Red Dwarf: Ranking The Time Travel Episodes From Worst To Best

Honourable Mention: Future Echoes

With the amount of episodes that dealt with the notion of time, not all could see the crew jaunting through the fourth dimension. Future Echoes is the most prominent of these, but it still had to be included here somewhere due to time being so central to its premise. Another reason it can't be omitted is because of just how brilliantly it treats the concept; when Red Dwarf passes the speed of light it causes the crew to catch up with things they're about to do before they've actually done them. Offering glimpses of what shall be going to happen, this particular episode embraces the theories of time dilation and predestination paradoxes not just in a funny way, but also one which proves the show has smarts way above the levels of other sit-coms. These culminate in Lister preparing for his own death, only to survive and be told by his 171 year old self that Rimmer instead witnessed the death of Bexley, Lister's son. At the extreme end of theoretical physics, temporal paradoxes have the potential to confuse and deter audiences, and it was a brave move to base the second ever episode around them so implicitly. Without lingering too heavily on the science however, Future Echoes proves that the show knows how to utilise these ideas for great comedy, great tension, and prove to casual viewers that science fiction doesn't have to be alienating.