Red Dwarf/Nanarchy

Nanarchy
Season 7, Episode 8
Airdate	March 7, 1997
Written by	Doug Naylor, Paul Alexander, James Hendrie
Directed by	Ed Bye
← 7x07 Epideme	8x01 → Back in the Red (1)
Red Dwarf — Season Seven

Nanarchy is the eighth episode of the seventh season of Red Dwarf, and the forty-fourth episode overall.

Guest Stars: Norman Lovett (Holly)

Plot Overview

After a brief recap of the previous episode and how Lister lost his right arm, we see Lister playing guitar; his left hand on the neck and ... Kryten's right hand strumming the strings. Kryten has been doing everything for him, even things that don't require two hands.

Kochanski urges Kryten to build him an artificial arm. He does try, but the arm proves unsuitable. She then asks why his self-repair nanobots couldn't fix Dave's arm. The problem, Kryten says, is that his nanobots deserted him around the time they were aboard the Esperanto. After a bit more discussion, Kryten prepares the deep sleep units for the centuries-long journey back to the Esperanto. They will look for his nanobots there.

They come out of deep sleep beside a planetoid. Off in the distance is the ocean planet where the derelict Esperanto lies -- where they fought the despair squid. Starbug's sensors read the planetoid as Red Dwarf. It doesn't make sense, so they take Starbug down. Kryten remains aboard while the others use an exploration buggy to check things out.

Outside is a raging sandstorm. Lister and and Kochanski stay inside the buggy, and the Cat goes out alone. He returns with parts from Red Dwarf. Back on Starbug, Lister looks through the goods: napkin rings, a box of hairnet requisition forms, a motorized tie rack, an inflatable shark, and something that looks like a wristwatch. It's Holly, back in his original (male) guise.

Kryten's nanobots mutantied; there was nothing left to explore in his body. They wanted a ship. While Kryten and the others were aboard the Esperanto, the nanobots must have made a miniature version of Red Dwarf for themselves and dumped the leftover parts on the planetoid.

Kryten adapts Starbug's scanners to look for the nanobots inside Starbug itself, and he finds them in Lister's laundry basket. Using a glass jar and a small card to keep the microscopic buggers in, he retrieves them. He makes contact by tapping the glass with a pencil. He then directs his attention to a monitor and communicates with them in "machine code", admonishing them for leaving him. He asks that they restore Lister's arm and turn the planetoid back into Red Dwarf.

The nanobots do their work well, and Lister gets a new arm. In fact, he gets a whole new body. A weight lifter's body with huge bulging muscles. Kockanski assures him that the nanobots will get it right on their next try.

Meanwhile outside, Red Dwarf was been reconstructed. Cat pilots Starbug into a landing bay, but there's a problem: the nanobots got the scale wrong. Red Dwarf is much to large. Their Starbug is like a fly next to the reconstructed Starbug 1.

Arc Advancement

Happenings

• Red Dwarf is rebuilt by Kryten's nanobots.

Characters

• Lister is bitter about the loss of his hand.
• The nanobots reconstruct Lister's arm, but they also upgrade his entire body with huge bulging muscles.

Referbacks

• Finding his mechanical arm a bit sluggish, Lister says to Kryten, "The only thing I've ever seen pick up slower is Rimmer in a disco!"
• Kryten recalls that he lost his nanobots on the Esperanto (in the episode Back to Reality).

Trivia

Allusions and References

• Kryten and Kochanski try to raise Lister's spirits by citing people who lost an arm and went on to be successful.
  • Admiral Nelson
  • Venus DeMilo
  • Vincent van Gogh (it was an ear, not an arm)
  • The one-armed man (from the 1947/1993 movies The Fugitive)
• Kochanski unflatteringly calls Kryten Florence Nightindroid, bceause he is doing everything for Lister.
• When she saw Gone with the Wind, Kochanski cried her way through a box of tissues.

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