The gang watch a sappy love story aboard Starbug and Rimmer is disgusted at how the hero sacrificed his own happiness for his lover. They come across a computer-generated ship, and Rimmer is captured and taken aboard. The Holoship (named 'The Enlightenment') will not answer Starbug's communication attempts on account of them being notoriously arrogant and self-centered. Meanwhile Rimmer is having quite a good time aboard the Holoship: he can touch, feel and taste. Not only that, but it's a ship regulation to have sexual relations at least twice a day with any other crew member. He meets a crew member, Commander Nirvanah Crane who gives him a tour of the ship. Upon having sex with her, He falls in love with her and she, even though they have disposed of the concept of 'love' aboard the ship, feels something for him also. Rimmer decides he wants to stay aboard the ship, and challenges a randomly-selected crew-member. The crew member turns out to be Nirvanah who lets him win on purpose when he tells her of how he always fails at everything and has never really achieved anything in his life. Rimmer leaves Red Dwarf to join the Enlightenment's crew but when he finds out that Nirvanah gave up her place for him, he decides to give it back to her and return to Red Dwarf, similarly to the hero in the movie (much to his own disgust).

Thomas Allman is in his room when a man dressed in black with a white skull-like mask comes along, charges him of being a waste of skin and erases him, replacing him with a more well-built version of himself... The crew are flying along in Starbug when they lose control of the ship. Using Lister's body, something announces itself as The Inquisitor and that they will return to Red Dwarf to face judgement. Kryten later describes the Inquisitor as a self-repairing simulant who survived to the end of time to find no heaven or afterlife. So he built a time machine and went back and forth through time, judging everyone on whether they have lead a worthwhile life, deleting the ones who didn't and replacing them with "the sperms that never got a chance". Back aboard Red Dwarf, the inquisition begins. Rimmer and Cat survive the trial because of their shallowness and low standards, but Lister and Kryten could have made more of their lives and are removed from history. Just as their physical forms are about to be erased, another Kryten appears behind The Inquisitor with one of his own time gauntlets and takes him by surprise. Kryten throws them the gauntlet before getting killed by The Inquisitor. They escape, but when they meet Rimmer and Cat, they don't recognise them. A different Lister and Kryten arrive and convince Rimmer and Cat not to harm them. Suddenly the Inquisitor attacks, killing the new Lister and Kryten. The rest escape, but split up, Kryten and Lister together, Rimmer and Cat together. Kryten finally decodes the gauntlet and frees them from their chains. Rimmer and Cat come in for help against The Inquisitor. They go to face him and Lister finally destroys him with the old "backfiring time-gauntlet trick" which erases The Inqisitor from history. Everything soon returns to normal.

Kryten wakes up on a moon surrounded by the remains of a crashed Starbug. He detaches his hand and tells it to return to Red Dwarf and bring back Lister and Cat. Lister comes, collects and "fixes" Kryten. Kryten tells them that Rimmer was captured while on a psy-moon (a terraforming moon that reshapes itself to mimic a persons psyche). The crew reluctantly go out on the surface to search for him. Rimmer is hung up in a dungeon and prepared to be tortured by The Unspeakable One. The crew make their way across the Swamp of Despair with frogs that say 'Useless' and through a graveyard with headstones that describe a positive part of Rimmer's personality that has died: self-confidence, honour, generosity, charm etc. Lister notices a freshly-dug grave with the headstone 'Hope' and Kryten tells the others to hurry, realising that they could be in serious danger if Rimmer loses all hope for himself. The crew finds the dungeon and drive back the unspeakable one, saving Rimmer. They try to escape in Starbug, but the ship gets caught in a swamp and begins to sink. Kryten realises that the unspeakable one only fled when he told Rimmer that they wouldn't desert him. Rimmer's personality created the terrain and they are forced to make Rimmer feel good about himself to weaken the Unspeakable One's power so they can escape. They try it and eventually Rimmer's positive emotions come back to life and fight off the hoards of negative emotions (self-doubt, mis-trust, loneliness etc.), allowing the gang to escape unharmed; except for Rimmer when they tell him that they only pretended to like him to escape!

The crew are on a snowy planet, when they come across an abandoned research centre. Rimmer objects to Kryten being in charge but is ignored by the others and goes to sulk. They send a scouter which reports that there is a scientist named Dr. Lanstrom inside the facility. Unfortunately she is a hologram and Kryten asks Rimmer to go back to Red Dwarf so they can rescue her, using another Space Corp Directive against him. Rimmer questions the validity of the Directives that Kryten uses so Holly gives Rimmer a hologrammatical copy of the directives manual, whereupon Rimmer again goes off to sulk. Going into the research center, they find the Doctor in stasis only to discover that she has contracted a holovirus that has made her insane but has given her extraordinary powers like hex vision and telekinesis at the price of her sanity. They escape when her life force is drained and she disappears, but the disease is transferred to Rimmer. When the rest of the crew get back on Red Dwarf, Rimmer forces them to stay in quarantine (to avoid catching the disease off them) and unbeknownst to him, he goes insane, locking them in without oxygen. The crew escape thanks to a luck virus which Kryten got from the facility. Rimmer chases them down the corridor with his hex vision and thanks to the luck virus injected into Lister, Kryten manages to turn him off and restore him to his previous self… Rimmer wakes up in quarantine only to discover that the other three have now contracted the virus and gone insane!

Lister and Kryten have invented a triplicator: a device which can make triples of objects. They demonstrate it on the last strawberry in the universe and receive two exact copies. Lister samples one and reels from the taste, saying that it is brilliant, so succulent and divine. He tries the other and scrunches his face in disgust as we see that there are maggots crawling around in it. Kryten notes that the triplicator has put all the best qualities in one copy and the worst in the other. Lister attempts to reverse the process but causes an overload and Red Dwarf blows up. After the blast, they realise that they accidentally triplicated Red Dwarf and there are two copies left behind. The crew board the "High" ship to find their counterparts are monks and are all into the better side of things: spiritual happiness etc. Kryten finds half of the triplicator he needs to merge the ships to get the original back. They board the "Low" ship and it is horrible, the crew are monsters and have let the ship go into decay. The "High" crew are killed by various things (mostly by their own stupidity when they walk toward someone firing at them) and eventually they find the other half of the triplicator. The "Lows" capture Lister and implant him with a controlling device and program him to kill the others. Lister tries to kill the rest of the gang but Kryten successfully removes the implant, only to stick it into Cat who gets revenge on Lister for trying to kill him. Kryten throws the implant away and they leave the "Low" ship and regenerate the original Red Dwarf. Before they return, Lister accidentally sits on the implant but the crew cannot figure out who is controlling him until Cat shoots at a cupboard which emits a faint giggle and Lister's "Low" counterpart tumbles out. The Cat then decides to have a little fun with Lister and the implant...

The crew are on an ocean planet investigating a seeding vessel called the SSS Esperanto which was studying the life forms that had been introduced by humans. They find 3 people aboard who committed suicide, and a haddock who did the same. Lister notices an oil covering everything and Kryten suggests that it is a hallucinogenic venom much like the oil from an octopus or squid. He does a chemical analysis and rushes the others back to Starbug saying that the oil contains a hallucinogen which induces despair, enough to drive the crew of the Esperanto to kill themselves. They try to escape in Starbug to avoid it happening to them, but the despair squid chases them and they crash into a rock. Starbug is destroyed. The gang wake up to find they were playing a computer game called Red Dwarf for the last four years (and they only scored 4%). Lister is the rich and successful Sebastian Doyle, Rimmer (his brother, Billy) is a bum, the Cat is the saddest geek you will ever see named Dwayne Dibley (Teeth stick out a mile, terrible taste in clothes, etc.) and Kryten is a half-human, half-machine cop named Jake Bullet. While leaving the video game building and adjusting to all that has happened, Sebastian finds out that he is the chief of an organisation called the Ministry of Alteration which organises mass murders to purify democracy. Bullet kills a cop while defending a young girl and they make a run for it and are chased by the fascist police. We then hear Holly trying to tell them that they're hallucinating, but they can't hear her. In their heads they manage to escape the police and run down an alleyway. Bullet, so appalled by his actions decides to kill himself. So do Billy and Dwayne. Sebastian, despising his mass murdering lifestyle, decides the same. Holly communicates to Kryten on a higher frequency and gets him to open a canister of Lithium Carbonate (a mood stabliser), which he thinks is a fire extinguisher. The gas saves them just in time and they reflect on w