Arnold Rimmer
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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.
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[edit] 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 — Arnold nearly starved — 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. His mother was little better; a cold, severe woman, she viewed Arnold largely with open contempt for his numerous failings, and barely paid any attention to him at all. 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 Samaritans, a suicide-prevention helpline. Sadly, four people committed suicide after talking to him — one of whom had dialled the wrong number and only wanted the cricket results — 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.
His years of ambition finally pay off when he is assigned to the mining ship Red Dwarf as Second Technician, which is not, to his immense pride, the lowest rank on the ship. That honour belongs to Third Technician Dave Lister, his bunkmate, for whom he instantly develops a warm and reciprocated loathing. His deepest ambition is to be become an officer, and he attempts the astronavigation exam no less than 13 times without success. Though he tries extremely hard to study and/or cheat, he usually loses his nerve shortly after the exam begins. In one case, he writes "I am a fish" on the answer sheet four hundred times, does a funny little dance, and faints. He leads a campaign to replace the standard Space Corps salute with an extremely elaborate one of his own design, which fails when absolutely no officers displays any interest at all. He is invited to the captain's table once in his entire career, and is served cold gazpacho, which he demanded be taken away and brought back hot, to the amusement of everyone else present. He blames this faux pas for the stagnation of his career (rather than the more obvious culprits, namely his personality and incompetence) and never forgives himself — his last words before he dies are "gazpacho soup".
Rimmer dies in the radiation leak which wipes out the entire crew of Red Dwarf, with the exception of Lister, who was in stasis at the time, and Lister's pregnant cat, Frankenstein, who was safe in the ship's 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 (he had just woken up having fainted during his exam and was on his way to stasis).
[edit] Personality
Something of a disagreeable person, Rimmer's character traits include anal-retentiveness, over-adherence to protocol and rank, cowardice, misogyny, and a severely inflated ego — married to an actual deep-seated self-loathing. This, combined with a lack of social skills, makes him unpopular with almost everybody he comes into contact with (except for Rachel, and she had a puncture). As Second Technician, he is the highest ranking crew member aboard Red Dwarf following the accident (despite being dead), and is eager to flaunt his new position. However, his attempts at throwing his weight around are frequently hampered by the fact that none of his crewmates are disposed to pay any attention to him, and the only way he initially gets Lister to obey him is to bribe him with cigarettes from the ship's hidden supply. Once Lister discovers the location of these cigarettes, this comes to naught. Nonetheless, Rimmer frequently deludes himself into believing that he is in charge and that he has somehow been moulding 'his' crew into an effective spacegoing unit.
Rimmer is also notably unsuccessful with women. 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 claims to have lost his virginity to a fellow trainee named Sandra, but this is either a lie or a very forgettable encounter, as his fond memories are of the car they were supposedly making love in. Remarkably, after his death he is much more successful with the ladies; he succeeds in seducing fellow hologram Nirvanah Crane, and comments afterwards that he's "turning into Hugh Hefner". After being resurrected by the nanobots, the sexual magnetism virus increases his number of sexual encounters to the point where he needs local anaesthetic to cope with the pain. On his first day in the Red Dwarf Prison, 'The Tank', Lister pours a sample of the virus onto Rimmer, who was quickly set upon by the Tank's sex-starved gay 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 Rimmer's other class mates was Fred "Thicky" Holden, who eventually went on to invent the highly successful "Tension Sheet" and married sex bomb supermodel Sabrina Mulholland-Jjones. Lister tries to replace Thicky Holden as the inventor of the Tension Sheet, but when Rimmer does the same he simply succeeds to put things back the way they were to begin with.
Fond of war, at least in principle, Rimmer dreams of being a general. He admires power and strength, and his role models included Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and George Patton. He puts 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, why he is such a good singer.
However, his martial dreams never progress beyond playing Risk, because he is an utter coward, more likely to flee from any situation involving danger. When he does get his chance at commanding in the Series IV episode "Meltdown", he leads an army of 'hero' wax-droids against 'villain' wax-droids. Several melt on his training course, 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 and hammond organ music, 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."
[edit] 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 living human being 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 — 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 strange creatures 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 try to rescue him. On their way to find him, they pass through a metaphysical graveyard, filled with markers for virtuous qualities - "Honor; Gone But Not Forgotten, Died Age 12". After his friends make a faux display of brotherhood, his good qualities are resurrected as Musketeer-esque figures arise from the graves, fighting and defeating the army of Self-Loathing.
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 Series III, he goes back in time to contact his eight-year-old self in order to alter his future. However, upon his return, he 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, once again returning him to his fate of being a hologram. He also at one point steals Lister's body (by forcing Kryten to drug him in order to perform a mind swap using the ship's hologram projection unit), 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 encounters 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, a charming Space Corps test pilot, interstellar hero, and sexual seducer. 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 — until, that is, he goes through a virtual amusement park based on Rimmer's memory called "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 VIII, 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 encounters the Grim Reaper and knees him in the groin, saying, "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.
[edit] 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 VIII 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, blue and green.
They are accompanied by a choir chorus of marching Rimmers, a xylophone and an unidentified brass instrument. The song lyrics are as follows:
If you're in trouble he will save the day
He's brave and he's fearless come what may
Without him the mission would go astray
He's Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimmer
Without him life would be much grimmer
He's handsome, trim, and no-one slimmer
He will never need a zimmer
He's Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimmer
More reliable than a garden trimmer
He's never been mistaken for Yul Brynner
He's not bald, and his head doesn't glimmer
Master of the wit and the repartee
His command of space directives is uncanny
How come he's such a genius? Don't ask me!
Ask Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimmer
He's also a fantastic swimmer
And if you play your cards right
Then he just might come round for dinner''
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 smeghead, in my entire life." Kryten replies "Sigmund Freud, eat your heart out."
[edit] Trivia
- Kryten, Lister, the Cat and even a service robot have all given Rimmer the finger (or the two finger gesture for the last one) at some point.
- There is evidence scattered throughout the series that Rimmer may have a different father to his brothers- specifically that he is actually the only one of the four Rimmer children to be the biological child of both Mr. Rimmer and Mrs. Rimmer.
