Lister wishes he had a different holographic companion and comes up with an idea to try and make it happen.
In contrast to the first two episodes which derived a lot of their humour from some cool sci-fi concepts, Balance of Power focuses on heavily in the characters of Lister and Rimmer to good effect. They are a classic example of the type of comedy duo found in buddy movies; Contrasting personalities who are antagonistic to each other but having important aspects in common, such as being at the bottom of Red Dwarf's command structure and now being stuck on board a virtually empty ship together.
There is a great flashback sequence near the beginning that perfectly sets up the episode. This reveals a lot about both characters and is done in a highly amusing way. Lister is shown to be not particularly ambitious and enjoying the simple pleasures of life like having laugh and a session with his mates. Whilst Rimmer is depicted as a pompous, joyless and with plenty of misplaced ambition.
What follows is Lister doing his best to improve his current situation including one thing that we all know will highly irritate Rimmer, whilst Rimmer does his best to thwart Lister's pans.
This contains some solid banter between the Chris Barrie and Craig Charles, plus some comical drunken shenanigans in the flashback sequence that includes Mark Williams as Peterson and Paul Bradley as Chen. Norman Lovett has a couple of nice deadpan lines and Danny-John Jules as Cat has some moderately funny moments.
With that we have some nice images showing the isolation associated with Lister's situation, particularly the transition from the flashback sequence to the empty mess hall. Also some decent physical comedy involving Rimmer losing control of his holographic body and the Scutters hilarious response to a reprimand.