Welcome aboard the Space Corps Jupiter Mining Vessel, the Red Dwarf.

Lister: "Love is what separates us from animals "
Rimmer: "No, Lister. What separates us from animals is that we don't use our tongues to clean our own genitals. "

-Lister and Rimmer, The End

Human spirit- The show addresses frequently what elements comprise the human soul and what it truly means to be "human". In a number of episodes, the crew are confronted with situations that test their moral fiber and ability to show the more altruistic side of the human spirit. Additionally, the crew are sometimes put in very strange scenarios that illustrate the writer's perspectives on the mental and emotional differences between humans and machines.

Possibly the best facilitator of conversation on this topic is Kryten, the mechanoid who lacks human emotions. In one extremely poignant episode, "DNA", Kryten is transformed from an android into a human, complete with real human emotions (see photo at left). However, during the course of the episode, Kryten is shown to be distressed over the fact that his eyes no longer have a zoom function, his nipple nuts no longer pick up radio wave signals, and that he still gets erotic thoughts about vacuum cleaners. Furthermore, Kryten informs his three spare heads (after all, he is an android) that they will no longer be of use since he is no longer a mechanical. The four eventually get into a fight, ending with Kryten insulting his own heads and the heads telling him that Kryten has turned on his own kind. Kryten is eventually turned back into a mechanical at the end of the episode at the insistence of Lister, who mistakenly attributes Popeye's saying of "I am what I am" to Descartes.

Kryten shows us in this episode that the hypothetical transition from mechanical to human would be taxing on the mind. Mechanicals are programmed to think one way. Even though Kryten had broken his programming and arrived at an independent set of morals, he was still a mechanical and not human. Becoming human technically made him an equal to that of Lister and Rimmer, meaning that he no longer felt compelled to do the chores onboard the ship. Kryten is exposed to true emotions and has difficulty coping with the awkward transition from mechanoid to human (as evidenced by the vacuum cleaner incident above).

Another good example of the human spirit theme is in the episode "Inquisitor". In the episode, a renegade GELF (see picture) takes the Red Dwarf crew prisoner and evaluates their worthiness. If they fail to have lived a worthwhile life, they are erased from existence and are replaced by someone more worthy. Kryten comes up with a plan to kill the Inquisitor and is prepared to carry it out, but Lister tells him no because Kryten is programmed not to kill.

Lister shows a staunch desire to adhere to basic robotic dogma in this instance. Drawing from Asimov's laws, Lister refuses to allow Kryten to kill the Inquisitor. This shows us that the Dwarfers are not in agreement over the correct action for a robot to take in this instance.

Time- Destiny and time are featured heavily in Red Dwarf. The two ideas are commonly entertwined, mostly through the concept of time travel and causality, or the idea that an action in the past will affect an event in the future.

As alluded to earlier, one of the most profound examples of the themes of time and destiny is the fact that Lister is his own father. In the episode "Ouroboros", Lister fills an in-vitro tube with his sperm and gives it to an alternate version of his lover, Kochanski, so that she and her hologramtic version of Lister can conceive a child. Through a series of events, Kochanski ends up having her child in Lister's universe, and Lister uses a time drive to go back in time and leave the baby version of himself under the pool table in the Aigburth Arms pub where he was found. In this now infinite cycle of continual rebirth, Lister claims, the human race can never truly be extinct.

A key theme used by the writers of Red Dwarf was destiny. We saw in this example that Lister will perpetually be his own father and keep the cycle of life going. Because Lister traveled back in time and performed his own birth once, he is destined to do the same action time and time again due to causality.

In the first series, the episode "Future Echoes" creates an interesting perspective on time and destiny. In the episode, the Red Dwarf breaks the light barrier and starts to see visions of events that have yet to happen. Some of these events include The Cat chipping his tooth and Rimmer seeing someone who believes to be Lister die a horrible death in the drive room. Lister is determined to stop both of these events from happening , but ends up being the cause of the fromer when he tackles the Cat in an attempt to prevent him from eating one of Lister's robotic fish. Lister is then summoned by Holly to the drive room to stop an emergency, and is prepared to face death. However, he repairs the drive plate without incident. When he returns to his room, he finds a version of himself from the future, who tells his younger self that the person that Rimmer saw die was actually his son, Bexley. This leaves Lister confused as to how he was going to have a child without a woman onboard.

Lister tries extremely hard in this episode to fight against destiny, but to no avail; He cannot stop what is going to happen. Even though he tries to avoid death, he is only able to escape due to being misinformed by Rimmer.

Masculinity- The theme of the role of males in deep space is not directly referred to in Red Dwarf. However, scholars (in particular, Dr. Elyce Rae Helford) have said that the show Red Dwarf should exist outside of a "patricarchal" society, yet the show shows that the Dwarfers are no less concerned about macho attitudes now that they are in deep space than they would have been on Earth.

It is clearly evident that the show centers around the male psyche; an almost exclusively male cast assisted by one dim-witted female computer. The only positive female character appears in the middle of the show's second to last series. In Dr. Helford's paper, Reading Masculinities in "Post-Patriarchal Space" of Red Dwarf, the author says that "[Red Dwarf] offer[s] depictions of masculinity generally unencumbered by actual tensions between the sexes, inviting viewers to examine gender relations primarily as envisioned by the male/masculine characters in fantasies, dreams, and memories. (Helford, 20)". Helford claims that the males in the show, despite no longer having to conform to displays of masochistic behavior, continue to compete for dominance. Lister and Rimmer often insult each other by making fun of teh other's sexuality. This kind of blatant homosexual bashing creates a feeling of male competition between people who no longer need to be competing for a mate.

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Last update: 11/23/2009

This site was created by Stephen Shapiro for HONR101, Speculative Visions, an honors course at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, instructed by Dr. Arthur Evans. If you have any questions or comments about the website, please contact: stephenshapiro_2013@depauw.edu