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Red Dwarf Season 02

Kryten

Red DwarfThis Week on “Androids”: Holly interrupts Rimmer’s futile attempts to learn Esperanto to inform the gang that he’s receiving a real live distress call which turns out to be from an android named Kryten aboard a crashed spaceship occupied by three lovely women. But when Red Dwarf arrives to save the doomed ship’s damsels in distress, they turn out to be very, very dead, to the point where even Rimmer can’t turn their emaciated heads. But Lister insists on taking Kryten back to Red Dwarf, where the android is totally lost until Rimmer gives him a list of chores that mainly involve cleaning every inch of the ship. Lister is determined to make a rebel out of Kryten.

Season 2 Regular Cast: Chris Barrie (Rimmer), Craig Charles (Lister), Danny John-Jules (Cat), Norman Lovett (Holly)

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: David Ross (Kryten), Johanna Hargreaves (The Esperanto Woman), Tony Slattery (Android Actor)

The Cast of “Androids”: Android 14762/E, Android 87542/P, Android 442/53/2, Android 72264/Y, Android 24/A, Android 960212/L

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 02

Better Than Life

Red DwarfWhat Goes Down: Rimmer upon Red Dwarf’s wrestling champion Yvonne McGruder, or so he claims; however, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. A mail pod arrives, containing all kinds of junk mail, a few Total Immersion Video Games (addictive virtual reality games that sense the player’s subconscious desires and brings them to life), Rimmer’s tax notification, and a letter from Rimmer’s mother which informs him that his father is dead. Despite Lister’s best efforts (and Cat’s worst) to cheer him up, Rimmer becomes very depressed. Lister and Cat talk Rimmer into joining them in a T.I.V. game known as “Better Than Life,” which was all the rage three million years ago in Earth’s solar system. They find themselves in a world where their innermost desires come true; Lister and Cat find a restaurant where they can at last order, respectively, a caviar vindaloo and a tank of live fish. Rimmer imagines McGruder, the victim/partner in the one and only sexual experience of his entire lifetime, and Cat imagines Marilyn Monroe as well as a mermaid whose body is fishlike on top and humanoid below the waist. But Lister and Cat haven’t counted on Rimmer’s self-abusive psyche…

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: John Abineri (Rimmer’s Dad), Debbie Ash (Marilyn Monroe), Jeremy Austin (Rathbone), Nigel Carrivick (The Captain), Judy Hawkins (McGruder), Tony Hawks (The Guide), Tina Jenkins (The Newsreader), Ron Pember (The Taxman), Gordon Salkillo (Gordon)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 02

Thanks For The Memory

Red DwarfA Quick Reminder: It’s Rimmer’s deathday, which Lister, Holly and the Cat are probably celebrating more elaborately than they would be if it were his birthday. They all get well pissed, but even the worst hangover doesn’t account for how they wake up the next morning – Lister and Cat each have one foot in a cast, Rimmer remembers confessing in a drunken stupor to Lister that he’s only had sex once with something that wasn’t inflatible, there are gaps in Holly’s memory, and worst of all, someone’s finished the puzzle that Lister had been trying to finish. Naturally, the ship’s black box recorder would have the information they’re after, but even this has gone missing, at least until it is found buried on a nearby moon. When they find out just what has happened, Rimmer and Lister wish they could just forget all about it…

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Sabra Williams (Lise Yates)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 02

Stasis Leak

Red DwarfContents Of Rimmer’s Diary: After Lister discovers an unusual entry in the diary of the late Arnold J. Rimmer, a stasis leak is discovered on Red Dwarf which allows the guys to visit the past only a few weeks before the accident that killed the ship’s entire crew. The catch – they can’t bring anything or anyone back with them, since the time differential will reduce that person or object to a pile of albino mouse droppings. Lister and Rimmer each embark on a quest to convince someone from the past to go into stasis and thus join them in the future – Lister, of course, tries to find Kochanski. Rimmer also tries to deliver the message to the person he cares about most: himself. But they discover that smegging about with time can have truly bizarre results.

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Morwenna Banks (The Lift Hostess), Sophie Doherty (Kochanski’s Roommate), C.P. Grogan (Kochanski), Richard Hainsworth (The Medical Orderly), Tony Hawks (The Suitcase), Mac McDonald (Captain Hollister), Mark Williams (Petersen)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 02

Queeg

Red DwarfDamage Report From The Damaged Damage Report Machine: Holly kicks off a banner day in Red Dwarf history by neglecting to tell anyone that there’s a meteor about to collide with the ship. The resulting collision manages to nearly destroy the hologram simulation suite, sending various parts of Rimmer’s mind and body off in different directions simultaneously, and Lister nearly gets electrocuted trying to fix it. When they return to the drive room, a new face appears on the screen – Queeg 500, Red Dwarf’s backup computer, a supposedly more efficient system with all the caring concern of a drill sergeant. Queeg ousts Holly from the main computer and takes control.

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Charles Augins (Queeg)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 02

Parallel Universe

Red DwarfPreface From “How To Pick Up Girls By Hypnosis”: Saving Lister from further discussion of Rimmer’s maladjusted view of women, Holly announces the invention of the Holly Hop Drive, which can instantaneously transport Red Dwarf across vast reaches of space, at least in theory. When Lister activates the Hop Drive, Red Dwarf winds up in another dimension parallel to Red Dwarf’s, but different – the roles of men and women are reversed, and Lister, Rimmer and Cat run into another Red Dwarf, occupied by a female Rimmer, a female Lister, a female computer named Hilly, and a creature that evolved from the ship’s dog. Rimmer is confronted with his sexist alter-ego who keeps trying to pick him up by hypnosis, and Lister winds up in bed with himself – in a more literal way than usual – and has to contend with getting pregnant.

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Suzanne Bertish (Rimmer), Angela Bruce (Lister), Matthew Devitt (Dog), Hattie Hayridge (Hilly)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 03

Backwards

Red DwarfWhilst giving Kryten flight lessons in the Starbug vehicle, Rimmer and the hapless mechanoid wind up diving into some kind of time and dimension warp, arriving in a strangely different late 20th-century Earth. On this Earth, everything moves backwards – and Rimmer and Kryten are forced to use the novelty of being “forward” to land a job at a nightclub. Lister and Cat manage to track the others down, only to find by now that they’ve actually gotten to like the idea of watching ancient history unfold…or as the case may be, watching it fold.

Season 3 Regular Cast: Chris Barrie (Rimmer), Craig Charles (Lister), Danny John-Jules (Cat), Robert Llewellyn (Kryten), Hattie Hayridge (Holly)

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Maria Friedman (Waitress), Tony Hawks (Compere), Anna Palmer (Customer in Cafe), Arthur Smith (Pub Manager)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 03

Marooned

Red DwarfHolly thinks she’s spotted five black holes, and the guys split up and evacuate Red Dwarf in case it’s not small enough to escape the black holes’ gravity. Lister and Rimmer set out in Starbug, while Kryten and Cat depart aboard Blue Midget. En route, Starbug crashes onto an icy moon, and it’s unlikely to be found before the meager supplies on board are gone. Faced with the grave choice of eating either a pot noodle or dog food to survive, Lister begins to lose hope and body heat. He asks Rimmer to sacrifice some of his worldly goods to serve as firewood – and Rimmer, naturally, refuses. Lister therefore sacrifices some of Rimmer’s worldly goods anyway.

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: none

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 03

Polymorph

Red DwarfA spacecraft tumbles through space adrfit, its cargo of highly dangerous life forms having escaped. The genetic mutant that has freed itself seeks out the mentally unstable and the flat-out-neurotic, so naturally it homes in on Red Dwarf in short order. It changes its shape to hide and then to paralyze its victims with fear while it drains their negative emotions. It manages to infiltrate Lister’s dinner, but it then induces paralyzing fear by turning into a monster which fits the rough identikit picture of Lister’s worst nightmare, and drains all the fear from him. Rimmer, Cat and Kryten, after subduing the now-fearless Lister, set out after the creature, but it manages to snare each of them, removing Kryten’s politeness, Cat’s sense of style, and Rimmer’s aggressiveness. Lister is left in a state of suicidal kamikaze bravado; Kryten is a tactless, insulting jerk; Cat has changed into some comfortable rags and gotten well sloshed; and Rimmer wants to try to negotiate with the alien, or, failing that, launch a ship-wide campaign to non-violently protest its presence.

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Frances Barber (Genny), Simon Gaffney (Young Rimmer), Kalli Greenwood (Mrs. Rimmer)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 03

Bodyswap

Red DwarfA malfunctioning skutter starts rewiring Red Dwarf, resulting in a malfunctioning everything, including the self-destruct system which could be connected to anything by now. As it so happens, the destruct system starts counting down when Lister orders a candy bar from the vending machine. Using a “mind swap” to load the personality of one of the ship’s long-dead senior officers doesn’t work, which is just as well – the destruct system countdown was activated by the vending machine, but not the explosive device itself. Rimmer later gets the idea of using the same procedure – the one with the mind swap, not the bomb – so he could occupy a physical form for a brief period, promising to get Lister’s body into shape before returning it to its rightful owner. As it turns out, Rimmer has been missing all the excesses of the flesh that holograms don’t get to enjoy, and when Lister demands his body back, Rimmer isn’t quite ready to return it.

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: none

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 03

Timeslides

Red DwarfLister is approaching suicidal levels of depression and boredom with his life aboard Red Dwarf, venting his loathing for life upon Cat and Rimmer. Meanwhile, in the ship’s photo lab, Kryten is developing photos of a party aboard the Nova 5 when he finds that they have sprung into motion. Repeating the same experiment with other pictures, he finds that the lab’s developing fluid has mutated over three million years, and can now bring photos to life. He then uses a slide projector to create life-size pictures that anyone can walk into, interacting with the subjects of photos from any era of history. Lister decides to go back and visit himself as a dismal rock-star-wannabe teenager, taking with him a sample of one of the future’s most profitable inventions – a Tension Sheet (a square of air-bubble packing material painted red with “Tension Sheet” written on it) – in the hopes he can pry his junior self away from “the Om song” long enough to get him to register the Tension Sheet as his own invention and get rich. When Lister disappears, it becomes apparent that he has changed his own future and become a millionaire who never signed aboard Red Dwarf. But Lister’s non-existence also erases the Cat and Kryten from the present, and Rimmer is left with Holly. Rimmer decides that it is his duty as a complete and utter bastard to set history to rights, unaware that this will bring his greatest wish to fruition – Rimmer will once again occupy a tangible body!

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Robert Addie (Gilbert), Rupert Bates (Bodyguard), Richard Hainsworth (Bodyguard), Emile Charles (young Lister), Simon Gaffney (young Rimmer), Stephen McKintosh (Thicky Holden), Louisa Ruthven (Ski Woman), Koo Stark (Lady Sabrina Mulholland-Jjones), Mark Steel (Ski Man), Ruby Wax (American Presenter), Adolf Hitler (himself)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 03

The Last Day

Red DwarfA letter arrives from DivaDroid announcing that the latest model of mechanoid will be on its way to replace Kryten, who is expected to shut down and dismantle himself. Lister tries in vain to get Kryten to rebel against this instruction, but Kryten seems perfectly happy and assured of his place in Silicon Heaven. In honor of Kryten’s last day online, Lister and the guys throw him the wildest party they can manage on short notice and all parties get thoroughly pissed. The only problem is that, if Kryten hasn’t been shut down before his replacement arrives, his replacement will shut him down in any manner it chooses. The fact that the new mechanoid has gone completely insane over the millennia doesn’t help out much either.

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Robert Llewellyn (Jim Reaper), Julie Higginson (Girl Android), Gordon Kennedy (Hudzen)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 04

Camille

Red DwarfThe Old, Old Story: Lister tries once again to teach Kryten to rebel, with only momentary success, though it is promising. Kryten pilots Starbug as he and Rimmer go exploring. When a distress call arrives from someone on a doomed planet, Rimmer decides it’s too dangerous to investigate, but Kryten thinks better of it – and why not, he reflects, when Rimmer’s such a smee heee? Kryten finds a female mechanoid in a grounded spacecraft, and he’s instantly ass-over-nipple-nuts in love. Curiously, when Kryten brings Camille back to Starbug (which she warns him not to do), Rimmer sees a beautiful hologram who can actually stand to be stuck in the same ship with him. Naturally, when Camille is introduced to Lister on Red Dwarf, he sees Kochanski. Cat also sees Camille as a life form with the sexiest body he can imagine – his own. Camille is a pleasure GELF, a genetically engineered life-form who changes its form to please its users, and expects to earn the crew’s scorn. Kryten decides to still be Camille’s friend, despite her true amorphous appearance.

Season 4 Regular Cast: Chris Barrie (Rimmer), Craig Charles (Lister), Danny John-Jules (Cat), Robert Llewellyn (Kryten), Hattie Hayridge (Holly)

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Judy Pascoe (Mechanoid Camille), Francesca Folan (Hologram Camille), Suzanne Rhatigan (Kochanski Camille), Rupert Bates (Hector Blob)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 04

D.N.A.

Red DwarfGenetic Profile: At long last, the guys finally encounter a real live alien ship – or a ship from Earth that’s advanced enough to be alien. The skeletal remains of one otherwise human-looking crew member has two hideous bird-like heads. Lister and Cat find a strange control room, the controls of which Cat immediately takes it upon himself to play with. This has some nasty consequences when the room turns out to be a device for resequencing DNA, and it turns Lister into a hamster, and then a chicken. Kryten and Rimmer arrive to help, and Kryten figures out how to return Lister to human form. Krtyen is then accidentally turned into a human himself, his greatest wish. Rimmer starts trying to find some cells of his dead body aboard Red Dwarf so he can reclone a body for himself, while Lister is having to explain every little detail of human lifestyles to Kryten, including why the rectal recharge socket doesn’t work, and why one should never get a double Polaroid over an electrical appliance. In testing the DNA resequencer before running Kryten through it, Lister’s mutton vindaloo is transformed into a mutant vindaloo big enough to eat anyone who’s ever eaten any form of curry…

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Richard Ridings (D.N.A. Computer voice)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

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Red Dwarf Season 04

Justice

Red DwarfThe Sentence: Lister, whose head has been embarassingly enlarged by a bad case of space mumps, wonders why Cat and Rimmer haven’t been round to see him, when Kryten inadvertently tells him about the escape pod that the ship has picked up, which contains either a security guard or an inmate of a spaceborne prison whose residents revolted against their keepers, and Rimmer starts the pod’s cryogenic thawing process in the off-chance that the vehicle contains a friendly human female, which, as it turns out, it doesn’t, although Lister and the others don’t realize this as they’ve gotten underway to the aforementioned penal station just in case their new passenger turns out to be a homicidal maniac, though they’re not counting on the station’s Justice Computer which metes out punishment appropriate to the crimes it discovers in its subjects’ memories after a mind scan, and this is certainly bad news for Rimmer, who is sentenced to life behind bars for the disregard of safety regulations that led to the death of the entire crew of Red Dwarf, but Kryten manages to plead Rimmer’s case to the Justice Computer and gains Rimmer’s freedom so they can all head back to the Starbug, which, in case you forgot, is where they left an escape pod to thaw out, which it has done, releasing a crazed homicidal simulant in the process.

Order the DVDswritten by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Nicholas Ball (The Simulant), James Smillie (Justice Computer voice)

LogBook entry by Earl Green