Red Dwarf: 11 Episodes That Never Made It To Air
8. Garbage World - Series 4 Episode 6
The running order of Series 4 was switched around a lot to move the war-themed episode Meltdown (eventually broadcast as the series finale) from the opening slot because of concerns over the ongoing Gulf War conflict. But at one point, Episode 6 was set to be an adaptation of the Garbage World sequence from the second Red Dwarf novel Better Than Life.
In the novel, the ice planet where Starbug crashes in Marooned (Series 3 Episode 2) is revealed to actually be Earth millions of years after the human race voted to evacuate it and use it as humanity’s rubbish dump. Meanwhile; Red Dwarf is being sucked into a black hole and, because of time dilation, the Dwarfers don’t rescue Lister for several decades from his perspective. During that time, he has spent the years living amongst the giant cockroaches that populate the planet and started to restore it.
How much of the Garbage World chapters were adapted is unclear (though the giant cockroaches were included) but the scale of it was enough for director Ed Bye to put the brakes on it for budgetary reasons. The episode was replaced by White Hole, which was adapted from the events of the novel surrounding Lister’s rescue but with the ending changed to be more conclusive, as the book version leads into a sequence based on Polymorph (Series 3 Episode 3).