RD V–”Quarantine”, or We All Keep Playin’ Those Mind Games

I present to you, gentle reader, a slightly late St. Valentine’s Day gift from me: A review of an episode all about insanity and power struggles. What better way, indeed, to say “I love you”?

…Well, I’ve already done “Holoship” and “Camille”. So quit yer whinin’. Anyway, this episode’s got quite a lot in it! So if it’s quite all right with you, let’s just skip the rambling entrance and get straight to the meat of the thing. All righty? All righty.

“Quarantine” begins with another episode in the long-running power struggle between Kryten and Rimmer, as Rimmer finds himself unable to persuade his crewmates even to launch a scouter at his command. It is galling enough for Rimmer that he wields no real authority or respect among the Dwarfers; to find that Lister and the Cat would liefer accept the command of Kryten — a mere sanitation droid, a bog-bot! — proves almost too odious to tolerate. The final splash of lemon juice in the wound, however, is the discussion about adding the hologrammatic Dr. Lanstrom to the crew. Not only is he marginalized when he issues the most innocuous of commands, and he is outranked in respect by one who he sees as an electronic scrubber of toilets, the other crewmembers are talking seriously of curtailing his existence privileges. Where would it end? Once he’s switched off, would he ever be reactivated? for Rimmer, the idea of being extinguished — the ultimate rejection — speaks to a very real and powerful fear (as witnessed in the discussions about it in “Future Echoes”). Yet Lister wonders why he’s “taking this so personal”.

Naturally, this exchange leaves Rimmer anxious, irritated and upset, and his argument with Kryten over Space Corps Directives does nothing to lighten his mood. Of course, Kryten isn’t making up Directives; but of course, Kryten isn’t about to use them against Lister or the Cat, either. While Lister antagonized Rimmer for the first two series because of the many basic differences in their personalities, Kryten becomes a very effective nemesis for Rimmer for the next several series possibly because they’re more alike than either of them would ever admit. Both show signs of a deep-rooted sense of inadequacy (Kryten’s, inbuilt; Rimmer’s, learned in his childhood); both have an idealized image of themselves that they can never quite realize (Kryten wishes to be a true rebel; Rimmer sees himself in command and wielding power); both of them, then, make themselves feel just a tiny bit closer to that image at the other’s expense (Kryten humiliates Rimmer with Space Corps Directives and passive-agressive gibes, while Rimmer appeals to Kryten’s programmed subservience and pummels him with insults). This desire for power on Rimmer’s part is to become an important component of this episode — but more on that later.

And so it is that the Dwarfers meet Doctor Hildegarde “Kill ‘em all” Lanstrom (allowing Rimmer to get a small portion of his own back before he is infected) and discover her various positive virii, including the luck virus, or “Deus Ex Machina Juice”. Incidentally, while I guess I can tolerate it for this one episode, the luck virus is something I wish they hadn’t brought back for Series VIII; it’s just far too easy to get a character out of any situation imaginable with it, same as it’s so easy to build a cheap sex gag or ten around the sexual magnetism virus. (Also, I note that out of the veritable treasure trove of advanced technology and things that presumably were tucked away on Starbug when VIII happened, that’s the only thing we see brought back. It’s just plain lazy writing.) At any rate, the rest of the crew manage to escape with both their lives and the box of virii, to rendezvous with Rimmer aboard the Red Dwarf. And thus begin the mind games.

The observant Red Dwarf fan will notice that Rimmer’s behavior is unusual immediately upon the return of the rest of the crew. The petty rule mongering he displays by sending the others into quarantine is more characteristic of the vindictive Rimmer of “Balance of Power”, using the potential loss of his cigarette supply as a sword of Damocles to keep Lister under his hologrammatic thumb. The Arnold Rimmer that might remember Lister’s various small kindnesses toward him is already gone, for the episode at least, as the virus nudges his mind inexorably towards absolute power and absolute sociopathy.

I’m not altogether sure that the holovirus makes Rimmer crazy, as such. A crazy man, I think, wouldn’t have nearly the capacity to plan, the play with, to jerk around the other Dwarfers as Rimmer does here — his confining the other crew goads even Kryten into uncharacteristically direct harshness. Even the dress and Army boots, along with the dialogue about the King of the Potato People, is not so much a manifestation of insanity on Rimmer’s part as it is a flagrantly transparent excuse to level such a charge against Lister, Kryten and the Cat. It’s a mindfuck, pure and simple, a manipulation, and probably the closest Rimmer will ever get to using people as pawns. He’s not exactly mad, but he is mad with power — downright out-of-his-curl-crowned-gourd drunk with it. We get a taste of Rimmer’s megalomaniacal tendencies in “Meltdown”; only now he’s been given infinitely more power than the command of a ragtag band of wax droids could afford him, with infinitely fewer consequences that the holovirus sufferer would observe directly.

This, perhaps, is what the holovirus does: it unlocks a magnitude and variety of supeernormal abilites with which no human can dream of coping without being overwhelmed and consumed — abilities so potent that only liquid Get Out Of Anything Free Card in the form of Lanstrom’s luck virus can defeat it. Giving a man who has been helpless throughout his life in the face of repeated heartbreak, injustice and plain bad luck the power to make the very fabric of reality his squealing bitch is a bit like giving whiny, unpleasant Anakin Skywalker the power to become unpleasant and crushingly powerful Darth Vader (only altogether less unconvincingly acted and generally shitty): by hook, crook or Force Choke, somebody’s going W.O.O. and he’s too totally addled with his newfound might to give a goddamn that those on whom he is meting out vengeance (subconscious-in-lieu-of-real-tormentors or otherwise) are the closest he’s ever had to friends.

…Wait, did I just compare Red Dwarf to Star Wars? And the universe didn’t implode around the resulting nerdiness singularity?

On a sort of side note to the previous paragraph, I think perhaps Mr. Flibble actually represents Rimmer’s last wisp of sanity. Note that he isn’t the one suggesting horrible and messy torment for the other crewmembers; Flibble is. It’s one last way of distancing himself, however slightly, from the atrocities he may try to commit — of acknowledging that last bit of Arnold Rimmer that still remembers that these are his crewmates, that bit which we see being drowned in a sea of unbridled psionic energy + lots of anger + convenient targets. Or is that just overanalyzing this poor, picked-over episode?