#cured

I'm firmly in Team-Pete-Wears-Creepers.

Personally, I have very mixed feelings. On one hand, I absolutely love the moment in Timeslides where Lister goes into Rimmer’s photo and scuffles with Hitler, and the duet almost feels like a complete 180 on that. Lister fighting Hitler is a great show of the positives of his character - not just his morality, but also his courage, and a quality that I can’t name. It’s the polar opposite to Rimmer’s belief that ‘you can’t just stick one on the leader of the Third Reich’ - Rimmer kind of mythologises Hitler with this idea, and it’s very wrapped up in the way that he romanticises war. In contrast, Lister doesn’t care what position of power Hitler holds, only about the atrocities he’s committing. I don’t want to say he treats Hitler as an equal, because that’s misleading, but he treats him as human, someone who can and should be challenged.

However, Cured obviously has the key difference in that Hitler is not really Hitler, even before the reveal that Telford reprogrammed the androids. As far as Lister knows at the point of his duet, this isn’t the man who committed genocide, but rather someone who was forced to bear responsibility for the mistakes of his ancestors. This is fairly similar to Lister’s feelings towards the cat race and, in the novels, towards humanity (where he takes on responsibility of all of the human race’s wrongdoings to Earth simply because he’s the only human left).

I think there’s also something to be said about the way evil is represented in this episode - not as a choice, but as an illness. Lister suggests this idea even before the full details of the facility’s philosophy are revealed. To me, it makes perfect sense that Lister, as an optimist and a humanist, would want to believe that evil can be cured, that nobody actually wants to do awful things, that a better world is possible.

There’s also Lister’s relationship with Rimmer, where he continues to feel affection for a man who chooses wrong time and time again, where he empathises with the part of Rimmer that’s lonely and wants friends, where he tries to help Rimmer over and over. Of course Hitler’s guilt-tripping would work on him.

Finally, Hitler admires and praises Lister’s artistic expression in a way no one ever has before. He actually wants Lister to play his guitar - for them to play together. This is something Lister hasn’t experienced in a long time and will likely never get to experience again.

In a vacuum, I do like Hitler’s crush on Lister and Lister’s empathy. I get that it’s a funny visual. I don’t think the episode was trying to actually show the real Hitler in a good or empathetic light. I even think that Lister’s reaction is consistent with his character as a whole and possibly even with the character whose reaction to encountering the real Hitler was to attack him. However, there is still a part of me that’s a bit bothered by it and its stark contrast to Lister’s reaction to Hitler in Timeslides. There’s a part of me that feels like there’s a level of implicit homophobia in this portrayal. Maybe it’s to do with the recent rise in fascism, especially through fascist ideas that have gained footholds through jokes and memes. There are definitely bigger issues in this episode (the ableism surrounding Telford’s ‘faking’ of his disability and the ideas around empathy/mental illness), but still.