“M-Corp” is episode five of Red Dwarf XII.
Lister is asleep in his quarters when Kryten comes in singing Happy Birthday. Kryten tells Lister that it’s the big one. Lister, after his guesses of 30 and 40 years old prove wrong, doesn’t want to hear any more.
Whilst Lister eats his breakfast, Kryten goes to get him his present. As, Kryten says, Lister has absolutely nothing, he’s very easy to shop for. Cat comes in and Lister starts clutching his chest, before finally collapsing on the floor. Cat, showing his usual interest in others, promptly starts tucking into Lister’s breakfast.
In sickbay, Rimmer is thoroughly enjoying the fact that Lister has had a heart attack on his birthday. Enjoying it too much in fact. However, Kryten says there is good news – from Lister’s point of view, not Rimmer’s – it wasn’t actually a heart attack but simply a really bad case of indigestion.
Kryten still wants to keep an eye on Lister, so Chippie, a medical monitoring ship is implanted in his bloodstream. Lister is not in the best of health, but Chippie has problems of its own. In the process of finding what went wrong with Chippie, Kryten discovers that they are several years behind on their software updates (remember, always keep updated!). Once the updates are finally complete, the JMC logo is replaced by that of M-Corp.
M-Corp is a huge conglomerate that has bought up JMC. As part of this process, cases of equipment, appliances and consumables appear on the ship, using M-Corp’s technology. This is greeted with pleasure, so there is undoubtedly going to be a really serious problem with it.
The first problem is when Lister can’t see some beer that is in the fridge, but Cat can. Lister doesn’t think that Cat is holding a can of beer, because he can’t see it. However, he is. Lister can only see M-Corp stuff, not anything else. The others aren’t affected, but then, none of them are human.
M-Corp has given Lister a perception filter that means he can’t see things that aren’t made by M-Corp. Which includes Rimmer’s lightbee, the Cat and Kryten. So he won’t be able to see any of them either. As well as many of the other things he uses in day to day life. Everything’s there, but Lister can’t see it. Which means there is a lot of Lister interacting with invisible products. The other three have to try and fix the problem caused by M-Corp. Meanwhile, things aren’t going well for Lister. M-Corp are not very nice.