Red Dwarf

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Red Dwarf is one of the best known cult British sci-fi TV shows that aren't Doctor Who, a "science comedy" series that only got green-lit by convincing the BBC it was going to make fun of sci-fi shows, such as the mega-hit Star Trek, but which developed a cult following for its unique blend of pseudo-hard sci-fi, black comedy, slapstick, and enough clever tech and space-related jokes to show the creators A: knew the science they were talking about, and B: were having plenty of fun taking the piss out of it all. It was sort of a live-action Futurama before Futurama was a thing, for any anons that still remember Futurama being a thing.

The Plot

In a not-too-distant future, humanity has colonized the solar system, and a megacorp called the Jupiter Mining Corporation runs a fleet of massive sub-light ships which flit around the system, snaffling up asteroids and breaking them down into usable minerals to then sell to the ever-resource hungry consumers of humanity. One such mining ship is the Red Dwarf, and amongst its crew of hundreds of miners and support staff, our protagonist is the lowest of the low; Dave Lister, a genial but unambitious bloke from Liverpool, stuck with the rank of 3rd technician whilst dreaming of the day he can return to Earth and buy a plot of land on Fiji, where he will keep a hobby farm and run a hot-dog & donut diner. This despite the fact most of Fiji has been sunken about a meter beneath sea level by volcanic eruption. Technician 3rd Class is the lowest rank aboard ship, and just about qualifies him for the most pathetic of maintenance tasks, such as restocking the candy vending machines with fun-sized chocolate-covered honeycomb pieces and cleaning the gunk out of soup dispensing tubes from the various auto-chefs scattered around the ship. In Dave's own words this makes him lower down the ship's pecking order than the Scutters - the simple service mechs that infest the ship like rats and consist of a primitive, three-fingered gripping claw on a little four-wheeled body - and the guys who restock the toilet paper. The only person of equally low rank is his immediate superior; Arnold J. Rimmer, Technician 2nd Class and the ship's resident smeghead.

Aside from a crush on a navigation officer named Kristine Kochanski, whom he pines after from afar, Lister's primary friends are a couple of comparatively low-level roughnecks like himself, and a heavily pregnant pet cat. As our series starts, this illegal pet is discovered by the ship's captain, who demands that Lister give the animal to them to be destroyed, or else he will spend the rest of the Red Dwarf's flight in temporal stasis before being fired once they get back to Earth. Dave chooses the latter... and is greatly confused when time restarts itself and Holly, the ship's controlling AI, greets him with the welcome that the radiation levels are now safe.

See, once Lister went into stasis, for some insane reason, Rimmer was given responsibility for performing maintenance on the shielding surrounding the ship's lethally radioactive core. Rimmer being an even bigger incompetent than Lister, whose primary fault is a lack of ambition, Rimmer botched the job and causes a massive radiation leak that killed the entire crew and sent Holly, as per safety regulations, rocketing on an unplotted course into deep space until the background radiation levels reached a safe level. It only took a mere 3 million years for this to happen, and by now the Red Dwarf is hopelessly lost somewhere in deep space.

Rather than give in to despair, Lister assembles a small crew of crazies around himself and sets off to try and find Earth again, determined to see what has become of humanity over the eons. No matter what dangers or batshit crazy things he has to get past to do it.

The Boyz from the Dwarf

Unlike Star Trek, Red Dwarf has only a small cast of protagonists, forced together by the sheer loneliness of their lifestyle as the only four occupants aboard a ship meant to contain hundreds of people.

Dave Lister: A good-hearted slacker and typical "lower-class bloke". Before being sealed in stasis dreamed of using his saved up pay to buy some land on Fiji, where he would live on a hobby farm and open his own hot dog and donut stand. Despite his laziness and disgusting habits, he easily has the strongest sense of justice out of any of the crew, often taking a hard stance against such things as Rimmer's glorification of war or Kryten's programmed servitude.

Arnold Judas Rimmer: Although the original Rimmer was killed in the radiation leak, Holly had the ability to create a hologram simulation of one deceased crewmember, choosing Rimmer because he was the person Lister had the most conversations with. Anal-retentive, power-hungry and incompetent, with a seriously messed up backstory. Was raised by an abusive father who forced him into the Space Corps, a crutch that he uses to avoid taking any personal responsibility for his failures. A total coward, despite his obsession with warfare and military history (and the fact being a hologram makes him almost impossible to kill). Originally phased through solid objects, although in Season 6 onwards he was upgraded with a "Hard Light" hologram emitter that returned his ability to physically interact with the enviroment.

The Cat: During the 3 million years in which Red Dwarf sped away from Earth, Lister's pet cat and her kittens were safely sealed in the hold, away from the radiation and with plenty of access to food. 3 million years of inbreeding in a mildly radioactive environment caused them to mutate into a race of nearly human-looking catfolk, and most of them eventually left Red Dwarf in search of the legendary promised land of Fuchal, having somehow maintained the memory of Lister's existence and dream before converting them into a mythical saviour-god and heavenly realm. One male Cat, known simply as "The Cat", remained on Red Dwarf by the time Lister was freed, having been born to two of the sick and crippled cats left behind to die by their fellows. The Cat is intensely vain to the point of narcissism, which is implied to be a natural trait of his species. He has a particular obsession with his appearance, and often checks his appearance in a mirror or talks about his clothing.

Kryten 2X4B-523P: A sanitation mechanoid that Lister, Rimmer and the Cat discovered aboard the crashed ruins of a ship called the Nova 5, still tending to the long-dead corpses of his former mistresses due to being unable to recognize that they were dead. Lister attempted to teach him how to break his programming and think for himself, to mixed results (for instance, he was taught to lie, but these lies are often transparent due to him stating that he's entering "Lie Mode"). As the smartest member of the crew often takes the science officer role, much to Rimmer's resentment. Is a strong believer in the android religion, which justifies mechanoids slavery to humanity by claiming that if they loyally serve they will be rewarded with "Silicon Heaven" in the afterlife (despite this, he finds the idea of "Human Heaven" laughable).

Secondary Characters

In addition to the four mainstay characters, Red Dwarf has played prolonged host to a handful of recurring secondary characters over the years.

Skutters: Little more than a three-fingered gripping claw on wheeled base, Skutters are the basic service mechanoids responsible for maintaining Red Dwarf in all of its nearly continent-sized glory. Not the brightest machines, but they do have distinct personalities, and are implied to play up how dumb they are in order to get one over on Rimmer, whom they hate. They get on much better with Lister, seeing a kindred spirit in him.

Holly: The ship's Artificial Intelligence, Holly basically runs the ship by himself, but doing it entirely on his own, and having been alone for 3 million years, has left him more than a little daft. He is a regular protagonist in the first two seasons, then undergoes a sex change and becomes a blonde-haired woman for seasons 3-5, during which time her senility seems to advance notably, as she's even dumber than the original Holly. During seasons 6 and 7, Holly is lost when Red Dwarf is stolen, whilst in seasons 10-12, he's been shorted out and doesn't interact with anyone.

Krystine Kochanski: The original Krystine Kochanski was a navigation officer aboard Red Dwarf; another British "lower class" girl who'd made something of herself by applying to Red Dwarf, whom Lister pined after from afar. During the events of season 7, a Krystine from a parallel dimension where she was Red Dwarf's lone survivor accidentally stumbles through a rift in dimensions and is inadvertently trapped on Starbug with the Boyz - much to her disgust. She stuck around for seasons 7 and 8, and then the movie "Back to Earth" established that she ran away to find a way back to her own dimension during the events of "the missing season 9", leaving Lister to think she was dead. This parallel Krystine is much more uppercrust and refined than her counterpart, but the two are treated as all but identical, since strong continuity isn't one of Red Dwarf's strongest points.

Ace Rimmer: A version of Rimmer from an alternate timeline where he actually managed to get over all his neuroses. "Ace" Rimmer is a brave and heroic starship pilot who was given the opportunity to test a ship capable of travelling between dimensions. The first dimension he travelled to was the prime Red Dwarf timeline, where he quickly befriended the crew and earned the resentment and envy of prime Rimmer. A later episode revealed that he became an interdimensional hero, who upon his death would be succeeded by another timelines' Rimmer. This was used to write Rimmer out of the show for Season 7, as the duty now fell on him to become the new Ace (even though he is likely the worst of all possible Rimmers). One of the series' most memorable characters, even if he only appeared in three episodes.

TV vs. Novels

Unlike many other universes that started as books and were turned into TV shows, Red Dwarf started as a TV show and was turned into a book series. The show's creators wrote two books, roughly adapting plots from the first couple of seasons of the show; "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" and "Better Than Life", but they eventually got into a creative dispute and split up, resulting in two different books that each portray their own spin on the "third book in the series" position - "Backwards" by Rob Grant and "Last Human" by Doug Naylor.

Because the books can go into details that the TV show couldn't, they showcase a more serious and grimdark depiction of the Red Dwarf multiverse. For example of the serious: in the show, Lister getting caught out over his cat seemed like a mixture of bad luck and stupidity; in the novels, it's a deliberate plan on Lister's behalf due to his expanded backstory - he got stranded on Mimas (one of Saturn's moons) after getting incredibly fucking drunk on a birthday pubcrawl in Liverpool and he only joined up with the Red Dwarf to try and get back to Earth for free; then he learned that it would take years before the ship would get there again, and he'd be required to work with Rimmer all that time, so he came up with a plan to get put into stasis so he could skip all that and just finally get home. For an example of the grimdark: Lister's first encounter with Rimmer's hologram recreation isn't until after the experience of being stuck all alone aboard ship with nobody to talk to or interact with causes him to fall into a deep drunken depression.

A Bleak, Hostile Universe

Stranded 3 million years in the depths of space, it is made clear from the start that Lister's mission of rediscovering the fate of humanity is probably hopeless. The series creators even pitched it to the BBC by claiming that they wouldn't be featuring any (expensive) aliens, unlike Star Trek or Doctor Who. This lasted for... maybe a season or two before they realized that "stock British sitcom of some assholes being assholes to each other, but in space" could only go so far, and they decided they needed to start bringing in some proper sciencey weirdness to play their oddball heroes off of. So, they decided to break the spirit of their promise whilst keeping to the letter of it.

During the 3 million years that Red Dwarf was careening wildly into the depths of space, humanity advanced to incredible measures in technology. Artificial intelligence, cybernetics, genetics, time travel, faster-than-light travel, psionics, dimension travel, and other impossible technologies were all born during that time period... and promptly left scattered around the universe like a garbage heap full of landmines. Which, depending on how you look at it, is a nice meta-reflection of British pessimism about space travel and their own space program's history of ineptitude (in the time span in which America sent several manned ships to the moon and back, Britain sent a glorified remote-control car to Mars... and crashed it). Lister and his buddies constantly stumble across these remnants of humanity's achievements, and it usually goes terribly wrong for them.

It also means that the universe isn't entirely uninhabited. But there's no alien civilizations. Instead, the nascent spacefaring races, little more than glorified techno-barbarian tribes on the galactic scale, are humanity's long-abandoned, half-mad bastard children; Mechanoids, Synths, and GELFs.

Mechanoids are the Red Dwarf version of robots - specifically, androids. Distant descendants of the Skutters, they're humanoid machines created to serve humanity, and then left to fend for themselves when humanity up and vanished. Since crewmember Kryten is a Mechanoid, they rarely show up.

Synths (short for "Synthetics"), on the other hand, do show up a fair amount... much to everyone's regret. Synths were combat mechanoids humanity created for a war that ultimately never happened; when they tried to scrap their creations, the Synths fought back and managed to flee into the depths of space, from which they have brooded with seething hatred for their creators ever since.

GELFs (Genetically Engineered Life Forms) are any of a myriad of weird alien-like bio-engineered or mutated creatures that humanity produced. The primary ones to show up of relevance are the Kinatawowi, a savage, tribal, Sasquatch-like race of hairy humanoid things who seem to exist mostly to be a parody of Wookies.

Okay, but is it any good?

Red Dwarf is a cult classic for many reasons, the first of which is that it's one of the most unique sci-fi shows out there. When the show finally finds its legs, it's got some of the most fun, interesting and clever uses of sci-fi tropes and world-building that can be seen in sci-fi television. The comedic nature of the show means it's tonally justified in being goofy and weird, but it still plays by its own internal logic, for the most part, taking its concept and running with it. It's a space comedy, but when it comes to the science fiction elements it doesn't lose out. The show can hold its own, up there with the likes of Star Trek, Farscape and other deep space romps...

...however...

The show itself was plagued with difficulties. For one, the BBC has, historically, never been very good at handling its science fiction shows (just look at vintage Dr. Who). This meant that the creators and actors felt pretty ostracised by the network and, despite their critical and commercial success, they never really received any recognition from the station.

This, along with a fair share of creative disputes and many, sometimes decade-long, hiatuses, lead to the show changing styles and production elements pretty much season to season. This has lead to great debate within the community over which seasons are considered "good" or even "worthwhile".

For the sake of neutrality, this section will not pass judgement on the quality of each respective season, but instead provide a guide to the "eras" of the TV show. These Eras are; seasons 1&2, a Douglas-Adams-style absurdist sitcom; seasons 3-7 which are more of a space comedy (season 7 veers into comedy-drama, though); season 8, which is a sitcom again, but now with a plot-line; season 9, a three-part meta-textual blade runner parody (actually pretty skub); seasons 10-12, a return to the original space comedy formula of "classic Dwarf"; and season 13, which is not a season, but a feature length TV movie.

tl;dr: Yes. Red Dwarf is good. Now go watch it, smegger!

/tg/ Relevance

Aside from being Approved Television for anyone with a love of sci-fi and comedy, especially fans of the earlier, more comical forms of Warhammer 40,000 or Rogue Trader, Red Dwarf has its own licensed roleplaying game; Red Dwarf - The RPG.