Out Of Time - S6-E6
Question: Kryten states that their future selves can only travel forwards in time, how are they able to go back to send the message? (00:17:02)
Answer: They must have been visiting an era earlier than the 1600s (when the Dwarfers were) when their time machine broke.
Chosen answer: The details are never made particularly clear, except that the ship was, at some unspecified point, stolen by Kryten's rogue nanobots while the crew were away from the ship on Starbug. A short online comic produced by the BBC suggests that this happened directly after the events of the fifth series' final episode "Back To Reality", that the crew returned from their encounter with the despair squid to find Red Dwarf missing, although events in the recent revival, "Back to Earth" appear to contradict that.
Tailkinker ★