In the beginning there was Dave Lister. A pub crawling, beer drinking, nothing of a man, born in Aigburth, Liverpool, and left under a pool table, and now lives in a public locker. Until, he signed up to become a crewmember of the Jupiter Mining Company's Mining Ship, Red Dwarf.
He worked cleaning the nozzles of all the food dispensing machines on Red Dwarf under the rule of Arnold J. Rimmer, a smarmy, egotistical, shell of a man, who constantly tries to become an officer....although he's taken the test 17 times or more and failed EVERY TIME! So we continue. Dave fell in love with the beautiful Kristine Kochanski, another member of the Red Dwarf crew, with whom he dated for 3 weeks, and planned to move to Fiji with, and build a farm, only having his dreams crushed when she dumped him for someone else.
After a short shore leave on one of Saturn's moons, Lister brought a cat, named Frankenstein, onto the ship, without quarantine. This was a major violation of the Red Dwarf directives. After being found guilty of smuggling Frankenstien aboard the ship, he was sentenced to 3 months of stasis, where he would not age or have any concept of time. Moments after being locked away in stasis, there was a malfunction of the ship....a shockwave of radiation killed every crew member of Red Dwarf. Lister, still being locked away in stasis, is suddenly released by Red Dwarf's talking computer, Holly. Lister, feeling as though he was just placed into the stasis pod, wanders aimlessly about the ship, looking for any crewmember. When he asked Holly, he replied, "Everyone's dead, Dave. You've been in stasis over 3 million years. The radiation level of the ship had only just became safe for the support of human life." Baffled, Lister realises he is the LAST living human being in the universe, and is billions of light-years away from Earth!
He asks about his cat, Frankenstein, who had been hiding in the heating ducts even before Lister was placed in stasis, and avoided the radiation blast. But, Holly tells Lister that Frankenstein was a SHE and she was pregnant when he brought her aboard the ship. Holly then explains that through millions of years of inbreeding, the children of Frankenstein had mutated into a species called "Felis Sapiens", meaning part cat, part human. There had been a Holy War over who their creator was! The Holy Cat named Frankenstein, the God Cloister....and the Holy Land called Fushell. That was what the Holy War was about. So the wars continued until finally, the followers of the Cloister Faith left the mining ship in an escape pod, on a pilgrimage to find the Holy Land, as did the followers of the Cloister Faith. Only to have both sets of followers meet their deaths.
Saddened by this, Lister begins to comprehend the lonliness he will have to endure until he gets back to Earth. So, Holly takes a personality disk, every crew member had one, and brings up the hologram of Arnold Rimmer, the least liked crewmember of Red Dwarf, and Lister's former shift manager.
After deciding to put up with Rimmer, Lister asks Holly if there are any other signs of life aboard the ship...ANY at all! Holly gets a faint reading from down in the food storage level. Rimmer and Lister eventually come across Cat, a "Felis Sapiens" being, who was inbred from Frankenstein's litter, but his parents were the village idiot and a moron! Cat, being naturally vain and conceited, always wears specially tailored suits, with the right accessories, and the perfect hairstyle!
About a month or so later, Red Dwarf receives a distress call from a janitor mechanoid aboard a ship called the Nova 5. They go to save the 3 women crew and their mechanoid janitor. Only to find out that all of the women were dead, and the crazy robot, named Kryten, had been cleaning, cooking, serving food, dressing, and playing games with 3 very dead skeletons!
Lister, Cat, and Rimmer decide to take Kryten on board the Red Dwarf with them, seeing as how 3 men alone on a ship can't be very sanitary. So, Lister now has to face the fact that he must spend lightyears searching for the planet Earth with a prude of a hologram with an ego so thick you'd need a jackhammer to get through, a vain, fairly stupid Cat/Human, an obsessed cleaning machine named Kryten, and a computer with an IQ of supposedly 6,000, but more like 12. Aren't you glad you're not him?
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