'Samsara' by Doug Naylor

Aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf, Lister and Rimmer play a game of ‘Mynopoly’, with Lister cheating and getting away with it, while the unlucky Rimmer constantly rolls the losing numbers on the dice. Meanwhile, Kryten and Cat investigate a three-million-year old escape pod from the SS Samsara, which is emitting an unclassified energy field; when one of the wakened occupants tries to give them a warning, she and her fellow survivor are immediately flash-fried into two piles of dust. After sneezing away the new arrivals, Lister and the rest of the gang mount a search for the Samsara, which Kryten believes has crashed onto the ocean moon below. After locating the vessel teetering precariously on an undersea ledge, the lads gain entry and find nothing but dust and the remains of the long-dead crew, their ancient skeletons locked in acts of sex and violence. Pondering how such a state-of-the-art research vessel could ever have crashed, Kryten uses his Psi-Scan to confirm that the crew were also flash-fried. Spotting a nearby one-armed bandit machine, Cat steals money from an orphan fund box and immediately hits the jackpot; as soon as Lister puts Cat’s winnings back in the collection box, he gets his dreadlocks caught in the waste food disposal unit; and when Cat comes to his rescue and cuts him free, he gets the knife stuck in his foot. Then things get even worse: the power goes off, trapping Lister and Cat together… As the Samsara starts slipping off the ledge, Kryten and Rimmer discover that the ship is powered by a ‘Karma Drive’: based on the same technology as the Justice World, the drive has two settings, ‘punishment’ and ‘reward’, and is usually set to the latter to promote team-building and camaraderie amongst the crew; however, although Green and Barker were married, it wasn’t to each other, and their affair abaord the Samsara caused the drive to punish them for their immoral behaviour, by afflicting them with bad health and bad luck. Rimmer realises that this is what influenced his ‘Mynopoly’ game, when Red Dwarf came into proximity with the still-active Karma Drive field. Kryten informs his crewmate that they just have to be nice to each other in order to escape and rescue Lister and Cat – but Rimmer knows full well that this means they are all smegged. The ship’s quantum motherboards activate – in seconds they too will be flash-fried as punishment for their actions; in a panic Rimmer resorts to insulting Kryten, which somehow causes the drive to power down… Having rescued Lister from the Cat’s ludicrously incorrect history of the invention of gravy, Kryten stops Lister’s display of relieved affection by punching him in the face; the mechanoid explains that Barker and Green reversed the Karma Drive’s protocols to reward their unethical behaviour; when the moral behaviour of the rest of the crew caused the ship to crash, the two adulterers left in the only escape pod – only to die when they woke up and tried to warn the Red Dwarf crew. As the lads hastily leave the Samsara before it keels over, Cat spots some ‘Mynopoly’ cards in Lister’s jacket – and Rimmer is understandably a bit peeved…


Chris Barrie (Arnold J. Rimmer), Craig Charles (Dave Lister), Danny John-Jules (Cat), Robert Llewellyn (Kryten), Dan Tetsell (Jim Green), Maggie Service (Professor Rachel Barker), Eddie Bagayawa (Captain Tom Kadri)

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)
29th September 2016 @ 9:00 pm

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

*Although this epsiode was scheduled for television broadcast on the 29th September 2016, it was released a week earlier for 'on demand' audiences via the UKTV Play platform

*Working title: 'Lift Off'