Red Dwarf / Tropes A to I

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A-B

• Abnormal Ammo: The heatseeker setting on the bazookoids. Also, the improvised garbage cannon in "Psirens".
• Aborted Arc:
  • In the first season, Lister was determined to find Kochanski's hologram disc and bring her back. This quest was utterly forgotten from season 2 onwards.
  • For the first two seasons, Rimmer had an unshakeable belief in aliens, hoping to meet an alien race with the technology to give him a new body. Not only was this dropped, but when the crew find what appears to be an alien ship in "DNA", Rimmer actually voices disgust, believing that they are going to return Glenn Miller, and telling "them" over the communications channel to "go away".
  • Lister's pregnancy at the end of series 2 was tossed out when the writers realized they couldn't make it funny or not-sexist. It comes up in unreadably fast text in the opening crawl for "Backwards" about what happened to them: the twins (very) rapidly aged to their late teens and (somehow) returned to their native universe.
  • The early episodes of Series 10 make reference to the plot thread of Kochanski's disappearance that was left over from "Back to Earth," and it actually was planned for her to return at the end of that series, but behind-the-scenes issues prevented it from coming to fruition. Series 11 didn't mention her at all, and both the cast and Doug Naylor seem to have all but admitted that she'll probably never return to the show, and certainly not as a regular character.
• Absent Aliens: All lifeforms encountered in the universe are ultimately Earth-derived. How they managed to get three million years into deep space in order for Red Dwarf to encounter them in the first place is rarely ever addressed.
  • The alternative is mainly used as a gag at Rimmer's expense. His firm belief in aliens is portrayed as foolish as well as misguided, as he is only interested in them being able to restore his physical body, along with other possible benefits of alien anatomy.
• Accidental Pervert: "Polymorph". When you're writhing on the floor, begging an android with a large tube attached to its crotch to pull off your underwear, it's kind of easy for people to get the wrong idea.
• Accidental Suicide: This was how Rimmer died in the first episode. He repairs a drive plate improperly, causing it to leak radiation and kill everyone on the ship (except for Lister, who was in stasis at the time), including himself.
  • This was also how the Simulant was defeated in "Justice." He had intended to attack Lister but thanks to the effects of the justice field (which reverses any crime committed on the user), winds up being dealt the same blows that he intended to make instead and is destroyed as a result.
• Accidental Unfortunate Gesture: In "M-Corp", Lister's brain is hacked so he can only see items manufactured by M-Corp. Kryten tests the limits of this blindness by holding up various objects and asking Lister if he can see it. Whenever an object is invisible to Lister, it is also invisible to the audience. The last (invisible) object he holds up causes his hand to vibrate in an alarmingly suggestive fashion. He then passes to Cat and Rimmer, whose hands also vibrate in a suggestive fashion, causing Lister to remark "I really hope that's an electric toothbrush!".
• The Ace:
  • Ace Rimmer. What a guy! He's everything Arnold Rimmer isn't: funny, brave, charismatic and has a catchphrase.
  • Lister actually has two counterparts who fall under this trope. The first is his counterpart from Ace Rimmer's reality, Spanners, who is married to Kochanski and routinely builds ships that break all the speed records and can even travel between dimensions. The second is the holographic version of Lister from the second Kochanski's reality, who is much more intelligent and sophisticated than our Lister. Unlike Rimmer however, Lister harbours no resentment toward Spanners at all, and only complains about Holo-Lister when he's upset by something else (his claustrophobia in "Duct Soup", and the loss of his arm in "Nanarchy").
• Ace Pilot: Almost as soon as the Dwarfers transition to Starbug for the majority of their time in Series V/VI - and even beyond when they return to Red Dwarf - the Cat falls into this role. Being a humanoid evolved from cats, his enhanced olfactory senses allow him to act as an early warning system, able to track space-borne phenomena such as asteroids and control a spacecraft to such a degree of proficiency that, even when (an alternate) Kristine Kochanski replaces Rimmer in Series VII, Cat doesn't have his position usurped by the fully-trained bridge officer. Although a hallucination, Series VIII brings his piloting skills to outrageous levels, allowing him to "pilot" multiple Blue Midget landing craft without even boarding a single one.
  Cat: Fly?! I can make this thing dance! [Cat then proceeds to slide out of the craft and lead four of them in a tap-dancing routine. No, seriously.]
• Achilles' Power Cord: In "The Promised Land", Rimmer burns out his light-bee battery, and is forced to string a chain of these across the ship in order to stay powered up.
• Accidental Art:
  • Inverted. Rimmer mistakes a light-switch for an artistic masterpiece.
  • Played straight when Lister recounts the first time he got drunk and threw up from the top of the Eiffel tower in "The Last Day". "The story I got told was some pavement artist sold it to a Texan tourist. Told 'im it was a genuine Jackson Pollock".
• Acquired Error at the Printer: Rimmer's parents were "Seventh Day Advent Hoppists", who hop every Sunday, due to a misprinted Bible wherein 1 Corinthians 13:13 reads "Faith, hop, and charity, and the greatest of these is hop."
• Acting Unnatural: In "Backwards", Kryten, in an attempt to look inconspicuous, walks into a cafe wearing a black cloak and a Ronald Reagan rubber mask.
• Action Prologue: "Stoke Me a Clipper" has one that is a Shout-Out to James Bond films where Ace takes on the Nazis.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Back to Earth does it. The crew meet Craig Charles, who plays Lister, and Rimmer asks for his own sitcom (Chris Barrie starred in The Brittas Empire, which alluded to Brittas having a similar event occur in his past to Rimmer).
  • Cat's 'Do I dance?' from "Parallel Universe". A more prominent example is the Blue Midget dance from "Back in the Red".
    • The Cat gliding around on roller skates in "Me2". Danny John-Jules was in Starlight Express.
  • The Shout Outs to the Alien series could be seen as one to Mac McDonald having played a colony commander in Aliens.
• Adaptation Title Change: It's based on the "Dave Hollins: Space Cadet" sketches from the Son of Cliché radio show.
• Addictive Foreign Soap Opera: Kryten is addicted to the soap opera Androids, which is a clear parody of what was then cult Australian import soap Neighbours.
• Adolf Hitlarious:
  • Done a few times, most notably when Lister managed to get himself inserted into the Nuremberg Rally. On Hitler's podium, no less.
  Lister (yelling at the unseen crowd): Ignore him! He's a complete and total nutter! And he's only got one testicle! [Turns around and flips off Hitler]
  • That particular episode ("Timeslides") opens with "Guest starring Adolf Hitler as himself". He appears again in "Meltdown". And again in "Cured"
  • Kryten mixes up a hypnotherapy tape with a copy of Hitler's Nuremburg speeches that he was using to practice German. This doesn't do much good for Lister's disposition.
    Kryten: Definitely hypnotic, but not in the right way
• An Aesop: Some episodes end on one, usually given by Lister. Examples include "Back To Reality" (Humanity's creations usually coming back to bite them in the ass, leading Kryten to quip about humans trying to play God and nearly killing everything themselves), "Justice" (The Evils of Free Will being a natural byproduct of True Justice) and "Meltdown" (A "The Reason You Suck" Speech to a borderline insane Rimmer about him sacrificing hundreds of sentient beings basically for his own amusement, fitting the episode's War Is Hell message).
• Afterlife Angst: Played With. Rimmer is not a traditional ghost (he's more of a Virtual Ghost) but nonetheless, one of his many hang-ups is the fact that he is now, as he puts it, a "stiffie". One of his goals early on is to get himself another body and he's pleased when he is (somehow) bought back to life (briefly) in "Timeslides".
• After the End: In a sense, since it takes place after the human race has likely gone extinct, and even if they did make it back to Earth there'd probably be nothing to find. The entirety of the series also takes place quite literally after "The End", which is the name of the very first episode.
• Agent Peacock: The Cat was always vain, self-obsessed and ditzy, but after season 3 he Took a Level in Badass. He is still Camp and obsessed with clothes, but he is also the point-man for any boarding action, the crew's favored pilot and perfectly capable of dodging bullets.
• A God I Am Not: Lister (In the guise of "Cloister The Stupid"), is the God-figure of the Cat people, them being descended from his cat, Frankenstein. Used in a few early episodes and then quietly forgotten about, until The Promised Land. This doesn't cause any major problems with the Cat's character development, since, by embracing his natural coolness and not trying to be slobby, he is shown to be secular.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Holly's IQ is, purportedly, 6000. Then again, s/he is 3,000,000 years old and gone a bit... peculiar.
  • Pree technically should not be bad, as she bases her actions on what she predicts the highest-ranking Officer would do. Unfortunately, when she operates on Red Dwarf, that happens to be Rimmer.
  • Averted in the books with the Belief Chip, an AI component implanted into the minds of any computer or robot sufficiently advanced to potentially pose a real threat if it decided to rebel against its makers. The chip creates an unshakable belief in the idea of Silicon Heaven, the eternal reward that mechanoids will earn in the next life for diligently serving their human masters without question or complaint in this life. Simple AI that couldn't pose a danger aren't fitted with such chips to keep manufacturing costs down, resulting in atheistic toasters and the like.
• Air-Vent Passageway: "Duct Soup" takes place primarily within the absurdly spacious vents of the Starbug. They're large enough for the Dwarfers to crawl around two abreast, and they run for two miles through the ship.
• The Alleged Car: Red Dwarf and Starbug were run-down, poorly constructed vessels to begin with. Then 3 million years took their toll on them. Naturally, the crew frequently complain that nothing works properly.
• The Alleged Computer: Holly. Despite apparently having an IQ of 6000, he (she in the later series) has gone very senile, and often blunderingly damages the people on the ship.
• Alliterative Name:
  • The Talkie Toaster. It might have been a part of marketing strategy to make this device more appealing.
  • Cat's alter ego Duane Dibley. In "Back To Reality", Cat immediately recognizes this is an extremely dorky name and he insists he does not want to be Duane Dibley.
  • One of the sentient vending machines from Series 10 is known as Taiwan Tony. Kryten affectionately calls him TT.
  • Surely one of the most prominent examples must be Kristine Kochanski.
  • Lister at one point claimed to have a gay friend called "Bent Bob."
• All Just a Dream: Sort of the plot of "Back To Reality" and Back to Earth. It even turns out the same species is responsible for both; male for the former, female the latter.
• All There in the Manual:
  • According to the booklet with one of the DVD boxsets, Rimmer's brothers were fathered by his uncle Frank.
  • Kill Crazy's real name is only revealed on the official website.
• Almost Out of Oxygen:
  • In "Quarantine", Rimmer, suffering from a holographic virus that sends him crazy, attempts to cut off Lister, Kryten, and the Cat's oxygen supply.
  • Lister is stripped of his free subscription of JMC Oxygen after resigning his post in "Fathers and Suns".
• Alternate Species Counterpart:
  • "Parallel Universe" features the crew going to a Gender-Bent Alternate Universe. Whilst their counterparts are for the most part female versions of themselves, the Cat's counterpart is a male evolved dog rather than an evolved cat.
  • "Dimension Jump" features a universe where Rimmer becomes a heroic space adventurer, with the others seen in alternative roles. Unlike in our universe, the Cat's counterpart (The Padre) is human instead of a Cat Folk, Kryten's counterpart (Bongo) is also human rather than a Robot Maid, and Holly's counterpart (Mellie) is an android (although the fact that she's an android is only revealed on the website) rather than a Benevolent A.I..
  • "Skipper" features one alternative universe where the Cat's counterpart was a giant RatMan, Lister having been put into stasis for bringing a rat on board instead of a cat.
• Alternate Universe:
  • The crew are transported to one in the episode "Parallel Universe" and meet their female counterparts.
  • Ace Rimmer comes from one in "Dimension Jump".
  • Kochanski comes from one in "Ouroboros".
  • "Backwards" is set in an alternate universe that's identical to ours except it's contracting back in on itself in a "big crunch" and consequently time has reversed its direction.
  • “Skipper” has Rimmer jumping through a ton of these. For instance, there was one where Lister more sophisticated and brought a pet rat on board, one where Rimmer’s the ship computer etc.
• Ambiguous Clone Ending: For a long time, it was left unclear which Rimmer is the Rimmer we see from Back to Earth onwards (the one from Series I-VII who became Ace Rimmer or the one from Series VIII who may or may not have died during the series cliffhanger) as Series X had presented evidence for both scenarios.^note Series X! Rimmer talks about remembering being killed by the radiation leak, which only happened to the first Rimmer, but also mentions dealing with the chameleonic microbes, which happened with the second Rimmer.. Word of God eventually revealed in 2020 that it was the Rimmer who went off to be Ace that appears from "Back to Earth" onwards.
• Amputation Stops Spread: Kryten and Kochanski's solution to save Lister from the fatal Epideme virus is to force the virus into his arm and then cut his arm off it doesn't work.
• Amusingly Awful Aim: In "Quarantine", Lister is injected with a "luck virus", and shows off by pulling all the aces out of a deck of cards. He's then called on to hit a dartboard on the wall behind him, left-handed. However, the dart ends up in the back of Kryten's head.
  Kryten: Huh. I think that indicates the virus has worn off.
• Amusingly Short List: There are countless people who have lost an arm and then lead a perfectly normal life. Thousands. More than thousands. Millions. The definitive list: Lord Nelson, the Venus de Milo, the one-armed man from The Fugitive, Vincent van Gogh (that dude managed to cut off his own ear with just one arm ) and Dave Lister.
• An Arm and a Leg: Played for laughs. As Lister is infected with the Epideme virus, they plan to drive it into his arm, then amputate it. Lister reluctantly agrees, so long as it's his left hand. Naturally Kryten has no choice but to amputate the right hand instead due to Kochanski making a mistake while tracking the virus. For added insult, it didn't even eliminate all of the virus.
  • Leads to a crowning moment of funny when Lister shouts at Kochanski: "My left arm I said! That's my right! What kind of navigation officer can't tell left from right!?"
  • Subverted with Kochanski. She forces Epideme into her own arm and then hacks it off. Or so it seems, as the arm was really Caroline Carmen's.
  • Played with in "Bodyswap", after Rimmer (in Lister's body) crashes Starbug. He pretends to have lost Lister's arm in the crash ("You've lost my arm!" "I've lost your watch too!"), but he's actually hiding it under the tattered remains of his uniform jacket.
• And I Must Scream: In "Rimmerworld", Rimmer's clones turn on him for having small amounts of the un-Rimmerlike traits they believe are evil and throw him in a small prison. As he's a hologram, he doesn't die and, as everyone on the planet is an even less likeable and more treacherous copy of Rimmer, he knows they'll turn him in if he escapes. He ends up imprisoned among these reminders of what a mess of a human being he is for 557 years.
• Android Identifier: Holograms (hologrammatic AI simulations of dead people) have an "H" badge on their foreheads, since otherwise, they could be mistaken for living people. The tie-in novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers describes it as 'the stigma of the dead'.
• And Then I Said: Rimmer pulls this out in "Better Than Life" but can't come up with something he might have said and is forced to admit he "doesn't remember". Since it's his fantasy, his dinner mates laugh anyway.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Whenever terrible things happen to Rimmer, Lister and Kryten at least feign sadness (unless it's directly his own fault, which it often is). Cat ... not so much.
  Cat: We're all really sorry, bud, except for me and him and him.
• Animal Assassin: Those Wacky Nazis in "Stoke Me a Clipper" use Snappy, an assassin alligator, on Ace Rimmer.
• Animal Is the New Man: After humanity died out, a race of cat-people descended from David Lister's cat took over. They then nearly wiped themselves out in a holy war over what color their god's hat was.
• Answers to the Name of God: In the Series X episode "Lemons", a man's name is actually Jesus. Not the famous one, but the crew manage to convince him that he is for a while.
  Lister: Really? Jesus!
  Man Sat Behind Him: Yes?
• Antagonist Title: The series has a few of these; "Queeg", "Polymorph", "The Inquisitor", "Psirens", "Legion", "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", " Emohawk: Polymorph II", and "Epideme".
• Arbitrary Skepticism: This is played with momentarily in "Back To Reality", when Andy, the "real world" game technician, claims that Lister's destiny is to "jump-start the second Big Bang," making Lister, "the ultimate atheist" (despite being a pantheist), actually God, and Rimmer, equally atheist, God's bunkmate.
• Armchair Military: Rimmer. He keeps meticulous logs of RISK games so he can re-live his "past glories".
• Armor-Piercing Question: Kryten delivers one to the Inquisitor when making his case for existence.
  The Inquisitor: In a human, this behaviour might be considered stubborn.
  Kryten: But I am not human. And neither are you. And it is not our place to judge them... I wonder why you do?
  The Inquisitor: ENOUGH!
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • The Cat, at any point where Starbug gets damaged.
  • From "Back To Reality" in Series V:
  Rimmer: This is a nightmare! I'm on the run from the fascist police, with a murderer and a mass murderer and a man in a bri-nylon shirt.
• Artifact Title: For half of the 1990s. Season V saw adventures move increasingly away from the titular Red Dwarf, and Season VI took place entirely without the ship as the characters had lost it (that series was semi-officially subtitled "The Starbuggers", although the subtitle never appeared onscreen). By the time it returned for Season VII it had been unseen for five real-life years.
• Artificial Human:
  • The 3000 series mechanoids were apparently this. Droids who looked frighteningly realistically human freaked out human beings as it turned out and they were recalled. A few of them escaped and erased their memories, replacing them with fabricated backstories. An unreality pocket has the crew convinced that Lister is one until they learn the truth. The 4000 series is subsequently given a head shaped like a novelty condom and a body with angles to match, but Kryten's replacement, Hudzen 10, is given a human type head and a robotic looking body.
    • We only find out the "history" of the series 3000 in an unreality bubble, it's not clear if the apparent history is correct or not, and one would assume that Kryten, with his guilt chip in overload already, wouldn't tell the rest of the crew otherwise.
  • Simulants are human in appearance with some differences (some have extra eyebrows or circuit boards) and are partly organic. A couple of them are shown with wear and tear: Most notably the first simulant the crew encounters in "Justice" looks to have exterior damage akin to a Terminator. Kryten, an android, is quick to point out simulants and androids are different. The key distinction is that an android will never rip off a person's head then spit down their neck.
• Artistic License: Kryten describes Virgil's ''Aeneid'' as "the epic story of Agamemnon's pursuit of Helen of Troy". That's at best a pretty loose and misleading description of what the story's actually about^note The title's kind of a hint. Additionally Lister points out how stupid the Trojans would have been to not think the Trojan Horse was suspicious. The Aeneid's version of the story has a Trojan warn the others, only to be killed by the gods for his trouble. Of course, this could be considered an in universe example, since the version Lister is reading is a comic book adaptation.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Kryten appears in the premiere of Series II and becomes a regular in Series III. (David Ross declined the opportunity to join the main cast due to his distaste for the Kryten makeup and was replaced by Robert Llewellyn. Ross would eventually return to voice Talkie Toaster in 'White Hole'.)
  • Kochanski appears twice in Series I, once in Series II and once in Series VI (actually a GELF in disguise) and becomes a regular in Series 7. Clare Grogan was replaced by Chloë Annett as Kochanski because Grogan had retired from acting in favor of becoming a TV host.
  • Captain Hollister appears but twice in Series 1 and again in "Stasis Leak" before returning as a regular in Series 8. Captain Hollister went the most time between his last appearance as a guest and his debut as a regular (11 years), his is the only case in which the actor who played him (Mac McDonald) ascended as well.
  • It's a well known in-joke amongst the cast, during the DVD commentaries for Series VIII, about one of the 'extras'. A hugely built intimidating man, referred to as Chopper. It's about him starting off as simply a background extra, and allegedly persuading the producers to get some lines. To the point where each episode following, he always received some lines, almost close enough to rival Holly.
• Ass Shove:
  • In the episode "Backwards", the crew accidentally time-travels to a version of Earth in which time runs backwards, to the effect that the natives speak backwards, walk backwards, wars are happy occasions on which millions of dead people come back to life, pub brawls end up cleaning up the pub ("Unrumble!"), food gets un-eaten, beer goes from your mouth back into the mug and from the mug back into the tap, and so on. Unfortunately, just before the Dwarfers leave, the Cat decides to take a crap in the bushes, and the other can't warn him in time... Cat appears from the bushes with a horrified expression and his hair standing on end and walks stiff-legged into the shuttlecraft, avoiding the others' eyes.
  Cat: Don't ask!!
  • "Back in the Red" sees "Starbug" fly up the rectum of a giant rat in an enormous air vent.
  • In "Lemons", Cat devises a crazy golf course that ends with hitting the ball into a medical student's practice rectum.
  • In "D.N.A.", Kryten asks about how humans recharge, stating that he found what he thinks is the socket, but the plug keeps falling out.
  • In "Krytie TV", Rimmer alludes to have attempted this on Lister with his own guitar. Lister notes that he'd have had more success with the neck end.
• As the Good Book Says...: In "The Last Day", Rimmer notes that his parents' denomination of choice was founded on a misprinted Bible verse. The verse itself is misquoted for the sake of the punchline:
  Rimmer: 1 Corinthians 13, where it says "faith, hop^note ("hope") and charity; and the greatest of these is hop."^note In the real verse, the greatest is "charity" (or "love," depending on the translation), not "hope".
• Asymmetric Dilemma: Kryten's favorite way of pointing out the flaws in the Cat's plans.
  Kryten: A superlative suggestion, sir, with just two minor flaws. One, we don't have any defensive shields, and two, we don't have any defensive shields. Now, I realize that, technically speaking, that's only one flaw, but I thought it was such a big one it was worth mentioning twice.
• A-Team Firing: While being chased by the laser-zapping Monster of the Week on Red Dwarf, Lister laments "Why don't we ever meet anyone nice?" Cat asks "Why don't we ever meet anyone who can shoot straight?"
• Atrocious Arthropods: One of the GELF types the Dwarfers have encountered over the years is the Psiren, a creature which resembles a giant assassin beetle. Said creature also lures unsuspecting crew in with their illusions so that they can suck out their brains with a straw.
• Attending Your Own Funeral:
  • George MacIntyre has a "Welcome Back" party immediately after his funeral, and thanks the Captain for his eulogy while joking that he doesn't understand why the Captain didn't use the one MacIntyre had written.
  • Rimmer, on several occasions.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Holograms, at least before the radiation leak, require an absurd amount of power and computer runtime that a ship can only sustain one at any one time with Red Dwarf able to generate a second if all non essential systems are shut down. In the event of the death of an essential crewmember, that crewmember is brought back. If another more vital crewmember dies, that crewmember supersedes the previous hologram, something George McIntyre jokes about after his funeral. Hard Light holograms are even more of a power drain, which leads Rimmer to suspect that something is seriously amiss when Katerina shows up in Back To Earth.
• Awkwardly Gay Dream: One of Lister's dreams after Arnold Rimmer left Red Dwarf to become the next Ace involves a kiss between Lister and Rimmer which Lister wakes up from quite shocked.
• Back from the Dead: The entire crew of Red Dwarf in Series VIII.
• Backported Development: Lots. For a visual example, when Series VII flashed back to shortly after Lister's revival, the H on Rimmer's head and his uniform were the ones used for Series VII rather than the one in Series I.
  • Another acute one is that the Red Dwarf sets were subtly updated between Series I and Series II, including a lot more detail in the Drive Room and Bunk Room sets, but when the Dwarfers go back in time to the pre-accident Dwarf in Series II's "Stasis Leak", the 'past' versions look exactly the same as the 'future' ones, including the giant blow-up Banana that only appeared in the Bunk Room in Series II. Which is a shame, because in a lot of other ways the episode does try very hard to be a match for how the fully crewed ship seemed to be in Series 1.
• Back to Front: The episode "Backwards" is partly set in a universe where time runs backward, so although the story is told from front to back it has elements of the trope, particularly with respect to the injuries Lister mysteriously acquires near the beginning of the episode as a result of events near the end.
• Backwards-Firing Gun: In "The Inquisitor", Kryten and Lister steal the Inquisitor's gauntlet and Kryten reprograms it. When the Inquisitor reacquires it and fires it at Lister, it fires backwards and removes the Inquisitor from history.
• Bad Liar: Kryten has to fight his original programming to lie at all, and even then, he (usually) announces that he's switching to "Lie Mode" first. And in the Series XI episode "Give And Take", it turns out that his "Lie Mode" now has a new tell: uncontrollable stuttering every few words.
• Bar Brawl:
  • "Backwards". Except it's a "bar room tidy". Unrumble!
  • The real bar room brawl in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse".
• Barbershop Quartets Are Funny: In "Officer Rimmer", Rimmer gets four of his bioprinter created clones to form a barbershop quartet, complete with a Rimmer-ified version of "Mister Sandman".
• Barrier-Busting Blow: Low Kryten hits Lister with one in "Demons and Angels".
• Bastard Bastard: Rimmer is revealed in "The Beginning" to be the byproduct of an affair between his mother and the family gardener. He has also been shown to be a cowardly, snivelling Jerkass.
• Bathroom Break-Out: In "Parallel Universe", Rimmer mentions a date he once had, who apparently got a little confused and tried to climb out the bathroom window. Seeing as he spent the whole evening making fun of her nose (in a very misguided attempt to break the ice), it never occurred to him that she was trying to get away.
• Batman Gambit: Kochanski, of all people, in "Beyond a Joke". When Kryten is kidnapped by the rogue Simulant aboard the S.S. Centauri, she instructs Cat to turn Starbug so it flies away from the Centauri at top speed. The Simulant, after realising they're not giving chase and actually fleeing, assumes they've planted a bomb on his own vessel and starts chasing after them. Cat and Lister are fooled too.
  • This is also how Lister beats the Inquisitor.
  • In "Fathers and Suns", Lister uses it on himself. For context, every year, Lister normally gets very drunk and writes himself a Father’s Day card. This year the next morning he finds a video from the perspective of his father talking to him like a son telling him he's a disappointment and to go get his tooth filled and join the engineering corps before watching the next message. Dave being Dave skips ahead immediately only to find message two rebuking him for just skipping ahead and tells him to go do what he said once more. Dave skips again only to be threatened with having his guitar flushed out an airlock if he skips once more. Dave skips again and at first the message acts like he believed Dave completed his tasks and to go over and play a song on the guitar. When Dave goes he finds it's a cutout and his real guitar is floating in space and he's warned to go do it now or he'll get more of daddy's discipline.
• Battle Butler: Kryten, in later series, although he is programmed never to take a human life. When he is forced to shoot a man to save a child, his guilt chip goes into overdrive and he attempts to commit suicide.
• Beard of Evil: In "Demons and Angels", the most obvious physical difference that Low Lister has with his High and regular counterparts is his filthy, unkempt beard. That and his Eyepatch of Power.
• Beat: The episode "Camille", when Kryten is telling her about his crewmates:
  Camille: Please, I can't meet your shipmates. Trust me.
  Kryten: But you don't know them! You'll like them! (beat) Well, some of them. (beat) Well, one of them. (beat) Maybe.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Rimmer spends the first few minutes of "Only the Good..." complaining that Hollister doesn't see him as officer material. He has a run-in with a vending machine which states that one day they'll meet again and it will destroy him, and Rimmer snarks that on that day, he'll be ship's captain. By the end of the episode, everyone higher ranked than him had been evacuated making him the highest ranked person on the now disintegrating ship, and as he tries to figure out how to save himself, the machine attacks. It's not certain how he fared.
  • Lister's desire to have a family in the very first episode backfires on him at the end of Series II.
• Bemoaning the New Body: Given that transformations are a fairly common occurrence, this happens quite often:
  • In "The End," Rimmer is initially quite subdued over being resurrected as a hologram, lamenting the fact that he's now just a computer simulation of who he was in life and due to being made of light, can't do anything for himself.
    Rimmer: I still have the same drives, the same feelings, the same emotions... but I can't touch anything. Never again will I be able to brush a rose against my cheek, cradle a laughing child, or interfere with a woman sexually.
    Lister: Rimmer, you never used to do any of those things anyway.
  • In "Balance Of Power," hologram corruption results in Rimmer waking up to find that his arm has been replaced with Olaf Petersen's arm, immediately recognizable by the fact it's hairy and covered in tattoos. He naturally starts complaining about having the arm of "a Danish moron" and proceeds to verbally abuse Holly over it... only for Holly to retaliate by having Petersen's arm attack him.
  • Early in "Bodyswap", the crew are forced to temporarily flush out Lister's mind and replace it with that of Executive Officer Carol Brown so that they can cancel Red Dwarf's self-destruct sequence. Brown is immediately confused and upset by the situation, spending the next few seconds demanding to know why she now has male sexual organs.
  • "Back To Reality" features the crew waking up to find that they've been playing a Red Dwarf-themed VR game for the last four years, and their real bodies look significantly different. The Cat is dismayed to find out that he's really a massive dork with a pudding basin haircut and an absolutely gargantuan overbite, especially once his real name turns out to be "Duane Dibbley," to the point that he's left incredulously reciting it over the next few minutes. In the finale, he's so miserable as his new self that he's willing to commit suicide over it — though it turns out that the whole thing is a hallucination caused by the Despair Squid, thankfully.
  • During "Emohawk: Polymorph II" the eponymous domesticated shapeshifter sneaks aboard Starbug and attacks the Cat, eating his coolness. As a result, Cat is immediately transformed into Duane Dibbley again, and is once more left reciting "Duane Dibbley?!" in utter horror.
  • "Nanarchy" ends with Kryten finding the nanobots and getting them to replace Lister's severed arm. Unfortunately, they end up overdoing it by rebuilding his body into a grotesquely musclebound giant with Lister's tiny head perched on top, much to the shock of everyone aboard. Lister takes one look at his new form and starts screaming.
  • In "Pete Part I", upon finding the Time Wand, Kryten's first attempts to test it end up regressing Kochanski and the Cat into 5-year-olds. They are immediately shocked and upset, demanding that Kryten turn them back immediately; he does so — only for his next attempt at playing with time to leave them with 1970s-style hair and clothes, much to their horror.
• Better than Sex: In "Me2", Rimmer copies himself and moves in together, he describes his new life of discipline as "better than sex". Of course, he's soon proven wrong when it turns out even he doesn't like himself.
• Beware the Skull Base: In "Gunmen Of The Apocalypse", the Rogue Simulant Battle Cruiser was deliberately designed with a skull-like form. Originally this was going to be a human skull and then later a goat one, but the creators decided that a cow skull would fit better with the Western theme of the episode.
• BFG: The Bazookoids.
• Big Damn Heroes: Ace Rimmer would have nothing to live for without this trope.
• Bigger on the Inside: Starbug has its internal volume increased substantially after the events of "Out Of Time" in spite of no change in its external dimensions, due to the various temporal anomalies caused by the battle between the crew and their future selves.
• Bio-Augmentation: The episode DNA featured a DNA modifier which would allow a user to change their genetic structure. When the crew encounter the ship it was on, they find the skeleton of a man with three heads. Kryten accidentally becomes human, Lister becomes a chicken, a hamster and a foot tall "Man-Plus" (Essentially Lister crossed with RoboCop) and a mutton vindaloo becomes a mutant vindaloo-based creature that can only be killed with the application of lager.
• Bio Weapon Beast: The Polymorph was genetically engineered to be the ultimate warrior, achieving this by being able to change its shape at will. Unfortunately,one of the by-products of its design is insanity.
• Birthday Episode:
  • Inverted in "Thanks for the Memory" which has the group celebrate Rimmer's deathday on a barren planetoid. The main plot kicks off when Rimmer gets so drunk at his party that he admits that what he most desires is to to have been in love and to be loved.
  • A straight example comes in "M-Corp", which opens with Lister's birthday. The plot kicks off when he suffers what he believes to be a heart attack (actually a severe case of indigestion) on said birthday.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: From "Emohawk: Polymorph II"...
  Ace Rimmer: He's looking so geeky he probably couldn't even get into a science fiction convention.
• Bizarre Gambling Winnings: Lister manages to gamble away the spaceship Starbug twice, firstly in the unproduced script "Identity Within" (where he loses the ignition keys in a game of four-dimensional pontoon whilst gambling with Brewfewinos in an attempt to save a female Felis Sapiens) and secondly in "Entangled" (where he loses the ship to a tribe of BEGGS along with Rimmer whilst looking for information about the whereabouts of Kochanski).
• Black Comedy: Happens on a number of occasions, but in a relatively subtle way compared to typical expressions of this trope. Take, for example, this exchange from the opening of "Legion"...
  Cat: What the hell is all this down the back of my chair? ...Peanuts?
  Lister: No, I've been trimming my verrucas.
  Cat: ...You have personal habits that would make a monkey blush!
  Lister: You really think I'm psychotically disgusting, don'tcha? They're peanuts, alright?
  Cat: Real peanuts? (begins eating them)
  Lister: Yeah.
  Cat: Where'd you get them?
  Lister: That derelict a couple of months back. Found them in the dead captain's old donkey jacket. Don't look at me like that! You enjoyed that Mint Imperial, didn't ya?
  Cat: And where didja get that?
  Lister: He was sucking that when he got shot! I had to prise his jaws open with a car jack.
• Black Comedy Rape:
  • Rimmer reveals in "Confidence and Paranoia" that he lost his virginity to (and whose only sexual liaison while alive the first time around was with) Yvonne McGruder, the ship's boxing champion. Who seemed to be suffering from a concussion because she kept calling him "Norman". This is given a slightly less squicky Retcon in the books.
  • The shenanigans with the Sexual Magnetism Virus in "Back in the Red". After Rimmer takes a dose of the virus all the women at the Captain's supper find him irresistible, and one by one they all go to "get coffee" with him in the galley. Played with in that by the end of the night Rimmer has clearly had enough and is visibly in pain.
  • Also in "Back in the Red", Lister comments that two years in prison means two years without sex, to which Rimmer flippantly replies, "You hope.".
  • Also also in "Back in the Red" and related to the previous example, after the main characters are locked up in the prison Lister applies a bit of the Sexual Magnetism Virus to Rimmer. We are left to imagine the outcome, but it's clearly the reason Rimmer wasn't speaking to Lister at the start of the episode.
  • And "Emohawk: Polymorph II":
  "Change of plan... leg it!"
  • Rimmer recalls in " The Last Day" that his first intimate experience was with his uncle Frank, who thought he was his mum. Paedophilia (albeit unwitting), and possibly not just one but two different permutations of incest, if Frank and Rimmer's mum were siblings. In the same scene, Rimmer also speculates that Lister's parents were brother and sister. Much, much later we find out that Lister's provenance is even weirder: thanks to a time machine not only is his mum his ex-girlfriend, but he's his own father.
• Blatant Lies: When Hollister reprimanded Rimmer for doing a rank job of fixing the drive plate in "Me2", Rimmer told him that he would take full responsibility for the consequences. Considering that one of the first things he does when meeting Lister as a hologram, is to blame him for the catastrophe, it becomes obvious that Rimmer was just trying to save face.
  • To "man-up" and accept the blame for a disaster that will kill everybody is a meaningless gesture anyway. Which makes it perfectly in keeping with Rimmer's symbolism-over-substance attitude.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The Nova 5 women.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • Primarily the Cat. Being descended from cats, he can't be properly judged by human standards. By cat standards he's a perfectly regular cat - which makes him vain, self-centered, egotistical and sex-crazed, with a tendency to jump out at things, hiss, and make yowling cat noises and dance when he just walks down corridors.
  • Invoked for laughs in "Rimmerworld", where the hostile reaction that Lister, Cat and Kryten get from the Rimmer clones is intensified because they do not display self-centered, malicious, Jerkass traits that have become the foundation of the race's moral structure.
  Rimmer Guard: These three abominations stand charged on eight counts of gross deviancy. Not content with not looking like the true image, they flaunt freakish behaviour such as charm, bravery, compassion and (pauses) honour.
  Rimmer Emperor: Are there no sighs of normalcy in these wretches? No cowardice or pomposity, no snideyness or smarm, not even basic honest-to-goodness double-dealing two-facedness?
  Rimmer Guard: Sire, these creatures did not even attempt to sell each other out for their own freedom - they lack even the most basic natural drives.
• Blue Liquid Absorbent: In "Only the Good...", Robot Kryten finds out about women menstruating for the first time in his life^note which is weird, considering he was in service of three female officers when the crew found him and he's obsessed with cleaning and in charge of washing clothes. Dave Lister pranks him, so Kryten behaves inappropriately to Kristine Kochanski. Kryten assumes Kristine wants to pour "all that blue stuff" over things.
• Body Horror: The multi-limbed, multi-headed Rimmer monster in "Officer Rimmer".
• Bolivian Army Ending:
  • Series VI ended with Lister, Cat and Kryten being killed by their future selves and Rimmer hurrying to destroy the Time Drive, just as Starbug explodes. It was a cliffhanger we had to wait four smegging years to get the resolution of.
  • The end of "Only The Good..." where it is undetermined whether Rimmer or the rest of the crew survived for that matter. This one notably remains unresolved in the revived series, which has not clearly answered how Red Dwarf was not destroyed or even which version of Rimmer the one in the new episodes is meant to be.
    • Given that Series X Rimmer retains memories of both his living and dead counterparts, and their actions, we can assume this is a 3rd Rimmer, who is made up of both his counterparts' memories. After Series 8 Rimmer died, most likely after the events of "Only The Good" and was resurrected using his Series 1-7 holo-disk, which contained the most recent backups of his personality on-hand, along with his "Alive" memories the crew were able to amalgamate a Rimmer who was up-to-date on their adventures without having "actually" been there.
• Bondage Is Bad: In "Demons and Angels", Lister runs into a deranged Enemy Without version of Rimmer who combines the Creepy Crossdresser, Depraved Homosexual, and Bondage Is Bad tropes all in one. He's dressed in some sort of "Dominatrix Dr. Frankenfurter" outfit while he attacks Lister with a whip before promising to torture and rape him.
• Bond One-Liner: Played for Laughs with Ace Rimmer.
• Book Ends: Way back in 1987, the show debuted in unusual fashion with the first episode of Series I being called "The End". Twenty-four years later, they finally created the obvious bookend — when Series X closed with an episode named "The Beginning". Both episodes end with the same line: "The slime's coming home!" Had there only been that one revival series, it would have provided a very neat circular conclusion.
  • Given that the show did return for Series XI and XII in 2016-17, "The Beginning" proved not to be, er, the end — but the show did however insert another sort of bookend into Series XII's final episode "Skipper". "The End" contains the famous "Everybody's dead, Dave" scene with Holly the ship's computer attempting to explain the gravity of the situation to a newly-revived-from-stasis Lister. 30 years on, in "Skipper" Rimmer temporarily ends up on a version of the Red Dwarf looking uncannily like he and it did in the original series, including Norman Lovett returning as Holly to walk him through a nearly identical scene where "Nobody's dead, Arnold".
  • The first episode of Series XII opens with all the crew playing poker, and the last episode ends with Rimmer returning from his journey across the multiverse having failed to find one where he felt less of a loser, and sitting down to join the others in their latest round of poker.
• Bootstrapped Theme: The show's upbeat closing theme was retooled, in a rocky instrumental version, as its new opening theme from Series III onwards. The more mournful original opening theme continued to be used as incidental music.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: In "Stoke Me a Clipper", Rimmer adopts Ace Rimmer's catchphrase 'Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast' when he has to take over Ace's life. He says it when leaving the ship, and mangles it completely.
  Rimmer: Stoke me a clipper, I'll be back for Christmas.
• Bottle Episode:
  • There have been several of these over the course of the series, such as "Marooned", "The Last Day", "White Hole", "Out of Time", and "Duct Soup".
  • The entirety of Series I is a Bottle Season due to the largest portion of the budget being used on the model shots.
• Bragging Theme Tune: We discover that Arnold Rimmer has one sung by tiny munchkin versions of himself.
  If you're in trouble he will save the day,
  He's brave and he's fearless come what may;
  Without him the mission would go astray!
  
  He's Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimmer!
  Without him life would be much grimmer;
  He's handsome, trim, and no-one slimmer,
  He will never need a zimmer!
• Brain Food: The Psirens. They look like man-sized insects and will project false visions to their victims. They're perhaps the only brain-eaters to use a straw.
• Brain in a Jar: Lister's evil, corrupt future self from "Out of Time"; the jar has his dreadlocks Sellotaped to the glass.
• Brain Uploading: All holograms, and also the episodes "Thanks for the Memory" and "Bodyswap".
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • In "Me2", Lister brings a picture to Arnold and Arnold's quarters (it makes sense in context) and reads the nameplate. 'Second Technician, Arnold J. Rimmer, and Second Technician, Arnold J. Rimmer?!' and looks at the camera in a smirking fashion before shaking his head.
  • In "Cassandra", after screaming "LETS GO KILL SOMETHING, YEAH!", Kill Crazy pauses to look at the camera before walking off.
  • Cat in "Parallel Universe", when he meets Dog. He glances to the camera and says:
    "I'm not sure what that is but I'm sure it wants to eat me..."
• Brick Joke:
  • In Back to Earth, the ENTIRE plot is caused by the ending sequence of an episode aired well over a decade ago, well before the hiatus began! "I'm going to eat you, little fishy..."
  • Hilariously used in "Stoke Me a Clipper". Where the pet crocodile of a Nazi Captain that Ace used to surf out of an exploding plane winds up landing on two soldiers' heads after Ace escapes a base. Was für ein Kerl indeed.
  • There was an interesting case where they may or may not have set up an incredible bit of Foreshadowing: In "Stasis Leak", Lister finds a picture of him and Kochanski getting married and a mention of a stasis leak that leads back in time to before the accident that killed the Red Dwarf crew. He eventually finds Kochanski, but she's already married to a future version of him. Future Lister is a bit of a Jerkass, but mentions that "in five years' time" they will find another way back into the past. Five years later, "Out of Time" aired, wherein the Dwarfers find a time machine and are immediately accosted by Jerkass future version of themselves who have been spending the last few decades being gourmands; dining with the richest and most powerful people in history, many of whom were "a bit dodgy" (such as Marie Antoinette and literal Nazis). Whether a series known for its MST3K Mantra as far as continuity is concerned actually intended to make a such a bit of foreshadowing, or the writers remembered and wrote an episode with that in mind, or if it was a happy accident, we'll likely never know for sure.^note Although, since Series VI opens with Lister being awakened from 200 years of suspended animation, technically, the trip to the past occurred shortly after the end of Back to Reality
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Lister. He's a complete slob, but when forced into action has demonstrated a great deal of ingenuity and resourcefulness. In Ace Rimmer's parallel universe, he's one of the top flight engineers in the Space Corps. As of Series X, he's studying to better himself.
• Britain Is Only London:
  • Averted; London is never seen or even mentioned in a major way prior to Back to Earth. The only time it really gets mentioned prior to that is on a roadsign in "Backwards," and even then it's flipped, rendering the city's name as "Nodnol" — contrary to popular belief, the backwards universe stuff in that episode is actually set in the city of Retsehcnam (Manchester, where the first three series were produced) rather than Nodnol, as indicated by a barely visible sign in one shot.
  • Grimsby is also mentioned, as are several other places. Lister, of course, is from Looprevil.
• Broken Ace: Arnold J. Rimmer is a literal example of the trope. Sucked dry of his negativity and neuroses (themselves powerful enough to destroy a Lotus-Eater Machine) by an Emotion Eater, he immediately turns into Ace Rimmer (what a guy!). Eventually, he becomes the next Ace Rimmer - as each one dies, he recruits the next, and so on, until it finally reaches Arnie himself. It is mostly his neuroses that hold him back - but luckily for him, the Red Dwarf universe has it set that pretty much every Rimmer gets redeemed. Before then, he makes an awesome Last Stand at the end of Series 6.
• Broke the Rating Scale: Dave Lister frequently talks about writing Michelin Guides or similar about various settings, resulting in "Legion" getting a psycho rating of "four and a half chainsaws, maybe five". Rimmer suggests that the G-Tower from The Tank in series 8 probably gets "the full five slop-out buckets" in the guide to Penal Hell-Holes.
• Brother–Sister Incest: In "The Last Day" Rimmer theorizes this is why Lister's parents abandoned him. His words are almost prophetic, in that that they were actually mother and son. Where he's his own father... it's weird, okay?
  • In "Rimmerworld", Rimmer realises that the female clone he's trying to create would technically be his sister. He decides she doesn't need to know, and follows the original plan. Also, by this logic, the clones are all technically brothers and sisters to each other and by the time Lister and co. arrive, 600 years have passed which means the current batch of Rimmer clones must be descendents of the originals.
• Buffy Speak: The Cat's knowledge of most spacial phenomena boils down to "wibbly thing" or "swirly thing". At one point, Lister asks if he can't be perhaps a little more "scientific".
  Cat: At this early stage, I'd hate to commit myself and wind up looking like a fool! Come see for yourself!
  Lister: A wibbly thing or a swirly thing, and he refuses to commit himself? He's losing it. He really is!
• Building of Adventure: The ship is city-sized and the primary setting.
  • In some supporting material, it's stated that the ship is 5 miles long, 4 miles wide, and 3 miles high. Which is 60 cubic miles of solid infrastructure to have adventures in. "Justice" mentions that Rimmer goes on a three week rambling holiday of the ship's diesel decks.
• Buried Alive: Rimmer is buried alive by the hidden psychopath in "Cured".
• …But He Sounds Handsome: In "Thanks For The Memory" Holly appears on a recording Holly doesn't remember making (the crew's memories were erased). Initially, he comments, "Nice-looking bloke," and then when the recorded Holly tells them to pause the recording, he does so, because he "Knows what he's talking about, that dude."
• Buxom Beauty Standard: When choosing the breast size for a new female computer, Rimmer insists on choosing 36D as her breast size, as opposed to Kryten's 30A choice.

C-D

• The Caligula: In "Rimmerworld", Rimmer genetically engineers an entire society made of clones of himself. He becomes The Caligula of his own society only to be overthrown by his underlings, much like the historical figure this trope is based on.
  • The Trope Namer himself appears in "Meltdown" as part of the "Evil" waxdroid army.
• Call-Back:
  • The largest design on the back of Lister's leather jacket in Series X is... Wilma Flintstone.
  • The news broadcast that Rimmer watches in "Better Than Life" is Groovy Channel 27, the same channel that Lister mentioned back in "Future Echoes".
  • Some of the DVDs in the shop in "Back to Earth" hark back to older seasons, most notably Mugs Murphy from series I and II and Die Screaming With Sharp Things In Your Head from "Demons and Angels".
  • "Can of Worms", the final episode of Season XI has a few beyond just bringing back a Polymorph. Aside from the Morphlings shape-changing having the same sound effect as the original Polymorph from Season III, the personality tuck that Lister goes through has a couple of references to "Bodyswap" - such as downloading Lister's mind onto a memory stick to be restored later and the expression Lister has while sitting in the machine is the same one he had in "Bodyswap" after the mind enema was administered (staring blankly forward with one eye, the other eye crossed while his tongue lolls out slightly).
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': What lands them in the brig during Series VIII. Despite being found innocent of the original charges against them, because they used classified crew data for their own advantage, they are found guilty of a totally different crime, with an identical sentence.
• Canon Immigrant: The concept of evolved rats finally appeared in an alternate universe in the series XII finale, "Skipper", having first appeared in the tabletop RPG.
• Captain's Log:
  • Holly would start the episodes of the first two series with a sort-of Captain's Log introduction. Captain Hollister also keeps a diary of some kind.
  • The first episode of Series VII, "Tikka to Ride", opens with Lister recording a captain's log (he even parodies the Star Trek format).
  Lister: Ship's Log, uhhh... one! I decided to keep a journal of life onboard ship and send it off on a probe! Since turning 28, I've felt a new maturity about myself and I can't remember the last time I tried to urinate on Rimmer from the top of D Deck. (beat) Oh, wait a minute. Friday! But, apart from that one lapse, maturity-wise I'm practically up there with Abe Lincoln and Moses!
• Cassette Futurism: In "Back to Earth", Kryten explains that the human race flirted with DVDs but reverted to VHS cassettes, because unlike a small thin disc, a big boxy cassette is virtually impossible to misplace.
• Catapult Nightmare: Lister in "Blue", after he and Rimmer kiss in the dream.
  • Not so much Catapult Nightmare as Trebuchet Nightmare. Lister violently throws himself out of his bunk.
• Catchphrase:
  • Male Holly developed a few:
  "All right, dudes?" "What's 'appenin', dudes?" "Emergency. Emergency. There's an emergency going on. It's still going on."
  • Ace Rimmer's one:
  Ace Rimmer: Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.
  • The Cat is extremely fond of asking "What is it?". This is occasionally repeated to the point of an Overly Long Gag.
• Cat Folk: The ship's cats evolved over the eons into a species of humanoids, one of whom is a main character (and the vast majority of whom emigrated away from Red Dwarf long before.)
• Cattle Punk: The second half of "Gunmen of the Apocalypse".
• Censorship by Spelling: In "Parallel Universe", when the Cat meets the Dog, the Dog insists that he spell out "bath"... and then doesn't understand him when he does.
• Cerebus Call-Back: In Series XII, Rimmer tells the others that, as a child, he spent ages staring at the family fish tank and wishing he could be a fish, swimming around peacefully with no troubles or worries, as a way to escape his utterly miserable life. Back in the very first episode, it was mentioned that he had a breakdown during an exam and wrote out "I am a fish" 400 times. The exam incident is changed from something funny to something tragic, 30 years after it was first broadcast.
• Character as Himself:
  • "Timeslides" has a special guest star credited at the start of the episode: Adolf Hitler. True to their word, Hitler appears through use of Stock Footage of his Nuremburg speech, which Lister interrupts.
  • "Back to Earth" combines this with Celebrity Paradox and Acting for Two with Craig Charles playing both Lister and himself. Some of the other Coronation Street cast appear as themselves.
• Characterisation Marches On: Rimmer is initially portrayed as utterly subservient to authority come what may. However, in "Stasis Leak", he loses his temper and assaults the captain multiple times^note though the second time he was convinced that the captain was just a hallucination, given he was dressed as a chicken for a costume party. He also calls Todhunter "a big lig" in "The End" after the latter agrees that he's a smeghead, goes on a brief tirade about the captain after hearing the personal remarks about him in "Waiting for God", and the first assault happened because he thought Lister should have been sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for the mushroom prank. In short, he respects authority only so long as they seem to be agreeing with him.
• Cheated Death, Died Anyway: Rimmer travels back into the past and somehow alters his own history in a way that when he returns to the present he's still alive instead of being a hologram- only to be killed moments later.
• Chicken Walker: Blue Midget, post-retcon.
• Christmas Episode: Although the show never had a genuine television episode set around Christmas, a mobisode was released in the late 2000s which has a Christmas theme. It revolves around the crew meeting Santa and his reindeer and playing charades with them.
• Cliché Storm: In universe, the Expenoids tend to speak in clichés. Lampshaded by Lister, who calls them out on not having any original Evil Plans or sayings.
  Simuloid: Well, well, We Meet Again!
  Lister: Smeggin' hell, you boys really are walking cartoons, aren't you?
  Simuloid: I think we are not so different, you and I.
• Cliffhanger Copout: More common than actual cliffhanger resolutions.
  • In "Balance of Power", Lister takes an exam to become the ship's chef just so that he will outrank Rimmer. At the end of the episode he gets the results; Rimmer asks how he did, and Lister replies: "That's 'How did you do, Mr Lister, sir!'" In the Opening Narration of the next episode, "Waiting for God", Holly simply adds: "Last week, Lister pretended he'd passed the chef's exam, but really he'd failed. That should tell you how interesting things are around here."
  • The Series II finale, of course, ended with Lister becoming pregnant, this was quickly explained away in the Series III premiere as part of a wall of Unreadably Fast Text.
  • Series VI ended with the entire crew aboard Starbug as it was destroyed by their future selves. A quick gag at the beginning of Series VII reveals that this caused a paradox that hit the Reset Button.
  • Finally, the Series VIII finale "Only the Good..." ends with the ship doomed. Back to Earth starts with an intact ship and the words "Nine Years Later", and otherwise does not reference "Only the Good..." in any way (though Rimmer, and seemingly the entire crew minus Lister, are dead and a hologram again). This particular cop-out continues three years later in "The Beginning", with two separate discussions on how they got out of it- both are interrupted before the reveal.
• Cloneopoly: In "Samsara", Rimmer and Lister play a game of Mine-opoly. Instead of passing 'go', you pass 'Blast off!', there are squares with 'oil' and 'fuel'. Cards include 'Fuel taxs, miss three goes', 'Free fuel'. Instead of houses, players build space stations.
• Clue of Few Words: One plot point in "Me2" is Lister trying to figure out exactly why Rimmer's last words before his death were "Gazpacho Soup". It eventually turns out that Rimmer was referencing an embarrassing situation where he, unaware of the fact that gazpacho soup was meant to be served cold, asked for it to be reheated whilst having dinner with the Captain, something which he felt destroyed his chance of moving up the career ladder.
• Cluster Smeg Bomb: Lister and Rimmer, one each.
  Lister (in "Bodyswap", while in Rimmer's body): Oh, smeg! What the smeggin' smeg's he smeggin' done?! He's smeggin' killed me!!
  Rimmer (In "Only The Good..." to a vending machine): Why don't you just smegging well smeg off, you annoying litle smeggy smegging smegger?
• Colonized Solar System: Referenced in the backstory. Many of the planets and moons of the solar system have been terraformed. Lister references having visited Titan, Miranda, and Mimas while on planet leave, while Rimmer grew up on Io. Lister and The Cat actually visit Ganymede in "Stasis Leak", where Kochanski is staying at the Holiday Inn with Lister's future self.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Rimmer in Series VI can switch between soft-light (intangible) or hard-light (solid) mode. You can tell which he currently is because his soft-light outfit is red and his hard-light outfit is blue.
• Comedic Work, Serious Scene: This is generally a goofy Fantastic Comedy about a group of mismatched misfits in deep space, but "The Promised Land" involves a scene where Rimmer is Driven to Suicide after the Cat points out that, as he is a holographic creation of the real Rimmer, he's merely a computer simulation. What follows is a scene played almost dead seriously as Rimmer admits that he feels unloved in Red Dwarf and Lister tries to stop him from shutting himself down, eventually succeeding in doing so by using moonlight as a metaphor.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • In the Series X episode, "The Beginning", a rogue simulant reports to his master that they had lost the crew of Red Dwarf in an asteroid field, at which point the master, who has been described as being bred for pure malice and hatred, hands him his sword and tells him "You know what to do", at which point, the subordinate disembowels himself. The master gets annoyed and tells him he was supposed to polish it. However, in a later scene, after complaining he wants his subordinates to question his orders, another subordinate points out that the last one who did was executed, at which point the master orders him hauled away to be executed, so, he might have been intentionally messing with the first guy.
  • In the Series III episode, "Marooned", Rimmer finding out that Lister lost his virginity aged 12 - and taking issue with the fact that this must have meant he wasn't a full member of the golf club where he lost it.
  • In "Entangled", Rimmer rants about the health and safety regulations being so incredibly lax, pointing to the radiation disaster that wiped out the crew as proof. Lister counters that had more to do with Rimmer's incompetence failing to repair the drive plate properly and Rimmer takes that as further proof that the higher-ups failed basic health and safety by assigning him to do the repair!
    • On reflection, he may actually have a point. We know that Rimmer is convinced that he could rise above his station if only his superiors would give him the 'break' he craves, and we know that Rimmer badgered Capt. Hollister pretty much at every opportunity he could get (to the extent that Hollister usually did whatever it took just to make him go away). With Lister in stasis, it's entirely plausible that Rimmer started hectoring the captain to give him a chance with something important, and Hollister capitulated just to shut him up - with unfortunately fatal consequences...
    • Indeed, it is the captain's job to assign tasks based on people's skills and qualifications. Regardless of badgering he should never have allowed Rimmer to fix something so potentially catastrophic. You wouldn't let an unqualified person fix a leaking gas pipe in your factory, or even drive a fork lift! Of course Rimmer would accept the task, he's young and eager to please, the captain is really to blame, he's the one who should have known better and never let Rimmer near it - judging by his crew evaluations, he knew well that Rimmer wasn't up to it!
  Holly: (Reading Rimmer's confidential report) There's a saying amongst the officers: "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. If it's not worth doing, give it to Rimmer."
  • This exchange from "Me2" when Lister is berating Rimmer for his chronic Never My Fault syndrome:
  Lister: It's always something! You never had the right set of pencils for your G&E drawing! Your dividers don't stretch far enough!
  Rimmer: Well they don't!
  Lister: SEE?!
  • In "Queeg", Lister tells Rimmer a long and involved story about a rogue AI that's really just a set-up for a weak pun. Rimmer fails to recognise the joke, and reacts to it as a serious story. After a moment, realisation strikes him — regarding an irrelevant detail of the story, and still completely missing the fact that it was a joke.
• Comic-Book Adaptation: The show had one released by Fleetway Comics. It ran for 20 issues between 1992 and 1994 and is most notable for it's incorporation of the Development Gag of having hologrammatic characters being in greyscale.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: Lister in "Psirens". "I resent this. I resent you saving my life in this way!"
  • For context, one of Lister's defining traits is that he believes himself to be a proficient guitar player while, in actual fact, he doesn't seem to know any scales or chords and his guitar isn't remotely in tune. When the Psiren took on his appearance and mentality, it inadvertently adopted Lister's belief of guitar proficiency and translated it into actual skill. Upon realising that the Psiren could actually rock out, Cat, Kryten and Rimmer promptly shot it. To essentially be outed as bad at something he thinks he's good at is what Lister resents.
• Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit: It is revealed in "Me2" that Dave left £17.50 in his bank account on Earth. Three million years have passed, and he now owns 98% of the world's wealth. He also left a sausage out on his table which went mouldy; now the mould covers seven-eights of the surface of the Earth. Furthermore, he left the lightbulb in his bathroom, racking up a gigantic debt to the local utility company, which has now become the ruling faction on Earth and whose battle fleet is rapidly approaching in an Attempt To Collect. It turns out to be a joke by Holly.
  • Mentioned in the American version. Lister's first words after being informed that he's been in suspended animation for almost three million years involve exclaiming that his baseball cards must be worth a fortune.
  • In the original version he also laments that he has an unreturned library book.
• Consulting Mister Puppet: In "Quarantine", Rimmer becomes deranged after contracting a holovirus, and starts associating with a penguin Hand Puppet called Mr. Flibble, who was the former trope namer.
  Rimmer (Shaking with rage): Mr. Flibble's very cross. You shouldn't have run away from him. What are we going to do with them, Mr. Flibble?
  (Mr. Flibble appears to whisper in Rimmer's ear)
  Rimmer: We can't possibly do that!
  (Mr Flibble tilts to look at the crew)
  Rimmer: Who would clean up the mess?
• Contemplate Our Navels: Either played straight or as a parody of science fiction in general being wont to do this, much of the show was taken up by philosophical ideas via sci-fi trappings, i.e. the manifestation of Lister's confidence and paranoia, or the Inquisitor.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the episode "Quarantine", Kryten furnishes Rimmer with a copy of the Space Corps Directives manual, when he accuses Kryten of making up the directives he quotes - this act drives the plot of the episode. Following this, Rimmer often quotes directives himself. As a Running Gag, he always gets them wrong (in the most hilarious manner possible) and is corrected by Kryten.
  • While Ace Rimmer doesn't appear until Series IV, the seeds for his character had already been sown: In the first series episode "Me2", Rimmer, after speaking with his hologramatic double, remarks "What a guy!" and in the second series episode "Kryten", he asks the other crew members to talk him up to the female survivors of the Nova 5, by calling him by his (alleged) nickname, "Ace".
• Contrived Coincidence: Parodied extensively in "Entangled".
  • Earlier on, in "Cassandra", the SS Silverburg had been at the bottom of an ocean moon for millions of years, yet it wasn't until after the Canaries boarded it that the bulkhead gave way, drowning many of them.
• Cool Cat: Cat obviously, although he's humanoid.
• Coordinated Clothes:
  • In "Parallel Universe" in the Cat's song dream sequence, our guys are wearing matching outfits. The Cat is performing the "Tongue Tied" song, and Rimmer and Lister are his backing vocals. The trio is dressed in the same red suits with frills. And they all dance!
  • "Quarantine": At the end of the episode, Lister, Kryten and Cat all wear red-and-white checked gingham dresses which Rimmer wore when he was insane, being infected by the holo-virus. The guys probably want to psych him out the same as he psyched out them with his madness.
• Cosmic Retcon: The resulting time paradox caused in "Out of Time" appears to have been this, with it being explained in Series 7 how it resulted in Starbug's size and design being altered and upgraded. It would also explain how Kochanski's appearance in the main universe changed, as Lister was able to recongise the alternate Kochanski despite being played by The Other Darrin.
• Couch Gag: The final line or two of Holly's show-opening distress calls in the first two series.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: In "Psirens", the crew find a message left by a man who, lacking a pen, used his own blood and intestines. They were torn as to whether he used his kidney as a full stop (period) or whether it had just "plopped out".
• Courtroom Episode: "Justice".
• Cowboy Episode: The episode "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" involves the characters entering a virtual Western town that serves as a metaphor for Kryten's struggles with computer virus. The episode even end with Starbug flying off into the sunset.
• Cranial Processing Unit: Kryten even has spare heads which have their own personalities.
• Cranium Chase: In "Cured", Kryten wakes up to discover that his head has been removed from his body and stuck on top of a mop handle. His head starts yelling instructions to his body which is blundering along the corridor searching for it.
• Crapola Tech: Crapola Inc (based in Taiwan) is the Trope Namer, who were responsible for the creation of, among other things, Talkie Toaster, a toaster with obsessive artificial intelligence.
• Crapsack World: Humanity is either dead or evolved beyond recognition, either way, they never developed FTL drives to reach this far out in space, leaving the only things for the characters to interact with are remnants of humanity that have also drifted out here and lived so long they've grown completely insane. Killer robots, monstrous viruses, insane holograms, mutant bio weapons. The closest thing to any sort of society are the Gelfs, which is probably a rather generous descriptor for them. It's truly a hopeless and godless world, still, you've got to have a laugh.
• Creator Cameo: Rob Grant appears in "Backwards" as a man un-smoking a cigarette.
• Credits Gag:
  • In "Future Echoes", the usual credits roll has the developing polaroid of Lister with his twins over the top.
  • In "Waiting for God", the credits stop as Rimmer comes to his horrible realization.
  • Rimmer and the skutters play the end theme on a Hammond organ in "Dimension Jump".
  • A Western-style theme is played for "Gunmen of the Apocalypse"'s credits.
  • Elvis Presley (okay, an impersonator) sings the Red Dwarf theme in "Meltdown".
  • In the remastered version of "Backwards", the credits are indeed shown backwards.
  • In "Stoke Me a Clipper", Ace Rimmer's theme is played instead.
• Creepy Crossdresser: The show plays this trope for laughs a few times:
  • In the Series V episode "Demons and Angels", Lister is running for his life from the evil versions of the Red Dwarf crew, until he runs into Evil Rimmer ... wearing what is best described as a Dominatrix-type get up.
  • In another Series V episode, "Quarantine". When Rimmer contracts a holo-virus that sends him mad, he appears out of uniform, and holding Mr Flibble. Also lampshaded:
    [Rimmer appears in an observation window. He is NOT in uniform.]
    Rimmer: Is something amiss?
    Lister: [trying to disguise the tremor in his voice] Amiss? God no. What could possibly be amiss?
    Rimmer: You don't think there's anything amiss? I'm sitting here wearing a red and white checked gingham dress — and army boots — and you think that's un-amiss?
• Cringe Comedy: Rimmer's hobbies, sex life and general attitude.
• Critical Staffing Shortage: It starts with over 1,000 crew. After almost all of them are killed by a nuclear accident, the ship is manned by two former vending machine technicians (one of whom is dead), a highly evolved cat, and a sanitation droid.
• Cross-Referenced Titles: : Series 3's "Polymorph" is about the crew facing off against the titular GELF. Series 6's "Emohawk: Polymorph II" is about the crew facing off against a domesticated version of the polymorph, the Emohawk.
  • "Back To Reality" is about the crew being trapped in a halluncination caused by a Despair Squid. "Back To Earth" is about the crew being trapped in a halluncination caused by an Elation Squid (a female Despair Squid").
• Cryo-Prison: The equivalent of the brig on the "Dwarf", and the reason Lister survived the reactor leak.
• Crystal Spires and Togas: In an episode where the lads got split up into a good and an evil part, the good version was portrayed like this.
• Cuckoo Nest: "Back To Reality" tries to convince the crew that they were really immersed in a Red Dwarf video game, a prospect all the more demoralizing when they discover the kinds of people they "really" are and the world they inhabit.
• Cultural Stereotypes:
  • Death is apparently "like being on holiday with a group of Germans".
  • In the USA pilot, death is "like being in an Amish bachelor party".
  • Three million years without sex is a long time for an Albanian shepherd who's allergic to wool. A deleted scene reveals the line to originally about a Welsh shepherd.
  • Lister's response to Jean Paul Satre's philosophy that "Hell is being trapped for all eternity in a room with your friends" with "All his mates were French".
• Custom-Built Host: The unfinished episode "Bodysnatcher" (which has a reconstructed version of it using storyboards available on the Blu-Ray release) has Rimmer shave off Lister's hair so that he can try to clone himself a new body for his consciousness to reside in. Unfortunately for him, Lister puts a stop to this before he can attempt to do so.
• Cut a Slice, Take the Rest: Played with. Lister carefully measures out a spoonful of curry powder, throws the rest of the can into his mix, and dumps the spoonful back into the can.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: One of the recurring jokes on the show is characters threatening very unusual and elaborate acts of violence against each other; i.e., "rip out his windpipe and beat him to death with the tonsil end," "shove my fist so far down his gob, I'll be able to pull the label off his underpants..."
• Damned by Faint Praise: The Least Worst Scripts.
• Damsel in Distress: Princess Bonjela in "Stoke Me a Clipper".

• Danger with a Deadline: In one episode, Rimmer is playing chess against one of the automated cleaning robots with full knowledge that while the robot might be able to outplay him, it also begins its work shift in a few minutes meaning it has to leave and thus forfeit the game.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Series V had much darker and creepier atmosphere than the previous series.
  • Back to Earth has shades of this at points, such as the Garden of Remembrance scene which is played pretty much straight down the line until Cat shows up. In fact, really any scene involving Lister and Kochanski.
• Dark World: The low Red Dwarf in "Demons and Angels", complete with a Red Dwarf crew of evil Doppelgängers.
• Daydream Surprise: In the episode “Blue”, Lister has a dream where Rimmer (who had gone off to be Ace) returns and acts friendly towards Lister, culminating in the two kissing. Naturally, the audience isn’t shown that this is a dream until after the kiss.
• Dead All Along: Ace Rimmer, the second time he visits the crew.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart:
  • Arnold Rimmer might technically be this to Ace Rimmer, having died in a nuclear accident and been brought back as a hologram in the pilot.
  • In Ace's second appearance, he's dying and attempting to convince Arnold to continue his dimension-hopping heroics.
  • Rimmer turned out to be the latest in a long series of alternate Rimmers who took up the mantle, so many that his predecessor's holo-bees comprise a Saturn-like planetary ring.
• Deadly Escape Mechanism: In "Skipper", Rimmer comes across an Alternate Universe where the radiation leak hasn't quite happened yet. When it does, he comes across Captain Hollister, trying to escape on board an escape pod. Unfortunately, it manages to jam before it can leave, leaving Hollister to be blasted in the face by several tons of radiation.
• Deep-Immersion Gaming:
  • The titular video game in the episode "Better Than Life".
  • The Series VII episode "Duct Soup" contains a scene cut from the original broadcast but restored for the extended DVD release in which Kochanski mentions spending years hooked up to a computer (the actual term "Better Than Life" is not mentioned, but the premise sounds similar) during her school years. After returning to the real world, she confesses to "going off the rails" for a while and becoming a "retro-punk".
• Deflector Shields: While shields are stated to exist, they are distressingly lacking on Starbug. So much so that in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", the simulants gave their shields an upgrade so they would be more of a challenge.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • "The Rimmer Experience" is a place of wonder, excitement and... wonder.
  • Also, in the beginning of "Stasis Leak", when Rimmer finds Lister reading his diary:
  Rimmer: Lister, that is my private, personal, private diary full of my personal, private, personal things.
  • In "Waiting For God", Rimmer about why he's superior to Lister:
  Rimmer: It's because I'm better than you! Better trained, better equipped, better... better. Just-just better!
• Depending Upon the Undependable: The show began when Arnold Rimmer, who had failed to progress beyond a minor supervisor's role in fifteen years service, was trusted with overseeing a critical engine repair. The result was the death of everyone on the ship (other than Dave Lister who was in stasis). In one episode, he was put on trial by an AI over this incident, and Kryten's defense entirely centers around the fact Rimmer is so obviously an idiot, anyone putting him in a position that might endanger the crew would be the true negligent. And the AI accepts this defense completely.
• Depraved Homosexual: In "Demons and Angels": Evil Rimmer, dressed like a punk version of Dr. Frank N Furter, tells Lister in his most intimidating voice:
  "First, I'm going to whip you within an inch of your life. Then... I'm going to have you."
• Despair Event Horizon: The venom of the Suicide Squid in "Back To Reality" creates a hallucination designed to cause this. For Kryten the thing which pushes him over the edge is taking a human life; for Lister it's 'discovering' that his 'real' self is a brutal enforcer for a totalitarian regime; for Rimmer it's no longer being able to blame his shortcomings on his upbringing; and for Cat it's...not being cool any more.
  Cat: Duane Dibbley..?
• Diabolus ex Machina:
  • Used for comedic effect in "Timeslides".
  • Used seriously in "Only the Good..."
• Didn't We Use This Joke Already?:
  Cat: So, what is it?
  Lister: Oh, someone punch him out!
• Dinner Order Flub: Gazpacho Soup Day!
• Dirty Coward: Captain Hollister in "Skipper", in an alternate reality, tries to escape the impending radiation leak in an escape pod. It jams.
• Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: It's far from being the only excuse he gives, but Rimmer sometimes blames at least some of his awfulness on the fact that he suffers from the worst disability there is: he's dead.
• Distracted by My Own Sexy: The Cat, repeatedly.
• The Ditz: The Cat. The old Cat Priest tells us it runs In the Blood:
  Cat Priest: Then the boy was born, to the cripple and the idiot!
  The Cat: What idiot?
  Cat Priest: Your father, boy!
  The Cat: My father was a jelly brain?!
  Cat Priest: Yes! That's why he ate his own feet!
  The Cat: (deadpan) I did wonder.
• Do Androids Dream?: The notion of 'Silicon Heaven' is programmed into all A.I.s above a certain standard (it's implied that scutters, at least, lack this programming). In the episode "The Last Day", Kryten faces shutdown, and accepts it humbly because of his belief in Silicon Heaven. Lister tries to argue him out of his belief, apparently unsuccessfully; however, Kryten later disables his robocidal replacement, Hudzen, with the same arguments Lister used on him.
  Hudzen: (in existential agony) No... Silicon heaven? Calculators... Just... Die?
  • Kryten then explains that he was only using these arguments to disable Hudzen, and that his faith in Silicon Heaven is unshaken.
• Domestic Appliance Disaster: In "Kryten", Lister tries to press his least slovenly clothes into a fit state to impress the female crew the Dwarfers are about to rescue — or so he thinks. Discovering he has burnt an iron-shaped hole in his garment, Lister shrugs, puts it on anyway, and spray-paints the skin underneath with an almost- matching color of spray-paint, so as to conceal the hole...
• Don't Ask: The Cat says this to the others in the episode "Backwards", having just found out what going to the loo in reverse is like.
• Don't Be Ridiculous: Lister and the Cat spend a minute sharing sexual fantasies about Wilma Flintstone before Lister points out how absurd they're being.
  Lister: She'll never leave Fred and we know it.
• Don't Explain the Joke
  Holly: Anything's better than listening to an album by Olivia Newton John...
• Double Vision: And how. Almost every series has an episode which utilizes this effect. "Stasis Leak" utilizes it the most impressively: The characters travel to before the accident, and concludes with three Listers and three Rimmers, plus Kochanski and the Cat bickering in Lister and Rimmer's bunk, leading that time period's Rimmer to have a complete mental breakdown:

  "Three Listers! Splendid! Perhaps Lister here would like to go over to the fridge and open a bottle of wine for Lister and Lister! Rimmer here doesn't drink, because he's dead, but I wouldn't mind a glass!"

  • Rather impressively for the time, Danny John-Jules uses this technique to high-five himself in Series IV.
• Do You Want to Copulate?: The Holoship does not have families, and crew members are required to have sex at least twice a day. Refusing an offer of sex is considered bad manners.
• Drama Panes: In general, any time, you see a character stare out of the observation dome (a transparent dome-like area used for stargazing), it's usually for dramatic purposes:
  • It's first appearance is in "Better Than Life", where Rimmer uses the opportunity to gaze out of it after learning that his father is dead. Lister tries to console Rimmer over it and the opportunity is used to reveal how abusive Rimmer's father was.
  • It's other appearance is in "Thanks for the Memory", where Rimmer, trying to cope with the fact that apparent memories of a long-gone girlfriend were actually implanted memories of Lister, gazes out of the observation dome again. Lister tries to help Rimmer by reminding him of the character building experience of heartbreak, but Rimmer has none of it and wants his memories erased of the fact.
• Dr. Frankenstein: It's specifically stated that Lister named his cat Frankenstein after the scientist, not the monster.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Queeg in "Queeg".
• Driven to Suicide / Heroic Sacrifice: When the attempt to cure Lister of the Epideme virus by isolating it in his arm and amputating it fails, he leaves Starbug with the intention of incinerating himself and the virus along with him before he can infect the rest of the crew. However the sentient virus talks him out of it by tricking him into thinking there is still a cure. Fortunately after they discover that this was a lie Kochanski is able to outwit the virus.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: The offscreen death of Kochanski in Back to Earth is a subversion, as she is given a memorial scene in Part One, and in Part Two it is revealed she is still alive and Kryten lied about it to Lister.
• Drowning Pit: The hidden psychopath attempts to dispose of Cat this way in "Cured".
• Drunk with Power: In the episode "Officer Rimmer", eternal prat Arnold Judas Rimmer is promoted to officer after he weasels his way into a captain's good graces (in fact, he was trying to blow up the captain's ship, which accidentally saved him from an asteroid belt). He immediately starts instituting a blatant class system on the ship with the other crew members relegated to crappy service elevators and corridors while Rimmer opens an exclusive officer's lounge and reclines in luxury. Then he goes one step further by creates dozens of duplicates of himself to order around and sing his praises. By the end, he's forced to give up his promotion when he inadvertently creates a Rimmer-hybrid monster and has to beg the others for help.
• Dude, Not Funny!: The use of the word 'clitoris' in "Polymorph" offended some viewers to the extent that they ceased their viewership. One Mary Whitehouse-type mother wrote to The BBC basically stating that she hadn't wanted her young daughter to know what a clitoris was until the daughter was post-menopausal.
• Duplicate Divergence: The hologram Rimmer was originally a perfect copy of the original, but the years spent with Lister and the others gradually changed him, to the point where he becomes the newest Ace Rimmer. When the original Rimmer is restored to life by Kryten's nanobots, Lister is dismayed at how he's exactly like he used to be.

E-I

• Early-Bird Cameo: The final scene of "Twentica" is set on board Red Dwarf, but uses the bunkroom set for Series XII (the scene is filmed in extreme close-up to disguise this). The final scene wasn't recorded on the night of the audience shoot due to time constraints, and by the time they came to film it as a pick-up the set had already been redesigned for the next series.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first two series are this entirely, largely due to the lower budget and Characterization Marches On:
  • The mood is much darker with minimal music. Lister spends much of the time having flashbacks to the days before the disaster, playing pranks on Rimmer and wondering how to get Kochanski back.
  • Holly is male, and plays a central role in the story. He would often explain to Lister what was going on. This was often handled by Kryten later on. Series I portrays him as more of a Genius Ditz who understands advanced concepts and sometimes even belittles Rimmer for his stupidity, which gives way to him being more outright stupid in Series II, and especially after he became female.
  • They almost never leave the ship - when they do it's using Blue Midget, not Starbug. For Rimmer to go outside he needs to be projected in a 'hologram cage' but he doesn't need to do this later on.
  • Kryten did not appear in Series I. He was introduced and only appeared in in the first episode of Series II, but looks, sounds, and acts very different, as he is played by David Ross as an English butler robot. At the time he was only considered a guest character. When they brought him back for Series III, Robert Llewellyn started playing him as a Canadian robot who handled much of the exposition.
  • The filming style is more washed out, and Rimmer's hologram 'H' is a different shape.
  • Cat mostly acts like a selfish idiot and is mostly there for comic relief rather than adding to the story (in later series he would often pilot Starbug because of his sharper feline senses and reflexes).
  • In his first few appearances as a regular cast member, Kryten obeys Rimmer over Lister due to the former being the higher-ranking officer of the two. This subsequently changes to him being programmed to obey living crewmembers (and thereby Lister over Rimmer) over holographic crewmembers, no matter what rank they may be.
• Egopolis: Timewave begins with the crew claiming a moon rich in Helium 7 for the JMC. Rimmer proceeds to name the planet 'Planet Rimmer', complete with its star becoming known as 'Sunny Rim'.
• Einstein Hair: In "Twentica", the crew are looking for Albert Einstein's help in putting together a device to defeat the Expenoids. They're told that he's lost his marbles and is living rough on the streets. They find a guy who fits Einstein's description (Read: Iconic haircut) and drag him back to the speakeasy science lab only to be told that he's just some random bum named Bob. The guy manages to get the device working anyway.
• Eldritch Location: The crew come across several 'alternate universes' where normal laws of physics and reason are skewed or don't exist at all.
  • The inverted gender universe in "Parallel Universe".
  • The backwards running time period in "Backwards".
  • The living photographs in "Timeslides".
  • Red Dwarf itself in "White Hole".
  • Though "scientifically" explained, the justice zone in "Justice".
  • The psi moon in "Terrorform".
  • The effects of the despair squid and its cousin in both "Back To Reality" and Back to Earth.
  • The crew enter a subspace passage surrounded in an infinite void in "Ouroboros".
  • The unreality bubbles in "Out of Time".
  • The stasis leak from "Stasis Leak".
  • The entire 'prime' universe in "Skipper", before Kryten fixes the quantum skipper - whatever decision is made the opposite happens.
• Election Day Episode: The season 12 episode "Mechocracy" sees Kryten and Rimmer running for "Machine President" in order to resolve a strike amongst the machines of the titular ship. The election is initially a draw, but Kryten wins by making a deal with Talkie Toaster for his vote.
• Embarrassing Initials: In "Polymorph", the newly anger-free Rimmer's suggestion for dealing with the eponymous alien monster is to form a Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society. He acknowledges that the abbreviation is something of a drawback.
• Embarrassing Middle Name:
  • Kryten-2X4B-523P — apparently mechanoids consider "2X4B" to be an embarrassing middle name. But at least it's not "2Q4B"...
  • Arnold Judas Rimmer. "Lemons" reveals that the reason Rimmer's mother gave him the name was because she was part of the Church of Judas, who believed that he was Jesus' twin brother, who willingly sacrificed both his life and reputation to save his brother by taking his place on the cross. The ending heavily implies she was right.
• Empathic Environment: The psi-moon in "Terrorform".
• The End of the Beginning: Both the first episode of the very first series ("The End") and the final episode of series X ("The Beginning").
• The Ending Changes Everything: In "Give & Take", Lister is kidnapped by an insane medical droid, Asclepius. When Rimmer and Kryten rescue him they accidentally destroy a specimen jar containing two kidneys, then discover that Lister is missing his kidneys, and presume the kidneys they destroyed were Lister's, which had been removed by Asclepius. However, the plot is resolved when they travel back in time to remove the kidneys from a past version of Lister and implant them in the present-day Lister, meaning that his kidneys had already been removed before he even met Asclepius - the implication being that the droid was actually perfectly sane, and was trying to give Lister a life-saving operation, and if Rimmer and Kryten had not waded in the events of the episode would never have happened.
• Enhance Button: Parodied mercilessly in "Back to Earth" — Uncrop! It serves as a Shout-Out / Take That! at the similar scene from Blade Runner.
• Enemy Without: The crew (and ship) are split into "High" and "Low" copies in "Demons and Angels"; the Highs don't survive very long when they encounter the Lows. In "Terrorform", the entire planet is literally Rimmer's self-hatred attacking him.
• Epiphany Therapy: It's been long established that Rimmer's neuroses are partly the fault of his emotionally distant and controlling father, who never said he was proud of him and used to stretch him on a rack so he'd be tall enough to join the Space Corps. In the episode "The Beginning" he learns that this man isn't his father at all and this almost instantly cures his self-doubt.
• Escapism: In an episode, the crew discovers a long-lost VR game called "Better than Life". It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Inquisitor may be a murdering Simulant with a superiority complex, but as he explains, he judges all of his victims by their own standards, even shapeshifting into them for their "trial." This is his reason for sentencing Lister and Kryten to be erased, because they each know they had more potential they never lived up to, whereas Rimmer blames his upbringing for his faults and the Cat is a Small Name, Big Ego who believes everything he does is awesome. Of course, Lister is able to thwart him by the end of the episode and return everything to normal anyway.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Cat thinks he's this - "Face it, buddy, I have a body that makes men wet!" - but no-one that isn't illusory ever shows any interest in him. Space Corps Special Service Test Pilot Arnold "Ace" Rimmer, on the other hand...
  Bongo: If you're interested, I'll be in my quarters at lunchtime, covered in taramasalata.
  Ace: I didn't know your bread was buttered that side, Bongo.
  Bongo: It isn't. I've been happily married for 35 years. It's just, a chap like you can turn a guy's head.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Yes, really, this does actually crop up in "Holoship". What somewhat influences Rimmer's attempt to become a crew member aboard the titular vessel is the ship requirement, in Kryten's words, "to have sex with beautiful, brilliant women, twice daily, on demand." It's a health rule.
  Rimmer: Twice a day? That's more than some people manage in a lifetime!
• "Everyone Is Gone" Episode: The show is an example of an Everyone's Gone series. In both the TV series and the novels, Dave Lister is placed in suspended animation as a punishment for breaking the ship's rules. While he is in stasis, a catastrophe hits the ship and wipes out the crew. Red Dwarf, formerly almost a small town in space, carries on under autopilot and computer control for three million years until the ship's AI judges it safe to awaken Lister. Holly the computer has a long frustrating time getting this through to Lister:
  Everybody's dead, Dave. Everybody. Is. Dead. Dave, everyone's dead. Everybody except you is dead...
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: The core premise and Trope Namer. And then inverted in "Skipper" when Rimmer leaps to an alternate universe just before the lethal radiation leak, and Holly informs Arnold - in the exact same detail - that yes, everyone is alive, Arnold. A pity they die a couple of minutes later, then.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Cat does not have a name, and is simply called the Cat or Cat throughout the show. The reason for this, according to the books, is that all cats think that they're the center of the universe and the idea that someone might not know who they are is beyond their comprehension.
• Evil Twin:
  • The Low counterparts in "Demons and Angels".
  • An evil imitation of Lister shows up in "Psirens".
• Evolutionary Levels: The evolution of the Cat race stopped once they reached humanoid, plus or minus a few nipples.
  • Which makes sense (well, Red Dwarf sense, anyway) given that the whole race evolved in an environment specifically designed and built for human habitation.
• Exotic Entree: The evil future selves in "Out of Time" spend their lives traveling through time so they can eat exotic delicacies like dolphin sweetmeats and baby seal hearts with hosts such as Louis XVI and Adolf Hitler.
• Explosive Instrumentation: A couple times early on, more frequent in the later series. Lister, the Cat and Kryten all die to exploding instrument panels in "Out of Time".
• Explosive Leash: Lister gets saddled with one by the BEGGs in "Entangled".
• Explosive Overclocking: In "White Hole", the crew overclocks Holly, who's been descending deeper and deeper into computer senility, hoping to bring her intelligence back. They get her to an IQ of 12,000, but it drops her lifespan down to less than four minutes.
• Exposition of Immortality: Given that the titular space vessel has been travelling away from inhabited human space for three million years, many of the remnants they encounter are at least that old or older.
  • The Inquisitor is a self-repairing simulant who Kryten tells of as "living until the end of time."
  • Hudzen 10 was the replacement model for Kryten. And his delivery pod followed the Series 4000 mechanoid through deep space until it found him on the Dwarf; and all that time alone did nothing for his sanity chip.
  • Many of the simulants encountered have been around since they originally rebelled against humanity, too.
  • Legion formed as a gestalt during a series of experiments in shared consciousness by a group of human scientists; he tells us when they died he had to hang around as a "mindless essence" for several million years until the Red Dwarf crew showed up.
• Expospeak Gag: Played for laughs several times, most notably in "Stasis Leak".
  Cat: (to Rimmer) What is it?
  Rimmer: It's a rend in the space-time continuum.
  Cat: (to Lister) What is it?
  Lister: The stasis room freezes time, you know, makes time stand still. So whenever you have a leak, it must preserve whatever it's leaked into, and it's leaked into this room.
  Cat: (to Rimmer) What is it?
  Rimmer: It's singularity, a point in the universe where the normal laws of space and time don't apply.
  Cat: (to Lister) What is it?
  Lister: It's a hole back into the past.
  Cat: Oh, a magic door! Well, why didn't you say?
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: In "Can Of Worms", Cat is impregnated by a polymorph who shoves her ovipositor down his throat while they are making out.
• Facepalm: Both Lister and Rimmer frequently facepalmed because of each other's insane ideas, general smeg-headedness or extreme and disgusting slobbishness.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Getting back to Earth.
• Fang Thpeak: The Cat suffers a little bit of this from time to time.
• Fantastic Drug:
  • Marijuana gin, which is probably simply cannabis-infused gin. Lister has drunk it at least once before, according to Rimmer.
  • Titan mushrooms, "more popularly known to the space-beatnik community as 'freaky fungus'": hallucinogenic mushrooms grown on Saturn's largest moon, where Red Dwarf had stopped off for shore leave. Lister fed Rimmer some Titan mushrooms as part of a fried breakfast, causing Rimmer to show up to inspection parade almost naked and "attack two senior officers, believing them to be giraffes who were armed and dangerous".
  • Outrazone (pronounced vaguely like "ultrazone" in a mock-Canadian accent) is a chemical gunk that is a highly-addictive drug for mechanoids. Kryten's outrazone-addicted "brother" Able is The Stoner.
• Fan Disservice: Lister making out with a Psiren and a Gelf in Series VI, as well as a walking corpse in Series VII. Supposedly this was specifically done as a joke on Craig Charles after the actor complained about Chris Barrie getting too many kissing scenes.
• Fantastic Vermin: The Starbug has an infestation of "space weevils" the size of large rats.
• Fast-Killing Radiation: The inciting incident which led to Lister being the last person left alive on Red Dwarf was an explosive radioactive leak of Cadmium II which wiped out everybody on board the ship. As seen in "Me2" especially, Rimmer and the others went down very rapidly, with Rimmer only having enough time to say "Gazpacho Soup!" before dying. It also seems to have reduced everyone into neat-looking piles of dust by the time Lister gets out of stasis. Of course, this might be Justified by the fact that the leak was caused by a fictional isotope of Cadmium. The little piles of dust is due to the main character being in stasis for several million years, rather than the radiation itself.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The teleporter apparently works based on 'subspace', allowing for instant transportation.
• Fat and Skinny: Baxter and Kill Crazy in Series VIII.
• Fate Worse than Death: Incredibly, Played for Laughs (just like everything else) when the guys are interviewing potential replacements for Rimmer.
  Lister: Well, of course, there's one or two other people we have to see, but, in theory, if offered the post of replacement hologram, would you accept?
  Miss Harrison: No.
  Lister: (clearly disappointed) No?
  Miss Harrison: No, I think I'm better off where I am.
  Cat: But you're dead!
  Miss Harrison: And meeting you guys has really made me appreciate it a whole lot more.
• Fee Fi Faux Pas: Rimmer's last words were "Gazpacho soup", which Lister eventually discovers is because, when he'd been with the Space Corps for 13 years, he got invited to have dinner with the Captain and, being arrogant and ignorant, he had no idea that the Gazpacho soup starter was meant to be served cold and so he demanded it be taken away and heated. He considers this perhaps the biggest reason why he never went anywhere in the ranks, going on an anguished rant about how he could have been somebody if it had ever been mentioned to him that Gazpacho soup is drunk cold while he was in training. Lister kindly refrains from pointing out that it is more likely that Rimmer never got anywhere because he is an unlikeable incompetent with more ego than skill.
  • The point that this incident could not possibly account for the prior 13 years of failure bears repeating.
• Feet-First Introduction: In "Demons and Angels", the evil version of Rimmer is introduced walking down a stairway to menace Lister, revealing that he's dressed as a sexually sadistic dominatrix.
• Fem Bot: Female droids do turn top, such as Crawford from "Trojan" and the unnamed female simulant from "Gunmen Of The Apocalypse" and "Rimmerworld", the latter of which is convincingly human looking and attractive enough for Lister to hit on. The 4000 series has female models as well, with many of them appearing in "Siliconia". Camille is a subversion in that her 4000 series appearance is an illusion, since she's actually a GELF.
• Fictional Board Game: One episode starts with Rimmer and Lister playing a game called mine-opoly, which appears to be a JMC branded version of monopoly.
• Fictional Flag: According to Last Human, GELF society has flags which feature the double-helix of the nucleic acid DNA on them, alongside the words "The Key to Life ? nothing should be denied" in a strange script.
• Fictional Greetings and Farewells:
  • There is the the "Rimmer Salute".
  • The "Ace Rimmer" goes "Smoke me a kipper. I'll be back for breakfast".
• Fictional Sport: Zero Gee Football, as followed by Dave Lister. Appears to be a form of grid-iron football played in a closed dome (Jim Bexley Speed apparently plays "roof attack", and appears on a poster over Lister's bunk looking something like the San Diego Chargers uniform.)
• Fictional Video Game: Mention is made of VR-immersion games such as "Better Than Life" and "Streets of Loredo", while an unnamed text-adventure game features a character named Gandalf the Master Wizard.
• Final Season Casting: The main cast of Series VIII, the last series of the original BBC run, saw the returns of Chris Barrie (who had been Commuting on a Bus throughout Series VII), Norman Lovett (who hadn't been a main character since Series 2), and Mac McDonald (who had only been in on a recurring basis in the first two series).
• Finger-Licking Poison: In "Back in the Red", with a (non-lethal) drug in the seal of an envelope.
• First-Episode Twist: Spoiler alert: Lister is the last human alive and is stranded 3 million years into deep space, accompanied only by the hologram of his dead bunkmate Rimmer, a senile computer and a creature that evolved from his pet cat. Naturally, watching the debut episode means waiting for this situation to establish itself. The original trailer for the show carefully avoided revealing that everyone except Lister would be killed off, only using footage from before the accident that kills the crew and, after providing short bios for Lister and Rimmer (not mentioning the Cat at all) saying that viewers would have to tune in to find out about the rest of the cast...
  • An early plan for the show, discussed in DVD commentaries, was to take this idea even further. The senior crew of the ship would have been played by well-known actors and the first episode would focus on them — right up to the point where they all died and attention shifted to characters who had been treated as little more than extras up to that point.
• Five-Token Band: A science fiction take on the subject. The crew consists of a mixed race human from Liverpool (Lister), a White Hologram who originates from Io (Rimmer),, the descendent of Lister's pet cat who resembles a Afro-British Male (The Cat), the Robot Buddy (Kryten) and a Benevolent A.I. who has been both a male and a female over the course of the show's run (Holly). The Series VI and VIII cast reinforces this with the addition of an alternate universe version of Kochanski, (a white female from another dimension) to the cast.
• Fix It in Post: In a smeg-up from "Meltdown", Lister knocks on an obviously-wooden-sounding wall and says, matter-of-factly, "Stone," causing the audience to start laughing. Their laughter set off Danny John-Jules, further ruining the take, at which point Craig Charles shouted at the audience "They were gonna sort that out in the dub!"
• Flanderization: The Cat goes from being a rather ditzy guy who acts like a cat and likes his clothes to a guy who's obsessed with fashion and sometimes says stupid things to just being really, really stupid, having virtually no lines that don't have to do with clothes, and few to no feline tendencies at all.
  • On the other hand, he also goes from being completely self-absorbed (as in, he cares more about his lunch than a dying Lister) and absolutely unhelpful to being Lister's buddy who will even sometime go out of his way for him. He also becomes rather more helpful to the crew in general. While Cat's initial traits DID get exaggerated, it also came with more screentime and him becoming more than a random wandering gag.
  • He's also become a good pilot as of Series VI.
  • While Lister's song writing skills prior to Series VI were less than ideal, he was still capable of playing guitar without causing pain and suffering to those around him.
  • Lister also suffers despite having grown a fair bit during the first six series. Series VII sees him acting like a complete idiot, it's hard to believe this was the same guy who was 'faulted' by the clones in Rimmerworld for being brave, selfless and charismatic.
  • Kryten abruptly becomes something of a Mother Hen-like figure after Kochanski arrives, with several episodes of series VII being about his issues with her, and he starts nagging all the characters a lot more. Toned down in Series VIII.
  • Holly starts off as a fairly competent computer with the occasional moments of ditzy-ness, but it gets worse with each series (such as in "White Hole" where she can only count by hitting her head on the screen) and by series VII and VIII he's completely out of it, offering advice and plans that don't make any sense (although with the odd moments of lucidity). This could be explained by his computer senility just getting worse, though.
  • Rimmer's cowardice isn't referenced in the first series. In fact, his first reaction to seeing The Cat is to attempt to attack him. By "Backwards", his first reaction to a Bar Brawl is to hide under a table at the first sign of trouble.
• A Fool for a Client: This happens in the series, allowing the setup of the following gag:
  Rimmer: If only I'd hired a smarter lawyer, instead of the brain-dead, pompous, stupid-haired git I ended up with.
  Lister: You defended yourself!
• Flowery Insults: While each of the "boyz" (including Holly an Kochanski) has astonishing capacity of verbal sparring, the award for the greatest use of this trope goes to Kryten for his defence of Rimmer in "Justice" based on Rimmer being too incompetent to be responsible for death of Red Dwarf whole crew.
  Kryten: (Turns) I ask the court one key question: would the Space Corps have allowed this man (Poits at Rimmer) ever to be in a position where he might endanger the ship? A man so petty and small-minded he would while away his evenings sewing name labels on to his ship-issue condoms? A man of such awsome stupidity...
  Rimmer: Objection.
  Justice: Objection overruled.
  Kryten:: A man of such awsome stupidity, he even objects to his own defence counsel. An over-zealous, trumped up little squirt...
  Rimmer: Objection.
  Justice: Overruled.
  Kryten: An incompetent vending-machine repairman with a Napoleon complex, who commanded as much respect and affection from his fellow crew members as Long John Silver's parrot...
  Rimmer: Objection.
  Justice: If you object to your own counsel once more, Mr Rimmer, you'll be in contempt.
  Kryten: 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 yoghurt.

• Foreshadowing: An unintended one; the gag at the end of "Rimmerworld" was originally intended for future Lister to come into the room after the gang had teleported out, oblivious to the fact that their past selves had just been there. This was eventually cut, leading into "Out of Time", where something horrible has happened to Lister.
  Future Rimmer: Rimmerworld was weeks ago! We're now more concerned with the really horrible thing that's happened to Lister!
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: By the end of the seventh season, the crew had access to, among other things: An inter-dimensional transporter, a virus which brings dreams to life, a portal leading to Red Dwarf, pre-radiation incident, a batch of developing fluid which allows one to enter any photo and alter time from that point, a matter transporting paddle, a DNA reconstituter, a triplicator, a virus which bestows incredible luck, and nanomachines which seem to be able to create almost anything (up to and including planets and sentient life forms). None of these items are ever used or even referenced more than once (Except the luck virus, which becomes a Chekhov's Boomerang in Season VIII). But worst of all, in a show where the entire plot conceit is a crew stranded in deep space, trying to get home, the Dwarfers find a fully functional time drive which allows them to travel anywhere in the universe, at any point in time. And yes, they can and do use it to go to Earth. More than once. Somehow, this doesn't end the show.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: "Bodyswap".
• Freudian Trio: Kind of a meta-example, but the producers (Rob Grant, Doug Naylor, Ed Bye) could sort of count as a power trio. Rob Grant was known for the impulsive and quick episodic comedy side, and given his rather large girth (In more recent years anyway. In his Creator Cameo, he hasn't really gotten fat yet.), could be identified as the id. Doug Naylor focuses on, and think too too much, on the science fiction element and on story arcs, that could identify him as the superego, and can be somewhat too serious. Ed Bye provides a balance between the two, he can be serious, but he also has a laugh (as evidenced in "Only The Good..." when he cameo'd as the Grim Reaper) .
• The Friends Who Never Hang: Rimmer and the Cat almost never interacted in the early series: Rimmer didn't think of the Cat as a person, and the Cat, before he got more domesticated later on, had no interest in a man who couldn't feed him.
• Funny Background Event: In a Call-Back to the Blue/Red Alert bulb gag from Series VI, the Series XI/XII Starbug has a sign in the cockpit with the phrase "NOT ALERT".
• Funny Bruce Lee Noises: Rimmer, on first meeting the Cat, just before he accidentally runs through him.
• Funny Flashback Haircut: When we see the teenage Lister in "Timeslides", he is sporting an Afro. The Cat is depicted when a very similar hairstyle when the time-wand reverts him to his teenage years in "Pete Part 1" as well.
• Fun with Acronyms: "The Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society."
  • Rimmer jokes that Canaries is in fact an acronym for "Convict Army: Nearly All Retarded Inbred Evil Sheepshaggers" just before he's informed that he's been signed up too.
• Funny Robot: Being a sci-fi comedy, the show Red Dwarf is filled with these, from the scatterbrained Holly to the John-Wayne-loving (and Rimmer-disobeying) skutters to the guilt-ridden and prone to jealousy Kryten.
• Furry Confusion: Even though The Cat is on the 'almost human' of the Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism, his mannerisms and habits are still very much cat like, more so than most actual cat furries with fur and a tail.
• Furry Fandom: Although it was made before the Internet made the fandom famous, "D.N.A." has Rimmer ask incredulously if Lister is claiming to enjoy strapping on a bushy tail and naming himself 'Nutkin' when Lister, attempting to explain why he feels Kryten should change back into a Mechanoid, mentions his envy of a squirrel he saw in the botanical gardens after getting dumped by Kochanski.
• Future Imperfect: The Cat race took Lister and his dream of retiring to Fiji and turned them into the Cat god Cloister the Stupid and the promised land of Fuschal. Lister, Rimmer and even Holly make historical inaccuracies, but it's tough to tell whether they're owed to widespread historical distortion or to the many varied failings of the characters.
  Rimmer: They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Edison. They laughed at Columbo!
  Lister: Who's Columbo?
  Rimmer: The man with a dirty mac who discovered America!
• Future Me Scares Me: Played for laughs in "Stasis Leak", played straight in "Out of Time".
• Gagging on Your Words: Kryten's attempts to lie in "Camille".
• Gag Penis:
  • Kryten's "groin attachment".
  • Archie could qualify.
  • Judging by his reaction in "Bodyswap", either Lister has one or Rimmer has shortcomings.
  • In "Only the Good...", Rimmer gets one (not seen) in the universe where everything's opposite.
  • In "D.N.A.", when Kryten becomes human, he hands Lister two polaroids of his 'groinal attachment' which have to be held together to get the whole thing in.
• Gainax Ending: Back to Earth has retroactively turned "Only the Good..." into this. The End? The smeg it was...
• Game Mod: The AR machine allows for this quite easily, allowing anyone with a bit of knowhow to be able to take assets from one game and add them to another, such as Kryten modding a T-72 tank into Jane Austen World, Lister being able to project the characters from Streets Of Laredo into Kryten's dreamscape, or Kryten creating an Indian restaurant experience mixed with the Jane Austen characters with Curry World, which turns out to be an[[invoked Obvious Beta thanks to the spiciness of the curry being set too high, even for Lister.]]
• Gargle Blaster: Several.
  • Holly's "android home brew" in "The Last Day" is lethal to humans, and probably to androids as well.
  • In "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", Sheriff Kryten asks for the stuff that guarantees you'll get your eyesight back in three days.
  • Baxter's hooch in "Only the Good..." is "about 300% proof," according to Rimmer. He's not far wrong, as a single sip renders him and Lister unable to stand unaided.
• Genetic Abomination: Several:
  • The Despair Squid, an apex predator resulting from an artificially enhanced evolutionary arms race. "It's got three alternatives - it thinks we're either a threat, food or mate. It's either gonna kill us, eat us or hump us."
  • The Polymorph, a genetically-engineered shapechanging emotional vampire.
  • The Gelfs, Genetically Engineered Life Forms who are... basically just ugly.
  • Emohawks - semi-domesticated Polymorphs used by the Gelfs to trade emotions, and also to get back at people who cross them.
  • The BEGGS, who are genetically-engineered to consume rubbish and are mentioned to be capable of eating people.
• Genre Mashup: Sitcom combined with sci-fi spaceship adventure.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Victims of the holo-virus shown in "Quarantine" gain red versions of these when they are about to fire off their hex vision. This winds up happening to Dr.Hildegard Lanstrom and Rimmer in said episode.
• Ghost City:
  • Most American cities in "Tikka to Ride".
  • The Red Dwarf itself qualifies.
• Gilded Cage: Legion imprisons the Red Dwarf crew in one.
• Global Currency: The "dollarpound" (or "quidbuck," if you're in a hurry), although early episodes used pounds.
• Girlfriend in Canada: In "Can Of Worms", Cat claims that he is not a virgin because he knows these two lady cats that live on Z deck. And who the others have never met.
• A Glass in the Hand: Once Rimmer became a Hard Light hologram, he could vent his frustration on inanimate objects.
• Glitch Episode:
  • The plot of the second half of the episode "Quarantine" centers around Rimmer the Virtual Ghost catching a holo-virus from the Monster of the Week and going insane, necessitating a luck virus assisted fix.
  • A later episode (Gunmen of the Apocalypse) had Kryten (a humanoid robot)insert a virus which had infected Starbug into himself to create an antivirus for it, necessitating an entry into his dreams to help him combat the virus.
  • The episode "Beyond A Joke" features Kryten losing his temper and glitching so violently that his head explodes; attempts to replace his head with spares only result in the backups exploding as well, forcing the crew to search for additional replacements and discover the reason for the bug. It turns out that this is the result of sabotage by Kryten's creator, who modelled the 4000 series on her boyfriend - and installed the exploding head glitch as a Take That! when said boyfriend dumped her at the altar.
• Godly Sidestep: In "White Hole", Holly gains an IQ of over 12,000 and professes to know the meaning of the universe. The only being present to ask her is a toast-obsessed kitchen appliance, and any questions it puts forward end up being about bread. Before anyone else can ask, she realises she has three minutes to live and refuses to communicate with anyone.
• God Test: Lister's comments have been misinterpreted over the years as the promises of a god, leading to this hilarious exchange:
  Lister: I am your god."
  Cat (gesturing to a table): "If you're God, turn this into a woman.
  Lister: I'm serious.
  Cat: So am I!
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Hudzen 10. After millions of years following after Kryten (so as to replace him), his "sanity chip" has been completely worn out, leaving him a deranged psychopath fully willing to harm a human.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • The Despair Squid was the result of compressing 5 billion years of evolution into 3 years. It killed just about everything in the ocean.
  • Also Pree, a computer intended to allow people to achieve more in less time by finishing tasks for them in the manner they would finish them. On a ship with a competent crew this is a desirable thing. On Red Dwarf ... less so.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel:
  • Confidence and Paranoia in, unsurprisingly, "Confidence and Paranoia". Although it's up for debate which is which
  • Also the episode "Demons and Angels".
  • In "Terrorform", Rimmer's resurrected self-confidence versus, well, everything else in his mind.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: The Highs in "Demons and Angels" when presented with the Lows.
  High Kryten: The poor wretch, he has a faulty gun! He's accidentally shot me five times! Oh, how I love him!
  High Cat: Brother, there is a grievous fault with thine weapon. It keepeth shooting people.
• Grand Theft Me: In "Bodyswap", Rimmer repeatedly swaps bodies with people while they're sleeping, without their consent, so he can experience physical sensations such as eating.
• Gratuitous Princess: There's inexplicably a princess in the middle of World War II, apparently there solely so Ace Rimmer can rescue her while fighting Nazis. What a guy.
• Great Accomplishment, Weak Credibility: In "Back In The Red Part 2," Rimmer gives Captain Hollister a startlingly accurate report on potential drive plate malfunctions. However, Hollister is immediately suspicious given that Rimmer has made a name for himself as an incompetent dolt who constantly fails the astronavigation exam. He's right to be dubious, as it turns out: Rimmer is using files taken from Starbug's computers to make himself appear cleverer than he really is. Unfortunately for Rimmer, Hollister takes the opportunity to drug him and put him in the Virtual-Reality Interrogation with the rest of the Dwarfers - though this isn't found out until part 3.
• Great Big Book of Everything: The Space Corps Directive Manual is remarkably comprehensive, with guidance on situations ranging from the commonplace to the singularly bizarre. Unfortunately, its organization apparently leaves something to be desired, as said commonplace and bizarre situations are often referenced in directives that are listed right next to each other. This is a source of continuing embarrassment for Rimmer, who in the later series has got the book almost memorized, but keeps getting the last one or two critical digits wrong whenever he tries to cite it.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Lister has spent a considerable number of years encouraging Kryten to do this to varying degrees of success. This also happened to the "wax-droids" from the themepark in Meltdown - after millions of years on their own, they stopped repeating their various routines and achieved independent thought. Unfortunately, they still retained the personalities of the people they were based on, and all the evil ones (Hitler, Napoleon, Mussolini, the Boston Strangler, James Last) declared war on the good ones. Then Rimmer came along...
• Groin Attack:
  • Rimmer does this to the Grim Reaper in "Only the Good...".
  • Rimmer has it done to him (in a way) by Lister in Back to Earth.
  • Cat is implied to have done this to Lister (in self-defense, since Lister was being remote-controlled into strangling him) in " Demons and Angels".
  • And what is Cat more dismayed about? The creases in the collar of his suit, of course.
  Cat: Look what you did to my neckline! This stuff never springs back!
  • Inverted in "The Last Day" by Hudzen 10. His promotional video shows him breaking a brick in half with his groinal attachment.
  • In "Entangled", Lister is fitted with a "groin exploder" to ensure he pays his debts after losing Rimmer in a game of poker.
  • In "Polymorph", Lister accidentally attacks his own groin with a baseball bat.
• Guile Hero: In spite of everything, the Dwarfers are remarkably good at thinking quickly and improvising battle plans when the chips are down and they have almost nothing to work with. "The Inquisitor" and "The Beginning" are the most notable examples.
• Halfway Plot Switch: Used in quite a few episodes. "Justice" subverts this by starting off as a story about Red Dwarf finding an escape pod and needing to find out who its occupant is, then switching halfway through to being about Rimmer being put on trial for his role in the accident that killed the ship's crew, before switching back to the original plot near the end.
• Hamster-Wheel Power: Appears twice, first in "White Hole" when the ship's power is turned off and the Cat makes Lister pedal in an attempt to fry an egg with a hairdryer (before insisting he power the electric blanket while he sleeps) and secondly in a metaphorical sense when Ace Rimmer attempts to train Rimmer to take on his mantle by encouraging him to 'be the cougar running free', and Rimmer's efforts are visualised as a hamster in a wheel.
• Hand Cannon:
  • The simulant's pistol from "Justice", complete with bayonet.
  • Kryten makes use of a bazookoid pistol in series VI, which is essentially a scaled down version of the standard bazookoid and is almost as effective.
• Hand-or-Object Underwear: Done with pieces of paper that say "Top Secret."
• Hanging Up on the Grim Reaper: In one episode, Arnold Rimmer knees the Reaper in his groin when he comes to claim him.
  Rimmer: Not today matey! Only the good die young!
  Reaper: That's... never happened before.
• Hate Sink: Rimmer is an in-universe example. He was picked out by Holly to be recreated as the hologram companion to last human Lister, because Holly knew that hating Rimmer was the one thing that could keep Lister sane. Per the trope page, his list of character traits indeed "includes pettiness, selfishness, stubbornness, greed, holier-than-thou contempt, cowardice, and an inexhaustible penchant for making bad decisions. He may also be rude and obnoxious, bigoted, sleazy, and undeservedly smug." This is Rimmer's personality to a tee. The twist is that whereas "a particularly pointed Karmic Death is always a nice touch, and can be quite satisfying to watch", Rimmer has already had one.
  Lister: Drop dead, Rimmer.
  Rimmer: Already have done.
  Lister: Encore.
• Head Desk:
  • Lister bangs his head on the table in "Queeg" when he finds out that all he got for dinner is burnt toast and one pea. His head goes down when he loses his pea.
  • While Rimmer is explaining to Lister that the latter has accidentally signed himself (and, unbeknownest to Rimmer, the other main characters) into a suicide squad, partway through the explanation, Lister starts banging his head on a table.
  • Rimmer in "Stoke Me a Clipper" when Ace makes contact with Starbug.
• The Heartless: "Terrorform" is a planet without even the vestiges of a heart that Rimmer has.
• Held Back in School: In "Dimension Jump", we learn that Rimmer almost was held back a year but just managed to avoid it. Ace Rimmer on the other hand was held back a year and it was crucial turning point in his life.
• Helping Hands: Kryten's hand is able to return to the ship and get help in "Terrorform", though it scares the hell out of Lister and Cat first. We learn in Series VIII that it's not Kryten's only fully-functional detachable part.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Kochanski is sent into this state by the squeelookle-ing sewer pipes in "Duct Soup".
  • Also, Kryten in "Beyond a Joke" after an incident involving lobster and ketchup.
  • Rimmer in "Trojan" when he becomes too resentful of his brother. Literally: he crashes from all the clogged up memory. Though it's more like "Heroic Spinning Beach Balls of Doom".
• Heroic Sacrifice JFK assassinating himself in "Tikka to Ride".
  • Able in "Beyond a Joke".
  • Kryten in "The Inquisitor":
  Kryten: Well I've got to go back in time now and sacrifice myself so that we can get into this mess we're in now in the first place.
• Hidden Depths: Lister and Rimmer are surprisingly complex characters, and despite their generally low positions in life, can show great competence. Averted with the Cat, who can barely be said to be a one dimensional character...a one dimensional character with a great ass!
• High on Catnip: Cat comments on how the unreality pockets in "Out of Time" are worse/weirder than triple strength catnip.
• Hilarious Outtakes: Referred to as Smeg Ups and Smeg Outs, these appear as DVD extras. They're so popular and genuinely funny in their own right that they have their own boxsets titled Just The Smegs.
• Hippie Jesus: Referenced when Rimmer dismisses their "High" selves as hippies.
  Kryten: Sir, you think Jesus was a hippy.
  Rimmer: He had long hair and didn't have a job! What more do you want?
  • When they meet Jesus in the episode "Lemons," he turns out to be a bit of a hippie (he's certainly a pacifist and is horrified at the amount of wars waged in his name). However, he turns out to be the wrong Jesus (he's Jesus of Caesaria, not Jesus of Nazareth).
• Historical Domain Crossover: In "Cured", the crew encounter a scientific base where Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, and Messalina have been recreated through cloning and cured of 'evil'. (Lab notes reveal that Rupert Murdoch proved resistant to the treatment.) However, it turns out the evildoers are actually androids who were originally the medical staff of the base who have been reprogrammed to believe they are historical villains.
• Historical In-Joke
  Lister: (talking to a crowd listening to Hitler) "Ignore him, he's a complete and total nutter! And he's only got one testicle!"
  • And the Who Shot JFK? spoof ("Tikka to Ride"), in which Kennedy ended up shooting his own past self because it turned out the timeline in which he survived became a Crapsack World.
    Lister: "It'll drive the conspiracy nuts crazy! They'll never work it out!"
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Lister tricks the Inquisitor into erasing himself from history.
  • The Emohawk might have stood a much better chance against the crew if it hadn't sucked out Rimmer's negativity and turned him into Ace.
• Hollywood Silencer: Averted with The Creator's pistol in Back to Earth.
• Holodeck Malfunction:
  • "Gunmen of the Apocalypse".
  • Kryten and Lister fake one in "Stoke Me a Clipper" to encourage Rimmer to do something brave.
• Hot Sauce Drinking:
  • Dave Lister has been known to drink tobasco sauce after spreading it on his cornflakes.
  • In the extended cut of "Tikka To Ride", he notes that he once drink a yard of vindaloo sauce and went out on the pull. He ended up having to make a dash for the nightclub toilets and was pretty much there for the entire night.
• How Did You Know? I Didn't: In "Can Of Worms ", Lister, Rimmer and Kryten are hunting shape-shifters when they are approached by the Cat. Lister (who is temporarily emotionless) blows him away without a second thought, revealing him to be a polymorph. Rimmer asks how he knew he wasn't the Cat, and Lister calmly replies "I didn't".
• How We Got Here::
  • In "Thanks for the Memory", the characters wake up four days after the opening scene with no memories of these days, a half-finished jigsaw completed and two of the characters with broken legs.
  • Several times in "Backwards", on the planet where time runs in reverse. For example, Lister lands on the planet with a black eye and bruised ribs, and doesn't know why until the bar-room brawl (or tidy) breaks out (during which his injuries get healed).
  • "Back In The Red" opens with Lister in prison with a living Rimmer, and apart from that and one other scene, the entire three-part storyline is dedicated to how they got there.
• Humanity Is Infectious:
  • The Cat and Kryten both become more "human" as the series goes along.
  • In the case of Kryten, this actually becomes potentially dangerous in Series VII.
• Humanity's Wake: Except for Lister the human race is extinct until Series VII.
• Humans Are Bastards:
  • Lister posits the theory that humans are a planetary disease in "Waiting for God". (Incidently, predating The Matrix by about a decade.)
  • Kryten (not so) subtly compares humanity to the Despair Squid in "Back to Reality".
  • Humans created GELFs for all manner of unsavoury reasons, and programmed androids to believe in an afterlife where people would serve them to keep them subservient.
• Humiliating Wager: "Samsara" has Rimmer and Lister make a bet over a game of mine-opoly: If Rimmer loses, he is not allowed to complain at all about anything that Lister does for the next week. If Lister loses, then he has to wear an evening gown all day and night until he can play James Last polka songs on the bagpipes. Lister cheats and, thanks to the (unbeknownst at the time) influence of the SS Samsara's justice field, he wins against Rimmer.
• Humongous Mecha: Blue Midget's redraw could count as one.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Kryten is almost totally subservient to the entire crew (primarily serving as a butler) however he also seems to be the most genuinely intelligent and is usually the one who comes up with solutions to the various problems they face.
• Hypocrite: Rimmer.
  • In "Kryten", Rimmer makes several snide put-downs about the obvious lengths Lister has gone to spruce himself up when the possibility that they might be meeting women has suddenly arisen. When Lister points out that Rimmer, who is wearing a ludicrously pretentious officer's uniform complete with medals, hasn't exactly dressed down for the occasion either, Rimmer's response is to start whining about how Lister always starts putting him down whenever it looks like they might be meeting women.
  • In "Me2", Rimmer delivers a self-righteous lecture about how Lister always held him back by being a terrible bunkmate due to his various irritating habits. When Lister, annoyed, shoots back that Rimmer himself wasn't exactly Mr. Easy-To-Live-With and points out numerous examples of Rimmer's own shortcomings as a bunkmate, Rimmer reacts with dismissive offence.
  • Strangely subverted in "Quarantine". Rimmer, who's gone completely nuts because of the holovirus, tricks the others into "admitting" they are insane when he has them in quarantine lock-up, and he sentences them to a few hours without any oxygen. It's hypocritical, but rather than coming off as two-faced it just evidences how spectacularly deranged he's gotten.
  • In "DNA" his "The Reason You Suck" Speech toward the Cat includes him claiming the Cat "runs from the first sign of danger" and "only looks out for number one". Rimmer himself is all too often a Dirty Coward with major It's All About Me tendencies.
  • In "Skipper", he claims that a person should surround themselves with people who are brighter and more successful than they are. But when he finds himself in a universe where Lister is the captain of Red Dwarf (as a result of spotting the faulty driveplate that Rimmer had failed to repair), he quickly leaves, unable to live in a universe where Lister is more successful than he is.
• I Always Wanted to Say That: Subverted in "Rimmerworld":
  Lister: This might sound like a bit of a corny line, but... can't even bring myself to say it...
  Rimmerguard: Say what?
  Lister: [visibly wincing] "Take us to your leader?"
  Kryten: Oh, sir, how could you?
• "I Am Great!" Song: In the episode "Blue", the VR "Arnold Rimmer Experience" ends with a song sung tiny munchkin Rimmers.
  If you're in trouble, he will save the day,
  He's brave and he's fearless, come what may;
  Without him the mission would go astray!
  
  He's Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimmer!
  Without him life would be much grimmer;
  He's handsome, trim, and no-one slimmer,
  He will never need a zimmer!
• I Am Legion: In, er, "Legion".
• I Banged Your Mom: In "Polymorph", the shapeshifter took on the likeness of Rimmer's mother and tells Rimmer than Lister has had her "five times, he was like a wild stallion" to make Rimmer angry.
  • With ALPHABETTI SPAGHETTI!
• I Call Him "Mister Happy": Archie.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Averted. Kryten is often quite willing to shoot himself when feeling especially guilty.
• I Choose to Stay: Lister, briefly in Back to Earth.
• I Did What I Had to Do: In the Series XI episode "Officer Rimmer", Rimmer launches a missile at another ship when it is in imminent danger of drifting into an asteroid field, because the resulting explosion would take Starbug with it. It doesn't get destroyed because the missile is deflected by an asteroid just enough to only glance the ship, which knocks it clear of the asteroid field. The officer on board the ship promotes Rimmer to an officer as a result, believing this was a case of Just as Planned - though ironically Rimmer did the right thing when faced with a situation of destroying the ship or both ships being destroyed.
• I Hate Past Me: In "Timeslides", the Dwarfers go back in time to meet 17 year old Lister back when he was the lead singer for Smeg and the Heads. Even the Cat thinks that Past-Lister is an idiot.
  (Present Day!)Lister: Stop sayin' everything's crypto-fascist! You make me sound like I was a complete git!
  ...and...
  Cat: Forget it! The guy's an idiot!
  (Present Day!)Lister: He's me!!
  Cat: Exactly!
• Identical Grandson:
  • Lister. He's the child of the second Kochanski and himself.
  • One of Lister's other sons seems to be identical to him, or at least similar enough to fool Lister's bunkmate without trying. Logical one, perhaps, as their father is a female version of Lister. Even more likely when you consider that, since Lister is his own father (and presumably the female Lister is her own father) The twins really don't have a whole lot of a gene pool since both of their parents and half of their grandparents are the same person!
• Ignorant About Fire: One of the problems Rimmer has while cooking in the Season Two episode "Better Than Life" where he is still an Intangible Man is that he is reliant on the ship's Skutters (robots) in following his cooking instructions. He told them to "watch that pan" and because they were programmed to be literal minded they just sat and watched it burn.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • Lister and Cat, entirely unintentionally.
    Cat: Chicken's good.
    Lister: Yeah, really good.
    Kryten: That's not chicken, sir.
    Cat: Oh, what is it?
    Kryten: It's that man we found. It just seemed such a waste to leave him lying there when he'd barbeque so beautifully.
    Rimmer: (sadistic laughing)
    Kryten: It seemed to me that if humanoids eat chicken, then obviously, they'd eat their own species. Otherwise, thay'd just be picking on the chickens!
  • When Lister cooks his own frozen organs (removed in surgery) by mistake thinking that they're pork, only they get stolen and eaten by Cat, before he can chow down. Upon finding out what those were Cat runs off to barf up his last four meals.
  • One of Lister's old schoolmates apparently achieved fame by eating his wife.
  • In "Queeg", Rimmer recounts how his "best friend" "Porky" Ruebuck spearheaded a campaign to eat him while they were in the Space Scouts. By the time the scoutmaster saved him, Rimmer was tied to a stake and covered in barbecue sauce.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy:
  • Lampshaded in "Quarantine", as they run away from danger.
  Lister: Why do we never meet anyone nice?
  Cat: Why do we never meet anyone who can shoot straight?
  • Ace Rimmer can take down whole hordes of rifle-bearing Nazi mooks with nothing but his trusty pistol while saving the princess. That's Ace being Ace—he's such a damned awesome hero he just can't be hurt by gunfire. The one time they graze his jacket, he's more pissed off about them ruining his clothes.
• Implausible Deniability: Played for laughs in "Me2". Lister breaks into the Rimmers' room to steal Rimmer's diary, whereupon the Cat emerges from a closet, wearing a suitably gaudy and over-the-top outfit, and turning towards the camera and shielding his face from Lister, says:
  Cat: Did you see him clearly? Could you spot him in a parade? I don't think so. I could've been anybody.
• Improbable Weapon User: The Dwarfers are technically this, since the bazookoids are actually mining equipment that just happen to be very effective as weapons. In fact, there's only one time in the entire series where they're used for their intended purpose: when Lister blasts away some rocks blocking Starbug's landing gear in "Psirens".
• Innocently Insensitive: While none of the boys (or even Kochanski) are going to win any awards for empathy, it's not usually malice that gets them into trouble with each other - Lister is too straightforward to sympathise with Rimmer's authority complex, Rimmer is so emotionally screwed up that he thinks being "empathic" is something that'll land you in quarantine, Cat has a Blue-and-Orange Morality that encourages him to think only of himself, and Kryten is still getting the hang of having emotions. Kochanski is just generally neurotic, and Holly's tactlessness is born of senility.
• Insane Troll Logic: Kryten's explanation for cooking a dead guy they found and feeding him to Lister and the Cat in "Tikka to Ride":
  Kryten: It seemed to me that if humanoids eat chicken, then obviously, they'd eat their own species. Otherwise, thay'd just be picking on the chickens!
  • The Cat gives us a good example of this in the Series XI episode "Samsara ", when he explains how Archimedes discovered gravy when he was sitting underneath a tree and a bath fell onto his head. After all, gravy didn't just invent itself, did it? And bathtubs fall out of planes all the time when the doors on them aren't closed properly.
• Insistent Terminology: Lister claims the event that caused Talkie Toaster to be reduced to several thousand pieces scattered about Red Dwarf's trash heap was an "accident". One involving Lister, the toaster, the waste disposal unit and a 14-pound lump hammer.
  • Internal Homage: "Skipper", both a Series Fauxnale and something of an early 30th anniversary special, features numerous homages to the series' past, including Rimmer travelling to an alternate version of the ship where the radiation leak hasn't yet happened, another where Lister was sentenced to stasis for smuggling his pet rat on board, and one where the leak never happened at all and Lister is captain of the ship (the last of which also features some flawless recreations of the original Series I sets).
• In the Future, We Still Have Roombas: The Skutters.
• Inventional Wisdom: "The Last Day" reveals that bazookoids have "dismantler" switches that cause the device to fall apart. The switch in question is located next to a couple of others, without a label, or something to prevent it from being pushed accidentally (as Kryten ends up doing).
• Inventor of the Mundane: Fred "Thicky" Holden, inventor of the "tension sheet", in "Timeslides".
• Invisible Monsters: Parodied, with a B-Movie titled 'Attack of the Giant, Savage, Completely Invisible Aliens'', which consists of Bad Bad Actors pointing at the sky and saying "It's the giant, savage, completely invisible aliens!"
• In with the In Crowd: The android Kryten is turned into an organic human. When talking to his sentient spare heads, he gets high-and-mighty with them. After that he realizes that he's turning into a jerk.
• I Say What I Say: The two Listers in "The Inquisitor".
• I Surrender, Suckers: Rimmer tries this out on four simulant death ships, to keep them from killing the crew (after all, you can't fire on a surrendering ship). They ignore him. This turns out to be a rather clever Batman Gambit to trick them into shooting each other
• It Came from the Fridge: The curry monster in "DNA".
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: In "Kryten", Rimmer refers to Kryten as "it". Looks like painting a portrait of Rimmer on the toilet, pouring soup on his bed, calling him "smeg for brains" and flipping him off taught him a lesson.
  • Rimmer also referred to the Cat as "it" initially.
• It Runs on Nonsensoleum: The show has such gleefully unscientific phenomena as a mutated flu virus that makes the sufferer's hallucinations "solid" (When Lister objects that this doesn't make sense, Rimmer's second attempt at explaining it fails to be significantly different from the first) and a similarly affected photo developing fluid that not only brings photos to life but allows time travel through them when projected onto a screen.
  • Also creatures like the shape-shifting Polymorph that gains sustenance and strength by sucking 'mental energy' - strong emotions/personality features - right out of the crew's heads via a form of sucking proboscis applied to the forehead.
  • Likely Lister getting pregnant by his female alter-ego in the Gender Flip universe is an example. It's unlikely in Real Life that the laws of biology would be as intrinsic to any given universe as the laws of physics, to the point of changing a person's anatomy.
• It Tastes Like Feet:
  • In Series VIII, Arnold Rimmer disgustedly proclaims that the gravy-covered meat they're being served on punishment tastes worse than his grandmother's buttocks deep-fried in old chip fat.
  • In Series VI, nobody wants to drink Kryten's homemade wine because it tastes disgusting. Probably because it's brewed out of recycled urine, tastes worse than the original waste fluid it was and leaves a foam mustache that just can't be removed...
  • An earlier episode mentions that the water has been recycled so many times that it's starting to taste like Dutch Lager.