Characters: Red Dwarf

A basic run down of all of the characters present in Red Dwarf, so that you're able to better understand my reviews. Unlike Survivors, any insults I throw at these characters were provided by the program itself.

Dave Lister

Dave "Cinzano Bianco" Lister, both his own father and son, was the last human alive. Born through artificial insemination on Starbug, in around 3,002,200, he was taken back in time by his older self and left under a pool table, with the word "Ouroboros" written on the side. As he grew up, he lost his virginity at the age of 12 on a golf course. Then, on a drunken pub crawl around London, he for some reason used all of his money to get a space-flight to Mimas, a Spanish-colonised moon.
    After waking up drunk, with only a passport with the name of Emily Berkenstein, he took up stealing taxi-hoppers and gathering the five-thousand Dollarpounds needed to return to Earth. It was on Mimas that he first met Arnold Rimmer, who was on Space-Leave from Red Dwarf, and took him to a brothel. It was this incident that inspired him to join the Space-program in an attempt to get home. Lister bought a cat on Mimas and smuggled it on board, meaning that after a period of working under Rimmer, he would be put in Stasis for the rest of the trip back to Earth.
    However, when Dave woke up, he found that there had been a radiation leak on Dwarf soon after he was put in stasis. This leak had killed everyone on the ship, and had taken 30 million years to fade away to a safe level. He was, in effect, the last human being in existence. Beknownst to Lister, not only had a race of creatures evolved from his cat and left one survivor, the ship's computer had ressurrected Rimmer in android form.
   Lister is one of the two main characters, but he is never given as much focus as Rimmer. He is a slob and idle by nature, often unable to complete the most simple tasks, but he is also very intuitive and is often the voice of reason. He is also deeply moral, a form of chaotic good, and believes the same of everyone else. Over the series, he becomes more mature and begins to take a greater interest in more philosophical ideas, although he still takes basic pleasures.

Arnold Rimmer

Arnold Judas Rimmer, Bronze Swimming Certificate, Silver Swimming Certificate, was a Second Technician about Red Dwarf. He was born the fourth son of mad parents; his father was obsessively bitter about not getting into the Space Corps, and always expected much from his children, while his mother was ignorant and adulterous. Rimmer and his brothers were often stretched on a rack to meet the Space Corps height limits, and Rimmer was constantly picked on by his brothers to the point of abuse.
      In boarding school, he wore boxing gloves to bed and had the nickname "bonehead", although he always wanted to be known as "Ace". As his brothers advanced into their respective fields, Rimmer remained a Second Technician, and was always humiliated, and steeped in self-loathing. One of the more traumatic events of his life, in his eyes, was when he was invited to the Captain's table and proceeded to ask for his cold soup to be re-heated. Before the accident, Rimmer had only one sexual encounter - a one-nightstand with officer Yvonne McGruder.
     Rimmer took the Astro-engineering exam, the exam that one needs to pass to rise in rank past Technician, a total of eleven times. It was his stress-induced coma during the last of these tests that prevented him from fixing a faulty drive-plate, the consequences of which led to the radiation leak. After he was resurrected, he felt deeply responsible due to this fact.
     Red Dwarf is essentially the study of how Rimmer is humanised by Lister, how he comes to terms with the negative aspects of his personality and becomes the ideal Rimmer, as his Parallel Universe counterpart(s) display. His final act on the show was an act of bravery, and he finally had enough self-confidence (and humility) to become Ace Rimmer.

The Cat

Cat is a creature born to a cripple and an idiot, one of the last few members of the Cat people, a race that evolved on Red Dwarf from the off-spring of Lister's pregnant cat. Like real cats, he's vain (taken Up To Eleven), sex-crazed and obsessed with preening and style. In later series he develops a much greater sense of smell, which adds some exposition.

Kryten

Kryten is a droid created by Crapola, designed as a sanitation droid to scrub toilets and fix pipes. He was working as a general servant droid on the Nova 5 when he decided to give the circuitry a good clean, accidnetally making the ship fly into an android. He looked after the crew for three-hundred years (long after their deaths) until he was picked up by the crew of Red Dwarf around 3,002,300 AD. There, he broke his programming and gained a personality. Soon afterwards he left on a space-bicyle, and after he had been blowen up by a passing asteroid, the crew of Dwarf picked up his remains and put him back together again, albeit with a new personality.
   
Thanks.