"It's the oldest trick in the book. Capture your ship, turn it into a planet, then explore a macro universe in a laundry basket."
Missing an arm in the wake of the Epideme infection, Lister is wracked with despair. In order to find a way to help him, they resolve to track down Kryten's long-lost nanobots to regenerate his body.
This episode contains examples of:
- All Planets Are Earthlike/All Gravity Is the Same: The Red Dwarf planetoid having breathable air and could probably be handwaved by the the nanobots building it that way.
- Amusingly Short List: There are countless people who have lost an arm and then lead a perfectly normal life. Thousands. More than thousands. Millions. The definitive list: Lord Nelson, the Venus de Milo, the one-armed man from The Fugitive, Vincent van Gogh (according to Cat, that dude managed to cut off his own ear with just one arm), and Dave Lister.
- The Bus Came Back: Holly returns after years of being off the show. And it's Male Holly, who hasn't been around since season 2.
- Call-Back: Kryten points out that their course has led them back to the ocean moon where they found the crashed SS Esperanto and fought the Despair Squid, the site of the episode "Back to Reality", which was the last episode before the "Boyz on Starbug" arc started.
- Flanderization: Kryten's always been prone to fawning over Lister, when he's not snarking at him behind his back, but his Mother Hen routine has gone up to eleven since Lister lost his dominant arm.
- Foreshadowing: The revelation that this signal has led them to the spot where they lost Red Dwarf in the first place turns out to be a clue leading up to The Reveal.
- Gone Horribly Right: Two-fold.
- When the nanobots first reconstruct Lister's body, they do it as a hulking, grotesque, body-builder's frame, which Lister is horrified to see.
- When they rebuild Red Dwarf, the nanobots do it vastly out of scale, reducing Starbug to the size of a rat's dropping in comparison.
- He's Back!: Holly. "Kicking bottom, or what?"
- Nanomachines: Kryten's subatomic nanobots, able to rearrange any molecular structure, eventually turn up in Lister's laundry basket.
- The Reveal: The planetoid the Dwarfers end up investigating turns out to be Red Dwarf itself; whilst the crew was dealing with the Despair Squid, Kryten's rogue nanobots turned Red Dwarf into a planetoid for safekeeping, and then built their own version to explore the universe with. When Starbug left the ocean moon, they followed the signal of the nano-Red Dwarf, leaving the real thing stranded behind them. Also, the nanobots turn out to have escaped the Dwarfers' search by stopping, allowing themselves to slip into Starbug, which they have been exploring ever since. This leads to them capturing the nanobots as they explore Lister's laundry basket.
- That Came Out Wrong: Lister says he's going to the loo and Kochanski innocently asks "Do you need a hand?" Given his current condition...
