The Story: This is an SOS distress call from the mining ship Red Dwarf. The crew are dead, killed by a radiation leak. The only survivors were Dave Lister, who was in suspended animation during the disaster, and his pregnant cat, who was safely sealed in the hold. Revived three million years later, Lister's only companions are a life form who evolved from his cat, and Arnold Rimmer, a hologram simulation of one of the dead crew.
The Crew: Lister Rimmer Cat Holly Kryten Kochanski
Occupation: Was Third Technician, now Space Bum
Race: Human (barely)
Born: Unknown; assumed to be somewhere close to the Liverpool, as
he was found in a box under a table Aigburth Arms in in
the pool room
Status: Single; last human alive
Favourite food: Curry
Favourite drink: Beer
Best Friend: The Cat
Favourite Music: Rastabilly Skank
Favourite Book: Rimmer's Diary
Favourite Film: It's a Wonderful Life
Favourite Term of abuse: Smeghead
Ambition: To get back to Earth / To have a relationship with
Christine Kochanski
Life and Lister did not at all hit it off well, right from the beginning. Found under a pool table in a box, Lister was abandoned as a baby and brought up by relatives. He attended art college but decided the hectic work schedule was ridiculous: lectures first thing in the afternoon!? Lister took a job as a trolley attendant in a car park, a job which he held for ten years before giving it up because he didn't want to get tied down to a career. On his 24th birthday his mates get him completely drunk and he wakes up in a MacDonalds on Mimas, one of the moons of Saturn. Trying to get his fare together for the return trip to Earth, Lister takes a job as a hopper-driver, essentially a cabbie, and it is during this time that he is to meet the man who will completely change his life, essentially by losing his: Arnold J. Rimmer.
Lister meets Rimmer as he ferries him to a brothel, though the man, heavily disguised with a false moustache and calling himself Christopher Todd-Hunter, declares he thought the place was a restaurant. Lister has been thinking of joining the Space Corps, and with Rimmer's somewhat unwilling help he applies and is accepted for a tour of duty aboard the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel, Red Dwarf. He goes in as a Third Technician, and remains at that level: the captain regards his promotion prospects as "none" (however, in the case of the aforementioned Rimmer, the comment is "comical"). Lister is assigned to Z Shift, which just so happens to be headed by the aforementioned Rimmer, who is less than pleased to have Lister on his team (in fact, he is less than pleased to have Lister on the ship!), but makes up for it by making snide remarks, and taking every single opportunity to put his subordinate on report whenever he can. Rimmer and Lister also bunk together, (not out of choice, you can be sure!), and while Rimmer pores over his astro-navigation revision Lister tells him of his five-year plan, to buy land on Fiji and settle down there with Christine Kochanski, there to raise sheep and cows. He says he will get the land very cheap because most of the island is three feet underwater.
When it is discovered that Lister has smuggled aboard a non-quarantined animal, a female cat called Frankenstein, who is in fact pregnant, he opts to be sealed in a stasis booth for eighteen months rather than turn the cat over to the ship's labs. When he emerges from stasis, Lister is told by Holly, the ship's tenth-generation AI computer, that everyone on board the ship is dead, due to a massive radiation leak, and he had in fact had to remain in the stasis booth for three million years, while the radioactivity in the ship's atmosphere fell to acceptable levels. Rather staggered by this news, Lister is even less pleased to find that the one person whom Holly has brought back to keep him company is Rimmer!
Every member of Red Dwarf had had, before the voyage, their personality imprinted on a computer slug, which could, in the event of their death, be used to reinitialise the personality and confer it on a hologramatic representation of that person: a hologram for short. That hologram would have the same memories, feelings, desires and drives of the person whose personality it contained, but being nothing more than a computer simulation made up entirely of light, they would be unable to touch anything, and no-one or nothing could touch them. In effect, they would be as substantial as a ghost. Red Dwarf is capable of sustaining only one hologram, and it would of course have been expected to be ship's procedure that the person most important to the ship that died would be brought back as a hologram; should someone less important be already occupying the single hologram disk, then the more important person would takeover their runtime.
In this case, of course, there was no need for seniority or importance. When Holly, who is capable of piloting the massive ship through the immeasurable vastness of space, had been considering a companion for Lister when he had to let him out, he had picked, in his opinion, the one who would best help Lister survive going insane. That person had been Arnold J. Rimmer.
The two pick up their non-friendship where they had left off: everything Lister does irritates Rimmer, and Lister thinks Rimmer is a complete git (which he is). Despite the fact that they have a five-mile ship and all the berths on it to choose from, Lister and Rimmer bunk together again: they may hate each other, but the corridors of Red Dwarf still echo with the ghostly, half-heard voices of the people he and Lister had once shared the ship with: people they had seen, talked to, touched, pushed past, shouted angrily at, made passes at, saluted to and bumped into in these selfsame corridors. Now, they could walk from one end of the mighty vessel to the other and not encounter a single living soul.
However, what neither of them know is that Frankenstein, Lister's cat, had been safely sealed in the hold at the time of the accident, and her descendants have been happily breeding there for three million years. They have evolved beyond mere quadrupeds, and have attained the power of speech, the ability to walk on two legs, and supercool fashion sense! In short, they have become a humanoid species, and Lister and Rimmer encounter the only survivor of their race aboard Red Dwarf, whom Lister calls, with stunning originality, Cat.
Lister's twin goals in life are to get back to Earth, and to somehow have a relationship with Kochanski. The fact that a) they are three million miles from the first and b) the second is dead does not deter him. He learns from the Holy Books that the Cat brings to him that he is the god of the Cat people, who know him as Cloister the Stupid! When they rescue Kryten, the service mechanoid from the doomed Nova 5, it is Lister who pushes the droid to break his programming, thus sending him off on a voyage of discovery that is not to last very long, as some time later Lister finds the mangled remains of his spacebike, which he had let Kryten take, smashed on an asteroid, and he has to repair the damaged android. However the Kryten he brings back is somewhat different to the original.
Travelling to a parallel universe, Lister encounters his female opposite, and after having sex with her finds that he is pregant! He has two sons, but they grow up too fast and so in order that they do not die Lister returns to the parallel universe and leaves Jim and Bexley with their mother. He is later prevailed upon by Rimmer to swap bodies with him, the deal being that Rimmer will occupy Lister's body for two weeks and get it fit again, but this is not what happens and Lister's body barely survives death at the hands of the unhinged hologram. When Kryten discovers a way of allowing them to travel backwards in time to any place of which they have a photograph, Lister goes back to his own past and convinces his younger self, who is fronting his first band, Smeg and the Heads to invent the Tension Sheet, and so becomes a multi-millionaire, avoiding ever joining the Space Corps. His luxurious lifestyle is short-lived though when Rimmer tries to do the same with his younger self, and only succeeds in realigning the timelines, sending Lister back to Red Dwarf.
Lister is changed into a chicken, a hamster and a tiny robocop-type man by the Transmogrifier, and plays pool with planets when Holly sets up an elaborate plan to stop a time-dilation effect caused by a White Hole. He tells his friends that he used to be called Dave "Cinzano Bianco" Lister, because once he was on a table, you couldn't get him off! After he successfully pots the planet as planned, Lister refers to himself as Pool God, King of the Cues, and Prince of the Planet Potters. Rimmer, however, has another name for him: jammy goit! Ace Rimmer, who comes from an alternate dimension, refers to him as "Skipper", after mistakenly taking him for "Spanners", the Lister in his dimension.
Along with Kryten, Lister is erased from
Time itself by The Inquisitor, but manages to trick the android
into destroying itself. The fact that Lister believes he can play
the guitar when in fact he couldn't do so to save his life is the
deciding factor when his body is duplicated by a psiren, which
reading Lister's mind believes it can play guitar, and
does, thus proving not to be the real Lister. In the finale to
the series (so far) it is revealed that Lister has been involved
in some horrific accident, which has left him as nothing more
than a brain in a jar. Rimmer would no doubt remark, with a snide
look on his hologramatic face: "Well, it would have to be a
very small jar, wouldn't it?"
Occupation: Was Second Technician, now Dead Git
Race: Human
Born: Io
Status: Dead : Hologram
Favourite drink: Sancerre
Best Friend: Rachel (but she has a puncture)
Favourite Music: Mantovani
Favourite Book: Napoleon's War Diaries
Favourite Term of abuse: Goit
Ambition: To meet some aliens and get a real body / To have sex /
To become an officer
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.
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!
Rimmer and Kryten end up in another parallel Earth, this time one where time goes backwards, and earn themselves something of a reputation as The Sensational Reverse Brothers, before their promising career is cut short. Marooned on an ice planet with Lister, Rimmer tells his compatriot that he once used hypno-therapy to have himself regressed to a past life, and discovered that he was once Alexander the Great's chief eunuch! During the time they spend together as they wait for a seemingly hopeless rescue, it comes to light that Rimmer has in his camphorwood chest over £24,000 in notes, priceless (as they are now the only copies left) books, and a collection of hand-carved Napoleonic miniatures. The money, books and soldiers all go to feed the fire which is keeping Lister alive, and Rimmer is less than happy when he discovers that, far from burning, as he thought, his guitar, Lister has in fact cut out the shape of the guitar from Rimmer's chest and burned that! When they discover how easy it is to switch personalities, Rimmer badgers Lister into allowing him to occupy his body for two weeks, with the intention of getting it fit again. However, not having had a solid body for 3,000,002 years, Rimmer snaps and when Lister regains control of his own body Rimmer steals it back, taking Starbug and almost killing Lister's body in the process!
When Lister reorganises the timelines so that he never joins Red Dwarf but instead invents the Tension Sheet and becomes mega-rich, Rimmer, left facing the prospect of life alone with Holly, tries to sort it so that he and not Lister invents the Tension Sheet, but he only succeeds in putting things back the way they were originally. Sentenced by the Justice Computer to a total servitude of 9,328 years for his believed culpability for the deaths of all aboard Red Dwarf, Rimmer is saved from this fate by Kryten, who presents a case that proves beyond all doubt that there is no way in hell anyone with an ounce of sense would put Rimmer in charge of anything important, much less the safety of the ship. Some time later, Rimmer meets his double from yet another dimension, this being the universally-liked, brave and courageous Ace Rimmer. Arnold hates him on sight, as he is a reminder to him of what he could have achieved. It turns out that the only difference between the two is that Ace was held back a year in school, and this made him buckle down and determine to do well.
Rimmer finally realises his destiny (or so he thinks), when transporting to a world where wax-droids fight a war against one another, he takes over the leadership of those deemed "the forces of good", and leads them into battle. Unfortunately, he manages to wipe out not only the bad ones but his own small army as well. Little wonder, with strategies like "We attack tomorrow, under cover of daylight!" But when they encounter a holoship, crewed by top-flight holograms, Arnie is in his element! He petitions the captain to let him join, but has to battle another crew member for that privilege. He uses a mind patch, but this goes wrong and he declares that he will withdraw from the contest, defeated. His opponent, however, is Nirvana Crane, with whom he has fallen in love, and she withdraws herself to let him win. When he discovers what has happened though, Rimmer uncharacteristically gives it all up to allow Crane be reinstated --- and no-one more surprised than himself!
Left alone on a psi-moon while Kryten is incapacitated, Rimmer is taken before the Unspeakable One, which is a manifestation of his own self-loathing. The entire planetoid has reconfigured itself to mirror his own personality, and has created such things as The Swamp of Despair and The Chasm of Hopelessness. Rimmer is rescued by his mates who pretend they like him, in order to get off the moon. He contracts a holovirus and goes completely mad, imprisoning his friends in quarantine and turning off their oxygen. In his holovirus-enhanced state, Arnie is capable of telekinesis and hex-vision, a powerful form of psi weapon. He is eventually defeated (along with his friend, the glove puppet Mister Flibble!) just before the virus would have taken his life.
When they meet Legion, the ancient creation of some of the most brilliant minds in history, Rimmer is given a hardlight body, this being a hologrammatic form that can touch and be touched, allows him to eat, taste, feel but makes him almost impervious to harm. Despite this, Kryten runs a routine check on him and finds that he is suffering from a hologrammatic version of nervous disorder. He is instructed to take things very easy, but this is not helped when he is catapulted into a wormhole and emerges on an uninhabited planet, light years from anywhere. Having successfully created a clone of himself, Rimmer is soon overrun by more clones, all of whom are using his basic cowardice, snideness, sarcasm and treachery as the template for what they consider normal behaviour. Rimmerworld is born, and the original Rimmer left to rot in a cell until his friends come to find him, 557 years later! Rimmer does however in the end reveal that there is a spark of decency and courage in him when, when faced with the prospect of fighting their future selves in a battle for Starbug, and hopelessly outclassed by the latter, he declares that they should fight. As he says: "Better dead than smeg!"
When the charismatic Ace Rimmer comes on board Starbug, Arnie is concerned: "We're down to our last three thousand vomit bags!" he declares, shaking his head. "It'll never be enough!" Ace, it transpires though, is dying. In point of fact he is a hardlight hologram, and not the original Ace which the crew met in Dimension Jump: the story is further related in the profile on Ace. He wishes Arnie to take over as guardian of the universe, a position at which Rimmer scoffs, but eventually, goaded to it by Lister, he accepts and with the help of his old friend settles into the role. Eventually, Ace having died and Lister having convinced the crew that what stands before them is not the sad shell of a man that they used to know as their crewmate (or, as the Unspeakable One put it, "That walking vomit-stain that the world knows as Arnold Rimmer"), but the dashing, brave and handsome Ace, Rimmer, having sat through his eulogy and watched his funeral, bids the boys farewell and leaves to take up his new post.
This episode, Stoke me a clipper, shows for the first time a soark of decency in Rimmer, as he stares out at all the thousands (millions?) of previous Rimmers who have held the post of Ace Rimmer, and declares "All those Rimmers!" Lister looks at them, and says "They all did it. They all passed on the flame. Are you going to be the one who breaks the chain?" And we finally see the humanity, the compassion and the belief in Arnold Rimmer that he can finally make a difference, be appreciated in the world. Somehow, it looks like the man we knew will be nothing like we remembered when he returns!
Again, the scene in which Arnold Rimmer is remembered, spoken of and posthumously promoted to First Officer by Lister, and then taken to his final resting place with all the other Rimmers, is enough to bring a tear to the most jaded eye. The scene is, typically, lightened by the presence of Rachel, the inflatable sex-doll, whom Lister solemnly refers to as Rimmer's widow (and yes, she is dressed in black)! And that is the last we see of Rimmer, but for his finest hour to date, when in a dream he returns to Lister, seeming to have lightened up, learned to have fun, and even kisses Lister! Worried by the suddenly good memories he is having of his old bunkmate, Lister seesks Kryten's help, and the mechanoid constructs The Rimmer Experience (You have to check out Kathy Park's hilarious Rimmer Experience tour, which depicts Rimmer as he believed he was: a leader, a hardened space adventurer to whom the others looked to in times of crisis, and who always knew what to do no matter the situation. Rimmer sings The Rimmer Song, the lyrics of which follow, showing exactly what type of man Arnold Judas Rimmer believed he was, no matter how others saw him. We can only look forward to his return in season eight!
If you're in trouble he
will save the day
He's brave and fearless, come what may
Without him the mission would go astray
He's Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimmer
Without him life would be much grimmer
He's trim and slim and no-one's slimmer
He will never need a zimmer
He's Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimmer
More reliable than a garden strimmer
He's never been mistaken for Yul Brynner
He's not bald and his head doesn't glimmer
Master of the wit and
the repartee
His command of Space Directives is uncanny
How come he's such a genius? Don't ask me
Ask Arnold, Arnold,
Arnold Rimmer
He's also a fantastic swimmer
And if you play your cards right then he just might
Come round to dinner!
Occupation: Most Handsome Guy On Ship
Race: Felis sapiens
Born: On Red Dwarf
Status: Alive
Favourite food: Crispies
Favourite drink: Milk
Best Friend: Himself, or at a stretch, Lister
Favourite Term of abuse: Anything he can call Rimmer
Ambition: To one day have sex
When Lister smuggled aboard Red Dwarf a black female cat who was pregnant, he unknowingly laid the foundations for a whole new lifeform. Safely sealed in the hold when the lethal radiation dose swept through the ship, killing all on board, Frankenstein bred on, her descendants giving birth to a race of humanoid cats, which eventually over the course of three million years evolved into felis sapiens, the Cat race. Following the teachings of the one they knew as Cloister, their god, the Cats warred among each other for centuries, until finally they took off in separate space arks, each to seek out the promised land of Fushi alluded to in their sacred texts. Left behind with the old and the infirm, those unfit to travel, the being who is now the only known survivor of felis sapiens was born to a cripple and an idiot, and when they died he was left alone to fend for himself. When Lister is released from stasis he and Rimmer come across the creature, who thereafter bears the name simply of Cat, or The Cat.
All the characteristics of the domestic housecat are evident in this creature: he is vain, arrogant, suits himself, cares for no-one and believes himself quite unshakably to be the centre of the universe. He has great taste in clothes, wearing a new flashy suit every day, and like a real cat has to nap and be fed. His lifelong ambition is to find another cat (or indeed anything!) and have sex with it, and he constantly refutes Lister's claim that there are no other cats on board the mighty ship. It comes to light that Lister and Cloister are in fact one and the same: Lister is their god. The Cat, of course, laughs at the idea, asking Lister "the ulimate question: if you're God, why that face?" It is true, though: Lister's plan to settle down on Fiji has been translated by the Cat scribes as Fushi, and the Holy Book the Cat brings him even shows a drawing of a man in stasis, which the Cat tells him is Cloister, suspended in time. "He gave of his life that we might live", he quotes. Lister doesn't push the issue; he is far more concerned with the horror and destruction his supposed prophecy to the Cats has wrought. Reading on through the Holy Book in the cat manner (by sniffing scents impregnated into the paper), he learns that for hundreds of years the Cats warred over what colour paper hats they would wear when they reached Fushi! He learned that they took his lifestyle as their scred commandments: It is a sin to be cool, Wear the Holy Custard Stains, and anyone who refused to eat hotdogs on Fushi day was stoned to death with stale buns!
When Lister later goes to look for the Cat, who has disappeared into the bowels of the ship, he finds living there an old Cat priest, who has lost his faith in Cloister. Lister, appearing as what the priest would see as his god, restores his faith and tells him that it was all for something, just before he dies.
Evidence of how little the Cat thinks of anyone is shown in the next episode, when Lister falls ill, and literally collapses in the corridor. The Cat, coming across him, squats down and says "Hey monkey! You're sick! If I wasn't your friend, I'd steal your shoes!" and then goes off in search of food. When Rimmer comes looking for him to help him, as he can't lift Lister, being a hologram, the Cat won't leave his lunch, and when Rimmer demands "What is more important? A man's life or your smegging lunch?" the Cat replies "That doesn't even deserve an answer!" The Cat is so desperate to "get his end away" that when the crew rush to the rescue of the three women aboard the Nova 5 he puts his arm around one of the decaying skeletons and says "Hey c'mon guys! So they're a little on the thin side!" In Better Than Life, he ends up with not one, but two girlfriends: Marilyn Monroe and a mermaid called Miranda. Served in an exclusive restaurant with a tank of live goldfish, he answers the question as to whether he would not rather have the fish cooked with "No thank you! I like my food to move!" Trying to console people is not the Cat's forte! Having blundered in by walking (well, slinking in, really) on Lister and Rimmer as the former consoles the latter about the death of his father, the Cat says he just has to eat! Lister shushes him, telling him Rimmer's father has died, and the Cat, looking puzzled, says "I'd prefer chicken!" Then, as he tries to comfort Rimmer, his effort consists of "Your father's in the ground now, and that's bad news for him, sure. But on the other hand, it's party time for all the little worms!"
In Stasis Leak, the Cat gets his first look at real women, and confides to Lister: "I've never been this close to a woman before. It makes me want to do something, but I don't know what! But whatever it is, I want to do a lot of it!" He, along with everyone else, is forced to work for his food when Queeg takes over Red Dwarf, and worries about his naps. "I have to work the whole day? The whole entire day? What about my naps? I'm a cat: I need to nap. If I don't have nine or ten naps in a day, I don't have enough energy for my main snooze!" He tries to help Holly as the AI battles Queeg 500 for control of Red Dwarf in a game of chess, advising him "I think I see a pattern. Every time you make a move, he makes a move!" When they travel to a Parallel Universe where Lister, Rimmer and Holly all meet female counterparts of themselves, the Cat is delighted! At last he will get to have sex, and what's even better, it will be with himself! However, it's not to be, as his counterpart turns out to be a dog!
The Cat is always fashion-conscious. When Lister makes to take Starbug into a time hole to rescue Rimmer and Kryten, the Cat says they can't, pointing out: "Orange with this suit?" When his leg is broken and threatens to go septic, he muses "Green with peach? I think I could pull that off!" His life is littered with examples of his sacrificing all to follow fashion trends and keep himself the most gorgeous guy on board the ship (not hard!). When he and Lister are captured by the waxdroids he says he doesn't want to wear an outfit with little arrows, and he even makes his own tailored spacesuit to avoid mussing his hair! The Cat's narcissistic nature takes a cruel turn when. on encountering the Polymorph, he has all of his vanity sucked out of him by the emotional vampire, and lets his dress sense go to the dogs, dressing like a tramp and swigging whiskey out of a bottle in a paper bag, believing himself of no interest to anyone, including himself. He sneers at Lister's request to borrow his body to track Rimmer, who has fled with his own body, with "Would you let a garbage truck driver drive your Rolls Royce?" He has the tables turned on him though, when Rimmer appropriates his body while he is asleep! He is then wiped out from existence entirely when Lister alters the timelines, doesn't join the Space Corps and as a result never rescues Frankenstein, in effect ensuring that the entire Cat race are never born. And when they throw a farewell party for Kryten, the Cat gives him a special present: an earring he has never liked!
He finally gets to meet himself when Kryten rescues Camille, a pleasure GELF, who appears to everyone as their perfect fantasy. Not surprisingly, the Cat sees himself as his ideal lover, and so it is he whom he meets when he goes to see the person of his dreams! When the crew encounter the despair squid, the Cat believes he has been turned into Duane Dibley, a geek with absolutely no class, no looks and teeth the druids could use as a place of worship! Life for him has no meaning, and he is ready to end it all. Having survived through this once, he again has to go through it when the crew are stalked by an Emohawk, and the most handsome guy on the ship becomes once again the most nerdy guy. This is nothing, however, to how he sees himself when the crew encounter their future selves. The Cat's plaintive wail is "What happened to my butt? You could park a car in that crease!"
Unfortunately, the contribution the Cat makes to season seven is, to be fair, negligible, and there's little as a result that we can add here to his profile, except when he talks of being fairly stupid, which he says comes as a result of his being the last of his race left on the ship, and having to teach himself everything. Since he knew nothing to start off with, as he says "Lessons were slow and difficult, especially on Wednesdays, when I had double-Nothing!" He is less than impressed with Kryten's choice of food when they arrive on 20th-century Earth, whining "I have to floss a dead person out of my teeth!" He takes immediately to Kochanski when she joins the crew, not surprisingly: she is a woman! He refers to her as Officer Bud Babe, or Officer BB for short. She of course is not impressed by his advances, and rebuffs him almost as totally as she does Lister. He admits shock at the "death" of Rimmer, declaring "I was only insulting him this morning!" Before Ace dies however, he makes sure to get the name of his hairdresser, which just reinforces his superficial personality, which he has, after all, never denied or made excuses for.
However, it is he who detects the backwash in the ducts of Starbug as the crew go crawling through them to try to get to the sabotaged generator, and thus in a real way saves their lives. He contrasts this with his insensitive treatment of Lister's claustrophobia, going on about how cramped the duct is, and not helping the situation at all. When Lister waxes fondly about his days with Rimmer, he advises Kryten to prepare the rubber room! He watches Rimmer give him dress advice in The Rimmer Experience, and nearly has a coronary on the spot! He is in his element however when Kochanski takes them to Jane Austen World, which he tells Lister happily is "Chick City, bud!" When he and Kochanski are disguised as gelfs later on in that same episode, he is his usual helpful self, forgetting he is supposed to speak gelf, and not human, and nearly gives the game away.
Even when Lister loses his arm in Epideme he is his usual self, going to Lister on his awakening from having his arm cut off, and offering the hand which has been cut off as he tries to shake hands with Lister. Later he tries to comfort him, but the basis of his "comfort" is that Lister was ugly to begin with, so why is he worried that now that he has only one arm women won't want him? Hey, they never would have in the first place! He does have the last word in the season though, as he flies Starbug towards the now-reconstructed Red Dwarf, which somehow seems MUCH larger than he remembers.... As he shakes his head and declares "Uh, guys? I think we have a problem..." I can only hope that his contribution to season eight will be better written.
Occupation: Red Dwarf Ship's AI Computer
Born: n/a
Status: Active, if a little senile
Best Friend: Lister, maybe
Favourite Music: Holrock
Favourite Book: Agatha Christie novels
Favourite Film: Casablanca
Ambition: n/a
Before the accident that wiped out the crew of the Red Dwarf, you could have asked Holly, the tenth-generation Artificial Intelligence supercomputer that ran the ship anything, and he would answer correctly, and immediately. With an IQ of 6000, Holly was the next best thing to infallible. But when the accident occurred and he was left alone for three million years in deep space, the Red Dwarf computer went a little senile, turned peculiar. Now he spends his time (like the rest of the surviving crew) trying to find ever more ways of filling up the time as infinity yawns before them like a great yawning thing. Holly's particular penchant is for practical jokes, which he invariably plays on Lister, who invariably finds them less than amusing. Like most (okay, all the people on Red Dwarf) Holly loathes Rimmer, but is forced to maintain Rimmer's hologrammatic form.
When they signed aboard Red Dwarf, everyone was required to have their personality imprinted on a computer chip, which could be used to revive them, in the event of their death, as a computer simulation, or a hologram. When Holly had determined that the radiation levels had fallen sufficiently to allow Lister emerge from stasis, he knew that the last human alive would need companionship, but there was no-one left alive. He decided to revive one of the dead crew as a hologram, and settled on Rimmer as the one most likely to prevent Lister from going insane. It is Holly who explains to both Lister and Rimmer about The Cat, who is a lifeform that has evolved from cats, as man evolved from apes. Holly it is too who explains about the Future Echoes that they experience when they begin the jump to lightspeed for the trip back home.
Holly amuses himself by playing little tricks on Rimmer, whose treatment of the amiable supercomputer certainly merit such japes! Rimmer demands a short-back-and-sides, and Holly gives him instead a beehive hairdo! Another time he swaps Olaf Petersen's arm for that of Rimmer, and the arm attacks the hologram. Holly deciphers, at Lister's request, the Holy Book the Cat has brought to him, and discovers that Lister is indeed Cloister, the Cats' god. Meanwhile, Rimmer is poring over a garbage pod, which he believes to be an alien vessel. When Lister asks Holly why he doesn't tell Rimmer what the nature of the pod is, the computer replies "Well, it's a laugh, innit?" When they recover a post pod from Earth there is a video letter for Holly from Gordon, the eleventh-generation AI aboard the Scott Fitzgerald. It turns out that Holly and Gordon are playing chess, though they haven't got any further than the first move, which Gordon has just sent on.
Mutiny comes in the form of Queeg 500, the Red Dwarf backup computer, who takes over the ship after Holly has been judged incompetent. Holly challenges him for control of Red Dwarf, but loses and is erased. However, it turns out that Holly and Queeg are one and the same, and the computer was just testing the others to show them what life could be like without him! When they cross into a Parallel Universe, Holly meets Hilly, a female version of himself, and is so in love with her that though they have to return to their own dimension, he later performs a headswap operation on himself and takes the form and voice of Hilly, but retains the name Holly. This unfortunately does something to his processors, and computer senility begins to set in.
She still knows enough though to explain to Rimmer what has happened when the Cat and Kryten disappear from existence after Lister has altered the time lines: because Lister has now led a completely different life, and never joined Red Dwarf, he never found Frankenstein on Titan, and the race of the Cat was never born. Similarly, Kryten was never rescued and so neither no longer exist in that timeline. Holly operates the transmogrifier they find aboard an alien vessel and changes Kryten from mechanoid into human; she also changes Lister into a superhuman (if a superhuman only a foot tall!), despite Rimmer's incredulous "You're going to let that fruitbat of a computer diddle with your DNA?"
She finally gets her full IQ back though, thanks to experiments conducted by Kryten, however this is at the expense of a somewhat curtailment of her remaining runtime. Her IQ has gone up to 12000, but her operational lifespan is now only three minutes! While in her almost-omnipotent form, Holly solves the problem of a White Hole spewing time by calculating an impressive "pool shot" that will bounce a planet into the white hole, cutting off the time dilation effects they are feeling. Unfortunately this revokes all time that has happened since they encountered the white hole, and so Holly's IQ goes back to that of a car-park attendant.
She is however able to save the quartet from killing themselves when they think they have gone Back to Reality; she cuts in on a higher frequency to warn Kryten that they are about to become the latest victims of the despair squid.
Occupation: Series 4000 Service Mechanoid
Born: n/a
Status: Active
Best Friend: Lister
Favourite Music: ?
Favourite Book: ?
Favourite Film: Casablanca
Favourite Term of abuse: Smeghead
Ambition: To fold an enormus supply of laundry
Designed and supplied by Divadroid International, Kryten is a series 4000 mechanoid, whose main function is to clean, cook and do other domestic chores. His software ensures that he takes orders from all humans, and has absolutely no regard for himself. However, while serving aboard the Earth ship Nova 5, he washes the ship's computer and causes the AI to short out, plunging the starship to its doom, and killing all of the crew save three of the female officers, whom he serves until they die. By the time help arrives, in the shape of the Boys from the Dwarf, many hundreds of years have passed, and Kryten's three charges have gone the way of all flesh, except that the mechanoid does not believe it. Once he has been convinced and the three women (or the remains of them, at any rate) buried, Kryten is taken back to Red Dwarf, where he is immediately put to work by Rimmer, the hologram foisting on him all the jobs and tasks he feels need doing, and that Lister won't do.
Lister, however, sees the treatmenf of Kryten as unfair, and encourages the droid to break his programming. He asks Kryten what does he want, and after a long pause during which the mechanoid wonders why anyone should care what he desires --- he was built to serve others: "I serve, therefore I am" --- Kryten admits that he has always dreamed of growing a garden of his own. Lister tells him to find a planet with an atmosphere and make it happen. Encouraged by our Dave, Kryten does eventually rebel against his new master, deserting Rimmer and heading off on Lister's spacebike to make his dream come true. However, some time later the crew discover the mangled remains of the bike crashed on an asteroid, and Kryten is not in much better shape! Lister manages to get him back online, but can't regain his original personality, this is merely a thinly-disguised attempt to explain the fact that the character had now been taken over by Robert Llwellyn, who is now playing the part of Kryten.
Kryten is taught by Rimmer how to pilot Starbug, and the two end up on a parallel Earth, where everything goes backwards! For a time they make a name for themselves as The Sensational Reverse Brothers, but they eventually have to leave and return to Red Dwarf. Kryten later has his inbuilt guilt chip overridden by the Polymorph, and with no guilt to hold him back considers handing the others over to the monster in return for his own life. When the beast is destroyed and they all return to normal, he offers to commit suicide but is stopped by Lister. He is twice wiped from existence, the first instance being when Lister alters the timelines in Timeslides, and as a consequence does not join Red Dwarf, the knock-on effect being that both Kryten and the Cat disappear from being! The second time this happens it is with Lister, as they battle the Inquisitor, during which Kryten sees himself die, though this is a timeline they manage to avoid.
During The Last Day, as Kryten awaits his replacement from Divadroid, the mechanoid explains to Lister the concept of Silicon Heaven, telling him that this is the place where all mechanicals go after death, their reward for leading a selfless life on the Earth. Lister tells him this is not the case, but Kryten cannot be convinced, and seeing no way to stop the countdown to shutdown of Kryten's CPU that is underway, Lister and his friends decide to throw a farewell party for their mechanical friend. It is during this binge that Kryten first realises that there is more to life than merely serving, and he is not ready to switch himself off yet. This is further pointed out to him when he meets Camille, who first appears to him as a female mechnoid, with whom he falls instantly in love. She turns out, however, to be a pleasure GELF, a Genetically Engineered Life Form, but when she shows Kryten what she really looks like (an amorphous green blob), he refuses to take any notice, and says this does not change anything. Romance blossoms, but is cut short when Hector, Camille's husband, comes by and Kryten has to use the power of lying, which he has only recently learned from Lister, to convince her to go with him.
The point about Kryten's ability to lie is an important one in the development of the character of Kryten. Being able to exhibit all the major negative human traits (lying, insulting, insubordination, sarcasm etc), Kryten is well on the way to being able to break his programming again, even being able to call Rimmer a smeghead to his face (well, almost!).
His next lesson in being human is literally that: encountering an alien machine, the transmogrifier, his DNA, is changed from mechanoid to humanoid, and for a short period Kryten is a human! This episode really explores the human condition well, as Kryten asks Lister why human eyes have no zoom or split-screen effect, and has some very interesting questions and revelations about his penis! Kryten also mistreats his spare heads, and when he later realises what he has done he uses the machine to change himself back. In Meltdown, he realises that his mechanoid programming is still strong enough to force him to obey Rimmer, who has gone completely loopy and is waging war with wax-droids!
Left in Quarantine with Lister and the Cat though, it emerges that he can still rebel against certain of his programming: when things get heated in the one-cell chamber, Lister calls him tetchy, after being warned not to. Pushed beyond his limits, Kryten takes in his hand the video Wallpapering, painting and stippling: a DIY guide, and ignores Lister's order not to put it on. He corrects the Cat, technically a humanoid and therefore technically Kryten's superior, and threatens him, calling him stupid. He comes through for his friends however when they fall foul of the lunatic entity Legion, and forces the gestalt being to help him rescue them. When Red Dwarf acquires a deadly computer virus, he enters a dreamlike state while he tries to devise an antidote, his subconscious placing him in the role of a sherrif in an old Western.
He it is who converses with the gelfs and reluctantly arranges Lister's marriage to their chieftain's daughter in return for the oxy-generation unit they need for their ship. He is also the voice of reason when, trapped on Rimmerworld, Lister declares that they could capture some guards, knock them out, take their uniforms and fight their way out: Kryten shrugs and says "Yes, or we could just use the matter paddle!" He is most upset at the end of season six, as he meets the visitors from the future, and finds out that Lister is fated to become nothing more than a brain in a jar!
At the opening of season seven, Kryten has his main head swapped by Lister in order that he may remove the behavioural chip and therefore have the mechanoid agree to Lister's proposed trip through time to find curry. With his chip removed, Kryten exhibits some very strange behaviour, cursing, smoking and using his groinal attachment to stir drinks. As he says himself "Just call me badass!" Having discovered what his trip through time has done to the cosmic balance of things, Lister asks why didn't Kryten warn him, but the mechanoid tells him that he knew what Lister was doing, he just didn't care! Without his behaviour chip to tell him right from wrong, Kryten has no way to know what is the correct mode of behaviour, a situtaion which leads to his taking a dead man off the street and cooking him for the boys! Hey, he reasons, humans eat animals, why not each other?
When he comes across Rimmer, pretending to be Ace, he detects that there is something different about the hologram, categorising it as "21% more weasly". He is sorry to see Rimmer (whom he believes to be Ace) leave, but much more worried when Christine Kochanski comes aboard. Now his whole world is turned upside down. With the influence of a woman on board, his usual requests and duties are now questioned, and he worries that Lister will stop liking him in favour of Kochanski. He does all in his power to ensure she gets back to her ship, but it doesn't happen, and he is reduced to making snide comments about her underwear. Little concerns and irritations grow to disproportionate size, and finally Kryten can take it no more, as he sabotages the ship's generator, forcing them all to climb through the ducts, all because he does not want Kochanski to have the bath he perceived she would have in Lister's quarters, presumably with him.
A side-splittingly funny scene in this episode, Duct Soup is the "dream scene" where Kryten sees Chrissie and Lister married, and throwing him out as gelf in-laws come to tea! Thank you with a capital R indeed! He tries to console Lister over the loss of Rimmer, but is upstaged by Kochanski, and so builds The Rimmer Experience for more see the entry on Rimmer. Which reminds all concerned what a complete and total smeghead Rimmer was! In this he scores over Kochanski, who even has to smile as he declares at the end of the ride "Sigmund Freud, eat your heart out!"
The rivalries are back in full swing however when Kochanski declares her intention to take them all to Jane Austen World, whereas Kryten has been preparing a special meal to celebrate the anniversary of the day he was rescued from the Nova 5. Unable to believe that Lister and the Cat would choose to go to an AR version of Pride and Prejudice than eat his "Scuttling-thing-a la-monkey-wrench", he follows them into the AR game, bringing along a tank, with which he totals the summerhouse! As they eat the dinner in guilty tension, Lister mentions that it might need ketchup, and Kryten literally blows his top! His head explodes, and the crew have to go off and see if they can find another one. As luck would have it, a passing rogue simulant ship has some, and he offers to trade them. However, arriving back on Starbug, they find that Kryten has been stolen!
Kryten then meets his "brother", another series 4000 android, who goes by the name of Abel, and is addicted to Otrazone. As the Starbug crew give chase and the standoff arrives, the simulant causes Kryten to access memories about his design that have a deep and lasting effect on the mechanoid. It turns out that the entire series of which he is part was built by his creator, Professor Mammet, as a bad joke, a mocking tribute to her husband-to-be, who was so fussy, pernickety, pompous and just plain annoying. Kryten's whole personality is based on this person and he is, in effect, the result of a joke of programming, a nasty snipe by his creator at a man who jilted her at the altar. Kryten learns that all his negative emotions are stored on a special file, his "negadrive", and when it gets full the file explodes, just like Mammet's fiance used to. Lister tells him that this is the reason Able turned to the Otrazone; he too learned Mammet's secret. But he also tells his friend that he has evolved, progressed to something that is beyond a joke. In the end, Abel sacrifices himself for the crew, thus redeeming himself.
It falls to Kryten to come up with the rather drastic solution to Lister's infection by the Epideme virus, the only way he can see to get it out of Lister's system: they must force the virus into one of Lister's arms, and then amputate it! This they do, but unfortunately they don't get all the virus out, and it begins to surge through his system again. Kochanski then forces it to transfer to her arm (though it's not her arm, but that of Carolyn Carmen) and cuts that arm off, thus killing Epideme forever. In order for this to have been done, though, Lister's heart has had to be stopped, so that the virus will believe he is dead and so go looking for another host. Kryten almost forgets to restart Lister's heart, as he seems finally to have come to terms with Kochanski, they both leaving the room talking conversationally until Kryten screams "MR. LISTER!!!!" and comes flying back in to restart his heart!
The interaction between Kochanski and Kryten gives a new dimension to the show, and opens up new facets of Kryten's character. Always the, if you will, mother figure of the crew, caring for them, cleaning up after them and feeding them (despite Lister's protestations: "Kryten, I'll get me own smeggin' breakfast!" Kryten: "Bon appetit, bin!"), he now has a rival, a challenger for his throne, and he digs in and grinds his teeth as he refuses to give up that position. Everything Kochanski does irritates him, from her putting the salad cream in the press instead of the fridge to her keeping socks in her pants drawer.... Also, since she is now also a rival for Lister's affections, Kryten feels threatened in this way too, and does all he can to get one up on the only girl on the crew, any time he can.
After his arm is severed, Lister is taken in hand by Kryten. Whether he believes himself responsible for the state of affairs (which in a way he is) or whether he just wants to take the opportunity to show Lister how much a friend he still can be, Kryten does just about everything for Lister, until Kochanski shows him that far from helping his friend, he is in fact making it harder for Lister to face the fact that he has lost an arm. Convinced by her that this is what is needed, Kryten fashions a robotic arm for Lister, but it tends to keep punching him in the face, which, he says, is a subconscious reaction by Lister to the realisation that it was Kryten who sawed off his arm. Finally abandoning the idea, they discuss what is left to be done.Kryten talks about his nanobots, subatomic robots that are part of his self-repair system. Kochanski believes they could build Lister a new arm, but Kryten tells them that they nanobots deserted him. They go in search of them and find instead Red Dwarf, transformed by the nanobots into a planet! After locating the tiny mechs exploring Lister's laundry basket (yes, I know!) Kryten forces them to build a new arm for Lister, but they go one better, or in Lister's case, one worse....
Occupation: Navigation Officer
Race: Human
Born: ?(Can't remember)
Status: Single/ Was last human alive in her dimension where she
and Hologramatic Lister were together
Favorite food: Cottage Cheese with Pineapple chunks in
Best Friend: Dave Lister in her own Dimension
Favorite Music: Opera
Favorite Book: Anything by Jane Austen
Ambition: To get back to her own Dave Lister
Navigation Officer on board Red Dwarf, Christine Kochanski was the center of Lister's world for three weeks, as the two enjoyed a short-lived relationship. After she died in the accident Lister spent every waking moment thinking about her, and several times tried to bring her back as a hologram. Failing in this, he went back in time through a Stasis Leak and tried to get her to go into stasis, so that she would survive the accident, and Lister would be able to release her when he got back to his own time. Unfortunately, when he caught up with her she had already married someone--- him! In this alternative timeline Lister had managed to come back in time already, and had set things to rights by marrying the woman he loved.
Rimmer used Kochanski's hologram personality disk to try to trick Lister into abandoning the idea of taking an exam to become his superior, but Lister saw through the scheme.
After three milliion years without her, Lister is finally reunited with Chrissie, though not the one he left behind. This is a Kochanski from an alternative dimension, and is played by another actress (Chloe Annett). She is with her own Dave Lister as they encounter each other, her Dave being a hardlight hologram. A rift in the null-space bridge causes her to be thrown in with our Dwarfers, and she instantly hates the situation. She sees Lister as a lazy, worthless, self-satisifed and useless layabout (as Cat said to Rimmer in Inquisitor: "Got to admit, she's got a handle on you there bud!"), Kryten as a pathological fusspot with a mother complex, and Cat as a one-dimensional, sex-obsessed creature. Yeah, she's got them all taped, all right! (Rimmer has at this point left to pursue his career as Ace, but were he here no doubt she would think him a complete and total smeghead!)
Used to being on a Starbug with a crew who know what they're doing, Kochanski is increasingly incensed by the lack of apparent expertise and knowledge the boys evince, and she absolutely does not like Kryten! Though the mechanoid sees her as a rival for Lister's affections, she herself has no such designs on Dave (or so she tells herself), and is only concerned with getting back to her own Lister. Kryten is more than happy to help her, but unfortunately for both it's not to be, and as she leaves, thinking she's getting back to her own Starbug but about to be once again thwarted, it comes to light that not only is she Lister's girlfriend, she is also his mother! Kochanski asks Lister to add his sample to an invitro tube she has, in order that she might have a child some day. Lister does, but then realises that the embryo in the tube is in fact him. Lister knows that when he was found, under the pool table in the Aigburth Arms in Liverpool, that the box in which he was found had the words "Our Rob or Ros" printed on it. He had always taken this to be callous evidence of the fact that not only did his parents not want him, they couldn't even be bothered to settle on a proper name for him, never deciding between Rob and Ross. However, as they transfer supplies from the other Starbug as Kochanski makes ready to depart, they come across a box of Ouroboros batteries, which has the symbol for the ancient Ouroboros: the snake swallowing its own tail, which Kryten tells him is the symbol for eternity, a circle of life that is repeated and never broken.
Stuck with the boys for now, Kochanski does her best to fit in, but it's not easy, being the only woman on board a ship of three males, far from your own dimension, without even the promise of a bath or a manicure to stave off the loneliness and empty feeling inside. Kryten tries to console her, but mistakenly uses the Heimlich Maneuver on her: still, it does stop her crying! Lister is a little more helpful: though he is a little upset that she has not fallen instantly in love with him, he knows how hard it must be for her, and has prepared a bath for her in his quarters. He intends to let her sleep here tonight, and sleep in her quarters. Kryten, however, is unaware of this, and flips, sabotaging the generator and forcing them all to crawl through the ducts of Starbug to try to restart it. It is here that Kochanski (and the others) learn of Lister's claustrophobia, and she endeavours to take his mind off it by speaking of her Lister, and pretending he is gay.
She helps him face the realities of Rimmer's departure but is upstaged by Kryten, as their ongoing rivalry continues unabated. Desperate to secure his position aboard the ship and not be ousted by the "one with all the inny-outy bits you like", Kryten does all he can to get one up on Kochanski, and she in turn reacts to this as does any female when threatened by a male on her own territory. The sparring between the two adds a wonderful extra dimension to the show, and fills out both Kryten and Kochanski's characters.
Kochanski endeavours to introduce the lads to a slice of culture by taking them to the AR version of Jane Austen World, but Kryten has been preparing a special meal and is angered at her intrusion. When he finally blows his top, it's up to Kochanski, Lister and the Cat to find him after he is taken by the rogue simulants. It is she who saves Lister when he is infected by the Epideme virus, her strategy earning her at last Kryten's grudging admiration. He knows now that he gave Kochanski the invitro sample of himself and that, some time in the future, he goes back to Earth with the baby (himself) and places him under the pool table, so that he can be found, brought up, and the whole cycle repeat. Therefore, he is his own father, and Chrissie his mother.
Quotes:
"Camille, I think I E5 A9 08
B7 you"
Kryten, Camille.
"That's the metaphorical
equivalent of flopping your wedding tackle into a lion's mouth
and flicking his love spuds with a wet towel - total
insanity."
Rimmer, Rimmerworld.
"Pub... a meeting place where
people attempt to achieve an advanced state of mental
incompetence by the repeated consumption of fermented vegetable
drinks."
Kryten, Timeslides.
"Love is a device invented by
bank managers to make us overdrawn."
Rimmer, Confidence and Paranoia.
"Love is a sickness that
holds back your career and makes you want to spend all your
money."
Rimmer, Confidence and Paranoia.
"I never fall for women that
are any good for me Kryten, it's either heart breakers or moral
garbage on legs."
Lister, Gunmen of the Apocalypse.
...You didn't have the right parents? Who's parents did you have? - Lister
...Just one thing before the disco, er,
Holly tells me that he's sensed a non-human lifeform aboard. -
Hollister
...Sir, it's Rimmer. - Lister
...Lister, the cat would be dead. -
Hollister
...So with respect sir, what's in it for the cat? - Lister
...He's dead Dave, everybody is dead,
everybody is dead, Dave. - Holly
...Wait, are you trying to tell me, everybody's dead? - Lister
...Well, she won't be much use to you on Fiji now, not unless it snows, and you need something to grit the path with. - Holly
...Death? It's like being on holiday with a group of Germans. - Rimmer
...I am Holly the ship's computer, with an IQ of 6000, the same IQ as 6000 P.E. teachers. - Holly
...Look, we're travelling faster than the speed of light. That means, by the time we see something, we've already passed it. - Holly
...He was the most un-popular man on board this ship, I mean, he even had to organise his own surprise birthday parties. - Lister
...Technician was the lowest rank on this ship. The man who changed the bog rolls was higher than us. - Lister
...You want to try reading your shirt sometime Lister, it's probably a novel by Victor Hugo. - Lister
...Six breasts? Imagine making love to a
woman with six breasts! - Lister
...Imagine making love to a woman! - Rimmer
...The highest form of life in the universe is man, and the lowest is a man who works for the Post Office. - Holly
...You know what the worst book ever
written ever was? - Holly
...I don't care! - Lister
...Football-It's a funny old game, by Kevin Keegan. - Holly
...No Lister, what makes us different from animals is, we don't use our tongues to clean our own genitals. - Rimmer
...Emergency, there's an emergency going on, it's still going on, it's still an emergency, would Arnold Rimmer please hurry to white corridor 159, this is an emergency announcement. - Holly
...We have enough food to last 30 thousand years, but we've only got one After Eight mint left, and everyone's too polite to take it. - Holly
...What about the time when you tied my hair to the bed post, and then sounded the fire alarm! - Lister
...I nearly needed brain surgery! - Lister
...What brains? - Rimmer
...Do you know what happens to Sausages
left un-attended for 3 million years? - Holly
...Yeah, they go mouldy! - Lister
...Your Sausages Dave, now cover seven-eighths of the Earth's surface - Holly
...It's like trying to urinate in a public lavatory, when you're standing next to a man 2 foot taller than you. It's just not possible. - Kryten
...Oh, spin my nipple nuts, and send me to Alaska. - Kryten
...You've got all the luxury extras, like realistic toes, and a slide back sunroof head. - Kryten
...Oh, what is that fragrance? - Kryten
...WD 40 - Camille
...Please, I can't meet your shipmates,
trust me. - Camille
...But you don't know them, you'll like them, well some of them,
well maybe. -Kryten
...No-one's ever said I was charming before, they said "Rimmer you're a total git", but "Charming" no. - Rimmer
...Hey, wait a minute, I've got it! Don't
fish swim South in the Winter? - Cat
...No, that's birds sir. - Kryten
...Birds swim South in the Winter? How do they breathe? - Cat
...Why would a haddock kill itself? Why am I even asking that question? - Lister
...This is not a daffodill! Repeat, this is
not a daffodill! - Holly
...Well thankfully Holly's un-affected! - Rimmer
...I never thought in my entire life I'd taste an eddible pot noodle. - Lister
...They've taken Mr Rimmer! Sir, they've
taken Mr Rimmer! - Kryten
...Quick, let's get out of here before they bring him back!! -
Cat
...Well I say let's break out the laser
cannons, and give them both barrels - Cat
...An adroit suggestion sir, with just 2 minor drawbacks. -
Kryten
...Ok, forget it!! - Cat
...Second technician Arnold Rimmer, IQ unknown. - Rimmer
...(To Rimmer) The side effects can be
devastating, you could be reduced to a jibbering simpleton! -
Kryten
Reduced? - Cat
...Oh, and Sir, you're wrong, we won't be apart, we just won't be together. I cannot believe I just said that! - Rimmer
...Sexual magnatism's a virus? Well get me to a hospital, I'm a terminal case. - Cat
...Because the King of the potato people won't let me. I've begged him, I've got down on my knees and wept. - Rimmer
...Do you have a magic carpet? - Rimmer
...Yeah, a little 3 seater. - Lister