The Drive Plate

Somebody should write a short fanfic exploring that. She’d show us the way.

There admittedly might be some retcons involved here, but I always found it interesting that Series I depicts Rimmer as having been affirmatively assigned the drive plate task, whereas in Justice, Kryten makes the very valid point that it’s a pretty major task to give to a low-ranking vending machine repairman. Which always made me think, did Hollister flamingo-up by giving that task to Rimmer, probably to save money or cut a corner by not having a qualified mechanic or engineer handle it? I also think it’s interesting how easily Red Dwarf blew up after the engine core was over-exposed in Demons & Angels, which leads me to also wonder if a shoddily-sealed drive plate SHOULD cause a radiation leak, or if mismanagement meant that a pretty minor error (maybe the drive plate is right next to the tubes for the chicken soup machine so it’s a minor thing theoretically in Rimmer’s purview) that shouldn’t matter in the scheme of things was just the first push in a cascading wave of errors and breakdowns? They wouldn’t send Rimmer to deal with the engine core, that’s way above his pay grade. So I always thought it was a minor thing that shouldn’t matter most of the time. 

I think the contradiction here arises out of the rewrite of The End. The original version had them doing more conventional engineering work to fix and maintain the ship, rather than the more menial vending-machine jobs that were introduced for the later draft (which then introduced the apparent contradiction of Rimmer being given such a significant task).

Either way, I think you can headcanon it that in a crew of just 169, the technicians might have to perform a wide variety of tasks.

Either way, I think you can headcanon it that in a crew of just 169, the technicians might have to perform a wide variety of tasks.

Until they retconned that too.
I still hold that there were 1,169 people on board but only 169 Space Corps crew manning the ship, with the rest miners and JMC support staff. So Lister as 169 was still bottom of the pile.

The theory that I personally subscribe to is that fixing the drive plate was the responsibility of a superior officer, but this officer wanted to skive so he fobbed the task off onto Rimmer instead.

Rimmer still gets a bollocking from Hollister in spite of this, because fixing the drive plate is something that a lot of technicians of Rimmer’s rank would be able to do, and by accepting the job Rimmer also accepted the responsibility over the outcome (Rimmer could have just admitted he wasn’t able to do it and sought the help of other colleagues, but his ego is too fragile for that). But the superior officer who was originally meant to do it would have been told off too if everyone hadn’t immediately died first.

I wonder how complex it was though – was it a big fiddly wiring job, or just screwing a plate in and he forgot one whole side of the screws because he was thinking about his exam or something.

For some reason I always think of it as involving welding.

Lister’s best guess in that scene turned out to be wrong.

Have any of you actually considered Googling what a drive plate is??

I don’t think that kind of drive plate makes sense with the idea of sealing to prevent a radiation leak.

So this can’t be what they were thinking of, although it wouldn’t be the first time they equated spaceship mechanics with car mechanics for a gag. 

Maybe that’s why he always failed the engineering exam?

That or Rimmer is just an idiot.