"This is an S.O.S. distress call from the mining ship Red Dwarf. The crew are dead, killed by a radiation leak. The only survivors are Dave Lister, who was in suspended animation during the disaster, and his pregnant cat, who was safely sealed in the hold. Revived three million years later, Lister's only companions are a life-form who evolved from his cat, and Arnold Rimmer, a hologram simulation of one of the dead crew."
By about the fourth series it had really got into its stride, with the crew encountering a new threat every week and dispatching it in imaginative, and - this being a British sitcom - often lavatorial / sexual / violent / puerile ways. (Rimmer : "Why don't we ever meet anyone who's pleased to see us?" Cat : "Why don't we ever meet anyone who can shoot straight?") Some episodes (such as Holoship) have never, to my knowledge, been repeated. One of the best (dramatically, and humourously) episodes was Back to Reality (I think?) where the crew are duped into thinking that they have been playing an immersive video game for the past four years. (This episode marked the first appearance of Duane Dibbley)
The show went downhill slightly with series seven, which had some stand-out episodes and a much larger budget, but did not have the atmosphere or writing of the previous series. And series 8 was completely crap. It seems slightly odd to me that so many people I encounter still count themselves as big Red Dwarf fans, as it never really hit the heights of Fawlty Towers or the like, and has been far outstripped by later sitcoms (although no subsequent series called for special effects so far in advance of the available budget, I'll admit).
A red dwarf is a main sequence star of small size (between 0.1 and 0.4 Sol masses) and low temperature (spectral class M). Since the luminosity of a main-sequence star is roughly proportional to mass^4, a red dwarf is typically around 10,000 times dimmer than Sol. However, a red dwarf also lives an extraordinarily long life compared to Sol: a star's lifetime on the main sequence is roughly proportional with 1/mass^3, so a red dwarf will typically last around 1,000 times longer than Sol. Compared to all the other stars around, red dwarfs are immortal.
Unlike a G-class yellow dwarf like Sol, when a red dwarf dies it doesn't enter the red giant stage; only a star big enough to fuse helium can become a red giant. Instead, it merely contracts into a white dwarf and slowly fades to a black dwarf over the next trillion years. Of course, no red dwarf in the entire history of the universe has died yet. They won't start dying off until you start talking about the timescales of the Stellar Era.
Some famous red dwarf stars include Proxima Centauri, Barnard's Star, and Wolf 359. Red dwarf stars are estimated to outnumber all larger stars combined by at least 2:1 (and probably closer to 9:1). However, the fact that they are very faint prevents us from detecting them at distances greater than 15 LY, a mere stone's throw compared to the size of the Milky Way.
Any /msgs to Codger about errors, omissions, typos or broken links (e.g. currently namespaced or otherwise-otherwise named episodes) and the such would be appreciated and responded to in due fashion.
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