Kryten
Kryten is a fictional character in the British science fiction situation comedy Red Dwarf. The name Kryten is a reference to the head butler in the J.M. Barrie play The Admirable Crichton. Originally referred to as a Series III mechanoid, he is later described as a 4000 Series, or Series 4000.
In their original plan for the series, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor had specified that there would be no aliens and no robots. Following the success of the first appearance by the Kryten character, Naylor convinced Grant to bring him back.
In the character's first appearance, originally only intended as a one-off, Kryten was played by actor David Ross but the popularity of the character meant that Kryten was introduced as a regular in Series III. The intention was to bring Ross back to play the role, but he was not available at the time and the position was filled by actor Robert Llewellyn.
David Ross later returned to voice Talkie Toaster in the series IV episode "White Hole" and the series XII episode "Mechocracy".
Fictional history
Television
1980s
Kryten first appeared in the Red Dwarf episode "Kryten", where he is characterised as a service mechanoid on board the Nova 5, a spacecraft originally from Earth. Kryten says that his entire purpose is "to serve and have no regard for himself". He sends a distress call which is picked up by the crew of the mining ship Red Dwarf, claiming that the male crew died when the Nova 5 crash landed on a planetoid, while the female crew are—according to Kryten himself—"stable, but injured". The female crew have actually been dead for "centuries"—Kryten apparently not realising this, and continuing to feed and serve them. Because there is no-one else on board the Nova 5, Kryten starts a new life on Red Dwarf with the hologram Arnold Rimmer as his new master. Dave Lister persuades Kryten to rebel against Rimmer and to become independent. Kryten changes the portrait of Rimmer he paints to make it appear as though he was sitting on a toilet, and then pours soup onto Rimmer's bed sheets. Kryten takes Lister's space-bike and goes out to find a planet with an atmosphere where he can grow a garden, which had always been a dream of his. This episode also marks a 'first' in science-fiction history in which an android deliberately gives a human being the 'finger'.Kryten returns in "Backwards", where he permanently becomes part of the Red Dwarf crew. At the start of the episode, Kryten is described in some scrolling text as being found in pieces after his space-bike crashed on an asteroid. Lister rebuilds Kryten, although he is unable to recapture his former personality. In the episode proper, Kryten causes the Starbug 1 shuttle to fall into a time hole while taking a driving test facilitated by Rimmer. The ship crash lands on Earth in a reality where time runs backwards, leaving Kryten, Rimmer and Red Dwarfs computer Holly stranded. Rimmer and Kryten spend three weeks working as the novelty act "the Sensational Reverse Brothers" and begin to enjoy life in this new reality, but are fired by a pub manager for a fight that Rimmer and Kryten become involved in later that night. Lister and the Cat come to rescue Rimmer, Kryten and Holly in another Starbug to get back to Red Dwarf.
In "Timeslides", Lister is seen travelling back in time by entering a photographic slide with mutated developing fluid to convince his younger self to become wealthy and successful and not join the Space Corps. This consequently causes Kryten to never be rescued. Rimmer unwittingly reverses this new timeline by going back in time to his boyhood self, causing Kryten to return to Red Dwarf.
In "The Last Day", a replacement android for Kryten is shown travelling en route to Red Dwarf, and a countdown for Kryten's shut down disc activates, leaving Kryten with only twenty-four hours notice before all mental and physical action automatically stops, because of his service life expiring so the new model can be sold. Kryten reveals that he has a strong faith in Silicon Heaven, an afterlife for electrical equipment, which Lister tries and fails to convince Kryten is not real. After feeling enjoyment for the first time at a party, Kryten overrides his shut down programming and causes his replacement, Hudzen, to shut down because Hudzen's android brain is unable to cope with the idea there is no Silicon Heaven; Kryten only surviving because he knew he was lying to Hudzen.
1990s
In "Camille", Lister is shown trying to teach Kryten how to lie, cheat and be offensive as part of a way to make Kryten break his programming and become independent. After Kryten dates and falls in love with a pleasure GELF called Camille —firstly in the form of a 4000 Series GTI mechanoid, and later her original amorphous blob form—Camille's estranged husband Hector, who like Camille is also a blob, lands in Red Dwarfs hangar to take her back and find an antidote for their condition. Kryten lies to Camille to protect her feelings and give her her best shot at happiness by convincing her to go with Hector.In the episode "DNA", Kryten is briefly transformed into a human being when the DNA from his part organic brain is used to alter Kryten's entire molecular structure. He quickly decides to change himself back into mechanoid form, because he feels miserable about making fun of Kryten's spare heads, the ones Kryten describe as those closest to him, and because being a mechanoid is what he "always ha been" and "always will be".
In "The Inquisitor", Kryten is put on trial by the legendary android known as the Inquisitor to determine whether or not his existence is justified or a waste. After Kryten is found unworthy of existence, the memory of Kryten is erased, and the Inquisitor replaces Kryten's life with that of an alternative, uncredited Kryten who never got a chance at life. This alternative Kryten is killed by the Inquisitor, while Lister subsequently tricks the Inquisitor into erasing himself from existence, causing the memory of Kryten to be restored.
In "Demons and Angels", Red Dwarf is blown up when the beam of a device called the triplicator is put into reverse, putting the engine core into meltdown, while creating a "high" and "low" version of Red Dwarf, complete with their own versions of Kryten. Before the lifespans of both versions of Red Dwarf expire after an hour, the crew collect pieces of the triplicator from both Red Dwarfs, and restore the original Red Dwarf by amalgamating the two copies with a rebuilt triplicator. The "high" version of Kryten is blown up by a bomb the "lows" throw at him, while the "low" version disappears with his version of Red Dwarf.
In "Back to Reality", ink from a "despair squid" causes Lister, Rimmer, the Cat and Kryten to share a hallucination, with the hallucinations attacking things they each consider "quintessential to self-esteem". In the hallucination, Kryten believes he is a half-human android traffic control officer called Jake Bullet, and while hallucinating, appears to kill a man, going against what Kryten believes is fundamental to him – "never to take a life". The four nearly commit suicide together, but a mood stabiliser saves them at the last second.
According to backstory in "Psirens", Kryten's creator is Professor Mamet. According to a "Psiren" duplicate of Mamet, Kryten is coded not to harm Mamet, and to obey her every command. In the episode, Kryten explains that Red Dwarf was "stolen", with the crew now based inside Starbug chasing after Red Dwarf to recover it.
In "Out of Time", Rimmer mentions that all trace of Red Dwarf has been lost. In the episode, a Starbug from fifteen years hence arrives, with Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten's future selves intending to copy some components from the present Starbugs time drive so they can fix the fault in their own drive and continue their lives of opulence, socialising with notorious figures of history such as the Habsburgs, the Borgias, Louis XVI, Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring. Lister tells the future crew to leave, and the future Starbug fires upon the present day one, apparently killing the crew and blowing Starbug up.
In the following episode, "Tikka to Ride", Lister mentions in a video log that the future Starbug destroying the Starbug of the present meant the time drive they had used ceased to exist in both the present and the future, or in other words, killing the present crew of Starbug in the present also killed the crew in the future, making it impossible for the future crew from ever going back in time to kill themselves in the present. The Cat later mentions in the episode that time returned to the point before the time drive was discovered. When Starbug's supplies of curry and lager are destroyed, Lister replaces Kryten's main head with one of his spares and removes his guilt chip in a bid to use the time drive to restore them. The newly uninhibited Kryten showed no concern about using profanity, serving the crew unhealthy meals, the damaging repercussions of the crew's accidental prevention of John F. Kennedy's assassination, or serving human flesh for Lister and Cat to eat.
According to Lister in "Ouroboros", Kryten ended up alone aboard the Nova 5 because he killed the crew in an accident, and prior to that on the SS Augustus, that ship's crew had all died of old age. In the episode, a Kryten from a parallel dimension is briefly seen, when a "linkway" through "non-space" is opened when the membrane between the two realities temporarily collapses. The alternate version of Kryten has gold casing.
In "Beyond a Joke", a rogue simulant gives Kryten access to a file in his CPU which Kryten had never been able to access before. According to this file, Professor Mamet was due to marry a fellow bio-engineer, John Warburton. When Warburton jilted Mamet the day before their wedding, as an act of revenge, Mamet created the 4000 Series of droids in his image. As part of the joke, all of Kryten's negative emotions are stored in a file: Kryten's "nega drive". When this file gets full, it blows, just like Warburton used to.
In "Epideme", Kryten mentions completing his Bachelor of Sanitation course at "toilet university" many years prior, where he studied the "lavatorial sciences". Navigation Officer Kristine Kochanski retorts that "toilet university" is simply a piece of software installed in Kryten, although he states that he still needed to sit a written exam to prove that it was properly installed. Lister has his right arm amputated in an attempt to rid his body of the Epideme virus. Kochanski ultimately gets rid of the virus by temporarily stopping Lister's heart and containing the virus in deceased Red Dwarf crewmember Caroline Carmen's arm, injected with blood and adrenaline, and tricking the virus into thinking the arm belongs to Kochanski. In the following episode, "Nanarchy", Kryten tries looking for his self-repairing nanobots to rebuild Lister's arm. Returning to the part of space where they were last seen, the crew discovers Red Dwarf has been converted by the nanobots into a planetoid made of sand and Holly restored to his old settings and abandoned there, with the Red Dwarf Starbug spent years chasing after being a subatomic version shrunken down and eventually exploring Lister's laundry basket, and the remaining bits they did not want being left on the planetoid. Kryten orders the nanobots to rebuild Lister's arm and turn the planetoid back into Red Dwarf.
In Back in the Red, Holly creates a new set of nanobots to bring the entire crew on board Red Dwarf back to life after Kryten's had gone missing again. Included among the resurrected crew is Rimmer, after the hologrammatic simulation of Rimmer left Starbug. Lister, Rimmer, Cat, Kryten and Kochanski are sentenced to two years in the ship's brig for misuse of confidential information. While on trial for unrelated crimes against the Space Corps, Kryten is also classified as a woman under Space Corps directives, because he does not have a penis. In "Cassandra", the five of them get signed up by Lister to the convict army the Canaries after Holly lies to Lister that they're a singing troupe.
In "Krytie TV", the prisoner Kill Crazy reprograms Kryten. After his reprogramming, Kryten turns into a "ruthless entrepreneur" that runs a pay TV service in the prisoners' cinema called Krytie TV, making him rich, feared and respected from hidden camera programming.
In Pete Part Two, Kryten feels humiliated about being classified as a woman and being posted to the women's wing of the brig due to him being "genitally challenged". To rectify this, he creates a penis he calls "Archie" out of an old electron board, toilet roll, sticky-back plastic and an Action Man's polo neck. Archie, however, subsequently escapes Kryten and Kochanski's cell and runs amok in the prison.
In "Only the Good...", a corrosive micro-organism is shown eating apart Red Dwarf. After Rimmer tries and fails to obtain the formula for an antidote from a "mirror universe" where everything is opposite, and not being able to find anyone on Red Dwarf upon returning, a vending machine informs Rimmer that everyone crossed back into the mirror universe. The machine opening the way to the mirror universe is shown to have been destroyed by the micro-organism, leaving Rimmer stranded and the only crew member aboard Red Dwarf in his universe.