The computer of the mining ship Red Dwarf, Holly (Norman Lovett), mentions that after a crisis where all of Red Dwarf's crew had died in a radiation leak, chicken soup machine repairman Dave Lister's (Craig Charles) pregnant cat, along with her unborn kittens, were sealed in the hold while Lister was put into stasis as punishment for keeping an unquarantined cat on board.

This cat, Frankenstein, is mentioned by the Cat as a story he learnt about at school, describing her as "The holy mother, saved by Cloister the Stupid, who was frozen in time, and who gaveth of his life that we might live ... who shall returneth to lead us to Fuchal, the promised land," with Lister realising that "Cloister the Stupid" refers to Lister.

Eventually, the two factions formed a truce and built two great space arks to go and search for Lister and the promised land.

One of the two arks, following a set of sacred directions (Lister's laundry list, which he lined Frankenstein's basket with), promptly crashed into an asteroid.

Rather than having a female Cat on board, however, this universe's version of Red Dwarf instead has a male humanoid Dog (played by Matthew Devitt).

[6] In "Timeslides" (1989), the Cat race temporarily ceases to exist after Lister is seen travelling back in time by entering a photographic slide with mutated developing fluid to convince his younger self (played by Emile Charles) to become wealthy and successful and not join the Space Corps.

[8] In "Demons and Angels" (1992), Red Dwarf is blown up when the beam of a device called the triplicator is put into reverse, putting the engine core into meltdown, while creating a "high" and "low" version of Red Dwarf, complete with their own versions of the Cat (both played by John-Jules).

In the hallucination, the Cat loses his "cool", and becomes a "no-style gimbo" with a massive overbite and unflattering clothes called Duane Dibley.

In the episode, a Starbug from fifteen years hence arrives, with Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten's future selves intending to copy some components from the present Starbug's time drive so they can fix the fault in their own drive and continue their lives of opulence, socialising with notorious figures of history such as the Habsburgs, the Borgias, Louis XVI, Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring.

[14] In "Ouroboros" (1997), a Cat from a parallel dimension (played by John-Jules) is briefly seen, when a "linkway" through "non-space" is opened when the membrane between the two realities temporarily collapses.

Returning to the part of space where they were last seen, the crew discovers Red Dwarf has been converted by the nanobots into a planetoid made of sand and Holly restored to his old settings and abandoned there, with the Red Dwarf Starbug spent years chasing after being a subatomic version shrunken down and eventually exploring Lister's laundry basket, and the remaining bits they didn't want being left on the planetoid.

Lister, Rimmer, Cat, Kryten and Kochanski are sentenced to two years in the ship's brig for misuse of confidential information.

Not being able to find anyone on Red Dwarf, a vending machine (voiced by Tony Slattery) informs Rimmer that everyone crossed back into the mirror universe.

[20] In Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (2009), set nine years later, Red Dwarf is intact; the human race is apparently "virtually extinct" in the universe apart from Lister again; Lister, Rimmer, the Cat and Kryten are the only people on board the ship; and Rimmer is shown to be a hard light hologram and the most senior officer on board again; how these have come about and what happened to the micro-organism is not explained.

In this special, a female "despair squid", whose ink causes joy and elation instead of despair to defend herself, causes Lister, Rimmer, the Cat and Kryten to share a hallucination where they believe they are fictional characters from a TV series called Red Dwarf, and their dimension is "invalid".

Kryten and Rimmer speculate that they were able to choose whether or not they wanted to wake up because of the strengthened antibodies of the four from the previous encounter with the despair squid.

[25] According to the novel Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989), the cause of the Cat's people's civil war was over whether their god was named Cloister or Clister.

"[3] In early episodes, the Cat exhibits typical feline behaviours such as licking anyone who gives him food,[27] playing with "shiny things"[4][28] and marking his territory, for which purpose he carries a small spray-can in his pocket.

By Series IV, the Cat becomes less obsessed with mating, and begins to develop a friendship with Lister and Kryten, although he maintains a strong dislike for Rimmer.

As he learns to relate to the crew, he stops licking them and marking his territory, and even begins to show genuine concern for others on several occasions.

[35] In order to understand the role, John-Jules studied the 1986 book Catwatching by Desmond Morris, learning, among other things, not to blink while in character.

[38] In the first and second pilot episodes of an American version of the television series, the Cat was played by Hinton Battle and Terry Farrell respectively.