Red Dwarf/Headscratchers

General

• Why are Rimmer and Lister the lowest ranked crew members on the ship? As Technicians on a ship almost entirely dependent on technology, they should really have been considered more highly than they were-- and even then, on a ship 5 miles long surely there should have been more than just the implied three technicians (Third, Second and First) to take care of repair work, even with the complement of self-repair systems and skutters?
  • If 'first technician' is a rank, then there could have been dozens of them. I suspect that First Technicians were accorded respect, and kept the life-saving equipment and expensive machinery in a decent state. Lister and Rimmer kept the Vending Machines working.
    • And they didn't even do that very well. It's implied that both of them probably spent almost as much time on ship-painting duty as anything else.
• Red Dwarf is 6 miles (10 km) long and has a crew complement of over 1,000. How does it even avoid falling apart with a crew of 4 and a pair of slacking skutters?
  • A semi-senile Holly with an IQ of 6000, apparently. The immense lack in crew members didn't really stop him/her from piloting the ship, trying to develop a time drive, or doing anything else that could have put the ship into jeopardy many times.
    • It was a mining ship. Besides the miners themselves, the vast majority of the crew were there to keep the miners alive (doctors, chefs, etc.) It's entirely possible that, as far as keeping the ship together goes, the other 996 were expendable.
    • And there would be a lot less maintenance needed now there are only two living beings on board. The mining equipment is now never used, and only a tiny amount of the ship's life support and power capacity is needed.
    • The novels state that there are more than just two skutters.
  • "Running a ship" with the life support turned off, engines turned off, straight course set, and in-between solar systems isn't really doing anything at all. Honestly, Holly might have just put himself on pause for centuries at a time.
    • It's mentioned in season 6 that Starbug has auto repair systems (with almost magical abilities); Red Dwarf would probably have them to.
    • When is that mentioned? It's only said that Starbug was "Built to Last".
    • The episode where Dave must marry one of those alien ape things. They have to trade for the life-support part of the ship however everything else damaged the ship is capable of repairing.
• Not to mention the fact that the crew of 4 must have been around the ship several to keep themselves from going bored and insane. And the skutters help a bit.
• 6 miles long, several hundred decks (a number someone?) and a crew complement that changes size depending on the episode, but never enough to fill anything like that amount of space. Two people per floor? Why do they have to share a room in the first place and where the hell was everyone else?
  • The novels say that there are 2000 decks, and most of them are devoted to cargo, food and water. Cargo is profit, you know.
  • Mining ship. The vast majority of its internal space was probably given over to ore storage. After all, the habitable portion of a supertanker is minute compared to the size of the vessel itself.
• The one thing that has always bothered me is why they needed to share a room in the first place. I mean, I know technically it's justified by Rule of Drama and possibly the co-dependent tendencies they each have (Heterosexual Life Partners anyone?) But it seems like Holly could do a better job of keeping them both sane by having them in nearby but SEPARATE rooms instead of driving each other crazy in one room. This is not an impossibility, especially since in Me² Rimmer actually does move out.
  • Before the accident it's mostly to give each crewmember some company and social interaction, once the crew is dead it's more than likely that Rimmer doesn't want to move his stuff out (the exception being in Me² where it's to move in with someone "better") and Lister not wanting to get away from the one person keeping him sane. Of course this is thrown out of the window in series 3 with the move to the officers quarters, but thats probably because Rimmer finally got around to decontaminating them.
  • Let's not forget that in Me², living with himself drives Rimmer more mad than living with Lister ever could.
  • Routine; they've shared a bunkroom for what seems to have been many months or years before the accident, and just kept up that routine. Also, they probably need the company even if they don't admit it. They're two of the three (later four) last people on the ship, and one of those people is an android who considers himself a servant (i.e. not suitable to share the master's quarters) and the other is a hyper-narcissistic cat who just buggers off and does his own thing whenever he feels like it. They might not like each other, but they're the only two humans around and they'd probably go mad if they deprived themselves of the other person's company.
  • Lister states in Kryten that driving Rimmer nuts is what keeps him going.
  • In Quarantine Lister says that being forced to stay together isn't such a big deal as they spend most of their time together anyway, but Cat points out that they all knew they could walk out the door at any time.
• Why does everyone seem to think that Rimmer is irredeemable, he has shown that he could be something better.
  • Do you mean characters in the show, or viewers? If it's characters in the show, well, it's easy to forget someone's positive aspects when their negative aspects are being thrown so annoyingly in your face every day. If you mean viewers, I don't really know. After all, the Rimmer of the first seven seasons essentially did redeem himself by becoming Ace Rimmer. The nanotech recreated one is still a dick, though.
  • Nano Rimmer isn't so bad, he joins in with the crew's zaney schemes and even helps Lister play practical jokes on Ackerman. Ok in the first few eps he's in he's a bit of a dick but as Lister said "it's you like you used to be" he loosens up pretty quickly.
  • "Could" does not mean "will". Rimmer himself became aware of what he "could" be when he met Ace. Was his response to attempt to become a nicer person? Study harder for his astro-navigation exam? Stop being such a coward? No, he made a bunch of jokes about Ace being gay, and resented the hell out of him for catching a break (even though he didn't). It's a few years before he mans up and takes Ace's place. Replacement Rimmer is no better, as he doesn't even have Rimmer Prime's excuse of being dead.
  • Rimmer rarely, if ever, actually attempts to redeem himself. He can be a better person, but he rarely bothers to actually make the effort.
  • Do remember that Ace Rimmer, is, well, The Ace. The usual response to being shown someone who is better than you in every way isn't "Maybe I can become him", it's "Dammit, why can't I do that?" or "Screw Him!".
    • True, but the point is that having the potential to be a better person doesn't actually make you a better person automatically; you have to put the effort in. And Rimmer, for the most part, doesn't.
  • As has been noted, Rimmer could be a better person, but for the vast majority of the series, he can't be bothered to make the effort to be one. His acts of a better nature (being concerned when Lister collapses from mutated pneumonia, blowing up the Time Drive when fighting the Corrupt Future Dwarfers, etc) are very rare and spread fairly widely apart. His acts of being a total asshole, on the other hand, come much more frequently. Even in general interactions, Rimmer is, more often than not, a pain in the ass. However, he's also done stuff like:
    • Exterminate the entire population of a planet just for the chance to finally live his dreams of being an Armchair General, and then not being in the slightest bit ashamed of doing so because, A: he won (technically), and B: "they were only wax droids).
    • Force Kryten to help him hijack first Lister's body and then The Cat's body.
    • Taunt his crewmates over the fact that the hologrammatic scientist they went to rescue is actually a raving loony and then leave them to die, uncaring if they get back or not.
    • Having managed to sneak up behind the psychotic robot menacing them, promptly dives into the escape pod behind her, leaving them all to die as the escape pod causes the derelict ship to start collapsing around them. Keeping in mind, as a hard-light hologram, Rimmer is Nigh Invulnerable and even as a soft-light hologram, being flushed into space would be nothing more than a change in scenery to him.
  • Rimmer's backstory is in and of itself inherently sympathetically -- however, Rimmer, in-universe, beats this into the ground as an excuse for why he is such a pathetic weasel of a man so much that the other Dwarfers are no longer capable of having compassion elicited by that. When you first hear about Rimmer's terrible past and present circumstances, he's a tragic figure. When you hear the same tired excuses repeated time after time, you stop thinking of him as tragic and start thinking of him as a petty little whiner who won't accept he could possibly be at fault for his own actions.
• Why did they keep running out of food? Was it just the curry? Shouldn't that have meant, with a crew of over 1000, they only packed enough curry plates for a meal and a half, based on when this troper first recalls them running out? Or about five meals, if Lister had it every meal, every day, and a few late-night snacks?
  • On Red Dwarf itself, any lacking in food supplies (e.g. After Eight mints, cow's milk) are explained by them all having been eaten by the Cat race over the past 3 million years. On Starbug, it's understandable that they keep running out of food as Starbug is only intended to be a short-range ship-to-surface vessel with only emergency supplies: all the food they have on Starbug is what they can salvage from derelicts.
  • I don't recall "running out of food" coming up, except in a few cases: when they boarded Starbug in a rush without sufficient time to pack supplies, Season 6 where their corn is eaten by space weevils, and early in Season 7 when the cargo decks of Starbug were flooded and their food supplies were ruined. All of those were in Starbug, which is a pretty small ship. One occurs when they explicitly don't have enough time to load food, and two others involve their food supply getting ruined by an outside factor.
  • Quote Holly at the beginning of one of the earlier episodes-- 'Supplies are plentiful. We have enough food and drink to last 30,000 years. But we are down to the last After Eight mint. And everyone's too polite to take it.' Until they lost the Dwarf supplies were rarely, if ever, an issue, aside from the Dog's Milk debacle.
• It's very much Plot Induced Stupidity, but what kind of protocol was accelerating the Red Dwarf out of the Solar System after the radiation leak? If Holly had put the ship in a parking orbit called the Jupiter Mining Corporation to decontaminate it, they wouldn't lose a doubtless very expensive ship.
  • This was Handwaved in the first book, where the radioactive fallout was so unstable that Holly had to drive it as far away from mankind as possible.
    • Which in turn begs the question as to why just sitting in a nearby uninhabited star system for the next three million years was insufficient.
    • This is Holly we're talking about; he got increasingly computer-senile and loopy after spending all that time on his own. There's a good chance that once he started speeding up he simply got distracted and eventually forgot to stop once he got going.
  • Also the novels suggested that Red Dwarf was already over one hundred years old when Lister joined up (It was built during an era of interstellar travel in the previous century , this is why it was equipped with stasis booths) meaning it was an obsolete old junker that was as slow as a lobotomized snail by the standards of its time, the Jupiter Mining Corp probably considered it not worth salvaging.
  • I'd always assumed that Captain Hollister had given Holly an order along the lines of "Get the ship as far away from Earth as possible" in order to mitigate the damage from the fallout and died before it occurred to him to amend the orders to permit salvage once the ship had reached a safe distance. Holly would have known he could safely stop in the outer solar system, but was presumably hard-wired to follow the Captain's orders until it was safe to let Lister out of stasis so Lister (as the highest-ranking surviving crew member) could countermand the order.
    • The radiation incident was almost instant. All Rimmer could say in the captain's quarters was "Gazpacho Soup". Not sure how Hollister could give much in the way of orders.
      • Hollister could have given the order to Holly at a time prior to the accident (to inform him what to do in the event such an accident happened aboard ship).
• Why would Holograms need to exercise? Or is it simply a discipline thing?
  • Presumably holograms simulate humans as much as possible. They are shown to feel hungry, and so presumably they also get weak and/or put on virtual weight if they stop exercising.
• Since gazpacho is soup by definition, isn't referring to it as "Gazpacho Soup" a little redundant?
  • It's an understandable mistake to make, especially considering that Rimmer didn't seem to have heard of it before (since he didn't realise it was meant to be served cold).
• How the heck can Rimmer still sleep in his old bunk? Holograms aren't supposed to be able to touch anything! It also makes one wonder how they don't just sink right through the bottom of the ship...
  • The hologram simulation hardware is obviously extremely sophisticated to be able to simulate a human personality in the first place. It's no doubt sophisticated enough to take the structure of the ship's fittings and fixtures into account when computing where the holographic crew member can and can't move... except for when Rule of Funny comes into play and he needs to fall through something solid.
  • Very carefully.
  • It's quite simple. He can't manipulate objects. Him getting on his bed doesn't require the bed to move, therefore, he can accomplish it. Similarly, he can sit on a treadmill, but unless it's a holographic treadmill he can't peddle.
  • There's probably code programmed into the holographic software to enable holograms to simulate interacting with basic fixtures -- chairs, beds, etc. It's probably easy enough to simulate with ship-issue beds and chairs (which are all of the same or similar height) and it no doubt helps them adjust to their condition and integrate into 'living' society better if they can simulate common behaviours such as sitting in a chair or lying on a bed rather than just eternally standing up. As not sinking through the floors, it would be a monumental waste of time and the equipment if you could essentially holographically bring someone back from the dead but couldn't program them them to exist within the ship environment; again, the ship's layout is no doubt programmed into them and they are projected in such a fashion to give the appearance that they are standing on the floor, again no doubt to help them and everyone else to adjust to them.
  • It's stated in the first novel that whenever a hologram appears to be "touching" something (walking on the floor, sitting in a chair, etc) they're actually hovering an extremely tiny distance over it.
• Where in the world did Red Dwarf get the fuel to continually accelerate away from Earth for 3 million years? Also, how can it be only 3 million years away from Earth in this case? It should take them 3 million years just to stop, never mind actually getting back to Earth.
  • From this, as stated in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers.
  • That's why the front of the ship is "net-shaped". It's also implied that the captured hydrogen was then burned in a huge internal combustion engine, complete with pistons, which doesn't make much sense. Then again, their space shuttles have gearshifts, so...
  • There is also a solar panel outside Lister and Rimmer's sleeping quarters. The ship just seems to take in any source of power it can.
  • When you're actually in space, IIRC you don't need much fuel to accelerate; just enough for the initial kick-start and then let momentum do the rest. You actually need the fuel to slow down so you don't just drift endlessly if memory serves. In three million years, a lot of momentum builds up.
    • Drifting on your current momentum isn't accelerating. To accelerate, you have to apply force, which in this case, means using the engines. Without that, you'll just coast along at the same velocity because of inertia — you'll keep your current momentum, but you won't "build up" any more momentum without some kind of energy input. The show specifically said at several points that Red Dwarf had been accelerating, not just coasting, away from Earth for three million years.
  • They address this in the second episode; when Lister is planning on going into stasis for the journey home, he mentions that it's going to take them some insane amount of time just to turn around to head back. As for why they don't acknowledge it further, since they're not in stasis it's probably a bit morale-draining to actually add up how much time it'll actually take them to get back to Earth, so have just settled on rounding it down to 'three million' as a way to help get their heads around it.
• More of a fandom thing: Can someone explain why some people seem to refer to Holly with only feminine pronouns, or male!Holly with masculine pronouns, female!Holly with feminine pronouns, and Holly in general with feminine pronouns? I'm used to the male-Holly series, so it's a bit disconcerting for me. It really shouldn't matter, since Holly's technically a sexless being who uses human images for avatars, and I really only think of Holly in masculine terms because "It" Is Dehumanizing. The only possibilities of which I can think are that the people who do this are more used to female!Holly or fall back on Holly being a typically feminine name. Is there some other reason, from someone more familiar with the later series, or who actually saw the transitional episode(s)?
  • There was one transitional episode, titled "Dad", and it was never even filmed. The writers scrapped the script because it was unfunny and possibly sexist.
  • I think it's possibly because Holly was female for a bit longer than s/he was male, at least originally; Norman Lovett was in two series, Hattie Hayridge was in three, and there was a bit of a gap before Lovett returned which just helped to cement Holly being female in people's minds. Also, as noted in the OP Holly's a traditionally female name, so it's just an easy habit to slip into.
• Why is Rimmer afraid of Alfred Hitchcock?
  • Because Alfred Hitchcock's been dead for three million years. What the hell would he be doing on Red Dwarf?
• For three million years before Lister leaves stasis, Red Dwarf had been accelerating to light speed. It would logically make sense that it would take about as long for it to slow down to a sane velocity. So how are Starbug and Blue Midget, which can easily be outrun by an unbalanced washing machine, able to leave Red Dwarf, hop onto some nearby planet for a spell, and then return? If they tried to land on a planet, the sudden change in kinetic energy would shatter the planet and turn the ship and crew into an expanding cloud of plasma, meaning that the show would have ended at the start of Series II.
  • Sometime during season one the Dwarf slipped through a space-time anomaly that slowed them down by a shitload. Or perhaps the footage of Starbug and BM are show much slower than they are actually taking place and are also going at lightspeed. It'd make parking a bitch, though.

Series 1

• You know the hologram in the first episode, what happened after the radiation leak?
  • A dying man collapsed back onto the Eject button, which shot George's disc out of the player. Said man then fell down dead and crushed it on the floor.
  • Alternatively Holly simply turned him off. He knew that with Lister in hibernation, then he'd have to resurrect someone to keep him sane when he's awoken. Rimmer worked because it wouldn't be too saddening for Lister to have to hang out with one mate he can never really have the sort of fun they used to have and Rimmer could be trusted to motivate Lister to make something of himself.
  • George went insane after two weeks of wandering around a ship full of corpses. Holly turned him off to put him out of his misery.
  • Holly replaced him with Rimmer. Apparently, he calculated that being annoyed by Rimmer was the best way to keep Lister sane and mentally active.
  • His disk could have been damaged/erased in the accident.
• Why is being sent to stasis a punishment? From the prisoner's point of view, it's in one second, out the next. You lose pay, but there's nothing to spend that pay on. Granted it's addressed in the book (with Lister deliberately bringing a cat on board to get sent into stasis), but it still seems an odd punishment.
  • Maybe it's just standard procedure to prevent criminals from committing more crimes until the ship returns to earth, where they receive their real punishment. Granted it seems a bit extreme in Lister's case, but that's bureaucracy for you.
  • Of course, we later on learn that Red Dwarf had an actual prison complex. Why not send Lister there? Perhaps his crime was not severe enough. Really, being put into stasis seems more like the equivalent of being fired than put in jail. Imagine you have an employee who has just screwed up majorly, but you are stuck with him for the next 18 months. You can't let him keep his job, but if you imprison him you still need to feed and look after him (actual prisoners presumably have their incarceration paid for with tax dollars). Putting him into stasis means that not only does he stop being paid, but you don't need to concern yourself with his well being.
    • It's a stretch, but remember the nanites rebuilt Red Dwarf as it's designed, not as it was previously seen (glommed on to a hunk of rock). Possibly Red Dwarf's blueprints contained plans for the prison complex, but the ship as it existed prior to season 6 didn't have one. Of course that doesn't explain why it has prisoners...
    • The prison is classified, it wouldn't stay that way if they threw in any offenders from the crew.
      • The Prison is also stated to be filled with hardened criminals - rapists, murderers, arsonists - and so jailing him with them would be inappropriate. You don't get thrown in a maximum security prison for jaywalking. Bringing a cat on board, would be a massive breach of ships protocol, rather than a civil crime. When it came to stealing - and then destroying - expensive company property however, that's a full blown offense whether you're in space or on land.
  • 18 months is a long time. All your friends would change, relationships would change, social circles would change. You might go in to stasis with 4 best friends, come out and find that friend 1 slept with friend 3's wife and now they all hate each other, or anything. The stasis itself isn't a punishment, but trying to fit back into your old life afterwards * is* . If you go to prison for 18 months, it's weird adjusting to all the changes in your social circles when you come back out, and that's with visitors giving you constant updates. With stasis, a door closes and you've got 5 best friends, the door opens and 3 of them are dead and the other 2 have left the ship for another company.
  • Also, I'm pretty sure it's specifically mentioned you receive no wages for the time you were in stasis. That's 18 months without pay, which can put a bit of a dent in your plans if you're saving up for something, like Lister was.
• How is it that if Lister doesn't go in stasis the cat would need to be killed and experimented on because it could damage the ship, but if he didn't go into stasis it could be left in the cargo hold? Couldn't Lister have stayed out of stasis with the cat in the hold and, if punishment was needed, had a regular punishment?
  • Lister is being punished because he isn't giving up the location of the cat. They're trying to find the cat in either case, it's just that Red Dwarf has a pretty small crew and the ship is a few dozen cubic miles big. They're gonna be searching for a long time, and if Lister helps them bypass that, they won't stick him into stasis.
• It's implied in The End that only a person more vital to the Red Dwarf mission could be sustained as a hologram. How come the ship's Captain wasn't turned on as a hologram instead of a lowly chicken soup machine repairman? Sure, Rimmer's a great character and all, but I hardly think that making sure the vending machines were working properly was a truly vital part of the mission.
  • Maybe Holly chose a new mission in the three million years; keeep the last human alive and sane. For that, he would need company, and Rimmer was the only constant acquaintance of Lister that could be counted on to give structure and discipline to his life (even though he would hate it). Selby, Chen and Petersen would be completely unreliable, and Kochanski would probably drive Lister mad with his own longing.
  • Plus, in 'Bodyswap', they "couldn't find the Captain's disk". It may have been lost completely.
  • Holly's overriding mission was to preserve human life. In one episode Kryten explains that Space Corp Directives state that Rimmer could be forced to turn himself off if Lister needed the extra power to survive. Holly is (sort of) capable of piloting the ship on his own, and the skutters are (again, sort of) capable of keeping the ship running, so really all that was left was keeping Lister safe and sane, which Hollister would have been useless for.
• So we discover that Rimmer is capable of transforming himself into an exact physical duplicate of Kochanski (and presumably anyone else) by simply installing her holodisc. Question: Rimmer's sexual history consists of one woman he essentially raped (she had a concussion and confused him for someone else) and his continuing love affair with a blow up doll. So... why doesn't he, instead of making out with a fake plastic woman, just become Kochanski in private and have multiple private sessions with her body? It's not as if he has any concern for her honour or whatever given that he has already stared down her bra and even if he did there are plenty of other female members of the crew he could duplicate.
  • Maybe Rimmer's perversions actually don't extend to wanting to gender-bend for private time. The fact that you just take it for granted that he would want to may indicate you need a little internet break, friend. (I mean, I'd want to, but I still have enough objectivity to know that the thought would freak most people out.)
• How come Rimmer didn't try to pass a different exam when Lister tried becoming a chef?
  • In Rimmer's own head he would only feel like an officer if he passed the engineering exam, as shown when he thought Lister taking the Chef exam would not make him a "real" officer.
  • He does try! That's what he's doing in the scene where he's trying to answer the question "What does the red spectrum tell us about quasars?" -- he's taking the astro-navigation exam, and dictating his answers to the skutters. If his (non-)answer is indicative of his overall performance, we can expect that he failed miserably again.
    • No. The astro-navigation exam is the same one he keeps taking. Original poster was asking why Rimmer doesn't take inspiration from Lister's plan, by switching to a different exam.
• What happened to the extra hologram ability seen in Me²?
  • It showed up again in Holoship when the crew were interviewing potential replacements for Rimmer.
    • Not really — Rimmer was off the ship at the time, and presumably being projected by the holoship's systems. Plus, they explicitly state that they can't drive more than one hologram at a time a few episodes later, in Quarantine.
    • But the Holoship was running at full capacity at the time which is why Rimmer had to replace an existing crew member in the first place.
    • Despite being at full capacity, the Holoship was still able to generate Rimmer's hologram while he was on there, with presumably no replacement of the crew necessary; it might simply be that the ship had provisions for temporary projection or 'sharing' the projection with the home ship, which might also free up sufficient power on the home ship to enable a second hologram to be projected, again at least temporarily. Alternatively, while it might not be using full power to generate all the holograms and can theoretically have more people on board, it simply has a sufficient crew manifest to enable the ship to function within it's assigned purpose and doesn't need to take on anyone else, unless they can act as a superior replacement for a pre-existing crew-member.
  • So how come they didn't use it to bring on another hologram? Rimmer's only real complaint about bringing on a different hologram was his (Admittedly realistic) fear he might not not get turned back on.
    • He also didn't want another hologram because it would have been higher-ranked than him, meaning he would lose what little authority he could claim.
    • Yeah, but wouldn't the whole "Most important Crew member" thing come into play? Even if the mission has changed to "Keep Lister Sane", it'd make more sense to bring on another crew member.
    • It did. Kryten explicitly states that as a higher-ranking officer, Doctor Langstrom is the priority to keep switched on over Rimmer.
    • So how come no-one was turned on?
    • IIRC It's explicitly stated several times, at least in the earlier seasons, that Rimmer's had all the other hologram discs hidden so that the others can't use them to replace him; he's certainly had Kristine Kochanski's hidden, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that he's had the others hidden as well. Doctor Langstrom is not one of the Red Dwarf's crew, meaning Rimmer hasn't been able to hide her disc, meaning it can be recovered and used to replace him.
  • Maybe the hologram doesn't take twice the power if it's two copies of the same person? Maybe it's the "mind simulation" part that takes power, not the "projecting an image" part.
    • Can't be. Since both react to different stimuli, and both clearly know who was the first Rimmer, they are different minds. Thereby, it must take the same power to run him.
  • When they first did it, they had to shut down a bunch of other systems. My reading was that because in later seasons they were doing a lot more (running Starbug, science rooms, etc) that they didn't have the spare power any more.
    • Perhaps, but then why did none of them bring it up in "Quarantine"? Even if they had to shut down most other rooms and systems for both holograms to run, I imagine it would be preferable to the "Timeshare" option.
    • My guess is that, given the opportunity of turning Rimmer off to make way for a viable and potentially more useful replacement, none of them had the slightest intention of turning Rimmer back on if they could help it (especially if said viable replacement was a multi-disciplinary genius, compared to whom Rimmer would look even more useless); they just used the 'timeshare' thing as a lame attempt to mollify him when he realized this. They didn't suggest powering down these rooms because they didn't want to give him that idea, or deny themselves useful facilities (they clearly use the science labs and Starbug a lot more by this point than they did in the earlier seasons when Rimmer created his duplicate) just to facilitate keeping around a person none of them like in the first place and consider to be a largely useless waste of space at the best of times.
    • Also, wouldn't they NEED the science rooms powered if they're bringing aboard a scientist hologram?

Series 2

• Novel question, after the Dwarfers escaped Better Than Life, why didn't they use the duality drive like they planned?
  • Because Holly was "sorta deadish" at the time and the ship wasn't running, and then they had all these other problems to deal with. They simply never had the chance.
    • Because Lister and Cat had to spend several weeks in traction as their bodies were re-nourished and their muscles rebuilt; they wouldn't have been ready to travel before that. Meanwhile, outside the medi-bay, Rimmer and Kryten have discovered a planet-sized ball of ice is hurtling towards them at considerable speed, and the Dwarf's engines are dead, so they're racing around trying to restart them.
    • So why not escape in the Nova 5?
    • Because the Nova 5 didn't have the medical facilities necessary for Lister and The Cat's recovery
• In Thanks for the Memory, cat is seen wearing a silver spacesuit. From just about everything else he's worn, why in smeg's name would he wear that?
  • Because he had to go into space (or at least a place with minimal-to-no atmosphere) in that episode; there's only so stylish you can make a standard space-suit and still have it function effectively.
  • The real explanation for why he doesn't wear his gold spacesuit from the episode "Kryten" is that "Thanks For the Memory" was actually the second episode recorded while "Kryten" was the fourth: the order was changed when they aired. In-universe there's really no excuse.
    • Or he simply doesn't want to wear the same outfit twice. Of course in later episodes he's less picky.....
• Just what does a triple fried egg sandwich with chili sauce and chutney taste like?
  • I'd imagine really awful.
  • After numerous experiments, For Science!, actually not bad, but it depends on what type of chutney you use. Works best in a roll rather than on bread though.
  • Honestly, pretty good, but you have to use a chutney that is both hot (as in spicy) and sweet, otherwise it's weird with the eggs, like you're putting jam on them. I've only tried it on grain bread. Lister is right, though: you do have to eat it before the bread dissolves -- although I think it has more to do with the heat of the eggs and the chili sauce being wet rather than chemical composition, as is implied in the episode.
  • It's really nice. I had it on white bread, with mango chutney and chilli sauce.
• How come The Cat had to bring suits with him when he went into stasis? If they lasted 3 million years one ways, there's no reason that they shouldn't last the other way.
  • They didn't. Cat made all of his suits himself. (That's a good point, though -- surely the fabric would deteriorate.)
    • When did they say that?
  • Then again, the food that the cat people ate managed to stay fresh enough to be palatable for 3 million years.
    • Couldn't it be assumed that the food had futuristic advanced canning?
• In Parallel Universe, female Lister said that society in her universe stopped being male-dominated after the men's right movements. Unless this is a different "60s" (which I suppose is possible, given later figures of Lister and Rimmer coming from the 23rd or 22nd century), isn't most of western society on our Earth still mostly male-orientated today, let alone when the episode was written in the eighties?
  • Quite a lot of people in our universe tend to overlook the still-quite-prominent issues facing women today and wonder why feminists bother, since "they won" back in the sixties; things have gotten better for women, which allows those inclined to not look any further for reasons why there might still be a lot of work to do in this area and just declare everything done. I'd imagine there's similar mindsets in the parallel universe as well.
    • Plus, people aren't always precise when they pick their words. She said "Not since the sixties" but probably really meant "It started getting a lot better since the sixties."

Series 3

• In "SDRAWKCAB", the rules of a contracting universe only seem to apply sometimes. People's consciousnesses seem to progress as they get younger, but their perception of a sequence of events seems to sometimes go one way, sometimes the other. For example, a mugger will jump out and force $50 into your wallet in the street, and even the physical laws of eating and drinking seem to indicate a slow un-digestion of food, leading to it being spit out of your body whole. It seems like in a world like this, a lot of things would be pre-determined based on a current physical state. The main contradiction to this happens in the sequence of events where Rimmer and Kryten are fired for a fight that they haven't had yet. If we are following the logic of timeflow in this scenario, they should have initially been fired for having a fight, had that fight early on in their career, and THEN worked as performers for whatever amount of time they were there, and, lastly, been hired for doing such a good job, leaving them unemployed.
  • It's possible that people from the normal forwards universe corrupt the time flow of the backwards one just by being there. Kryten is still able to eat an egg and drink a glass of water in the conventional way.
  • IIRC the sequence of events correctly (in reverse order: Kryten and Rimmer's gig in ruined bar --> Kryten and Rimmer are fired --> Bar Unrumble), it could be that while they were fired for the bar fight, they were still contractually obliged to do the last gig, no doubt with docked or no wages to help cover the damages they had (inadvertently) caused; they seem to be a big draw, and they're there already so the bar owner could probably recoup some losses by selling tickets and getting people in to buy drinks but doesn't want them back after that.
• Why does Rimmer have such an urge to pig out in Bodyswap, it has been shown that Holly can just make Rimmer feel the sensation of eating anyway (in fact in the first book, Rimmer 2 was eating hologramatic mints) and some episodes have Rimmer exercising , WHY WOULD A HOLOGRAM NEED TO EXERCISE?
  • Rule of Funny, Force of habit, and, in the episode where Holly gets replaced by Drill Sergeant Nasty, Rule of Cruel.
  • Perhaps the 'sensation' of eating doesn't compare to the actuality? After all, eating isn't just in the taste of the food, but looking at it, touching it, smelling it; there's a whole range of tactile sensations which contribute, however minutely, to the eating process. Whereas the 'sensation' of eating just seems to be a bit of twitching.
  • RE: The 'exercise', that's partly because Rimmer schedules himself a timetable including 'exercise'; presumably it's not something that he has to do, but it's something he timetables for himself as part of a routine. Of course, he just does it for appearances anyway, but in the Drill Sergeant Nasty episode, the replacement just strictly keeps him to it.
  • Speaking of Bodyswap: they had the ability to project a second hologram (Me²), Rimmer had the ability to take on other crewmembers' bodies and voices (Balance of Power), for that matter they could have just switched Rimmer off and switched a high-ranking crewmember on temporarily. Why did none of these things occur to them?
    • Holly says the self-destruct system checks the captain's voice and brain scan. Presumably, holograms don't have brain scans.
    • At that time, they were dealing with rewired electric circuits. If Lister ordering a chocolate bar and a milkshake started a self-destruct countdown, what could mucking about with the holograms do?
• In Timeslides, Lister goes back in time and prevents himself from going on Red Dwarf. But later in the series we see that going on Red Dwarf was what caused him to be born. Wouldn't this cause him to suddenly pop out of existence?
  • My theory is that he was totally incorrect, and that he got the time wrong, essentially stranding his only son in the past on false pretenses. A better question is why Rimmer's still on Red Dwarf when the others disappear.
    • Holly explains that, unlike Rimmer, all of the other crew members' existence depended on Lister coming aboard Red Dwarf. Without him, Frankenstein would never have been rescued from Mimas and become the mother of the cat people. Likewise, without Lister, Kryten would never have been convinced to leave the Nova 5. Only Rimmer and Holly were the only things unaffected by the time ripples.
  • Alternately, the universe that we're seeing in Red Dwarf is Universe Prime, from which all other possible universes after baby Lister is found under the pool table are offshoots. This leads us to some Fridge Brilliance in the Better Than Life novel where Holly says that Lister created the universe. Since Lister's interference with the time stream directly causes the existence of that particular universe, Holly is technically correct.
  • Or the Inquisitor of series 5 visits the alternative Lister (as in the one living on Earth, with the millionaire lifestyle paid for by the profits of inventing the Tension Sheet) and decides that he's abused and waste his life, so consequently deletes him and allows an alternative sperm to exist as David Lister, who ends up being the standard space bum Lister was anyway before he changed the past and became that millionaire, who ends up meeting Kochanski from her alternative universe, they have a baby, they go back in time and plant the baby under the pool table where Lister remembers being found, thus maintaining the circle of life, and the timeline is essentially normal again.
    • Although as the Inquisitor himself was wiped from existence everything he ever did would have also been undone. So he would have never wiped rich Lister from the universe but that would also mean that Slum Lister would have never destroyed the-OH no I've gone cross eyed!
• Why didn't Kryten's planned obsolescence thing activate in the three million years he was on the Nova 5?
  • The replacement (Hudzen 10) had to arrive first? Although I've noticed that prior to setting in stone a 3rd-millennium date of creation, Rimmer estimated the deaths of the Nova 5 crew at "centuries", and I believe Kryten said Hudzen had been chasing him for "thousands of years".
• Is there a name for the robot religion?
  • Probably something like Silicon-Evangelist or Electronism. There's no established name for it really, it could be anything.
  • It wouldn't really need a name. It's not much of a religion, in the normal sense. To robots, Robot Heaven's a simple fact. And to everyone else it's a nonsense. It's not a belief-system. It's just a belief.

Series 4

• What if a sociopath^[1] were to come under the mind probe? They wouldn't feel guilt, so they wouldn't be convicted of anything.
  • Although the point of the episode is that the Mind Probe is an inherently flawed way of apportioning justice, it seems to be more responsibility rather than just guilt that it picks up on. It it appears to scan and record memories IIRC -- Rimmer got convicted despite being smugly convinced that he was going to get through the Probe with flying colours ("I haven't so much as returned a library book late!"), while Lister gets exonerated despite clearly feeling guilty for the delinquent acts the Probe picks up on. The Probe picked up on Rimmer's memories and conviction that he was responsible, not (just) his feelings of guilt -- similarly, if dealing with a sociopath, it would presumably pick up on the sociopath's memories of having committed the offence and base it's judgement on that rather than just whether or not the person felt guilty about them.
  • But wasn't the reason that Lister could go through was that his crimes weren't violent and that he had served his time?
    • Lister does mention that there were other, similar offences that he wasn't punished for, but presumably in his case it was a combination of the non-violent nature of the offences and Lister's clear signs of remorse for them. Alternatively, the statute of limitations expired on Lister's theft charges (it's been three million years), while murder, intentional or otherwise, may not have a statue of limitations.
      • Lister has also been in stasis for 3 million years longer than he should have been, it's possible the Justice Computer views this as having served his time for these unknown crimes.

Series 5

• Why did no one ask the crew from Holoship what happened to Earth?
  • Because they wouldn't know Earth's ultimate fate, only what was going on when their ship was launched.
• Why doesn't the Inquisitor try to interview people at the end of their lives, when they have made all the contributions they can?
  • Presumably, the Inquisitor knows what will happen then, having survived until the end of time itself.
  • You question that, when it gets them to judge themselves: A massive egotist would pass with flying colours, but a martyr would fail horribly.
    • Arguably that's a problem inherent to the Inquisitor's methods regardless of when he interrogates his victims. One could make a case for the fact that the Inquisitor, as a simulant, has nothing but psychopathic contempt for mankind and doesn't care if his arbitrary means of judgement are fair, valid or sane. A timeline expunged of every human being with an inkling of personal doubt or critique, and inhabited solely by self-righteous egocentrics like The Cat sounds like an unwaking nightmare.
    • Inquisitor might not see this as a problem though. He might see it as the POINT. If a person is satisfied with their own lives, and happy with it, then there's no reason he should change it. No other measure of a 'well lived life' is more valid than seeing if the person themselves is happy. It might not be a nice world when he's finished doing that to everyone, but it's a plausible philosophy.
• In Demons & Angels, the copies of objects made by the Triplicator expire after about an hour. So supposing Lister (for example) eats the copied strawberries, wouldn't they vanish from inside his stomach when their time is up?
• In Back to Reality, they said that Rimmer could not blame his parents for his failures because he shared an upbringing with his younger, more successful half-brother. However, Rimmer already had more successful brothers that he shared an upbringing with (which they mention repeatedly as having been more successful, and the only time its mentioned how they all had mental breakdowns was in a deleted scene). A better line would have been about how Arnold Rimmer, the pathetic boil on the ass of humanity that he was, was even more successful than his alternate self.
  • There's plenty of implication in the series that Rimmer (Arnold) actually has 'evil parents' who essentially didn't give him the same upbringing as his brothers. Me² states explicitly that his brothers were sent to the academy but that they 'couldn't afford' to send Arnold.
  • Then why did Rimmer become suicidal in Back to Reality? He had no memory of his alledged life and the exact same thing could have applied.
    • Just wild speculation, but perhaps it's because Rimmer was the youngest of four brothers while his counterpart "Billy Doyle" was the elder of two half-brothers?
  • On that note, if Rimmer is so cowardly, how could anything he saw in his hallucinations make him commit suicide?
    • Some people think that suicide is selfish and cowardly. I hate those people but I have to admit, "selfish and cowardly" sums up Rimmer pretty well.
      • But the thing is, people kill themselves because they can't deal with life's problems. It's not life's problems that Rimmer's afraid of, it's death. I would think he'd rather go through almost anything than die.
        • Suicide and the tendencies that lead to it aren't really about 'bravery' in the sense of overcoming a fear of death, per say; it's more about being reduced to such a low, depressive point that death literally seems like the preferable option when placed opposite continuing on living.
  • This may be explained by differences in personality. The three elder brothers (and Ace Rimmer, for that matter) were probably motivated enough to succeed despite their upbringing, not because of anything their parents did. Arnold on the other hand kept writing things off as being really his parents' fault, and just coasted through life never taking responsibility for his actions, and never truly bettering himself.
  • Maybe it's what Kryten didn't mention about Rimmer's situation/hallucination that drove him to despair. The fact that he was on the run from the fascist police with a "murderer, a mass murderer and a nerd" certainly dashes any hopes he has of his ultimate ambition of becoming an officer.
    • The ink isn't just an hallucinogen it's also a depressant, I always assumed it was that that pushed him to try and commit suicide rather than than his hithertoo mild in comparison halucination. He's more of a phycologial screw up tha the rest of the crew anyway.
  • Consider Kryten's exact words; "He shared an upbringing with you [Lister], his richer, more important half-brother." There's two things happening here:
    
    Firstly, there's the obvious level of Rimmer's Freudian Excuse; the thing he always uses to justify his failings and uselessness is that if he'd had a different life, with different parents, and a different upbringing, he'd be a success. The hallucination gave him a different upbringing, different parents, a different brother. Result? He's still a useless fuck-up, perhaps even more so, and his brother's still more of a success. It's not necessarily the fact that his brother's still more successful than him that causes his despair, it's that he no longer has that excuse to fall back on -- the hallucination is telling him that it doesn't matter where he comes from or who his parents are or what his brother does, he's inherently a useless and pathetic loser and he always will be.
    
    As well as that, however, it's not just anyone who's positioned as more successful than him here. It's Lister. He could, as noted above, probably deal with someone else being more successful than him, since he's used to it. Lister, however, is the one person out of everyone who Rimmer's always been able to look down upon. Lister is the one person he's ever had any kind of authority over (albeit by exactly one rung on the totem pole and not-withstanding the fact that Lister doesn't care about the totem pole anyway), and who, by his standards, is even more small, insignificant and pathetic than Rimmer himself is, and who has an even worse life than him. In the world of the hallucination, however, he doesn't even have that any more; even Lister, of all people, is more successful than him in this new world. Worse still, give Lister the same upbringing as Rimmer, and while Rimmer remains a total loser, Lister takes what he's given and makes a success of his life (by Rimmer's standards anyway, and this is his part of the hallucination we're discussing). Thus reenforcing the fact that for all Rimmer's whining, it's not his upbringing or his past that's to blame for the way he is and how his life turned out; it's just him. Not only is Rimmer being confronted with the fact that his Freudian Excuse is utterly worthless, but that Lister -- the one person he's ever been able to measure himself against and come out superior to by his standards -- is a fundamentally better person than him. Result? Complete despair.

Series 6

• If Psirens need to eat brains, what have they been eating for the last three million years?
  • Maybe they don't need to eat that often?
  • Maybe they've been eating Gelf brains? Who says it needs to be human brains?
  • Whoever said they need to eat brains? Maybe they just like the taste.
• How come the crew's future selves in Out of Time attack and attempt to kill them? Couldn't they just knock them out and steal what they need from the Time Drive, or even capture them if needed?
  • They'd probably still have a chance in stopping them from their luxurious lifestyle if left alive, most likely.
  • The future crew attacked the present crew not with the intention of destroying them, but rather disabling them in order to board and take the time drive. Future crew simply failed to take into account the upgrades they had added to Starbug during the intervening years, and had also forgotten quite how poor a condition Present Starbug was in.
  • As for knocking them out, the future crew are quite aged and elderly while the present crew, while perhaps not exemplars of human physical perfection, are still younger, fresher and in all up better shape; they would probably lose a face-to-face confrontation, but have an advantage in the upgraded Starbug, which is what they're using.

Series 7

• Several nitpicks from re-watching Ouroboros
  • In the alternate reality where Lister died and Kochanski was the one put in stasis, why was Lister of all people bought back as a hologram? Holly stated that the reason Rimmer was bought back as a hologram was to keep Lister sane, and because he was the one person he had exchanged the most words with. Surely Holly would have bought back one of Kochanski's friends, or 'Tim' instead of Lister?
  • In the AU Lister and Kochanski never broke up (by that point the Prime Universe had been retconned so their relationship was a fling that Lister never got over), so it would make sense that Holly would revive her One True Love. Alternatively, in 'our' universe Holly brought Rimmer back as winding him up was the best way to keep Lister sane. It's made pretty explicit that Kochanski enjoys controlling people (or at least seeing them unhappy), so in her universe Lister - a unrepentant slob - would provide her with the optimum amount of "improvement" to inflict to keep her sane.
    • Keep in mind that AU Lister is, among other things, gay. It's possible that in the AU, he was good friends with Kochanski.
    • I thought that AU Lister being gay was a lie Kochanski told to help Lister's claustrophobia?
    • In the primary (and no doubt in the secondary) timeline, Holly is clearly computer senile by that point and not really thinking things through clearly; the 'keep Lister sane' justification is (in the novels at least, although I'm sure it's implied in the TV series somewhere) is on some level a function of Holly's capabilities not being 100% -- after all, word-count alone isn't exactly the best factor in determining who is the best person to spend eternity with. In the alternative timeline, he probably had some kind of warped logic for bringing back Kochanski's ex just as he had the same logic for bringing back Lister's loathed bunkmate which he justified under the same excuse. And IIRC the 'gay' story was indeed just a tale Kochanski spun to take Lister's mind off things.
  • How on earth did Lister work out that he was his own father just from seeing a box with 'Ouroboros' on it? I can understand that he would make a connection with that and the box he was found in, but where did the rest of it come from? And why does no-one question what he's going on about?
    • Being Genre Savvy for Squick, for one.
    • He may literally be "Barely Human," and thus his abnormal genetics may have been caused by him being his own father.
• Where did AU Lister come from? His parents, I mean.
  • His parents were also Lister and Kochanski. Folowing "Dimension Jump"'s logic, Lister and AU!Lister were one and the same man until their paths diverged at some point.
• If the people who found Lister's box thought it said, "Our Rob or Ros(s)", why wasn't he given one of those names?
  • Maybe they just didn't like the names.
  • Because it's reasonable enough to assume the contents of the box belong to "Our Rob or Ross" rather than containing a person called Rob or Ross.

Series 8

Back to Earth

• At the start, Rimmer mans the sonar (because he's a coward) while the rest go to fight a giant squid. Sounds fine, Rimmer is never going to put his own life in danger, especially when there is some at all legitimate reason not to. However, once the mission starts, Rimmer just blindly ignores the sonar and the crew, nearly getting them all killed. Rimmer is a total smeghead, but a man who kept taking the officers test enough times that his mother thinks he's an admiral cannot be accused of not trying.
  • Yes he can. The first season firmly established that pretty much every time he cheated--the first episode shows him writing answers on his body, another shows him taking memory pills. If you ask me, ignoring the sonar is out-of-character for a completely different reason: Rimmer may be a goit, but even he wouldn't stand by and do nothing while his friends suffered if there was nothing for him in it.
  • Yes, but compare his behavior in Back to Earth, Part 1 to the series 1 episode Confidence and Paranoia, where he is visibly panicking that Lister is hurt. He does care about the other Boys from the Dwarf, he just cares about himself more.
  • He's also seen doing almost exactly the same thing at the beginning of Quarantine, when the crew are radioing him for help and he's pretending like he can't hear them.
    • It's not like he could have helped them in Quarantine if he'd gone to them he'd just have got the virus. My reasoning for Rimmer's out of character behaviour in Back to Earth is that it's yet another version of Rimmer in that ep. Thus far we've had the original Rimmer who was killed in the accident, original hologram Rimmer who left to become Ace in series 7, nano Rimmer in series 8 and now this new holgram who has memories of nano and original hologram Rimmer. And that's without counting his copies, clones or parallel universe selves.
    • Also, remember that in the Quarantine example, Rimmer is majorly pissed off with the others (a lot more so than usual) for trying to recruit another hologram despite his unusually, though still not entirely, valid objections about how this would affect him (there was a very real chance [from his point of view, anyway] that he might get permenantly deactivated in favour of the new member). Note how he mocks the other by sarcastically (though they don't know that) repeating their own arguments. Still dickish, even by his standards, but justifably so.
    • They're in danger for their lives and he's mocking them and refusing to offer them any kind of help, however little, out of nothing more than pique. It's only 'justifiable' if you happen to be a majorly petty, self-obsessed and spiteful person.
      • Which pretty much perfectly describes Arnold Rimmer!
  • There's a reason Rimmer had to take the officer's exam so many times; he's a total incompetent. It's been part of his character since day one that if you put him in charge of something, he'll usually find some way to screw it up.

Novels

• In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, the amount of supervision given to a nuclear reactor was criminally little. They were counting on a red light to turn on (which it didn't), and three warning blips on a random navigation officer's screen (which he ignored due to a coffee spill). There was absolutely nobody monitoring the cooling system when it stopped functioning, which then allowed the reactor to reach critical mass and leak radiation, killing everyone. While this makes more sense than the original explanation of giving the job to Rimmer (absurd by any definition given his repeated incompetence), it still feels like No OSHA Compliance was stretched to breaking point.
  • This fits in nicely with the background Running Gag of Red Dwarf, as well as Britcom overall, that everything in their universe is utterly terrible, the crews are incompetent and the ships are held together with duct tape. It was largely a deliberate reaction to hyper stylised (mostly) US Sci-Fi shows. Nobody ever showed up to work with the sniffles or a Hangover on The Enterprise, which is was arguably the most unrealistic element of a show where people regularly broke light speed and had sex with aliens.
    • It's also somewhat Truth in Television. The Americans made several successful manned trips to the moon, while the British sent a glorified RC car to Mars ... and it crashed. Typing "Sellafield Breach Of Security" into Google returns almost 300,000 results.

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1. ↑ Someone with ASP