#And I’d get it to some degree if they were all uncaring assholes but Lister is usually shown to be compassionate and good-hearted.

[thats-highly-significant]

It genuinely blows my mind how Red Dwarf has multiple episodes where the problem is that Rimmer has been unloved for his whole life and has a series of genuinely harmful neuroses as a result of his general upbringing. And in one of those episodes (cough cough terrorform) the solution is to make Rimmer feel loved and accepted, and he gets better! And yet! Because it was an episodic BBC comedy from the late 80s they didn’t want to change the status quo too much between episodes so Rimmer just never ever actually gets better. There’s something kind of awe-inspiring about creating a completely insufferable character who usually operates as the punching bag to Lister’s straight man, and then taking a lot of episode runtime to tell the audience in explicit terms that he is the way he is because of a tragic series of life events, and that he could get better if someone bothered to show him some compassion, and then just going straight back to Well, It Is Time to Laugh At Rimmer. It’s like well why don’t you just fucking kill me and be done with it