Red Dwarf/Pete (1)

Pete (1)
Season 8, Episode 6
Airdate	March 25, 1999
Written by	Doug Naylor
Directed by	Ed Bye
← 8x05 Krytie TV	8x07 → Pete (2)
Red Dwarf — Season Eight

Pete (1) is the sixth episode of the eighth season of Red Dwarf, and the fiftieth episode overall.

Guest Stars: Mac McDonald (Captain Hollister), Graham McTavish (Ackerman), Andrew Olston (Mex), Ricky Glover (Baxter), Ian Masters (Birdman)

Plot Overview

Captain Hollister punishes Lister and Rimmer for playing an embarrassing prank on Warden Ackerman (see below). The punishment is that Lister and a team of his choice must play a game of basketball against a team of guards led by Mr. Ackerman.

Before long, the game is underway. The score: 48 to 3 in favor of the guards. Soon we see the reason why: the guards are using all sorts of unscrupulous tricks -- jabbing, punching, body-checking, etc. A guard even shorts out Kryten's circuits by jabbing a screwdriver into his neck.

When the buzzer sounds, the cons gather on the bench. Lister and Rimmer let them know that they have "taken care" of everything. They slipped a virility drug into the guards' juice (the scutters helped them smuggle it out of the medibay). Within seconds they will be "harder than a quadratic equation," Rimmer says.

When the buzzer sounds again, play resumes. The guards now move at a much more languid pace, hunched over trying to hide their "condition", most of them covering their crotches as well. Captain Hollister just can't understand what changed-- they were winning. Now the cons are running rings around them. Resigned to losing, Captain Hollister, has a drink of the team's juice. Within seconds, a look of surprise crosses his face. He looks down at his own crotch and realises what's going on.

After the game, Lister and Rimmer are back before the captain once again. Lister takes the blame for obtaining the medicine in order to protect the scutters. They are asssigned "spud duty" as punishment.

At supper time, Rimmer chokes down the meal brought by the guards, but Lister doesn't even touch his food. Instead he waits until Bob the Scutter brings him a chicken vindaloo, beer, and an order of popadons. In return Lister oils Bob with WD-40.

After Bob leaves, Lister gets an idea. If they had a programmable virus, they could program it to eat potatoe skins and leave the potatoes untouched. That would make short work of spud duty. He decides to leave a message with Bob's "missus".

Lister goes to a metal pipe that runs through their cell. He taps the pipe repeatedly, sending code. He gets a response! The tapping goes on for quite a while, sending and receiving. Finally Lister turns away in defeat, "Damn!" It was a "wrong number" -- he got a Chinese laundry!

Kryten and Kochanski are sent on a Canary mission to the S.S. Manny Celeste to search for a missing Canary batallion. There they find a group of Canaries, apparently frozen in place. One of the men is holding a device in his hand. Kochanski takes it, saying "'Tempus', that's Latin for time."

The men are not frozen, they are just moving very, very slowly -- the same speed as your average Little Chef waitress, according to Holly. When Kochanski asks what else it can do, Kryten demonstrates by turning them into children (see below). After he turns them back to normal, Kochanski realises that with this device they can make their sentences pass in mere seconds.

Back on Red Dwarf Lister and Rimmer are faced with a mountain of potatoes twice as tall as they themselves. Confidently, Lister sprinkles the potatoe-eating virus onto the piles. It beings working almost immediately. Giddy, they begin to gather the peeled potatoes, but soon they notice their their clothes are being eaten as well. As their clothes disintegrate, they realise that their hair is also coming out as well.

Soon they are back before Captain Hollister, naked and hairless, covering their private parts as best they can. Hollister skips punishment this time, but threatens them with "the hole" if he ever sees them in his office again. Grateful for this act of kindness, Rimmer reaches out and shakes the captain's hand. Soon the captain's clothes begin to disintegrate and his hair falls out as well. Two months in the hole!

Meanwhile Kryten, the Cat, and Kochanski have returned from their Canary mission. In the commissary they play a prank on a bully (Baxter), changing his chicken into a live chicken. Cat laughs out loud, necessitating the use of the time wand to make a timely getaway, before Baxter pummels him.

In the hole Lister and Rimmer have a companion: Birdman, an eccentric, elderly man with a pet bird named Pete. Pete is 9 years old. Soon enough however, Bob the Scutter arranges a jail-break, cutting a hole in the floor. Now free, they join Kryten, Kochanski, and the Cat in the hold, where Kryten restores their hair to normal with the time wand. He explains that with the wand their sentence can now be served in a nanosecond.

In all the excitement Birdman's bird Pete has died (from too much excitement). Kryten sets the time wand to bring Pete back to life, but instead of restoring Pete to the way he was, it turns him into a huge dinosaur (birds are descended from dinosaurs). Bird Man can't see terribly well. When he hears that Pete is alive again, he pours some bird seed into his hand and offers it to Pete. Pete wastes little time and eats the seed and Bird Man in one bite.

Arc Advancement

Characters

• Bob the Scutter has a missus: Madge.

• Lister and Rimmer are almost like best friends in the episode. Amusing, isn't it?

Trivia

The Show

• The "cons" basketball uniforms are yellow; the guards are black with red letters.
• The backboard of the basketball goals say:

JMC

Floor 13

• The final score of the basketball game between the guards and the cons is at least 48-53 with the cons in the lead.
• Captain Hollister was "up" for seven hours because of the virility drug.
• Lister gets stuck on a connect-the-dots puzzle: a bucket and spade.

Allusions and References

• When the Cat and Kochanski are regressed to their teen years, Holly describes them as looking like the Turkish entry in the Eurovision Song Contest.
• As Bob the Scutter makes the hand-off of the programmable nano-virus to Lister, he hums the theme song from the movie The Great Escape.
• When the dwarfers first encounter the lost Canary team frozen in time, Kryten says, "I've never seen anything like this before. A group of men who display all the normal lifesigns, but seem totally incapable of movement." Lister responds, "Never seen QPR play away, then?" -- an apparent reference to QPR's disappointing performance in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Memorable Moments

• Lister and Rimmer get into trouble for slipping a dose of the truth serum sodium pentathol into Ackerman's inhaler. This caused him to report for duty on the bridge, whereupon he apologised for being late, saying he'd been having "jiggy-jiggy" with the Science Officer's wife, and hadn't allowed enough time to change out of his Batman outfit. Lister suggests that he consider Tarzan, as the change time would be much quicker.
• In a flashback to their first day in the Tank, Warden Ackerman is "welcoming" them. The Cat takes this the wrong way and says how he "seems like a nice guy." This earns him a blow from a nightstick. Ackerman responds icily, "If you want to speak, ask my permission." Cat simply does not understand. He goes on the defensive, saying how he was simply paying him a compliment, which of course earns him another beating. This goes on for some time before the Cat finally understands.

Quotes

• Birdman has just been eaten by Pete the Dinosaur ...

Kryten: What now sir?

Rimmer: Follow the Rimmer-shaped blur!

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