'M-Corp' by Doug Naylor

Kryten brings Lister a celebratory breakfast for his fiftieth birthday, but Lister collapses from severe indigestion. In the med-bay, Kryten injects a monitoring chip into Lister’s bloodstream as a means of improving his diet and exercise regime; but when ‘Chippie’ predicts that he will die at the age of sixty-three, a stressed-out Lister suffers an arterial blockage that makes the chip die instead. When Kryten discovers that Chippie has a corrupted file from old software, Cat admits that he unplugged the software update cable so he could power his hair tongs; Kryten replaces the plug, and the backlog of updates installs on Red Dwarf’s systems – bringing the news that the Jupiter Mining Corporation was bought by M-Corp in the Twenty-Third Century. As M-Corp-branded supplies and kit materialise all over the ship, Lister discovers that he is no longer able to see any JMC items; Kryten advises that the upgrade has installed a perception filter against anything that isn’t M-Corp – and then he, Rimmer and Cat become invisible and inaudible to Lister. Lister finds himself alone in a ship full of invisible things, including his bed, his guitar and his toaster; in desperation he uses the M-Corp teleporter to enter a virtual environment, where the customer service A.I., Aniter, informs him that he will have to earn credits to pay for everything: food, drink, friends and even speech; prevented from leaving, Lister quickly runs out of credits after Aniter deliberately sets fire to the room to make him buy a fire extinguisher; so M-Corp takes credits from Lister’s timeline, causing him to rapidly age… Meanwhile, Kryten proposes rebooting Red Dwarf back to factory settings, assuring the hologrammatic Rimmer that he will be re-loaded from a month-old back-up; when the plan is successful Kryten repairs Chippie’s computer, enabling him to locate Lister. The lads follow their comrade into the M-Corp virtual world, which is now full of people and possessions – and a very ancient Lister. Kryten, Rimmer and Cat try to rescue Lister, but are prevented from leaving by Aniter; however, clever Kryten buys a malicious virus to disable the A.I., allowing them all to escape. Back in the real world, Lister is restored to his proper age – but he still cannot see or hear his mates. Deducing that the perception filter virus was installed in Lister’s brain all along, Kryten reinstalls Lister’s personality from a JMC crew file back-up; the only problem is that it was taken when Lister was twenty-three, so until Kryten can fill in the gap by using CCTV recordings, Rimmer has to endure the original insubordinate smeghead Lister all over again…


Chris Barrie (Arnold J. Rimmer), Craig Charles (Dave Lister), Danny John-Jules (Cat), Robert Llewellyn (Kryten), Helen George (Aniter), Ian Goldsworth (Steve), Oliver Maltman (Chippy), Phil Adele (Jim)

Directed by Doug Naylor

Produced by Richard Naylor and Kerry Waddell
Executive producers Simon Lupton, Henry Normal and Doug Naylor
Co-produced by Baby Cow Productions and Grant Naylon Productions for Dave / UKTV

TX: (Dave)
9th November 2017 @ 9:00 pm

Notes:
*Featuring Dave Lister, Arnold Rimmer, Cat and Kryten

*Although this epsiode was scheduled for television broadcast on the 9th November 2017, it was released a week earlier for 'on demand' audiences via the UKTV Play platform