No idea how to properly run a rewatch, so I'll just get started:
S01E01 - The End
Right off the bat, the opening scene is absolutely top-tier and does an incredible job of introducing Rimmer and Lister, as well as being funny as fuck.
When I was little I was always fascinated with the pre-disaster scenes in the early series, especially the first two thirds or so of this episode. You get a real feel for Hollister and Kochanski in the relatively brief time you see them, which I think makes their deaths (and subsequent mentions/appearances through the rest of the series) work much more effectively than they logically should, for characters who were only on screen for a few minutes each.
The post-disaster scenes are great because they pretty much set the tone for the whole first series. The direction powerfully establishes the desolation of the empty, moribund ship, and the true horror of Lister's situation becomes abundantly clear as he roams around the ship seeing the obliterated powder-corpses of the crew... but he's pretty chilled out about the whole thing and immediately bounces back into mindless optimism, befriends the Cat and decides to head straight back to Earth and make the best of it. That's more or less how he acts for the whole first series, as I remember it.
Every time I see the early episodes I forget how good the original sets are. In my mind they always kind of shift to looking a bit cardboardy and awkward, but they're actually way, way more striking IMO than the weird science ship designs that suddenly arrive from series three onwards. It's a boring, grey mining ship, full of industrial corridors and walkways. It looks unnerving even when fully staffed by a crew, but after everyone is killed, the giant empty rooms and dimly-lit corridors become downright scary. That fits the show far better, and I really love when they start decorating their quarters with anything they can find in series 2 and stick that huge inflatable banana on the wall just to have a break from the relentless grey.
Great start, anyway. They manage to establish a hell of a lot in a relatively short time. Didn't even mention that Cat and senile-Holly are both introduced to great effect all in the last 10 minutes or so of the episode. It's also got plenty of laughs despite the amount of setting and story information it has to include. Every conversation between Lister and Rimmer is funny, as is "what cat?", "everybody's dead, Dave", "I'VE BEEN EATING HALF THE CREW"...