Come the series VI episode "Legion" (1993), Rimmer's Light Bee is upgraded by the titular character to a 'hard-light' hologram where he is now able to interact with his surroundings as well as being essentially indestructible, yet still able to feel pain.

The ship crash lands on Earth in a reality where time runs backwards, leaving Kryten, Rimmer and Holly (now played by Hattie Hayridge) stranded.

[2] In "Timeslides" (1989), Lister is seen travelling back in time by entering a photographic slide with mutated developing fluid, and he tells his seventeen-year-old self (played by Emile Charles) how to gain a successful multi-billion-pound[note 2] business empire with fifty-eight houses by inventing the "tension sheet" so that he won't join the Space Corps and get trapped on Red Dwarf in deep space.

By becoming the inventor of the tension sheet and never joining the Space Corps, Lister's entire timeline is altered, causing Kryten to never be rescued and the Cat race to no longer exist.

Rimmer is left on his own with Holly and tries going back further in time to his eight-year-old self's (played by Simon Gaffney) days in boarding school so that he invents the tension sheet.

According to his backstory, Rimmer's parents were "Seventh-day Advent Hoppists" and believed that every Sunday should be spent hopping, because their version of the Bible had a misprint in 1 Corinthians 13 and they had interpreted this passage literally.

[15] According to Lister in "Justice" (1991)--and in the novels--before the nuclear accident that killed the crew of Red Dwarf, Rimmer was in charge of "Z Shift", and it occupied his every waking moment.

In the episode, a Starbug from fifteen years hence arrives, with Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten's future selves intending to copy some components from the present Starbug's time drive so they can fix the fault in their own drive and continue their lives of opulence, socialising with notorious figures of history such as the Habsburgs, the Borgias, Louis XVI, Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring.

[30] Lister, for a time, desperately misses him, and it takes a therapeutic song by a simulation of Rimmer (played by Barrie), shown in "Blue" (1997), to remind him what a horrible presence he could be.

In Back in the Red, Lister, Rimmer, Kryten, Cat and Kochanski (now played by Chloë Annett) are sentenced to two years in the ship's brig for misuse of confidential information.

[34] In "Only the Good..." (1999), when a corrosive micro-organism is shown destroying Red Dwarf and everyone else evacuates to a mirror universe, Rimmer is trapped on the disintegrating ship.

This revelation liberates Rimmer from the spectre of his lineage on the grounds that he has accomplished a great deal by the standards set by his biological father, and he is able to formulate a successful plan of attack that destroys the Simulant vessels before returning to Red Dwarf.

After being banished off Red Dwarf by the newly rebooted Holly (void of his old memories and computer-senilic personality), the crew eventually come across a ship possessing new and powerful technology, specifically related to holograms.

By morning, the crew discover they are buried under the sand, however Rimmer formulates a plan to contact the rebooted Holly, which Kryten manages using an antenna extension from his hand.

Using the acquired Anubis Stone attained from the cat clerics, they once again transform Rimmer into his former "Diamond Light" incarnation, who uses his powers to dispose of the bomb off Red Dwarf and subsequently helps bring down Rodon's main battlecruiser in the following confrontation.

He encounters Lister, who has stolen the Mimas-equivalent of a taxi known as a 'Hopper' to earn money, and pays him to take him to the red-light district of the city where Rimmer plans to frequent a droid brothel, while lying and saying he intends to eat at a restaurant.

Unbeknownst to either, there truly was mutual attraction, but both decided to wait for the other to make the first move after that one night—Rimmer to prove a point and McGruder because she was delusional due to her concussion—leading to their going separate ways.

She told him false stories of his father's courageous acts of valour and through these fictitious tales McGruder was inspired to become a Space Corps Marine and sign-up for a dangerous mission on board the Mayflower, a large spaceship with terraformation capabilities, with the potential prospect of meeting his father, who via the black box of Red Dwarf he learned was resurrected as a hologram to keep the sole survivor, Lister, sane.

Following a series of events, Lister had spent a period of time alongside McGruder and a handful of survivors from the Mayflower, separate from the main crew of Rimmer, Kochanski, Cat, and Kryten.

In the abridged audiobook, as read by author Rob Grant, the wild west simulation section is cut and instead Rimmer's light-bee is sucked into deep space following a hostage crisis with the Agonoid, Djuhn'Keep, onboard Starbug.

[47] Rimmer's primary character traits include anal-retentiveness, over-adherence to protocol, cowardice, bitterness and a severely inflated ego which is likely a coping mechanism to counteract for his deep-seated sense of self-loathing, which he tries but sometimes fails to hide from others.

As the highest ranking survivor aboard the ship (despite being a hologram), Rimmer often deludes himself into believing that he is in charge and that he has somehow been moulding "his" crew into an effective spacegoing unit,[48] despite the fact that the others tend to take suggestions from Lister or Kryten in a crisis.

In "Blue" (1997), it is revealed that Rimmer keeps a "war journal" in which he twists events to depict himself as a hero who is braver than Lister, smarter than Kryten and cooler than the Cat.

Kryten further argues that Rimmer only felt guilty for causing the accident because of his delusions about his importance to the mission, comparing him to a front-gate security guard who considers himself corporate head.

Although Rimmer ultimately succeeds in destroying the opposing army, his forces are completely wiped out when he uses most of them as a diversion and then has Kryten turn up the heating to melt all the droids.

[19] In addition to his fondness for militarism,[14] elitism and Hammond organ music,[49] Rimmer also enjoys Morris dancing and is an authority on 20th century telegraph poles,[49] especially those observed while trainspotting.

He attempts to coerce Lister to shoot a dangerous Simulant (Nicholas Ball) in the back (bemoaning the fact that said Simulant was currently awake),[17] suggests shooting Kryten and Lister into space when they appeared on the ship in a timeline where they had been erased from history,[52] suggests that he and Kryten eject Lister and Cat from Starbug when it is revealed that the ship lacks fuel to reach the nearest planet – although this is also prompted by the discovery that the ship only had air for seven minutes and was ended when Rimmer learned that his projection unit only had enough power for four minutes[22] — and in a despair squid-induced hallucination of 21st century Earth, casually pushes a fellow hologram (Sophie Winkleman) into traffic after she repeatedly threatens to have him "erased" and claims that hologram-killing is "morally, ethically [...] fine".

Once Rimmer is sapped of his anger by the Polymorph, he is a conciliatory pacifist wishing to promote peace between the creature and various members of the crew and keen to not hurt anybody's feelings during their discussions.

Barrie, who had originally auditioned for Lister,[54] was familiar with Rob Grant and Doug Naylor having worked together on Son of Cliché and Spitting Image and with the producers on Happy Families and various Jasper Carrott productions.

Chris Barrie was given an offer to reprise his role, but turned it down for fear of being tied into a restrictive, long-term contract, which is common in American television production.