[S2E4] Stasis Leak

The group traces the stasis leak and find it is a passageway to the past, to around three weeks before the Cadmium 2 accident that wiped out the crew. Discovering that the stasis leak prevents anything from the past being brought to the present,[3] Lister and Rimmer each decide to use it still to make their futures better. While Rimmer uses it to find his past self and warn him of the upcoming accident, thus hoping he will get into stasis and avoid dying, Lister opts to find Kristine Kochanski (Clare Grogan) and have her use the ship's other stasis cell. Lister soon tracks her down to a hotel with Cat, he finds her already married to his future self from five years into the future, much to his confusion. When they rejoin Rimmer, they find him unsuccessfully convincing his younger self he is real. When future Lister and Kochanski arrive alongside future Rimmer, the matter becomes so complicated that past Rimmer decides to accept it only as a hallucination and asks them all to leave him alone.

[S2E4] Stasis Leak

The boys from the Dwarf discover a portal which allows them to travel back in time three million years, to before the accident which wiped out the rest of the crew. Lister wants to use the opportunity to solve the mystery of a photograph he has found of himself marrying Kristine Kochanski, something which never actually happened. Meanwhile, Rimmer wants to use the opportunity to save his own skin - literally - but there is only one working stasis booth, and his past self is badly tripping out on drugs.

In a black-and-white flashback to three million years earlier, to before the crew of Red Dwarf was wiped out by the radiation leak, called into Captain Hollister's office, a nonchalant Dave Lister is due a reprimand as his bunkmate and superior Arnold Rimmer, at stiff attention, explains to the captain what has occurred, whilst the captain gets increasingly irritated by Rimmer's extended complaining.

Outside in the corridor, Lister and Rimmer get cups of tea from a vending machine and Rimmer complains about how he himself now has eight weeks of PD. Lister tries to apologise, saying that he got the mushrooms from a locker which must have belonged to Headbanger Harris, and he dare not say anything since he does not want to get anybody in trouble. After Lister fetches the space suits from their sleeping quarters, Rimmer is momentarily alone, during which he sees a holographic version himself, complete with a "H" on the forehead, rise up out of the table. Staring at what he believes to be another hallucination, the other Rimmer tells him that he has come from the future by means of a "stasis leak" on Floor 16 to save him. Rimmer looks at his coffee suspiciously, thinking that Lister has doped him again, and wanders off.

Holly interrupts on the monitor to ask "what is going down in Groove Town". Lister asks Holly what a "stasis leak" is, but Holly does not know. Rimmer bemoans that Holly is supposed to have an I.Q. of 6,000 yet never knows anything, but Holly retorts that it is only the same as 12,000 car park attendants. Lister, Rimmer, and Cat then decide to investigate what the "future Rimmer" had said in Rimmer's diary, and begin to make their way down to Floor 16, where "future Rimmer" said the stasis leak was. Since that is 2,567 floors away, the are forced to take one of the Xpress Lifts, which Lister despises due to the fact that these journeys take a long time, coupled with his claustrophobia. It doesn't help when a recorded video of the Lift Hostess begins playing, offering them a viewing of Gone with the Wind and cyanide capsules should anything go wrong.

Arriving on Floor 16 three hours later, the trio fall out of the lift with apparent jet-lag, with Cat clutching his stomach and complaining about how the food container tasted better than the chicken. Walking down the corridor, they see an old stasis booth apparently malfunctioning, and next to it an eerie, humming blue glow surrounded by white smoke. Lister says that it must be the stasis leak, and walks into the blue glow, emerging into an adjacent showering room - although to his shock it is full of miners, very much alive, and shaving. Returning back through the glow before he is noticed, he tells Rimmer and Cat that it is safe, and they all go through.

Standing in the shower, Lister and Rimmer theorise what could have caused the stasis leak, and struggle to explain it to Cat. Lister supposes that, since a stasis booth freezes time, a stasis field leak must preserve whatever it has leaked into, and it has leaked into the shower room. From a date on the way, they realise that it's three weeks before the accident which wiped out the crew, and that Red Dwarf must still be in Earth's Solar System. A man then tries to enter the shower and is surprised to see Lister, Rimmer, and Cat there. Lister says to him that it is the "Annual General Meeting of the Agoraphobics' Society", and closes the curtain.

Rimmer wonders whether it would be possible to bring anybody back to their own time through the stasis leak - namely, himself - and they decide to try an experiment. Lister picks up a bar of soap, and they walk back though the stasis leak. However, the soap has turned into three-million-year-old dust when they emerge on the other side. Cat quips that it would be an excellent idea to try and bring Rimmer back through the stasis leak if it would turn him into dust.

Back in their own time, Lister and Rimmer have a long discussion back in the bunkroom. Lister says that he is going to go through the stasis leak and stay in the past, even at the cost of his own life, so that he can spend three weeks with Kochanski. Rimmer is scared of being left alone, and implores Lister to stay in the name of friendship, even though Lister reminds him that they don't like each other. Lister says about how people move on, and as an example tells Rimmer about Duncan, his best friend during childhood and who taught him how to put mirrors on his shoes so that he could look up girls skirts. Duncan had to move away to Spain due to a bank job his father had pulled, but Lister was reminded of Duncan every time he looked at his shoes. Rimmer decries his own luck and gives Lister his own story - at how a pet lemming he once had bit his finger and wouldn't let go, and so Rimmer had to smash its brains out against his favourite helicopter wallpaper.

When Lister mentions that there is another functional spare stasis booth (his past self being in the other one), Rimmer declares that he is going to get his past self into it, so that he won't die. He even hopes that this will create two versions of himself; an alive one and a hologram one. Lister then resolves to get to Kochanski first, and get her into the stasis booth before Rimmer so that Kochanski will survive the radiation leak. Rimmer decides to get a head start and sneaks out in the night to the stasis leak.

In the morning, Lister decides to take the Holly Watch (containing his own future version of Holly) and Cat along with him into the past for help. Holly doesn't like being a watch, dangling about all sideways and upside down. Holly also begs Lister not to put his hands in his pockets, since he is terrified of a fluffy liquorice allsort in there. Cat wants to wear a glittering silver tuxedo to what will be his first meeting with human women, and Lister has trouble trying to get Cat to wear old, stained overalls so that he will be inconspicuous. Going back through the stasis leak, Lister embarrassingly bumps into a naked man in the shower. Lister asks if he ordered a kiss-a-gram, then runs off, awaiting Cat. Cat appears and asks if he saw a short human with pigtails pass through. Cat awkwardly glances down before he leaves, telling him that it is the personality that counts.

In the meantime, future Rimmer passes by past Rimmer and past Lister, as they talk beside a vending machine about their recent sentence to Punishment Detail. Future Rimmer then goes into the sleeping quarters, and waits for his past self to enter. Coming up through the table, he tries to tell his past self to go into stasis, but his past self is having none of it, thinking that his future self is a "mushroom". Future Rimmer hides as Captain Hollister enters to try and make amends with past Rimmer, and tell him that he is going to cancel his Punishment Detail. However, the captain is wearing a chicken suit that he has donned for a fancy dress party that night, and Rimmer believes that he is seeing another hallucination. After giving the captain numerous insults, threatening to put an onion up his bottom, kicking him in the groin and throwing green paint all over the captain, Rimmer ends up with eight years PD from the furious captain.

Lister is devastated to see the room is a honeymoon suite with a "do not disturb sign", meaning Kris has just got married. Lister then believes that the man who married Kochanski must be the man stood next to them in the photograph, instead of himself. Holly tries to console Lister by telling him about his own previous failed love affairs. Kochanski then appears out of the honeymoon suite, and invites them in. Inside, Lister discovers a bearded version of himself from five years into the future (the one from the photograph), who has found another way to go back in time and married Kris. Present Lister then realises that he doesn't have to try getting her into the other stasis booth, and leaves happily to go back to his own time knowing it is his destiny to find Kris again and marry her. As they leave to go back to Red Dwarf, Cat reveals he has stolen their bottle of champagne.

Dave Lister always dreamed of getting together with her and moving to Fiji. Although she was killed by the radiation leak in the first episode, Lister still hoped to bring her back as a hologram in the same way Arnold Rimmer was brought back.

Starting in season seven, Kristine Kochanski, played by Chloe Annett, became a regular, recurring character. She is from an alternate universe, where Lister died in the radiation leak, and she survived by being in stasis. She has a close relationship with her sensitive and caring Dave Lister, who started out as a soft-light hologram. She only crossed over to our universe to get a sperm sample from our Lister so they could have children, but she was trapped here. 041b061a72