After an attempt to assemble a do-it-yourself rejuvenation shower goes wrong and strands the dwarfers on Earth in the Iron Age, they are forced to hike all the way to India to retrieve a lemon to create the battery they need to fuel their return to their own time and place. Along the way, they have a fateful encounter with a certain A-list historical figure.
This episode contains examples of:
- Accidental Time Travel: The Dwarfers are transported to Britain 23AD when they improperly build and then proceed to use a Rejuvenation Shower.
- Adventures in the Bible: The gang go back and meet Jesus.
- Answers to the Name of God: A man's name is actually Jesus. Not the famous one, but the crew manage to convince him that he is for a while.Lister: Really? Jesus!Man Sat Behind Him: Yes?
- Eternal English: Jesus speaking it is handwaved by him visiting England note , and the woman from whom they buy the lemons mentioned having lived there, but why everybody else in the past knows it (or why they evidently speak modern English rather than the version spoken in England at the time) is never explained.
- Forgotten Phlebotinum: Like most things in Red Dwarf, the rejuvenation shower never gets mentioned again after this episode.
- Fountain of Youth: What the Rejuvenation Shower is supposed to do.
- Furniture Assembly Gag: The Dwarfers try to build a "rejuvenation shower" which would have made themselves younger. Problem is that it's a Swedish self-assembly. They do get it set up but the Cat complains that there is still a lot of leftover parts, which ends up turning it into a Time Machine which transports them to 23AD.
- Giving Radio to the Romans: A Deleted Scene has Jesus failing to sell carrier bags to people of the past.
- Halfway Plot Switch: The titular fruit are found relatively early on in the episode with minimal fuss (well, aside from the 6-month trek across two continents), with Jesus becoming the focus of the story thereafter.
- I Ate WHAT?!: The Cat is horrified when he finds out that he had unknowingly eaten Lister's organs (which Kryten had removed without Lister knowing and stored) at the beginning of the episode.
- Jesus: The Early Years: The Dwarfers assume they've run into Jesus during this period.
- Jesus Was Way Cool: Zigzagged and invoked, with Lister outright telling the man he thinks is Christ himself that he figures he has good and bad points.
- Just Eat Gilligan: British fruits and vegetables such as apples can generate the same power as lemons, meaning the gang didn't need to go all the way to India.
- Longevity Treatment: If the shower was working properly, it would be able to turn an old person young again.
- Misapplied Phlebotinum: The Cat actually asks Lister why they don't just use the time machine to stay on Earth but Lister wants to go back to the future and look for Kochanski.
- Mundane Object Amazement: Jesus takes traveling through time with cat-men and metal men very well, mostly because the real focus of his attention is on the humble carrier bag.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted when, at the end of the episode, it's revealed that the Dwarfers have been interacting with Jesus of Caesarea and not Jesus of Nazareth.
- Our Time Machine Is Different: The rejuvenation shower ends up working as the Time Cop type, staying in the future while the time travellers have a remote that gets them back to the present.
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: It's implied that people in the future see Christianity as a bad thing due to all the wars it caused. Jesus comes to the same conclusion after reading a future encyclopedia and the dwarfers decide not to stop Christianity from forming because without it there would be no Wallace & Gromit.
- The Reveal: The Jesus the Dwarfers meet isn't Jesus of Nazareth, he's Jesus of Caesarea, a completely normal guy and not his more famous namesake at all.
- Take That!: The reason why the rejuvenation shower is a do-it-yourself work is because it's Swedish. And the reason the shower doesn't work the way it should is that they never bothered to read the assembly manual that undoubtedly came with.
- Time and Relative Dimensions in Space: The shower conveniently sends them to Earth rather than empty space.
- Twin Switch: Rimmer's mother belonged to a Christian group that believed Jesus and Judas were identical twins with Judas being crucified while pretending to be Jesus so Jesus could later claim he came back to life. At the end of the episode two identical brothers called Jesus and Judas show up.
