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

7. Tikka To Ride

Picking up where the previous series' cliffhanger ended (more on that later), Lister replaces Kryten with a spare head and removes his guilt chip so that he can reacquire a time machine in order replenish the now missing curry supplies. Unwittingly landing in Dallas, 1963, the crew accidentally push Lee Harvey Oswald out of the window and create an alternate future in which the Cuban Missile Crisis was decided in the Soviet Union's (and the mafia's) favour. An episode which featured some great ideas, it doesn't quite pull them off thoroughly enough, leading to too many unanswered questions. Although guilt free Kryten gives the episode some of its biggest laughs, and several memorable moments of disgust, the exact relationship between spare heads and the 'actual' Kryten is never properly explained. More than this though, the fact that JFK himself becomes the mysterious second gunman is a very novel idea, but one which goes against the episode's internal logic; Lister's introductory monologue is based entirely on the fact that you can't kill yourself in the past. The X-tended version also revealed the paradoxical nature of Lister's missing curries, but likewise came at the expense of not ending the episode on a natural resolution.