Cop (Back to Reality)

Cop
Race	Human
Place of Origin	Fascist Earth
Appearances	RD: Back to Reality
Alter Egos	None
Family	Unknown
Actor	Lenny Von Dohlen

The Cop was a plainclothes policeman who accosted the Dwarfers during a hallucination caused by a Despair Squid.

When the Starbug crew became convinced that they had been playing a TIV game for four years, they decided to leave the arcade and find out more about their new identities. When they reached the car park and found Lister's car, a small girl ran past them with an apple in her hand. She was being chased by a fascist policeman, who was trying to gun her down. He demanded that the Dwarfers move aside so that he could get a clear shot with his submachine gun, but Kryten refused to let Rimmer step out of the line of fire.

The cop was angry with the Dwarfers for letting "an enemy of democracy" escape justice. He claimed that she had stolen "an apple of the people", which Lister suspected was from the cop's lunchbox. He decided arbitrarily that the Dwarfers were guilty and was prepared to execute them on the spot, demanding that Lister come out of the shadows.

As soon as he saw Lister's face, however, he was astonished and put his weapon away. He identified Lister as Colonel Sebastian Doyle, a high-ranking member of the secret police. When asked by The Cat why Doyle had been missing for four years, he responded with the rumour that Doyle had grown weary of his duties and had gone away to "renew" himself.

He then spotted the girl trying to escape and moved to gun her down. Kryten couldn't allow that to happen, so he shot the cop dead instead. This made the Dwarfers go on the run from the fascist police and also made Kryten suicidal with guilt for taking a human life instead of stunning him. Holly managed to get him to release a mood stabiliser into Starbug's cabin which brought them back to reality (RD: Back To Reality).

This hallucination caused a new alternate reality to be created where the Fascist Earth was real, but the cop would still be dead.