Kryten - Life

Life

Kryten is a Series 4000 mechanoid or "slave 'noid" — a robotic servant — and is quite neurotic. He is very humanoid, with the exception of the flat cubic planes visible on his face and head, and stands at 6 feet tall. Kryten's design is mostly plastic, but there are some slight organic elements in his construction.

Kryten was built by the corporation DivaDroid International in 2340; one of a number of Series 4000 models based on a design by Professor Mamet, a roboticist (played by Jenny Agutter). This design was actually intended as a joke on Mamet's ex-fiancé, John Warbuton, the mechanoids being a caricature of his fussiness and pomposity. All negative emotions such as jealousy, guilt, envy, frustration, and insecurity build up in a "mind negadrive", which when full would cause the head of the Series 4000 mechanoid to literally explode. This was supposedly a likeness to when Warburton would "blow".

Kryten is hard-wired to obey all of Mamet's orders without question, so when a Psiren impersonated Mamet and ordered Kryten to crush himself in a garbage compactor, he had no choice but to comply. His reply upon emerging, having been compacted into a cube: 'I'm almost annoyed!'.

Before Kryten left the Solar System, he was made to attend "toilet university", as he would remind people. This was revealed by Kristine Kochanski to be merely a piece of software which ensured Kryten was thorough in his cleaning of lavatories. Nevertheless he still had to take an exam to ensure that it was properly installed.

Kryten originally left the Solar System aboard a ship destined for "Deep Space", the SS Augustus, and served aboard the vessel for decades. Not much is known about these years of Kryten's life, except that the human crew of the SS Augustus all died of old age, leaving Kryten alone for an unspecified amount of time.

Sometime after this, Kryten was picked up by the crew of the Nova 5 and he became the personal servant of three female crew members of this vessel. The Nova 5 crashed into an asteroid and for millennia, perhaps even millions of years, Kryten refused to believe the crew were dead and continued to wash and iron their clothes, dress them, and put out meals in front of their remains, all the while preserving their skeletons. It was from these long years alone that Kryten developed a phobia of being left alone, or human crews deserting him. Kryten's rigid belief in "Silicon Heaven", the electronic afterlife, kept him going — the idea that he would be rewarded for his servitude in the afterlife, where humans would instead become the servants. Kryten was eventually rescued by the crew of Red Dwarf where he is now reduced to serving the slobbish Dave Lister (to some extent at least), the only surviving human crew member on that vessel.

It is possible that Kryten was inadvertently responsible for the accident aboard the Nova 5. In the first Red Dwarf novel, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, the Nova 5 crashed because Kryten washed the navigation computer with soapy water. It is unclear whether or not this is canon in the Red Dwarf universe. It is mentioned by Dave Lister in the television series, that the accident aboard the Nova 5 was Kryten's fault.

Kryten (as portrayed by David Ross) was introduced in the first episode of the second series, in which he was only supposed to be a guest star. Initially, Arnold Rimmer took advantage of his servility, getting him to paint a grand portrait of Rimmer. Dave Lister persuaded Kryten to rebel against his programming (which included showing him the movies Rebel Without a Cause and Easy Rider) and to become independent. Kryten changed the portrait of Rimmer to make it appear as though he was sitting on the toilet, and then poured soup onto Rimmer's bed sheets. Kryten took Lister's space-bike and went out to find a planet with an S3 (or Earth-like) atmosphere he could grow a garden, which had always been a dream of the robot's.

Kryten did not appear in the rest of the second series. The character proved popular amongst fans of the show, and so the decision was made to bring him back at the beginning of the third series and make Kryten a permanent member of the Dwarfers. David Ross was unavailable, and so Robert Llewellyn was brought in to play the character.

A very fast scrolling text at the beginning of the third series (a parody of the Star Wars opening crawl) explains that Kryten smashed the space-bike into an asteroid. Lister found Kryten's remains and had to rebuild him from scratch, and so was unable to recreate him exactly. This was intended to explain the differences between Ross' portrayal of the character and Llewellyn's, as well as Lister needing to help Kryten break his programming all over again. Most noticeably, whereas he previously had an "English butler" voice, he now spoke with what Llewellyn admits to be a bad Canadian accent.

In the episode DNA, Kryten is briefly transformed into a human being (played by Llewellyn, minus his usual make-up) using the organic material used in his construction as a template. He quickly decided to change himself back into mechanoid form, because he didn't like his time as a human. This was due to the fact his nipples couldn't pick up radio waves (specifically "Jazz FM"), his eyes didn't have a digital zoom capability, power leads didn't fit in his anus properly when he tried to recharge himself, and he got "double polaroids" when looking at photos of kitchen appliances.

In the seventh series, Kryten discovered that he has a "brother" named Able as they both had the "same motherboard" (also played by Robert Llewellyn, who co-wrote the episode), named in reference to the Biblical Cain and Abel. Kryten originally rejected the wastrel, drug-addicted mechanoid before an act of supreme self-sacrifice convinced him of his brother's worth.

In the eighth series, Kryten becomes a prisoner in Red Dwarf's Tank along with his friends. He is classified as a woman due to his lack of male genitalia and sent to the woman's wing. He becomes friendlier with Kristine Kochanski while there, but is still desperate to correct the situation. He builds himself a makeshift penis from an old electron board, a toilet roll, some sticky back plastic, and an Action Man's poloneck jumper. He names his penis "Archie", and tries to teach it by getting it to jump through hoops. "Archie" however runs around the prison wings and many prisoners mistake it for a haywire mouse.

In the final episode of the series, Red Dwarf is attacked by a corrosive chameleonic virus. Kryten and his fellow Dwarfers are abandoned aboard the rapidly decaying Red Dwarf. To develop a solution, Kryten builds a prism based laser, which if concentrated on a mirror, creates a portal to a reverse universe, in the hopes of discovering an alkaline to cancel out the virus' effects. The machine successfully transports Rimmer to a reverse universe but breaks soon afterwards. As the damage to the ship becomes irreparable, Kryten, Lister, Kochanski and the Cat fix the machine and cross into the mirror universe to escape, Rimmer would later become stuck on board the dying Dwarf as the virus destroys the prism.