Dear Johnny Fanboy,

The Ouroboros episode of Red Dwarf VII explains that Dave Lister is his own father. Gametes from him and an alternate-reality version of Kochanski are artificially gestated and, eighteen months later (according to an on-screen caption), Lister travels back in time to leave his baby self underneath a pool table in the Aigburth Arms in Liverpool.

However, this does not explain how the alternate version of Lister, the one who ended up as a hologram, came into being. How was he conceived?

Andy Hewitt

Johnny Fanboy replies:

It's possible that some other opportunity (ahem) comes up to allow the conception of the alternate Lister, if we assume that at some point in the future Kochanski manages to return to her own universe. After all, Lister's (ahem) contribution to the gamete-mixing in-vitro tube would probably contain millions of sperm, so there would be plenty to spare for a second attempt.

Alternatively, maybe there's some kind of cosmic pattern of genetic material being passed from one universe to another. After all, Lister's other sons, the twins Jim and Bexley, who are also the products of parents from different universes, ended up in the female-dominated reality seen in the episode Parallel Universe. Therefore, perhaps Kochanski's Dave is the product of DNA from another reality altogether.

However, my favourite theory is this... We know that Lister has previously fathered identical twins (Jim and Bexley), and that twins tend to run in families. Therefore, it is entirely possible that Lister and Kochanski's union also results in twins. One twin ends up under a pool table in "our" universe, while the other is somehow transferred to Kochanski's universe, to grow up into "her" Dave. Maybe the linkway between the universes is re-established at some point after the birth, but it is only possible, perhaps due to the size of the linkway, to pass the baby across.

Incidentally, as for when those eighteen months stated on the caption actually elapse, I reckon the epilogue to Ouroboros takes place between Beyond a Joke and Epideme. Either that, or we are talking subjective time, because the crew supposedly spend a couple of centuries in stasis during Nanarchy when they head back to the site of the USS Esperanto (from Back To Reality), in which case the epilogue takes place during or after Series VIII.

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