, but would surely have become Series 9. However, this is how the books end.
• Tony Slattery guest starred as the voice of the dispensing machine Rimmer steals from.
• The production team had completely run out of money by the time it came to making this episode and due to the fact there was no budget left, the production designer Mel Bibby asked visual effects designer Bill Pearson to make the model of the SS Hermes escape pod himself at home. Bill Pearson did this for the promise of a bottle of red wine.
• In the show's second episode, Future Echoes, Rimmer tells Lister he "can't whack Death on the head", (when Lister was convinced he has seen the future was about to die) which is a bit ironic seeing that Rimmer kicks him in the groin in this episode. However, the Rimmer who kicks Death in the groin is not the same hologram who featured in the second episode of series one.
• The title spoofs the finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, All Good Things....

Pete - Part 2

The gang decide to follow Rimmer's lead and run away from Pete, now de-evolved into a Tyrannosaurus rex, but he manages to eat the time wand. Meanwhile, Kryten's penis Archie (which he has made himself in an effort to be reclassified as a man) escapes and he is prevented from chasing it when the Canaries are detailed to stop Pete after his deadly rampage through the supply decks.


Trivia

• Originally the script included a sequence of Kryten trying to fight with the T-Rex, before getting abruptly shooed off by its foot.

Pete - Part 1

In this episode, Lister and Rimmer get into trouble a few times.They are punished by being forced to peel potatoes next week and attempt to get out of it by stealing a special virus that eats the skins of potatoes in minutes.The virus transfers on to them and the end up naked and bald.


Trivia

• Pete parts I & II were originally written as a single episode called Captains Office.
• This was the 50th episode of Red Dwarf.
• One of the people 'frozen' in time can clearly be seen blinking.
• The skutter whistles the tune from 'The Great Escape'.

Krytie TV

After Kryten reveals he showers with the female inmates (having been classed as a woman when he arrived on Red Dwarf due to his lack of external — or indeed any — genitals), he is knocked out and reprogrammed by the less scrupulous members of the Tank and duly starts up his own pay-TV venture, Krytie TV, and the star of its first show, 'Women's Shower Night', is none other than Kristine Kochanski. Meanwhile, Lister gets his guitar back, minus strings and in the same post is notification of an appeal against his circumstances which if successful will apply to all other prisoners in his situation.


Trivia

• This episode had 20 re-writes.
• This is Robert Llewellyn's favourite episode.

Cassandra

Rimmer, Lister, Kryten, Kochanski, the Cat and Holly are all imprisoned in the Tank for two years for misuse of confidential files and due to a misunderstanding are also signed up for "the Canaries", a group of expendables who go first into dangerous situations and not as Lister thought, the prison choir. (The joke in the show is that the group name is an acronym, standing for: Convict Army, Nearly All Retarded, Inbred, Evil, Sheepshaggers.) Their first mission is aboard the wreck of the SSS Silverberg, a prison ship for its computer, Cassandra, who can predict the future with 100% accuracy (which Rimmer, Lister, Kryten, Kochanski and the Cat try to get out of by singing you are the sunshine of my life).


Trivia

• This episode was broadcast in the United States before being shown in the UK.
• As observed by Danny John-Jules in the DVD commentary to this episode, the name and appearance of Cassandra were given an homage in the recent revival of the popular sci-fi television series Doctor Who.
• In Season 5, Episode 1 - Holoship, the holoship Enlightenment's computer (Stocky) can predict the future, but unlike Cassandra, has a 95% accuracy (100% - 5% error margin).
• Cassandra is a reference to the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy whose beauty caused Apollo to grant her the gift of prophecy. However, when she did not return his love, Apollo placed a curse on her so that no one would ever believe her predictions.

Back In The Red - Part 3

The crew make their escape on Blue Midget and start their quest of finding Kryten's lost nanobots. Sadly, the reality is that they are trapped in an artificial reality program and their actions will be used as evidence against them in their trial by Captain Hollister.

Holly admits to programing the nanobots to recreate the dead crew members. He did it to keep Lister calm but his plan went "tits up."


Trivia

• The ship Blue Midget makes a return after last being seen in Bodyswap. In terms of true-series continuity, this marks the first appearance of the new CGI re-design of the ship.

Back In The Red - Part 2

Using the luck virus, sexual magnetism virus and the confidential reports, Rimmer begins a scheme to get promotion by blackmailing his way up the ziggurat of command. The sexual magnetism virus has the effect of making him attractive to all the female crew members which he finds has it's ups and downs. Meanwhile, Kryten has been restored to his factory settings which he does not like and Lister plans an escape plan with Kochanski and Cat using a famous face from the past.


Trivia

• A sign on the door identifies the doctor's character as Dr. Legs Akimbo. However, this isn't visible in the finished episode.
• The Red Dwarf VIII Script Book shows that Doug Naylor had originally intended for the Monkees song "Take a Giant Step" to accompany the four Dibbley characters stepping into the corridor and walking together in unison. This sequence was shot, and when clearance was not granted for the use of Monkees music, the song Little Green Bag by George Baker Selection, best known for its use in Reservoir Dogs, was used instead. this song is also used in the DVD extras of the series 2 featurette "Alternate personalities"

Back In The Red - Part 1

Kryten's nanobots have rebuilt the ship, but done so far too large. As the crew are sucked into a gigantic air vent the ship begins to shrink to normal size all around them. Not only has Red Dwarf been reconstructed, but the entire crew have been resurrected too along with Rimmer who is also a lot less dead. Lister, Kochanski, Kryten and Cat quickly find themselves on trial for various crimes. Lister needs the help of Rimmer to escape and hunt down the nanobots and in return he helps Rimmer to search for the luck virus (Quarantine). Upon finding the virus Rimmer pockets the sexual magnetism virus for personal use. The feature-length edit of this episode gives viewers the chance to encounter what the highly anticipated Red Dwarf movie will most likely become.


Trivia

• The Tank inmate Nige was played by John Lynch who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the most facial piercings. When this episode was recorded he had 152.

Season 8

The nanobots have populated the ship with its original crew. This is especially good news for Rimmer, who is now a lot less dead, but is extremely bad news for everyone else. Locked up on Red Dwarf's prison deck, the crew join the Canaries - a battle-hardened convict army and not, as they first thought, the prison choir.

Episodes:

• Back in the Red - Part 1*
• Back in the Red - Part 2*
• Back in the Red - Part 3*
• Cassandra
• Krytie TV
• Pete - Part 1*
• Pete - Part 2*
• Only the Good...

*Also included as feature-length stories


On The DVD (Buy The DVD)

• Cast Commentary
• "The Tank" Original Documentary
• Deleted Scenes
• Smeg Ups
• "Comedy Connections" Red Dwarf Special
• "Super Models' Featurette
• Storyboard Sequences
• Children In Need Sketch
• PBS Sketches and Idents
• "Fight!" Featurette
• Trailers
• Raw FX Footage
• Isolated Music Cues
• "Dave Hollins" Radio Sketch
• Photo Gallery
• Weblink
• PLUS Hidden Easter Eggs
• Back in the Red - Xtended
• And Collector's Booklet

Nanarchy

In an attempt to get Lister a new limb after the Epideme incident, Kryten tracks down his missing nanobots, only to find they are in Lister's laundry basket and they have got an old friend with them.


Trivia

• Kryten addressing the viewers ("Last week on Red Dwarf...") was the first time the show broke the fourth wall deliberatly. The only other time the fourth wall was broken was in the episode me2 when Craig Charles accidently looked at the camera while laughing.
• This is the first time since "Parallel Universe" that Norman Lovett has appeared as Holly, the ship's computer. In between, his character was played by Hattie Hayridge.
• The episode title can be analysed in two ways. The most obvious is to think of it as a pun on the word "anarchy", in connection with the nanobots. Alternatively, since the suffix -archy signifies rule of some sort, it could be interpreted as nan-archy, the rule of the nanobots. They are not strictly speaking in charge, but their actions do determine the fates of the Dwarfers.

Epideme

The Red Dwarf crew find a starship buried in an astro-glacier, and consequently encounter a zombie who used to be a crew member on Red Dwarf, but left when the ship was at Titan. Lister gets infected with an intelligent virus and promptly fails to convince it not to kill him. Kochanski has a solution that is better than death, but comes at a high price.

Beyond A Joke

Starbug passes an old derelict spaceship, the SS Centauri, which Kryten scavenges for supplies. He finds some live lobsters in stasis and brings them aboard Starbug to cook a fine supper. This is convenient, since it is exactly five years to the day since Kryten was rescued from the wreck of the Nova 5 and he was looking for a way to celebrate the anniversary (unbeknown to the rest of the crew who have forgotten what day it is).

Meanwhile, Kochanski does some scavenging of her own on the SS Centauri, and finds some new software to use with the virtual reality suite aboard Starbug she believes may come in useful. Kochanski is fed up with the juvenile activities of Lister and the Cat, and so decides to educate them on the finer points of etiquette by introducing them to a virtual reality rendition of "Pride and Prejudice Land" in "Jane Austen World". Meanwhile Kryten's plans for a lobster supper he had been preparing all day are scuppered by this.

Kryten's jealousy gets out of hand (in previous episodes of the series, his behaviour has becoming increasingly erratic), and he enters the virtual reality simulation and begins assassinating the virtual characters. He then loads a T-72 tank from a World War II game, and blows up the lakeside gazebo in which Lister, the Cat and Kochanski are having tea and crumpets.

Back in Starbug, whilst having their lobster supper, Lister suggests brown ketchup to go with it. This is too much for Kryten and he goes beserk, literally blowing his top — his head explodes. After fitting Kryten with a spare head, that head too blows up. This happens numerous times until all Kryten's spare heads have exploded. Kochanski does not know why this is happening, and Lister suggests that they board the SS Centauri again and look for some spare mechanoid heads there and perhaps any technology which may explain why this is happening to Kryten. However they discover a Rogue Simulant captain (played by Don Henderson) has since commandeered the Centauri.

Kochanski and the Cat come aboard the Centauri pretending to be GELFs and dressed as Kinitawowi tribesmen with whom the Simulants have an alliance with, and enter trade negotiations with the Simulant. They bring Lister on a leash and pretend he is their slave. Meanwhile a real Kinitawowi tribesman, a partner of the Simulant, ransacks Starbug and steals the remains of Kryten. The Simulant and the GELF then escape with Kryten aboard the Centauri. The other crew cannot catch up as the Centauri is much faster than Starbug, travelling at warp speed, which Starbug cannot do.

On board the Centauri, Kryten has the defect fixed which caused him to blow up his heads (although it is still not at this point explained why this was) by the Simulant. Kryten is then prepared for market as it seems the Simulant intends to sell the mechanoid to the GELFs. Kryten meets another mechanoid named Able who is a servant to the Simulant and who, it turns out, is from the same batch as Kryten (a 4000 series) and carries the same serial number. This means that Kryten and Able are, in effect, brothers. However Able is a "zoney" — he is addicted to a narcotic known as "outrozone" that is specially designed for mechanoids. Abuse of this drugs has corrupted Able's circuit boards. It takes Able about twenty seconds to recall his own name.

Kryten learns some depressing truths about his creator, Professor Mamet, and some truths about his model of mechanoid. Kryten, along with the entire 4000 series of mechanoid, were in fact designed as an insult to John Warburton, a bio-engineer who was once engaged to Professor Mamet. After Warburton jilted Mamet the day before their wedding, Mammet designed the series 4000 mechanoid in his image for revenge. The series 4000 mechanoids were bumbling buffoons; a caricature of his fussiness and pomposity. All negative thoughts and emotions (such as jealousy, guilt, envy, frustration, and insecurity) build up in a "mind negadrive", which when full would cause the mechanoid's head to blow up. This was supposedly a likeness to when Warburton would "blow".

The pair of mechanoid brothers escape to Starbug.

In the end, the Centauri attacks Starbug but the Dwarfers are saved by Able, who sacrifices his life for them. Able uses an escape pod to fly out to the attacking vessel, and activates Kryten's "mind negadrive", projecting Kryten's pent-up negative emotions onto the Centauri. The negative emotions envelop the attacking vessel in electronic form. The Simulant captain, overcome with grief and despair because of the effect, sets off the auto destruct sequence aboard the Centauri. The force of the explosion causes Able's escape pod to crash into an asteroid with some force, killing him instantly.

Kryten mourns Able, but at the same time is happier knowing that he had a brother, and that in the end Able gave Kryten reason to be proud of him. Kryten realises that he has evolved into something "beyond a joke".

The episode ends with Kryten rewriting the "Jane Austen World" virtual reality scenario to "Curry World". The food becomes too hot even for Lister's single remaining tastebud.


Trivia

• Robert Llewellyn (who plays Kryten) helped Doug Naylor write this episode.
• Robert Llewellyn wrote this episode with the intent to feature very little of Kryten due to his increasing dislike for the application of the Kryten makeup. After numerous revisions of the script, Kryten unexpectedly became an integral part of the episode, and Llewellyn also had to play the part of another droid, Kryten's brother, called Able. This meant he had to wear the Kryten makeup twice as much, as Able was played by Llewellyn in the same costume coloured green instead of black.
• This was the last episode of Red Dwarf to feature two popular villanious races of the franchise: Rogue Simulants and GELFs both make their last appearances in the show.
• Whilst filming the "Pride and Prejudice World" scenes in the lakeside gazebo, Danny John-Jules lost his "cat teeth" as he ate grapes. Production had to be halted whilst the cast and crew searched for the fake fangs.
• The model for the Rogue Simulant battle cruiser was made from old answering machines.
• The Rogue Simulant captain was played by veteran British actor Don Henderson. Science fiction fans may remember Henderson from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) in which he portrayed High General Tagge. This episode proved to be Henderson's last work in the world of acting, and he died weeks after shooting his scenes for this episode. Henderson was in the latter stages of terminal throat cancer during filming, and his husky voice was not a special effect as many viewers believed but due to his condition. The crew and cast of Red Dwarf recall their fondness for Henderson on the Series VII DVD commentary, wherein he is referred to as a "sweet and friendly old man".
• Kryten says that he loads a T-72 tank from a "World War II" game; however the T-72 didn't enter production until 1971, long after World War II was over.
• The tank that was used was borrowed from the James Bond film GoldenEye set.

Blue

Blue was the fifth episode to air in Series VII of Red Dwarf. It is famous for The Rimmer Experience, a sequence featuring munchkin-like mannikins of departed crew member Arnold Rimmer extolling Rimmer's virtues in a song strongly reminiscent of Toad's song in A. A. Milne's Toad of Toad Hall.


Synopsis

Lister finds himself missing Rimmer so much he starts dreaming about kissing him. Kryten takes matters into his own hands by creating virtual ride, The Rimmer Experience, based on Rimmer's diaries, providing Lister with a permanent cure.


Trivia

• The working title of this episode was "Heartache".
• The filming of the The Rimmer Experience scene was said to be hellish. It took nearly a full day, but most of the cast had whiplash from being banged about in the carriage within five minutes. The cast referred to this as "Black Wednesday".
• "The Kiss" again came about because Chris Barrie and Craig Charles were complaining about the lack of kissing scenes, so the writers fixed them up with each other.
• Charles and Barrie did really kiss for that scene. Apparently, they were so lost in this, they didn't hear the director yelling cut and continued to kiss for quite a while (seen on the special features DVD)
• During the Rimmer Experience, three versions of Rimmer from Seasons 3 - 7 are shown. The version of Rimmer from Seasons 1 and 2 is not shown.
• In one of Lister's flashbacks he tells Kryten, Lister and Rimmer are scrounging through lockers. Lister opens a locker because Rimmer, being a hologram, probably can't do it. If this had taken place before Kryten came on the ship (even though the only indication was that Lister was telling the story to Kryten), Rimmer should have been dressed in gray and had the thick "H" on his head. Also, he shouldn't have reacted to the heat of the flames as he wouldn't have had a physical presence, even though he was dressed in his hard-light blue jacket.
• This is Rimmer's last appearance as a hologram. His next appearance is as a human in Season VIII's Back in the Red: Part I

Duct Soup

Life on board ship is making Kochanski frustrated, so Lister arranges for her to have a bath in his quarters, a gesture that worries Kryten considerably. But before she gets the chance, an engine failure leaves the crew trapped in Lister's quarters, and they must navigate the tiny duct labyrinth to restart the engines before they crash. Lister starts to suffer from claustrophobia and explains how he got it, while Kochanski distracts him with some surprising news about her Dave.


Connection to Identity Within

"Duct Soup" was the last episode of Series VII to be written, as it replaced the script for the "lost episode" "Identity Within". This was due to budget constraints as the script for "Identity Within" was quite ambitious would have been too costly to produce (most of the budget had already been spent on the previous episode "Stoke Me a Clipper"). So, they opted instead for this simple-to-shoot idea of a character driven episode and of filming without special effects and in quickly put together tunnels built on the car park at Shepperton Studios.


Trivia

• Due to its unusual nature as a Red Dwarf episode, "Duct Soup" was not well received by fans, generally speaking.
• Robert Llewellyn (who plays Kryten) states in the Series VII DVD special features that "Duct Soup" is his favourite ever episode of Red Dwarf, due to the character development of the Dwarfers and the backstories developed, as no other Red Dwarf episode had character development on this level. In the episode commentary for the Series VII DVD, Chloë Annett (who plays Kochanski) also states that this is her favourite ever episode, while Craig Charles (who plays Lister) counts it among his favourites.
• In reference to another episode, Lister's claustrophobia is mentioned in the "Confidence and Paranoia" episode, where, when he is outside the ship with his Confidence, Lister says that he gets a little claustrophobic in his space suit. Very few episodes show Lister in closed spaces, but when he is, he doesn't make a fuss about it.

Ouroboros

The crew of Starbug come across a linkway between dimensions and meet their counterparts from another reality, one in which Kochanski was in stasis when the Red Dwarf crew died, and Lister has since been brought back as a hologram. The linkway breaks, when attacked by GELFs, and Kochanski is trapped with our crew; and although Lister does not mind, Kryten becomes jealous and is determined to get her back to her own dimension. Lister finally uncovers his parents' identities.

The episode's name is derived from Ouroboros, the mythological dragon or worm (Or in this case, snake) swallowing its own tail.


Production Notes

• This is the second Red Dwarf episode to forfeit the opening titles for the purposes of time and episode pacing (the first being the Series II episode "Parallel Universe").
• This episode included the first computer generated sequence ever produced by the newly-commissioned CGI department of the BBC, an exterior shot of the blue "sub-space" passageway connecting to Starbug

Series continuity

• The baby Lister was placed under the table in November, 18 months after he was born. 18 months, being a year and a half, before November is May of the previous year. In Emohawk: Polymorph II Lister states that he is an Aries. If Lister were an Aries, he would be born in either March or April and not May (Taureans and Geminis are born in May). This could be explained that as he was abandoned the orphanage had to take a guess with his age and was just off by a month or so
• It is confirmed in this episode that Kryten killed the crew of the Nova 5 (albeit accidentally). This is in line with the Red Dwarf novels, where Kryten caused the ship to crash by washing the inside of the computer systems.

Stoke Me A Clipper

Ace Rimmer arrives from another dimension badly injured and reveals to Arnold Rimmer his secret — the fact that alternate versions of Rimmer from countless dimensions have all taken the reins to be everybody's favourite hero. Now Ace must train Rimmer to succeed him and keep the legend going. The episode title comes from Rimmer's end-of-episode attempt to 'be' Ace Rimmer as he tries to copy the catchphrase "Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast." but does it all wrong and ends up with "Stoke me a clipper, I'll be back for Christmas." shortly before ejecting himself from the space craft instead of taking off.


Guest actors

This episode featured a large number of famous guest actors. Some of these included:

• Scottish-born Hollywood movie veteran Brian Cox played the Medieval English King.
• Prolific British comedy actress Sarah Alexander portrayed the French Queen.
• Veteran English soap actor Ken Morley portrayed the German commander Captain Voorhese. Morley is best known for previously playing the character of Reg Holdsworth on the British soap opera Coronation Street. He had also previously played a Wehrmacht general in 'Allo 'Allo.
• British television actress Alison Senior portratyed Princess Bonjella.
• A German television comedy duo, Kai Maurer and Stephan Grothgar, portrayed the Wehrmacht soldiers who get hit on the head by the crocodile.

Quote(s)

These are two variations of the "Ace Rimmer saying"

Ace Rimmer: Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast

Rimmer: Stoke me a clipper, I'll be back for Christmas


Trivia

• The working title for this episode was "Natural Born Rimmers" but it wasn't used, being deemed too risqué.
• A special effects crewman/set maker recalls on the Series VII DVD special features that this episode was fun to make, but at the same time the most difficult episode of all to produce.
• Ace Rimmer fights off Nazis and jumps out a World War II Heinkel on the back of a crocodile. The same crewman recalls that in the original script for this episode, Ace Rimmer was fighting off Rogue Simulants and jumped out out a flying saucer on the back of an alien.
• Chris Barrie refers to the opening of the episode as a "007" moment
• Even though he later says to Rimmer that he wasn't the original Ace, Ace greets the crew as if he were. It is believed by fans that Ace kept log's in which his other replacements could use to learn about the adventures he'd been through and the people hed met.
• Even though Ace tells Rimmer that he too is a hard-light hologram, Ace does not have an "H" on his head. this is explained in the show as the Light-bee remote changes the outward appearance of holograms and removes the H.
• The large collection of dead Rimmers means that Ace has not only travel between dimensions but also through time. There is also the plot hole as to the planet in their dimension being that which holds all of the 'Coffin-Pods'.

Tikka To Ride

Unable to function without a good curry, Lister tampers with Kryten so he will help him to go back to Earth with the time-drive and place a large takeaway order. Their calculations are a little off and they find themselves at Dallas, Texas in November 1963, where Lister pushes a gun-man out of a fifth floor window, allowing President Kennedy to live. Within minutes, they have altered the future for the worse, and now they are going to have to hatch a plot that is going to drive the conspiracy theorists crazy (using a small hill covered in grass: "You mean... the Grassy Knoll, sir?")


Trivia

• Earlier in the episode it is explained that the paradox caused Starbug to grow substantially and have considerably more decks/rooms. yet Starbug itself did not change in size, indicating that the paradox created a Tardis like effect upon the ship.
• This episode features the first use of a flashback to a previous episode ("Out of Time").
• This episode was the second to have no studio audience. The first one, the third series episode "Bodyswap", was not done in front of an audience, as Craig Charles and Chris Barrie had to mouth their lines, so they could be synced in later.
• The title of this episode is a piece of word-play based on the name of the song "Ticket to Ride" by the Beatles, in accordance with the theme of curry on which the storyline focuses.
• Craig Charles only took one take to do the long monologue at the start of the episode.
• When the second shooter fires from the Grassy Knoll, Lister, Rimmer and Cat are dressed up as tramps. Three tramps are reported to have been found on the Grassy Knoll when the police searched it after the shooting, but nobody knows who they were or what happened to them afterwards.
• The Xtended version of the episode features a fuller, alternative ending. Lister is seen to discover that the curry supplies had been hidden by himself from the past to the aft section of Starbug, to prevent them from being destroyed in the flood. However, Rimmer's joke is only played out when he separates that section from the rest of Starbug.

Continuity

• This episode contains an unusually large number of continuity errors, some of which even contradict the previous episode. Two of the most glaring errors are the following:
• A big deal was made in "Out of Time" of the fact that the time-drive travels only in time, not in space. In this episode, the time-drive seems to function in both, and yet the crew at no point decide to use it to get them home, or to retrieve Red Dwarf, although the crew are determined to avoid time travel to prevent turning out like their future selves. The time-drive being able to function in space as well as time could be explained by the portable model's resemblance to the matter paddle from "Meltdown". Presumably, Kryten combined the two, for which there is a precedent, as Kryten tweaked the matter paddle to duplicate matter in "Demons and Angels", otherwise the teleporter could be used as this is already capable of travelling in space and time as seen in "Rimmerworld". Also, at the beginning of the episode, Lister says that things have 'Emerged from both timelines to cope with the paradox', and as their future selves obviously found a way to get back to Earth to sample the finest life can offer, the time drive found in this episode may be theirs.
• At the beginning of this episode it is explained that, when the crew from the future killed their past selves, the resulting paradox restored their past selves to life. However when Kennedy does the exact same thing at the end of the episode, his past self remains dead.

Season 7

After a temporary bout of deadness, the Dwarfers find themselves solving one of the biggest conspiracy plots of all time, before Ace Rimmer drops in with the challenge of Rimmer's life. Meantime Kryten gets seriously tetchy and Lister has one of the hottest screen kisses ever. Pity it's not with the girl of his dreams. Pity it's not with a girl.

Episodes:

• Tikka to Ride*
• Stoke Me a Clipper
• Ouroboros*
• Duct Soup*
• Blue
• Beyond a Joke
• Epideme
• Nanarchy

*Also includes special extended version


On The DVD (Buy The DVD)

• Cast Commentary
• "Back From the Dead" Original Documentary
• Deleted Scenes
• Smeg Ups
• "Identity Within" - the lost episode
• Robert Llewellyn Video Diary
• Fan Films - the winning shorts
• "Burning Rubber" Featurette
• "How Do They Do That?" - the effects
• Trailers and Kryten Introductions
• Raw FX Footage
• Isolated Music Cues
• "Dave Hollins" Radio Sketch
• Photo Gallery
• Weblink
• PLUS Hidden Easter Eggs
• Remastered Tikka to Ride
• And Collector's Booklet

Out Of Time

Red Dwarf is completely lost. The crew enters a region of space populated by unreality pockets, a security measure around a top-secret Space Corps test ship. Kryten places the crew in Deep Sleep and conducts his own looting mission and Starbug escapes with a time-drive. They are subsequently contacted by another Starbug, populated by their future selves, who explain that their own time-drive is malfunctioning and request to be allowed to copy parts from the present-day time-drive. Lister refuses after seeing what the future crew has become, and they launch an attack on Starbug: they would rather die than be denied their self-indulgent lifestyle. Rimmer shows uncharacteristic bravery by suggesting they fight, stating "Better dead than smeg." The episode ends with Lister, Cat, and Kryten all dying from explosions in the cockpit and Rimmer blowing up the time-drive. The final scene is of Starbug exploding and the promise "to be continued."


Production notes

• The episode was reportedly filmed with Autocue prompts installed throughout the Starbug set, since Doug Naylor did not actually finish the script. He had to type lines for the actors to read, and simultaneously make it look like a well-rehearsed episode to the audience. The cast recall the experience fondly in the DVD commentaries.
• The working title for this episode was "Present from the Future", while Craig Charles script title was "R.I.P. Dave Lister".

Alternate versions

• An alternate ending was filmed (and is on both the 1994 outtake video Red Dwarf: Smeg Ups and the the Series VI DVD) where Rimmer destroys the time-drive and sets things back the way they were by killing their future selves as a result. The Dwarfers then celebrate with margaritas — which they discover to their disgust is brewed from urine recyc.

Rimmerworld

Rimmer is suffering from stress and Kryten prescribes several measures for him to prevent an electronic aneurysm. Meanwhile, the crew decides to replenish supplies by looting the Simulant ship they shot down a few weeks ago ("Gunmen of the Apocalypse"). One of the Simulants has survived and confronts Lister, Kryten and the Cat. Rimmer, however, sneaks into an escape pod and runs away which causes the destruction of the ship. His pod subsequently heads straight for the closest S3 planet, on the other side of a wormhole, and when it arrives Rimmer decides to use the terraforming equipment to create a paradise. He also manages to clone himself, hoping for female company, but instead begins an entire new race of Rimmer-clones who eventually turn against him and imprison him in a dungeon. When his shipmates arrive in Starbug a time dilation effect means that for Rimmer 600 years have passed. They arrive on Rimmerworld only to be promptly captured and thrown into Rimmer's dungeon by power-hungry Rimmer-clones, who consider anything un-Rimmer like to be a crime (i.e., charm, bravery, intelligence). The crew teleport out of the cell and escape with Starbug.


Quotes

Rimmer has discovered that he can make a woman out of his DNA strands. In a voice over, he debates if it would be right for them to have sex, as technically, it would be his sister...

Rimmer: "After much soul searching, I reluctantly decided: What the hell, I just wouldn't tell her." He smiles to himself, and shrugs."


Trivia

"Rimmerworld" was filmed back to back with "Gunmen of the Apocalypse".

Emohawk - Polymorph II

An orb-shaped, computer-controlled, class A Space Corp External Enforcement Vessel warps near Starbug and decloaks to scan the transport ship. After doing this the probe accuses the Dwarfers of looting derelict spaceships (a crime of which they are completely and totally guilty) and sentences them to death under frontier law.

Starbug is pounded with pulse missiles and is nearly destroyed, but manages to flee into a GELF zone where the probe will not follow. With Starbug on fire, the crew deliberately crash-land on a moon with a shallow ocean to extinguish the flames. However the moon is not uninhabited - a primitive humanoid tribe of GELFs, the Kinitawowi tribe, reside on the moon. Lister is forced to marry the chief's daughter, whose name is Echechechechechech, in return for an oxygen generation unit (or O/G unit) so that Lister and the Cat can breathe on take-off. Lister escapes from his new bride as the others are leaving with the O/G unit and they make their escape in Starbug but they are trailed by the chief's pet emohawk, a domesticated polymorph, which begins stealing the crew's emotions. The Cat loses his cool and morphs into Duane Dibbley, while Rimmer loses his cowardice and becomes Ace Rimmer. After Ace makes a failed attempt to snap Duane Dibbley's neck and vent Starbug to get rid of the polymorph (thereby sacrificing himself), Lister and the crew manage to capture the emohawk and freeze it. This allows them to extract the DNA of Cat and Rimmer to return them to normal.


Quotes

After Lister is married his bride wants to consummate their union.

Lister: "All right, I just want to slip into something more comfortable. It's called Starbug." Outside Lister runs past his pals.
Lister: "Change of plan... LEG IT!"


Trivia

• The working title of this episode was "Polymorph II - Emohawk". The cast jokes in the DVD commentary of this episode that the scrubbed title sounds like a football score.
• This episode marked the first appearance of humanoid GELFs in the form of the Kinitawowi tribe.
• The full name of Lister's GELF bride, as it appears in the subtitles on the series VI DVD and the information on the official Red Dwarf site, is "Echechechechechechech"
• Ainsley Harriot played the role of the GELF chief, a role he asked for due to being a fan of the show. Harriot later became a celebrity chef and hosted the television shows Can't Cook, Won't Cook and Ready, Steady, Cook for the BBC. Later, in 1998, Harriott presented a special edition of Can't Cook, Won't Cook called Can't Smeg, Won't Smeg for the 10th anniversary of Red Dwarf with the cast of Red Dwarf cooking a meal while remaining in character.
• Two much loved "alter egos" make an appearance in this episode: Cat becomes Duane Dibbley and Arnold Rimmer becomes Ace Rimmer.
• Danny John-Jules provides a little known fact in the DVD commentaries: Eddie Izzard, now a famous comedian and international movie star, used to be a warm-up man for the Red Dwarf crew.
• A great line said by Ace Rimmer was unfortunately cut from the final edit: as he struggles to break Cat's neck, he ultimately decides against killing him, stating that "It'd be like garroting Bambi."
• The GELF village set was, in fact, an already standing set left over from the short lived series Covington Cross.
• A running gag in the series involving Lister's marriage is seen in Series VII, where a GELF ship attempts to capture him and bring him back to his wife.

Gunmen Of The Apocalypse

Starbug has strayed into a Rogue Simulant hunting zone and is detected by a battle-cruiser whose xenophobic mechanoid occupants despise humanity. The Dwarfers are captured (after trying to convince the Simulants they are not humans but aliens in one scene by using a chinface), but instead of killing them the Simulants upgrade the engines and driver interface of Starbug, as well as fitting armour and laser cannons on the spaceship. They do this so that they can have a battle for the purposes of sport.

By a fluke the Red Dwarf crew cripples the Simulant ship, but before it is destroyed it transmits an "Armageddon Virus" into Starbug's navigation computer, leaving the ship locked on a suicide course straight towards a large volcanic moon. Kryten contracts the virus himself in order to try and formulate a software antidote.

Kryten's battle with the virus manifests itself as a Wild West–flavoured dream; he is the drunken and burnt-out Sheriff of Existence standing against the four Apocalypse Boys: Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death. To try and help Kryten to buy some time, the Dwarfers use an artificial reality machine to enter Kryten's Wild West hallucination. The Apocalypse boys render Lister, Cat, and Rimmer powerless, but it buys Kryten enough time to develop an anti-virus and release it against the Apocalypse Boys and the virus infecting the ship.

Starbug crashes into the surface of the moon, but the deletion of the virus allows the crew to take back control of Starbug and they blast out of the molten lava within seconds, before the ship melts. Starbug flies off into the setting sun and the Dwarfers "yee-haw" like cowboys.


Trivia

• Along with the episode "Back to Reality", "Gunmen..." is often voted "best Red Dwarf episode" in fan polls.
• This episode was Red Dwarf's highest accolade so far, winning an International Emmy Award for the 1994 Outstanding Popular Arts category.
• The International Emmy Award was presented to Robert Llewellyn (who played Kryten) in New York City by Hollywood veteran, Tony Curtis, who is reportedly a fan of the show.
• In the saloon a piano version of the Red Dwarf theme can be heard.
• This episode was filmed in Laredo; a small, privately owned, Wild West-themed resort town in Kent, England. The game with which the Dwarfers enter the battle is called "Streets of Laredo". This is also the title of a well-known song, sung by a young cowboy who's about to die from being shot.
• It was estimated in pre-production that the scenes in Laredo would take several days to film. However, the crew were informed by the BBC of impending time constraints and so squeezed seven days' worth of filming into a mere twenty-four hours.
• During filming of this episode, Janet Street Porter was Head of Art & Culture at the BBC (a post she didn't hold for very long due to public criticism) and she made no secret that she didn't like Red Dwarf. Street Porter received the ambitious script for "Gunmen..." late, and after reading it, sent out a memo that all production for this episode must be stopped immediately due to the fact she believed it too difficult to film, too costly and too time-consuming when the crew could be focusing on other shows. By the time the Red Dwarf crew received her memo, filming had already wrapped and even post-production already started.
• When the crew were horseriding, Craig Charles spurred on the horse on which Chris Barrie was riding with some force and enthusiasm. The horse resorted to running around fields in circles, and it reportedly took two hours to slow the horse down so that Barrie could get off. Ironically, before this incident Charles had never ridden a horse before and Barrie had claimed he was an accomplished horse rider. Barrie supposedly did not talk to Charles again for weeks, due to his anger at him over this incident.
• The working title of this episode was "High Midnight".
• In the original script for this episode, all scenes in Laredo were to be filmed at night and the Apocalypse Boys were to come for Kryten at midnight instead of noon. This proved too time-costly and the idea was scrapped.
• The lava Starbug crashes into was actually slightly liquified jelly.
• In the original script, Starbug was going to crash into the ocean instead of lava. However this was changed as it proved even more of a difficult shot for the effects team if Starbug was to crash into water then lava. The reason being apparently that the after splashing into the water, the bubbles were nearly as big as the model of Starbug itself.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Fistful of Datas" features a similar scenario to this episode. In the A to Z of Red Dwarf, Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard) stated that he at first found Red Dwarf to be similar to Star Trek: TNG and tried to call his lawyers about it, but backed down after he watched it further. The segment with The Riviera Kid shooting the sign was shown immediately after Stewart spoke on this. Since then, Patrick Stewart has been a fan of Red Dwarf.
• Rimmer's alter ego, Dangerous Dan McGrew, was a character from a Robert W. Service poem, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew".
• The third episode with alternate end credits: The theme song is played in a Country/Western guitar style.
• While filming the scene where Lister comes off the VR machine at Kryten's insistence, Craig Charles injured his groin by forgetting to take that part off before walking away. This blooper can be seen on the Series VI DVD.

Plot Inconsistency

• Even though he acquired his hard-light drive in the previous episode, and was still using it by the end of it, Rimmer is shown in his soft-light form at the beginning of this episode. He is also never shown as a soft-light hologram after this one (Except during the different versions of Rimmer in the Rimmer Experience during the episode "Blue"). It is thought that Rimmer was made soft light to conserve Starbug's power for silent running, which was necessary at the beginning of the episode to hide from simulents.

Legion

Starbug is 24 hours behind Red Dwarf and is losing ground on the larger ship. They are distracted when a heat-seeking 'missile' locks onto them and tractors them to a space station inhabited only by a being called Legion, who proves his good faith by converting Rimmer from a "soft light" to a "hard light" hologram, thus making him able to touch and feel. Legion also performs an emergency appendectomy on Lister. Unknown to them, Legion is in fact a gestalt entity, made up of the personalities of those on the space station with him and must keep the crew on the station with him forever if he is to maintain his existence. Kryten saves the crew by rendering the other members unconscious, thus forcing Legion to take on only his personality, which is programmed to assist humans whenever possible. Legion helps put the crew back on Starbug, then comments on the relief it will be to not share in the neuroses of the crew.


Quotes

The crew are tracking a mysterious object through space, and the ship is on Blue Alert – basically, there is a small ALERT sign flashing blue

Rimmer: Step up to Red Alert!

Kryten: Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.


Trivia

• The working title for this episode was "Call Me Legion"; the title is a reference to Mark 5:9, wherein Jesus confronts a possessed man:

"For Jesus had said to him, "Come out of this man, you evil spirit!"
Then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"
"My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many."

(Legion says this when the Red Dwarf crew ask what they should call him).

• The "Ionian Nerve Grip" which Kryten attempts to use on Rimmer is patterned after the famous Vulcan nerve pinch from Star Trek, perhaps with a dash of the Vulcan "death grip" thrown in for good measure.
• Rimmer's statement: "Broadcast on all known frequencies, and in all known languages, including Welsh", has been used by several broadcasts as a nod to the idiosyncracies of the language.
• One of the biggest continuity goofs in Red Dwarf occurs here. Legion is seen removing Lister's appendix though in the episode "Thanks for the Memory" Lister is shown to have had it out at least once, possibly even twice before. This is Rimmer's line "That's why I had my appendix out — twice" (commenting on a memory implant of Lister's life over his own). The Red Dwarf writers have since said that, when Lister was turned into a chicken and then turned back into himself (in "DNA"), the computer restored him with his appendix, hence explaining why Legion took it out here. A variant explanation provided in the novel Last Human suggests that Lister was born with two appendix.
• The list of names of the scientists involved in the Legion Project begins with Heidegger, echoing a noted 20th century philosopher, but then continues with the names Holder, Davro and Quayle who echo Noddy Holder, Bobby Davro and Dan Quayle and are far from noteworthy in academic fields.

Psirens

Lister comes out of Deep Sleep (a less-efficient version of stasis) aboard Starbug. Kryten brings him up to speed on the situation: Red Dwarf was lost 200 years ago and he has been chasing the ship alone and upgrading Starbug for long-term habitation. There is a chance of recovering Red Dwarf at last by heading through an asteroid belt that Red Dwarf is forced to circumnavigate. However, the belt turns out to be a spaceship graveyard inhabited by Psirens, shape-changing GELFs who lure unwary travellers to them and suck out their brains through a straw. Cat is almost lured away by two attractive women and Lister sees Kristine Kochanski (who tells him that she has two children, Jim and Bexley, that are his). Starbug crashes and Lister has to blast the front landing gear out, but is tricked twice while on the surface: once by an attractive woman, then by a Psiren masquerading as Kryten. Two Listers manage to get on board, however. It is determined who the wrong Lister is by asking them to play guitar, which Lister does poorly but the Psiren does extremely well. Lister is suitably upset by their accusations that he is a poor guitar player, though.


Trivia

• The scene where Lister has to convince his crewmates that he is the true Lister and the other Lister is in fact a psiren, seem somewhat inspired by a similar scene in Star Trek VI where there are two James T.Kirk and the real one has to convince someone not to kill him but the other.
• Captain Tau was named after the commanding officer in the American pilot of the show.
• Anita Dobson was cast in the role of Captain Tau, after Rob Grant had approached her husband (Queen guitarist Brian May) to be Lister's hands in the guitar scene (he was unavailable however)
• The actress Samantha Robson (Pete Tranter's sister) later went on to a successful career in The Bill as Vicky Hagen.
• The snogging scene between Lister and the Psiren was a result of Craig Charles being frustrated that Chris Barrie got more kissing than he did on screen. Naturally the Red Dwarf crew decided it should come at a price, in this instance a mouthful of KY Jelly. This became a running gag, with Lister being forced to kiss a number of disgusting creatures over the course of this and the next series.
• This is Clare Grogan's final appearance as Kristine Kochanski. When Kochanski returns in Season VII, she is played by Chloë Annett
• An episode of The X-Files pits Mulder against a creature similar to the Psirens.
• In the scene where the Psiren, disguised as Lister, plays the guitar, the hands didn't belong to Craig Charles: they in fact belonged to Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music.

Season 6

Red Dwarf is lost and Lister can't remember where he parked it. Chasing their mother ship leads the crew through simulant hunting zones, hostile GELF space and a Wild West reality.

Episodes:

• Psirens
• Legion
• Gunmen of the Apocalypse
• Emohawk - Polymorph II
• Rimmerworld
• Out of Time

On The DVD (Buy The DVD)

• Cast Commentary
• Fan Commentary - Gunmen of the Apocalypse
• "The Starbuggers" Original Documentary
• Deleted Scenes
• Smeg Ups
• Howard Goodall: Settling the Score
• "Sick" Featurette
• "Return to Laredo" Featurette
• Behind the Scenes Footage
• Andy de Emmony Interview
• Trailers
• Raw FX Footage
• Isolated Music Cues
• "Dave Hollins" Radio Sketch
• Photo Gallery
• Weblink
• PLUS Hidden Easter Eggs
• And Collector's Booklet

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

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.