Tag: BBC2

Fresh from his latest round of heroic deeds, Ace Rimmer returns from the past, on a mission to find his counterpart on Starbug. Ace just isn’t the same Ace anyone remembers – in fact, Ace is now a hard-light hologram, having replaced the original Ace. The funny thing about all those heroics is that they seem to lead to a high death rate. And “Ace” is here to recruit Red Dwarf’s own resident smeghead as the universe’s next hero. But “Ace” can’t finish Rimmer’s training before his own light bee powers down for the last time.

The universe is in a hell of a lot of trouble.

written by Paul Alexander & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Brian Cox (The King), Ken Morley (Captain Voorhese), Sarah Alexander (Queen), John Thompson (Good Knight), Alison Senior (Princess Bonjella), Mark Carlisle (Lieutenant), Mark Lingwood (Gestapo Officer), Kai Maurer (Soldier), Stephan Grothgar (Soldier), Andy Gell (Soldier), Alison (Voorhese’s crocodile)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

A sleepless night on Starbug is made even worse when a generator failure leaves the ship dead in space (with just enough momentum to carry it on an uncontrolled dive toward a rather large star). The only way to get to the backup systems is an arduous trek through the ship’s duct system, facing such hazards as drying cycles and the backwash from urine recyc. Lister suffers from claustrophobia in the tiny crawlways – well, actually, to be honest, they’re not all that tiny. And worse yet, the crew discover that this calamity has been engineered by a force which isn’t so much sinister as it is simply paranoid…

written by Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: two uncredited GELFs

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Lister’s overconfidence in flying the ship results in his almost destroying Starbug by driving through the tail of a comet, which for some reason leaves his fellow crewmembers rather upset. Perhaps it’s the general smegginess of the situation, perhaps it’s the atypical rush of bravado, or maybe it’s just insanity, but one visit to the supply room and one very disturbing dream later, Lister misses Rimmer. Fortunately, Kryten thinks he can help cure Lister of his loneliness, whether it takes hypnosis…or worse!

written by Kim Fuller & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: none

Original title: Heartache

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Kryten prepares a sumptuous dinner in celebration of the anniversary of the day Lister and Rimmer rescued him from the Nova 5. Kochanski derails his plans with a group vacation to a Jane Austen artificial reality program. Kryten ensures that her plan tanks, so to speak, and forces the others to join him for dinner – but Kryten ends up dining on ashes, for two reasons. The first reason is that no one seems particularly grateful to have been led to the dinner table at gunpoint, and the second – and rather more important – reason is that Kryten’s head explodes at the sheer ingratitude of his comrades. His spare heads also blow when Lister tries to repair him. Kryten’s only hope exists in the form of another 4000-series mechanoid named Able, a decrepit old droid who has been reduced to an electronic zombie by a secret which will be revealed to Kryten when he is reactivated.

written by Robert Llewellyn & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Robert Llewellyn (Able), Don Henderson (Simulant), Vicky Ogden (Mrs. Bennet), Alina Proctor (Jane Bennett), Catherine Harvey (Kitty Bennet), Sophia Thierens (Lydia Bennet), Rebecca Katz (Mary Bennet), Julia Lloyd (Elizabeth Bennet)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Kochanski spots a large chunk of ice in space, containing the long-dead Jupiter Mining Corporation supply ship Leviathan. The entire crew, as it happens, is dead – with the singular exception of a former Red Dwarf crewmember frozen in a block of ice. Once brought aboard Starbug, however, the mysteriously preserved human turns out to be a walking cadaver infected with a 100% fatal intelligent virus called Epideme – which is quickly passed along to Lister when his new visitor can’t keep her hands off him. Kochanski and Kryten take extreme measures to chase Epideme out of Lister’s body, but instead of boosting his immune system, they disarm him instead.

written by Paul Alexander & Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Nicky Leatherbarrow (Caroline Carmen), Gary Martin (Epideme)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Things are not going well for Lister and his friends. Kryten has been sentenced to be completely rebooted back to his original personality parameters, and the others are due to stand before a board of inquiry for crashing a Starbug into the ship. Worse yet, Lister has entrusted Rimmer with helping them escape or bringing evidence of the nanobots to the captain’s attention. However, Rimmer has no time to do either since he’s spending all of his time enjoying the sexual magnetism virus. Cat, Kochanski and Lister barely escape being recaptured (thanks to Lister’s use of the luck virus), and are soon on their way to freedom…so long as nothing goes wrong with their plan. But they haven’t counted on Rimmer’s need to keep the source of his secrets…well, secret.

written by Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Mac McDonald (Captain Hollister), Kira Mirylles (Doc Newton), Jemma Churchill (First woman officer), Andy Taylor (Dr. MacLaren), Sue Keeryn (Second woman officer), Karl Glenn Stimpson (MP Thornton), Guenevere Swallow (Third woman officer), Geoffrey Beevers (Doctor)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Things go from bad to worse as Lister, Kryten, Cat and Kochanski manage to get to a Blue Midget shuttle and escape – but in reality, they’re in an AR machine under the watchful eye of Captain Hollister and the “new” Red Dwarf’s Holly. But by monitoring their actions in artificial reality, Hollister does discover that their story about nanobots must be true – but they’re also desperate enough to steal a shuttle and leave on their own. Proving that the only consistent thing is their luck, Lister, Rimmer and the others are sentenced to serve time in Red Dwarf’s top-secret, well-populated prison floor.

written by Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Mac McDonald (Captain Hollister), Graham McTavish (Ackerman), Yasmin Bannerman (First ground controller), Jeillo Lennards (Second ground controller), Karl Glenn Stimpson (MP Thornton)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Lister signs himself and his friends up for Canary duty, an elite corps of prisoners who tackle the dangerous task of being the first members of Red Dwarf’s crew to visit inhospitable an unknown environments, determining whether or not it’s safe for more valuable and irreplaceable crew members (i.e. the automatic robotic mining equipment) to make planetfall. Their first assignment, to board a long-lost Space Corps vessel discovered in a nearby planet’s ocean, proves to Lister that he didn’t sign up for a singing group. The derelict ship’s only inhabitant is a computer called Cassandra with infallible powers of foresight. This otherwise useful power proves to be a massive pain in the ass when Cassandra predicts that at least one of them will soon die.

written by Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Geraldine McEwan (Cassandra), Graham McTavish (Ackerman), Jake Wood (Kill Crazy), Shend (Warden Knot), Ian Soundry (Guard)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Since entertainment is hard to come by in the prison block, Lister is understandably overjoyed when Petersen mails his guitar to him – but due to prison regs involving suicides, the strings have been confiscated, somewhat limited Lister’s repertoire (but not by much). In lieu of that, it’s another night at the prison theater, whose usual diet of bad movies is interrupted by Kryten, initiating a live broadcast from the female prisoners’ shower room. Lister is at first appalled, and then rather fascinated, by this invasion of Kochanski’s privacy. But what he doesn’t know is that he is the next star of Kryten’s embarassing broadcast…

written by Doug Naylor & Paul Alexander
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Jake Wood (Kill Crazy), Graham McTavish (Ackerman), Mark Caven (Man in film), Sarah Wateridge (Woman in film), Clifford Barry (Guard)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Captain Hollister sentences Lister and Rimmer to play basketball against the prison guards to punish them for playing a practical joke on Ackerman. However, impishly improvising once again, Lister and his friends make a surprise comeback and win the game, landing them in trouble yet again. Meanwhile, on a mission with the Canaries, Kryten and Kochanski discover a time wand, capable of slowing down, speeding up, or suspending time in small pockets – and smuggle it back aboard Red Dwarf so they can speed up time for the rest of the ship and be released from their prison sentences. Lister and Rimmer escape from the grimmest part of the ship’s prison, along with a nut case who prizes his sole possession, a sparrow named Pete. But the shock of freedom kills Pete. Lister convinces Kryten to use the time wand to revert Pete to his youth, but a slight miscalculation sends Pete millions of year backward on the evolutionary scale, transforming him into a rather hungry dinosaur.

written by Doug Naylor
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Mac MacDonald (Captain Hollister), Graham McTavish (Ackerman), Andrew Alston (Max), Holly Earl (young Kochanski), Perri Nichael (young Cat), Ricky Glover (Baxter), Ian Masters (Birdman), Shend (Warden Knot)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Kryten throws the time wand to Bob the Skutter, who is promptly swallowed by the enormous dinosaur that was once known as Pete. In a vain attempt to get the creature to cough up the time wand, Lister and the others cook up a dinosaur-sized vindaloo, complete with a live cow, to upset Pete’s enormous stomach. This it does too well, however, returning the time wand when it gets sick after eating half the food supply on Red Dwarf. Hollister now sentences Lister and Rimmer to turn Pete back into a sparrow at any cost.

written by Doug Naylor and Paul Alexander
directed by Ed Bye
music by Howard Goodall

Guest Cast: Mac MacDonald (Captain Hollister), Jake Wood (Kill Crazy), Ricky Glover (Baxter), Ian Masters (Birdman)

LogBook entry by Earl Green