Backwards Marooned Polymorph Timeslides Bodyswap The Last DayBack to RD intro page |
Holly: Abandon ship! Black Hole approaching. Abandon ship... (The siren stops) Oh, God, now the siren's broken. Awooga, awooga. Abandon ship!
Rimmer: But a Black Hole's a huge, compacted star! It's millions of miles wide! Why didn't you see it on the radar screen?
Holly: Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black. And the thing about space, your basic space
colour is black. So how are you supposed to see them?
Rimmer: But five of them! How can you be ambushed by five Black Holes?
Holly: Always the way, isn't it? You hang around in deep space for three million years and you don't see one. Then, all of a sudden, five all turn up at once.
Rimmer: "Toy soldiers"? They've been in our family for years. They're priceless nineteenth-century replicas of Napolean's Armee du
Nord.
Lister: So you can't change the clothes and that, like you can with Sindy?
Lister: Twenty-four thousand!? And you had the front to borrow money off me to buy me a birthday present?
Rimmer: It was only fifteen quid.
Lister: Right. Fifteen quid. And what did I get? A five-quid book token.
Rimmer: Are you sure you've got everything?
Kryten: Just the bare essentials - food and medical supplies.
Cat: Yeah, and I'm just taking the bare essentials, too - thirty-six changes of clothing and ten full-length dress mirrors.
Lister: Cat, we're going to be away twelve hours.
Cat: You think I need more mirrors?
Rimmer: Look, please, honestly. They're priceless.
Lister: I'm just having a goosie.
Rimmer: Look, if you get curry all over them, how's that going to look? What's Lieutenant-General Baron Jaquinaux of the First Cavalry Division supposed to be doing with meat vindaloo all over his tunic?
Lister: It'll make him look more authentic. People'll think he's got dysentry.
Rimmer: I just made an innocuous comment, I merely voiced a rumour that MacWilliams was sexually tilted in favour of sleeping with the dead. I didn't start the rumour. I simply voiced it.
Rimmer: I'll tell you something. Something I've never told anyone. When I was fifteen, I went to Macedonia on a school trip, to the site of
Alexander The Great's palace. And for the first time in my whole life, I felt ... I felt I was home. This place was where I belonged. Years later, I got friendly with a hypnotherapist - Donald - and told him about the Alexander the Great thing, and he said that he'd regress me back through my past lives. I was dubious, but I let him put me under. It turned out my instincts were absolutely correct - I had lived a past life in Macedonia. That palace was my home. Because, believe it or not, Lister, he told me that, in a past incarnation, I was Alexander the Great...'s chief eunuch.
Rimmer: Well, maybe it's rot, I don't know. But it's funny - to this day, I can't look at a pair of nutcrackers without wincing. And why is it, whenever I'm with a large group of women, I have this overwhelming urge to bathe them in warm olive oil?
Lister: I have that urge, Rimmer. It's got nothing to do with past lives.
(Lister enters Starbug, followed by a blizzard.)
Rimmer, without looking up: Still snowing, is it?
Lister: We're going to die, aren't we? How much food is there?
Rimmer: There's half a bag of soggy Smoky Bacon Crisps, a tin of mustard powder, a brown lemon, three water biscuits, two bottles of vinegar and a tube of Bonjella gum ointment.
Lister: Gum ointment?
Rimmer: Yes, it was in the first-aid box. It's that minty flavour. It's quite nice.
Lister: It's quite nice if you smear it on your mouth ulcer, but you can't sit down and eat it.
Rimmer: You may have to.
Lister: That's it? There's nothing else?
Rimmer: Just a Pot Noodle. Oh, and I found a tin of dog food in the tool cupboard.
Lister: Well. It's pretty obvious what gets eaten last. I can't stand Pot Noodles.
Rimmer: Mayday! Mayday! I wonder why it's "Mayday."
Lister: Eh?
Rimmer: The distress call. Why d'you say "Mayday"? It's only a bank holiday. Why not "Shrove Tuesday" or "Ascension Sunday"? Ascension Sunday! Ascension Sunday! The fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost! The fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost!
Lister: Everywhere I look reminds me of food. Look at these books. Charles Lamb, Herman Wok, the complete works of Sir Francis Bacon, Eric
Van Lustbader...
Rimmer: Eric Van Lustbader? What's he got to do with food?
Lister: Van. Bread van, meat van, food!
Lister: Tell me a story. Any story.
Rimmer: I don't know any stories.
Lister: Anything. Tell me how you lost your virginity.
Rimmer: My what?
Lister: Come on. Talk to me.
Rimmer: How I lost it? Well, it was so long ago ... I was so young and sexually precocious, I'm not sure I can remember.
Lister: Everyone can remember how they lost their virginity. It's one of those things ... like everyone can remember where they were when Cliff Richard was shot. Or when the first woman landed on Pluto. Or when they installed the gigantic toupee over the earth to cover the gap in the ozone layer. It's just one of those things you always remember.
Rimmer: Well, I don't. Good grief, you can hardly expect me to recall every sexual liason I've ever partaken of. What d'you think I am - Marvo the Memory Man?
Lister: Come on, Rimmer. The truth.
Rimmer: The truth? Not much to tell, really. I've always been a bit of a fish out of water when it comes to women. Never know what to say. I wasn't very highly sexed, to be honest with you. I think it was all that school cabbage I was forced to eat as a boy. Still, the first time ... the first time was this girl I met at Cadet College. Sandra, she was called. We did it in the back of my brother's car.
Lister: What was it like?
Rimmer: Oh, brilliant. Incredible. Bentley
convertible. V8 turbo. Walnut veneer panelling. Marvellous machine. So what about you?
Lister: Michelle Fisher. The ninth hole of the Bootle Municipal golf course. Par four, dogleg to the right, in the bunker behind the green.
Rimmer: You lost your virginity on a golf course? How did you have the nerve?
Lister: It wasn't in the middle of the Ryder Cup or anything. It was midnight.
Rimmer: Oh, I seeee.
Lister: Michelle. Michelle Fisher. God, she was gorgeous.
Rimmer: How old were you?
Lister: Just gorgeous. If she'd have wanted, she could probably have got a job behind the perfume counter at Lewis', that's how good-looking she was.
Rimmer: How old were you?
Lister: She took off all her clothes and just stood there in front of me, completely naked. I was so excited, I nearly dropped my skateboard.
Rimmer: Your skateboard? How old were you?
Lister: Twelve.
Rimmer: Twelve!!! Twelve years old!!? You lost your virginity when you were twelve??!
Lister: Yeah.
Rimmer: Twelve?? Well, you can't have been a full member of the golf Club, then.
Rimmer: I used to play golf. I hate people who abuse the facilities. I hope you raked the sand back nicely before you left. That'd be a hell of a lie to get into, wouldn't it? Competition the next day, and your ball lands in Lister's buttock crevice. You'd need more than a niblick to get that one out.
Lister: Are you trying to say I've got a big bum?
Rimmer: Big? It's like two badly-parked Volkswagens. The only things I ever lost when I was twelve were my shoes with the compass in the heel and the animal tracks on the soles. Porky Roebuck threw them in the septic tank behind the sports ground. I cried for weeks - I was wearing them. I never even thought about sex when I was twelve.
Lister: Maybe that's because you used to be Alexander the Great's cheif eunuch.
Rimmer: What are you doing?
Lister: There's nothing left to burn.
Rimmer: But not my books! Don't burn the books.
Lister: There's nothing else left.
Rimmer: But it's obscene. A book is a thing of beauty. The voice of freedom. It's the essence of civilization.
Lister: Biggles' Big Adventure.
Rimmer: Well, perhaps not that one, but you know what I'm saying.
Lister: Complete Works of Shakespeare. That should be good for a couple of hours.
Rimmer: Three days without food, and the walls of civilization come tumbling down!
Lister: What d'you mean?
Rimmer: They say that every society is only three meals away from revolution. Deprive a culture of food for three meals, and you'll have an anarchy. And it's true, isn't it? You haven't eaten for a couple of days, and you've turned into a barbarian.
Lister: I'm just burning a book!
Rimmer: It's not just a book. It's the only copy of probably the greatest work in English literature. Probably the only copy left in the entire universe, and you're quite happy to toss it on the fire to keep your little mitts warm for fifteen minutes?
Lister: There's nothing else to burn.
Rimmer: That's it, then, is it? Goodbye Hamlet? Farewell Macbeth? Toodle-pip King Lear?
Lister: Have you ever read any of it?
Rimmer: I've seen West Side Story. That's based on one of them.
Lister: Yeah, but have you actually read any?
Rimmer: Not all the way through, no. I can quote some, though.
Lister: Go on, then.
Rimmer: "Now..." That's all I can remember.
Lister: Where's that from, then?
Rimmer: Richard III, you moron. The speech that he does at the beginning. "Now..." something something something. It's brilliant writing. It really is. Unforgettable.
Lister: OK, I'll save it till last. Lolita. Is it OK if I burn Lolita?
Rimmer: Save page sixty-one.
Lister: Well, now I know why dogs lick their testicles - it's to take away the taste of their food.
Rimmer: The whole twenty-four grand isn't going to last an hour, is it? It took me ten years to save it. Ten years!
Lister: I'd better start unpacking the soldiers.
Rimmer: No. There must be something else to burn. There must be.
Lister: There isn't. I looked. Listen, I know it's a bummer. I know it must be heartbreaking. But it's only stuff. It's just possessions. In the end, they're not important. They might go a bundle for some swanky Islington antique shop, but right here, and right now, all they are is nicely painted firewood.
Rimmer: This isn't happening. It's a nightmare.
Lister: You've got to get your priorities right. It's like those people you read about who run back into a burning house to rescue some treasured piece of furniture and wind up burning to death. Nothing is more important than a human life...
Rimmer: What about your guitar?
Lister: ... Except my guitar.
Lister: It's my life-line. I ... I need that guitar. When it gets to me - I mean the loneliness - when it gets on top of me ... it's the only way I can escape. I mean, I know I'm not exactly a wizard on it, and it's only got five strings, and three of them are G, but the whole of my life I've never had anything to hang on to - no roots, no parents, no education...
Rimmer: No education?
Lister: I went to art college. All I've ever had is that guitar. It's the only thing in the whole of my miserable smegging life that hasn't walked out on me. Don't make me burn it.
Rimmer: There's no point in being modest. I know what that guitar meant to you. The same as that trunk meant to me. If that trunk got so much as scratched, I'd be devastated. It's not the outward value - for me, that trunk is a link to the past. A link to the father I never managed to square things with.
Lister: (Slightly panicky) Is it?
Rimmer: It's the only thing he ever gave me, apart from ... apart from his disappointment. But you've shown me, by burning your guitar, what true value is. Decency. Self-sacrifice. Those are the things that make up real
wealth. And from where I'm standing ... I'm a pretty rich man.
Lister: Oh, God.
Rimmer: Burn the soldiers.
Lister: No. Not the soldiers too.
Rimmer: You burnt your guitar. I wish to make a sacrifice, too. Burn the Armee du Nord. Cast them into the flames, let them lay down their lives for the sake of friendship. ... What's that smell?
Lister: What smell? I can't smell any smell.
Rimmer: Camphor.
Lister: Oh, God.
Rimmer: Your guitar was made of camphor wood! It was probably worth a fortune. Burn the soldiers - burn them right now!!
Holly: As it transpired, there weren't any Black Holes.
Rimmer: But you saw them - you saw them on the monitor.
Holly: They weren't Black Holes.
Rimmer: What were they?
Holly: Grit. Five specks of grit on the scanner-scope. See, the thing about grit is, it's black, and the thing about scanner-scopes...
Rimmer: Oh, shut up.
Rimmer: Kryten, would you get the hacksaw and follow me?
Kryten: Where are we going?
Rimmer: We're going to do to Lister what Alexander the Great once did to me.
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