Dave Lister
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| Red Dwarf character | |
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| Dave Lister | |
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| Affiliated with | Red Dwarf crew |
| First appearance | The End |
| Last appearance | Only the Good... |
| Portrayed by | Craig Charles |
- For the origami historian of the same name, see David Lister (Origami Historian).
David Lister is a fictional character from the British television series Red Dwarf who is portrayed by actor/comedian/poet Craig Charles.
Lister is recognisable for his self-made leather jacket and hat, his boiler suits and his lengthy dreadlocks that he grows only from the back of his head (which could possibly be considered a dreadlocked mullet). Lister is an absolute slob with a love of curry and lager, and who ironically turns out to be the last human being in the known universe.
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[edit] Early life
An orphan, he was discovered as a very young infant 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. He was roughly six weeks old at the time, and his real parents were never located. Lister celebrates his birthday on 14 October 2155, but because of the confusion Lister celebrates his birthday "most of the time".
He was adopted by the Willmot family, but his adoptive father died when he was six. His adoptive mother apparently followed soon after, and he was raised by his "gran", presumably the mother of one of his adoptive parents. His gran's surname was Lister, from whom Dave gained his own surname. She was a tough, pipe-smoking woman, who headbutted 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 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 river. 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.
When he was 17, he formed a band called Smeg and the Heads. Seemingly their only song was called "Ohm". The young Lister had the tendency of calling everything "crypto-fascist" if he disliked it, or "shady" if he approved. 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 memorably went out with a girl named Lisa Yates, but the relationship ended because he did not want to commit to a career, a fact that Lister has since secretly regretted.
According to the books by Grant Naylor, Lister went on a drunken Monopoly board pub crawl with his friends to celebrate his 25th 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", and a worrying rash. Lister, determined to make enough money to get back home, steals "hoppers" (the equivalent of taxis on Mimas) but he loses all his money after being attacked by a drug addict, hooked on the drug "Bliss". Penniless, and tired of living inside a luggage locker, Lister signs up for a job on the mining ship Red Dwarf, which was due to make a mining run to the outer solar system, and then back to Earth. He barely qualifies for a place on the ship, having only one GCSE — in Technical Drawing, which he failed.
[edit] Personality
Lister is extremely slobby and very unmotivated. His best shirt has two curry stains on the front, and prior to going into stasis, he saved money by never buying soap or deodorant. 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. He is referred to as being an atheist in the episode "Back To Reality"- "the ultimate atheist" in fact, but in the episode "The Last Day" Kryten suggests he might be a pantheist, believing God to be in all things. Though, when pressed on his belief of "Silicon Heaven", he replies "Yeah, but I just don't think it applies to kitchen utensils. I'm not a frying pantheist". 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, 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 was enough to drive him to suicidal despair. When confronted with an evil version of himself on a warped, twisted copy of Red Dwarf, Lister says of his evil counterpart by saying, "But he kills; I'm not capable of that." When the crew met Ace Rimmer, a 'perfect' alternate version of the regular Arnold Rimmer, Lister learns that his counterpart from Ace's universe is a successful engineer married to Kristine Kochanski and father to two sons named Jim and Bexley. Unlike Rimmer, who was insanely jealous of Ace, Lister accepted his double's prosperity, saying that he was happy to know there was a Lister who lived an ideal life.
Lister is warm-hearted and occasionally very introspective, and according to Rimmer, extremely optimistic and naive. He is in many ways complete opposite of Rimmer and the two are constantly at odds with each other. It is presumably this reason that Holly picked Rimmer to come back as a hologram in order to keep Lister sane. Rimmer is constantly pointing out Lister's stupidity (a somewhat hypocritical analysis), but in actual fact Lister is quite bright — if indisposed to use his intelligence to any great degree. He is capable of piloting a spaceship very well, of operating Red Dwarf and has a knack for mechanical repairs, particularly amateur cybernetics. He is literate, despite Rimmer's claims to the contrary, but he is not a regular reader, except for comic books. He understands the international language Esperanto (or at least he can understand it better than Rimmer, who despite his best efforts is extremely poor at it). He 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.
Lister believes himself to be an excellent guitarist, but 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 plays guitar like "the ghost of Hendrix" — as Lister believes himself to play. 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."
Dave Lister is also known as 'the king of crap' for purchasing (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).
Lister has a strong appetite for Indian food, especially curries and vindaloo. Rimmer describes him as sweating madras sauce and having lost functional taste buds after eating nothing but curries. He has been attacked by his food twice: Once by a kebab (that was actually a polymorph) and then again by a mutton vindaloo transformed into a psychopathic humanoid monstrosity (the Mutton Vindaloo Beast — half man and half hot Indian curry) by Holly's fiddling with a DNA Modifier. While trapped on an ice planet, and given a choice of either dog food or pot noodle, he exclaimed "Well it's pretty obvious what will get eaten last...I can't stand pot noodle."
[edit] 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 and killed 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". Lister has played pool with planets, been 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.
After a sexual liaison with his female alter-ego from a female-oriented alternate universe, Lister gave birth to twin sons named Jim and Bexley, named after the Zero-G 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. Although this is not canon it is mentioned in the deleted scenes on the Red Dwarf Season VI DVD.
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. Presumably he is also the father of the various alternate universes Lister has seen (as most of them would not have had this opportunity), lending some credence to his claim to be "the definitive version".
Lister is mentioned to be in his mid-twenties in the original series. In the eighth series, it is stated that five years have passed by in the show, meaning that Lister is physically around thirty by that point. Chronologically, Lister is well over three million years old, and a few centuries on top of this, due to the amount of time he has spent in stasis. In the first episode of Series V, his physical age is given as 47 (in appearance at least)
[edit] 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, 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 trademark 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. We can assume this prophecy is correct, since dozens of other prophecies made by Cassandra during the episode were correct. This future version of Lister may also be the same as the one seen in Future Echoes.
- One vision of a potential future for Lister was seen in the episode Stasis Leak, in which he finds a photograph of himself marrying his old flame Kristine Kochanski. He travels back in time, to the The Ganymede Holiday Inn where he finds himself (from five years into his own future) on honeymoon with Kristine Kochanski. This however has not occurred in the show, despite there having been around five years passing in the show. However, it is theoretically possible that this event happened early in the 200 years between Series V and VI, and was never referred to again; also, since Lister refers to himself "turning 28" at the start of Series VII (his age was given as twenty five at the start of the series), there is also a slight possibility that this potential future simply hasn't occurred yet.
- In Timeslides, Lister changed the past yet again. In this new version of his future he ended up as a billionaire who died at age ninety-eight, when he lost control of the plane he was flying as he made love to his fourteenth wife. However this alternate timeline was reverted by Arnold Rimmer, interfering in an attempt to make himself a billionaire in Lister's place (Rimmer's efforts were futile and resulted in neither character ending up a billionaire).
- In the sixth series episode Out of Time, Lister is seen to have ended up as a brain in a jar (upon which his trademark dreadlocks were attached to) after some horrific umnentioned accident that was yet to occur. This outcome was presumably undone when the present crew destroyed their timedrive, disallowing the path the future crew had taken up to that point.
- 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 (possibly the dimension in the first episode of Series III, "Backwards") and is told that he will be rescued in thirty-six years time. Two accounts of what followed (again, inconsistent with each other) are Backwards and The Last Human. The latter also features yet another alternate Lister, this one adopted by a disturbed upper-middle class couple, rather than "our" Lister's adopted parents, and suffering extreme sociopathy as a result. The former tells how he unspent eight years in prison for murder and had a relationship with Kochanski, but backwards.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ 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 11,169.
- ↑ In series V, Holoship, his physical age is stated as 47 after his chronological age, which is stated as mid-twenties. This is meant to be a joke about Lister's poor physical health. It has not been stated as fact.
- ↑ In the first Red Dwarf book Lister played a bass guitar. With only 2 strings, both of them G.
- ↑ Lister also admits his lack of skills playing the guitar to some extent much earlier than "Nanarchy". In the series 3 episode "Marooned" Lister says "I know I'm not exactly a whizz at it" when pleading with Rimmer to be allowed to play one last song on his guitar before it has to be burnt and again in Series VI, after emeging from deep sleep with amnesia and realising what his life is like from the same perspective as the other characters before regaining his memories and reverting to his usual self.
