Lexx
| Lexx | |
|---|---|
| Crew members of the Lexx. From left: 790, Kai, Xev Bellringer, and Stanley H. Tweedle Lexx | |
| Created by | Paul Donovan |
| Starring | Brian Downey, Eva Habermann, Michael McManus, Xenia Seeberg, Jeffrey Hirschfield, Tom Gallant |
| Country of origin | Canada |
| No. of episodes | 61 |
| Production | |
| Running time | Season 1 (2 hrs.approx.) Season 2 - 4 (45 minutes approx.) |
| Original release | |
| Network | Sci Fi Channel |
| Release | 18 April 1997 – 26 April 2002 |
LEXX is a science fiction TV series that follows the adventures of a group of mismatched individuals aboard the Lexx, "the most powerful destructive force in the two universes" from which the show takes its name. The Lexx is a living spacecraft, shaped like an insect. It is capable of destroying planets with ease, and eats the debris as fuel.
The series is a Canadian/German co-production, with some additional funding from Britain's Channel 5. Because it was not made for a US network it includes a lot more sexual innuendo (and, at least in the early episodes, nudity) than US audiences are generally accustomed to seeing. As of 2002, the show was intermittently shown on the SciFi Channel; currently, it is regularly shown on Showcase.
LEXX was co-produced by Salter Street Films, later absorbed by Alliance Atlantis.
The series was filmed in Berlin, Germany, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, Bangkok, Thailand, and Namibia.
Characters
The crew
The crew of the Lexx includes:
- Security guard 4th class Stanley H. Tweedle (Brian Downey), agent of a failed rebellion and, by accident, captain of the Lexx.
- Zev (later Xev) Bellringer of planet B3K, a half cluster lizard, renegade love slave. Played by Eva Habermann (as Zev) in the first season, and Xenia Seeberg (as Xev) thereafter.
- 790 (Jeffrey Hirschfield), a robot head that received the love slave programming meant for Zev, first loving Zev, then in later series, Kai.
- Kai (Michael McManus), last of the Brunnen G, an emotionless, undead Divine Assassin.
- The Lexx itself (voiced by Tom Gallant), with which Stanley regularly interacts.
The crew of the Lexx is motivated largely by fear, lust, and hunger — factors which gradually came to dominate the storylines more and more, eventually making LEXX famous for its sexual themes and often bizarre storylines. Each episode in the later series takes the crew through another stage of their journey through chaotic, hostile universes without any legitimate authority while exploring the relationships between the protagonists and their individual histories.
Minor characters
Light Universe:
- His Divine Shadow, former ruler of the Divine Order.
- Thodin, a leader of the Austral-B Heretics.
- Giggerota, cannibal.
- Mantrid, supreme Bio-Vizier with a vast army of robot arms.
- Lyekka, man-eating plant woman and occasional Lexx crew member.
Dark Zone:
- Prince, Isambard, ruler of the planet Fire.
- Priest, Prince's right-hand man.
- Bunny, resident of the planet Water (and later Earth).
- Fifi, another resident of Water.
- Dr. Longbore, resident of Earth.
- Vlad, Divine Executioner.
The Lexx
The Lexx is a bioengineered, Manhattan-sized, planet-destroying, living starship in the shape of a giant wingless dragonfly. It was grown by ingesting organ collections on the Cluster, the seat of the Divine Order. Its original intent was for use by His Divine Shadow as a terror weapon to force the surrender (or utter destruction) of the remaining "Heretic" worlds of the Light Universe. This plan was foiled when the crew commandeered it to escape from the Cluster.
The mechanics of the Lexx are rather exotic. The Key is a living thing that allows whomever is hosting it to captain the Lexx. This key can be passed to others during moments of extreme emotion, such as orgasm or death, and while it passed to several other characters during the run of the show, Stan always manages to get it back. Commands are carried out by voice of the captain; however, on the bridge there is a hand-shaped beacon that appears to confirm important orders, such as destroying a planet. This beacon is only seen when somebody steps onto the central command dais, where it will appear green. When the beacon has been engaged by the keymaster, it will become red. In the first few episodes, this beacon used to show an allotment of different virtual tasks, circling a Lexx-like diagram. The Lexx acknowledges commands and often comments with a droning, simple male voice; for example, "As you command, Stan." The Lexx has emotions (it actively enjoys destroying planets, for instance, and becomes rather petulant when denied the opportunity) and has a level of intelligence that the show's creators have compared to a dog. In the final episode of the show, as the Lexx is dying, it tells Stan that he was always its favorite captain.
The Lexx needs to eat constantly to stay alive and useful, and can land on a planet's surface to scoop up suitable organic foodstuffs, however it is still contented to simply blow-up a planet and feast on the sizable chunks. When denied food the Lexx can become rather cranky, but it always attempts to follow orders no matter what is happening. The moral dilemma of destroying inhabited worlds for Lexx’s functioning and survival is a recurring plot theme, and occasionally Lexx will swallow passing ships without informing the crew. Another means of collecting energy is to "resorb" discarded items left on its floors. The Lexx uses this matter and reprocesses it into usable items for the crew, such as edible (if not disgusting) green-slime food. It has been noted that Lexx is incapable of synthesizing the element Selenium in its food stores. Lexx also has showers and a practical if appalling toilet system, with living commodes that use large, waggling tongues for user sanitation.
The Lexx also hosts a contingent of smaller bioengineered ornithopter-like craft called "moths", which the crew periodically use – in air or space – for short-range travel or to go where the Lexx may prove unwieldy, and moth builders, zombie-like human slaves reengineered entirely for moth building. The moths are insect-like ships (as befits their name), and twitter constantly as they travel. The moth only uses its wings when in an atmosphere, and has a "jet pack" of sorts on its underbelly when travelling through space. Stan usually sleeps in the husk of one of the dead moths.
The most important function of the Lexx is its ability to destroy entire planets with a single high-powered blast. Its primary - yet only - weapon is initiated by command from the captain only, followed by a highly dramatic sequence when the Ocular Parabola found on the surface of its eye tissue flips from a smooth surfaced dome into revealing thousands of satellite dish-like structures. Then, from this complex array of dishes, huge amounts of yellowish-orange particles are released en masse. These particles are then focused, by Lexx’s nervous system, because it posseses the essential knowledge necessary to focus the wave. After all the particles are focused to a central point, just above its "mouth", they seem to burst into a massive forward-moving planar wave, this wave then continues to expand ahead of the Lexx exponentially, to collide with a planet or whatever the captain needs to have destroyed. In the final season the Lexx has the ability to change the intensity of its shots, demonstrating dramatic changes in size. This means that the Lexx can fire controlled non-lethal/lethal blasts.
Its only method of propulsion, is through the long, slender "tail" Lexx posseses. It moves through space by taking streams of subatomic particles and accelerating them. This is accomplished through use of electromagnetic feilds. Lexx seems to use a kind of high-energy ion or plasma drive, capable of sending it to incredible speeds. It is uncertain if the same particles it uses for propulsion are the same as the kind it uses for the weapon. In any case, its drive is capable of taking the Lexx to FTL (Faster than Light) speeds.
The technological irony of the Lexx is also apparent, because of its tremendously specialized function and organic body. An example of this is the complete and utter lack of a diversified weapons system, which is not common to most sci-fi warships. (Often in the very beginning of the series Stanley Tweedle will say, "Give it everything you got Lexx!" - with the intention of unleashing every weapon available. Meanwhile, it can only fire with one weapon, at a very slow rate.) Also, the Lexx has an incredibly soft exoskeleton, especially on the eyes, leaving it vulnerable to offensive attacks. The follies of Lexx’s engineering are apparent througout the series, mainly because it has no internal defences (excluding Lyekka, Kai could be included too, but he is rather unreliable), or even a properly protected landing bay.
The Lexx ages several thousand years during the run of the series, and in later seasons its advanced age and decrepitude following millennia of starvation and neglect lead to it becoming increasingly unstable. In the final episode of the series Lexx dies shortly after giving birth to a smaller, very Lexx-like ship, the result of a brief union with an insect on Earth.
The Power Behind the Weapon
The physics behind the Lexx planet-killing weapon is apparent from an observational view. The Lexx has been used to stabilize the mass of a Black Hole into a Fractal Core by firing its weapon into it. This can only mean that its weapon must have both mass and energy, consistent with many combined subatomic particles, focused into a single planar wave.
It has been said by the show's creator that that the Lexx’s weapon is powerful, but quite crude. Therefore the popularly felt notions that the Lexx’s wave is entirely made of pure energy or a singularity weapon is gravely inaccurate. If in fact the Lexx’s weapon used pure energy, then the laws of physics (namely Thermodynamics) would dictate that it would lose alot of its destructive power to heat and light, prior to making contact with the target. Plus, not only would the wave not have a significant mass or no mass at all, its planet-rendering properties would depend largely on the distance of the Lexx from its target. This could prove troublesome for the Lexx because if were to get too close, it could injure itself. Also the sheer amount of pure energy it would have to produce bio-chemically, in order to convert into its pure destructive energy would be enormous. The particle theory also explains why the wave exibits a "contrail" of matter behind it, once it has reasonably cleared a distance from the Lexx.
As per the singularity weapon hypothesis, the blast does not conform the traditional sense of the word "Singularity". The evidence for this is simply the fact that the blast is visible to the naked eye, rather than a Spacetime distortion, which would appear as a rippling effect. Anti-matter is also out of the question, because of the containment, production and saftey issues presented by harnessing it.
Certain speculations in regards to the speed of the planar blast are also in dispute, because it has been seen to hit the planet Pluto in a matter of seconds/minutes where as in other events, the wave has been observed to hit at far slower speeds, while the Lexx was in close proximity to the planet or object. The Lexx appears to possess to ability to change the intensity, size and speed of its shots.
Thus, the mechanism itself is more like hitting a base ball with a huge particle bat. It has also been stated that the weapon of the Lexx is just as powerful as the Death Star's main cannon (although proof of this is sketchy at best, because both the Death Star and the Lexx’s weapon seem to use brute force as a method of devastation).
Episodes
- Main article: List of LEXX episodes.
There are four seasons of LEXX totalling 61 episodes. The first season, debuting in Canada on 18 April 1997, consisted of four two-hour TV movies (sometimes screened as eight one-hour episodes), alternatively titled Tales from a Parallel Universe. However, some episode guides do not list the two-hour movies as a series but confusingly list the subsequent seasons as the first through third.
The second season consisted of twenty 48 minute episodes, with an overall story arc concerning an evil scientist called Mantrid, who wants to kill everyone by converting the entire universe to one-armed Mantrid drones.
The third season comprises 13 episodes in which the Lexx is trapped in orbit around the warring planets Fire and Water, and the crew encounters an enigmatic and cheerful evil being known as Prince, who may be the Devil. The two planets orbit each other at an extremely close distance, and share a tunnel of atmosphere between them, allowing the inhabitants of Fire to wantonly attack Water for no obvious reason. Fire is filmed between the dunes of Namibia and the Gothic architecture of Berlin. The ruler of Fire is Prince, who can reincarnate whenever it suits him. Water appears to have no opposing ruler, and contains a small population of hedonists on floating islands.
In the fourth and final season of 24 episodes, the Lexx arrives at Earth in the year 2000, only to find that Prince (now named Isambard Prince, and somehow head of the ATF) and several other old adversaries have arrived there too. Between them, Prince and the Lexx manage to demolish large chunks of the Earth – including the city of Ottawa (a Canadian metonymical in-joke) – before the climactic final episode, televised on 26 April 2002.
Seasons one to three of LEXX were released on VHS and Region 2 DVD in the UK by Contender Limited, although the Season 3 DVDs were initially exclusive to the MVC Entertainment chain of stores and all volumes have since been deleted. Contender failed to obtain the rights to Season 4, which instead went to Momentum Pictures (a subsidiary of Alliance Atlantis), however they have not released any DVDs.
All four seasons were released in the US (DVD Region 1) by Acorn Media.
Fandom
LEXX fans tend to strongly disagree about what episodes were the best or worst of the show, and no wonder. Perhaps few shows in TV history have been so inconsistent in tone (and, some would say, quality) as LEXX. While other genre shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files mixed drama and comedy in unexpected ways, LEXX seemed to delight in confounding fans at every turn. The show veered wildly and constantly between drama, comedy and plenty of kinky sex. The original TV movies and the "Mantrid" and "Fire and Water" seasons were mostly dramatic with plenty of comedy, but the show's final season, set on Earth in the year 2000, took many turns into pure farce and remains controversial with the show's fans.
The show suffered somewhat from comparisons to the much more popular Farscape, which also aired on the Sci-Fi Channel during the same era and had a similar premise but a very different execution (and much higher budget). Farscape and LEXX fans tended to break into two distinct camps.
LEXX was always a cult hit at best, and rumors of a spin-off movie or TV series seem to have petered out (although the final episode of the series left this possibility open, with most of the characters still alive and the surviving Lexx crew aboard a new, baby Lexx ship). A comic book series was also announced, although this too seems to fallen through. Fans call themselves "Lexxians," and there have been very occasional LEXX conventions (usually more like smallish LEXX parties.)
External links
- Lexx at IMDb
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- The Official LEXX Fanclub
- Sadgeezer.com - Scifi site featuring LEXX episode guides, BBoard, pictures, etc.
- Beans Abound - An interview with Lexx’s creators