The Cat Continued....
When Lister smuggled aboard Red Dwarf a black female cat who was pregnant, he unknowingly laid the foundations for a whole new lifeform. Safely sealed in the hold when the lethal radiation dose swept through the ship, killing all on board, Frankenstein bred on, her descendants giving birth to a race of humanoid cats, which eventually over the course of three million years evolved into felis sapiens, the Cat race. Following the teachings of the one they knew as Cloister, their god, the Cats warred among each other for centuries, until finally they took off in separate space arks, each to seek out the promised land of Fushi alluded to in their sacred texts. Left behind with the old and the infirm, those unfit to travel, the being who is now the only known survivor of felis sapiens was born to a cripple and an idiot, and when they died he was left alone to fend for himself. When Lister is released from stasis he and Rimmer come across the creature, who thereafter bears the name simply of Cat, or The Cat.
All the characteristics of the domestic housecat are evident in this creature: he is vain, arrogant, suits himself, cares for no-one and believes himself quite unshakably to be the centre of the universe. He has great taste in clothes, wearing a new flashy suit every day, and like a real cat has to nap and be fed. His lifelong ambition is to find another cat (or indeed anything!) and have sex with it, and he constantly refutes Lister's claim that there are no other cats on board the mighty ship. It comes to light that Lister and Cloister are in fact one and the same: Lister is their god. The Cat, of course, laughs at the idea, asking Lister "the ulimate question: if you're God, why that face?" It is true, though: Lister's plan to settle down on Fiji has been translated by the Cat scribes as Fushi, and the Holy Book the Cat brings him even shows a drawing of a man in stasis, which the Cat tells him is Cloister, suspended in time. "He gave of his life that we might live", he quotes. Lister doesn't push the issue; he is far more concerned with the horror and destruction his supposed prophecy to the Cats has wrought. Reading on through the Holy Book in the cat manner (by sniffing scents impregnated into the paper), he learns that for hundreds of years the Cats warred over what colour paper hats they would wear when they reached Fushi! He learned that they took his lifestyle as their scred commandments: It is a sin to be cool, Wear the Holy Custard Stains, and anyone who refused to eat hotdogs on Fushi day was stoned to death with stale buns!
When Lister later goes to look for the Cat, who has disappeared into the bowels of the ship, he finds living there an old Cat priest, who has lost his faith in Cloister. Lister, appearing as what the priest would see as his god, restores his faith and tells him that it was all for something, just before he dies.
Evidence of how little the Cat thinks of anyone is shown in the next episode, when Lister falls ill, and literally collapses in the corridor. The Cat, coming across him, squats down and says "Hey monkey! You're sick! If I wasn't your friend, I'd steal your shoes!" and then goes off in search of food. When Rimmer comes looking for him to help him, as he can't lift Lister, being a hologram, the Cat won't leave his lunch, and when Rimmer demands "What is more important? A man's life or your smegging lunch?" the Cat replies "That doesn't even deserve an answer!" The Cat is so desperate to "get his end away" that when the crew rush to the rescue of the three women aboard the Nova 5 he puts his arm around one of the decaying skeletons and says "Hey c'mon guys! So they're a little on the thin side!" In Better Than Life, he ends up with not one, but two girlfriends: Marilyn Monroe and a mermaid called Miranda. Served in an exclusive restaurant with a tank of live goldfish, he answers the question as to whether he would not rather have the fish cooked with "No thank you! I like my food to move!" Trying to console people is not the Cat's forte! Having blundered in by walking (well, slinking in, really) on Lister and Rimmer as the former consoles the latter about the death of his father, the Cat says he just has to eat! Lister shushes him, telling him Rimmer's father has died, and the Cat, looking puzzled, says "I'd prefer chicken!" Then, as he tries to comfort Rimmer, his effort consists of "Your father's in the ground now, and that's bad news for him, sure. But on the other hand, it's party time for all the little worms!"
In Stasis Leak, the Cat gets his first look at real women, and confides to Lister: "I've never been this close to a woman before. It makes me want to do something, but I don't know what! But whatever it is, I want to do a lot of it!" He, along with everyone else, is forced to work for his food when Queeg takes over Red Dwarf, and worries about his naps. "I have to work the whole day? The whole entire day? What about my naps? I'm a cat: I need to nap. If I don't have nine or ten naps in a day, I don't have enough energy for my main snooze!" He tries to help Holly as the AI battles Queeg 500 for control of Red Dwarf in a game of chess, advising him "I think I see a pattern. Every time you make a move, he makes a move!" When they travel to a Parallel Universe where Lister, Rimmer and Holly all meet female counterparts of themselves, the Cat is delighted! At last he will get to have sex, and what's even better, it will be with himself! However, it's not to be, as his counterpart turns out to be a dog!
The Cat is always fashion-conscious. When Lister makes to take Starbug into a time hole to rescue Rimmer and Kryten, the Cat says they can't, pointing out: "Orange with this suit?" When his leg is broken and threatens to go septic, he muses "Green with peach? I think I could pull that off!" His life is littered with examples of his sacrificing all to follow fashion trends and keep himself the most gorgeous guy on board the ship (not hard!). When he and Lister are captured by the waxdroids he says he doesn't want to wear an outfit with little arrows, and he even makes his own tailored spacesuit to avoid mussing his hair! The Cat's narcissistic nature takes a cruel turn when. on encountering the Polymorph, he has all of his vanity sucked out of him by the emotional vampire, and lets his dress sense go to the dogs, dressing like a tramp and swigging whiskey out of a bottle in a paper bag, believing himself of no interest to anyone, including himself. He sneers at Lister's request to borrow his body to track Rimmer, who has fled with his own body, with "Would you let a garbage truck driver drive your Rolls Royce?" He has the tables turned on him though, when Rimmer appropriates his body while he is asleep! He is then wiped out from existence entirely when Lister alters the timelines, doesn't join the Space Corps and as a result never rescues Frankenstein, in effect ensuring that the entire Cat race are never born. And when they throw a farewell party for Kryten, the Cat gives him a special present: an earring he has never liked!
He finally gets to meet himself when Kryten rescues Camille, a pleasure GELF, who appears to everyone as their perfect fantasy. Not surprisingly, the Cat sees himself as his ideal lover, and so it is he whom he meets when he goes to see the person of his dreams! When the crew encounter the despair squid, the Cat believes he has been turned into Duane Dibley, a geek with absolutely no class, no looks and teeth the druids could use as a place of worship! Life for him has no meaning, and he is ready to end it all. Having survived through this once, he again has to go through it when the crew are stalked by an Emohawk, and the most handsome guy on the ship becomes once again the most nerdy guy. This is nothing, however, to how he sees himself when the crew encounter their future selves. The Cat's plaintive wail is "What happened to my butt? You could park a car in that crease!"
Unfortunately, the contribution the Cat makes to season seven is, to be fair, negligible, and there's little as a result that we can add here to his profile, except when he talks of being fairly stupid, which he says comes as a result of his being the last of his race left on the ship, and having to teach himself everything. Since he knew nothing to start off with, as he says "Lessons were slow and difficult, especially on Wednesdays, when I had double-Nothing!" He is less than impressed with Kryten's choice of food when they arrive on 20th-century Earth, whining "I have to floss a dead person out of my teeth!" He takes immediately to Kochanski when she joins the crew, not surprisingly: she is a woman! He refers to her as Officer Bud Babe, or Officer BB for short. She of course is not impressed by his advances, and rebuffs him almost as totally as she does Lister. He admits shock at the "death" of Rimmer, declaring "I was only insulting him this morning!" Before Ace dies however, he makes sure to get the name of his hairdresser, which just reinforces his superficial personality, which he has, after all, never denied or made excuses for.
However, it is he who detects the backwash in the ducts of Starbug as the crew go crawling through them to try to get to the sabotaged generator, and thus in a real way saves their lives. He contrasts this with his insensitive treatment of Lister's claustrophobia, going on about how cramped the duct is, and not helping the situation at all. When Lister waxes fondly about his days with Rimmer, he advises Kryten to prepare the rubber room! He watches Rimmer give him dress advice in The Rimmer Experience, and nearly has a coronary on the spot! He is in his element however when Kochanski takes them to Jane Austen World, which he tells Lister happily is "Chick City, bud!" When he and Kochanski are disguised as gelfs later on in that same episode, he is his usual helpful self, forgetting he is supposed to speak gelf, and not human, and nearly gives the game away.
Even when Lister loses his arm in Epideme he is his usual self, going to Lister on his awakening from having his arm cut off, and offering the hand which has been cut off as he tries to shake hands with Lister. Later he tries to comfort him, but the basis of his "comfort" is that Lister was ugly to begin with, so why is he worried that now that he has only one arm women won't want him? Hey, they never would have in the first place! He does have the last word in the season though, as he flies Starbug towards the now-reconstructed Red Dwarf, which somehow seems MUCH larger than he remembers.... As he shakes his head and declares "Uh, guys? I think we have a problem..." I can only hope that his contribution to season eight will be better written.
