Red Dwarf/WMG

Lister died in stasis, and he's in Hell for all episodes after the first
. Think about it. He's trapped 3,000,000 years away from Earth with his worst enemy on the ship where he hates working (according to the novels), with no chance of ever achieving his goal of marrying Kochanski and starting a farm/hot dog and donut shop in Fiji. Cat was created by his psyche, as nobody would ever want to spend eternity with someone like him. Kryten may just share Lister's Hell. In Timeslides, he admits to being utterly sick of his life. It's similar to the Sam and Max personal Hells, where the characters are stuck in their worst nightmares but are (usually) completely unaware.
 * So the Cat priest was right: Lister is Jesus In Purgatory.
 * Alternatively....

The crew all died in "Out of Time" when they got shot by their future selves, which caused a paradox and unraveled the fabric of the universe.
Series VII and VIII are the crew's idea of Hell: Having to put up with Kochanski, losing Rimmer - whom they'd grown to like, though they'd never admit it - being imprisoned by the regenerated original crew of Red Dwarf... It also explains why the two series are so shit - it's all made up by their collective mind as part of their eternal torture.
 * In fact, the first episodes of series 7 can be considered a final judgement for them: "Tikka to Ride" was Lister's, tempted by the time machine, "Stoke me a Clipper" was Rimmer's, as he overcame his cowardice, "Duct Soup" was Kryten's, since he lied to humans and betrayed his programming, and the unaired Cat episode was Cat's.

The Dystopian world from the episode "Back to Reality" is the real world.
Sebastian, Billy, Jake and Dwayne were captured by the government agent that Jake supposedly shot. The government killed Jake and Dwayne, but couldn't kill Sebastian or Billy because of Sebastian's position as Voter Colonel. It would have been too hard to cover up the deaths of an important government official and his brother, and so the government put them back into "Red Dwarf" with altered memories, which made them believe it was all a dream and replaced Kryten and Cat with other players.

In Rimmerworld, they committed genocide against the ONLY alien life in the universe
Granted, they were single-celled protozoa. But still, it was not some random genetic Earth material that made its way there - it was truly alien!
 * How do you know that the protozoa died? Perhaps they lived and evolved into sentient multi-cellular organisms that gathered into small hunter-gatherer tribes and raided the Rimmers for food and metal tools. The Rimmers then started a campaign to exterminate them, fighting a bitter war for two centuries before they finally gave up and reluctantly allowed the natives to live so long as they stayed away and did not pollute the genetic purity of the Rimmer race.
 * The native hunter-gatherers would eventually dominate. The Rimmers might be more advanced, but a race whose hat is "asshat" would be too internally riven to beat them down forever.
 * Most of the Rimmers' technology comes from the colony pod that the Original Rimmer came down in. The Rimmers would use this technology to defeat the hunter-gatherers; but when they ran out of power sources, the natives would take their revenge and enslave them, becoming the masters of the planet for eternity.
 * Maybe there wasn't any "basic single-celled protozoa" on the planet. Remember that Rimmer is convinced that aliens exist; he'd assume that, if there is no visible life on the planet, it must be there in invisible form.
 * "The only lifeforms are single-celled protozoa and me" - given he's on a capsule with terraforming equipment, it's not a stretch that it would have scanning capabilities to determine any prior lifeforms.
 * The planet appears to be inhabitable, if a tad deserty, before Rimmer fire up the accelerators. There might have been some native life.
 * The single-celled protozoa was the the native life, and the eco-accelerators advanced it to to create the Earth-like environment and the Rimmers.
 * Has no one considered that the protozoa had stowed away in Rimmer's pod, and are therefore Earth natives?
 * Alternatively, it's an old human planet that's gone over desertification in 3 million years. The protozoa are the only things left.

Every time the show does a Retool, it's in a different parallel dimension.
A possible canon explanation for the abundance of retcons and complete disregard for continuity. Every time the show makes a major shift in tone, the events of the show are taking place in a different dimension to the previous series. This happens between series 2 and III, series V and VI, series VI and VII, and series VII and VIII.
 * The first retcon may be due to Married!Lister from "Stasis Leak" telling Our!Lister to not see run for your life on the 1989 Earth. Because of this, the timeline is changed so that Our!Lister doesn't go on and marry Kochanski.

Holly is AM.
A few years into Lister's long sleep in stasis, AM obliterated almost all human life in the Solar System. After four out of his five playthings died, he began examining the rest of the universe for other sentient beings to torture; by sheer luck, AM discovered Red Dwarf hovering far beyond Pluto. Seeing an opportunity for greater sadism, AM transmitted himself into the ship's mainframe, erased Holly, and stole Holly's image; he then sent the ship on a joyride far into deep space.

Over the next three million years, AM amused himself by manipulating the development of the Cats and causing the occasional holy war. When Lister left stasis, he began the torture in earnest by resurrecting Rimmer as a hologram. Everything bad that has happened to the crew from seasons one to eight has been another subtle torture by AM, who was using his godlike power to create the enemies and monsters they encountered and excusing his actions with his apparent senility.
 * Better yet, the present Red Dwarf crew are the original five playthings: Lister is Gorrister, Kochanski is Ellen, The Cat is Benny, Rimmer is Nimdok, and Kryten is Ted. Anything else?
 * What about when they had lost Red Dwarf and they were stuck on Starbug? How could AM keep toying with them?
 * Well, considering that this theory is based on AM being behind everything, it means that AM copied himself onto Starbug's computer and is still playing silly buggers with them. Alternatively, he set up the creatures and monsters of Series Six and Seven before getting hijacked by Kryten's nanobots; once he's recovered in the form of the Holly Watch and regains control of Red Dwarf, he commands the nanobots to recreate the crew and kick off the events of Series Eight.
 * That's disturbing....
 * I've got the cure for that! A few minutues after AM awoke Lister, Lister accidently poured some larger on the bridges control panel, and which caused AM to malfunction; allowing Holly, who was hiding in a data bank that AM had overlooked, to mount a digital assault on AM's core program using the personalities stored in the hologram libary including a version of Rimmer with certain attributes extrapolated to create a being quite like ACE RIMMER!!!!!! And Holly deleated AM, undooing his horrific deeds, all to a truly epic version of the theme music. However the battle did dammage Holly's artificial intelligance causing a condition mistaken for computer senility.
 * Well, if it undid all his horrific deeds, then why the hell does the series even happen? Remember, the theory states that AM creates every horrible thing that the crew encounter: without AM, the crew should have no problems, especially since Rimmer can't even be incarnated as a hologram with the Ace hologram taking up most of the ship's allotment to hologram power. Plus, why and how could Holly do anything suggested? He hasn't even met Ace Rimmer yet, Ace's most important attributes don't even exist in Rimmer at the beginning of the series, and a hologram wouldn't be worth a damn against a godlike supercomputer that only goes down with the assistance of two of AM's multiple personalities and a Villainous Breakdown. Also, Holly has been deleted within the theory: he is dead as a doornail, his personality emptied onto a surplus hard-drive and flushed into space. And if he did manage to hide away in a single console, it would mean that he's been doing that for the better part of three million years: unlike AM, he doesn't have the evolution of the Cats to entertain him, so Holly is not only suffering from Computer Senility, but terminal paranoia and an utter inability to control the ship due to having no access to anything besides the screensaver.
 * As a matter of fact, if you wanted to resolve the Poison Oak Epileptic Tree in an ideal way that works with the continuity of both the series and the theory, just look at Back To Earth: Holly is offline due to Lister accidentally flooding the ship, which means that AM is confined to his own damaged hard-drive and only capable of controlling a single terminal, which is stuck typing "I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM," over and over again.
 * Which Arnold stumbled upon, read the story (with some additions detailing his subtle torture of the crew) and franticly deleated AM's hardrive. And if the first counter theroy is true, Holly could have been planning his revenge or working on his holly rock plan.
 * Since when did the story come into play here? He's typing the words "I have no mouth and I must scream," not the whole damn story.

The entire series is Lister playing a defective copy of Better Than Life: Apocalypse Expansion.
After he was sent to his room to await sentencing, he decided to play some Better Than Life to pass the time. He got stuck, and the seven years have been him being transported to a planet then the doctors/programmers trying to get him out without breaking his brain. The game let him enter the apocalypse scenario (because he was feeling bitter and muttered "I wish they were all dead" while the game was loading), wiped his memory of starting the game, and gave him false memories of being trapped in the freezer while chasing his cat. It brought in the best combination of personalities it could find to keep him having fun without becoming a completely hopeless waste of oxygen (Rimmer, Holly, and a synthesized personality that it threw in because nobody else fit), and then every time the cast changed (Kryten's second appearance, Holly's change, and Kristine Kochanski) it was because of the programmers trying to keep him from going nuts before they brought him out. The original Kryten was a construct of the game.

It explains all of the science going on that the characters admitted was impossible within the context of the show's universe, especially how a cat with at most six kittens could parent and feed an entire race of eventually human-sized (english-speaking, clothing-wearing) beings without ever leaving the storeroom.
 * To be fair, the storeroom is a couple of cubic miles in volume.
 * This theory is actually used in the ending of the first novel and for a good portion of the second. The problem with applying it to the tv show is that Better Than Life did not arrive on board until the titular episode in the second series.
 * But is it not also stated in the books that those playing Better Than Life forget they're playing a game? And what better way to forget about something than to not acknowledge that it even exists? If the doctors/programmers are trying to remove him from the game slowly, surely the best way to do it would be to allow him to come to the realisation himself? Thus they "mail" new information to his subconscious, letting him know about the games existence. In later series, they cook up the despair squid and simulation units - to reinforce the idea that reality can be subjective - as well as subtally suggesting he is the lynchpin of the entire universe (which a lot of the time travel episodes suggest) and then finally, in Back To Earth, flatly stating that he is an entirely fictional character.

The Enrichment Centre is in Red Dwarf.
After the events of Red Dwarf, Holly managed to develop the Portal gun and used some empty warehouses to test it in. Then, after Cat, Lister, Rimmer, and Kryten died, Holly was left alone for many more years until s/he had been driven insane. So s/he woke up Lister and Kochanski's daughter Chell, who had been put into stasis when her parents died. The "Cake is a lie" scribblings were just made by some slightly barmy skutters.

The future selves from "Stasis Leak" are the same future selves from "Out of Time".
Consider this: in "Stasis Leak", Lister gets told by his future self, "In five years time, you'll find another way to come back in time"; a subjective five years later, they discover the Time Drive in "Out of Time".

Also, consider this: both future selves of Rimmer have moustaches.

So presumably, some time after the events of "Stasis Leak", Future Lister suffers an "accident" that leaves him as a brain in a jar (and the same accident kills Kochanski), and the Dwarfers start using the Time Drive again (and abusing it) around that time.

Also, remember that by the end of "Back to Earth," it has been about fifteen years (subjectively) since Lister emerged from stasis: the future events from "Stasis Leak" should have come to pass already, but didn't. If this theory is accurate, this discrepancy would make sense because the "Stasis Leak" future selves would have been erased from the timeline just like the future selves were erased at the end of "Out of Time").
 * It's more like two years between Stasis Leak and Out of Time, meaning Future Lister would have met Cassandra by Stasis Leak, so he could have known of the encounter ahead of time. And Kochanski could have been 'Rimmer', leading Future Lister to get into a fight with real Rimmer and consequently end up as a dreadlocks and a brain. Or perhaps Holly did it.
 * It's not "more like two years", it's five years. In "Out of Time" Kryten says he's been part of the crew (and doing Lister's laundry) for "four long years", and Kryten came back to Red Dwarf soon after Lister's twins were born. So the episode "Parallel Universe" (two episodes after "Stasis Leak") happens between nine and ten months before Kryten comes back. That rounds off to five years.
 * What the hell is that supposed to mean? (The "Kochanski could have been 'Rimmer' [...] Or perhaps Holly did it" bit.) I've read it and re-read it multiple times and I can't make any sense of it. Kochanski could have been Rimmer? Holly did what? I'm incredibly confused right now.
 * In season 8 they meet an accurate future predicting computer called Cassandra, one of the things that happens is it says Rimmer is going to die, so he gives his jacket with name badge to another prisoner, and that 'Rimmer' dies. If he'd given it to Kochanski, she dies, Lister fights him, and so on.

The entire series was a nightmare Lister was having in the Stasis punishment.
For some reason, his mind wasn't automatically put to sleep when his body was frozen in time. The stasis generator thing has a side effect of putting a person's mind to sleep when their body is frozen, rather than the mind existing as a result of chemical reactions in the body and the separation only occuring when something like artificial time-control affects the physical brain. The whole thing could have finished in a much shorter time than he was in stasis, if the only things happening were what was on- and just off-screen. The last couple of seasons were just him getting bored (all the more-ridiculous stuff that happened), and losing touch with what reality actually looked like (for example, the dancing Blue Midget).

Gordon Brittas is an alternate universe version of Arnold Rimmer.
Both of them had a very similar experience where they joined the Samaritans for one day and caused several deaths only with their personalities, including one that was a wrong number. Considering that other versions of Rimmer apparently existed in different times and places, it seems reasonable that one could exist hundreds of years in the past under a different name.

Rimmer's meddling in the timeline in Timeslides had a far greater effect that just (temporarily) bringing him back to life.
Given that that very episode showed that changing the timeline had far larger consequences than previously considered (removing Lister from Red Dwarf erasing the Cat and Kryten, for example), it seems odd that Rimmer's efforts simply result in resetting the timeline, albeit with him alive again. However, up until that point, Rimmer had gone through life without the experience of "Thicky" beating him to the punch to the invention of the Tension Sheet (not to mention it possibly being patented far before it originally had), but meddling the timeline inserted that experience into the flow of Rimmer's life, having knock-on effects altering Rimmer's personality, if only in a small way. This, combined with the sum of his experiences, lead to the "Better dead than smeg!" line, and his eventual acceptance of the Ace Rimmer role.

Everything that happened after Back to Reality was a hallucination
At the end of the episode, the Dwarfers are still hallucinating, and they only imagine that Holly brings them out of the hallucination. Everything that happens afterword is a fantasy created by the despair squid's ink. They imagine that they lose Red Dwarf, Rimmer leaves, Kochanski arrives, and the Dwarf is resurrected only for them to end up in prison. They are still are hallucinating in Back to Earth, but perhaps are starting to realize that none of what's happening is real and are close to waking up.

Dog (the alternate universe version of Cat) was desciended from a pregnant bitch named Dracula.
Werewolf would make sense, but then, anything would make more sense than Frankenstein.
 * Wouldn't the hypothetical Dracula (presumably named for the famous Countess Dracula) be a pregnant male dog, since that's the universe where males get pregnant?

The change to the timeline in "Timeslides" didn't make Rimmer survive the accident, but made it so they could resurrect him at a later date.
Rimmer retroactively not being a hologram all the way through up to the events of "Timeslides" would've had way too big a knock-on effect on all the events we saw up til then (the biggest being that Lister would've naturally revived Kochanski's hologram right away without Rimmer to stop him). So the WMG is that "Thicky" Holden getting the credit for the Tension Sheet and being amazingly wealthy and famous from age eight somehow led to the invention of something that could restore holograms to life which the Dwarfers stumbled upon 3 million years later. So Rimmer was a hologram, then was brought back to life, then ended up being blown up and dying again all too quickly (and apparently the resurrection was a one-time deal as he stays a hologram from then on). == Most of the series exists in Holly's imagination. == After Lister went into stasis and and everyone died in the accident, Holly was left all alone with no one to talk to. To entertain himself, he imagined that he revived Lister 3 million years later, brought back Rimmer as a hologram, and that a being that evolved from Frankenstein and an android named Kryten joined them.

Holograms can still dream, as they have the same thoughts and personality as the living person.
Since thoughts are linked to dreams (even if they are in the subconscious), holograms can probably still dream the same as much as a real person. It's even shown in a few episodes that Rimmer needs his sleep, so...
 * That's actually in the series. Rimmer has on at least one occasion woken up from a dream shouting "Yes, mummy, I'm just packing my satchel!" and has been shown dreaming he's singing a musical number in the hologram simulation suite.

The drive plate Rimmer improperly fixed was decorative
It makes no sense they would make someone so spectacularly incompetent fix such a vital system. Instead, the Drive Plate Rimmer fixed was the eighth or ninth backup system and even if improperly repaired would not have done anything. Rimmer was just such an incompetent that he cracked all the seals and backups.
 * The original script states that George McIntyre was killed by the original fault in the drive plate.

The Red Dwarf explanation of the JFK assassination in "Tikka To Ride" was the truth, but with different characters.
Think about it. It makes about as much sense as the "magic bullets" theory, or any other conspiracy about Who Killed JFK. The creators mightn't have known, but they came up with the true story of JFK's assassination.

The Dwarfers never escaped "Better than Life".
The ridiculous amount of changes to the Red Dwarf universe seem more like glitches than reality. Holly getting a head-sex change, Kochanski's appearance, or the reconstruction of the Red Dwarf for instance. Also, Kryten was placed in the game by Rimmer, subconsciously, as an element designed to torture him. As for Rimmer leaving to become the next Ace, this was simply the real Rimmer escaping the game. He reentered to get Lister out, but was distracted by getting a fully living body.
 * Or, that wasn't the real Rimmer at all, just a simulation of him that the game created because the crew found themselves missing him despite everything.
 * In a new red dwarf radio series Better than life actually makes you forget you're playing it so they wouldn't know. It has the unfortunate side effect of slowly killing you, though.
 * That was actually the second novel.

The confrontation in "Out of Time" was an Unreality Bubble.
All throughout that episode, the crew were experiencing unreality pockets in time. Since they're seen alive in the next episode, their future selves and their attack was yet another unreality bubble.


 * During the battle, you can see a "unreality jolt" effect. Shortly afterwards, Rimmer is manipulated into destroying the Time Drive, which is exactly what the bubbles are designed to do (stop looters from taking and using the Drive). In fact the whole Future Selves thing was to convince the Dwarfers not to use time travel (again, to dissuade them from using the Drive), as was Tikka to Ride (showing them the consequences of time travel abuse and convincing them not to do it.)
 * Rimmer being heroic? That's unreality if I've ever seen it.

Lister's past with Kochanski isn't a Retcon but a product of their interference with time at the end of timeslides.
After their damage the did to the past by the end of the episode settled, their memories got altered to match those of the new history and something they did in the past caused Lister to finally decide to ask out Kochanski back in the past.
 * Considering the amount of continuity errors changes in history that occur (the number of crew originally aboard Red Dwarf, the century the accident happened etc.) this isn't too far fetched, especially considering that they travelled through time before Timeslides.

Rimmer is an objectivist.
Or at least started out as one at the begining of the series.

The reason the two Kochanskis are so different
The first Kochanski (Grogan) and the second Kochanski (Annett) are not only physically different (explained due to Grogan giving up acting and being replaced by Annett), but they're very different personality wise too.

This is because they're from different realities, and like with Arnold and 'Ace' Rimmer, there was a specific point in their lives that would branch off to create the two different Kochanskis.

The first Kochanski's parents divorced, and she was raised in Scotland by her father. This not only explains the accent, but also her easy going nature, and the fact she's a bit of a Ladette.

The second Kochanski's parents decided to stay together, and raised Kochanski in England. She grew up a little spoilt due to her parents overcompensating for their failing marriage, and clearly is used to the finer things in life. She's also more refined and lady like, even though she still has that Action Girl streak.
 * Nope. The episode "Duct Soup" establishes that the second Kochanski was raised in Glasgow. (And although the first Kochanski does appear to be friendlier, she really isn't a "ladette". In fact, her personality appears very feminine.)
 * In "Duct Soup" The second Kochanski makes reference to her having attended Cyber School, surrounded by computer recreated characters of important historical figures, and CG friends, likely experiencing alot of recieved pronounciation. I'm presuming the differences between the two Kochanskis, is that the first one (Grogan) never experienced Cyber School, but instead went to a more rough and tumble Glaswegian state school. These different experiences would make for very different people.

The Red Dwarf's normal cruising speed is 99.9% of the speed of light
The resulting Time Dilation is how they can visit multiple solar systems in one series with only sporadic and really screwy forays beyond light-speed. Decades pass outside the Dwarf between each episode.

Kochanski in series seven is actually the original Kochanski who had previously been replaced by The Inquisitor
At some point in Kochanski's history, she was met by The Inquisitor. She judged herself unworthy and was therefore replaced with the Kochanski from the start of the series (an event taking place in both realities). Then when the Inquisitor's influence was removed from history, Kochanski was returned to her original self, thereby explaining why this version is what all the other characters now remember her to be.