Obviously it's not cheating... Lister (Chris Barrie) watches as Rimmer (Chris
Barrie) prepares a few memory aids for his latest exam (from: 'THE
END')
THE END:
Meet Lister and Rimmer, the two lowest ranking crew members and bunkmates
aboard Red Dwarf. All the two ever do is bicker with each other over increasingly
mundane things. Rimmer hopes to be an officer, but can't pass the exams and Lister is
simply a self-made slob who spends his nights drunk with his friends, Peterson, Chen
and Selby and whom has fallen for Navigation Officer, Kristine Kochanski. They had
a brief fling and broke up, but Lister is still besotted with her. Life is a chore for the
two lowest ranked members of the crew, but one day things change quite
drastically.
It seems like any normal day. After the funeral of a crew member and
his subsequent welcome back onto the ship (as a hologram) Rimmer is taking yet
another attempt at passing his exams, but has left his revision rather late (as usual) so
is reduced to copying out his textbooks onto his arms... needless to say, he very
quickly fails. But that's Rimmer's life all over. However, Lister is the one in for the
nasty surprise. After it is discovered that Lister has smuggled a cat on board, he is
brought before Captain Hollister who
orders him to either hand over the animal or be put into suspended animation for six
months. Lister wants to keep the Cat, it's part of his dream of living on Fuji. A plan
he's worked on for years. So he opts for stasis, having time frozen for six months.
Unfortunately, it
is three million years before Holly (Red Dwarf's now senile computer with an IQ of
six thousand PE teachers), revives him. The crew are dead, killed in a radiation leak
caused by Rimmer's inept maintenance skills except for one man, Rimmer. Holly
decided to bring him back as a hologram to keep Lister sane, despite the fact the crew
despise each other and Rimmer despises Lister more now he's dead and the slobbish
one gets to stay alive! Lister isn't alone for long, though. The
appearance of a man in an incredibly sharp suit prompts Holly to explain how Lister's
cat was sealed in the cargo hold and evolved over three million years into the most
vain species ever, the Cat people whose greatest achievement (in their eyes) was the
invention of the steam operated trouser press.
Lister decides the only thing to do is to go back to Earth, and the three million year
long journey begins. The
Beginning.
FUTURE ECHOES: Lister has decided to go into stasis on the trip back to
Earth, much to Rimmer's dismay. After all, it'll mean the hologram is left alone for
three million years. Either that or he'll be turned off with not much hope of being
turned on again when the crew reach Earth. However, this idea is cut short when
Hol;y casually informs the crew that Red Dwarf has been accelerating for three
million years and has just broken the light barrier.
The crew begin to see images
from their future. Lister
encounters a conversation with Rimmer before it happens and the Cat is seen with a
broken tooth before it breaks. Holly explains that these sightings are 'future echoes.' It
turns out that everyones' future is predetermined and that therefore it can be played
out in front of their eyes. So everything they see happening in the images will happen
at some point. Unluckily for Lister, the next image involves him being
blown up into his component atoms by a large explosion in the drive room. Happily
for Rimmer, this
involves Lister being blown into his component atoms by a rather large explosion in
the drive room.
Lister decides to try and cheat the laws of time and space and tries to change his fate
by saving the Cat's tooth, but finds it impossible.
He is dejected, especially when Holly tells him that the drive room is in danger of
exploding and he must go
help. Expecting to die, Lister is determined to go out with a bang ("If Death comes
near me, I'll rip his tits off!")
However, when he doesn't die both he and Rimmer
are confused. An appearance by his
future self soon explains that it was his son, Bexley, who died in the drive room and
not him. He then leaves Lister with a vision of himself and two babies. How does he
get two babies with no woman on board? Lister doesn't know, but reckons it's going to
be a laugh
finding out!
BALANCE OF POWER: Lister hates being under Rimmer's command,
having to complete millions of meaningless tasks and being denied any cigarettes.
The hologram has hidden in the entire ship's supply so that Lister will be forced to
comply to his every wish in order to fed his addiction. The other downside of
Rimmer's rule is that he is the ship's hologram, and Holly can only sustain one
hologram at a time. This is a blow to Lister who is still crazy about Kristine
Kochanski and wants to spend a night with her to tell her how he really feels. Of
course, Rimmer refuses to be turned off even for one evening and so Lister comes up
with a plan to get his way. He'll take the exams Rimmer has tried to pass for years,
and he'll persistently try until he passes and becomes an officer. Therefore he'll
outrank Rimmer and the hologram will have to do whatever he wishes.
Rimmer
knows that Lister couldn't pass an
engineering exam, he doesn't own any loose leaf file paper for a start! But so does
Lister and he surprises Rimmer by informing him that he isn't intending to take the
engineering exam. He's intending to take the Chef's exam instead! Not that he wants
to be
a chef, he just wants to be above Rimmer so he can gain access to Kochanski's
personality disk and have her as ship's hologram. And a chef is way above Rimmer's
rank of Second Technician... Rimmer realises the danger and tries to persuade Lister
otherwise but its too late.
Rimmer despairs as Lister sits
the exam, he even tries interrupting Lister in Kochanski's body to convince him to
stop but Lister sees right through Rimmer's feeble attempts to thwart him. As the
results come in, Rimmer can only look on helplessly as Lister announces emphatically
that he is
now an officer.
WAITING FOR GOD: OK, so Lister was lying about the chef's exam, but
there are more exciting things unfolding. Rimmer is more than ecstatic to find that
Red Dwarf has encountered a pod. With an unshakeable belief in the existence of
aliens, Rimmer immediately assumes it to be a pod from some sort of alien battle
cruiser with a warrior inside with six breasts that can make him a body. Meanwhile,
Lister is rather happy to discover that he is God.
Well, God of the
Cat People, anyway. Lister is shocked to find in the Cat Bible that he is Cloister
the Stupid, who gave his life to save the holy mother, Frankenstein (his pet cat) His
slobby lifestyle was their religion, and his dream of a farm on Fuji is their version of
the Promised Land. Lister finds that the cats died in holy wars arguing over what
coloured cardboard hats to have on Fuji and that they invented five sacred laws of
which Lister has already broken four (he would have done the fifth, but there weren't
any sheep on board.) Shamed by what he has created he decides to try and explain it
to the Cat, but the creature has once again managed to disappear. Following the Cat
into the bowels of the ship, Lister discovers
that one other cat remains, a devout priest who still follows the sacred laws unlike the
Cat who is more interested in being cool, and talking about his investigating feet. The
priest reveals that he and the Cat are the last of their people, the others having left
Red Dwarf in pursuit of the Promised Land. He himself has lost faith in the old ways
and is shocked by Lister's appearance. So much so that he dies moments after Lister
meets him and tells him that he will be with him in
the Promised Land.
Still, there is some consolation. Lister and Holly worked out
relatively quickly that Rimmer's pod was in fact a
Red Dwarf garbage pod, and Lister has lots of fun playing along with his hopes and
dreams before finally revealing it to him.
CONFIDENCE AND PARANOIA: Lister, still hung up on a girl he only
dated for three weeks, wants to find out if Kochanski
ever really loved him. He always put down their failure to advise given to him by his
friends that he was controlled by his confidence and paranoia, the
former trying to help him and the latter trying to scuttle him. Rimmer proclaims the
idea hogwash, saying that the only stranger things than Lister's concept were events
where it rained fish in Belgium and where the Mayor of Warsaw exploded.
Lister
wants to know the truth but is in for a shock when he goes to the Officer's block to
read Kochanski's dream recorder, Rimmer hasn't decontaminated it yet and Lister falls
foul to a bout of pneumonia. However, this is now a three million year old mutated
version of the virus. The virus makes his dreams become solid people and
events, so it is of little surprise that it rains fish in the corridors and the Mayor of
Warsaw explodes in front of a startled Rimmer.
Finally, Lister's imaginary
guiders, his Confidence and Paranoia are created and the wreak havoc with his self
esteem (one is always complementing him, the other hates him). Whilst his
confidence is showering him with flattering comments about his guitar playing
(especially that amazing love song), Rimmer tries to tell
Lister that the two newcomers must be destroyed so that he can be cured but
Confidence, knowing that he would die, has other plans. Appealing to Lister's desires
about Kochanski, he and
Lister devise a way of brining Kochanski aboard Red Dwarf. It turns out that Holly
can support two holograms if certain systems are turned off and so if they have her
personality disk they can bring back Lister's former love. However, Rimmer refuses to
hand it over still insistent that the visitors are insane and must be destroyed before
they kill Lister. However, Confidence has gotten into Lister's psyche and he won't
listen. He quickly works out where Rimmer his the disks and sets off to get
Kochanski's.
It turns
out Rimmer was right and that Confidence is mad, killing Paranoia in the interest of
taking control of Lister, trying to kill Lister himself by tempting him and ultimately
committing suicide by taking his
helmet off in space. Still, now he is cured of his illness and at least Lister has
Kochanski's disk. He hooks it up to the mainframe of the ship and switches it on... but
he is in for a shock.
It produces a second Rimmer, who takes delight in revealing that he’d never be
stupid enough to put Kochanski's disk in its correct box where any old idiot could get
their hands on it! Lister thought he had it bad before, now he's
got it in stereo!
ME^2 : The two Rimmers have decided to get away from Lister by moving
into a room together, which is a joy to Lister who can finally live out his slobby
existence exactly how he chooses. Gone are the books on picking up women by
hypnosis and the endless piles of astro-navigation revision and in comes the true
bachelor pad of toothpaste squeezed form wherever Lister chooses and his favourite
copy of the pop-up Karma Sutra. But although starting out peachy, it's clear that
there are problems. Neither Rimmer wants to appear weak, so they keep pushing each
other in work, exercise and basically everything else until they are both cracking up. It
seems that Rimmer is so screwed up he can't even get along with an identical version
of himself.
Meanwhile, Lister has got hold of Rimmer's death video, a macabre title
constructed
by Holly upon the hologram's request. After spinning through the hours of poetry
recitals, self gratifying narration and put-downs of everyone in his life he finally gets
to the video replay of the last moments of his life, spent in the Drive Room explaining
to Hollister why he had failed to fix the drive plate properly. Lister discovers that the
odious man's last words, spoken after being his by a nuclear wind, were 'Gazpacho
Soup'. Why? And why is November 25th marked out in Rimmer's diary as "Gazpacho
Soup Day?" He is determined to find out and the chance finally
appears when the two Rimmers have a blazing row with each other over their mother,
and the former one walks out on his other to go back to the bunk room.
Lister
decides the only way for peace
to reign is to delete one of them, and it is the original Rimmer who looses the toss.
Just before he is wiped, Lister convinces him to tell the truth about 'Gazpacho Soup.'
It is the sad story of when he ate at
the captain's table and asked for his soup to be warmed up (he didn't know gazpacho
soup was meant to be served cold) and how he ate it as the rest of the officers laughed
at him. Rimmer considers it the end of his career that he
didn't know the proper dining etiquette and puts all his shortcomings down to it.
Humiliated, he demands to be deleted immediately but it turns out that Lister has
already deleted the other Rimmer and he was put through hell just so Lister could
hear the story. Rimmer makes Lister promise never to mention gazpacho soup again.
The trouble is, Lister can't resist the temptation.....
Rimmer
Chris
Barrie
Cat
Danny John-Jules
Holly
Norman
Lovett
GUEST CAST
Hollister
Mac
McDonald
Kochanski
C.P. Grogan
Peterson
Mark
Williams
Chen
Paul Bradley
Selby
David
Gillespie
© 1999 sculder_mully@oocities.com
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