Lister looks as ecstatic as you'd expect with the idea of Rimmer in stereo.
At the end of the last episode, Lister — with the help of his Confidence made manifest — figures out where Rimmer is hiding the holodisks and attempts to swap Rimmer with a hologram of his adored Kristine Kochanski... only to discover that Rimmer has already replaced the disk in her envelope with a duplicate of his own.
The two Rimmers proceed to be utterly insufferable, spouting their usual catchphrases, fussiness, zealous devotion to promotion, and unwarranted arrogance. Lister enjoys having the whole quarters to himself when they move to the empty room next door. Despite every initial appearance of domestic bliss, however, Rimmer proves himself to be his own worst enemy... as usual.
The actual title of the episode, as it appears onscreen and is listed on DVDs etc, is specifically "Me2".
Tropes
- Attending Your Own Funeral: Rimmer has a videocassette of his death. Admittedly, ship's computer Holly recorded the deaths of everyone on board, but Rimmer is the one who went and created a long ode glorifying himself as the foreword.
- Batman Gambit: Lister decides to switch off "Prime" Rimmer and treats him to a few final holo-whiskeys before the end. Drunk and about to be erased, Rimmer finally explains the meaning of "Gazpacho soup!"... whereupon Lister informs him that he's already deleted the second Rimmer.
- Better than Sex: Rimmer describes his new life of discipline, exercise and literally his own company as "better than sex". Of course, he's soon proven wrong when it turns out even he doesn't like himself.
- Blatant Lies:
- When Captain Hollister reprimanded Rimmer for doing a rank job of fixing the drive plate, Rimmer told him that he would take full responsibility for the consequences. Considering that one of the first things Rimmer does as a hologram when meeting Lister is to blame him for the catastrophe, it becomes obvious that he was just trying to save face.
- To "man-up" and accept the blame for a disaster that is just about to kill everybody is a meaningless gesture anyway. Which makes it perfectly in keeping with Rimmer's symbolism-over-substance attitude.
- More contemporaneously, Rimmer also does an incredibly poor job of pretending he hasn't just had a screaming blowout with his duplicate that can be heard all the way down the corridor.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Lister brings a picture to Arnold and Arnold's quarters and reads the nameplate. 'Second Technician, Arnold J. Rimmer, and Second Technician, Arnold J. Rimmer?!' and looks at the camera in a smirking fashion before shaking his head.
- Chest of Medals: Rimmer, as it turns out, has four medals. And these are genuine awards. However, they're just for three, six, nine, and twelve years of long service.
- Comically Missing the Point: This exchange when Lister is berating Rimmer for his chronic Never My Fault syndrome:Lister: It's always something! My charts were misplaced! My dividers don't stretch long enough!Rimmer: Well they don't!Lister: SEE?!
- Competition Freak: The Rimmers egg each other on through physical exercise, even when they're pushing themselves too far. Then, in an attempt to out-macho one another insist on ludicrously early waking times that would leave them without sleep.
- Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit: It is revealed that Lister left £17.50 in his bank account on Earth. Three million years have passed, and he now owns 98% of the world's wealth. He also left a sausage out on his table which went mouldy; now the mould covers seven-eighths of the surface of the planet. Furthermore, he left the lightbulb on in his bathroom, racking up a gigantic debt to the local utility company, which has now become the ruling faction on Earth and whose battle fleet is rapidly approaching in an Attempt To Collect... It turns out to be a joke by Holly.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Lister recounts one time when Rimmer tied his hair to the bunk post and then turned on the fire alarm in retaliation for Lister's pranks. Lister nearly needed brain surgery for that. Jokes and pranks are meant to be harmless or something you can both laugh over later, not something that almost kills someone.
- Dissonant Serenity: Rimmer Prime, after moving back in with Lister, chats to him in a calm if somewhat listless tone. When the second Rimmer incites the skutters to bang on the wall and yells at him through it, Prime Rimmer gives Lister a calm "excuse me," walks over, and screams "SHUT YOUR FOUL WHINING YOU PIECE OF DISTENDED RECTUM!" at the top of his lungs, and returns to his bunk as though nothing's happened.
- Face Death with Dignity: When Rimmer believes he's going to be turned off, he shows up in full dress uniform, complete with medals.
- Fee Fi Faux Pas: Rimmer's last words were "Gazpacho soup", which Lister eventually discovers is because, when he'd been with the Space Corps for 14 years, he got invited to have dinner with the Captain and — being ignorant and arrogant — had no idea that the gazpacho starter was meant to be served cold and so he demanded it be taken away and heated. He considers this perhaps the biggest reason why he never went anywhere in the ranks, going on an anguished rant about how he could have been somebody if it had ever been mentioned to him while he was in training that gazpacho soup is drunk cold. Lister kindly refrains from pointing out that it is more likely that Rimmer never got anywhere because he is an unlikeable incompetent with more ego than skill.
- Forgotten Phlebotinum: Red Dwarf being able to make a second hologram never comes up again. Rimmer learns that having a second Rimmer is a bad thing so there's no reason to keep hiding Kochanski's disk or not to resurrect someone he likes (though Rimmer is, of course, exactly the sort of person who'd keep Kochanski's disk hidden regardless purely out of spite).
- Foreshadowing: The fact Lister sends the second Rimmer out of the room when he's planning to delete the original, but allows the Cat to stay even though they're there for the same reason (watching Rimmer be erased) is a hint there's something more to what's going on.
- Hypocrite: Rimmer initially gloats about moving in with himself, viewing it as an upgrade over Lister's company, and gets rather pompous and self-righteous about how Lister's irritating habits as a bunkmate always held him back. Lister gets annoyed and shoots back that Rimmer himself wasn't exactly Mr. Easy-To-Live with, rattling off a similar list of equally annoying things that Rimmer does as a bunkmate. Rimmer reacts with scoffing, dismissive offence.
- Implausible Deniability: Played for laughs. Lister breaks into the Rimmers' room to steal Rimmer's diary, whereupon the Cat emerges from a closet, wearing a suitably gaudy and over-the-top outfit, and turning towards the camera and shielding his face from Lister, says:Cat: Did you see him clearly? Could you spot him in a parade? I don't think so. I could've been anybody.
- Incredibly Lame Fun: Without Rimmer around to snark at anymore Lister has to come up with his own ways to fill all his time, and the best he can come up with is blowing gum bubbles and acting like he's hosting an Olympic event. When Holly interrupts him, Lister's attempt to maintain the facade that he isn't pathetically wasting his time doesn't last long, he's so starved for something to occupy his attention.
- Insane Troll Logic: Worked up into a frenzy of self-loathing over the soup, Rimmer starts going on a rant about how it's clearly common knowledge to everyone but him, taught to all the people who make admiral from birth.
- Intimidating Revenue Service: Holly plays a prank on Lister claiming that spaceships from NORWEB
are coming after him for his "crimes against humanity" (accumulating all the world's wealth and letting a mouldy sausage cover the entire planet), plus he owes them for three million years' worth of electricity bills.note - Jerkass: Rimmer, obvious, but more specifically, the officers at the Captain's table. Upon hearing that Rimmer asked for heated gazpacho soup, none of them chose to clarify that gazpacho is meant to be served cold. Instead, they just laughed as he ate it hot.
- Megaphone Gag: When the Cat finds Lister's noisy eating distracting in the ship's movie theater, he whips out a megaphone and tells him to shut up, even though they're sitting right next to each other.
- Never My Fault: Rimmer's tribute video for his own death includes a lengthy monologue in which he blames everything and everyone in the universe except himself for falling just short of greatness. He dedicates a significant portion of the runtime to complaining about having Lister as a bunkmate. It's later revealed that he does actually blame himself, but it's for a minor faux pas and not his zealous brown-nosing, jobsworth behavior, or complete inability to pass an engineer's exam.
- Other Me Annoys Me: It goes far beyond annoyance. This episode makes it clear just how powerful Rimmer's sense of self-loathing is — the duplicate quickly begins to say all the cruel and ugly things Rimmer believes of himself.
- The part of the novel based on this episode states that the major reason for Rimmer's annoyance is because his duplicate is of the version of him from when he had initially been switched on as a hologram. The duplicate has none of the character development that Rimmer has gone through since, and the slight differences are tearing them apart.
- Pass the Popcorn: The Cat and the second Rimmer show a morbid desire to see Rimmer be erased. The Cat at least has the excuse of being a Cat, but the second Rimmer sulks when Lister tells him to beat it.
- Pooping Where You Shouldn't: As Lister is looking through Rimmer's diary, the Cat comes out of one of the closet doors in the bunkroom:The Cat: He won't find that one. Heh, heh! Not until he changes his boots.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Not only does Rimmer believe that a cartoon is Citizen Kane, but in a deleted scene, he thinks Orson Welles was in Carry On Camping. What's even weirder is that his death scene contains a Shout-Out to Citizen Kane, with his oblique last words propelling Lister to try to find out the meaning behind them.
- Pun: How the episode ends. Having finally wrangled the soup story out of Rimmer, Lister agrees he'll never mention it again, and Rimmer concedes that, slobby as Lister is, he's a man of his word. Lister then says "souper!" (The actors, as might be expected, proceeded to crack up).
- Retcon: Back in "The End", Holly indicated that at the time they died, Rimmer and Captain Hollister were stood in the middle of the drive room, and Kochanski and Petersen were by the navigation console. Here, it's shown that Rimmer and Hollister were thrown into the captain's office and navigation console respectively by the force of the explosion (albeit they were at least stood where Holly claimed they died when the explosion hit), while Kochanski and Petersen weren't present at all. Though this can be justified by Holly having misremembered the details of the event due to the three million years that have passed, and his resultant computer senility.
- Sarcasm-Blind: When Rimmer asks Lister what the film playing in the cinema is, which is clearly a cartoon, Lister replies Citizen Kane. Rimmer believes it.
- Second-Face Smoke: In the cinema, Rimmer insists that Lister, who is smoking, move three seats over to be in the smoking section. Lister blows smoke right through Rimmer's face.
- Self-Plagiarism: The "NORWEB" was also used in the Grant/Naylor sketch show Son of Cliché, which was the radio precursor of Red Dwarf.
- Shout-Out: Rimmer's death is a parody of the opening of Citizen Kane, right down to the falling globe and his cryptic last words.
- Sleep Learning: Rimmer has attempted to use the self-hypnosis tapes "Learn Esperanto While You Sleep" and "Learn Quantum Theory While You Sleep". The only results we're told of are that neither he nor his bunkmate Lister got any sleep.
- Understatement: After he and his duplicate scream at each other through the bulkhead, Rimmer Prime admits to Lister that "me and Rimmer... we've had a bit of a tiff."
- You Didn't See That: Lister catches the Cat up to no good:Cat: "Did you see him clearly? Could you spot him in a parade? I don't think so. I could've been anybody."
- Zero-G Spot: Implied by Lister's Pop-up Kama Sutra: Zero-Gravity Version, if not seen.
