I Found My Swimming Certificate!

Despair Squid - my favorite episode of the TV show Red Dwarf. (Which is an anagram of Fr Edward...) Actually, it is one of my favorite episodes of all time of any TV show. Let's recap:

In this episode, four beings are underwater exploring a far out world when they encounter a giant squid. The squid destroys their ship and they all die. Then they wake up in room filled with Virtual Reality equipment. It is revealed that the entire series of this show had just been these four people playing a video game, but they had forgotten. As they walk around, they can see how other people are playing the characters that they had been playing for the past couple of seasons. The interesting thing was that in the other games, the crew were winners. (Red Dwarf's crew were hapless losers, stumbling from one bad event to the next throughout the series.) Especially relevant was Rimmer.

Rimmer was the biggest loser of the group - he always blamed his lack of success on his lack of advantages growing up that more successful people had had. But he found out in watching other people play the Rimmer character, that they were competent people. They all had the same starting place in the game, but somehow they turned this character into a winner.

In talking with people in the game lounge, the other people couldn't believe that he played the character as a loser. Rimmer's only accomplishment in life was his swimming certificate, which he proudly hung up. But in the game, it was a trick. The idea that such a lowly certificate could be the high point of someones life was supposed to stand out in the game and make the player take notice. He was supposed to look more closely at the certificate, then he would have realized that the dot in the "i" in "Swimming" was actually micro text telling him that he was really an undercover agent on a secret mission. This knowledge would propel the character into being a hero in the game.

The part that I found most fascinating about all of this - he really shouldn't have needed to read this. The only difference between his Rimmer and the other players' Rimmers was this knowledge, but what reason would anyone have to believe the writing in micro text? What if he had just lived his life like he was that undercover spy? Then, wouldn't he have had the same great life? Did it matter that someone else told him, or could he have turned his life around with a simple self generated thought, rather than someone else's thought?

The Edward