The End
Red Dwarf - Series 1 - Episode 1

The first ever episode of Red Dwarf focuses on setting up the premise of the show, and does little else.

On a spaceship named Red Dwarf, a few dozen months from Earth, there is a mining operation being carried out in and around Jupiter. The two lowest ranking crew members, David Lister and Arnold Rimmer, just won't get on with each other. Rimmer is meticulous and pedantic, and Lister is a scuzzy slob who never buys any soap. Today Rimmer is trying to become promoted so that he no longer has to share a room with Lister. But before that can happen, he has to pass his astroengineering exam. Rimmer knows that he knows little about astroengineering, so he tries to cheat by copying his textbooks onto his body.

While Rimmer is elsewhere failing his exam, Lister is feeding the pregnant cat he smuggled aboard the ship. Soon, he is called into Captain Hollister's office and questioned about his cat. The captain gives him a choice - hand in the cat to be cut up and tested, or spend 18 months in suspended animation with no pay as punishment. Lister chooses to be put into stasis for 18 months, and on the way to the stasis booth, he sees Rimmer being led away on a stretcher. Lister goes into the booth and is frozen, but instead of coming out in a year and a half, he comes out 3 million years later.

After he leaves stasis, Lister walks into a surprisingly empty drive room. The ship's computer, Holly, informs him that a badly repaired drive plate exploded, exposing everyone to a lethal dose of "cadmium II". This reduced everyone but Lister to white dust. Lister is, surprisingly, not excessively unhappy about this. He is more unhappy when Holly tells him how long he has been in stasis so that the radiation had time to decay to a safe level.

In addition to that, Holly has shot Red Dwarf out of the Solar System at top speed in order to stop the radiation reaching Earth. Not only has Red Dwarf been away from Earth for three million years, but it is also three million years of travelling away from Earth. After Lister sits down for a few moments to think about this, a hologram of his dead roommate Rimmer walks into the room. They argue for a while and suddenly a large humanoid cat-like creature bursts onto the scene by jumping out of a ventilation duct and scaring the hell out of Lister and Rimmer. Holly informs the pair that the creature is merely an evolved descendant of Lister's cat, Frankenstein. As he feeds Frankenstein, Lister has a good idea: why not go back to Earth? Rimmer mocks him, but Lister has made his mind up and shouts jubilantly, "Look out, Earth! The slime's coming home!"

Thus concludes our introduction to Red Dwarf; three losers and a senile computer lost in space on a ship the size of a city.

Future Echoes (episode 2)


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