- When investigating an ocean ship, The Esperanto, the crew are attacked by a Despair Squid and awake to find they are entirely different people who have been playing the game "Red Dwarf" for the last four years. Is this truly their reality?
- The Red Dwarf investigates an ocean ship, The Esperanto, where they find the ship's crew have all committed suicide, and are attacked by a sea monster called The Despair Squid. Later they wake up to find they are not who they thought they were and have been playing an artificial reality computer game for four years.—Daniel Williamson
- Starbug submerges on the sea bed of an ocean planet to investigate a derelict vessel, the SSS Esperanto. Lister, Cat and Kryten board the derelict, Rimmer remains on Starbug to report the entries from the ship's log. The vessel was a seeding ship, researching the creation of new marine life, tests were successful, yet the journal stops, Kryten worries that one such experiment was too successful and annihilated all other life on the planet.
The Dwarfers finds the bodies of the crew, long dead from suicides, even a dead fish seems to have killed itself, Lister finds some squid ink, Kryten scans the substance and finds it contains hallucinogenic qualities, they hurry back to Starbug. Starbug's radar detects a life-form closing in, a gigantic squid, its hallucinogenic ink is the cause of the mass death on the planet, Starbug takes off and is hit by the ink, Starbug crashes into rock and explodes, the crew are believed dead.
The crew gain consciousness in an artificial reality suite, having been playing a video game version of Red Dwarf, their appearances have changed, Lister has long hair, Rimmer is not a hologram, Kryten is a cyborg and Cat has an overbite and a mop top haircut. An engineer enters the room to prepare the machine for the next users, the Dwarfers had no idea they were playing a game and scored badly, the next group enter, a handsome bunch, more likely players, the Dwarfers are sent to the recuperation lounge.
In the lounge the four come to terms that their lives were fabricated, having not a single memory of who they really are, the possibilities seem grim. A medic enters and gives them all their belongings, they discover their true identities. Cat is a graceless dork named Dwayne Dibbley, Kryten is a traffic cop with the foolish macho name, Jake Bullet, Rimmer is a down-and-outer named William Doyle and Lister is his successful half-brother, Sebastian.
As they leave Lister looks into a view finder and sees the other group playing Red Dwarf, they are far better players. They arrive in the parking lot and find posters telling of a Fascist government, they head to Lister's limo and a girl runs past them, an armed secret police officer holds them prisoner for letting her escape, but he recognizes Lister as his superior, it seems Lister is the ruler of the Fascist government. The girl is seen leaving and the officer aims at her, Kryten draw his gun and shoots him dead, meaning to wound him, Kryten is in shock at killing a human which is against his programming.
The scene cuts to the mid-section of Starbug where the Dwarfers are under the effects of the squid ink and Holly is trying to snap them out of it. They hallucinate being chased by police and take refuge in an alley, Kryten is going to shoot himself for disobeying his programming, all the others don't like who they are and want to shoot themselves too, there's only one bullet, so they compensate by holding all their heads together and letting the bullet go through all of them.
Holly speaks to Kryten on a higher frequency, finally able to get through to him, she makes him release the wheel on a fire extinguisher which is a canister of lithium carbonate on Starbug, Kryten returns to the suicide and Holly is able to save them from death. The crew are out of the hallucination, the lithium carbonate rescued them. Kryten understands the squid ink was designed to induce despair, the crew of the Esperanto were subjected to it and it killed them, and it nearly killed the Dwarfers. Holly apparently killed the squid with limpet mines. Starbug is set to leave the planet, Lister says the Esperanto crew messed up by creating the squid.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content