BBC America has been running Red Dwarf all weekend.
The last time I saw it, there was just the 4 of them, Kryten, Lister, Rimmer and the Cat on board Red Dwarf.
Now, they are in prison and there are lots of humans.
I’ve been trying to find a web site to explain this but haven’t yet. Can anyone help?
You can go here: http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/ and all will become clear! I personally don’t like the return of the original crew myself.
well, I looked at the web site and it doesn’t say didley about the story line.
Yeah, I tried to find that out as well, but watching series 7 & 8 sucked so painfully I had to turn it off until they were showing series 1-6 again. I guess it must have happenned toward the end of series 7, because I’ve seen the first few episodes (so awful I couldn’t watch the rest). Should have just let it end after series 6.
Basically, in the latest season, everything is restored as it was before Rimmer accidentally killed the entire crew and the 3 million years go by before Lister comes out of cold storage.
They are on the Red Dwarf as it used to be, surrounded by all their fellow crew members and a grumpy captain etc. Rimmer is alive and not a hologram etc.
http://home.interpath.net/pat/rd/faq.html
THAT link should hekp as it has quite a lot of subsequent links to other questions you may have.
IIRC they encounter some kind of robots at the end of one series that (by the start of the next series) rebuild Red Dwarf and its crew to its original specification (i.e. not how it was in Season 1, but how the designers wanted it to be). Rimmer and Lister end up in prison, IIRC, because the crew “know” that they killed everyone even though they’re now rebuilt (confusing, eh?).
The last two seasons were awful anyway - too much money on new special effects and not enough time spent on decent scripts.
That would be the nano-bots.
Somehow Lister and co end up on the runabout and Red Dwarf gets stolen by the nano-bots, they then spend some time chasing it down only to find that Red Dwarf has been shrunk down in scale to nano-bot scale.
The Nano-bots end up being very sorry and to make up for it build an absolutely HUGE Red Dwarf.
Finally they get it right and they rebuild the whole shebang complete with crew.
Sheesh. Allow me.
Off screen a few seasons back, Red Dwarf was hijacked by persons/things unkown, whereupon they spent a couple of seasons chasing its vapor trail in the Starbug. They eventually discovered that it had been Kryten’s nanobots that were responsible. The nanobots had ditched most of the material that made up RD, made a nanoversion of the ship, and had spent the last few years exploring Lister’s laundry basket. Anyhoo, Kryten convinced the nanobots to rebuild the ship (and Lister’s recently severed arm, but that’s not important right now). The bots felt so bad that they made the ship bigger and better than before, including resurrecting all the crew. Now Rimmer, the hologram, had left the ship to become the next incarnation of Ace Rimmer, the multidimensional James Bond type hero. But the original Rimmer was resurrected along with everyone else.
So, once the ship reappeared, Lister ‘n’ pals crashed the Starbug into it and were arrested for stealing a ship and sneaking the Cat on board. Lister recruited Rimmer to help them escape, and, well, to make a long story short, the captain ended up convinced that Lister’s story was true, but threw them in the brig anyway for using confidential records to bribe Rimmer to help them escape. So they’re all in prison. What prison, you ask? Turns out that there was a secret prison all along on floor 13, transporting some of the worst criminals in the universe. Hope that helps.
Oh, and there are now 2 Hollys, both male versions. There’s the resurrected one running the ship, sane, and the insane version on Lister’s watch.
You forgot the Extra-dimentional Kochanski.
Shortly after ‘Ace’ split, they ran into a rift into another dimention, and met their sort-of counterparts from another dimention.
Thing is, in this dimention, Kochanski found out about Frankenstein and convinced Dave to hand her over.
Thing is, she took pity on the poor kitty, and SHE was the one who got caught and put into stasis.
3 million years later, she’s revived and Holly brings back Lister to help keep her sanity. They find Cat and Kryten, of course. They also manage to lose THEIR Red Dwarf.
Now, while the two crews are catching up, the rift gets severed, trapping Krissy in THIS dimention. (Her Dave was NOT happy about that. Ours was, though. 
Both Krytens agreed with her Dave.)
She doesn’t like our Lister…or our Kryten…or our Cat.
See…with her influence (rather than just being 4 guys), the group became…well…human (rather than 4 guys ^__^). She’s just not into games like ‘Name that Smell’.
She’s in prison along with the rest, of course.
Somebody posting under “Smeghead” SHOULD know this stuff. I might add that shortly after Arnold is turned into the latest incarnation of Ace, they introduce Christine Kochanski, played by Chloe Annett, as a regular character and crew member - they encounter a Red Dwarf from an alternate dimension, and she winds up trapped aboard THIS Red Dwarf. I didn’t think she worked all that well, but the OP might have wondered why she was one of the gang.
The OP forgot to mention Holly as one of the original (or at least first few seasons) characters, either in Norm Lovett or Hattie Hayridge form.
I think by far the BEST thing about the Red Dwarf’s “prison” episodes was Mac McDonald’s Captain Hollister. I just wonder how many takes they had to do to get through that “Do you KNOW what happens when a Tyrannosaurus …” routine with straight faces.
Hollister (Written on a note card because he couldn’t speak):
12 Months in The Box
Lister and Rimmer:
But, Sir…!
Hollister:
Not you. Me.
(Paraphrased 'cuz it’s been a while since I saw that episode.)