It's a normal day on the Jupiter Mining Corporation mining ship Red Dwarf. Second Technician Arnold J. Rimmer and Third Technician Dave Lister are arguing in the midst of their job, fixing chicken soup machines. Rimmer, being as he is a smeghead, insists is absolutely meaningful work and scolds Lister repeatedly for not showing this job the respect it deserves.
Aside from bickering, Lister also slobs about with his friends Selby, Chen and Petersen, while Rimmer urgently prepares for his upcoming officer's exam — despite the fact he's failed every time he's taken it before. Meanwhile, the ship mourns the death of one of their own, who's then brought back as a hologram. Later on, Lister confides in Rimmer about his big plan: to buy a farm on Fiji. Rimmer is dubious, what with the fact Fiji has recently sunk. Unknown to Rimmer, Lister's also hiding a live cat in his quarters, planning to take Frankenstein with him to Fiji.
The day of Rimmer's exam arrives, and he goes off having cunningly written down all manner of technical notes on his arms. Almost immediately after the exam begins, however, Rimmer encounters a couple of problems. One, he doesn't know anything about what he's written down; and two, the ink on his arms has started running. So, with as much dignity as he can muster, Rimmer has a complete breakdown.
As this is happening, Lister is summoned to Captain Hollister's office, who wants to ask him about that cat of his. Lister attempts to maintain denial about the cat he's hiding... the cat he took a photo of... the photo he sent to the ship's lab to be developed... The captain is outraged, since an unquarantined cat could easily do all manner of damage to Red Dwarf.
Lister though refuses to give up Frankenstein, and as a result is punished with stasis — being frozen in time until the ship returns to port.
...
Lister re-awakens to an abandoned Red Dwarf, with ship's computer Holly telling him to report to the drive room. As he does, Lister notes little piles of white powder lying around. And as for the crew? They're dead, Dave. Rimmer's dead, Chen's dead, Selby's dead. Everybody's dead, Dave.
- Lister: Hang on... are you trying to tell me everybody's dead?Holly: Should never've let him out in the first place.
As it turns out, after Lister went into stasis, a massive radiation leak flashed through the ship, killing everybody but him. This includes ship's flight officer Kristine Kochanski, whom Lister had a crush on. Then Holly breaks even further bad news. You see, he couldn't release Lister until the radiation dropped to safe levels, and that took... three million years. And Lister's still got that library book! Also, Holly's slightly worried that after three million years he might have gone a little "peculiar".
The good news is that not everyone's gone. Rimmer, of all people, is still around, as a hologram. Sadly, dying hasn't really changed Rimmer's personality one iota. He blames Lister for his death, even though the whole "fatal radiation burst" was Rimmer's fault. Bickering ensues, and Lister storms off. As the two march through the corridors, they meet someone else: a wailing, be-fanged, sharp-dressed humanoid who can't even recognise his own shadow. The two humans are startled and run off, with the newcomer following them... only to stop when he realises his suit has a crease.
Holly fills them in. He's a cat, from a race of humanoid cats, descended from Frankenstein — she was safely sealed in Red Dwarf's hold when the radiation leak hit. Rimmer demands Lister get rid of the Cat, but Lister declares that he's coming with them. Where? To Earth, naturally. It's got to still be there, right? Rimmer points out that to modern man, Lister'll probably look like some hideous thing crawled out of the slime. Lister's not discouraged, and tells Holly to plot a course for Fiji.
- Lister: Look out, Earth! The slime's coming home!
Tropes:
- All There in the Script: According to the original script, George McIntyre was killed by a radiation leak (albeit one more contained than what would occur later) from the faulty drive plate that Rimmer would later fail to repair properly.
- Ambiguous Syntax: Lister outlines his plan for the future as "I'm gonna buy meself a little farm on Fiji, and I'm gonna get a sheep and a cow and breed horses." A bemused Rimmer asks "With a sheep and a cow?"
- Attending Your Own Funeral:
- George McIntyre 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 McIntyre had written himself.
- A Deleted Scene Invoked has Lister giving eulogies to the crew while ejecting their remains into space, and Rimmer decides to give himself a eulogy.
- Brief Accent Imitation: Rimmer mimics one of Lister's lines in a Scouse accent. Later he also uses a Somerset farmer's accent when mocking Lister about his plans to own a farm.
- Broken Record: Holly trying to explain to Lister that "Everybody is dead, Dave".
- Burial in Space: George MacIntyre's remains get shot into space and Lister does it with the rest of the crew in a Deleted Scene.
- Characterization Marches On: Rimmer's first reaction to the Cat is to attack him while making karate yells — a far cry from the coward he'd later become.
- Character Tic: Rimmer marking any comment aimed at him down in his notepad. He's forced to give up after dying.
- Comic-Book Adaptation: The first three issues of the Smegazine adapt this episode.
- Cryo-Prison: Lister has to spend the rest of the mission in stasis as punishment for bringing a cat onboard.
- Cryptic Background Reference: Captain Hollister briefly refers to something that happened on the Oregon when some unquarantined rabbits got loose during his lecture to Lister. Exactly what happened is never detailed, though the context implies that it involved the animals causing havoc on the ship and would explain why he's so against Frankenstein's presence on the Red Dwarf.
- Cultural Stereotypes: Death is apparently "like being on holiday with a group of Germans".
- Dude, Not Funny!: Lister's reaction to Holly's comment about Kochanski's only use on Fiji being something to grit a snowy path with.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- Holly was originally a disembodied voice. Some remnants of this linger through the episode, including the Everybody's Dead, Dave sequence. Likewise, this is why Lister is looking at the ceiling on several occasions when he answers Holly - because he was supposed to be looking at the speakers the voice was coming from.
- Lister was originally meant to be more brain-fried, rather than just lazy. His clueless reaction when Rimmer mentions iguanas is a holdover of the concept, as is the conversation with Frankenstein where he clearly has no idea how kittens work (thinking she might have twins, and wondering how he’s going to split his milk ration between them).
- The Holly Distress Call Couch Gag that usually plays after the opening credits for Series I and II is absent here, as it would have spoiled what happens later on in the episode.
- Cat shrugs off the story of Frankenstein, Cloister the Stupid, and the cat race's genesis as some old myth that no-one really believes in. Only three episodes later, it's revealed that the mythology around Cloister was taken so seriously that it resulted in a full-on holy war among the cat race, albeit it splits the difference by revealing that Cat personally doesn't take the religion that seriously.
- After the first meeting between Lister and Rimmer's hologram, the latter absent-mindedly goes to lean on the central table in the drive room, and falls partway through it. While Rimmer remains unable to truly physically interact with the world (with the occasional exception) until early in Series VI, he doesn't fall through solid objects in this manner again, likely the result of Holly adjusting his projection so that he can use furniture in its intended fashion.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: The Trope Namer.
- Five-Finger Fillet: In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, Petersen can be seen doing this (badly) with a pen.
- Foil: Rimmer and Lister are this for each other with their completely different outlooks and attitudes. In this episode, Officer Todhunter also seems to be one for Rimmer; they're actually rather similar looking but Todhunter is clearly smart, capable and successful, and seems to be quite popular, whilst Rimmer is none of those things and obviously resents him for it.
- Human Notepad: Rimmer, due to writing down damn-near all his physics textbook onto his arms and legs. Lister even suggests he could just hand his body in to the examiners. But when he tries taking the exam, his nervous sweating makes all the ink run.
- Hypocrite:
- Rimmer wants Lister up on mutiny charges because he accidentally stepped on his toe. In "Stasis Leak", we find out that Rimmer had tried to jam a pencil up the captain's nose after he gave Lister a lenient punishment for drugging him.
- Lister calls Rimmer a smeghead in front of Todhunter. Rimmer uses the situation to insinuate the superior officer (Todhunter) should punish Lister for calling him a smeghead. Yet when Todhunter agrees with Lister and also calls Rimmer a smeghead, Rimmer reacts angrily and proceeds to insult Todhunter as he walks away.
- I Ate WHAT?!: Lister's horror upon learning the strange white powder he'd been tasting was the remains of the Red Dwarf crew.
- Insane Troll Logic: Rimmer maintains his charge of mutiny against Lister on the grounds that Lister prevented him at the time from performing a vital duty. Lister immediately points out that the "vital duty" at said time was an attempt to snap Lister's guitar in half. Based on that, in Rimmer's mind, there is no right to owning personal things at all and a person of higher rank has full rein to destroy such objects on the grounds that it is a vital duty on behalf of the ship, and the person defending his personal property is to be charged with mutiny. (Given later episodes featuring Lister’s guitar, a case could be made that Rimmer held its destruction to be vital to his own sanity, but it’s still pretty tenuous.)
- Ironic Episode Title: "The End" is the very first episode. Borderline because the episode actually does deal with a massive accident that wipes out almost the entire crew, setting up the series for After the End. (And with that situation set up, the episode ends with a caption in the same font, saying "The Beginning".)
- Madness Mantra: Rimmer when he suffers a nervous breakdown during one of his failed astro-navigation exams.Rimmer: Up, up, up, that's where I'm going!
Lister: Not until you pass an engineer's exam. And you won't do that because you'll just go in there and flunk again.
Rimmer: Lister, last time I only failed by the narrowest of narrow margins.
Lister: You what? You walked in there, wrote "I am a fish" four hundred times, did a funny little dance, and fainted. - The Main Characters Do Everything: It's not clear why Rimmer had to do something important like fixing the drive plate if he was on Z Shift which was known to be the most useless maintenance crew onboard. The novel continuity and Red Dwarf USA omit his involvement and when he gets put on trial for killing the crew in "Justice", this gets retconned by claiming it was only his own self-importance that led him to believe he was responsible.
- Noodle Incident: While reprimanding Lister for bringing an unquarantined animal onboard, Captain Hollister mentions the rabbits on the Oregon.
- Offscreen Crash: Rimmer in the remastered version. Somehow. In the original there was no sound effects.
- Overly Long Gag: "Everybody's Dead, Dave." "What, everybody?" "Yes, Dave. Everybody's dead, Dave." "Chen? Peterson?" "Yes, Dave. Everybody's dead, Dave." "What, even Selby?" "Yes, Selby! Everybody's dead, Dave!"
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Todhunter, the ship's second in-command, is polite and reasonable. Though he still admits Rimmer's a smeghead.
- Sanity Slippage: At first, Holly seems to still be the same after three million years or so alone. Then he makes an off-colour joke and admits that after all that time he's gone "a little peculiar".
- Shapeshifter Baggage: The actors point out in the commentary that due to the size of Mac MacDonald, Captain Hollister should have left a much larger pile of dust behind when he died.
- Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Trailers for the episode attempted to cover up the fact that the show would eventually take place 3 million years into the future, meaning that the Cat isn't mentioned at all despite his importance to the story. It extends to the Radio Times listings, which in spite of noting that most of the crew will eventually die, only lists the character that Danny John-Jules will be playing as a "?".
- Skewed Priorities: Lister's horrified on realizing he's been frozen for three million years. He's still got that library book.
- Sleeper Starship: Before putting Lister in stasis, Frank Todhunter implies it's normally used for interstellar travel.
- Small Name, Big Ego: The first several minutes help establish just how sad and pathetic Rimmer is, writing down Lister for being a mild nuisance at work. Then it turns out he went as far as to write Lister up several hundred times, including labelling one of Lister's responses as "mutiny" (Lister trod on his foot. Rimmer believes this would somehow have endangered the ship, and therefore counts).
- Survived the Beginning: This appropiatedly titled episode starts with everyone dying save a single survivor; Everybody's Dead, Dave. Not only does the entire crew of the titular spaceship die, but the entire human race goes extinct while Dave is a Human Popsicle.
- Technobabble: Parodied, when Todhunter 'explains' the Stasis Booth to Lister. It quickly trails off into utter gibberish.
- They Would Cut You Up: Sort of the catalyst for the whole series. The Captain tells Lister his cat will be cut up and have tests run on it — prompting the response, "Would you put it back together when you were done?"Hollister: Lister, the cat would be dead.Lister: Well, with respect, sir, what's in it for the cat?
- Time Stands Still: The stasis booths are an inversion where the occupant is frozen in time while the rest of the universe continues.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Exaggerated. The crew (including Mauve Shirts like Todhunter and Petersen) are briefly introduced and then all die in a radiation leak.
