Dave Lister Continued....
Life and Lister did not at all hit it off well, right from the beginning. Found under a pool table in a box, Lister was abandoned as a baby and brought up by relatives. He attended art college but decided the hectic work schedule was ridiculous: lectures first thing in the afternoon!? Lister took a job as a trolley attendant in a car park, a job which he held for ten years before giving it up because he didn't want to get tied down to a career. On his 24th birthday his mates get him completely drunk and he wakes up in a MacDonalds on Mimas, one of the moons of Saturn. Trying to get his fare together for the return trip to Earth, Lister takes a job as a hopper-driver, essentially a cabbie, and it is during this time that he is to meet the man who will completely change his life, essentially by losing his: Arnold J. Rimmer.
Lister meets Rimmer as he ferries him to a brothel, though the man, heavily disguised with a false moustache and calling himself Christopher Todd-Hunter, declares he thought the place was a restaurant. Lister has been thinking of joining the Space Corps, and with Rimmer's somewhat unwilling help he applies and is accepted for a tour of duty aboard the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel, Red Dwarf. He goes in as a Third Technician, and remains at that level: the captain regards his promotion prospects as "none" (however, in the case of the aforementioned Rimmer, the comment is "comical"). Lister is assigned to Z Shift, which just so happens to be headed by the aforementioned Rimmer, who is less than pleased to have Lister on his team (in fact, he is less than pleased to have Lister on the ship!), but makes up for it by making snide remarks, and taking every single opportunity to put his subordinate on report whenever he can. Rimmer and Lister also bunk together, (not out of choice, you can be sure!), and while Rimmer pores over his astro-navigation revision Lister tells him of his five-year plan, to buy land on Fiji and settle down there with Christine Kochanski, there to raise sheep and cows. He says he will get the land very cheap because most of the island is three feet underwater.
When it is discovered that Lister has smuggled aboard a non-quarantined animal, a female cat called Frankenstein, who is in fact pregnant, he opts to be sealed in a stasis booth for eighteen months rather than turn the cat over to the ship's labs. When he emerges from stasis, Lister is told by Holly, the ship's tenth-generation AI computer, that everyone on board the ship is dead, due to a massive radiation leak, and he had in fact had to remain in the stasis booth for three million years, while the radioactivity in the ship's atmosphere fell to acceptable levels. Rather staggered by this news, Lister is even less pleased to find that the one person whom Holly has brought back to keep him company is Rimmer!
Every member of Red Dwarf had had, before the voyage, their personality imprinted on a computer slug, which could, in the event of their death, be used to reinitialise the personality and confer it on a hologramatic representation of that person: a hologram for short. That hologram would have the same memories, feelings, desires and drives of the person whose personality it contained, but being nothing more than a computer simulation made up entirely of light, they would be unable to touch anything, and no-one or nothing could touch them. In effect, they would be as substantial as a ghost. Red Dwarf is capable of sustaining only one hologram, and it would of course have been expected to be ship's procedure that the person most important to the ship that died would be brought back as a hologram; should someone less important be already occupying the single hologram disk, then the more important person would takeover their runtime.
In this case, of course, there was no need for seniority or importance. When Holly, who is capable of piloting the massive ship through the immeasurable vastness of space, had been considering a companion for Lister when he had to let him out, he had picked, in his opinion, the one who would best help Lister survive going insane. That person had been Arnold J. Rimmer.
The two pick up their non-friendship where they had left off: everything Lister does irritates Rimmer, and Lister thinks Rimmer is a complete git (which he is). Despite the fact that they have a five-mile ship and all the berths on it to choose from, Lister and Rimmer bunk together again: they may hate each other, but the corridors of Red Dwarf still echo with the ghostly, half-heard voices of the people he and Lister had once shared the ship with: people they had seen, talked to, touched, pushed past, shouted angrily at, made passes at, saluted to and bumped into in these selfsame corridors. Now, they could walk from one end of the mighty vessel to the other and not encounter a single living soul.
However, what neither of them know is that Frankenstein, Lister's cat, had been safely sealed in the hold at the time of the accident, and her descendants have been happily breeding there for three million years. They have evolved beyond mere quadrupeds, and have attained the power of speech, the ability to walk on two legs, and supercool fashion sense! In short, they have become a humanoid species, and Lister and Rimmer encounter the only survivor of their race aboard Red Dwarf, whom Lister calls, with stunning originality, Cat.
Lister's twin goals in life are to get back to Earth, and to somehow have a relationship with Kochanski. The fact that a) they are three million miles from the first and b) the second is dead does not deter him. He learns from the Holy Books that the Cat brings to him that he is the god of the Cat people, who know him as Cloister the Stupid! When they rescue Kryten, the service mechanoid from the doomed Nova 5, it is Lister who pushes the droid to break his programming, thus sending him off on a voyage of discovery that is not to last very long, as some time later Lister finds the mangled remains of his spacebike, which he had let Kryten take, smashed on an asteroid, and he has to repair the damaged android. However the Kryten he brings back is somewhat different to the original.
Travelling to a parallel universe, Lister encounters his female opposite, and after having sex with her finds that he is pregant! He has two sons, but they grow up too fast and so in order that they do not die Lister returns to the parallel universe and leaves Jim and Bexley with their mother. He is later prevailed upon by Rimmer to swap bodies with him, the deal being that Rimmer will occupy Lister's body for two weeks and get it fit again, but this is not what happens and Lister's body barely survives death at the hands of the unhinged hologram. When Kryten discovers a way of allowing them to travel backwards in time to any place of which they have a photograph, Lister goes back to his own past and convinces his younger self, who is fronting his first band, Smeg and the Heads to invent the Tension Sheet, and so becomes a multi-millionaire, avoiding ever joining the Space Corps. His luxurious lifestyle is short-lived though when Rimmer tries to do the same with hisyounger self, and only succeeds in realigning the timelines, sending Lister back to Red Dwarf.
Lister is changed into a chicken, a hamster and a tiny robocop-type man by the Transmogrifier, and plays pool with planets when Holly sets up an elaborate plan to stop a time-dilation effect caused by a White Hole. He tells his friends that he used to be called Dave "Cinzano Bianco" Lister, because once he was on a table, you couldn't get him off! After he successfully pots the planet as planned, Lister refers to himself as Pool God, King of the Cues, and Prince of the Planet Potters. Rimmer, however, has another name for him: jammy goit! Ace Rimmer, who comes from an alternate dimension, refers to him as "Skipper", after mistakenly taking him for "Spanners", the Lister in his dimension.
Along with Kryten, Lister is erased from Time itself by The Inquisitor, but manages to trick the android into destroying itself. The fact that Lister believes he can play the guitar when in fact he couldn't do so to save his life is the deciding factor when his body is duplicated by a psiren, which reading Lister's mind believes it can play guitar, and does, thus proving not to be the real Lister. In the finale to the series (so far) it is revealed that Lister has been involved in some horrific accident, which has left him as nothing more than a brain in a jar. Rimmer would no doubt remark, with a snide look on his hologrammatic face: "Well, it would have to be a very small jar, wouldn't it?"
