Red Dwarf

Red Dwarf is a small and relatively cool star, which make up the vast majority of stars and are roughly half the size of our sun. It is also the name of a popular British science fiction-like comedy TV show.

The basis of the TV show was that in the future nothing much has changed. Rather than have exciting wonderful things happen, instead we are all still dressing much the same, doing much the same thing, and still have much of the same problems. It is just that in the future, we have robots to help us do things, machines are better, and we are utilising the vast resources of space to mine things (rather than mine our own earth). The Red Dwarf is the name of a mining ship which goes through space mining resources. It uses things that it mines as its fuel source as well. The ship is too large to land and was built in space.

Based on this premise, Lister (played by Craig Charles) is the last human alive, after he was put in suspended animation as penalty for smuggling a cat on board (his cat's name was Frankenstein, and he thought that the cat was a boy). While in suspended animation, Rimmer sets off a nuclear explosion which kills the entire crew. By the time that the ship has determined that the radiation level is safe enough to re-animate Lister, Earth and all of humankind has been destroyed and the ship has been moving for 3 million years away from earth. Meanwhile, Lister's Cat Frankenstein, who was pregnant, had kittens, who then multiplied, managed to survive the radiation somehow, and mutated/evolved into humanoid life forms. The person that Lister most hated in the world, Rimmer, is brought back as a hologram. Later, they adopt a robot called Kryten, and later still in a parallel universe they find the woman that Lister liked, Christine Kochansky (who is played by a different actress to in the earlier episodes).

Unlike more serious science fiction shows such as Star Trek, Red Dwarf makes no attempt at consistency. The show makes no sense whatsoever, and putting 2 episodes together to try to find consistency will lead to hundreds of thousands of plot holes. Indeed, even within a single episode there are often dozens of holes. In spite of this, there is some general consistency to the show, with flash backs to previous episodes or discussion of what happened in previous episodes leading to new events in later episodes.

The show lasted for 8 seasons, being halted after 6 seasons due to Craig Charles being arrested for rape. Whilst Craig Charles was eventually found not guilty, the show was paused in case he would not be able to participate. When the show resumed, the actor that played Rimmer was no longer available as he was involved in Brittas Empire and other ventures, hence a plot development led to him being taken out of the regular cast (although he made guest appearances).