Red Dwarf / Tropes J to Q

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J-L

• Jerkass Has a Point: In "Bodyswap" Lister accidentally activates the Red Dwarf's self destruct device and the crew plan to transfer the consciousness of the ship's deceased executive officer into his body in order to deactivate it. However Lister is none too keen on having his mind wiped as part of the procedure:
  Rimmer: Look, Lister I agree it's a STUPID plan, it almost certainly won't work but the very worst that can happen, the very bottom line is that you'll be a mindless, gibbering vegetable for the rest of your life. But (points to the bomb's countdown) if the rest of your life is only 20 seconds WHAT THE HELL?
• Jesus Was Way Cool: In "Lemons", the crew is accidentally sent back in time and encounter Jesus in 23 AD in India, where he's a fairly nice guy who's big on pacifism. After accidentally taking him back to the future with them, he ends up reading about himself and is horrified at what the religion he starts will do to the world, so journeys back in time to trash his reputation in order to make sure that no one bases a religion around him. The Red Dwarf crew, despite being fairly a-religious, figure they should go back in time and fix this, and manage to convince Jesus that while Christianity did plenty of terrible things, he can still do good. Then they figure out that he's the wrong Jesus (he's Jesus of Caesaria, not Jesus of Nazareth) so the whole thing is moot. You do get to see someone credited as "Man Who May Be Jesus" at the very end, but it's indeterminate whether this Jesus is Way Cool or not.
• Joke Exhaustion: Rimmer recounts the time he went on a date with a woman who had an artificial nose. In an extremely misguided attempt to break the ice, he cracked jokes about noses until she excused herself, went to the bathroom, and fled through the window.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: "Terrorform". Sort of. More 'Journey to a Planet that Has Shaped itself to Represent Someone's Mind.' Unfortunately, that someone is Rimmer.
• Jumping on a Grenade: Ace does this in "Emohawk: Polymorph II". Since he's Hard Light and virtually indestructible, he's none the worse for wear.
• Killed Mid-Sentence:
  • Kryten, twice. Of course, he turns out to be Not Quite Dead in both.
  • And Ace Rimmer.
• Killing Your Alternate Self: To restore Earth's timeline in "Tikka to Ride", President Kennedy has to die. And who better to kill JFK - and drive the conspiracy theorists nuts as they'll never be able to figure it out - but the JFK from the alternate, Crapsack World, timeline?
• Kissing Warm-Up: Referenced in "Confidence and Paranoia", when Paranoia starts dredging up Lister's embarrassing adolescent memories.
• Klingon Promotion: In "Holoship", Rimmer wanted to join the crew of a hologramatic ship. The ship already had a full compliment, so the only way in was "dead man's boots", defeating an existing member of the crew in an intelligence test. The losing crew member would be switched off and Rimmer would take their place. Doesn't quite work out like that, of course.
• Lady in Red:
  • In Series VII, Kochanski's default outfit is a tight red uniform which screams "sexy lady". In one episode, Lister gives Kochanski a beautiful red sparkly dress as a present, but she wears it only in Kryten's Imagine Spot and in the ducts under one of Lister's spare boiler suits.
  • Princess Bonjella in "Stoke Me a Clipper" wears a long tight red dress.
• Lampshade Wearing: In "The Last Day", Lister somehow wakes up wearing a traffic cone ("On a mining ship, 3 million years into deep space") after a night of drunken revelry. Cat Hand Waves it by saying "It's not a good night unless you get a traffic cone."
• Large Ham: Kill Crazy.
  Kill Crazy: LET'S GO KILL SOMETHING! YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAH!
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • The Justice Field from "Justice", which makes any crime commmited or attempt to injure someone, be instead reflected back to the person performing it. Lister figures out how to weaponise it by goading an insane, nigh-indestructible Simulant into attacking him.
  • In "Samsara", the titular ship features a Karma Drive, said to be based on the Justice Field, which creates a Karma Field that rewards good behaviour amongst its crew whilst punishing unethical actions. However, this is then Inverted by two crew members having an affair, who change the settings on the drive to reward bad behaviour and punish the good in order to continue the affair without retribution. This unintentionally leads to the deaths of the Samsara's entire crew.
• Last Day of Normalcy: The very first episode gives us a glimpse of a normal day at Rimmer and Lister's jobs, where we see them bickering over their jobs, as well as seeing how Rimmer fares against the Officer's exams (badly) and both Lister's relationship with Kochanski and his Dream of starting a farm in Fiji. Whilst a crew member's funeral occurs that day, he is promptly resurrected as a Virtual Ghost and it's treated as nothing too serious. Then, Lister is found to have an illegal cat on board, is forced into stasis, and wakes up 3 million years into the future to find that Everybody's Dead, Dave.
• The Last Man Heard a Knock...: Lister's the last human being alive for most of the show, but he's never alone.
• Last-Name Basis: Rimmer and Lister. Only twice have they ever addressed each other by their first names (Arnold and David, respectively); once when they were drained of a negative emotion in "Polymorph" (anger for Rimmer, fear for Lister), and once near the end of the Catapult Nightmare in "Blue", which lead to the both of them sharing a kiss.
  • Also how Lister figures out that 'Kryten' is actually a Psiren. Psi-Kryten calls him Dave instead of Mr Lister.
• Last of His Kind: The Cat and Lister at least until the arrival of first Kochanski and later the whole crew of Red Dwarf). Of course, the cat race still exists somewhere Out There, and one of the "lost episodes" that exists only as storyboard (see the DVD extras) would have featured a visit to a planet of Cat's people, as a spoof of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Amok Time".
• Last-Second Term of Respect: In the pilot episode, when Captain Hollister demands that Lister turn over his cat, Frankenstein, Lister goes on a long explanation about his five-year plan and says that no one, not even Hollister, will get in the way of that, "And I do respect you. (Beat) Sir."
• Late to the Punchline: Played with 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 spends a minute reflecting on the story before realisation dawns — about something unrelated to the punchline, which he still hasn't got.
• Laughing Gas: In "Fathers and Suns", the Dwarfers are trying to uninstall Pree from the mainframe when she intends to throw Red Dwarf into the nearest sun. In an attempt to stop this, Pree releases laughing gas, causing the group to start laughing uncontrollably and slowing down their progress. On the upside, Kryten is able to use the opportunity to resolve the tooth problem that Lister had been having all episode.
• Lazy Bum: Lister is one of the ones we root for. He never does any work whatsoever, but it's not like a giant empty spaceship with no crew needs a lot of work, and he's more fun than his Control Freak nemesis.
  Kryten: Name?
  Lister: Dave Lister.
  Kryten: Occupation?
  Lister (after considering carefully): Bum.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The pub owner's reverse rant in "Backwards", ostensibly informing Kryten and Rimmer they're fired, actually criticises "the one prat in the country who's bothered to get hold of this recording, turn it round and actually work out the rubbish that [the pub owner's] I'm saying." Of course, when the episode was filmed, reversing the recording was a complicated process.
• Learnt English from Watching Television: It's explained that The Cat's race learned English from watching the American movies (specifically John Wayne movies and The Flintstones) in the ship's hold. Of course, The Cat obviously learned his mannerisms from watching James Brown , though it's never mentioned in series.
• "Leave Your Quest" Test: In "Legion", the crew are dragged into a space station by a tractor beam, but find the only occupant - the eponymous Legion - simply wants to accommodate their every need and hopes they'll abandon their journey to find the stolen Red Dwarf ship. This is because he's a gestalt entity and can only exist when there are other life-forms on the station. All the residents died millennia ago.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Kill Crazy, who is so trigger happy, he doesn't even make it out of the submarine because charging into battle so eagerly that he knocks himself out by running into the door frame (ironically this saved his life, since everyone but the "Boys from the Dwarf" drowns in the submarine when the bulkhead collapses after three million years of being on the bottom of a water planet too many). At one point, it does prove to be an advantage as a mutated creature takes one look at him and runs away.
  Kill Crazy: Let's go KILL SOMETHING!
• Legacy Immortality: Ace Rimmer.
• Lethally Stupid:
  • Rimmer failed to repair Red Dwarf's drive plate properly, which led to the radiation leak killing everyone aboard bar Lister. According to Season 8, screwing up fixing the drive plate would require having a brain the size of a newt's testicle.
  • Kryten as well, as his actions led to the deaths of the Nova 5's crew.
• Lethal Negligence: The disaster that wiped out all but one of the crew was caused by Rimmer improperly fixing the ship's drive plate, causing a lethal radiation leak. In "Justice", this act is referred to as "wilfull negligence" on Rimmer's part.
• Let Me Get This Straight...:
  • While not the actual plan, but in response to the crew trying to explain around Rimmer's temporary insanity in "Quarantine":
  "So let me get this straight. You want to fly on a magic carpet, to see the King of the Potato People, and plead with him for your freedom, and you're telling me you're completely sane?"
  • Played straight in "Rimmerworld") where Rimmer does this repeatedly in the first part of the episode.
    Rimmer: So let me get this straight. If we board that ship and we get captured, we're finished. However, if we board that ship, don't get captured but the superstructure disintegrates around us, we are finished. On the other hand, if we board that ship, don't get captured, and the superstructure doesn't disintegrate around us, but we can't find any fuel, we are in fact finished.
• Life Saving Misfortune: Lister being placed in stasis for smuggling a cat aboard Red Dwarf meant he was safe from the radiation leak which killed the rest of the crew.
• Like You Would Really Do It: In-Universe. Lister has this reaction regarding his dad (who is Lister himself) actually throwing his guitar out the airlock
• Limb-Sensation Fascination: In "Bodyswap", Lister agrees to let the hologram Rimmer take over his body for two weeks, in return for Rimmer taking on an exercise regime to get Lister's body in shape. However, Rimmer is overwhelmed by the experience of having a physical body for the first time since his death, and goes on a two week binge of eating, drinking and smoking.
• Limited Wardrobe: Averted to hell and back with the Cat, who changed outfits twice or sometimes three times per episode. Once the crew are confined to Starbug in series VI, the basis of his outfits becomes more limited (A black PVC undersuit with various jackets and the like swapped out on top). While he had, rarely, worn the same outfit more than once in the past, this was the first time it was called attention to In-Universe, when his greatest fear on confonting a killer rogue simulant for the second time is that she might notice he had on the same clothes as the first time they met. According to a behind the scenes feature, he has fifteen distinct outfits in the six-episode Series III.
• Literal Split Personality:
  • "Demons and Angels" featured a triplication device, which created a Good Ship with crew (who exist in the starship equivalent of Crystal Spires and Togas, and can even make Pot Noodles edible), an Evil Ship with crew (where Rimmer's H has fallen sideways and... yeah) and a Neutral Ship with crew (i.e. the original gang). The Neutral Ship duly exploded, and it required a polarity reversal to recreate it from the others.
  • "Confidence and Paranoia" featured the episode titles' personality traits manifesting a real people from Listers' mind. They then spend the rest of the episode trying to influence Lister until Confidence murders Paranoia and accidentally commits suicide.
• Living Photo: The episode "Timeslides" Kryten discovers that some three million-year old photo developer has "evolved" so that photos developed with it become windows into the past, when put in a projector one can even use them for limited Time Travel. One of the first indicators that the photographs have mutated is that they come to life, depicting scenes in action like Kryten having a birthday.
• Locked in a Freezer: Lister and Rimmer in "Marooned", though Rimmer's in no danger. It also subverts the standard ending - Rimmer briefly gains a new appreciation for Lister's strength of character, only to discover that Lister lied to face and used his camphor wood chest for fuel rather than the guitar.
• Logic Bomb:
  • Kryten deactivates Hudzen-10 with one in "The Last Day". Hudzen mentions a Silicon Heaven, which Kryten exclaims doesn't exist. Kryten and Holly persuade Hudzen they're telling the truth, and Hudzen, having been programmed to believe in Silicon Heaven, shuts down. Kryten did believe in Silicon Heaven, but was lying. (Strangely, Kryten was only shown learning how to lie at the beginning of the following series, though it may have had to do more with lying to organics as opposed to other robots.)
  • Series 7 starts with Lister trying to record a ship's log entry on a video camera in an effort to explain why he and the other Dwarfers are still around despite the ending to Series 6. Thanks to the large amount of paradoxical nonsense inherent in simply explaining it^note They got into a fight with their amoral future selves, who had abused the Time Drive to live a life of luxury - regardless of who actually owned that luxury - and ended up dying from their future selves' advanced weaponry. In so doing, the Dwarfers never lived to abuse the Time Drive in the first place, erasing the entire battle and its reasons for occurring from the timeline. , the camera subsequently explodes in his hand.
  • In "Fathers and Suns", Lister is able to do this to a hostile AI trying to kill the rest of the crew to make her uninstall herself.
• Longer-Than-Life Sentence: In the episode "Justice", Rimmer gets sentenced to ten thousand years imprisonment. Subverted as he is expected to be able to serve his sentence and be released at the end since he is a hologram. Of course as always Status Quo Is God and the Reset Button is hit by the episode end.
• The Long List: Provided by Lister when he tries to make things clear to the reactivated Talkie Toaster. It proves futile.
  Lister: We don't like muffins around here. We want no muffins, no toast, no teacakes, no buns, baps, baguettes or bagels, no croissants, no crumpets, no pancakes, no potato cakes and no hot-cross buns and definitely no smegging flapjacks.
  Talkie Toaster: Aah, so you're a waffle man.
• Long Runner: Twice over, in effect. Notwithstanding the 4-year gap between Series VI and VII, the 'original' TV run was from 1988-99 — 11 years. After a full decade's hiatus in which it seemed to have permanently ended, the show returned with Back to Earth in 2009 and produced new material at intervals up to the latest special in 2020 — another 11 years. All told, Red Dwarf has now aired new episodes over a span of 32 years.
• Long-Runner Tech Marches On:
  • This sci-fi sitcom long-runner features this in the set design, having had its original heyday during the late-'80s/early-'90s but been revived most recently in 2012. The early seasons feature ship's computer Holly (seen as a face on a screen) moving about on R/C tube TV rigs, and Total Immersion Video Games being triangular-shaped VHS tapes, but this has (eventually) evolved over time so that by 2012's Season X the Red Dwarf comes equipped with flat-screen monitors. Whilst both of these types of technology are present on the same ship, the "just go with it" nature of the show means that it isn't too distracting.
  • The show hung a massive lampshade on this trope in the 2009 'comeback' miniseries Back to Earth, when the characters encounter DVDs and ask "what are these?" since video cassettes were seen in the earlier series to apparently still be ubiquitous in the future. The dialogue reveals that in their timeline at least DVDs swiftly fell out of favour again, owing to humanity's congenital inability to put the discs back in their case: they were re-replaced by VHS tapes as "videos are just too big to lose".
• Lost Him in a Card Game: In "Entangled", Lister loses Rimmer while playing poker with GELFs.
  Cat: We're all deeply sorry, bud. Except for me and him and him.
• Lost in Transmission: The American pilot ended with Lister being visited by his own future self. Future!Lister had only a few moments to convey a very important message, but everybody nattered about irrelevant details until there were only a few seconds left. The message Future!Lister finally managed to deliver consisted only of "You've got to—"
• Lotus-Eater Machine:
  • "Better Than Life" features a Virtual Reality Game that can make all your deepest fantasies come true. In the end, though, Rimmer's deep self-loathing results in the destruction of everybody's perfect worlds.
  • It is later reversed in "Back To Reality" by a hallucinogenic venom from a Despair Squid that causes the group to, together, hallucinate a reality that drives them to the brink of suicide. They are only stopped by Holly forcing Kryten to release a mood stabilizer.
  • The three-part miniseries "Back to Earth" that aired in 2009. Act II and Act III get increasingly bizarre until they are revealed as a Lotus Eater Machine hallucination brought on by a hallucinogen that links all the affected characters in a pleasant dreamworld. After finding out, Lister is tempted to stay but ultimately he opts for the real thing..

• Luring in Prey: The Psirens are a form of GELF that alter the perceptions of their victims to generate illusions and as a form of luring in prey, at which point their brains are sucked out. It's shown off in "Psirens", where they generate the illusion of a flaming meteor and then a radar readout to get the Dwarfers to crash into their territory, then disguise themselves as beings such as Kochanski and two female temptresses to get them to leave Starbug and get within their range.
• Lyrical Dissonance:
  • The end theme is an upbeat number that starts with the words, "it's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere; I'm all alone, more or less."
  • "Tongue Tied" is an upbeat love song which describes the metaphorical reactions of a person when they're pleased to see someone they love in gory detail.

M-P

• MacGuffin: Finding Earth was ostensibly this even when the characters stopped caring about it, as having the characters lives be explicitly completely aimless would be too subconsciously dour for a sitcom. Later series have the MacGuffin be finding Kochanski instead.
• Made of Indestructium: Starbugs are incredibly resilient vehicles. The one from series VI/VIII has crashed "more times than a ZX-81".
• The Mad Hatter: Dr. Langstrom in "Quarantine".
• Mad Libs Catchphrase: Perilous situations would often result in the Cat exclaiming, "That's it, we're deader than [long-outmoded item of clothing]!"
• Magic Floppy Disk: On a sci-fi comedy show taking place on a futuristic mining vessel, people still use videocassettes...except they're triangular. It is explained in the 2009 Easter special that DVDs have become outdated by videos, since videos have once precious advantage—you can put them back in the box with minimal risk of breaking them.
  • Lister's entire mind can be stored on a dictaphone casette tape - although this is at least partly justified by Rule of Funny.
• Maintain the Lie: In "Better Than Life" Rimmer told his mother that he passed every exam he ever took, and had therefore reached the rank of "Rear Admiral Lieutenant General". As opposed to the man who cleaned the chicken soup machine.
• Market-Based Title: The producers' and broadcaster's original stance on Back to Earth was that it was a special, not a series in its own right. However, when it came to the first full series on Dave a few years later, it was felt that branding it Red Dwarf X would work better for marketing, meaning BtE is now considered "Series IX" for said purposes.
• Mayor of a Ghost Town: They've got the run of the ship; with a few exceptions, they've got the run of the universe, really.
• Meaningful Name: The SS Samsara in the episode of the same name is appropriate given its karma field.
• Meaningless Villain Victory: Used against the heroes in "Back in the Red". Having been imprisoned for stealing and destroying a Starbug, their attempt to escape and prove their innocence demonstrates to the captain that their story is true, exonerating them regarding the theft. But it also demonstrates that they had improperly accessed classified personnel files, a crime carrying exactly the same penalty. (The files would have revealed the Captain bribed his way up the career ladder, which explains why he was looking for the loophole.)
• Mechanical Animals: Lennon and McCartney, two robotic goldfish owned by Lister that are seen early on in the series. From what little we see of them, they seem to fulfil the role of pets to Lister. They do get A Day in the Limelight in the comics however, which depicts them as having miniature torpedos for defense.
• Medium Blending: "Back in the Red" has the crew end up in a virtual reality's claymation screensaver.
• Medium-Shift Gag: The full version of the musical number "Tongue Tied" includes a clay-animated sequence.
  • "Back in the Red, Part 3" sees the crew trying to escape a computer simulation. On pulling it off, they end up in the claymation screen saver for a time.
• MegaCorp:
  • In the "creatively titled" "M-Corp" the crew download an overdue software update from the 26th century from their mining company, only to learn that at this point in history said company was taken over by the titular evil corporation, which had in fact had managed to Take Over the World and control vital necessities like food, water and air and could even tax people charge people for their subversive thoughts. Since Lister is the only registered crew member on board, M-Corp goes so far as to edit his perceptions and prevent him from even seeing or hearing anything that isn't owned by them, including Rimmer, Kryten and Cat. He eventually transports to an unknown location run by an M-Corp A.I. that forces him to buy things and is willing to inflict pain on him and put his life in danger just so he can buy items to save himself, and eventually starts charging him in his time and lifespan. This MegaCorp was so powerful that it was essentially a Reality Warper as it could offer you - or take from you- anything it wanted in order to charge you more.
  • The Jupiter Mining Corporation is a lesser example, with the Space Corps being essentially a Private Military Contractor that provides crews for JMC vessels.
• Memory Gambit: "Thanks For The Memory".
• Merlin Sickness: "Backwards".
• Mermaid Problem: In "Better Than Life" Cat envisions himself dating a fish with humanoid legs.

  Holly: Somehow I'd imagine she'd be a lady on top and a fish on the bottom.

  Cat: No, that's a stupid way around!

• Mess of Woe: By the time of the Promised Land TV Special, Lister's depression over being the last human alive is shown to have manifested as him hoarding the old crew's stuff in his room, with the bunker covered in useless junk and used alcoholic containers. It is even implied that Rimmer had stopped living there because of how bad it had gotten.
• Micro Dieting: After a day of slaving away, Queeg permits Lister... a pea on toast. Unfortunately he loses the pea.
• Microts: The Kinitawowi are shown to use hanaka as a form of time measurement in "Emohawk: Polymorph II". Kryten says a hanaka is exactly the same as a minute, which somehow leads the Cat to calculate that five hanaka is twenty-eight hours.
• Mile-Long Ship: The Dwarf is usually 6 miles long, 4 miles tall, and 3 miles wide.
• Mind Screw: Quite a few examples, but Back to Earth took it up to eleven.
• Misery Builds Character: Ace Rimmer is this all over. He is different to normal Rimmer because their shared timeline split off when they were children. One of them got held back a year in school, the other didn't. It turns out it's actually Ace that was held back a year, and so he suffered for it (ie by being bullied and suffering the humilation of it all), and decided to fight back, and continued to fight back ever since, building his character and becoming awesome. Normal Rimmer, on the over hand, was never held back a year, and therefore spent the rest of his life making excuses for himself.
• Misplaced a Decimal Point:
  • Played with when Holly's IQ has been significantly increased (to 12000) in exchange for exponentially reducing her lifespan. When looking at her new lifespan, the screen displays 345 before she realizes "The decimal point, where's the decimal point?" She then discovers that she has 3.41 minutes left to live.
  • In "Queeg", the titular computer who was actually just Holly proving a point "insults" Holly's IQ in this manner.
    Queeg: It has a six in it, but it's not six thousand.
    Lister: Well what is it?
    Queeg: Six.
• Mistaken for Dying: The episode "M-Corp" has Lister injected with a health monitoring chip that updates him on when he's going to die. The chip, upon encountering a serious arterial blockage, tells Lister he's about to die in five seconds... and then promptly shorts out with Lister none worse for the wear. Kryten believes that the chip was confusing its own death date for Lister's.
• Mistaken for Exhibit: Rimmer mistakes a light switch for an art installation in "Legion".
• Mistaken for Insane: In "Back in the Red," Kryten's Cassandra Truth about the timeline of the original crew's deaths and his own creation, as well as his odd behavior and way of speaking, leave a psychiatrist convinced that he's in need of a factory reset.
• Mobile Factory: Presumably Red Dwarf is supposed to be one, since it's described as a "mining ship". We never actually see it do any mining, though...
  • Well, all those replacement Starbugs and Blue Midgets have to come from somewhere. There is a large rock attached to the ship's underbelly, which was presumably mined out of somewhere.
  • A blink and you'll miss it moment shown here◊ shows the rock is actually a an asteroid which collided with the ship.
• Money Fetish: Invoked by a sexy female reporter on Lister, due to his having become super-wealthy by inventing the Tension Sheet, in Season III's "Timeslides". "Now that's the kind of cash that opens anybody's legs."
• Money to Burn: In the episode "Marooned", Lister and Rimmer are looking for kindling to keep the fire going. Once all the books have been burnt, Lister burns the 24 grand that Rimmer has saved up. However, Rimmer is dead already and has no use for the money and even if he did, there is no civilization left in which to spend it.
• Monster of the Week: The show goes this way after about the third series. To their credit, the crew is pretty genre-savvy about it, especially in Series VI. For example, Rimmer explains to one monster that everybody they'd met to that point has tried to kill them. It also swings the other direction in Series 7 & 8, having the storylines cover multiple episodes. (Although they are still self-contained.)
• Mood Whiplash: When Lister and The Cat are debating Rimmer and Kryten's fate, after vainly searching for them in "Backwards":
  Cat: Three weeks we been doin' this.
  Lister: We'll do it 'til we find 'em.
  Cat: (somberly) We ain't gonna find 'em...They're gone, buddy. But look on the bright side...(jubilant) They're gone, buddy!
• Morality Chip: Lister is perpetually trying to help Kryten break his programming and give him the ability to discern between truly immoral behavior and the sometimes heavy-handed restrictions imposed by his ethical subroutines. This includes disabling the chip and teaching him emotions/lying. When the ethical subroutines are disabled, Kryten turns into a complete wanker.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Trope Namer. Many of the GELFs could qualify.
  • Also, the Polymorph's Shapeshifter Default Form. The statement that named this trope is Rimmer explaining why they shouldn't attempt to fight it.
• Mr. Exposition: Holly, and later Kryten.
• Mister Seahorse:
  • In Season II's "Parallel Universe", Lister is impregnated by his female counterpart from a gender-flipped alternate universe, although the pregnancy was turned into an Aborted Arc offscreen.
  • In "Can Of Worms", Cat becomes pregnant when a polymorph uses him to host her eggs.
• Ms. Fanservice: Kochanski in Series VII. This was largely abandoned in Series VIII, which she spent the vast majority of dressed up in the bulky prison jumpsuit and Canaries uniforms, though "Cassandra" and "Krytie TV" are notable exceptions.
• Multi-Part Episode: "Back In The Red" (a three-parter), "Pete" (a two-parter), and "Back to Earth" (a three-part miniseries) are these.
• Mundane Utility:
  • After losing his opportunity to buy a Stirmaster from an automated infomercial company in "Trojan", Lister turns the simulant that they just defeated into one.
  • In "Twentica", the Expenoids demand a device from the crew in exchange for Rimmer. Turns out that Lister and the Cat were just using it to prop up the pool table.
• Murderous Malfunctioning Machine: The Hudzen 10 droids were intended to replace the Series of Mechanoids which Kryten was part of. However, the one sent out to replace Kryten had seen a deterioration in his sanity chip. The result is that when the crew refused to turn Kryten off, he attempted to kill them all.
• My Future Self and Me:
  • The ludicrous temporal shenanigans of "Stasis Leak" in Series II. Lister attempts to re-kindle a relationship with his former girlfriend and in doing so encounters a future version of himself who has already married her.
  • And Rimmer runs into the original him, who he went into the past to try and save, and thus runs into a future version of himself who has an unconvincing mustache.
  Past Rimmer (In the process of having a mental breakdown yelling at present and future Listers, Cat, Kochanski and present Rimmer, all of whom he thinks are hallucinations brought on by a breakfast of space mushrooms. It Makes Sense in Context): 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.
  Future Rimmer (after appearing unexpectedly through a solid object): I don't want anyone to get into a flap here, but I'm the Rimmer from the double double future. I'm the Rimmer who's with the Lister who married Kochanski. Now from this point on things get a liiiiiittle bit confusing.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Rimmer's increasingly poor attempts to speak Esperanto in "Kryten", especially as the Conlang was designed to be simple to learn. Further highlighted by Lister being shown to have become semi-fluent, due to the sheer amount of times that Rimmer has watched the tapes having long-since burned the answers into his memory.
• My Own Grampa: It's revealed that Lister is his own father. Via in-vitro fertilization with Kochanski, no less. This becomes a major plot point in one Series X episode as regards his novel way of celebrating Father's Day: get blind drunk, tape himself messages that he'll forget the next morning to play back to himself, the closest to father-to-son interaction he'll ever have.
• Mythology Gag: In the episode "Psirens", the SCS Pioneer is commanded by Captain Tau, played by Anita Dobson. Tau was also the name of the female captain of the Dwarf itself in the failed US pilot.
• Name One: In "Nanarchy" a depressed Lister, who has recently lost his right arm, challenges the others to name someone who lost an arm and went on to lead a normal life. They readily give an answer – Horatio Nelson – but then Lister says "Name five." The other answers they end up giving are much less convincing: the Venus de Milo (a sculpture), Vincent van Gogh (despite Lister pointing out he had one ear), "that one-armed guy from The Fugitive" (a murderer), and Lister himself.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • Arnold Judas Rimmer, for a double dose of treachery. Subverted however in that he eventually becomes a Jerk with a Heart of Gold after receiving more character development. And the show even came up with a somewhat legitimate reason why his mother gave him that name in the first place: her brand of Christianity saw Judas as an unfairly demonized hero.
  • Queeg (see The Caine Mutiny) is also used for the computer that temporarily replaces Holly. He's actually Holly trying to teach the crew to apprectiate him more.
  • The western-dreamscape character "Bear-Strangler" McGee.
  • The leader of the simulants in Series Ten has the title of The Dominator.
• Nanomachines: Nanobots are responsible for rebuilding the whole of Red Dwarf, crew included, at the end of series 7.
• Narcissist: Cat is absolutely in love with himself. The most telling example is when a Shapeshifting Seducer assumes the form that he desires most... himself.
  Cat: So I'm the object of my own desires?
  Shapeshifter!Cat: Is there anyone more deserving?
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Lister as Voter-Colonel Sebastian Doyle in "Back to Reality". "Vote Fascist for another glorious decade of total law enforcement!"
• Necro Non Sequitur: Cassandra's demise.
• Negative Space Wedgie: The crew have encounted their share of them, including a time hole (AKA an orange swirly thing), a white hole, a stasis leak, and a minefield of alternate reality pockets.
• Nerds Are Sexy:
  • Averted and kicked to the floor by Duane Dibbley.
  • Only to be picked right back up again with how Kochanski is characterized in Series VII.
• Nested Mouths: The Polymorph.
• Never My Fault: One of Rimmer's problems is that he never accepts responsibility for anything and instead has spent his whole life blaming everyone else for the bad things in it, from Lister to his parents. In "Me2" Lister points this out.
• Never Say That Again: Kryten can't handle being called "tetchy" in "Quarantine".
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Ace Rimmer's Nazi enemy has a crocodile for a pet, keeping it on his lap and stroking it affectionately, parodying Blofeld's Right-Hand Cat. He throws it at Ace and jumps out of the plane they're on, but Ace overpowers it and proceeds to "surf" on it in free fall.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The intro for series IV-V, that made it look like an action-heavy adventure show instead of an irreverent comedy with a sci-fi backdrop.
• New Baby Episode: The episode "Dad" was intended to be an example of this. It would have revolved around Lister giving birth to a child (conceived in the Parallel Universe)and dealing with fatherhood before ultimately having to send it back to its conceived dimension. The episode was ultimately scrapped as the creators thought the jokes were too sexist and the plot was briefly summarised in the opening crawl for "Backwards".
• The Nicknamer: Cat, who very rarely refers to anyone by their actual name. Kochanski is "Officer Bud Babe" and Holly is simply "Head" whilst everyone else gets insulting names. Kryten has been "Eraser head" and "Chewed-Eraser Head", with "Novelty Condom Head" a particular favourite, Rimmer is most frequently "Goalpost Head", though he has also been "Trans-Am-Wheel-Arch Nostrils" and "Captain Sadness" among others.
  Cat: I found Goalpost-Head. No sign of Dormouse-Cheeks, though.
  • In "Give & Take", we find that - albeit following the example of Cat and Lister's insults - Kryten had all data pertaining to Rimmer contained in a folder marked "Captain Bollocks"; one which he had accidentally deleted in order to free up more hard drive space.
• Nietzsche Wannabe: The Inquisitor; subverted by his attempts to populate the universe with meaningful humans.
• No Ending: Quite a few episodes end fairly abruptly, often with the main conflict only barely resolved.
  • "Polymorph" ends with the reveal that a second polymorph was on the ship the entire time, showing it disguised as Lister before turning into its true, grotesque form. The much-derided "remastered" version changes the ending to state that it hid away in Lister's underpants drawer and eventually died of old age, many years later.
  • The original Grand Finale, "Only the Good..." ends with Rimmer trapped onboard Red Dwarf as it's eaten apart by microbes. The Grim Reaper appears, only for Rimmer to promptly kick him in the dick and run away. The Uncancelled series resolves this with an unexplained (albeit addressed) Snap Back.
  • "Officer Rimmer" ends with the crew firing the first Bazookoid shot at the monster terrorizing the crew before it abruptly cuts to credits. Presumably they didn't have the budget to show it actually dying.
  • The episode "Samsara" (which also happens to be part of series XI) appears to set up the next scene where the crew need to escape the ship while being as cruel to each other and as self-serving as possible along the way before suddenly cutting to the credits.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: Happens to Kryten after he's used as a battering ram, and briefly starts calling Lister "Susan."
  • And also in "Quarantine" when the insane Rimmer telekinetically attacks him with a fire axe.
• Non-Serial Movie: Red Dwarf nearly got a movie that ignored the eighth season. The Bolivian Army Ending of Series VIII was Doug Naylor attempting to Torch the Franchise and Run so the TV continuity couldn't be continued. The movie was scrapped when the only financial backers wanted to replace the cast with more successful answers leading to the show continuing with the ship having an Unexplained Recovery.
• Nonverbal Miscommunication: In "Dear Dave", Cat attempts to convey his news to the rest of the crew through charades (because he is bored). His attempt to mime 'the mail-pod has arrived and crashed into my clothes' is construed by the others as everything from 'we're about to fly into a black hole' to 'we're being attacked by zombies'.
• Noodle Incident / Noodle Implements: "The Last Day":
  Lister (waking up after a night's drinking): On a mining ship, 3 million years into deep space, can someone explain to me where the smeg I got this traffic cone?
  Cat: Hey, it's not a good night unless you get a traffic cone. It's the policewoman's helmet and the suspenders I don't understand!
  • We never find out what happened after "Only the Good..." to restore the status quo of previous seasons. It gets referenced in "The Beginning" only for the details of the solution to the virus being shushed.
  • In the Smeg Outs video, Kryten discussing the problems the show has had over the years with animals, cites chickens that wouldn't fly and rabbits that wouldn't hop before adding "...and thank heavens we never actually hired that constipated elephant."
• No One Else Is That Dumb: When a Psiren is impersonating Lister, the other characters ask one of the two indistinguishable Listers to prove he is the real one by playing the guitar. The first Lister does so, very well, and the other characters shoot him. They know the second Lister is the real one because he only thinks he can play.
• No Periods, Period: Lampshaded and averted. It's briefly mentioned in "Balance of Power" when Kochanski (really (and clearly) Rimmer) claims to be "having a woman's period." In "Only the Good...", Lister explains to Kryten why the second Kochanski has said it's the wrong time of the month. Kryten is shocked that television and film have so successfully avoided this. Kryten, armed with this new knowledge of the female body, hilariously averts the trope.
• No-Sell: Hudzen 10 takes no damage from Lister's shotgun and simply tosses him aside.
• No Snack for You: In "Only the Good", we get a vending machine with artificial intelligence that gets angry when Rimmer uses a coin-on-a-string to get a free chocolate bar. Rimmer is unimpressed with its threats of terrible vengeance, only to get clonked on the back of the head by a flying soda can at the end of the episode.
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: In series I, Lister is 25 ("Future Echoes"). In Series II, Rimmer states that they've now been in deep space for two years, and various other references indicate that each series represents about a year, meaning the characters should be aging in real time. Then series III rolls around and Lister is somehow still 25 ("Backwards"). In series 6's "Out Of Time", Kryten complains about having to do the laundry over the course of "Four long years" (Since series 3, presumably, which would make sense). Then, after a 3-year production hiatus, series 7 begins with Lister telling us that he's just turned...28. As if to lampshade this by taking Refuge in Audacity, series X (Which takes place a minimum of 9 in-universe years after the end of series VIII and aired nearly 25 real-life years after the first episode), describes Kochanski, who was previously established as being about the same age as Lister, as now being 31 years old!
  • Subverted in Series XII, where Lister canonically celebrates his 62nd birthday, which is just as big of a Gut Punch to Lister himself, because he'd been living every day of his life exactly the same aboard the Dwarf. It's possible he was just wrong about his and Kochanski's age in Series X.
• Not Disabled in VR: A subtle one with Rimmer, who is intangible due to being dead, being able to have physical form and interact physically while in the VR game "Better Than Life".
• Not-So-Innocent Whistle: In Back to Earth, Kryten demonstrates his "Innocent Whistle Mode" after being caught conspiring with Rimmer.
• Not in the Face!: In "Legion", circumstances force Kryten to knock out his crewmates. The Cat: "Do what you gotta, but don't mess up my hair."
• Not Quite Saved Enough: Rimmer in "Timeslides".
• Not Quite the Right Thing: "Nanarchy" has the crew persuading Kryten's nanites to regrow Lister's arm. They do... then they decide to fix the rest of him, resulting in a Lister with a ludicrously buff body, much to everyone's horror.
• "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: In "Thanks for the Memory", Lister looks in on what Rimmer is dreaming. Rimmer is doing a tap dance in a top hat and tails, but no pants.
• Not Where They Thought:
  • In "Parallel Universe", Holly invents a method of getting the ship back to Earth. After trying it, Holly claims that they've gotten back to Earth, but the Earth is missing. The crew later finds that they haven't ended up where the Earth should be, but rather in a parallel universe where everyone's the opposite gender.
  • In "Backwards", Lister and the Cat think that they're in their universe, in Bulgaria, near a place known as Nodnol. It turns out that they're near London in a universe where time goes backwards.
  • In "Meltdown", Lister assumes that he and the Cat have time travelled and ended up in Nazi Germany. They are in fact on a planet populated by waxdroids, in their own time.
• Novelization: A number of early episodes were adapted as novels, however enough plot changes were made that they are considered to exist in a separate continuity to the TV series.
• No Water Proofing In The Future:
  • Kryten, and all the other Series 4000 mechanoids of his type.
  • In "Entangled", Lister shorts out the control panel on the Red Dwarf by spilling chilli sauce on it, then attempting to put out the resulting fire with his lager.
  • In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, a console officer spills his coffee on his keyboard and assumes the warning light is a result of this, rather than the radiation leak bearing down on everyone.
• Now Do It Again, Backwards: It's how Red Dwarf is reconstituted from its High and Low counterparts in "Demons and Angels".
• Numbered Sequels: This practise was started with the third series, which was billed in listings magazines as Red Dwarf III (leading some fans to list the first two series as Series 1 & 2, and all later series with Roman numerals), but VII was the first series to be numbered onscreen.
• Obfuscating Disability: In "Cured", the hidden psychopath turns out to be the wheelchair bound Professor Telford, who reveals that he is not crippled when he stands up and points a rifle at the crew.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Holly in "Queeg".
• Objectshifting:
  • In "Polymorph", the Dwarfers face a genetically modified life-form that can transform into anything and feeds on negative emotions. Along with the various human and animal life-forms encountered throughout the episode, it also transforms into a radio, a ball, a kebab, and Lister's boxers.
  • The gang face a tame version in "Emohawk." This one sneaks onto Starbug disguised as Lister's hat and gets the drop on the Cat while disguised as a can of beans.
  • ... And a whole litter of them in "Can of Worms" after a polymorph uses Cat as a host for its eggs, all of which end up leaving his body in a number of extremely uncomfortable forms.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: In "Marooned", Rimmer gives high praise to Lister for actually burning his guitar, as he knows it means as much to him as Rimmer's Javanese camphor-wood trunk means to him, relating to Lister exactly what that trunk symbolizes to him. Too bad for Rimmer that Lister just cut a guitar-shaped hole in the trunk.
  Rimmer: And you've shown me, by burning your guitar, what true value really is.
• Ode to Food: The Cat once sings a song to his fish called "I'm Gonna Eat You, Little Fishy".
• Offing the Offspring: In the episode "Psirens", the psirens' illusion of Kochanski gives Lister the impression that she is planning to do this to her and Lister's offspring and then herself to save their "child" from an invasion by monsters who would torture them brutally one captured.
• Offscreen Crash: Rimmer in the remastered pilot. Somehow. In the original there was no sound effects.
• Oh, Crap!: Rimmer has this reaction in "The Inquisitor". Rimmer thinks he's found a way out of being judged by the inquisitor because of the legitimate point that he might not get a fair hearing. The Inquisitor then explains that to make the hearing as fair as possible, every person's judge will be...
  [The Inquisitor opens his helmet, revealing Rimmer's face underneath]
  Rimmer!Inquisitor: ...Yourself!
  Rimmer: Oh, smeg!
  Rimmer!Inquisitor: "Oh smeg!" indeed, matey.
  • The Simulants in "The Beginning" when they realise that Rimmer has outsmarted them and they try to surrender.
• Oh Wait, This Is My Grocery List:
  • In "Twentica", a badly wounded bootlegger tells Lister he is not going to make it and hands him a card. Lister reads the card and says "Pizza delivery? You want to order a pizza?". The bootlegger replies "Sorry. Wrong pocket" and hands him the card for the science speakeasy.
  • Some of the Cat race mistake Lister's laundry list for spatial co-ordinates and end up crashing into an asteroid.
• Older and Wiser: Sort of as they are still the same group of idiots and misfits they've always been, but by Back to Earth and onwards they are far more competent at being space adventurers and are better at working as a team.
• Older Than They Look: Kryten. In "Back in the Red: Part 1" he tells Dr McLaren that he was created in 2340. Since the events of "The End" take place at some point between the 21st and 23rd century (several episodes contradict the figure), and Lister is in stasis for around three million years, that means that when the crew first meet him in "Kryten", the eponymous character is roughly three million years old himself. Even in a show that hardly prides itself on its consistency and continuity, that's a staggering figure.
• Once a Season: A Time episode. There are several forms of time travel, ranging from stasis leaks to actual drives for starships.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Red Dwarf gave us a justified use, then lampshaded it when Arnold Rimmer reads of the captain having described him as "constantly failing" the astronavigation exam:
  Rimmer: Constantly fails the exam? I'd hardly call 11 times "constantly". I mean, if you eat roast beef eleven times in your life, one would hardly say that person "constantly" eats roast beef, would you?
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Between Rimmer and Lister in Entangled. Rimmer is talking about the fact Lister threw his paperwork out of the airlock whilst Lister is talking about the fact he bet and lost Rimmer in a poker game.
• One-Man Army: Ace Rimmer. In "Stoke Me a Clipper", he downs a Luftwaffe plane, takes out a whole squad of Nazi soldiers apart from one and simultaneously rescues a princess. What a guy.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted; there are at least five minor or unseen characters called Frank. And at least two named Gilbert.
• The One Where Everyone Dies: "Out of Time" ends with the crew being killed by their future selves. By the beginning of Series VII, they've been brought back by a time paradox that this created.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Lister's depression during "Timeslides" gets so bad he actually says he wants a job.
  • The situation in "Quarantine" has Kryten so tetchy he implies he's willing to kill Lister for his disgusting habits.
    • Such as calling him 'tetchy'.
• Opposite-Sex Clone:
  • Opposite sex dimension in "Parallel Universe". They meet their versions.
  • Rimmer eventually, after several failures breeds an actual opposite sex clone of himself in the episode "Rimmerworld", which even has his face.
• Other Me Annoys Me:
  • Whenever the Dwarfers meet parallel universe, alternate timeline, copied or time-displaced versions of themselves, to the point that "Stasis Leak" ends on Rimmer screaming at the various time/dimension-traveling versions of himself and his crewmates to just go away.
  • Lister once sold his DNA to a cloning firm for the princely sum of $£100 and half a packet of cigarettes. It turns out that all those smartass Scouse call centre operators that have been plaguing Lister with crap offers are actually his clones.
• Our Sirens Are Different: Psirens are psychic alien sirens.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • The aforementioned Everybody's Dead, Dave.
  • And:
    Cat: Fish!
    Food Dispenser: Today's fish is Trout à la crème. Enjoy your meal! (repeat exchange five more times)
  • Cat playing his ditziness up to eleven:
  Cat: So what is it? (in more than one episode)
  • Red Dwarf X has these too. In "Lemons", the Dwarfers have time-travelled to 23 A.D. Earth, and stumble across a pleasant local by the name of... Jesus.
    Cat: So how old would Jesus be now?
    Rimmer: In 23 A.D.? Gosh, well, let's see... (Starts tapping on his palm like a calculator)
  (Beat)
  (Several more beats)
  (Quite a lot of beats indeed)
  Rimmer: ...oh... twenty-three?
• Overly Pre-Prepared Gag: The episode "Queeg" has Lister tell Rimmer a long rambling story about why it's cruel to give machines personalities. He tells about how his friend Peterson had a pair of "Smart Shoes" that could always get you home no matter how drunk you were. But Peterson woke up hundreds of miles away because the shoes wanted to see the world. He tried to get rid of them but they'd show back up. In the end the shoes stole a car and wound up driving it into a canal because they couldn't steer properly. Peterson was upset, but a priest consoled him that the shoes were happy and in heaven now. You see, it turns out shoes have soles.
• Pac Man Fever: Averted. Lister is seen playing a GTA clone with a steering wheel and light gun with proper sound effects. Although the Cat does assume Lister is playing a text-only adventure game when trying to communicate the fact that what appears to be a one-eyed tarantula is crawling up his leg.
• Page-Turn Surprise: In Log No. 1996, a spin-off book featuring the crew's journals over one year, the entry for March 17 has Kryten explaining that he's set up a hydroponics pod and laced it with a chemical cocktail to promote rapid growth; he anticipates quick results. On the next page...
  MARCH 18
  Kryten: Ship taken over by a 9,000lb greenfly.
• Painful Rhyme: "Blue"'s Rimmer song. Lampshaded in the extended version where Rimmer sings that he's running out of words that rhyme with his name and hopes the song will play out before he's completely stuck.
• Paint It Black: Evil Holly and Evil Lister in "Demons and Angels".
• Palette-Swapped Alien Food: All over the table in "Legion".
• Pals with Jesus: Subverted in "Lemons". They meet a guy named Jesus, just not the Son of God. He later "invents" the bag, after discovering it on the Dwarf.
• Pardon My Klingon: "Smeg." At least, it was supposed to be a thoroughly fictional profanity.
  Rimmer: Why don't you smegging well smeg off, you annoying little smeggy smegging smegger?
  • In the earlier series, goit and gimboid appeared.
  • Earlier episodes also featured the fictional insult "you're being a total Gwenlan", apparently named after a producer who turned down the original pilot. It's explained in Universe as a stab at Kylie Gwenlyn, who's responsible for, among other things, Androids, Kryten's favourite soap opera.
• Parrot Expo What: The Cat does this on occasion, usually having it explained by Kryten.
• Passed in Their Sleep: Rimmer found a letter saying that his father (who of course died thousands of years ago) died peacefully in his jeep...er...sleep.
• Pass the Popcorn:
  • Watching the black box recording in "Thanks for the Memory".
  • Also, in "Terrorform", when Rimmer is about to be tortured and Lister explains they can either rescue him or sit and watch, Cat asks if anyone has any opera glasses.
• Perpetually Protean: Features this in play whenever a Polymorph shows up; when not taking on forms designed to provoke emotions from its victims, it shapeshifts wildly into a huge variety of different bodies for the simple act of travelling down a corridor, only retaining a stable shape when it needs to remain hidden.
• Perverse Sexual Lust: Cat and Lister once debate who's hotter - Wilma or Betty. They opt for Wilma before Lister lampshades how insane their conversation is - Wilma would never leave Fred.
• Phony Degree: "Arnold J Rimmer, BSc, SSc". (Those initials stand for "Bronze swimming certificate" and "Silver swimming certificate".)
• Photoprotoneutron Torpedo: the Series X Simulants' "Photon Mutilators".
• Phrase Catcher: Ace Rimmer. Meetings with him almost always end with the other party reverently saying "What a guy!" as Ace walks away.
• Pinball Projectile:
  • In "Gunmen of the Apocalypse".
  • The ultimate example of this is "White Hole" where multiple planets are crashed into one another in order to plug up the Negative Space Wedgie.
• Planet Baron: In the episode "Rimmerworld", cowardly hologram Rimmer hops into an escape pod, gets diverted into a wormhole, and spends the next six hundred years (post-Time Dilation) on an barren planet. Because the escape pod was from an advanced terraforming ship, however, he is able to create life — even cloning humanoids based on his own DNA records. When the crew of Starbug finally arrive, they find the planet dominated by Space Romans, all with Rimmer's face. The Emperor Rimmer, however, is one of the clones, not their Rimmer, who, effectively immortal, has been kept prisoner for centuries — not even other Rimmers can stand him.
• Planetary Relocation: In "White Hole", the crew are faced with the problem of how to escape from an all-destroying black hole. Holly the computer eventually comes up with a solution: to play snooker with planets so that one becomes a cue ball to be used to pot a gas giant into the black hole, thus plugging it for long enough for the Dwarf to accelerate out of the way. Lister, a veteran of the pol table at the Aigburth Arms, promptly necks eight cans of lager, arguing the only way to play pool is when you are utterly pissed. He then attempts a trick shot with spin off the cushion, affecting the orbits of up to eight planetary bodies.
• Plot Armor: Everyone but Rimmer gains in universe plot armour in the episode Cassandra when a precognitive computer predicts that they will all survive the impending destruction of the wreck they're on. They try to use theirs to get Rimmer to safety after he didn't need it as the computer was lying.
  • Lister already had armour in the form of seeing a vision of himself as an old man in the episode "Future Echoes".
• Plot Hole: Lister's attempt to make a "gift" of the memories of one of his love affairs to Rimmer introduces several of these into Rimmer's life.
  Rimmer: That's why I was an orphan, even though my parents were alive. That's why I had my appendix out twice.
  • Interestingly, Lister also had his appendix removed twice, as Legion removes his appendix when he realises it's about to kill Lister.
  • Last Human handwaves this by stating that by freak of nature, Lister had two appendices.

Point of Divergence:

• One little split in the destiny line created Ace Rimmer. However, it turns out that it's not getting a break and passing a test that created Ace - it's being held back a year and humiliated that made him finally fight back, which makes our Rimmer's "it's not my fault, I just had a bad childhood" line technically true.
• While the actual Point of Divergence was likely earlier given the differences between the two Kochanskis, the alternate dimension seen in "Ouroboros" definitively split off from the main one when Kochanski discovered Frankenstein and confiscated her from Lister. This led to her being put in stasis and surviving the accident instead of Lister.

• Pointy-Haired Boss: Captain Frank Hollister is revealed to have only reached his rank through blackmail (from the lowly position of Doughnut Boy, no less), implying that he is only marginally more qualified than Rimmer or Lister, though clearly more clever and/or more ambitious.
• Police Code for Everything: Rimmer will frequently cite the codes for Space Corps Directive violations when encountering the Monster of the Week, and Kryten relates the actual text of the code, typically prompting Rimmer to have to correct himself.
• Political Overcorrectness: In "Timewave", the Dwarfers find themselves aboard a ship that appears to be the starship equivalent of Tumblr where everyone expresses themselves creatively, but nobody is allowed to criticize anything.
• Poor Man's Porn: In the extended version of "Ourobouros", after donating his genetic material for Kochanski's In-Vitro tube, Lister mentions the only suitable... ahem, material on board Starbug is a record sleeve from a James Last album.
• [Popular Saying], But...: "Stasis Leak" has:
  Holly: What I'm saying, Dave, is that it's better to have loved and to have lost... than to listen to an album by Olivia Newton-John.
  Cat: Why's that?
  Holly: Anything's better than listening to an album by Olivia Newton-John.
• Portmantitle: Doug Naylor seems to be fond of these, as several of his solo episodes are titled this way; specifically "Nanarchy", "Twentica", "Krysis" and "Mechocracy".
• Possessive Paradise: The crew come across a luxurious space station manned by an entity calling itself "Legion". It was built by the greatest human intellectuals who ever lived, but they have all died three million years ago. He's delighted to cater to the crew's every whim and treat them like honored guests. However, he forbids them from leaving because he's a formless entity that is created from the collective minds of the residents on the station. If they leave, he'll become nothing again.
• Power of Friendship: Inverted. The rest of the crew use this with Rimmer to escape the Psi-Moon in "Terrorform". Rimmer is suspicious right from the start, and even when it does work long enough to get them off the moon, Rimmer immediately realizes that it was all tot, and that they meant not a word of it. Much to his displeasure, by that point they're only too happy to confirm his suspicions.
• Power Outage Plot: in "White Hole", an attempt to restore Holly's genius at the expense of her runtime results in her having three minutes to live. She shuts herself down to save runtime, taking most of the ship's functions with her, including life support, doors and lighting. The Dwarfers are forced to figure out how to survive without electricity, which is a huge problem on a spaceship the size of a city: just travelling through the ship requires them to use Kryten as a battering ram, and a trip for supplies takes weeks with no lifts. At least until the titular celestial phenomenon appears, causing more problems but also allowing them to undo the damage to Holly.
• Power Makes Your Voice Deep: When Rimmer becomes the Mighty Light (a Diamond light form which gives him superpowers) in "The Promised Land", his voice becomes notably deeper as a result.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: From "Gunmen of the Apocalypse": "Now if you'll forgive the rather confrontational imperative, Go for yer guns, ye scum-sucking molluscs!"
  • From the same episode: "We're gonna cut you up so small, the worms won't even have to chew."
• Precision F-Strike:
  • Rimmer gets to say "bastard" on five occasions and "bitch" once, all of which count. The former in 'Waiting For God' arguing with Lister about the Quagaars, 'Thanks For The Memory' insulting Hollister, 'Timeslides' on going back in time to 'save' Lister, 'White Hole' on why he won't turn himself off, and 'Back In The Red pt I' when all the women start lusting after him. Lister says it in Backwards when talking about backwards Father Christmas, In 'Bodyswap' albeit in Rimmer's body after the latter, in his body, crashes Starbug and pretends he's lost an arm, and in 'Tikka To Ride' discussing Kryten's definition of a 'Giant Pizza', actually Lee Harvey Oswald after he's fallen to his death.
  • The show also has precisely one instance of an actual swear word (Cat says "shit" in "Emohawk: Polymorph II", and it's pretty hard to make out at that).
  • Depends on your definition of swear word; definitely includes Lister's infamous 'Alrighty then, let's get out there and twat it!' line from 'Polymorph' (one of the mistaken assumptions why the video release was a 15 certificate, the highest in the series), numerous uses of 'git' and variations thereof, usually by Rimmer, 'arsehole' spoken by Lister in 'Kryten' is seen as more vulgar than its American counterpart; even its trademark insult 'smeg' is seen as this in some circles.
  • The very first one in "Future Echoes":
  Rimmer I look (looks in the mirror) LIKE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL TIT!!!!!! (thanks to Holly giving him a 'haircut', he now possesses a Marge Simpson-esque beehive)
• Precursors: A variation in that all life in the universe originated on Earth, which makes us the Precursors.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Kochanski has one for the Epideme virus. It keeps comparing itself to a television series and when it thinks it's infected her, claims to have been "renewed for another season". She replies, "Wrong, Buckhead, you're axed!" and hacks off the arm it's in.
• Pretty in Mink: "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" starts with Lister doing a VR simulation of a Film Noir, where he romances a dame wearing a fur wrap.
• Prison Ship: Red Dwarf itself serves a secondary purpose as a prison transport ship. Apparently only a few people are aware of that floor.
• Production Throwback: In Series VIII, the original Series I/II sleeping quarters makes a return for the first episode, "Back In The Red" and also in the Series XII finale, "Skipper". Lister and Rimmer's Series I outfits make brief returns in Series XII. In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in "Back To Earth", a Mugs Murphy DVD boxset appears alongside the Red Dwarf boxsets.
• Prophetic Fallacy: In "Cassandra", Cassandra predicts Rimmer will die in 20 minutes, but doesn't know who Rimmer is. Rimmer gives his jacket and nametag to Knott, who does die in 20 minutes, apparently "Rimmer" to any onlooker.
• Psychic Radar: During the episode "Quarantine", both Lanstrom and Rimmer, under the effects of the Holovirus, are able to home in on the location of the rest of the crew by sensing their thoughts.
  "Unfortunately she has already found you! Twinkle, twinkle, little eye, now it's time for you to die!"
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: In "DNA", Cat is fiddling with the DNA machine trying to get Lister out, but with little success. Lister responds with, "Do. Nothing! Press. Nothing! GET! KRYTEN!"
• Pursue the Dream Job:
  • Dave Lister's dream is to move to Fiji, buy a farm and open a Hot Dog Stand. He tries to save the money to carry out his big plan.
  • Rimmer's is to be an officer in the Space Corps. Problem is, he's rubbish at the required exams. Even after his death, being stranded three million years into deep space and the human race, never mind the Space Corps, no longer existing, he still tries.
• Pushed at the Monster: In "Polymorph", the crew lose various aspects of their personality because of an Emotion Eater shapeshifting GELF stowaway. Kryten loses all empathy, and consequently mutters behind their backs that he will sacrifice his teammates when they find the polymorph.
• Put on a Bus: Holly, once in Series VI and VII, and again during the Dave Run. He eventually makes a cameo appearance in "Skipper" before returning full time in "The Promised Land".