In the middle of Series VII, a chance encounter with an old acquaintance leads him to temporarily depart the crew to do something meaningful with his existence ("Stoke Me a Clipper" - S7E2).
He also loses his arm when he is infected by a virus ("Epideme"/"Nanarchy"-S7,E7-8), but this is restored with the Red Dwarf ship by Kryten's nanobots.
The one kept down became Ace, who claimed that the shame of being a clear foot taller than his classmates inspired him to buckle down, fight back, and work hard, while Arnold spent the rest of his life making excuses for his many failures.
Unlike Rimmer who desperately wanted to be an officer but turned out to be a vending machine attendant - Ace is a commander, but is always modest about the attention he receives.
Ace was offered the chance to pilot a brand-new spacecraft, one that can cross dimensions - leading to him meeting the Red Dwarf crew.
The now brave and heroic Rimmer saves the lives of the crew when the Emohawk turns into a grenade, but must reluctantly return to his cowardly ways upon defeating the creature.
Duane Dibbley is the dorky alter-ego of the Cat, played by Danny John-Jules with a bowl haircut and a large overbite.
He first appears in the Series V episode "Back To Reality (S5,E6)," as part of a hallucinogenic experience, designed to cause despair in the Dwarfers.
Rimmer is forced to take regular long-distance runs whilst Cat and Lister are made to work for tiny amounts of food.
Their behavior is rather more human-like than might be expected for such crudely designed robots; they play cowboys-and-Indians, enjoy watching films, are highly emotional and appear to be somewhat unstable and malfunctional, presumably as a result of 3 million years of continuous operation.
The tiny, motorized, three-clawed service droids were actual working models, save the episode "The End" (S1,E1), where the skutters were a post-production addition to the chicken soup nozzle scene.
Interference originating from the radios of a nearby taxicab company, which was particularly busy during filming of the episode "Future Echoes" (S1,E2), caused havoc with the skutter models on set.
These skutters were given a revamp in design: a wider, rounded body with a complex neck and a narrow head with concealed eyes that pop up.
[5] In "Back To Earth"(S9,E1-3), the skutters had been given a complete redesign, and were added in post as a CG effect rather than being a remote controlled mechanism, as there wasn't enough money in the budget to even revamp the casing.
Due to this, as the actors had no visual cue, Danny John-Jules was required to step in as a replacement for a skutter so that Chris Barrie had something to react to.
[7] Outside the TV series, Talkie Toaster plays a secondary, yet vital role in the book Better Than Life, where Holly revives him in order to have someone to talk to while the crew are stuck in the virtual reality game.
In the novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, McIntyre was an officer on Red Dwarf who was severely depressed due to growing debt problems.
After a horrifying experience in the hands of gangsters (he returned to Red Dwarf carrying his nose in a Titan Hilton Hotel napkin), McIntyre committed suicide.
According to the original script of The End, McIntyre was killed by a minor radiation leak from the drive plate that Rimmer failed to repair.
As part of Kristine Kochanski's story to ease Lister's claustrophobia, she claims the Todhunter from her dimension is gay, despite being a married man and notorious womanizer.
According to "Thanks for the Memory", Yvonne McGruder was the ship's female boxing champion, and the only woman Rimmer ever had sex with while he was alive.
[12] Seen only in the eighth series, Mr Ackerman is a stereotypically sadistic prison governor, enjoying his power over the inmates in Floor 13 (Red Dwarf's brig), "The Tank."
She suddenly appears as a hard-light hologram in "Back to Earth, Part One" after Rimmer's negligence nearly results in the death of his crewmates.
Although he only appears in one episode and had no audible lines, Mr. Flibble became a fan favourite, and is now an interviewer on the Red Dwarf official website.
After the Red Dwarf crew told him to leave the ship, he deemed them all to be members of non-human species (bar Lister, whom he designated 'What the Hell!
In "Better Than Life", Rimmer mentions that his father was unsuccessful in his attempts to join the Space Corps and consequently became obsessed with ensuring his sons would (he stretched them on a traction machine to make them tall enough and withheld dinner unless they could answer questions on astronavigation correctly).
This does not affect Rimmer badly (as the rest of the crew had worried it would), instead liberating him from his lifelong fear of letting his ancestors down and allowing him to come up with a plan to save the day.
In "Dimension Jump" she is briefly shown as a mother who is concerned for her son's upbringing and education but is insensitive to his feelings (for example, lecturing him about his situation at school while he is hanging upside down as the result of a mean prank by his brothers, rather than help him down first).
"Frank" is also the name of his paternal uncle, his namesake, who is the father of two daughters, Sarah and Alice, is revealed to have been having an affair with his sister-in-law, and who inadvertently gave his nephew, Arnold, his first french kiss (after having mistaken him for Rimmer's mother in a dark room on a vacation).
Many co-stars of the first few episodes have gone on to careers away from Red Dwarf, such as Robert Bathurst, Tony Hawks, Paul Bradley, Craig Ferguson and Mark Williams.