Recap / Red Dwarf Season VI "Rimmerworld"

The episode begins with Rimmer getting the bad news: despite being a hologram, his program has a rare flaw caused by his living self's disastrous genetic and stress-related health problems, and he must avoid stressful situations or risk a fatal error. Also, Lister has decided to loot the derelict of the simulant ship that they destroyed because the supply situation is desperate.

The wreck is dangerously unstable, and as they finish salvaging, the female simulant tracks them down. Not caring if she lives or dies at this point, the simulant attempts to trigger a "shipquake" that will tear it apart. Rimmer manages to sneak up behind her, but rather than ambush her, elects to jump into the nearby escape pod — much to everyone's disgust — and ends up causing the shipquake himself. Fortunately, Kryten finds a handheld teleporter which allows them to beam back to Starbug, despite a brief sojourn into the past.

After getting back to their correct time zone and escaping the exploding simulant ship, the trio are contacted by Rimmer, who after a little I Meant to Do That routine, admits he can't actually control where the pod is taking him. Since his pod is an old autopiloted one, he'll be stranded on the nearest habitable planet until Starbug fetches him. And also he's going through a wormhole, so the time dialation means he'll be spending six hundred years in his own company.

Since it was a pod from a terraforming ship, that becomes literal. After sprucing the place up into a verdant garden, Rimmer tries to create an Eve. He winds up only able to duplicate himself, but resolves to try again. The Starbug reaches the planet and the boys are immediately captured by several Rimmers in Roman garb, and taken before their leader. Apart from their physical deformities, they are charged with charm, bravery, and worst, honor. They didn't even try to sell each other for their own safety! They're thrown in the dungeon where they find the original model, half-mad with despair at being overthrown by himself. Thankfully, Kryten has the teleporter, and they make a swift escape. However, they apparently end up back in the past once more, before the "past" Rimmer reveals they've actually jumped several weeks into the future, and something hideous has recently happened to Lister. Despite Lister's protests, Kryten beams them back to their correct time, leaving him (and the audience) unaware of what his future holds.

Tropes featured in this episode

• Accidental Misnaming: Rimmer calls the others Titan, Kit, and Derek Custer when they find him in the dungeon. On his end he hasn't seen them in literally centuries and has spent most of it alone in a dungeon.
• And I Must Scream: Rimmer's clones turn on him for having small amounts of the un-Rimmerlike traits they believe are evil and throw him in a small prison. As he's a hologram, he doesn't die and, as everyone on the planet is an even less likeable and more treacherous copy of Rimmer, he knows they'll turn him in if he escapes. He ends up imprisoned among these reminders of what a mess of a human being he is for 557 years.
• Anything but That!: Cat and Lister can't stand the food they have had to eat ever since their fridge packed in.
  Kryten: You'd rather have a psychopathic mechanical killer rip off your skull and play you frontal lobes like a xylophone than have another bowl of my nourishing space nettle soup?
  Cat: Buddy, I'd hand him the sticks and hold up the sheet music.
• Appropriated Appelation: For laughs, Lister refers to himself as Derek Custer after Rimmer misnames them.
• Blatant Lies:
  • "Congratulations, sir! You've come storming through your medical with flying colors! See you next time!"
  • After Starbug escapes, Rimmer radios from the terraforming ship and tries to claim that I Meant to Do That.
• BBC Quarry: One is used for the handful of scenes set on the initially desolate surface of Rimmerworld, before it gets terraformed with the Eco-Accelerator Rockets.
• Brick Joke: The hand-sized worry balls. When Rimmer is discovered in prison, they're the size of marbles.
• Call-Back:
  • The episode starts with the boys deciding to loot the wreck of the simulant ship they fought in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse." Lister also makes a passing comment about them having crashed into a moon, which is likely a reference to the previous episode, "Emohawk: Polymorph II".
  • Right before his escape pod drops out of signal range, Rimmer responds to Kryten's advice to keep a positive attitude by angrily telling him that "You are a total, total, total, total...", very much like the insult that he directed at Holly back in "Queeg".
• Captain's Log: Rimmer narrates his terraforming project after landing his escape pod.
• Could Say It, But...: On escaping into another wrong timeline, Lister and Cat warn each other loudly not to tell Rimmer the misery he's due for the next six centuries.
• Egopolis: Rimmer names his planet "Rimmerworld."
• Emergency Temporal Shift: Features this twice in a row, by accident: having picked up a teleporter from a derelict Simulant vessel, the crew use it to escape the collapsing craft - only to accidentally transport themselves back to Starbug a week too early, earning them a stern talking-to from past Kryten. Later in the episode, they use the same teleporter to escape from the prison on Rimmerworld, only to find themselves in a future version of Starbug, where future Rimmer takes great delight in informing them that something terrible has happened to Lister...
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even Rimmer is disgusted by his planet full of clones. Possibly Other Me Annoys Me taken to its height. And the fact that they locked him in a dungeon for five and a half centuries probably didn't help his opinion of them either.
• Flanderization: Invoked; the cloned Rimmers are based on the absolute worst parts of Rimmer's personality, strengthened and culturally reinforced over generations.
• From Bad to Worse: Zig-zagged. After he initially gets off the exploding simulant ship in the escape pod, Rimmer is informed that it'll take 18 months for it to land on a habitable planet, and thereby the other three to catch up with it. However, the pod then finds a wormhole that'll bring it to a different habitable planet in just four days... only for Kryten to point out that due to the wormhole's time dilation effects, from Rimmer's perspective it'll be six hundred years before they catch up.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Rimmer's intial fear of being stuck on a planet all on his own. What actually happens is so much worse.
• Gone Horribly Right: Rimmer clones himself in an attempt to create an Eve. He does manage to create female Rimmers, but only after producing at least one living male Rimmer: this allows for the two to interbreed, resulting in a population made up entirely of smarmy, cowardly, backstabbing gits.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Unsurprisingly, the Rimmers make lousy jailers, failing to even relieve the crew of their personal possessions.. one of which is a teleporter device.
• Hypocritical Humour:
  • When trying to persuade Lister against raiding the derelict Simulant vessel:
    Kryten: Sir, we have enough thistles and weeds and cultured fungi to scrum yourself stupid until the day you die. This foolhardy trip beggers logic.
    Rimmer: Lister, we'd be fools not to listen to him. When is he ever wrong? Okay, he might have a head shaped like an inexplicably popular fishing float, but he does operate from a position of pure logic and we'd be fools to ignore his sage council.
    Kryten: At least let me and Mr. Rimmer go in your place. We are, after all, merely electronic lifeforms and therefore expendable.
    Rimmer: And what the smeg would you know, bog-bot from Hell?
  • When trying to assure Rimmer about the length of time-dilation he will experience after going through the wormhole:
    Rimmer: Longer than a year and a half?
    Kryten: Uh, yes sir, a little more.
    Rimmer: How much more?
    Kryten: Well, let's not beat about the bush: a lot more.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After his cowardly abandonment of the others, Rimmer is informed that he'll be stranded for most of a millenium. And then he has to spend 557 years imprisoned by his own clones who have modeled their society after the worst parts of his personality.
• Let Me Get This Straight...: Rimmer sums up the risks of looting the Simulant Battlecruiser.
  Rimmer: So let me get this straight. If we board that ship and get captured, we're finished. If we board that ship, don't get captured but the superstructure disintegrates around us, we're finished. However, if we board that ship, don't get captured and the superstructure doesn't disintegrate around us... but we can't find any fuel, we are in fact finished.
  Lister: That's about the noose of it, yeah.
  Kryten: After you with the balls, sir.
• Mysterious Veil: Used for Fan Disservice when the king of the Rimmers removes the veil from a concubine to reveal she's a woman with Rimmer's face.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Lister tries to have a Double Meaning conversation with the simulant when he sees Rimmer positioned behind her... but soon starts saying "you can't be serious, think of all we've been through" to the simulant's confusion.
• Opposite-Sex Clone: Rimmer tries and fails to accomplish this, but his first effort fails. He did eventually succeed, given that we see female Rimmers. His log notes that technically a female clone of himself would be his sister making sex between them morally dubious.
  Rimmer: After much soul-searching I reluctantly decided, "What the hell", I just wouldn't tell her.
• Our Clones Are Different: Rimmer tries to populate a planet in the process of being terraformed with copies of himself. For starters, the clones are created from his holographic matrix in lieu of actual DNA. They also come out fully grown from a cocoon. Rimmer is initially unable to create an Opposite-Sex Clones, although when the other Dwarfers get there, the presence of female Rimmers suggests that he eventually succeeded in the end.
• Parenthetical Swearing: Kryten tells Rimmer "we're all perfectly aware of what you are."
• Pass the Popcorn: Cat's reaction to Rimmer being stuck on a planet on his own for six hundred years is just to lament there's no champagne around.
• Planet Baron: Rimmer hops into an escape pod, gets diverted into a wormhole, and spends the next six hundred years (post-Time Dilation) on an barren planet. Because the escape pod was from an advanced terraforming ship, however, he is able to create life — even cloning humanoids based on his own DNA records. When the crew of Starbug finally arrive, they find the planet dominated by Space Romans all with Rimmer's face. The Emperor Rimmer, however, is one of the clones, not their Rimmer, who, effectively immortal, has been kept prisoner for centuries — not even other Rimmers can stand him.
• Planet of Hats: Possibly the most hideous version, a planet populated entirely by Rimmers, who have deified the darkest parts of his personality. Gutless, gormless, charmlessness is the order of the day. Heroism, selflessness and good looks are considered crimes worthy of banishment. And as Kryten explains, since there's no outbreeding, genetics-based lunacy persisted throughout the entire race.
  Head Rimmer: Are there no signs of normalcy in these wretches? No cowardice or pomposity? No snideness or smarm? Not even honest-to-goodness double-dealing two-facedness?
  Rimmer Legionnaire: Sire, these creatures did not even attempt to sell each other out for their own freedom. They lack even the most basic natural drives.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: After Lister starts flirting and asks what she's doing tonight, the simulant says "Dying." And shoots the ceiling, causing the ship to break apart.
• Riddle for the Ages: What had happened to Future Lister? A deleted scene exists that reveals actually he was just in the loo, but it was removed to foreshadow the next episode.
• Say My Name: Subverted when they leave Rimmer for 557 years. Upon seeing his friends again, Rimmer recalls their names "Derick Custer" (Lister), "Kit" (Cat) and "Titan" (Kryten).
• Shout-Out: The metal balls are another Queeg reference.
• Skewed Priorities: The Cat, repeatedly.
  • He's prepared to murder any surviving Simulants just to make sure they don't see he's wearing the same outfit twice, and makes a point of stating to the female simulant that the outfit he's wearing is completely different from the one he wore back in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse".
    Kryten: (after the Cat's speech) That was an important speech sir, and it needed to be made, but might I suggest that from this moment the rest of the discourse is conducted by those with brains larger than a grape?
  • He's horrified at the thought of being killed and burnt by the Rimmers, because flames clash with his outfit, and the thought of the lead Rimmer ingesting their ashes with white wine, because it's red that goes best with ashes. On these instances, it gets a pained look from Lister.
  • Invoked and subverted with the simulant ship raid. Kryten points out that this is foolhardy, given they have an ample supply of nourishing (if simple) food. Then Lister reveals that a recent crash punctured their reserve fuel tank and they only have a few days of power left, maximum, before the ship will be dead in space — with them along with it. So they legitimately have to raid the derelict for a fresh supply of fuel.
  • Played straight with Lister concealing the aforementioned fuel-supply issue, and then not telling the crew they can't actually use the guns they've brought onto the unstable simulant ship lest it collapse, because he "didn't want to alarm them".
  • While being held at gunpoint by the simulant, Lister asks her out on a date.
• Stating the Simple Solution: Lister details an elaborate escape plan involving a brick from the wall, disguises, etc. Kryten says that they could do that, or they could use the teleporter.
• Take Me to Your Leader: It pains Lister to be caught in such a cliché:
  Lister: This is going to sound like a bit of a corny line, but... I can hardly bring myself to say it.
  Rimmer-Clone: Say what?
  Lister: "Take us to your leader."
  Kryten: Oh, sir, how could you?!
• Take That!: As cited just below, Kryten takes a stab at the "famously unstable" monarchies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as examples of inbreeding. This show was made in Britain, in the twentieth century, where they still have one of those monarchies.
• Tangled Family Tree: The denizens of Rimmerworld are literally nothing but the result of generations of interbreeding between male and female clones of Rimmer, executing any who are born divergent from the greater Rimmer template. Kryten is particularly aghast by this massively inbred nature, pointing out that the damage it's doing to the species and referencing the detrimentally inbred European monarchies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
• Unlimited Wardrobe: Subverted, for once, with The Cat. He's wearing the same outfit he wore in "Gunmen Of The Apocalypse". Lampshaded, too, as he goes out of his way to insist to the Simulant that he's wearing a different outfit.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Kryten accidentally teleports himself, Cat, and Lister a week into the past whilst trying to escape from the collapsing Stimulant ship. His other self reacts with extreme annoyance at his future self's sloppiness.
• Villainous Incest: Rimmer decides to clone an Eve for himself, but realises that she will technically be his sister. He decides the solution to this will be...not to tell her.
• Weaponized Stench: Upon learning that even a loud noise could cause the Simulant ship they're on to start breaking apart, Rimmer sarcastically asks if they're planning to chloroform any attacking Simulants with Lister's armpits.
• Zany Scheme: Probably one of the best subversions ever. It got applause.
  Lister: There's got to be a way out. There hasn't been a prison built that could hold Derek Custer. Why don't we scrape away this mortar here, slide one of these bricks out, then using a rope weaved from strands of this hessian, rig up a kind of a pulley system so that when a guard comes in, using it as a trip wire, gets laid out, and we put Rimmer in the guard's uniform, he leads us out, we steal some swords, and fight our way back to the 'Bug.
  Kryten: Or we could use the teleporter.
  (The audience laughs and applause)
  Lister: O-or at a pinch, we could use the teleporter.

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