Camille
Lister tries to teach Kryten how to lie and insult people, but to little avail; all Kryten can manage is to call Rimmer a "smeeee-heeeed"(translation--"smeghead"). When Kryten takes Rimmer astroid-spotting on board the 'Bug, Kryten finds a crashed vessel, and , despite Rimmer's orders, investigates for survivors. He finds one--a mechanoid named Camille, who is a Series 4000 just like Kryten. Camille and Kryten are attracted to each other; Camille agrees to join Kryten on the Dwarf. But when he tells her that there are others on the ship, she inexplicably begs to be left behind. Kryten brings her on board anyway.
Upon entering Starbug, Kryten introduces Camille to Rimmer. But Rimmer doesn't see a mechanoid; he sees a hologrammic woman who bears a remarkable resemblance to Rimmer's sister-in-law Janine! Rimmer and Camille chat, and Rimmer finds her attractive and charming. Kryten can't figure out why Rimmer likes Camille so much.
Camille is brought to the Dwarf's medical unit, where she meets up with Lister. But instead of seeing a mechanoid or a hologrammic human, he sees a woman who (supposedly) looks like his love Kristine Kochanski. Lister is smitten...until Rimmer enters the room and starts chatting with Camille about 20th century telegraph poles. Lister realizes that he and Rimmer are hearing Camille say different things at the same time! Camille admits to Lister that she is a pleasure GELF (Genetically Engineered Life Form).
Camille was designed to be the perfect mate for whomever she was brought into contact with. (Incidentally, when Cat looks at Camille, he sees an image of himself.) She apologizes, and morphs into her true form--a huge green blob. Kryten doesn't care what she looks like, he truly loves her; so they go out on a date. Kryten takes Camille to dinner, then to a showing of Casablanca. They are interrupted by Holly, who tells them that Camille has a visitor--her husband! She wants to stay with Kryten, but Kryten insists she go with Hector, her husband, and help him in his life's work to cure himself and Camille of their condition. Camille, he says, belongs with Hector and his research. And so, Kryten watches his love board a spaceship, never to be seen again...
Episode Quote: "It's the old, old story. Droid meets droid. Droid becomes chameleon. Droid loses chameleon, chameleon turns into blob, droid gets blob back again, blob meets blob, blob goes off with blob, and droid loses blob, chameleon and droid. How many times have we seen that story?"
D.N.A.
The boys find a derelict spaceship; its inhabitants are hideously malformed, but, according to their ID's, were once human! Lister and Cat find a Transmogrifier; unwittingly, Cat turns Lister into a chicken. Kryten and Rimmer rejoin the group; Kryten, in trying to fix Lister, turns him into a hamster; as Cat presses buttons on the control panel in an effort to demonstrate what he did to Lister, somehow Kryten gets in the way of the beam. As Lister is transformed, Kryten is transformed, too...into a human.
Kryten tries to cope with being a human--not having zoom feature eyes, non-working nipples (on a mechanoid, they pick up radio stations), and discovering what happens in his pants when he looks at a triple-bag easy-glide vacuum cleaner with turbo-suction and a self-emptying dustbag. Lister realizes that Kryten is not normal, and advises him to change back into a mechanoid. Kryten refuses.
Kryten goes to tell his spare heads the good news, but they are less than ecstatic. Kryten has been ignoring them in his new condition, and now they are of no use! After an argument, Kryten leaves his spare heads, feeling dejected. Lister suggests that Kryten might want to change back now, and Kryten agrees. So the boys head back to the derelict. They use Lister's mutton vindaloo as a test subject for the transmogrifier, but accidentally create a psychopathic curried beast that chases the Dwarfers around the ship! The boys head back to the transmogrifier, and Lister insists that he be turned into a super-human to battle the vicious vindaloo beast. It works...kind of. He is a super-human, but he is only 10 inches tall! In a stand-off with the beast, Lister hurls a can of lager at it...and the creature disintegrates!
Episode Quote: "Kryten, I don't care what model it was. No vacuum cleaner should give a human being a double polaroid."
Justice
As Lister is getting over a case of the space mumps, Kryten accidentally informs him that they have found a pod. There is a woman inside! Or so they thought...as it turns out (after they have started the defrosting process on the capsule), this pod was an escape module from a prison ship where the prisoners mutanied. The pod could contain either a guard or a murderous android simulant! So they head for the penal colony the prison ship was heading for, hopefully before the pod thaws completely.
The colony turns out to be "Justice World," where the Dwarfer's minds are probed for any sort of crime; if there is any crime in their memories, they will be committed to the penal colony. Lister is the most worried, considering his history, but it turns out that Rimmer is guilty of one thousand, one hundred and sixty-seven counts of murder! This of course stems from his facilitating (okay, CAUSING) Red Dwarf to blow up three million years ago. So Rimmer is sentenced to nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight (consecutive) years in prison.
The peculiar thing about Justice World is, as Rimmer points out, that is it covered by something called a "justice field." If you commit a crime within the field, the consequences of that crime happen to you. For example, Lister tries to set Rimmer's bed on fire; the bed does not burn. Instead, Lister catches on fire.
Rimmer is not happy in prison. But Kryten has a plan to free the hologram. Because it was Rimmer's guilt the probe detected, not the crime itself, if Kryten can prove that Rimmer is too emotionally wierd to be objective about the situation, Rimmer could go free. So, the trial commences. Kryten proves beyond a doubt that Rimmer is so dorky he is guilt-free. When they head back to Starbug, they see the pod has finished defrosting, and it is open. And guess what...it wasn't the guard. So now the boys are being chased by a psychopathic simulant throughout the penal colony...and then the Justice field takes effect and saves the day...
Episode Quote: "Who would put this man, this joke of a man, a man who couldn't outwit a used tea bag, in a position of authority where he could wipe out an entire crew? Who? Only a yogurt. This man is not guilty of manslaughter. He's only guilty of being Arnold J. Rimmer. That is his crime. It is also his punishment. Defense rests."
White Hole
Using Talkie Toaster as a guinea pig, Kryten's idea of "intelligence compression" could restore Holly's I.Q. of 6000. As her I.Q. is raised, her life expectancy would be exponentially reduced. So, Kryten rigs Holly up, and his plan works! However, it works too well. Instead of her intelligence level rising and levelling out at 6000, it didn't stop till it reached 12,068. Kryten's miscalculation, while making Holly impossibly smart, also reduced her life span to 3.41 minutes. Holly does the only thing she can do; she switches herself--and the ship--off. So now the boys are stuck with no heat, no light, and no food--everything on the ship was electric and under Holly's dominion. Kryten and Rimmer head down to the cargo decks for food; on their way back, they are troubled by a case of relative time dilation in an amazingly compressed space.
There is a white hole in the vicinity that is spewing time back into the universe (it is the opposite of a black hole, which sucks time and matter out of the universe). It causes time jumps and other problems, so the boys agree to consult Holly for a solution, even though she has less than two minutes of run-time left.
Holly gives them a computer slug that is compatible with Starbug's Navvy-Com. The solution is a curious one--the boys will shoot a thermonuclear device from Starbug, causing a nearby sun to flare; one of the planets circling that sun will be knocked off course directly into the white hole, plugging it up. Lister thinks the idea is great, but the shot won't work. He gets the others (except Rimmer) to let him, Dave "Cinzano-Bianco" Lister, take the shot instead. As the white hole disappears, the boys fade out, and since they occupy a redundant time line, they will have no memory of any of these events, from Kryten repairing the toaster to the present. This assurance is enough to override Kryten's reluctance to insult a human, to aim a particularly good (and long awaited) one at Rimmer!
Episode Quote: "In which case, Mr. Rimmer, sir, I should like to take this opportunity of saying that you are the most obnoxious, trumped-up, farty little smeghead it has ever been my misfortune to encounter!"
Dimension Jump
It turns out that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, where every possibility is played out. A single decision can drastically affect the course of one's life. For example, when Rimmer was seven, there was a question of him being kept back a year. We fast forward to twenty years later..."Ace" Rimmer is a test pilot in the Space Corps, well loved by all who know him. He is well adjusted, kind, brave, intelligent, handsome, and has great hair. He is friends with Dave "Spanners" Lister, a Space Corps flight engineer, who is married to Kristine Kochanski and has twin boys, Jim and Bexley. When "Bongo," Ace's immediate superior (who bears a remarkable resemblance to Kryten sans makeup) informs Ace that the Corps engineers have built a ship that that cross dimensions, and that it is a one-way trip, Ace is ready and willing. He boards the ship, and blasts off.
Meanwhile, back in OUR dimension, Kryten, Holly, Lister, and Cat try to sneak out on a fishing holiday to a planet they have just passed, but Rimmer catches them. He laments that nobody likes him, although he tries really really hard. Lister, out of pity, invites him along. As they reach the planet, the fabric of space-time opens up, and a ship shoots out, hitting Starbug. It crashes into the planet, which is in the middle of a hurricane, and begins to sink. Cat's leg is badly broken in the crash.
Ace (who was in the ship that crashed into Starbug) goes to help the crew. Everyone is amazed! When Rimmer meets Ace...well, let's just say Rimmer didn't take it well. Rimmer is bitter over Ace's success, and Ace is disappointed in how obnoxious and stupid his counterpart is. However, there is no time for that--Lister and Ace go outside into a forty-knot gale to fix the damaged starboard engine. They must quickly get back to the Dwarf, so they can help Cat. Lister and Ace return triumphant!
When it looks like Cat would lose his leg to gangrene, Ace volunteers to operate--he has had training in microsurgery as well as engineering. He saves the Cat's leg-and even after being on his feet for 36 hours, Ace is still laughing and joking. He even teaches Kryten how to play the piano. Rimmer is more than upset, he is jealous. He blames everything on his parents, his crummy education, and resents Ace his success. Ace decides to leave this dimension, even though he and Lister have become good friends; he can't stand to see himself so warped. He even tells Lister why he and Rimmer are so different; one of them was kept back a year. And that one was him. Staying down a year made Ace what he is; while Rimmer spent the rest of his life making excuses.
Ace takes off, going to visit other dimensions to find another Rimmer who is more of a pain the butt than ours. And so, his impossible search continues...
Episode Quote: "Smoke me a kipper...I'll be back for breakfast."
Meltdown
Kryten finds a matter transporter that can take them anywhere within 500,000 light years (why they don't just transport to Earth, I don't know). Kryten and Rimmer go ahead in the advance scout party, and send the paddle back--but not before they are chased by giant fake-looking prehistoric monsters.
Lister and Cat are transported, strangely enough, into a room where Hitler and his crew are planning some kind of invasion. The paddle wasn't supposed to take them back in time! They are sent to prison, where they realize that not everybody is dressed up as Nazis; there are many different period costumes. Abraham Lincoln is thrown into the cell with them and begins his explanation of what is going on.
Kryten and Rimmer are captured at gunpoint by Elvis Presley and a bishop. They are brought back to a command center that is populated by Pythagorus, Einstein and Marilyn Monroe; Kryten and Rimmer learn that they are actually on a huge wax droid theme park world. There is a battle raging between "heroworld" where they are, and "villainworld," where the cream of evil resides--Hitler, Mussilini, Rasputin, Caligula, the Boston Strangler. The villains want the hero's wax, so they can insert new evil programs into the bodies of the droids. Most of the great heros were killed already; the heroes no longer have a leader. Rimmer's dream of being in a war comes true; he declares himself general of this pathetic pocket of resistance, and starts to whip them into shape (Three of them melt in exhaustion). Rimmer is, basically, insane.
Caligula and Rasputin come into Lister, Cat, and Lincoln's cell and questions them about the paddle; but they escape. They find their way back to the command center, where Rimmer immediately puts them under arrest when Lister threatens to talk the troops into mutiny. Rimmer then proposes a daylight assault on the enemy across a mine field, while Kryten and Queen Victoria sneak into the Third Reich building, planning to turn up the boiler so all the evil droids will melt. It of course works, but when the final census is taken...none of the droids survived. Arnie managed to wipe out the entire population of the planet...but he won. Kryten recovers the paddle, and the boys are warped away...
Episode Quote: "Yeah, Rimmer. Right. Absolutely. Now all the corpses that litter that battlefield can just lie there safe under the knowledge that they snuffed it under a flag of peace and can now happily decompose in a land of freedom. Ya smeg head."