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Dave Lister
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David "Dave" Lister, commonly referred to simply as Lister, is a fictional character from the British science fiction situation comedy Red Dwarf, portrayed by Craig Charles. (In the never-aired pilot for the American version of the show, Lister was played by Craig Bierko.)
Lister is normally dressed in a leather jacket and hat, his boiler suits and his lengthy dreadlocks that he grows only from the back of his head. Until series VII, he was the last human alive - due to radiation leak on the mining ship Red Dwarf which killed the crew whilst he was in stasis.
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Encyclopedia
David "Dave" Lister, commonly referred to simply as Lister, is a fictional character from the British science fiction situation comedy Red Dwarf, portrayed by Craig Charles. (In the never-aired pilot for the American version of the show, Lister was played by Craig Bierko.)
Lister is normally dressed in a leather jacket and hat, his boiler suits and his lengthy dreadlocks that he grows only from the back of his head. Until series VII, he was the last human alive - due to radiation leak on the mining ship Red Dwarf which killed the crew whilst he was in stasis. Holly, the ship's computer, piloted the ship away from earth and kept Lister in stasis until the radiation reached normal background levels - 3 million years later. As the series progresses, Lister plays pool with planets, is attacked by a killer kebab, and defeated cybernetic war-machines time and time again. However, nothing has surprised Lister more than eating an edible Pot Noodle.
Early life
An orphan, he was discovered at six weeks old on November 26, 2155, under a pool table in a Liverpool pub (the Aigburth Arms), nestled in a cardboard box with the mysterious word "ouroboros" scribbled on the side. Lister celebrates his birthday on October 14, 2155, but because of the confusion Lister celebrates his birthday "most of the time". Lister is in fact his own father, shown in 'ouroboros' when he fills up a test tube for Kochanski, then realises after seeing a battery box, that he in fact is the baby in the test tube.
He was adopted by the Willmot family, but his adoptive father died when he was six. At the age of eleven, he went to live with Grandma Lister. She was a tough, pipe-smoking woman, who head butted the headmaster of Lister's school when Lister came bottom in French and whose cooking led to his being nicknamed "Fat Boy" until he was thirteen. He decided to lose weight after he was shocked to find that the coroner had to go back for more chalk for his grandmother when she died as a result of a traffic accident. Lister lost his virginity at the age of twelve in one of the bunkers on the ninth hole of Bootle Municipal golf course.
Lister suffers from claustrophobia, which stems from an incident at age 17 when a vengeful husband caught him making love to his wife, in the supermarket where he was employed. The man kidnapped the naked Lister, locked him in a box and threatened to throw him into a canal. Lister begged for mercy and was finally released onto the stage of a local theatre in the nude, in the middle of the Bootle Amateur Players' production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Around the same time, he formed a band called Smeg and the Heads. Seemingly their only song was called "Om". Lister was accepted at art college, but dropped out on his first day when he learned his schedule would include lectures "first thing in the afternoon". Lister went out with a girl named Lisa Yates, but the relationship ended because he did not want a commitment, a fact that Lister has since secretly regretted.
Within the continuity of the books by Grant Naylor, Lister went on a drunken Monopoly board pub crawl with his friends to celebrate his 23rd birthday, where he got very, very drunk;— when he awoke, he was on Mimas, one of Saturn's moons, wearing a lady's pink crimplene hat and a pair of yellow fishing waders, with no money and a passport in the name of "Emily Berkenstein". Lister, determined to make enough money to get back home, spent six months stealing "hoppers" (the equivalent of taxis on Mimas) and collecting the fares, but he loses all his money several times from blowing it all on alcohol (with the belief that if he gets drunk enough again, he will awaken back in London) and on one occasion being mugged by a drug addict hooked on the drug "Bliss". Eventually, Lister signs up for a job on the mining ship Red Dwarf, which unknown to him was due to make a four-and-a-half-year mining run to Titan before heading back to Earth.
Life onboard Red Dwarf
As a third technician, Lister was the lowest ranking crewman on Red Dwarf, a ship with a crew of 169 , and spent his time performing tasks too menial for the skutters, under the hated supervision of Arnold Rimmer, or getting drunk with his friends Olaf Petersen, Selby and Chen. Lister was imprisoned in a stasis booth because he smuggled a cat (which he named Frankenstein) aboard the ship. In the book, he deliberately let the cat be discovered so that he would be placed in stasis, thus getting back to Earth in (subjectively) zero time.
While Lister was in stasis, a release of lethal radiation occurred onboard as a result of a repair carried out by Rimmer, killing the entire crew. Holly, the ship's computer, kept Lister in stasis for three million years until the radiation levels decreased. Lister was left as the last human being in the universe, accompanied on Red Dwarf by a hologram simulation of Rimmer and a humanoid creature that evolved from his cat — Lister is actually believed to be the god of this race of cat-people, who know him as "Cloister the Stupid".
After a sexual liaison with his female alter-ego from a female-oriented alternate universe, Lister, via caesarean section, gave birth to twin sons named Jim and Bexley, named after his favourite zero-gravity football player, Jim-Bexley Speed. Due to them being born in a different reality to their conception, both of them grew to be eighteen years old within three days, so to make sure they did not die within a fortnight, Lister sent them back to their mother's dimension.
Lister has a tattoo on his right buttock, dedicated to the love of his life: it is a heart with an arrow through it and underneath it has in dripping curry sauce, "I love Vindaloo". It was obtained while on planet leave on Ganymede with Petersen, who spiked his cocktail with four-star petrol. When he woke up the next day he had enrolled as a novice monk in a Ganymedian monastery. He also has another tattoo claiming that he loves Petersen placed on his inner thigh, which stems from an unidentified incident where the two got so heavily drunk together that Lister had no idea what was going on. In the Red Dwarf roleplaying game, Petersen's character profile (featured in the "The Extra Bits" booklet) states that he has a reciprocal tattoo from the same incident.
Lister is dedicated to resurrecting and winning over the one true love of his three-million year life: Kristine Kochanski, the long dead navigation officer of Red Dwarf. It is his ambition to marry Kristine Kochanski and start a frugal life at a farm on the Earth islands of Fiji. When Lister meets an alternate universe incarnation of Kochanski, he is given the chance to create an in-vitro child. When the child is born, he takes it back in time and space to the pool table when he was first discovered. This means that Lister is essentially his own father, and his girlfriend is his mother.
Fate
The last time Lister is seen on screen is in the last episode of the eighth series, "Only the Good...", in which he escapes a rapidly disintegrating Red Dwarf by crossing over into a mirror universe along with Kristine Kochanski, the Cat and Kryten. It is unknown what happens to Lister after this as the cliffhanger was never resolved.
However, throughout the previous series at least several glimpses of Lister's future have been seen:
- In the episode "Future Echoes" in the first series of the show, a vision of Lister is seen with him as a very old man of 171 years old with a mechanical prosthetic hand. This future version of Lister still has his dreadlocks, although they are over two metres long and almost white with age.
- In the episode "Cassandra" in the eighth series of the show, the Dwarfers make contact with a prophetic and clairvoyant computer that has the ability to predict the future without a margin of error. Lister is told by Cassandra that he will live to 181 years old and will die whilst trying to take a bra off with his teeth.
- In the book Better Than Life, which explores different adventures than the TV series, Lister eventually discovers Earth, but finds that it is ruled by eight-foot-long cockroaches. He becomes their king and plans to rebuild the planet. The others find him thirty-six years later (after believing Lister was missing for a fortnight due to a time dilation). Later, after Lister dies of a heart attack in a confrontation with a polymorph, his body is taken to the alternative universe where time runs backwards and is told that he will be rescued in thirty-six years time. Two accounts of what followed are Backwards and Last Human.
Discovery of Lister's parents
It is revealed in the episode "Ouroboros" that Lister and his ex-girlfriend, Kristine Kochanski, are in fact his parents and that he is his own son. After meeting the Kristine from the alternate universe, she asked him for a donation of sperm (because the hologram of her Lister cannot father children) so that she could have children. While loading supplies from the alternates ship, Lister sees the word "ouroboros" on one of the crates and then discovers that the eventual child of him and Kristine is himself, that he takes himself back in time and leaves himself to be found by his foster parents.
The episode ends with Lister appearing in a bar carrying his 6-month-old self in a box labelled "ouroboros", to which Lister, and the two who discovered him, mistook as "Our Rob or Ross". He explains to his baby self (and also assuring himself in a way) that he was never abandoned, but his life is an ever going cycle to keep the human race from going extinct.
Personality
Lister is very lazy, and more importantly, unmotivated. He is a slob, his best shirt is the one with only two curry stains on the front, and prior to going into stasis he saved money by never buying soap, deodorant or socks. He enjoys "bumming around", drinking large amounts of lager, and eating Indian food. Lister has dreadlocks on the back of his head, which he seems to have for most of his life (in "Future Echoes", Lister meets himself at age 171, and his dreadlocks are the length of his body). Lister's religious beliefs are unclear. In the episode, "The Last Day", Kryten states that Lister is a pantheist, believing God to be in all things; however, in the later episode "Back to Reality" he is described as the "ultimate atheist".
He prides himself on being a good man possessing moral courage, something used against him by a 'despair squid' in "Back to Reality"; when hallucinating under the influence of the squid's ink, he was driven to suicidal despair by his belief that, in the alternate world in which he found himself, he was a genocidal minister of a totalitarian state responsible for the mass murder of countless innocents. When confronted with an evil version of himself on a twisted copy of Red Dwarf, Lister says of his evil counterpart, "But he kills; I'm not capable of that."
In many ways, Lister is the complete opposite of Rimmer, and the two are constantly at odds with each other. Rimmer is constantly pointing out Lister's stupidity, but actually Lister has been shown to be quite bright. For example, he managed to learn the international language Esperanto from Rimmer's tapes (certainly better than Rimmer), while Rimmer himself was unable to. He is capable of piloting a spaceship and has a knack for mechanical repairs, particularly amateur cybernetics. The novel, Last Human explains that Lister often knows the solution to a problem, but consults Kryten, as he lacks confidence in his own opinion. He also considers himself good at pool, saying that he was nicknamed "Dave Cinzano Bianco Lister" because once he was on a table you couldn't get rid of him.
Dave Lister is also an avid junk collector who has purchased (among other things) a talking toilet, a talking toaster with artificial intelligence, and two robot goldfish, which he named Lennon and McCartney (the latter of which swims backwards and is prone to breaking down).
Entertainment
To prevent boredom, Lister enters in many recreational activities.
- Fishing — Lister mentions how he used to go down to the canal to go "condom fishing" before joining Red Dwarf, and secretly plans to go fishing with Kryten and The Cat (and Holly) behind Rimmer's back ("Dimension Jump"). In "Timeslides", The Cat also offers playing Junior Angler with Lister.
- Television — Lister and Cat have indepth discussions about The Flintstones (debating if Wilma is sexier than Betty) as well as Tales of The River Bank: The Next Generation ("Camille").
- Films — Lister enjoys watching films from classics like Citizen Kane and Casablanca (the remake with Myra Binglebat and Peter Beardsley, which Lister described "definitive"), to films like Attack of the Giant Savage Completely Invisible Aliens and the Killer Bikini Vampire Girls films. Lister also likes soppy romance films (see "Confidence And Paranoia" and "Holoship").
- Games — To pass time onboard Red Dwarf, Lister has created many different games including "Match the Bodypart to the Crewmember" and "Armpit Name That Tune" ("Blue"). Kochanski even suggests that Lister's favourite games include "Name That Smell" and "How Many Marbles Can You Fit Up Your Nostril" ("Beyond A Joke").
- Virtual/Artificial Reality — Lister enjoys using the virtual reality suite onboard Starbug playing such games as Wimbledon and Gumshoe ("Gunmen Of The Apocalypse"). Rimmer claims that Lister uses the AR machine to have sex — a claim supported in "Stoke Me a Clipper". Although Lister agreed with Kochanski to partake in Jane Austen World, Lister found the experience boring ("Beyond A Joke").
- Attempt to play his guitar
Guitar
Lister is very attached to his guitar, believes himself to be an excellent guitarist, although his belief is misplaced. In the episode "Psirens", his companions are able to distinguish a psiren disguised as Lister from the real Lister because the psiren is able to play guitar. Lister eventually acknowledges his inability to play the guitar to at least some degree; in "Nanarchy" he comments, after playing his guitar with assistance from Kryten due to the loss of an arm, "at least now I'm only half crap." In Series 1, Lister's guitar is firstly an Ovation acoustic and silver in colour. Then in Series 3, episode 2 ("Marooned"), his guitar is shown to be a black, electric guitar — according to Lister it is a "genuine Les Paul copy".)
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