‘Red Dwarf’: The story so far

It’s rare to find a comedy that has lasted as long as Red Dwarf, let alone a sci-fi comedy, but before we get sucked into a white hole of confusion or any of the other time-space anomalies the crew of the Red Dwarf has encountered over 35 years, let’s get back to basics.

Since 1988, Red Dwarf has mainly been a TV show following the misadventures of Dave Lister. A second technician aboard the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel Red Dwarf in the 23rd century, he’s unfortunate enough to be sentenced to 18 months in suspended animation for smuggling his pregnant cat aboard. He’s also fortunate enough to avoid the radiation leak that kills the rest of the crew.

Waking 3 million years later, long enough for the radiation to subside, Lister has to get used to a new reality (“They’re dead, Dave”). He’s light years from Earth, where the human race has probably long since been wiped out. Holly, the ship’s advanced computer has become senile, but is wise enough to return Lister’s uptight boss Arnold Rimmer as a hologram to keep the last human sane. Joining them is Cat, the humanoid descendant of Lister’s pet, and from the third season, the servile mechanoid Kryten, who Lister continually tries to help break his programming. 

Red Dwarf may be a half-hour TV sitcom at heart, but the years have seen it develop across multimedia, including novelizations, collectible toys, an interactive quiz game, a magazine, and even a Top 20 single in the United Kingdom.

It can thank its enduring appeal on a few factors. One is its continually evolving format, while another is its generally consistent cast and writers. and then there’s that phenomenally catchy theme tune. Then there’s the fact it has its cake and eats it. Although it’s set three million years in the future, the dysfunctional family of characters is very contemporary, often wheeling out 20th Century references and parodying classic sci-fi. Over the years, it developed a distinct vocabulary and culture, from hologrammatic crewmates and bazookoid weapons to  endearing substitutions for swear words like “smeg,” “gimboid,” and “goit.”

A space sci without aliens

Perhaps most interesting is what makes Red Dwarf quite unlike many other sci-fi sagas. 

Aliens don’t exist in Red Dwarf’s universe (although Rimmer is convinced they do). The threats the ship’s “posse” encounters are man-made, like G.E.L.F.s (genetically engineered lifeforms) or simulants. Almost everybody they meet is dead, should be dead, or has gone insane. For a comedy, it has one of the most nihilistic concepts around. 

With news that original creators Doug Naylor and Rob Grant have agreed to continue the franchise in multiple iterations, it looks like Red Dwarf’s journey is far from over. Here’s a whistle-stop tour of what’s happened so far.

Series I and II — bunkmates

The first two series ran like studio-bound sitcoms, leaning on the odd couple of Lister and Rimmer. The first episode, “The End,” set the concept up as Lister, Rimmer, and Cat adjusted to each other. Notable incidents in the first two runs included the appearance of future echoes when the ship breached light speed, Rimmer’s disastrous attempt to bunk with a duplicate of himself, and a space virus that manifested Lister’s hallucinations.

The crew then met Kryten and became stuck in the VR game Better than Life, which was transformed into a living nightmare by Rimmer’s neurosis. After a stasis leak allowed them to travel back three million years to face the ethical choice of averting the disaster that killed the crew, Holly played a trick on them when the strict Queeg 500 supercomputer replaced him. To cap off year two, Lister fell pregnant in a dimension where all the crew’s counterparts were female, potentially fulfilling an earlier future echo in an unlikely way.

Grant and Naylor adapted several of these stories for the novel Better Than Life.

Series III and IV — high-concept day trips

By the third year, Kryten had joined the posse full-time, and Holly had gender-swapped as excursions in the adorable Starbug craft became a regular occurrence. Trips included a planet where time ran backward, an ice planet where Lister and Rimmer were marooned, facing the judgment of Justice World, and getting caught in a war between waxworks of historical figures.

The Red Dwarf had its fair share of visitors, too, including a shapeshifting Polymorph that fed on negative emotions. The Dwarfers got to stage their own Casablanca when they encountered Camille, a creature that appeared as the fantasy woman of their dreams. After they avoided a time-bending white hole (which spewed out time) thanks to Lister’s pool skills, they met the iconic alternative version of Rimmer called “Ace” whose dimension jump only made him feel more inadequate.

Adaptations of select stories in these series were included in the second Red Dwarf novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers.

Series V and VI — the end of an era

The sci-fi concepts stepped up in the 12 episodes of the fifth and sixth series. After meeting a ship entirely crewed by holograms, the posse ran into the Inquisitor, a time-traveling android who judged and removed the worthless from time. Then Rimmer proved he was the last person who should land on a planet that terraformed itself to reflect the subconscious of its residents shortly before he was infected by holo-virus that drove him “quite, quite mad,” and quarantined his shipmates. The posse then found themselves trapped in another virtual reality when they appeared to fall prey to a despair squid on an ocean planet.

At the start of series six, the Dwarfers woke up on Starbug after 200 years to find that the ship had been stolen. After evading the asteroid-dwelling Psirens, Rimmer could finally touch things after gaining a hard-light upgrade as the crew narrowly escaped the deranged Legion. They assumed the roles of the Gunmen of the Apocalypse to defeat a simulant virus in a digital reality before the polymorph returned to wreak havoc. Perhaps most horrifically of all, was when Rimmer populated a planet with clones. The discovery of a time machine then pitted the Dwarfers against their future selves in a cliffhanging space battle.

After this series, Grant and Naylor ended their writing partnership, but both took the story in different directions in the separately penned novels, The Last Human and Backwards.

Series VII — losing Rimmer

The show shifted to a one-camera sitcom in its seventh year, as it moved away from the monster of the week format. Having survived their encounter with their older selves thanks to a time paradox, they found themselves embroiled in the assassination of President Kennedy, before Rimmer left the ship to take “Ace” Rimmer’s place, and an alternative Kristine Kochanski – Lister’s ex-girlfriend – joined from another dimension. The new arrival triggered Krytens’ jealousy and made the crew evaluate what they lost with Rimmer before they defeated a sentient virus, and uncovered the identity of Red Dwarf’s hijackers.

Series VIII — Return to the Dwarf

The end of Red Dwarf’s BBC journey pleasingly linked to the past as the posse discovered intelligent nanobots had not only captured the ship, but revived its crew. Along with a reanimated Rimmer, they were jailed for stealing and crashing Starbug and inadvertently joined the Canaries convict army when Lister mistook them for a choir. They encountered the predictive computer Cassandra and a time-manipulating ‘time wand’ which accidentally regressed a prisoner’s pet canary into a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The gang was left behind when the ship’s crew fled from a metal-eating virus, with their only hope of survival an antidote from a mirror universe.

Specials — Back to Earth

The show fell into a meta-trap for its 21st anniversary when digital channel Dave revived it. Three specials brought the Dwarfers on Earth in 2009, where they found they’re characters in a TV show.

Series X, XI, and XII — Back to the Dwarf

Dave commissioned a new series that was entirely written and directed by Doug Naylor. It took a while to warm up, but eventually formed the show’s most consistent block of character-driven comedy with the classic lineup and concept back in place (albeit with Holly missing). 

Classic sci-fi twists saw the crew stranded in 23 AD looking for the equivalent of a 9-volt battery to return to the future, before Kryten and Cat became quantum entangled. The crew then survived the effects of a ship’s karma drive and a third encounter with the polymorph. A trip to a 24th Century ship where all criticism is punished – and another attempt by Rimmer to find success in a parallel reality – proved Red Dwarf was still drawing from a rich pool of ideas in new ways. 

The Promised Land

We last saw the Dwarfers in a feature-length episode. Returning to the themes of the first series, they met three cat priests who worship Lister as their god, only to find a feral rival was hunting down any felis sapiens who didn’t worship him. 

There’s the whistle-stop tour, but if you want to leap into the show, here’s our pick of the best Red Dwarf episodes and where you can catch them. It took Red Dwarf 32 years to get its long-awaited movie, but signs are there’s far more to come.