arnold rimmer

The SADDEST Red Dwarf detail

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While browsing the Red Dwarf wiki I found this little tidbit on the page for “Siliconia”:

Oh, I never noticed that, ow my heart. Here’s the scene in question from “Siliconia”-

RIMMER: I like being a mechanoid. I don’t have to become an officer anymore, compete with my brothers. Envy, ambition, that acid ball of resentment I carried around with me the whole time, it’s gone.

LISTER: We have to get your neuroses back!

RIMMER: But sir, I don’t want them back.

LISTER: Then what makes you you?

RIMMER: I don’t want to be me. I want to be a mechanoid, programmed to serve. Sometimes when I was young I’d sit for hours staring at our fish tank feeling envious.

CAT: You wanted to be a fish tank?!

RIMMER: I wanted to be a fish. They had food, a small rock to swim in and out of, they didn’t have a care in the world.

CAT: That’s cos I wasn’t there!

RIMMER: Those little fish, they’d never know what it was like to fail and disappoint. They’d just swim around in circles, not a thought in their heads. And it’s the thinking that causes all the pain.

And way, way back, thirty years ago, during the very first episode of the show-

LISTER: Not until you pass your engineer’s exam. And you won’t do that
because you’ll just go in there and flunk again.

RIMMER: Lister, last time I only failed by the narrowest of narrow
margins.

LISTER: You what? You walked in there, wrote, “I am a fish,” four
hundred times, did a funny little dance, and fainted.

RIMMER: That’s a total lie!

LISTER: No, it’s not! Petersen told me.

RIMMER: (Mocking LISTER) “No, it’s not! Petersen told me.” Lister, if
you must know, what I did was, I wrote a discourse on power circuits
which was simply too radical, too unconventional, too mould- breaking for the examiners to accept.

LISTER: Yeah. You said you were a fish.

The Siliconia speech might not even have been an intended nod to continuity, but dang… Rimmer is only happy when he’s a fish.

Better dead than smeg

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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.

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milucalex-deactivated20200601:

Was reading the Aramis page on the BBC Musketeers wiki and:

In an attempt to protect the King and Queen’s lives, Aramis covered his entire body over a thrown grenade.

Rimmer actually did that twice, firstly in Emohawk: Polymorph II and again at the end of TPL and he did it without a second’s thought and all to protect Lister, Cat and Kryten.

Lister was right when he said Rimmer was Aramis after all.

Oh hey I was watching “Polymorph” yesterday and there’s this bit!

RIMMER: (Pointing at the screen) That’s me, there.  Those are my brothers: John, Frank, and Howard.  God, we were close.  “The Four Musketeers,“ we used to call ourselves.  Well, “The Three Musketeers,” actually – they always let me be the Queen of Spain.  Marvellous.  I mean, yes, I was the butt of the occasional practical joke, but I mean, er, nothing sinister. Just the usual boyhood pranks, you know:  apple-pied beds, and black-eyed telescope … and, one time, they even hid a small land mine in my sand pit.  They took it from my father’s gun cabinet.  I mean, how were they supposed to know it was going to go off? Marvellous guys.

I’m really digging how that scene has extra resonance now, over thirty years after it was written.

Moonlight of the Red Dwarf variety

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Going back over old Red Dwarf posts and man, I forgot how much…the actual show sort-of-but-not-quite shipped Rimmer/Lister. Or kind of? (I mean, there was a kiss, fake though it was.)

Honestly, of all the situations I expected to find myself in this month, “suddenly hardcore shipping the two main characters of a comedy TV show you’ve loved for ages but never considered that way (while the world is in the middle of one of the worst crisises in decades)” is… not one of them. Ah well. What I do really miss is being In Fandom, I guess. Having a sort of fandom central hub (LiveJournal and then Tumblr used to serve this function) where you could just run in and shout “I LOVE THIS THING” and get a chorus back of “WE ALSO LOVE THIS THING.” I suppose Twitter is sort of the fandom central hub now but Twitter just doesn’t work as a platfom for me because you can’t have long conversations.

Anyway, it also so happens that Red Dwarf continuity looks like this:

except even more nonsensical, so I’d be really bad at being a Proper Fan of it. (I still haven’t actually watched Back to Earth since… heck, probably since it first came out. What the smeg was that?)

Throw into that the fact that I guess I’m sort of too old for Shipping now anyway, and… well, I’ll just be here on the sidelines, reblogging all the lovely Promised Land meta and fanart and jazz to secret side social media accounts and so forth.

But, man Promised Land told such a beautiful story. I’m an absolute sucker for “characters who are two halves of the same whole whether they like it or not” relationships, and I never realised there was one right under my nose for going on a decade. Whaddya know.

I think when Rimmer says to Lister at the end, “There’s a moon here, Listy, that wouldn’t mind some sunlight,” what he’s really saying is “We’re about to die. Please be with me,” and ouch, my heart.

I really do love this thing.

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tomdemongod:

It’s 4am and I want to write an essay on why Rimmer is gay with so much internalised homophobia he will literally; manifest as a kinky gay stereotype made from the ‘worst of him’ , make homophobic remarks to literally himself from an alternative universe and idolise the ‘perfect women’ as stereotypes from porn and media instead of women he feels attracted to (as there is none. He is a homosexual).

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