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
