Arnold J. Rimmer
Arnold Judas Rimmer is a fictional character in the British science fiction comedy series Red Dwarf, played by Chris Barrie.
His character traits include anal-retentiveness, adherence to protocol and rank, cowardice, inflated ego (for example, The Rimmer Experience) and shakiness around women - he only had sexual intercourse once in his life with Yvonne McGruder for twelve minutes. He had one true friend Porky Roebuck, who betrayed Rimmer in a Space Scouts survival course and was the ringleader of ten boys who planned to eat Rimmer. Porky bagsied his right buttock.
He was brought up as the youngest of four brothers. His parents were both very abusive and nasty, and his father (who was rejected from the Space Corps for being an inch below regulation height) was fixated on his sons getting into the Space Corps, to the extent that he made them answer astronavigation questions for food and stretch them on a rack to make them taller. They were "Seventh Day Advent Hoppists", meaning they believed that every Sunday should be spent hopping (it was due to a misprint in their copy of the Bible, making a passage read "Faith Hop and Charity, and the greatest of these is Hop"). By the age of 14 Rimmer had had enough and divorced his parents, but he still left school early to join the Space Corps.
Despite his ambition, he had only achieved the rank of Second Technician -- the second-lowest rank on the Red Dwarf, outranking only Rimmer's nemesis, Third Technician Dave Lister.
He has tried to pass the exam to become an officer 13 times, each time failing (on one occasion he had a panic attack and ended up writing the phrase "I AM A FISH" 400 times on his answer sheet before doing a dance and fainting). His last words before he died were "Gazpacho Soup!" referring to a horrifying memory when he demanded at the captain's table that his gazpacho soup be taken away and brought back hot.
He was killed by a radiation leak in the first episode of the series (which he himself caused by misreparing a drive plate), and subsequently appears in the form of a hologrammatic simulation created by the ship's computer, Holly, as company for Lister, the only member of the crew to survive the disaster.
He is the worst companion a person could have and at first glance would appear to be the worst person to keep Lister sane, but Lister once acknowledged that "driving Rimmer nuts is what keeps me going".
He once managed to make a copy of himself to keep him company, but it turned out that the two Rimmers despised each other and the duplicate was switched off. At one point, while passing through the penal colony Justice World, Rimmer's mind was read and he was found guilty of the deaths of all the crew members of Red Dwarf (1,167 people) and was sentenced to 9,328 years in prison. He managed to be found not guilty, his case being that he only felt responsible due to his ego.
Rimmer also has an alternate universe counterpart, Ace Rimmer, who is a dashing, babe-magnet stud-muffin nonchalant hero -- the exact opposite. Ace Rimmer's total personality difference to Arnold Rimmer boils down to being kept back a year in school. Ace was kept back, and learnt to fight back and stand up for himself, while Arnold was passed through and never learnt how.
In Series 7, Rimmer, surprisingly, became the new Ace Rimmer, and left to explore the multiverse. It is not known how got on. In Series 8 the crew, including Rimmer, were rebuilt by nanobots. Lister, who had grown almost friendly towards the hologrammatic Rimmer over the years, summed up the new version with "Oh, smeg. It's you the way you used to be."
His surname comes from a snobby prefect who went to the Red Dwarf creators' school. But only the boy's name was taken, not his personality.
