The mining ship Red Dwarf is a spaceship 6 miles (10 km) long, 5 miles (8 km) tall, and 4 miles (6 km) wide belonging to the Jupiter Mining Corporation. In the first episode, an on-board radiation leak of Cadmium II kills everyone except for low-ranking technician Dave Lister, who is in suspended animation at the time, and his pregnant cat, Frankenstein, who is safely sealed in the cargo hold. Following the accident, the ship's computer Holly has to keep Lister in stasis until the background radiation dies down — a process that takes three million years. Lister therefore emerges as the last human being in the universe — but not the only life form on-board the ship. His former bunkmate and immediate superior Arnold Rimmer is resurrected by Holly as a Hologram after the accident to keep Lister sane, while a creature known only as The Cat is the last known surviving member of Felis Sapiens, a race of humanoids that evolved in the ship's hold from Frankenstein and her kittens during the millions of years that Lister was in stasis.The main dramatic thrust of the early series is Lister's desire to return home to Earth. Along the way are frequent distractions that usually see the not-so-intrepid Dwarf crew encountering strange races and lifeforms that have developed in the intervening millions of years.
The crew roster changes as the years go by. During the second series, the group encounters the sanitation mechanoid Kryten, rescuing him from a long-since crashed vessel. Initially, Kryten only appears in one episode of series two, but by the beginning of series three he has become a full time character in the series. At the end of series five, Red Dwarf itself is stolen from the crew, forcing them to travel in the smaller Starbug craft for the subsequent two series, with the added side-effect that they lose contact with Holly. And in series seven, Rimmer departs the crew to take up the role of his alter-ego from a parallel universe, Ace Rimmer, whose name has become a long-standing legend and a legacy passed down from dimension to dimension. Shortly afterwards, the crew find a replacement for Rimmer when they encounter another parallel version of themselves from a universe in which Kristine Kochanski, Lister's ex-girlfriend, was the person put into stasis and so the last remaining human. A complicated series of events leaves Kochanski stranded in "our" universe, and she is forced to join the crew.
In the eighth (and, so far, final) series, Red Dwarf itself is reconstructed by the nanobots that had originally stolen it and broken it down into its constituent atoms. In the process, the entire crew of the ship — including a pre-accident Rimmer — are resurrected, but the Starbug crew all find themselves sentenced to two years in the ship's brig on a set of convoluted charges. The series ends, however, with Red Dwarf being eaten away by a virus and all on board evacuated, save for Rimmer who is, in the cliffhanger ending, left stranded alone to face Death.
