Arnold J. Rimmer Continued....

An officer and a gentleman, respected and admired by all his fellows, a lover of women, hero, space adventurer and model for future generations... these are just a few of the many things that Arnold Rimmer is not. With his three high-flying brothers, John, Frank and Howard top-notch members of the Space Corps, Arnold is looked down upon by his mother and his father. Early on in life, the father of the Rimmer family had bought a rack, and every morning he would measure his sons to see if they had grown overnight. If they hadn't, then they would go on the rack! This was due to their father's irrational fear that his four sons would miss out on joining the Space Corps by failing to reach the regulation minimum height, as he himself had done. Rimmer's father also tested his sons on astro-navigation and engineering theory before they were allowed to be fed: no correct answers, no food. Arnold nearly died of malnutrition!

When he is old enough, Rimmer applies to the Space Corps academy but fails every test. Scorned by his parents, ashamed that he will be unable to live up to their expectations and also jealous of the success his brothers are enjoying, Arnold joins the crew of the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel, Red Dwarf, in the hope that he can sit the exams independently, but even in this he proves useless, and is doomed to remain at the rank at which he joined the ship: Second Technician, which essentially means that he and his ilk check vending machines around the huge vessel and ensure they don't run out of chocolate bars or chicken soup! In this he is joined by Dave Lister, who is part of his Z Shift, the very worst of the dregs of the technicians.

Lister and Rimmer take to each other like a dog to a cat, hating each other on sight, and indeed Red Dwarf is not their first meeting place: Lister had in point of fact ferried Rimmer (using the name of one of his superiors as cover) to a brothel on Mimas, an incident which had haphazardly led to Lister's joining the Red Dwarf crew. To others, especially Lister, Rimmer is a small-minded, petty man who delights in enforcing and observing pernickity regulations and awards the slightest breach of such by putting his subordinate (usually Lister) on report. The tale is related of how Rimmer accused and put Lister on report for mutiny! He tells Lister that he stepped on his foot, thereby impairing his ability to perform his duties, thereby clearly putting the ship at risk and thereby clearly mutiny! This small episode gives a good idea of what the man known as Arnold J. Rimmer is like.

Rimmer spends so much time in the run-up to his exams devising a revision chart, complete with symbols for rest periods, cram periods and so forth, that by the time he is finished making the chart it is time to take the exam. He thereafter decides to cheat, by copying out as much of the textbooks onto his arms and legs as he can, intending to glean the answers from his tattooed body and thus pass. His plan is foiled however when the ink runs, and he can't make out any of the writing. Once again, he fails. This is, however, to be his last attempt at this exam, or any exam, as shortly afterwards the entire crew of Red Dwarf is subjected to a lethal dose of radiation, which leaves the mighty ship lumbering on through space, a massive graveyard with Holly, the ship's AI computer, ensuring that the leviathan remains on course.

Lister has, a short time previous, been put into stasis, and therefore he manages to survive the holocaust that wipes out the rest of the crew. Reviving him some three million years later, Holly decides that the last human being alive needs some companionship to save him from going insane due to loneliness, and settles on Rimmer as his partner. He reinitialises Rimmer's personality from the computer disk every member of Red Dwarf was required to download onto before departure, and brings Arnie back as a hologram. Being a hologram means that though Rimmer can talk and see and hear, and has the same memories, ambitions, drives and desires as the man he once was, he cannot touch anything, nor can anyone touch him: he is entirely composed of light, a computer simulation maintained by Holly, and dependent on the power source of the huge ship. This does not, however, stop him from haranguing Lister as soon as he meets him again, blaming him for not being there to help him seal the drive plate that allowed the lethal radiation to escape and poison the ship.

Rimmer has never been able to accept failure, or the responsibility for failure or indeed anything. He blames his parents for his upbringing, his lack of contacts for the pathetic way his career went, and Lister for just about everything else. He says that if people had not kept dragging him back he could have achieved the rank of an officer that he so desperately desired. He never once stops to consider that the reason he has not achieved any of his goals, least of all promotion, might just be down to the fact that he is arrogant, overbearing, incredibly hard to get on with and not in the least reasonable or likeable. In short, he is a total and utter smeghead.

But Rimmer does not believe this, and continues, even after his death, to blame Lister for everything he can, and find fault with him at every opportunity. When they encounter the Cat, he wants to throw it off the ship, but having no physical presence must bow to the wishes of his erstwhile subordinate. Even though he is dead, Rimmer still retains his right of rank over Lister, despite the fact that Lister points out to him that both of them were ranked lower than the man who changed the bog-rolls in the ladies' toilets!

Rimmer is unanimously despised and scorned by everyone aboard the ship: Holly can't stand him, the Cat thinks he's a waste of space, and when Kryten joins the crew later on, he fights against his programming until he can call Rimmer a smeghead! Even the scutters hate Rimmer! When Lister, who has been trying to get Rimmer to allow him to switch his former superior off for a short time so that he can reinitialise the hologram personality disk of Christine Kochanski, and go on a date with her, finally declares that he is going to sit the exam for chef, Rimmer worries, as this would mean that Lister would technically outrank him, a situation which could not be allowed to develop! Having failed to talk Lister out of the exam, Rimmer poses as Kochanski and tries to trick Lister into giving it up, but Dave sees through the disguise and goes ahead with the exam, which in the end he fails.

Rimmer is constantly on the lookout for aliens with a technology in advance of Earth's, aliens who can replace his hologrammatic form with a real, solid human body, so when Holly picks up a pod on the scope he is disappointed to find that it is nothing more than a garbage pod. His disappointment comes hot on the heels of anger at Lister, who has discovered, somewhat to his dismay, that he is the being the Cat race revere as Cloister, their god, and is indirectly responsible for the war that wiped out thousands of their kind. Sneering at Lister, he declares "I could have been God, given the lucky showbiz break you got!" When Lister finally succeeds in getting his hands on the disk he believes to be that of Kochanski, Rimmer warns him that the disk will only bring him misery. How right he is! Rimmer has swapped the disks, and what energises in front of Lister is not his long-lost love, but a second Rimmer!

Delighted to have another him to talk to, Rimmer the Original decides to move in next door with his double, and packs up his things. Lister, glad to help his former bunkmate move out, comes across a video, which Rimmer tells him is a tape of his own death. Watching the video surreptitously, Lister hears Rimmer's final words as "Gazpacho soup!", and wonders why Rimmer would end his life with such a phrase on his lips. He asks Rimmer, but of course the hologram will not tell him. However, it soon turns out that life with Rimmer is not working out for Rimmer. The two holograms are not getting on as well as they would have thought they would.

Because Rimmer in any incarnation (with the exception of Ace Rimmer) is a pain in the neck, the two snipe at and fight with each other, and it is not long before they are at each other's throats. As their quarrel turns to petty bickering and spills over to encompass Lister and the Cat, one of them has to go. But before he erases the orginal Rimmer, Lister must know about Gazpacho soup. Seeing as he is to "die" anyway, Rimmer tells him.

Gazpacho Soup Day: it was the greatest day of his life, he tells Lister. After only being with the company fourteen years (!) he was invited to dinner at the captain's table. Unfortunately for him, they had gazpacho soup for starters, which Rimmer didn't realise was supposed to be served cold. He made the chef take it away and bring it back hot, and believes that this rather small faux pas in front of the men he had hoped one day to join was instrumental --- nay, directly responsible for his never being promoted. He soon has other things to occupy his mind however, when the crew pick up a distress call from a ship called the Nova 5.

The service mechanoid, Kryten, tells them that there are only three survivors, all female, and the boys rush to the scene, Rimmer kitting himself out in his best officer's uniform, complete with rows and rows of medals, and an extra pair of socks shoved down the front of his trousers! He asks Lister not to put him down in front of the girls they are about to meet, saying that Lister should mention the fact that Arnie died and was pretty brave about it. He wants his shipmate to refer to him as something other than Rimmer: Ace, perhaps, or Big Man. However, romantic liaisons are not to be, as the three women in question are in fact dead, and have been for centuries. Left alone for so long, Kryten has turned somewhat peculiar, and at first refuses to believe that his young female charges have passed on. Eventually though he is convinced, and the crew take him back to Red Dwarf, where Rimmer wastes no time in taking advantage of the fact that they now have a live-in servant: and what's more, he doesn't backtalk or outright refuse to do things as Lister does. Kryten is happiest when serving, and Rimmer is happiest when being served, so the two should get on famously.

But Lister is not standing for this, and urges Kryten to break his programming, which after some effort he does, flipping the bird to Rimmer and heading off on Lister's spacebike. Some time later a post pod catches up with Red Dwarf, and Rimmer learns in a letter from his mother that his father is dead. Seeing how totally blown away by this news the hologram is, Lister tries to comfort him, but it emerges that Rimmer hated his father, for the reasons outlined at the beginning of this piece. To help him forget about the bad news he has just received, the Cat and Lister offer to take him with them into a TIV: Total Immersion Video game, called Better Than Life. Here, one can live out all one's fantasies, and be whatever they want to be. Rimmer enjoys it for a while, being made an admiral, getting a solid body and making love again to Yvonne McGruder, his one and only romantic tryst, but soon his brain rebels at nice things happening to him, and he ends up ruining it for everyone.

On his Deathday however (the anniversary of the day he, and all of Red Dwarf's crew except Lister met their deaths), he puts himself in a tight corner by getting drunk and telling Lister how many times he has ever made love. Lister, unable to listen to Arnie's whimpering any longer, goes down to the hologram simulation suite and downloads eight months of his own memory into that of Rimmer, giving him a love affair that Lister experienced. Dave's memories of this period are now Rimmer's, and he indeed believes that he, not Lister, loved the beautiful Lisa Yates. The ruse eventually comes to light though, and Rimmer is even more upset. When they find a stasis leak on one of the decks, Rimmer encounters his own self, three million years in the past, after Lister reads from Rimmer's diary, telling him that what the then Rimmer thought was a hallucination may in fact have been the now Rimmer coming back in time to warn his past self that he would be dead in three million years (which comes as no surprise to Arnie-three-million-years-ago!). Lister goes back himself with the Cat to try to rescue Kochanski, but Rimmer has as much success convincing himself that he must go into stasis to avoid the accident as Lister has with Chrissie.

When Holly is replaced by Queeg, the Red Dwarf backup computer, things begin to go very badly for Rimmer! Advised by the computer that the company is paying to keep him online, Queeg takes control of Rimmer's hologrammatic body, and forces him to exercise, go for runs, and revise! It's only when Holly regains control of the ship that Rimmer is let off the hook. Some time later the fruitbat computer mistakenly brings Red Dwarf into an alternate dimension, where female opposites of Rimmer and Lister exist. Faced with his own sexual attitudes and manners in Arlene Rimmer, the hologram refuses to accept that this is in fact the way he behaves towards women! Arlene tries everything to get him into bed, including attempting to hypnotise him, a trick Rimmer had used once before himself, to convince a girl to go out with him. However, it is in fact Lister who ends up in bed with his female double, and the Rimmers both look down their noses at them for it, and enjoy every minute of Lister's discomfort, especially when, after they return to their own dimension, Lister's pregnancy test proves positive!

Rimmer and Kryten end up in another parallel Earth, this time one where time goes backwards, and earn themselves something of a reputation as The Sensational Reverse Brothers, before their promising career is cut short. Marooned on an ice planet with Lister, Rimmer tells his compatriot that he once used hypno-therapy to have himself regressed to a past life, and discovered that he was once Alexander the Great's chief eunuch! During the time they spend together as they wait for a seemingly hopeless rescue, it comes to light that Rimmer has in his camphorwood chest over £24,000 in notes, priceless (as they are now the only copies left) books, and a collection of hand-carved Napoleonic miniatures. The money, books and soldiers all go to feed the fire which is keeping Lister alive, and Rimmer is less than happy when he discovers that, far from burning, as he thought, his guitar, Lister has in fact cut out the shape of the guitar from Rimmer's chest and burned that! When they discover how easy it is to switch personalities, Rimmer badgers Lister into allowing him to occupy his body for two weeks, with the intention of getting it fit again. However, not having had a solid body for 3,000,002 years, Rimmer snaps and when Lister regains control of his own body Rimmer steals it back, taking Starbug and almost killing Lister's body in the process!

When Lister reorganises the timelines so that he never joins Red Dwarf but instead invents the Tension Sheet and becomes mega-rich, Rimmer, left facing the prospect of life alone with Holly, tries to sort it so that he and not Lister invents the Tension Sheet, but he only succeeds in putting things back the way they were originally. Sentenced by the Justice Computer to a total servitude of 9,328 years for his believed culpability for the deaths of all aboard Red Dwarf, Rimmer is saved from this fate by Kryten, who presents a case that proves beyond all doubt that there is no way in hell anyone with an ounce of sense would put Rimmer in charge of anything important, much less the safety of the ship. Some time later, Rimmer meets his double from yet another dimension, this being the universally-liked, brave and courageous Ace Rimmer. Arnold hates him on sight, as he is a reminder to him of what he could have achieved. It turns out that the only difference between the two is that Ace was held back a year in school, and this made him buckle down and determine to do well.

Rimmer finally realises his destiny (or so he thinks), when transporting to a world where wax-droids fight a war against one another, he takes over the leadership of those deemed "the forces of good", and leads them into battle. Unfortunately, he manages to wipe out not only the bad ones but his own small army as well. Little wonder, with strategies like "We attack tomorrow, under cover of daylight!" But when they encounter a holoship, crewed by top-flight holograms, Arnie is in his element! He petitions the captain to let him join, but has to battle another crew member for that privilege. He uses a mind patch, but this goes wrong and he declares that he will withdraw from the contest, defeated. His opponent, however, is Nirvana Crane, with whom he has fallen in love, and she withdraws herself to let him win. When he discovers what has happened though, Rimmer uncharacteristically gives it all up to allow Crane be reinstated --- and no-one more surprised than himself!

Left alone on a psi-moon while Kryten is incapacitated, Rimmer is taken before the Unspeakable One, which is a manifestation of his own self-loathing. The entire planetoid has reconfigured itself to mirror his own personality, and has created such things as The Swamp of Despair and The Chasm of Hopelessness. Rimmer is rescued by his mates who pretend they like him, in order to get off the moon. He contracts a holovirus and goes completely mad, imprisoning his friends in quarantine and turning off their oxygen. In his holovirus-enhanced state, Arnie is capable of telekinesis and hex-vision, a powerful form of psi weapon. He is eventually defeated (along with his friend, the glove puppet Mister Flibble!) just before the virus would have taken his life.

When they meet Legion, the ancient creation of some of the most brilliant minds in history, Rimmer is given a hardlight body, this being a hologrammatic form that can touch and be touched, allows him to eat, taste, feel but makes him almost impervious to harm. Despite this, Kryten runs a routine check on him and finds that he is suffering from a hologrammatic version of nervous disorder. He is instructed to take things very easy, but this is not helped when he is catapulted into a wormhole and emerges on an uninhabited planet, light years from anywhere. Having successfully created a clone of himself, Rimmer is soon overrun by more clones, all of whom are using his basic cowardice, snideness, sarcasm and treachery as the template for what they consider normal behaviour. Rimmerworld is born, and the original Rimmer left to rot in a cell until his friends come to find him, 557 years later! Rimmer does however in the end reveal that there is a spark of decency and courage in him when, when faced with the prospect of fighting their future selves in a battle for Starbug, and hopelessly outclassed by the latter, he declares that they should fight. As he says: "Better dead than smeg!"

When the charismatic Ace Rimmer comes on board Starbug, Arnie is concerned: "We're down to our last three thousand vomit bags!" he declares, shaking his head. "It'll never be enough!" Ace, it transpires though, is dying. In point of fact he is a hardlight hologram, and not the original Ace which the crew met in Dimension Jump: the story is further related in the profile on Ace. He wishes Arnie to take over as guardian of the universe, a position at which Rimmer scoffs, but eventually, goaded to it by Lister, he accepts and with the help of his old friend settles into the role. Eventually, Ace having died and Lister having convinced the crew that what stands before them is not the sad shell of a man that they used to know as their crewmate (or, as the Unspeakable One put it, "That walking vomit-stain that the world knows as Arnold Rimmer"), but the dashing, brave and handsome Ace, Rimmer, having sat through his eulogy and watched his funeral, bids the boys farewell and leaves to take up his new post.

This episode, Stoke me a clipper, shows for the first time a soark of decency in Rimmer, as he stares out at all the thousands (millions?) of previous Rimmers who have held the post of Ace Rimmer, and declares "All those Rimmers!" Lister looks at them, and says "They all did it. They all passed on the flame. Are you going to be the one who breaks the chain?" And we finally see the humanity, the compassion and the belief in Arnold Rimmer that he can finally make a difference, be appreciated in the world. Somehow, it looks like the man we knew will be nothing like we remembered when he returns!

Again, the scene in which Arnold Rimmer is remembered, spoken of and posthumously promoted to First Officer by Lister, and then taken to his final resting place with all the other Rimmers, is enough to bring a tear to the most jaded eye. The scene is, typically, lightened by the presence of Rachel, the inflatable sex-doll, whom Lister solemnly refers to as Rimmer's widow (and yes, she is dressed in black)! And that is the last we see of Rimmer, but for his finest hour to date, when in a dream he returns to Lister, seeming to have lightened up, learned to have fun, and even kisses Lister! Worried by the suddenly good memories he is having of his old bunkmate, Lister seesks Kryten's help, and the mechanoid constructs The Rimmer Experience (You have to check out Kathy Park's hilarious Rimmer Experience tour, which depicts Rimmer as he believed he was: a leader, a hardened space adventurer to whom the others looked to in times of crisis, and who always knew what to do no matter the situation. Rimmer sings The Rimmer Song, the lyrics of which follow, showing exactly what type of man Arnold Judas Rimmer believed he was, no matter how others saw him. We can only look forward to his return in season eight!

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