The Red Dwarf Timeline

Version 1.0
Charles Daniels

Hey I'm really bored so I'm writing a timeline with all the data I have from the 36 episodes, the first two books, and the Programme Guide. Please tell me if I screw up!

AD

1582

• T'ai-ch'ang aka Chu Ch'ang-lo Kuang Tsung is born

1620

• T'ai-ch'ang became the Chinese emperor during the Ming Dynasty 20th Century
• Rimmer is a fan of telegraph poles from this era

1946

• Lister's favorite Movie "It's a Wonderful Life" is released

1950's

• Einstein does most of the important groundwork for the stasis theory and time-freezing, unfortunately just as he was on the verge of breakthrough he started dating Marilyn Monroe and lost interest.

1993

• Lister, Rimmer, Kryten, Cat, and Holly arrive in a Backward reality during this year (3991)

2077

• Wednesday March 2nd: The wall clock on Red Dwarf displayed this time when the boys went back in time through the stasis leak. Red Dwarf being an old ship probably had a broken clock in the washroom since that date will actually occur on a Tuesday.

2080

• Interstellar travel is considered economically and philosophically interesting. Around this time the stasis booth is invented.

2130

• Stellarnauts try to reintegrate into a society and cope with the fact they are 50 years younger than their own children. This led to curious generation gap problems, of which the Greeting card industry took full advantage.

2149

• Rimmer is born on Io. Fred Holden aka "Thickie" Holden is also born. (Holden's birthdate is conjuncture assuming he was in the same grade at the same age as Rimmer)

2155

• Lister is born. The exact date is not known because he was adopted. His Space Corps records offical state it as October 14th. He was found in a box under a pool table sometime in November of 2155. Due to all of this confusion Lister celebrates his birthday "Most of the time.."

2156

• Rimmer is not held back in Junior D causing him to become a slime ball. The alternate Rimmer, ACE (Whatta' guy), does stay behind and learns to stick up for himself. Rimmer's oldest brother John becomes a Test Pilot.

2157

• Rimmer fails to invent the Tension Sheet and Thickie Holden does instead.

Later 2150's

• Sometime between 2156 and 2159 Rimmer is betrayed by his only friend at Io House Porky Roebuck. During a Space Scout camp when Porky lead a group of boys trying to eat the hapless Arnold.

2162

• Lister's adopted father dies.

2163

• Rimmer divorces his parents at age 14 - took them to court, got paid maintenance until employment age and access every fourth weekend to the family dog.

2165

• Rimmer leaves home to enter the Space Corps. He attended Saturn Tech where he took a maintenance course. He also took a film course at night school, became a member of the Io Amateur War-Gamers, the Recreators of the Battle Neasden and the Love Celibacy Society, plus of course, Cadet School and the Hammond Organ Owners Society. He even joined the Samaritans even thought it was extremely short lived because the first 5 people he talked to committed suicide, including one person who just rang up for the cricket results! The newspapers with their typical subtlety named it "Lemming Sunday".

2167

• At the age of 12 Lister loses his virginity on the tenth hole of the Bootle Municipal Golf Course. Lister and his friends have also taken up scrumping - for cars!

2168

• After much testing it seems as if Rimmer finally makes it aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf at the rank of third technician and through further actions reached the dizzying heights of SECOND Technician.

2170

• Lister starts work (presumably part time) as a trolley attendant, he later starts to think of this as a career

2172

• At age 17 Lister is in the band Smeg and the Heads. He has written the "Om" song and has horrible taste in clothing. Lister also has the ungodly habit of calling everything crypto-fascist.

2173

• Lister makes a token attempt to better himself by going to Art College, he is disgusted to learn that lectures started first thing in the afternoon! 97 minutes after enrolling, he'd had enough, and he left. From what I can figure from the episodes, the books, and Lister's biography in the Program Guide it is about this time when he meets Lise Yates, has a relationship which involves high amounts of sex and he stupidly breaks it off to "play the field".

2174

• Earth's polar star changed and the entire Zodiac had to be realigned. Denis and Josie meet at a New Zodiac Festival. Denis is a Bliss addict and Josie a game head. Denis also has a 2nd class degree in Bio-chemistry and Josie a 1st class degree in Pure Mathematics.

2175

• Thickie Holden originally invents the Tension sheet. Due to interference with the time lines he does it much earlier in 2157. During the '74 - '75 season Jim Bexley Speed, London Jets Roof Attack, breaks the all-time record for three-dimensional yardage in a single Zero-Gee football season.

2176

• Denis and Josie last made love in this year. They are still involved but too addicted.

2180

• Lister fearing that he is getting tied down to a career leaves his job as a trolley attendant. Lister celebrates his 25th birthday and winds up drunk. He wakes up on Mimas (one of Saturn's moons) with only a passport in the name of Emily Berkenstein. He arrives late in the year sometime in October or November and stays here for a few months.

March 16, 2180

• Rimmer loses his Virginity to Yvonne McGruder, the ship's female boxing champion. It started at 7:31pm and lasted until 7:43pm, and that includes the time it took to eat the pizza. This was the only time he had sex in his life. November 25, 2180 : Gazpacho Soup Day.

2181

• After many drunken nights on Mimas Lister decides to Join the space corps. Due to his habitual aversion for work he requests sick leave due to diarrhoea on no less than 500 occasins. After a few months on board Lister is sentenced to 3 years in suspended animation for violating Space Corps quarantine procedures. Also everyone aboard Red Dwarf dies due to exposure to cadmium II. The exposure was caused when Arnold Rimmer did a horrible job sealing the drive plate.

2192

• (Date is conjecture) Frankenstein dies. The Cat population in 198,732.

2224

• After the World Cup new rules had to be created for GAS (Genetic Alternative Sports). Scotland fielded a genetically engineered goal keeper that was 8 foot high and 16 feet across, thereby filling the entire goal. Somehow they still failed to qualify for the second round.

2230

• Pluto's solstice, in which Pluto took over Neptune as the outmost planet in the solar system.

2296

• Kryten uses Mechanoid Visual System, Version IX.05. from the Infomax Data Corporation which is copyrighted in this year.

2340

• Kryten's copyright is from this year.

4080

• It is finally proven the mankind is totally alone in the universe. No other intelligent life exists anywhere in the universe.

2,002,181

• There was a plague, the plague was hunger. Less than thirty Cat tribes now survived, roaming the cargo decks in search of food, but the food was gone. Weaking and ailing, they prayed at the supply hold's silver mountain: huge towering acres of metal rocks which the Cats believed watched over them. Amid the wailing and screeching one Cat stood up and held aloft the sacred icon. the icon which had been passed down as holy , and one day would make it's use known. It was a piece of V-shaped metal with a revolving handle on its head. He took down a silver rock, while the other Cats cowered and screamed at the blasphemy. He placed the icon on the rim of the rock, and turned the handle. And the handle turned. And the rock opened. And inside the rock was Alphabetti spagetti in tomato sauce. And in the other rocks were other delights. All sealed in perfect vacuums, preserved from the ravages of time. God had spoken. Felis sapiens was born.

3,002,181

• Lister awakens from stasis to find everyone has died and his only companions are Arnold Rimmer - A hologram simulation of one of the dead crew, A life form which evolved from his Cat, and Holly the ships computer with an IQ of 6000, the same IQ as 6000 P.E. Teachers.
• The remaining crew encounter future echoes when they break the light barrier: Rimmer sees Lister's son Bexley die, Rimmer and Lister see Lister at age 171, Lister with two babies and several other less thrilling occurances. Lister tries to take a Chef's exam to order Rimmer to give him the location of the Hologram Disks and a date with Kochanski, he fails. Lister finds out he was in fact worshipped as a god amongst the Cat people. His pathetic goals are made into images of heaven and causes of holy war. He meets the last Cat priest who dies shortly after, thus making Cat the only known Felis Sapien in the universe. Rimmer tries to discover the secrets of the Quegaars that turn out not to be aliens but trash travelling in a Red Dwarf Garbage Pod.
• Lister contracts a mutated form of pneumonia and his hallucinations become solid. One of his hallucinations is of two men Confidence and Paranoia. Confidence kills Paranoia and when Lister discovers this he re-evaluates his previously friendly relationship with the hallucination. They were however friends long enough for Lister to discover the whereabouts of the Holodiscs outside the ship but unfortunately when Lister tries to activate Kristine Kochanski's disc he gets a second hologram of Rimmer.
• The two holograms of Rimmer move in and at first enjoy a productive relationship however they end up fighting amongst themselves. Finally Lister wipes one of the holograms but not before getting some personal information about Rimmer.

3,002,182

• Red Dwarf recieves a distress call from the Nova 5. As usual Rimmer fears this means aliens. But according to Kryten (a service mechnoid aboard the Nova 5) the ship contains life forms of a much less hostile nature - women. The Red Dwarf crew spruce up to respond to the call. But when they arrive at the scene, it is clear that Jane, Tracy, and Anne are dead and have been for centuries. Lister takes to Kryten and brings him back to the ship, where he teaches Kryten to rebel and follow his dreams. Kryten rides off on a space bike looking for a planet with an atmoshpere.
• A post pod arrives 3 million years late, which is about average for second class mail. It contains a video game called Better Than Life, which plugs into the brain and allows the player to experience his or her fantasies. It is all working out but Rimmer can't control his imagination, and ends up with a wife, seven kids, a mortgage and an unsympathetic Outland Revenue Collector. This continues until the others find themselves caught up in his nightmare - buried up to necks in sand smeared with jam and about to be eaten by ants. It comes as a relief to everyone when the game ends.
• Lister wakes up to find out his leg has been broken and that someone has completed his jigsaw. It turns out that the memories of the crew over the past four days have been erased. But by whom? And why? They find the black box recording on a small moon and play back the last four days: Lister felt sorry for Rimmer and, as a 'death day' present, decided to give him the memory of an affair that he had with one Lise Yates. Although all goes well to begin with, Rimmer discovers Lise's love letters to Lister. Rimmer gets increasing worse and finally they decide to erase their memories of the whole ordeal.
• A leak from the suspended animation chamber creates a doorway to the past. Lister immediately assumes that this is the best way back to Kristine Kochanski while Rimmer sees it as a chance to save his own skin. But things don't go to plan: Lister is late for his own wedding; Rimmer can't convince himself he's real; and when three Rimmers and Listers appear in the same room, things get a bit complicated.
• Holly's performance is on the decline so the back up computer, Queeg 500, takes over the ship, demoting Holly to night watchman. Queeg's new regime of early mornings, exercise, and exams is not big with the crew! Holly is sorely missed, and so plans a comeback. He challenges Queeg to a deal: to the winner, command of Red Dwarf; to the loser erasure. But all is not what it seems, and it transpires that it was all Holly's idea of a joke - much to the crews annoyance.
• Holly devises a faster-than-light drive which immediately goes wrong and propels them into a Parallel Universe. Here, the society is based on females as the stronger more dominate sex. Lister, Rimmer, and even Holly have female equivalents - while the Cat' counterpart is a dog. Predictably, Lister ends up in bed with his parallel partner, Deb. The trouble is that, in this universe men have the babies and Lister didn't take any precautions. The crew is highly amused to learn Lister is pregnant.

3,002,183

• "Three million years in the future, Dave Lister, the last human being alive, discovers he is pregnant after a liaison with his female self in a parallel universe. His pregnancy concludes with the successful delivery of twin boys, Jim and Bexley. However, because the boys were conceived in another universe, with different physical laws, they suffer from highly accelerated growth rates and are both eighteen years old within three days of being born. In order to save their lives, Lister returns them to the universe of their origin, where they are reunited with their father (a woman), and are able to lead comparatively normal lives. Well, as normal as you can be if you've been born in a parallel universe and your father's a woman and your mother's a man and you're eighteen years old three days after your birth. Shortly afterward, Kryten, the service mechanoid, who had left the ship after being rescued from his own crashed vessel, the Nova 5, is found in pieces after his space bike crashed into an asteroid. Lister rebuilds the 'noid, but is unable to recapture his former personality. Meanwhile, Holly, the increasingly erratic computer, performs a head sex change operation on himself. He bases his new face on Hilly, a female computer with whom he'd once fallen madly in love."

3,002,184

• Series 4

3,002,185

• Series 5

3,002,385

• Series 6

3,002,525

• If no other weird time travel or stasis boothing occurs Lister will be physical\mental age 171 and come back in a future echo to urge Lister to take pictures of his sons and taunt Rimmer.

THE END OF TIME ITSELF

• It would seem the Inquisitor lives to this moment and perhaps even beyond. After milliena alone he decides there is no afterlife, no god, and the only purpose in existance is to lead a worthwhile life. So he constructs a time machine and judges each individual in history. However in the year 3,002,185 AD Lister erases him from existance....so this entry does not occur in the current Red Dwarf timeline (that after the episode Inquisitor) Note this would cause a paradox. Lister erased the Inquisitor with his gaunlet so therefore the Inquisitors actions were all removed from the space-time continuum...including the manufacturing of the gaunlet and since he never made the gaunlet or even existed he never erased Lister from history so Lister could fight back and erase him..and therefore since here wasn't erased he exists again..only to be erased..etc.