Kryten 4000 Series Continued...
Designed and supplied by Divadroid International, Kryten is a series 4000 mechanoid, whose main function is to clean, cook and do other domestic chores. His software ensures that he takes orders from all humans, and has absolutely no regard for himself. However, while serving aboard the Earth ship Nova 5, he washes the ship's computer and causes the AI to short out, plunging the starship to its doom, and killing all of the crew save three of the female officers, whom he serves until they die. By the time help arrives, in the shape of the Boys from the Dwarf, many hundreds of years have passed, and Kryten's three charges have gone the way of all flesh, except that the mechanoid does not believe it. Once he has been convinced and the three women (or the remains of them, at any rate) buried, Kryten is taken back to Red Dwarf, where he is immediately put to work by Rimmer, the hologram foisting on him all the jobs and tasks he feels need doing, and that Lister won't do.
Lister, however, sees the treatmenf of Kryten as unfair, and encourages the droid to break his programming. He asks Kryten what does he want, and after a long pause during which the mechanoid wonders why anyone should care what he desires --- he was built to serve others: "I serve, therefore I am" --- Kryten admits that he has always dreamed of growing a garden of his own. Lister tells him to find a planet with an atmosphere and make it happen. Encouraged by our Dave, Kryten does eventually rebel against his new master, deserting Rimmer and heading off on Lister's spacebike to make his dream come true. However, some time later the crew discover the mangled remains of the bike crashed on an asteroid, and Kryten is not in much better shape! Lister manages to get him back online, but can't regain his original personality (Lestat sniggers: this is merely a thinly-disguised attempt to explain the fact that the character had now been taken over by Robert Llwellyn, who made the part of Kryten his over the course of the next three seasons).
Kryten is taught by Rimmer how to pilot Starbug, and the two end up on a parallel Earth, where everything goes backwards! For a time they make a name for themselves as The Sensational Reverse Brothers, but they eventually have to leave and return to Red Dwarf. Kryten later has his inbuilt guilt chip overridden by the Polymorph, and with no guilt to hold him back considers handing the others over to the monster in return for his own life. When the beast is destroyed and they all return to normal, he offers to commit suicide but is stopped by Lister. He is twice wiped from existence, the first instance being when Lister alters the timelines in Timeslides, and as a consequence does not join Red Dwarf, the knock-on effect being that both Kryten and the Cat disappear from being! The second time this happens it is with Lister, as they battle the Inquisitor, during which Kryten sees himself die, though this is a timeline they manage to avoid.
During The Last Day, as Kryten awaits his replacement from Divadroid, the mechanoid explains to Lister the concept of Silicon Heaven, telling him that this is the place where all mechanicals go after death, their reward for leading a selfless life on the Earth. Lister tells him this is not the case, but Kryten cannot be convinced, and seeing no way to stop the countdown to shutdown of Kryten's CPU that is underway, Lister and his friends decide to throw a farewell party for their mechanical friend. It is during this binge that Kryten first realises that there is more to life than merely serving, and he is not ready to switch himself off yet. This is further pointed out to him when he meets Camille, who first appears to him as a female mechnoid, with whom he falls instantly in love. She turns out, however, to be a pleasure GELF, a Genetically Engineered Life Form, but when she shows Kryten what she really looks like (an amorphous green blob), he refuses to take any notice, and says this does not change anything. Romance blossoms, but is cut short when Hector, Camille's husband, comes by and Kryten has to use the power of lying, which he has only recently learned from Lister, to convince her to go with him.
The point about Kryten's ability to lie is an important one in the development of the character of Kryten. Being able to exhibit all the major negative human traits (lying, insulting, insubordination, sarcasm etc), Kryten is well on the way to being able to break his programming again, even being able to call Rimmer a smeghead to his face (well, almost!). His next lesson in being human is literally that: encountering an alien machine, the transmogrifier, his DNA, is changed from mechanoid to humanoid, and for a short period Kryten is a human! This episode really explores the human condition well, as Kryten asks Lister why human eyes have no zoom or split-screen effect, and has some very interesting questions and revelations about his penis! Kryten also mistreats his spare heads, and when he later realises what he has done he uses the machine to change himself back. In Meltdown, he realises that his mechanoid programming is still strong enough to force him to obey Rimmer, who has gone completely loopy and is waging war with wax-droids!
Left in Quarantine with Lister and the Cat though, it emerges that he can still rebel against certain of his programming: when things get heated in the one-cell chamber, Lister calls him tetchy, after being warned not to. Pushed beyond his limits, Kryten takes in his hand the video Wallpapering, painting and stippling: a DIY guide, and ignores Lister's order not to put it on. He corrects the Cat, technically a humanoid and therefore technically Kryten's superior, and threatens him, calling him stupid. He comes through for his friends however when they fall foul of the lunatic entity Legion, and forces the gestalt being to help him rescue them. When Red Dwarf acquires a deadly computer virus, he enters a dreamlike state while he tries to devise an antidote, his subconscious placing him in the role of a sherrif in an old Western.
He it is who converses with the gelfs and reluctantly arranges Lister's marriage to their chieftain's daughter in return for the oxy-generation unit they need for their ship. He is also the voice of reason when, trapped on Rimmerworld, Lister declares that they could capture some guards, knock them out, take their uniforms and fight their way out: Kryten shrugs and says "Yes, or we could just use the matter paddle!" He is most upset at the end of season six, as he meets the visitors from the future, and finds out that Lister is fated to become nothing more than a brain in a jar!
At the opening of season seven, Kryten has his main head swapped by Lister in order that he may remove the behavioural chip and therefore have the mechanoid agree to Lister's proposed trip through time to find curry. With his chip removed, Kryten exhibits some very strange behaviour, cursing, smoking and using his groinal attachment to stir drinks. As he says himself "Just call me badass!" Having discovered what his trip through time has done to the cosmic balance of things, Lister asks why didn't Kryten warn him, but the mechanoid tells him that he knew what Lister was doing, he just didn't care! Without his behaviour chip to tell him right from wrong, Kryten has no way to know what is the correct mode of behaviour, a situtaion which leads to his taking a dead man off the street and cooking him for the boys! Hey, he reasons, humans eat animals, why not each other?
When he comes across Rimmer, pretending to be Ace, he detects that there is something different about the hologram, categorising it as "21% more weasly". He is sorry to see Rimmer (whom he believes to be Ace) leave, but much more worried when Christine Kochanski comes aboard. Now his whole world is turned upside down. With the influence of a woman on board, his usual requests and duties are now questioned, and he worries that Lister will stop liking him in favour of Kochanski. He does all in his power to ensure she gets back to her ship, but it doesn't happen, and he is reduced to making snide comments about her underwear. Little concerns and irritations grow to disproportionate size, and finally Kryten can take it no more, as he sabotages the ship's generator, forcing them all to climb through the ducts, all because he does not want Kochanski to have the bath he perceived she would have in Lister's quarters, presumably with him.
A side-splittingly funny scene in this episode, Duct Soup is the "dream scene" where Kryten sees Chrissie and Lister married, and throwing him out as gelf in-laws come to tea! Thank you with a capital R indeed! He tries to console Lister over the loss of Rimmer, but is upstaged by Kochanski, and so builds The Rimmer Experience for more see the entry on Rimmer, and also check out Kathy Park's wonderful Rimmer Experience tour), which reminds all concerned what a complete and total smeghead Rimmer was! In this he scores over Kochanski, who even has to smile as he declares at the end of the ride "Sigmund Freud, eat your heart out!"
The rivalries are back in full swing however when Kochanski declares her intention to take them all to Jane Austen World, whereas Kryten has been preparing a special meal to celebrate the anniversary of the day he was rescued from the Nova 5. Unable to believe that Lister and the Cat would choose to go to an AR version of Pride and Prejudice than eat his "Scuttling-thing-a la-monkey-wrench", he follows them into the AR game, bringing along a tank, with which he totals the summerhouse! As they eat the dinner in guilty tension, Lister mentions that it might need ketchup, and Kryten literally blows his top! His head explodes, and the crew have to go off and see if they can find another one. As luck would have it, a passing rogue simulant ship has some, and he offers to trade them. However, arriving back on Starbug, they find that Kryten has been stolen!
Kryten then meets his "brother", another series 4000 android, who goes by the name of Abel, and is addicted to Otrazone. As the Starbug crew give chase and the standoff arrives, the simulant causes Kryten to access memories about his design that have a deep and lasting effect on the mechanoid. It turns out that the entire series of which he is part was built by his creator, Professor Mammet, as a bad joke, a mocking tribute to her husband-to-be, who was so fussy, pernickety, pompous and just plain annoying. Kryten's whole personality is based on this person and he is, in effect, the result of a joke of programming, a nasty snipe by his creator at a man who jilted her at the altar. Kryten learns that all his negative emotions are stored on a special file, his "negadrive", and when it gets full the file explodes, just like Mammet's fiance used to. Lister tells him that this is the reason Able turned to the Otrazone; he too learned Mammet's secret. But he also tells his friend that he has evolved, progressed to something that is beyond a joke. In the end, Abel sacrifices himself for the crew, thus redeeming himself.
It falls to Kryten to come up with the rather drastic solution to Lister's infection by the Epideme virus, the only way he can see to get it out of Lister's system: they must force the virus into one of Lister's arms, and then amputate it! This they do, but unfortunately they don't get all the virus out, and it begins to surge through his system again. Kochanski then forces it to transfer to her arm and then cuts that arm off, thus killing Epideme forever. In order for this to have been done, though, Lister's heart has had to be stopped, so that the virus will believe he is dead and so go looking for another host. Kryten almost forgets to restart Lister's heart, as he seems finally to have come to terms with Kochanski, they both leaving the room talking conversationally until Kryten screams "MR. LISTER!!!!" and comes flying back in to restart his heart!
The interaction between Kochanski and Kryten gives a new dimension to the show, and opens up new facets of Kryten's character. Always the, if you will, mother figure of the crew, caring for them, cleaning up after them and feeding them (despite Lister's protestations: "Kryten, I'll get me own smeggin' breakfast!" Kryten: "Bon appetit, bin!"), he now has a rival, a challenger for his throne, and he digs in and grinds his teeth as he refuses to give up that position. Everything Kochanski does irritates him, from her putting the salad cream in the press instead of the fridge to her keeping socks in her pants drawer.... Also, since she is now also a rival for Lister's affections, Kryten feels threatened in this way too, and does all he can to get one up on the only girl on the crew, any time he can.
After his arm is severed, Lister is taken in hand by Kryten. Whether he believes himself responsible for the state of affairs (which in a way he is) or whether he just wants to take the opportunity to show Lister how much a friend he still can be, Kryten does just about everything for Lister, until Kochanski shows him that far from helping his friend, he is in fact making it harder for Lister to face the fact that he has lost an arm. Convinced by her that this is what is needed, Kryten fashions a robotic arm for Lister, but it tends to keep punching him in the face, which, he says, is a subconscious reaction by Lister to the realisation that it was Kryten who sawed off his arm. Finally abandoning the idea, they discuss what is left to be done. Kryten talks about his nanobots, subatomic robots that are part of his self-repair system. Kochanski believes they could build Lister a new arm, but Kryten tells them that they nanobots deserted him. They go in search of them and find instead Red Dwarf, transformed by the nanobots into a planet! After locating the tiny mechs exploring Lister's laundry basket (yes, I know!) Kryten forces them to build a new arm for Lister, but they go one better, or in Lister's case, one worse....
