If your relationship with Red Dwarf has been a fairly casual one you'll be forgiven for maybe missing what I'm about to tell you. The RD universe is dense, clever, and has a single through line. Ever notice all the weird creatures encountered in the series were all man made?
By the time we meet David Lister. There has already been a failed age of inter stella travel, a dangerous total emersion video game craze, the Bliss designer drug, genetic wars, and a Simulant uprising.
There are no aliens.
"For hundreds of years ship full of Astros in stasis we hurled out of our solar system and inter stella travel enjoyed its golden age. The goal of course was that they'd encounter intelligent life. They didn't. Not even a moderately intelligent plant. Not even a stupid plant. Nothing. In all of the universe the planet earth was the only planet with any life forms. That's all there was"
- Infinite Welcomes Careful Drivers.
This is how it goes. In the 3 million years the RD crew have been in deep space. Under the leadership of President Millhouse Nixon the sun has been killed. An ill fated mission to control the weather has cause the sun to destabilise.
The human race has to move. To a new planet in a new solar system. The Mayflower, a seeding ship, is sent to build a new home for the human race. Aboard are Androids, Simulants, and genetic cross breeds of great strength to help terraform the new world and build our cities before our illustrious arrival.
A batch of Space Corps Marines are onboard too with the human races' most precious cargo. The G.O.D. Protocol. The sum of all human genetic knowledge. The heart of the mission.
Every 10 years a marine has a 3 day tour of duty. On his 4th tour LtCol Michael R Magruder (Rimmer's son by Yvonne Magruder) is tricked into releasing a batch of Simbi-morphs into the ship. The Morphs release the Simulants and take over the ship. The Marines wake from hyper sleep but they're out numbered and on the 3rd day defeated. During the fire fight the ship is damaged and crashes into an ocean moon. Eventually the survivors launch the escape pods. The co-ordinates of the Mayflower are written down, torn into sections and split between the genetic races so no-one race can return to the ship and the awesome power of G.O.D within.
In those 3 million years the Mayflower survivors have spread out amongst the stars, settled, and evolved.
As the Red Dwarf crew head for home it begins to encounter these settlements.
There is just so much scope. We haven't even looked to alternative dimensions yet!
Smoke me a Kipper I'll be back for breakfast.
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