Disclaimer: I wrote these character profiles of the Red Dwarf crew over ten years ago, for my Red Dwarf website which is now defunct thanks to the hoster going belly-up, and I thought it might be nice to resurrect them here. But be warned! These profiles give away a LOT of information about the show, so if you haven't seen the programme or are currently watching it for the first time, you might want to skip these sections till you finish watching, as there will definitely be spoilers here you'll want to avoid.
These profiles only cover up to season seven (though I may update them later) and do not take into account the events in "Back to Earth" or the current new season (season ten) that showed recently on TV.
Arnold Rimmer
An officer and a gentleman, respected and admired by all his fellows, a lover of women, hero, space adventurer and model for future generations... these are just a few of the many things that Arnold Rimmer is not. With his three high-flying brothers, John, Frank and Howard top-notch members of the Space Corps, Arnold is looked down upon by his mother and his father.
Early on in life, the father of the Rimmer family had bought a rack, and every morning he would measure his sons to see if they had grown overnight. If they hadn't, then they would go on the rack! This was due to their father's irrational fear that his four sons would miss out on joining the Space Corps by failing to reach the regulation minimum height, as he himself had done. Rimmer's father also tested his sons on astro-navigation and engineering theory before they were allowed to be fed: no correct answers, no food. Arnold nearly died of malnutrition!
When he is old enough, Rimmer applies to the Space Corps academy but fails every test. Scorned by his parents, ashamed that he will be unable to live up to their expectations and also jealous of the success his brothers are enjoying, Arnold joins the crew of the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel, Red Dwarf, in the hope that he can sit the exams independently, but even in this he proves useless, and is doomed to remain at the rank at which he joined the ship: Second Technician, which essentially means that he and his ilk check vending machines around the huge vessel and ensure they don't run out of chocolate bars or chicken soup!
In this he is joined by Dave Lister, who is part of his Z Shift, the very worst of the dregs of the technicians. Lister and Rimmer take to each other like a dog to a cat, hating each other on sight, and indeed Red Dwarf is not their first meeting place: Lister had in point of fact ferried Rimmer (using the name of one of his superiors as cover) to a brothel on Mimas, an incident which had haphazardly led to Lister's joining the Red Dwarf crew.
To others, especially Lister, Rimmer is a small-minded, petty man who delights in enforcing and observing pernickity regulations and awards the slightest breach of such by putting his subordinate (usually Lister) on report. The tale is related of how Rimmer accused and put Lister on report for mutiny! He tells Lister that he stepped on his foot, thereby impairing his ability to perform his duties, thereby clearly putting the ship at risk and thereby clearly mutiny!
This small episode gives a good idea of what the man known as Arnold J. Rimmer is like. Rimmer spends so much time in the run-up to his exams devising a revision chart, complete with symbols for rest periods, cram periods and so forth, that by the time he is finished making the chart it is time to take the exam. He thereafter decides to cheat, by copying out as much of the textbooks onto his arms and legs as he can, intending to glean the answers from his tattooed body and thus pass. His plan is foiled however when the ink runs, and he can't make out any of the writing. Once again, he fails. This is, however, to be his last attempt at this exam, or any exam, as shortly afterwards the entire crew of Red Dwarf is subjected to a lethal dose of radiation, which leaves the mighty ship lumbering on through space, a massive graveyard with Holly, the ship's AI computer, ensuring that the leviathan remains on course.
Lister has, a short time previous, been put into stasis, and therefore he manages to survive the holocaust that wipes out the rest of the crew. Reviving him some three million years later, Holly decides that the last human being alive needs some companionship to save him from going insane due to loneliness, and settles on Rimmer as his partner. He reinitialises Rimmer's personality from the computer disk every member of Red Dwarf was required to download onto before departure, and brings Arnie back as a hologram.
Being a hologram means that though Rimmer can talk and see and hear, and has the same memories, ambitions, drives and desires as the man he once was, he cannot touch anything, nor can anyone touch him: he is entirely composed of light, a computer simulation maintained by Holly, and dependent on the power source of the huge ship. This does not, however, stop him from haranguing Lister as soon as he meets him again, blaming him for not being there to help him seal the drive plate that allowed the lethal radiation to escape and poison the ship.
Rimmer has never been able to accept failure, or the responsibility for failure or indeed anything. He blames his parents for his upbringing, his lack of contacts for the pathetic way his career went, and Lister for just about everything else. He says that if people had not kept dragging him back he could have achieved the rank of an officer that he so desperately desired. He never once stops to consider that the reason he has not achieved any of his goals, least of all promotion, might just be down to the fact that he is arrogant, overbearing, incredibly hard to get on with and not in the least reasonable or likeable. In short, he is a total and utter smeghead.
But Rimmer does not believe this, and continues, even after his death, to blame Lister for everything he can, and find fault with him at every opportunity. When they encounter the Cat, he wants to throw it off the ship, but having no physical presence must bow to the wishes of his erstwhile subordinate. Even though he is dead, Rimmer still retains his right of rank over Lister, despite the fact that Lister points out to him that both of them were ranked lower than the man who changed the bog-rolls in the ladies' toilets! Rimmer is unanimously despised and scorned by everyone aboard the ship: Holly can't stand him, the Cat thinks he's a waste of space, and when Kryten joins the crew later on, he fights against his programming until he can call Rimmer a smeghead! Even the scutters hate Rimmer!
When Lister, who has been trying to get Rimmer to allow him to switch his former superior off for a short time so that he can reinitialise the hologram personality disk of Christine Kochanski, and go on a date with her, finally declares that he is going to sit the exam for chef, Rimmer worries, as this would mean that Lister would technically outrank him, a situation which could not be allowed to develop! Having failed to talk Lister out of the exam, Rimmer poses as Kochanski and tries to trick Lister into giving it up, but Dave sees through the disguise and goes ahead with the exam, which in the end he fails.
Rimmer is constantly on the lookout for aliens with a technology in advance of Earth's, aliens who can replace his hologrammatic form with a real, solid human body, so when Holly picks up a pod on the scope he is disappointed to find that it is nothing more than a garbage pod. His disappointment comes hot on the heels of anger at Lister, who has discovered, somewhat to his dismay, that he is the being the Cat race revere as Cloister, their god, and is indirectly responsible for the war that wiped out thousands of their kind. Sneering at Lister, he declares "I could have been God, given the lucky showbiz break you got!"
When Lister finally succeeds in getting his hands on the disk he believes to be that of Kochanski, Rimmer warns him that the disk will only bring him misery. How right he is! Rimmer has swapped the disks, and what energises in front of Lister is not his long-lost love, but a second Rimmer! Delighted to have another him to talk to, Rimmer the Original decides to move in next door with his double, and packs up his things. Lister, glad to help his former bunkmate move out, comes across a video, which Rimmer tells him is a tape of his own death. Watching the video surreptitously, Lister hears Rimmer's final words as "Gazpacho soup!", and wonders why Rimmer would end his life with such a phrase on his lips. He asks Rimmer, but of course the hologram will not tell him.
However, it soon turns out that life with Rimmer is not working out for Rimmer. The two holograms are not getting on as well as they would have thought they would. Because Rimmer in any incarnation (with the exception of Ace Rimmer) is a pain in the neck, the two snipe at and fight with each other, and it is not long before they are at each other's throats. As their quarrel turns to petty bickering and spills over to encompass Lister and the Cat, one of them has to go. But before he erases the orginal Rimmer, Lister must know about Gazpacho soup. Seeing as he is to "die" anyway, Rimmer tells him. Gazpacho Soup Day: it was the greatest day of his life, he tells Lister.
After only being with the company fourteen years (!) he was invited to dinner at the captain's table. Unfortunately for him, they had gazpacho soup for starters, which Rimmer didn't realise was supposed to be served cold. He made the chef take it away and bring it back hot, and believes that this rather small faux pas in front of the men he had hoped one day to join was instrumental --- nay, directly responsible for his never being promoted.
He soon has other things to occupy his mind however, when the crew pick up a distress call from a ship called the Nova 5. The service mechanoid, Kryten, tells them that there are only three survivors, all female, and the boys rush to the scene, Rimmer kitting himself out in his best officer's uniform, complete with rows and rows of medals, and an extra pair of socks shoved down the front of his trousers! He asks Lister not to put him down in front of the girls they are about to meet, saying that Lister should mention the fact that Arnie died and was pretty brave about it. He wants his shipmate to refer to him as something other than Rimmer: Ace, perhaps, or Big Man.
However, romantic liaisons are not to be, as the three women in question are in fact dead, and have been for centuries. Left alone for so long, Kryten has turned somewhat peculiar, and at first refuses to believe that his young female charges have passed on. Eventually though he is convinced, and the crew take him back to Red Dwarf, where Rimmer wastes no time in taking advantage of the fact that they now have a live-in servant: and what's more, he doesn't backtalk or outright refuse to do things as Lister does. Kryten is happiest when serving, and Rimmer is happiest when being served, so the two should get on famously. But Lister is not standing for this, and urges Kryten to break his programming, which after some effort he does, flipping the bird to Rimmer and heading off on Lister's spacebike.
Some time later a post pod catches up with Red Dwarf, and Rimmer learns in a letter from his mother that his father is dead. Seeing how totally blown away by this news the hologram is, Lister tries to comfort him, but it emerges that Rimmer hated his father, for the reasons outlined at the beginning of this piece. To help him forget about the bad news he has just received, the Cat and Lister offer to take him with them into a TIV: Total Immersion Video game, called Better Than Life. Here, one can live out all one's fantasies, and be whatever they want to be. Rimmer enjoys it for a while, being made an admiral, getting a solid body and making love again to Yvonne McGruder, his one and only romantic tryst, but soon his brain rebels at nice things happening to him, and he ends up ruining it for everyone.
On his Deathday however (the anniversary of the day he, and all of Red Dwarf's crew except Lister met their deaths), he puts himself in a tight corner by getting drunk and telling Lister how many times he has ever made love. Lister, unable to listen to Arnie's whimpering any longer, goes down to the hologram simulation suite and downloads eight months of his own memory into that of Rimmer, giving him a love affair that Lister experienced. Dave's memories of this period are now Rimmer's, and he indeed believes that he, not Lister, loved the beautiful Lisa Yates. The ruse eventually comes to light though, and Rimmer is even more upset.
When they find a stasis leak on one of the decks, Rimmer encounters his own self, three million years in the past, after Lister reads from Rimmer's diary, telling him that what the then Rimmer thought was a hallucination may in fact have been the now Rimmer coming back in time to warn his past self that he would be dead in three million years (which comes as no surprise to Arnie-three-million-years-ago!). Lister goes back himself with the Cat to try to rescue Kochanski, but Rimmer has as much success convincing himself that he must go into stasis to avoid the accident as Lister has with Chrissie. It's interesting to note that even after the "double Rimmer" episode earlier, Arnie has not learned his lesson, and still thinks that a second him on the ship would be a good idea.
When Holly is replaced by Queeg, the Red Dwarf backup computer, things begin to go very badly for Rimmer! Advised by the computer that the company is paying to keep him online, Queeg takes control of Rimmer's hologrammatic body, and forces him to exercise, go for runs, and revise! It's only when Holly regains control of the ship that Rimmer is let off the hook.
Some time later the fruitbat computer mistakenly brings Red Dwarf into an alternate dimension, where female opposites of Rimmer and Lister exist. Faced with his own sexual attitudes and manners in Arlene Rimmer, the hologram refuses to accept that this is in fact the way he behaves towards women! Arlene tries everything to get him into bed, including attempting to hypnotise him, a trick Rimmer had used once before himself, to convince a girl to go out with him. However, it is in fact Lister who ends up in bed with his female double, and the Rimmers both look down their noses at them for it, and enjoy every minute of Lister's discomfort, especially when, after they return to their own dimension, Lister's pregnancy test proves positive!