Arnold Rimmer

Arnold Judas Rimmer BSc, SSc (Bronze Swimming Certificate, Silver Swimming Certificate), who sometimes goes by Arnold Jonathan Rimmer is played by Chris Barrie in the television series Red Dwarf. He is instantly recognisable by both the permanent sneer on his lips and the "H" (hologram) symbol on his forehead.

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

Personality

Rimmer is something of a disgreeable person: his character traits include anal-retentiveness, adherence to protocol and rank, cowardice, misogyny, and a severely inflated ego. This, combined with his utter lack of social skills, has made him fairly unpopular with everybody he has ever come into contact with. The only sexual relationship he had while alive lasted twelve minutes, including the time to eat the pizza. He did have one true friend in his youth, Porky Roebuck, who betrayed Rimmer in a Space Scouts survival course and spearheaded a plan to eat him. While Rimmer was turning on the spit, Porky "bagsied" his right buttock; this experience, naturally, somewhat soured Rimmer on the concept of friendship.

He is fond of war, at least in principle, and dreams of being a general. He admires power and strength, regardless of what the power is used for, and his role models include Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and George Patton. However, he is unlikely ever to pursue his martial dreams beyond the Risk board, because he is an utter coward.

His nature was neatly summed up in the captain's remarks from his confidential report, as revealed in Season One Episode Four: "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."

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 didn't eat unless they could answer complicated astronavigation questions - Arnold nearly starved - and, to ensure that they would not be held back by insufficient height, stretched them on a rack to make them taller. By the time Frank was 11, he was six feet 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, five people committed suicide after talking to him - one of whom had dialed the wrong number and only wanted the cricket results - and he quit the same day, which the newspapers dubbed "Lemming Sunday".

Sometime during his life, Rimmer 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 can’t swim, so why does he have swimming certificates.

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 honor 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 so he has attempted the exam no less than 13 times without success. Though he tries extremely hard to study and/or cheat, he usually loses his nerve once the exam begins. In one case, he wrote "I am a fish" on the answer sheet four hundred times, did a little dance, and fainted. Still he perseveres. 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 exactly once in his entire career, and was served cold gazpacho, which he demanded be taken away and brought back hot. 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 - his last words before he died were "gazpacho soup".

Rimmer died in the first episode of the show. He did a shoddy job repairing the engine drive plate, and he, along with almost the entire Red Dwarf crew, died in the resulting explosion.

Death and afterlife

Virtually all of the Red Dwarf series takes place some three million years after Rimmer's death, when he was brought back as a hologram by the ship's computer, Holly. Lister, who was in stasis during the disaster, was now the only known human in the Universe, and Rimmer's mission was to keep him from going insane with loneliness. At first, Rimmer seemed the least obvious possible candidate for the job, but as time went on, Lister came to acknowledge that "driving Rimmer nuts is what keeps me going". Notwithstanding his desperate desire to not be turned off, the holographic Rimmer bemoans his fate — he's 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 retained his memories and physical appearance, but was composed almost entirely of light and had no tangible form. Although he hadn't exactly used his body to its fullest during his lifetime, he found himself missing it after his death. He remained very unhappy with his lot for several years after his death. At one point, he managed to trick Lister into generating another Rimmer hologram to keep him company - but, as it turned out, he and his doppelgänger didn't get along well, thanks to their shared self-loathing. The second Rimmer was soon turned off.

This conflict between Rimmer's various personality traits has formed the basis of several other episodes, as well. While passing through a penal colony called Justice World, Rimmer's mind was read and he was found guilty of the second degree murder of all 1,167 crew members of Red Dwarf. However, his crewmates proved 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 5, 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. Thusly, 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.

Rimmer was briefly and inexplicably reincarnated due to some ill-advised meddling with time and causality, but only lived long enough to eat Adolf Hitler's banana and crisps sandwich and to call for his inflatable sex doll Rachel (and a puncture-repair kit) before being re-killed in a freak explosion. He also stole Lister's body at one point, almost destroying it in the process. But, after a few years in his "soft-light" form, Rimmer was upgraded to a "hard-light" hologram, which gave him a physical form and the ability to interact directly with the world. This return to tangibility marked 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.

Further evidence that Rimmer's personality flaws aren't 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 learned humility and inner strength, and grew up to become Ace Rimmer, Space Corps test pilot, interstellar hero, and sex god. Naturally, Rimmer hated Ace from the moment he laid eyes on him. However, when Ace died, Rimmer took over for him, to his own great surprise. After Rimmer left, Lister found himself missing him profoundly - until, that is, he went through The Rimmer Experience and remembered just how obnoxious he had been.

Shortly after the hologrammatic Rimmer left to become Ace Rimmer, nanobots reconstructed the original Rimmer's body along with the rest of the Red Dwarf crew and brought him back to life. Unfortunately for all concerned, the reconstructed Rimmer had gone through none of the experiences - and thus none of the character growth - that had 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.