Plot
The episode begins with a young Arnold Rimmer being told by his mother that the headmaster at his school was considering keeping him back a year. Having received the headmaster's notice in the post, she warns her son that this could affect the direction his life takes...
Years later, in a parallel dimension, another Arnold Rimmer exists. Commander 'Ace' Rimmer is a test pilot in the Space Corps: he is charming, good looking, intelligent, popular, brave and modest. Being the heroic type, he jumps at the chance to test-fly a dimension-jumping prototype spacecraft despite the fact he'll never be able to return home. After saying farewell to this friends, Ace takes-off and initiates a dimension jump.
Aboard Red Dwarf, Lister, Kryten and the Cat attempt to sneak away in the middle of the night to enjoy a fishing holiday on a nearby ocean planet on Starbug and escape Rimmer for a few weeks. However, Rimmer wakes up when everyone tries to leave and is hurt that the others would leave without him. Lister tries his best to talk their way out of it, but it's no use and he's forced to invite Rimmer along to everyone's chagrin. Aboard Starbug, Rimmer quickly starts to irritate everyone by constantly trying to tell Kryten what to do by piloting, then by offering to play his Hammond Organ CDs for Lister and the Cat. Thankfully, he is stopped when Starbug encounters a dimension disturbance... from which Ace's ship appears and collides with the ship.
Starbug crash-lands on a water planet, but Ace does not desert them and follows down to help. Aboard Starbug he comes face-to-face with his counterpart Rimmer and an instant mutual dislike develops. In contrast, he and Lister quickly become good friends and, despite Ace's broken arm, the two brave the elements to fix the craft while Rimmer stays aboard and makes snide jokes about his counterpart.
After his spectacular display of courage, the rest of the crew think Ace is quite a guy—except the original Rimmer, who is bitter, and positive that in the other reality, Ace got all the breaks in life that he'd been denied. But it turns out that Ace Rimmer had been the one kept down a year at school; while Rimmer was allowed to progress and spent the rest of his life making excuses, while the humiliation of being kept down forced Ace to knuckle down and fight back.
Meanwhile, the Cat has a broken leg, sustained during Starbug's crash, and is becoming delirious. Once aboard Red Dwarf, Ace says he can patch up the Cat with a bit of micro-surgery, but that afterwards he must move on. He tells Lister he can't stand his spineless counterpart any longer and that there are a billion other realities to explore and maybe he'll meet a Rimmer even worse than the one he met aboard Red Dwarf... but he doubts it.
Read more about this topic: Dimension Jump (Red Dwarf Episode)
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