Dave Lister (Red Dwarf) - Life Onboard Red Dwarf

Life Onboard Red Dwarf

As a third-class 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 an unquarantined cat, which he named Frankenstein, aboard the ship. In the novel, he deliberately let the cat be discovered so that he would be placed in stasis, thus getting back to Earth in (subjectively) no time at all. In the original show, the cat was a treasured pet who was pregnant with kittens that Lister planned to raise on Fiji once he got there. When it was discovered in the TV show version, Lister chose to be placed in stasis rather than surrender the cat for dissection.

While Lister was in stasis, a release of lethal radiation occurred on board as a result of a faulty 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 returned to normal. Lister was left as presumably 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 parallel universe, Dave Lister gave birth (via caesarean section) 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 children grew to be eighteen years old within three days. Realising that if they stayed with him they would be dead 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 Lister 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 happening to him. In the Red Dwarf roleplaying game, Petersen's character profile (featured in "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 life - Kristine Kochanski, the long dead navigation officer of Red Dwarf. It is his ambition to marry Kristine Kochanski and start a frugal life on a farm on the Earth islands of Fiji where he will have a cat- originally to be Frankenstein but instead would be The Cat-, farm sheep, cows and horses and run a donut and hot dog stand while Kochanski was able to relax, wear a white dress and ride the horses.