Whats in canister 1121?
According to the RED DWARF QUIZ BOOK (see “Are the books about RED DWARF?”), it’s the remains of Kristine Kochanski. When Lister comes back to life on the backwards Earth, he discovers that he’s married to an elderly version of Kochanski. Presumably, treating the canister with gamma and X rays was part of Holly’s plan for restoring her to life along with Lister. (If none of this makes any sense to you, you haven’t read the ending of the novel BETTER THAN LIFE — see “What is RED DWARF?”.) The original script for “The End” included a scene (cut from the final version) in which Lister placed the powdered remains of each crewmember in a separate canister and ejected them all into space (and this is done with George McIntyre’s remains in the aired version). It’s reasonable to conclude that Lister did this, although nothing is said about it in either the episode or the novel. The number of canisters floating in space (“something in the region of ten thousand”) is consistent with the size of
