| “ | Red Dwarf is being devoured from within by a corrosive microoroganism. As you probably know, we don't have enough craft for everyone to be rescued, so most of you will be left behind to die. Oh, there's an apology about that in the internal mail. | „ |
| ~ Captain Hollister |
Captain Frank Hollister is the secondary antagonist of the sci fi comedy franchise Red Dwarf, serving as a supporting character in the first two seasons , before returning as the main antagonist in season eight
He is the captain of the titular mining ship, and the superior to Second Technician Arnold Rimmer and Third Technician Dave Lister. Although originally a fairly reasonable authority figure by the time of his resurrection he regressed to a much more sadistic and mean-spirited man due to being driven to near insanity by the Boys From The Dwarf during their time imprisoned in The Tank.
He is portrayed by Mac McDonald, who also plays one of the goons to the Joker in Batman.
Biography[]
In series VIII, following resurrection thanks to the nanobots, Hollister returns and has the crew of Lister, Kryten, alternate dimension Kristine Kochanski, and the Cat remanded until their trial following their crashing of Starbug into a loading bay of the ship.
Throughout the three-part series opener of "Back in the Red", it is slowly revealed that Hollister had put the crew, with the additional of resurrected Rimmer, in an artificial simulation against their will to uncover their intentions plus witness their attempted escape from the ship. For this, he has them imprisoned on new charges of attempting to flee and misuse of confidential information.
Hollister returns as a big bad in "Pete Part I" and "Pete Part II", where organizes a one-sided basketball game between the guards and the prisoners, including the crew, after Lister and Rimmer humiliated Warden Ackerman. However, Lister sneaks in some Viagra and spikes the guards' punch between games, giving them erections, including Hollister who was their coach.
An infuriated Hollister sentences Lister and Rimmer to "spud duty" where they are forced to skin mountains of potatoes. Once Lister obtains a "programmable virus" that was intended to skin the potatoes for them, but in actuality did that and ate Lister and Rimmer's clothes and hair off, Hollister the two to two months in the hole for solitary confinement.
Come the second-part, the crew have utilized the time wand, a machine able to set any object to a prior incarnation from it's genetic time, and accidentally turned a bird into a colossal Tyrannous Rex. Hollister, alongside a battalion of armed guards, attempted to tackle the beast but fell victim to a wave of diarrhea after the crew attempted to feed it curry to get the time wand back, which it previously ate. Hollister bites the bullet and gives Lister and Rimmer the time wand to stop the dinosaur, as they are the only ones capable of operating it.
After some shenanigans, Lister and Rimmer succeed in reversing the dinosaur to Pete the bird and resurrecting its owner, Birdman. However, a baby dinosaur managed to escape and ended up licking Hollister's back during a massage appointment. As a result, Hollister now has PTSD and assigns himself a year-long isolation sentence in the hole.
Presumably one-year later in the series finale, "Only the Good...", a sick Hollister is attended to by Rimmer, finally given probation. Meanwhile, Red Dwarf has picked-up an escape pod from the destroyed spaceship, Hermes, containing a highly-coercive microorganism.
This microbe manages to escape its confines and spread to the ship, slowly destroying everything in its path. Hollister decides the best route is to evacuate the ship, however, due to what he claims to be limited supply and space, decides to leave the imprisoned crew behind to die.
In an alternate ending, Rimmer successfully obtains the antidote from a mirror universe and the crew take control of the ship, with Rimmer deciding to abandon Hollister and the rest of the resurrected crew. However, as that was scrapped, the broadcast episode leaves Hollister's fate ambiguous and it remains unelaborated in further series.
In the series XII finale, "Skipper", a parallel universe Captain Hollister makes an appearance during the initial radiation leak that killed the crew. Here, Hollister is attempting to flee in an escape pod, to which our Rimmer, who has "quantum skipped" into this reality, attempts to join him.
Hollister denies Rimmer entry, claiming there are four-seats so "only room for him". However, the pod jams at the last minute and Rimmer decides to quantum skip to another universe, leaving Hollister to die in a fiery explosion once the wave of radiation reaches him.
