Dave Lister and Arthur Rimmer Confront Themselves in the Stellar Final Episodes of Red Dwarf's First Season
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Red Dwarf’s Dave Lister (Craig Charles) and Arthur Rimmer (Chris Barrie) are a classic comedy team. Dave is the relatable everyman forever taking the piss out of his ship-mate/tormentor. Rimmer, in sharp contrast, is the droning voice of unearned authority. Rimmer is Elmer Fudd to Dave’s Bugs Bunny, Felix Unger to his Oscar Madison, and Jim Halpert to his Dwight Shrute.
“Confidence and Paranoia,” the fifth episode of Red Dwarf’s first season, posits Rimmer as a proto-Incel. If you wanted to be clickbaity, you could even say that the show invented the concept of a lame dude vowing to forego love and sex out of fear and distrust of women by having Rimmer describe himself as part of a “Love Celibacy” movement made up of other similarly unbearable men.
Another crucial difference between the two is that Dave lives for the possibility that he’ll be able to experience at least a simulacrum of love, romance, and sex if he succeeds in scoring some quality time with the hologram of a woman who has been dead for three million years. That can’t be good for a romantic relationship.
Dave breaks the rules by spending time in a part of the ship that has not been de-contaminated yet and becomes ill. He is afflicted with a mysterious illness that causes his hallucinations to become real.
This first produces a shower of fish, and then the Mayor of Warsaw spontaneously combusts before Dave’s Confidence and Paranoia take human form.
Dave’s Confidence is a glad-handing sycophant who treats Dave like a minor deity or poet-philosopher rather than an everyday schmuck. He calls Dave the Prince of Charisma and the Duke of Deliciousness, among other hosannas.
Dave’s Paranoia, meanwhile, adopts the form of a sickly-looking man with a ghostly white pallor who looks like he died from Consumption and nobody bothered to tell him.
Dave is used to being treated with poisonous condescension by Rimmer, so he is overjoyed to have a good buddy who treats him far better than he deserves to be treated.
Things take a dark turn when Dave’s Paranoia disappears, and it is revealed that Dave’s Confidence, as part of a cracked plan to be bosom buddies with Dave by any means possible, killed him.
Dave’s Paranoia unsurprisingly acts like Rimmer, a figure similarly ruled by fear, dread, and neuroses. Dave just wants to have fun, but joylessness is at the heart of everything that Rimmer does.
“Confidence and Paranoia” is an excellent reminder that the voice inside your head that tells you that you’re amazing and wonderful and that the peons of the world should bow down before you and your awesomeness is not your friend. It’s your enemy. It’s the antithesis of healthy and productive. It’s actually incredibly destructive. I’ve listened to that voice far too often in my career, and I cannot tell you how many times it has fucked me over.
That’s partially because when you get that feeling, it’s actually drugs or alcohol talking and drugs and alcohol. I know that’s certainly true in my case. Then you come down and realize that the world is still at least moderately hostile to your existence.
“Confidence and Paranoia” opens with a classic bit involving Holly (Norman Lovett) being depressed because he’s read every book ever written. He consequently can definitively state that the worst book ever is not Art of the Deal, Atlas Shrugged, or Dangerous, but rather Kevin Keegan’s Football: It’s a Funny Game.
I have no idea who Keegan is. You don’t need to be familiar with the book or its author to find the idea of the worst book of all time being a self-regarding, ghostwritten memoir by an athlete hilarious.
Having read every book in existence, Holly is intelligence personified. That’s why he’s miserable. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be familiar with life’s immeasurable horrors. I don’t want to humblebrag or anything, but I have been depressed for YEARS now, so you can only imagine how brilliant I am.
“Me2” ends Red Dwarf’s stellar first season on a high note. It’s a testament to how funny and entertaining Red Dwarf is that a show about a ship where EVERYONE is dead and has been for three million years with the exception of the hero, a hologram of a co-worker he strongly disliked, and a mutated cat-man with a lot of flash and pizazz is almost never depressing.
Red Dwarf is a triumph of minimalism. With less than a handful of characters and one dispiriting setting, it creates a rich universe with unforgettable characters and eminently quotable dialogue.
In “Confidence and Paranoia,” Dave buddied up with the physical manifestation of his confidence and grudgingly tolerated his Paranoia made flesh.
A similar dynamic is at play in “Me2.” As the title suggests, the episode finds Rimmer resurrecting someone who appears to be simultaneously his favorite and least favorite person in the universe: himself.
At first, this situation works out splendidly. Rimmer is overjoyed to be with someone who isn’t just like him; he is him. Rimmer’s double shares all of his tedious interests and boring obsessions. They’re peas in a pod until something very predictable happens.
Rimmer comes to loathe his doppelganger for the same reasons his coworkers loathed him when he was alive; he’s a dreary, pompous boob incapable of joy, happiness, or relaxation.
Forget Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum about hell being other people. For Arthur Rimmer, hell is yourself.
“Me2” further solidifies that of Red Dwarf’s two main characters the sadder and more tragic is Rimmer. For starters, he’s dead. That can do a number on a guy’s career and social life.
But Rimmer also has the misfortune to be a rule follower in a world gone mad where rules no longer apply. He’s a nobody who desperately wants to be somebody and is tormented by the impossible gulf between his desires and his capabilities.
Rimmer is funny, but there’s also something fundamentally sad about him. He has a great monologue at the end of the episode when Dave asks him why “Gazpacho soup” was his “Rosebud”-like cryptic final words.
He replies, eventually, when he thinks he has nothing to lose, that it’s a reference to an evening when he finally achieved everything that he wanted in life: to be invited to sit at the Captain’s table and be treated with dignity, like a real human being rather than a barely tolerated gear in a great machine.
Everything was going swimmingly until Rimmer was served a bowl of gazpacho. Being ignorant and incompetent, he thought it was a mistake that it had been served cold and asked that it be heated up.
The milquetoast company man is the target of his colleague’s stinging barbs. His faux pas humiliates him to the point where he never gets over it.
It’s a very funny but also melancholy moment. Rimmer keeps grasping madly for the big brass ring in a dystopian future where none of his furious striving matters.
The first season of Red Dwarf leaps from high to high. It’s the missing link between Dark Star and Futurama, albeit with an English twist. If I were to give the season a grade, it would be A.
That is pretty damn good. I’m excited for future seasons, but the first season sets the bar almost impossibly high.
Hopefully, season number two will be able to clear it!
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