Arnold Rimmer

Arnold Rimmer in Red Dwarf

Arnold Judas Rimmer BSC, SSC (Bronze Swimming Certificate, Silver Swimming Certificate), who sometimes goes by Arnold Jonathan Rimmer, is a fictional character in the television series Red Dwarf, played by Chris Barrie. He is instantly recognisable by both the permanent sneer on his lips and the 'H' symbol on his forehead, which stands for 'Hologram'.

The creators of the series acknowledge that Rimmer's surname comes from a snobby prefect with whom they attended school. They claim, however, that only the boy's name was used, and not his personality.

Life

He was born on Io, where he grew up in the shadow of his three older brothers, Frank, Howard, and John. His family life left much to be desired. His father had been rejected from the Space Corps in his youth for being an inch below regulation height, and was fixated on his sons succeeding where he had failed. The boys did not eat unless they could answer complicated astronavigation questions â€" Arnold nearly starved â€" and, to ensure that they would not be held back by insufficient height, were stretched on a rack to make them taller. By the time Frank was 11, he was six foot five. Religion was little consolation to young Arnold; the family belonged to an obscure fundamentalist sect, the 'Seventh Day Advent Hoppists' (a play on Seventh-day Adventists), who followed literally a misprinted edition of the Bible. This led them to spend each Sunday hopping, thanks to a passage reading, 'Faith, hop, and charity, and the greatest of these is hop.' At the age of 14, Rimmer divorced his parents and left home.

Despite his loathing of his father, he still felt a perverse desire to vicariously live out his dream. He still left school early to join the Space Corps, and devoted his life to his career. Outside of work, his activities were few. He once volunteered for the Good Samaritans, a suicide-prevention helpline. Sadly, four people committed suicide after talking to him â€" one of whom had dialled the wrong number and only wanted the cricket results â€" and he quit the same day, which the newspapers dubbed "Lemming Sunday". Rimmer served in the Space Corps for fourteen years, during which he rose from the rank of third technician to second technician and received four medals: three years long service, six years long service, nine years long service, and twelve years long service. Sometime during his life, Rimmer also earned two swimming certificates: one Bronze Swimming Certificate, and one Silver Swimming Certificate (BSc and SSc respectively). It is alluded to later in the series that Rimmer cannot swim, so how he came to receive the certificates is something of a mystery. Although the episode "Back to Reality" suggests that the certificates are meant to be taken as a clue to Rimmer's "true identity" as a handpicked special agent of the Space Corps whose assignment was to guide Lister to his destiny as the creator of the second universe, this is not likely to be true, as the entire crew was hallucinating that their experiences on Red Dwarf were the result of four years in a computer game.

His years of ambition finally paid off when he was assigned to the mining ship Red Dwarf as Second Technician, which was not, to his immense pride, the lowest rank on the ship. That honour belonged to Third Technician Dave Lister, his bunkmate, for whom he instantly developed a warm and reciprocated loathing. His deepest ambition has always been to be become an officer, and he attempted the astronavigation exam no less than 13 times without success. Though he tried extremely hard to study and/or cheat, he usually lost his nerve shortly after the exam began. In one case, he wrote "I am a fish" on the answer sheet four hundred times, did a funny little dance, and fainted. He led a campaign to replace the standard Space Corps salute with an extremely elaborate one of his own design, which failed when absolutely no officers displayed any interest at all. He was invited to the captain's table once in his entire career, and was served cold gazpacho, which he demanded be taken away and brought back hot, to the amusment of everyone else present. He blamed this faux pas for the stagnation of his career (rather than the more obvious culprits, namely his personality and incompetence) and never forgave himself â€" his last words before he died were "gazpacho soup".

Rimmer died in the radiation leak which wiped out the entire crew of Red Dwarf, with the exception of Lister, who was in stasis at the time, and his pregnant cat, Frankenstein who was safe in the ships hold.

The series contradicts itself on how Rimmer died, and, consequently, how the radiation leak came about. In Series I, Rimmer is alleged to have failed to repair the drive plate properly, and blames Lister for his death because it was "a two man job". When Lister steals the video of Rimmer's death at the end of Series I, it shows the captain of Red Dwarf berating Rimmer for doing sloppy work on the drive plate at the time of the explosion.

In later series and in the Red Dwarf novels, it was decided by Grant Naylor that Rimmer's rank was too low and his abilities too lacking for him to have been plausibly assigned the responsibility of repairing the drive plate. Consequently, in Series IV Episode 3, "Justice", the story suggests that Rimmer's sense of responsibility for the disaster is due to his zealous egomania and that he could not possibly have been responsible for the accident. This is reinforced by the novel, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, in which the radiation leak is due to a complex chain reaction (including a reactor technician spilling coffee all over his control panel), in which Rimmer plays no part.

Personality

Something of a disagreeable person, Rimmer's character traits included anal-retentiveness, adherence to protocol and rank, cowardice, misogyny, and a severely inflated ego â€" married to an actual deep-seated self-loathing. This, combined with a lack of social skills, made him unpopular with almost everybody he comes into contact with (except for one person, and she had a puncture). The only known sexual relationship he had while alive was with Yvonne McGruder; it lasted twelve minutes, including the time it took to eat the pizza. He claimed to have lost his virginity to a fellow trainee named Sandra, but this was either a lie or a very forgettable encounter, as his fond memories are of the car they were supposedly making love in. He succeeded in seducing fellow hologram Nirvana Crane, and commented afterwards that he was "turning into Hugh Hefner". After being resurrected by the nanobots, the sexual magnetism virus increased his number of sexual encounters to the point where he needed local anaesthetic to cope with the pain. On his first day at the Tank though, Lister poured a sample of the virus onto Rimmer, who was quickly set upon by the Tank's sex-starved inmates. He did have one friend in his youth, Porky Roebuck, who betrayed Rimmer in a Space Scouts survival course, spearheading a plan to eat him. While Rimmer was turning on the spit, Porky "bagsied" (claimed) his right buttock. One of Rimmers other class mates was Fred "Thicky" Holden, who eventually went on to invent the highly successful "Tension Sheet" and married sex bomb supermodel Sabrina Mullholand JJones. Lister once tried to replace Thicky Holden as the inventor of the Tension Sheet but when Rimmer tried to do the same he simply succeeded to put things back the way they were to begin with.

Fond of war, at least in principle, Rimmer dreamt of being a general. He admired power and strength, and his role models included Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and George Patton. He put this down to being the reincarnation of Alexander the Great's chief eunuch, which he believes also explains his fear of nutcrackers and, according to Lister, explains why he is such a good singer.

However, he was never likely to pursue his martial dreams beyond Risk, because he was an utter coward. When he did get his chance at commanding in the Series IV episode "Meltdown", he led an army of 'hero' wax-droids against 'villain' wax-droids. Thanks to his training course, several melted, while the rest are wiped out in Rimmer's 'surprise attack' of a charge over the mine-field under cover of daylight. Eventually, the population of the entire planet was wiped out by Rimmer's master plan - to raise the heat until they all melted. His justification for the genocide of an entire species was that, working under the principle that the 'villain' army had been wiped out and despite the fact that so had all his own men, he had won the war.

Besides his fondness for militarism, he is also an authority on telegraph poles, especially those observed while train spotting.

His nature is neatly summed up in the captain's remarks from his confidential report, as revealed in Series I Episode 4: "Waiting for God":

"There's a saying amongst the officers: if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. If it's not worth doing, give it to Rimmer. He aches for responsibility, but constantly fails the engineering exam. Astoundingly zealous. Possibly mad. Probably has more teeth than brain cells. Promotion prospects: comical."

Death and afterlife

Virtually all of the Red Dwarf series takes place some three million years after Rimmer's death, when he is brought back as a hologram by the ship's computer, Holly (In point of fact, Rimmer is not a hologram in the truest sense of the word, but a volumetric display - presumably the authors decided it would be more appropriate to have an "H" on his head than "VD"). Lister, who was in stasis during the disaster, is now the only known human in the Universe, and Rimmer's mission is to keep him from going insane with loneliness. At first, Rimmer seems the least obvious possible candidate for the job, but as time goes on, Lister comes to acknowledge that "driving Rimmer nuts is what keeps me going". Notwithstanding his desperate desire to not be turned off, the hologrammatic Rimmer bemoans his fate â€" he is dead, and is keenly aware that his current sensibility is just a computer simulation of how he would feel if he were alive.

As a "soft-light" hologram, Rimmer retains his memories and physical appearance, but is composed almost entirely of light and had no tangible form. Although he didn't exactly use his body to its fullest during his lifetime, he finds himself missing it after his death. He remains very unhappy with his lot for several years after his death. He manages to trick Lister into generating another Rimmer hologram to keep him company — but, as it turned out, he and his doppelgänger do not get along well, thanks to their shared self-loathing. The second Rimmer is soon turned off.

This conflict between Rimmer's various personality traits forms the basis of several other episodes, as well. While passing through a penal colony called Justice World, Rimmer's mind is read and he is found guilty of the second degree murder of 1,167 crew members of Red Dwarf (Not including Lister - who survived - and himself). However, his crewmates prove that this guilt was entirely in his mind. Rimmer's massive ego had simply assumed that all of his actions were of the utmost cosmic importance, and thus that he was directly responsible for their deaths. In a later episode in Series V, Rimmer attempts to officially claim a small planetoid in the name of the Jupiter Space Mining Corps, only to discover that the planetoid is a "Psi-Moon", an artificial planet that telepathically reads the mind of the first human(oid) being to land upon its surface and then telekinetically sculpts its landscape to reflect the psyche of its target. Thus, Rimmer is taken captive by a band of weirdos in black robes with red eyes (his "inner demons"), who plan to sacrifice him to the monstrous incarnation of his Self-Loathing, prompting the other crewmembers to come and rescue him.

When Red Dwarf encounters a holo-ship, the Enlightenment, with an all-hologram crew composed of the "best and brightest", Rimmer can interact as if he were alive again, so naturally he cheats on a test to become a member of the crew. A female officer aboard the ship, Nirvanah Crane, explains that because they were all holograms and had zero chance of pregnancy or transmiting sexual disease, the holo-crew's R&R hours consists of near-constant casual sex, with as many partners as you wanted over time with no emotional strings attached. Rimmer and Crane fall in love, and Crane sacrifices her place on the ship for Rimmer, only for Rimmer to do the same in return. This act of nobility surprises even Rimmer himself.

Rimmer is briefly and inexplicably reincarnated due to some ill-advised meddling with time and causality when, in Season 3, he goes back in time to contact his eight-year-old self, but doesn't live terribly long afterwards as, in his joy at no longer being dead, he eats the sandwich from Hitler's lunchbox and then later on bangs both his fists on two boxes of explosives - resulting in a fatal case of being-blown-up. He also steals Lister's body at one point, almost destroying it in the process when he tried to escape his pursuing crewmates.

After some time as a "soft light" hologram, the Red Dwarf crew encounter a being known as Legion, who upgrades Rimmer's projection unit from "soft light" to "hard light", giving him a physical form and the ability to interact directly with the world, in addition to making him virtually indestructible. This return to tangibility marks the beginning of a profound change for the better in Rimmer's personality. Though still undeniably obnoxious, his time as a "soft-light" hologram had given him a better perspective on life. To conserve power (more of which is required for Rimmer's hard light hologram) he normally uses soft light, only switching to hard light when necessary. (Rimmer's uniform jacket is red when in soft light and blue for hard light.)

Further evidence that Rimmer's personality flaws are not irrevocable can be found in the alternate universe in which he was kept back a year in school instead of being allowed to pass. That version of Arnold Rimmer learns humility and inner strength, and grows up to become Ace Rimmer, Space Corps test pilot, interstellar hero, and sex god. Naturally, Rimmer hates Ace from the moment he lays eyes on him, seeing him as proof that Rimmer could have been something if he had achieved the break that Ace had been given. However, when Ace dies, Rimmer takes over for him, to his own great surprise. After Rimmer leaves, Lister found himself missing him profoundly â€" until, that is, he goes through The Rimmer Experience and remembers just how obnoxious he had been. (It has become popular among fan fiction for Rimmer to return to Red Dwarf having handed his ship over to another version of Ace, as he was so pathetic that he couldn't manage as the dimension-hopping hero.)

Shortly after the hologrammatic Rimmer left to become Ace Rimmer, nanobots reconstruct the original Rimmer's body along with the rest of the Red Dwarf crew and bring him back to life. Unfortunately for all concerned, the reconstructed Rimmer has gone through none of the experiences, and thus none of the character growth, that has made his hologram counterpart moderately tolerable. Along with Lister, Kryten, the Cat, and Kristine Kochanski, he was sentenced to two years in the ship's brig for misuse of confidential information.

At the end of series eight, when a chameleonic microbe destroys Red Dwarf and everyone else evacuates to a mirror universe, Rimmer is trapped on the disintegrating ship. His fate is currently unknown, but at the end of the episode he knees the Grim Reaper in the groin and says, "Only the good die young," alluding to the fact that he may very well survive. However, with no new episodes of Red Dwarf being broadcast since 1999, no resolution has been achieved.

The Rimmer Experience

The Rimmer Experience is a sequence from the UK science fiction comedy series Red Dwarf, appearing in the Series VII Episode 5, "Blue".

This episode takes place after Rimmer has left the crew and is the last episode before Series 8 to show Rimmer.

The Rimmer Experience is akin to a roller-coaster ride. The participants (Lister, Kryten, Kochanski and the Cat) are taken in a small car along a track, while viewing video and audio simulations made by Kryten based on Rimmer's diaries. Kryten suggests that they ride the Experience when Lister reveals that he is beginning to miss Rimmer (who has left to become Ace Rimmer.) The purpose of the Experience is to snap Lister out of his false, nostalgic memories of Rimmer and remind him of Rimmer's true nature.

The Experience begins by travelling through a large pair of fairground-style windows. A huge Rimmer head speaks to the three viewers about the heroism in the events that follow, and the remarkable nature of the man (himself) featured in them.

This is followed by a simulation of the Starbug cockpit, in which Rimmer corrects Kryten about the nature of asteroid belts, and Lister and the Cat tremble in fear. The second simulation is of Rimmer giving the Cat fashion tips, followed by Lister saying that he owes his life to Rimmer.

The Experience culminates in what is popularly known as the Rimmer Munchkin Song. This is sung by a chorus of Arnold Rimmer puppets, which also perform a marching dance at the same time. The puppets, or Munchkins as they are popularly known (after the singing Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz), wear uniforms identical to Rimmer's in red and blue.

They are accompanied by a choir chorus of marching Rimmers, a xylophone and an unidentified brass instrument.

By the end of The Experience, Lister is so fed up he declares "I never want to see or hear from that scum-sucking, lying, weasel-minded smegger, in my entire life." Kryten replies "Sigmund Freud, eat your heart out."