Written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, and directed by Ed Bye, the episode has the Red Dwarf crew investigating how, and why, they lost four days from their memory.
On a Saturday night, while the Red Dwarf group hold a party for him on the anniversary of his death, Arnold Rimmer drunkenly confides in Dave Lister about his time with the ship's female boxing champion, Yvonne McGruder, and how it was the only sexual encounter he ever had.
[4] Returning to the ship with the black box, the group review its footage and discover what happened over the past few days.
Seeing him distraught and hurt from the truth, despite his best efforts to comfort him, Lister decided the group should erase all traces of the past few days from their memories.
[8] To film Lister's drunken pilot skills on the flight back to Red Dwarf, wires were used by the model team to give the jerking motion.
[10] In their book The Red Dwarf Programme Guide, Chris Howarth and Steve Lyons point out the "uncanny similarities" between the Red Dwarf episode "Thanks for the Memory" and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Clues", which aired on American television nearly two and half years later.
Howarth and Lyons note that the American show "has the cast waking up to find that time has passed of which they have no memory.
[15] Changes throughout the series included replacement of the opening credits,[16] giving the picture a colour grade and filmising,[17] computer generated special effects of Red Dwarf[18] and many more visual and audio enhancements.