Dave Lister
 | This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. The reason given is: Lead especially reads like a children's magazine, with "golly-jeepers" gushing, like "time and time again". Which isn't even true, as he did each of the mentioned things only once apiece. (November 2009) |
| David Lister | |
|---|---|
 The "Last Human" | |
| First appearance | The End |
| Last appearance | Back to Earth |
| Created by | Rob Grant and Doug Naylor |
| Portrayed by | Craig Charles |
| In-universe information | |
| Alias | Lister of Smeg, Derek Custer |
| Nickname | Listy, Dave, Skipper, Dave "Cinzano Bianco" Lister |
| Species | Human |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Technician, Third Class, Bum (Self Proclaimed) |
| Family | Adopted By The Wilmot Family, Grandma Lister |
| Children | Jim Lister and Bexley Lister (in alternate realities), himself |
| Relatives | Father: himself, Mother: Kristine Kochanski |
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 a radiation leak on the mining ship Red Dwarf which killed the crew while 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 progressed, Lister played pool with planets, was attacked by a killer kebab, and defeated cybernetic war-machines, among various other unusual adventures.
Early life
An orphan, he was discovered at six weeks old on 26 November 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 14 October,[citation needed] "most of the time". Lister is in fact his own father, shown in the episode "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 Wilmot family, but after his adoptive father died when he was six[2] he went to live with Grandma Lister. She was a tough, pipe-smoking woman who once famously headbutted the headmaster of Lister's school when Lister came bottom in French, leading to Lister's expulsion, and whose cooking led to his being nicknamed "Fat Boy" from ages eleven to thirteen. Lister decided to lose weight after his grandmother died when she was hit by a truck, and he was shocked to find that the coroner had to go back for a second piece of chalk to complete the chalk outline. After his grandmother's death Lister apparently lived and attended school in an orphanage, sleeping in a pitch-dark dormitory alongside many other boys including "Squeaky" Gibson, whose life he saved on one occasion when he discovered Gibson having an epileptic fit. Around the same time he got his first job as a supermarket trolley attendant, which he would eventually quit after ten years "because he didn't want to get tied down to a career".
Lister lost his virginity at the age of twelve in one of the bunkers on the ninth hole of Bootle Municipal golf course. He also spent a good part of his puberty lusting after the older sister of one Pete Tranter. 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 in which he was the singer and guitarist, along with his friends Dobbin (drums) and Gazza (bassist). Seemingly their only song was called "Om", the only lyrics to which appeared to be repetitions of the vocalisation "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 Lise 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 24th 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 who was high on the narcotic "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 Triton 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,[3] 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 Deb Lister, his female alter-ego from a female-oriented alternate universe, he, 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.[4]
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.[5] 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
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. Though Lister believed this was an incredibly sexy way to go, the others quickly pointed out that at 181 years old it may be his own bra, and that the teeth may not be in his mouth at the time.
- 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.
Back to Earth
In the 2009 special "Red Dwarf: Back to Earth", after an encounter with a female despair squid, Lister, along with the rest of the crew, hallucinate an alternate reality in which they are fictional characters and that their lives are just a TV series that they have somehow escaped from.
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; they are also present, if shorter, on his 17-year-old self in "Timeslides"). 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". In "Waiting For God", Lister displays disgust over the Cat people's war over a religious disagreement stating that they were "using religion as an excuse to be crappy to each other."
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." Likewise when he kills "The Creator" of Red Dwarf during his Back to Earth hallucination, his initial reaction is to state that he doesn't kill people and doesn't understand why he did it. He has also shown some philosophical sides over the course of the series, such as when he reflected on the relative pointlessness of the Justice Field witnessed in "Justice" and the escalation of uncontrolled evolution that resulted in the creation of the Despair Squid in "Back to Reality".
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.
- Television — Lister and Cat have in depth discussions about The Flintstones (debating if Wilma is sexier than Betty) as well as Tales of the Riverbank: 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 Revenge of the Surfboarding Killer Bikini Vampire Girls. Lister also likes soppy romance films (see "Confidence And Paranoia" and "Holoship"). In the novels, his all-time favourite film is It's A Wonderful Life.
- 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").
Guitar
Lister is very attached to his guitar,[6] 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".)
Alternative Listers
As well as Deb Lister, there have been various other alternative versions of Lister. During an encounter with The Inquisitor, Dave is replaced with an alternative version of himself. This Dave Lister, one of the sperm who didn't make it whilst fertilising his Mothers egg, was given the chance to live a better life than the one lived by the real Lister. However, the fact that he is dressed identically, and also stranded on Red Dwarf, suggests that this Dave fared no better. This Dave was ultimately killed by The Inquisitor whilst the real Dave tried to escape deletion from existence.
Under the influence of a despair squid's hallucinogenic ink, Lister is fooled into thinking that his time aboard Red Dwarf was just an encounter in a Total Immersion Videogame. After leaving the game, Lister briefly gets to watch the action as another group plays the game as it was intended to be played - the scenario observed involves the team having fabulous space opera adventures in outer space and interacting in a far less dysfunctional manner, and a resurrected Kochanski in a passionate relationship with Lister, who is played as a tough, cigar chomping action hero type.
Discovering a temporal rift in normal space, Lister, along with the rest of the crew, travel through and encounter an alternative Red Dwarf crew, with some small differences: in this reality, it is Lister who is the hologram, having failed to survive the accident that wiped out the crew. His hologramatic status led to this Lister becoming a better person, more caring and attentive, and cured of his slobby habits.
References and footnotes
- ^ ^ There have been many references to Lister's age, and he is regularly stated as mid-twenties, for example by Binks on Holoship. In Tikka to Ride, he confirms that he has turned 28. He later in Back in the Red part 1, that he has been out of stasis for about 5 to 6 years.
- ^ "Lister, David | Personnel | Space Corps Database". Red Dwarf. Retrieved 2009-03-23.
- ^ ^ This number has changed between series. In the first series, it was mostly given as 169, although it was 129 in one episode. In Series IV, Episode 3, Rimmer is accused of 1,167 counts of manslaughter, due to his own guilt over the accident that killed the crew of Red Dwarf. This would make the crew count 1,169 (as Lister is the only survivor and Rimmer cannot be charged with his own murder). The novelisation Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers states that the crew number is actually 11,169.
- ^ Opening Crawl of Series III episode 1 "Backwards". Red Dwarf. Season III. Episode 1.
{{cite episode}}: Unknown parameter|episodelink=ignored (|episode-link=suggested) (help); Unknown parameter|serieslink=ignored (|series-link=suggested) (help) - ^ "Psirens". Red Dwarf. Season VI. Episode 1.
{{cite episode}}: Unknown parameter|episodelink=ignored (|episode-link=suggested) (help); Unknown parameter|serieslink=ignored (|series-link=suggested) (help) - ^ LISTER: 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. "Marooned". Red Dwarf. Season VI. Episode 1.
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