"Yo, goalpost head, I'm pretty sure your arm's only meant to have a mind of its own around sexy ladies!"
Sick and tired of Rimmer lording his power over him, especially now that he's hidden the ship's cigarette supply away, Lister hits upon the perfect way to put an end to it: by becoming an officer himself.
This episode includes examples of:
- Always Someone Better: Rimmer is horrified when Lister decides to get a promotion that will make him Rimmer's superior, and does whatever he can to sabotage Lister's plans.
- Berserk Button: Insulting Holly is one of the ways he will get back at you with a vengeance. Rimmer calls him ugly, and Holly takes offense, citing he chose his current face from a man who was considered the greatest lover who ever lived. Normally, it should have ended there for Holly, but then Rimmer said the guy must have operated in the dark a lot, implying the man was a Serial Rapist. That did it.
- Big Eater: Cat requests fish from the vending machine six times.
- Brain in a Jar:Lister: My uncle's brain's in a jar. It's really sad.
Chen: Why is it sad?
Lister: He's not dead yet. - Brick Joke: In the opening scene, Lister is working for Rimmer and getting paid in cigarettes, but Rimmer docks him part of a cigarette for insubordination and makes him pull out some of the filling of the cigarette in question. A few scenes later, after the audience has time to forget about this, Lister tries to light a cigarette and has to hastily drop it when it burns too quickly because it's the one with the filling missing.
- Desecrating the Dead: A variant; when Rimmer tries to blockade Lister from going to his exam, Lister just walks right through him. The novelisation explains that this is a major social faux pas. But to be fair, most dead people don't generally tend to be dicks and jerks and Rimmer has been this for so long, Lister has definitely no respect for him.
- Dub-Induced Plot Hole: In the Czech dub, Lister says in the flashback that he'd dropped Rimmer's revision timetable in a chicken vindaloo, but in the dub of the previous episode Lister claims he's never eaten a chicken vindaloo. (In the original English dialogue, it's a prawn vindaloo in the previous episode and a goat vindaloo in this episode.)
- Dude, Not Funny!: Rimmer tries to invoke that he and Lister are friends and had good times together. Lister insists on knowing one such occasion. And Rimmer has trouble remembering until...Rimmer: Ah! How about the time your safety line snapped and you fell into the cargo bay?
Lister: I cracked my spine in three places.
Rimmer: Yes, but it was hilarious. We laughed like drains.
Lister: (not putting up with this smeg) You laughed. I spent six weeks in traction. - Early-Installment Weirdness: It was originally planned that Holly would be a disembodied voice. This is clearly evident in the scene where Lister complains about Rimmer – he looks all over the place, not at the monitor.
- Epic Fail: As part of his preparation for the chef's exam, Lister shows off a gorgeously elaborate cake he made. The fail part comes from the fact he was trying to cook roast beef.
- Fake Period Excuse: Rimmer, impersonating Kochanski, tries to explain "her" behaviour as due to "having a woman's period".
- Fantastic Drug: In the pre-accident flashback, Rimmer admits that he's taking learning drugs to help him revise. Unfortunately, they work a little too well and all he ends up memorising is the conversation he has with Lister, Petersen, Chen, and Selby in the ship's bar regarding his revision timetable.
- Fantastic Racism: Classism, actually, but Rimmer is quite disgusted when Lister reveals that he's actually studying to be a chef rather than an astro-navigator, asserting that chefs "aren't real officers". Lister retorts that they still outrank Rimmer.
- Flipping the Bird: The skutters give the British two-finger version to Rimmer.
- Freeze-Frame Ending: The episode ends on a freeze frame of Lister leaping into the air in victory. This was done as a pragmatic measure: while filming the scene, Craig Charles landed badly and injured his back, rendering the end of the shot unusable and preventing reshoots.
- French Jerk: When Holly brings up that Jean-Paul Sartre once said "Hell is being locked in a room forever with your friends", Lister angrily retorts that he only said that because all of (Sartre's) friends were French.
- Gender Bender: Rimmer turns himself into a hologram of Kochanski by copying her disc, pretending to be her in a desperate attempt to convince Lister not to take the exam. It briefly works before Lister notices 'Kochanski's' speech is littered with Rimmerisms.
- Groin Attack: Sort-of self-inflicted one, when Rimmer's arm gets swapped with Petersen's, which starts attacking him. Rimmer sweet-talks Holly into stopping it, but before the arms can be swapped back, Petersen's arm punches him in the nuts.
- Hypocrite:
- Rimmer demands to know where Lister got his illegal learning drugs for his chef's exam. Lister reveals he got them from Rimmer's locker.
- Rimmer uses "White Card, Black Card" stuff in a conversation with Lister regarding getting Kochanski back as a hologram, using it with glee. But when Lister uses a Black Card – ergo, stopping the current conversation topic – Rimmer is outraged.
- Rimmer tries to call back the friendship that they have had over the years. And when Lister asks for the same simple thing yet again (swapping out Rimmer for Kochanski for one evening), Rimmer goes hostile thinking Lister won't turn him back on.
- Incredibly Lame Fun: Rimmer considers going over an endless checklist of supplies to be fun, and calls Lister crazy when he complains.
- Jerkass: Rimmer's probably at his most nastiest and childishly spiteful in this episode, to the extent he nearly crushes Lister's will to live.
- Lawful Stupid: That Rimmer acts this way is lampshaded by Lister, who gloats that when he becomes an officer, he'll be able to stick Rimmer with any dirty job he likes and know Rimmer will do it without complaining, because he "respects that officer smeg".Rimmer: If you mean I respect my superiors no matter who they are, and I obey orders blindly and unquestioningly ... yes! Yes I do!
- Loophole Abuse: When Lister says he will take an exam to get promoted above Rimmer, Rimmer laughs because he knows Lister doesn't have what it takes to be an astro-navigator. However, Lister points out that he's not taking the astro-navigation exam: he's taking the chef's exam.Rimmer: But a chef? A white-hatted ponce? That's not a real officer!Lister: It outranks you, smeg-for-brains.
- Man, I Feel Like a Woman: Rimmer becomes Kochanski. He doesn't concern himself with feeling his feminine physique until the process is only partly reversed by Holly.
- Not that he was in any hurry to get that last body part replaced.
- Obsessed Are the Listmakers: A throw-away gag in the flashback is that Rimmer wasted seven weeks that he could have spent studying for his exam on instead writing up a timetable for studying, with the implication that he does this every single time he tries to take the exam. In the novelization ("Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers"), it's explicitly stated that this is exactly what he does. This gets a Call-Back in "The Beginning" when his first step in planning a strategy against the Simulants is to make a timetable.
- Out-of-Character Alert: Rimmer tries to trick Lister out of taking a test that would make him Rimmer's superior, and allow him to replace Rimmer with a hologram of Kochanski. He does this by taking on Kochanski's appearance, and telling Lister that she would never be interested in him. However, his performance is pretty lousy; "Kochanski" repeats some phrases Rimmer often uses, is easily bluffed when Lister mentions a fake tryst they had, and then tries to cover up her weird behavior by saying she's "having a woman's period".
- Overly Long Gag: The Cat ordering fish from the food dispensing machine and its response, which is repeated six times in a row.
- Something Only They Would Say: Lister catches on that "Kochanski" is actually Rimmer when she uses the phrase "Up the ziggurat lickety split".
- This Means War!: Rimmer's using the pecking order to peck Lister about denying the latter Kochanski's hologram disc. So Lister decides to take the exams to become Rimmer's superior. If the pecking order is in place, why not exploit it?
- Those Wacky Nazis: An exasperated Lister declares he would have been happier being stuck aboard Red Dwarf for eternity with Herman Goering than with Rimmer.Lister: Ok, he was a drug-crazed transvestite, but at least we could have gone dancing.
- Toilet Humor: Lister says "Oh, crap." in response to Holly's reasoning to bringing Rimmer back as a hologram and not someone else. Prompting the toilet with artificial intelligence to pop out.Lister: Not you!Toilet: I do apologize; I wasn't paying attention. See you later.
- Troll: Though we only find out in the next episode; turns out Lister failed the exam, despite claiming otherwise.
- Wisdom from the Gutter: Rather than waste his time with the incredibly challenging astonavigation exams that Rimmer has been failing at for years, Lister chooses to pursue the far simpler and more enjoyable chef exams instead.
