Red Dwarf - Setting and Plot

Setting and Plot

See also: List of Red Dwarf episodes and Red Dwarf ships

The main setting of the series is the eponymous mining spaceship Red Dwarf, which is 6 miles (9.7 km) long, 5 miles (8.0 km) tall, and 4 miles (6.4 km) wide and is operated by the Jupiter Mining Corporation. In the first episode set sometime in the late 22nd century, 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 keeps 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 alone on-board the ship. His former bunkmate and immediate superior Arnold Judas Rimmer is resurrected by Holly as a hologram to keep Lister sane. At the same time, a creature known only as Cat is the last member on board of Felis sapiens, a race of humanoid felines that evolved in the ship's hold from Lister's cat, Frankenstein, and her kittens during the 3 million years that Lister was in stasis.

The main dramatic thrust of the early series is Lister's desire to return home to Earth, although the crew's ownership of an unlimited time-space travel drive in series seven was to later negate this intention. As their journey begins, the not-so-intrepid crew encounters such phenomena as time distortions, faster-than-light travel, mutant diseases and strange lifeforms that had developed in the intervening millions of years. During the second series, the group encounter the service mechanoid Kryten, rescuing him from a long-since crashed vessel. Initially, Kryten only appeared in one episode of series two, but by the beginning of series three he had become a regular character. At the end of series five, Red Dwarf itself is stolen by persons unknown, forcing them to travel in the smaller Starbug craft for two series, with the side-effect that they lose contact with Holly. 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 found a parallel version of themselves from a universe in which Kristine Kochanski, Lister's long-term love interest, had been put into stasis at the time of the leak and so became the last remaining human. A complicated series of events leaves Kochanski stranded in "our" universe, where she is forced to join the crew. At the end of series seven, we learn that Red Dwarf had been stolen by Kryten's service nanobots, who had abandoned him years earlier.

At the beginning of the eighth series, Red Dwarf is reconstructed by Kryten's nanobots, who had 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 find themselves sentenced to two years in the ship's brig (at first, for crashing a Starbug and bringing onboard Kryten and Cat as stowaways, but later for using information from the confidential files). The series ends with a metal-eating virus loose on Red Dwarf. The entire resurrected crew evacuates save the original dwarfers. In the cliffhanger ending, Rimmer is left stranded alone to face Death (and promptly knees him in the groin and flees).

Nine years later, the four are once more the only beings on the ship. Rimmer is again a hologram, Holly is offline, and Lister is mourning Kochanski, lost to him out of an airlock some time previously. A chance to get back to Earth through a dimension warp presents itself, though it is not quite what it first appears to be, it results in giving Lister new hope when he learns that Kochanski is still alive after all.