Arnold Judas Rimmer is a fictional character and one of the main characters of the science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf, played by Chris Barrie. Rimmer is a second-class technician and the de jure leader of the mining ship Red Dwarf. Portrayed as snobbish, pedantic, and self-centred, Rimmer is unpopular with his crewmates and is often the target of insults and general ridicule.
After he is killed by a radiation leak during an ellipsis in the series' first episode "The End" (1988) Rimmer is present for most of the series as a computer-generated hologram, indicated by the 'H' symbol on his forehead. From series I-V, Rimmer is intangible as a hologram and unable to interact with his environment, referred to in-universe as "soft light". Come the series VI episode "Legion" (1993), Rimmer's Light Bee is upgraded by the titular character to a "hard light" hologram where he is now able to interact with his surroundings as well as being essentially indestructible, yet still able to feel pain. Following the character's departure in the series VII episode "Stoke Me a Clipper" (1997), Rimmer is absent from the show until series VIII, where a human version of Rimmer is shown having been resurrected by nanobots with no memory of the hologrammatic Rimmer's experiences and only those of Rimmer prior to the radiation leak in the first episode (likely from when he had his personality disc last updated before his death). Following a ten-year hiatus after series VIII, the character reappeared as a hologram in the miniseries Back to Earth (2009) onward. Why he became a hologram again, or what happened to the character at the end of the series VIII episode "Only the Good..." (1999) has never been revealed. For a brief time in the feature-length special The Promised Land (2020), Rimmer is temporarily upgraded to Diamond Light, an advanced combination of both soft and hard light.
The creators of the series acknowledge that Rimmer's surname comes from a snobby prefect with whom they attended school. They joke that only the boy's name was used, and not his personality because "that would imply he had one".
Fictional history
Television
1980s
Rimmer first appeared in Red Dwarfs first episode "The End" (1988), where he is characterised as second technician on board the mining ship Red Dwarf, ranking above Dave Lister (Craig Charles), the lowest ranked crew member on board the ship with whom he shares quarters, and below all four of the service robots. As a technician, Rimmer does maintenance work on vending machines that not even the robots are assigned to. Rimmer is shown having difficulty revising for his "engineer's exam" which he hopes to pass and become an officer after having failed before prior to the episode, and he reveals that he was not academically educated like others who had become officers. After Lister is awakened from stasis, where he was put as punishment for bringing an unquarantined cat on board, the ship's computer Holly (Norman Lovett) tells Lister that the ship's crew died in a radiation leak from a drive plate Rimmer had improperly repaired and Lister was kept in stasis until the radiation levels returned to normal three million years later. Rimmer is depicted as having been brought back to life as a hologram, having the same drives, feelings and emotions as the human Rimmer, but being unable to touch anything. The only other survivor on board Red Dwarf is a creature called "Cat" (Danny John-Jules), a descendant of Lister's pregnant cat who was safely sealed in the hold along with her unborn kittens during the radioactive crisis.
By the time of "Future Echoes" (1988), Rimmer claims to have taken the "astronavigation exam" without passing nine times, or ten, "if you count the time he had his spasm". He also claims in this episode that his father had said, "Shiny clean boots and a spanking short haircut, and you can cope with anything," right before "that unfortunate suicide business".
In "Balance of Power" (1988), Holly reveals that reason Rimmer was brought back as a hologram was because, in Holly's judgment, Rimmer was the best person to keep Lister sane because the two had "shared fourteen million words between each other", making Rimmer the crew member with which Lister had the most interaction; in Holly's judgment, the fact that their interactions were almost entirely antagonistic was irrelevant. Lister later asks Rimmer where the disc which contains Navigation Officer Kristine Kochanski's (C P Grogan) hologram has been hidden so that Lister could go on a date with her, but Rimmer refuses to switch his own disc off to bring back Kochanski for an evening due to the risk that Lister might not turn Rimmer's hologram on again. Holly has the ability to override Rimmer and switch his disc off but cannot do so because Rimmer outranks Lister and he is programmed to prioritise the former's orders over the latter's.
In "Confidence and Paranoia" (1988), Lister believes that the only reason that Rimmer became a part of the love celibacy society was because he could not get a date, and he could never get a date because Rimmer's mother bought all of his casual clothes. Rimmer denies this, pointing out he went to bed with Yvonne McGruder, but Lister says she thought Rimmer was someone else due to her wonky vision from a concussion. Lister, with the help of a solid manifestation of Lister's confidence (played by Craig Ferguson), deduces where Kochanski's personality disc is hidden as well as a means of how the ship can power two holograms at once. Lister is still unable to go on a date with Kochanski, however, as the disc inside Kochanski's box has been swapped with one containing a duplicate of Rimmer.
In "Me²" (1988), Rimmer is shown moving in with his double as better company in the next bunkroom over from Lister. Rimmer's double reveals that all of Rimmer's brothers were academy educated, but he was not. Rimmer claims that this was because his father could not afford it. Rimmer also mentions taking a film course at night school, although he confuses a cartoon showing at the cinema in the episode with Citizen Kane. Lister watches a video of Rimmer's death, where his last words are "gazpacho soup". Demonstrating intense, literal self-hatred, the second cruelly insults and berates the first. Believing that Lister is going to wipe his hologram anyway because of the two Rimmers' constant arguing, Rimmer explained his dying remark as referring to a dinner at the captain's table with six officers, during which he made a faux pas where he had his gazpacho soup taken away to be brought back hot, not realising that gazpacho soup is meant to be served cold. This caused the officers at the table to laugh at him, and he was never invited back. The incident haunted Rimmer for the rest of his life (and beyond). Gradually, his obsession over the incident caused him to remember it as the most disastrous, imbecilic action of his life, and it undermined his self-esteem out of all proportion. Lister, displaying deep empathy, tried to comfort Rimmer, assuring him that "anybody could make a mistake like that." His confession complete, Rimmer prepares to be wiped, but Lister admits that he had already wiped the second Rimmer instead; Lister had allowed Rimmer to believe his "death" was imminent because Lister wanted to know what the "gazpacho soup" remark meant, and he knew that Rimmer would never tell him under any other circumstances.
Despite "Future Echoes" having previously suggested that Rimmer's father killed himself, according to a letter received from Rimmer's mother in "Better Than Life" (1988), Rimmer's father (played by John Abineri) had died peacefully in his sleep and Rimmer appeared unaware about how his father had died before Lister read out to Rimmer what his letter said. Rimmer's backstory in this episode revealed that Rimmer had hated his father, who had fixated on Rimmer and his three brothers to join the Space Corps and become officers when Rimmer's father had been rejected for being an inch below regulation height. To this end, he refused to allow them to eat unless they could answer complicated astronavigation questions. This led to Rimmer almost dying of malnutrition. Rimmer's father also stretched his sons on a traction machine to make them taller, causing Frank to be 6'5" by the time he was eleven. Rimmer disliked his parents enough to the point where he divorced them from himself when he was fourteen; Rimmer received paid maintenance until employment age and access to the family dog every fourth weekend.
According to "Thanks for the Memory" (1988), Rimmer did a maintenance course at Saturn Tech. Rimmer also claims that his sexual liaison with McGruder was the only point in his entire life he had had sex.
In "Queeg" (1988), Rimmer mentions how, after being burnt once by a person he considered his best friend, he had considered no-one in his life to be "true friends", and that friends were only friends when it suits them. He explains that when he was fifteen, he had a "friend", Porky Roebuck, with Rimmer believing that Porky's father having an affair with Rimmer's mother proved how close he and Porky were. Porky and Rimmer went on a Space Scouts survival course together, where Porky was the ringleader of a plan to eat Rimmer; Rimmer being tied to a stake and having barbecue sauce poured on him before he was almost cooked. Lister believes that Porky was "only" bullying Rimmer.
"Parallel Universe" (1988) shows Holly's "Holly Hop Drive" trying to get to Earth within a few seconds. Instead, however, it lands the crew in a female-oriented parallel universe with another version of Red Dwarf; its crew including a female version of Rimmer called Arlene Rimmer (played by Suzanne Bertish). Regarding Rimmer as little more than a "discardable sex object", the female Rimmer sexually harasses and gropes Rimmer and tries to hypnotise him even after Rimmer shows no interest.
In "Backwards" (1989), Rimmer facilitates a driving test for the mechanoid Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), where Kryten causes the Starbug 1 shuttle to fall into a time hole. The ship crash lands on Earth in a reality where time runs backwards, leaving Kryten, Rimmer and Holly (now played by Hattie Hayridge) stranded. Rimmer and Kryten start working as the novelty act "the Sensational Reverse Brothers" and begin to enjoy life in this new reality, but after three weeks, they are fired by a pub manager (Arthur Smith) for a fight that Rimmer and Kryten only become involved in later that night. Lister and the Cat come to rescue Rimmer, Kryten and Holly in another Starbug to get back to Red Dwarf.
According to backstory in "Marooned" (1989), Rimmer did not lose his virginity to McGruder, but to a girl Rimmer met at cadet school called Sandra in the back of his brother's car. However, when adapted in the novel Better Than Life (1990), it is revealed Rimmer was lying.
In "Polymorph" (1989), Rimmer considers the relationship he had with his brothers to be "close". He mentions that he was the butt of the "occasional" practical joke growing up. Despite varying from apple pie beds and black eye telescopes to hiding a small land mine in Rimmer's sandpit, Rimmer believes that none of this was "sinister". Rimmer says that some considered his mother (played by Kalli Greenwood) to be cold and aloof, but himself believes that she had no time for fools. Rimmer believes this to be "tragic", because they would otherwise have got on "famously".