The intention[citation needed] was to bring Ross back to play the role, but he was not available at the time and the position was filled by actor Robert Llewellyn.

Because there is no-one else on board the Nova 5, Kryten starts a new life on Red Dwarf with the hologram Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie) as his new master.

In the episode proper, Kryten causes the Starbug 1 shuttle to fall into a time hole while taking a driving test facilitated by Rimmer.

The ship crash lands on Earth in a reality where time runs backwards, leaving Kryten, Rimmer and Red Dwarf's computer Holly (Hattie Hayridge) stranded.

[6] In "Timeslides" (1989), 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) become wealthy and successful and not join the Space Corps.

Rimmer unwittingly reverses this new timeline by going back in time to his boyhood self (played by Simon Gaffney), causing Kryten to return to Red Dwarf.

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.

In the episode, a Kryten from a parallel dimension (played by Llewellyn) is briefly seen, when a "linkway" through "non-space" is opened when the membrane between the two realities temporarily collapses.

Navigation Officer Kristine Kochanski (Chloë Annett) retorts that "toilet university" is simply a piece of software installed in Kryten.

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 (played by Norman Lovett) 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 did not want being left on the planetoid.

[21] In Pete Part Two (1999), Kryten feels humiliated about being classified as a woman and being posted to the women's wing of the brig due to him being "genitally challenged".

To rectify this, he creates a penis he calls "Archie" out of an old electron board, toilet roll, sticky-back plastic and an Action Man's polo neck.

[23] 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.

Lister initially believes that Kochanski is dead as well, but two children in the hallucination (played by Charlie Kenyon and Nina Southworth) inform that Kryten lied to him, and she actually left him after taking a Blue Midget shuttle.

He loses interest in the things he normally enjoys and subsequently installs a bright red "pimptactular" carbon-fibre shell to his body in order to recapture his youth and gains a sudden attraction to bungie jumping.

[26] According to the novel Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989), the Nova 5 crashed because Kryten washed the navigation computer with soapy water.

While he continues to be a sanitation droid, and to enjoy cleaning and serving others, he has also become the science expert amongst the Dwarfers, often leading missions such as their search for Rimmer on the psi-moon in "Terrorform" (1992).

[29] Kryten also extends his emotional range, which leads to him deactivating his shutdown disk (DivaDroid, his creators, believes in planned obsolescence), although the crew are then forced into a showdown with his would-be replacement.

This guilt is not necessarily balanced out by a sense of pride in the good work he does – in the episode "The Inquisitor" (1992), he believes his selflessness was purely a matter of programming and therefore he has not led a worthwhile life.

[9] In the episode "Back to Reality" (1992), Kryten almost commits suicide when under the belief that he takes the life of a human (he later finds out it was just an illusion created by the despair squid).

Robert Llewellyn writes in his book The Man in the Rubber Mask that before settling on a Canadian accent, he, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor considered Swedish and American.

Llewellyn discovered the Canadian accent while spending time in Vancouver, British Columbia[citation needed]; which he describes as being a cross between Scottish and American.

In this series, Kryten was owned by the ship's Captain prior to the disaster that wiped out the crew, and passed the three million years by repeatedly reading a sign saying "FIRE EXIT" in a loop.