Arnold J. Rimmer

Arnold Judas Rimmer BSC, SSC
Red Dwarf character
Arnold Rimmer on board the SS Enlightenment
First appearance	"The End"
Created by	Rob Grant and Doug Naylor
Portrayed by	Chris Barrie
Information
Nickname(s)	Goal Post Head, Alphabet Head, - Smeg Head, Trans-Am Wheel-arch Nostrils, Bonehead, Captain Bollocks
Aliases	Ace Rimmer, Billy Doyle
Species	Human / Hologram
Gender	Male
Occupation	Technician, Second Class (series), Technician, First Class (books)
Family	Lecturer Rimmer (stepfather) John, Frank and Howard Rimmer (half-brothers)
Relatives	Dungo the Gardener (biological father) Michael McGruder (son; Last Human continuity only)

Arnold Judas Rimmer is a fictional character in the science fiction situation comedy Red Dwarf, played by Chris Barrie. He is unpopular with his crew mates, and is often the target of insults or pranks. After he is killed off screen by a radiation leak during a timeskip in the series' first episode "The End" (1988), which is later shown on screen in "Me²" (1988), Rimmer is present for most of the series as a computer-generated hologram, indicated by the "H" symbol on his forehead. Rimmer is depicted as a living human in flashbacks set prior to the accident throughout the show along with situations where Rimmer travels back in time to his own past, and in series VIII in 1999, a flesh and blood version of Rimmer is shown having been resurrected by nanobots with no memory of the hologrammatic Rimmer's experiences. However, following a ten-year break between episodes, the character reappears as a hologram from the miniseries Back to Earth (2009) onwards.

The creators of the series acknowledge that Rimmer's surname comes from a snobby prefect with whom they attended school. They claim, however, that only the boy's name was used, and not his personality because that would imply he had one.

Rimmer first appeared in Red Dwarf's first episode "The End" (1988), where he is characterised as second technician on board the mining ship Red Dwarf, ranking above Dave Lister (Craig Charles), the lowest ranked crew member on board the ship with whom he shares quarters, and below all four of the service robots. As a technician, Rimmer does maintenance work on chicken soup vending machines that not even the robots are assigned to. Rimmer is shown having difficulty revising for his "engineer's exam" which he hopes to pass and become an officer after having failed before prior to the episode, and reveals that he wasn't academy educated unlike others who had become officers. After Lister is awakened from stasis, where he was put as punishment for bringing an unquarantined cat on board, the ship's computer Holly (Norman Lovett) tells Lister that the ship's crew died in a radiation leak from a drive plate Rimmer had improperly repaired and Lister was kept in stasis until the radiation levels returned to normal three million years later. Rimmer is depicted as having been brought back to life as a hologram, having the same drives, feelings and emotions as the living Rimmer, but being unable to touch anything. The only other survivor on board Red Dwarf is a creature called "Cat" (Danny John-Jules), a descendant of Lister's pregnant cat who was safely sealed in the hold along with her unborn kittens during the radioactive crisis.