Better dead than smeg
The other night I watched Out of Time, the Red Dwarf season 6 finale, having not actually watched it in waaaaay too long. And oh man I forgot how important an episode for Rimmer it is. “I say fight!” is huge for him! Probably the biggest jump forward in his characterisation pre-the Dave era! And then it’s… sort of forgotten about, but eh.
“Better dead than smeg!” is such a good line. It’s funny, because obviously the word Smeg is always smegging funny. But then you think about what he’s actually saying there, what he’s saying about his future self (who isn’t a million miles away from his past self)… “I’d rather die than be that person, an unequivocal bad guy who enables fascists.”
(And of course in the episode prior to this one Rimmer was trapped for six hundred years with nothing but even worse versions of himself around, probably leaving him a lot of time to muse on his bad qualities. He’s not about to let another incredibly evil version of himself run rampant! Makes sense, right?)
I always so dearly love what can only be called I’ll Never Turn To The Dark Side moments and this is such a good one. I wish it’d gotten more attention and callbacks within the show itself. (I suppose it was technically also setting up for Ace in the next season, if they’d had that planned at that point, I have no idea, but…) It’s just, Rimmer is such a fascinating character because there is honour underneath the smug git surface, it shows up so rarely but he (and Lister too) definitely know it’s there, just so hard to reach. Which is just another of the many, many tragedies of the characters of this dumb space sitcom.