I like Lexx: An Overview
Science fiction has generally never been the most popular genre in a general sense. While there have been a few exceptions that have become staples of popular culture, even that popularity is somewhat backhanded. Where someone can be wholly into sports, cars, or what have you and still be considered stereotypically acceptable, if someone's an avid follower of a certain sci-fi series, they'll inevitably get saddled with labels such as 'geek' and 'nerd', and at best their interests will be viewed as slightly eccentric as opposed to perfectly acceptable.
This isn't a rant about any perceived injustice in culture. I really don't care enough about popularity or social acceptability to place that much importance on it. It's more of a poorly constructed segue into my main point:
Any given example of sci-fi is, at best, an unexpectedly popular phenomenon in general culture, to be enjoyed, but a further study and obsession with looked upon as unusual. Being human with an insatiable need to categorize things, I tend to put science-fiction into three levels of popularity. The highest tier is that sci-fi which manages to become popular in general society and, at least for a while, become a regular fixture in pop culture. This is the level inhabited by things such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and arguably series like the new Dr. Who and the latest incarnation of Battlestar Galactica.
The second tier is occupied by those series and creations which, while having strong followings of their own, aren't generally well known among popular culture. A bit above cult, a bit below mainstream. A few good examples of this are series and movies like Babylon 5, Red Dwarf, The Fifth Element, the old Battlestar Galactica, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (any version, really), and Mystery Science Theater 3000, possibly even Farscape.
The third tier is pretty much anything below this that has seen international release. The 'cult' stuff that is not quite popular enough to even achieve the level of 'cult classic'. In my own ranking, Lexx falls somewhere near the top of this tier. It ran for four seasons on both Showtime and the Sci-Fi channel, had very brief bouts of popularity, but if you ask any non sci-fi fan, and even a decent number of sci-fi fans, they've never heard of it.
It's also easily my favourite sci-fi series in the history of ever. I fell in love with it back in my teenage years when my parents happened to watch portions of seasons 1 through 3, then re-discovered my love for it when Rhi and I went through an extended marathon through all of it. Now, being the prying little twit I am, I'm going to try and figure out just what it is about this series that so completely earned by love.
****MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD, JUST A WARNING FOR ANYONE WHO EVENTUALLY WANTS TO WATCH, OR HAS ONLY WATCHED PART OF THE WAY THROUGH****
Background: Lexx is a sci-fi series, hell, it's arguably a space-opera in the purest sense of the word. It takes place not so much on a universal scale as a multiversal scale, involving the rise and fall of empires, love, heroism, evil and revenge spanning millenia, transcending space and time.
Lexx takes place in a futuristic universe/multiverse (though as we discover late in season three, it's not quite as far in the future as we were originally led to suspect), split into two halves: The Light Universe and the Dark Universe. The Dark Universe is the realm of chaos and depravity, a place of anarchy with no centralized system of control, where every system fights for itself and is at the whims of a callous universe at large. The Light Universe is a place of order, a place of sanctuary and safety where people have a better chance of long-term survival and prosperity.
At least that's what the propaganda tells everyone in the Light Universe.
The history of both universes is foggy, at best. Humanity has thoroughly colonized both the Light and Dark universes, and it has remained this way for countless millennium. At some point, possibly tens of thousands of years in the past, humanity was driven nearly to the point of extinction by a universe-spanning war against something known only as 'The Insect Civilization'. In this war, a certain human culture, originally from the Dark Universe, known as the Brunnen-G led humanity back from the brink of defeat to eventual victory against the Insects, nearly destroying the entire civilization.
Rebuilding in the aftermath of the war, humanity was forced to rely on Insect technology to recover, and many of the Insects styles remain to this day. The Brunnen-G, described as a race of warriors, dreamers and poets, turned insular and eventually separated themselves from the rest of the Light Universe, where they now lived. During the rebuilding, a new power arose. Over the course of thousands of years, there came an empire known as the League of Twenty-Thousand Planets, led by a religious sect known as the Divine Order. This aggressively imperialistic power was led by a figure known only as His Divine Shadow, directing the expansion of the empire from its seat of power, a world known as The Cluster.
Eventually the Divine Order set its sights on Brunnis-2, the homeworld of the Brunnen-G, and set out to destroy it and the race that had once saved humanity from extinction. The Brunnen-G, by this point entirely decadent and insular, offered no resistance, aside from a small group of rebels led by a young spirited scholar by the name of Kai. Their attempt to save their planet failed, and all of them, including Kai, died at the hands of His Shadow.
Fast forward two thousand years, and you've reached the universe as it stands when the series opens. The League of Twenty Thousand, led by the Divine Order, are the dominant force in the Light Universe, having wiped out all resistance aside from a pocket of resistance known as the Astral-B Heretics. The Cluster is now a super-fortress, where prisoners, heretics, and virtually anyone who doesn't worship His Divine Shadow are delivered for execution, dissection and placement in the protein bank.
His Divine Shadow, an immortal figure who has ruled the League for thousands of years, is building something, a superweapon that will finally cow all the heretics and rebels into submission. The Lexx, the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes.
Now, writing it out like that makes it sound a hell of a lot like Star Wars, but I promise that is not the case, I'll show more of why as I go along.
The series itself follows the four main characters who, through a series of misadventures, managed to gain control of the Lexx: Stanley Tweedle, Xev Bellringer of B3K, 790 and Kai. The Lexx itself qualifies as one of the main characters, as it is sentient, if quite singleminded and not very bright.
Stanley Tweedle: Stan is someone who just couldn't seem to catch a break in life. He made a decent living as an assistant deputy backup courier for the Astral-B Heretics, until he was captured by the infamous sub-nebulae mercenaries Beppo and Fip, tortured, then sold to the League of 20k where the information he was carrying in his tooth was used to launch a surprise attack on nearly 100 allied planets. Since then he was assigned to the Cluster and forced to work as a security guard, class 4, just in case they wanted him for further questioning.
Things turn south as he fails to report in for disciplinary organ-harvesting for annoying a superior, and he is then branded a heretic. Through a series of unlikely coincedences, he ends up gaining control of, and subsequently escaping the Cluster on the Lexx.
Xev Bellringer of B3K: Life sucks when you grow up in a box, and Xev can attest to it. Sold to the wife-bank before she could walk, she was trained to be a loving and devoted wife to whoever ended up buying her. Unfortunately all her training broke down on her wedding day, and she punched out her husband. She was promptly arrested and sent to the Cluster to be mentally re-conditioned and physically transformed into a love slave.
During the same set of coincidences that put Stan in charge of the Lexx, Xev's reprogramming ran into some problems, while her body was altered to a suitable form for a love-slave, her body got mixed with some DNA from a cluster-lizard, a quite nasty creature with an appetite for brains. Also, while gaining the body and libido of a love-slave, she managed to avoid the mental re-conditioning, and escaped with Stan.
790: At one point 790 was a human being, then he did some random thing which annoyed the League of 20k enough to have him arrested and his body harvested for the protein bank. Some small slice of his brain now acts as part of the processing source for a 790 class cyborg, the general automated workforce and information processors for the League of 20k.
He was assigned to conduct Xev's love-slave transformation when a cluster-lizard interfered and attacked him. Xev, in a fit of curiosity, placed his severed head on the table where it received the love-slave mental reconditioning. As she was the first thing he saw after this, he immediately became completely devoted to both serving her every wish and getting into her pants, and instantaneously developed the necessary sentience to follow these desires through.
Kai: As stated in the backstory, Kai died two thousand years ago in a suicide attack against the Divine Order. After his death, however, His Divine Shadow devoured his soul and memories, then had his body de-carbonized and transformed into a divine assassin, a nearly indestructible automaton sent to personally kill those who displease the Divine Order.
During the misadventures that ended up giving Stan control of the Lexx, Kai was sent to intercept and kill him. Due to more misadventures, Kai accidentally ended up regaining his memories from the preserved brain of the former host body of the Divine Shadow that killed him. With these memories, he regained enough willpower to break free of the Divine Order's control and join Stan, Xev and 790 in escaping the Cluster.
All four are now on the run, with the entirety of the Divine Order's forces trying to hunt them down because not only did they steal the most powerful force of destruction in the two universes, but there is also a certain prophecy that states that the last of the Brunnen-G would bring down the reign of the Divine Order, a prophecy that seems to be on the verge of coming true.
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Now that everyone's up to speed, why exactly do I love the series so much? Sure, there's the obvious things, such as a fantastic, beautiful setting, a very insectile theme to the architecture and technology, rather blatant sexual innuendo appearing every minute or so, weird as hell storylines and dialogue, and more. But Lexx is far from the only series that has this sort of thing, so why did I fall so completely in love with it? I've come up with a few possible reasons:
1) Genuine, three-dimensional characters
Almost every character with even moderate screen-time in Lexx is a fully fleshed-out personality with their own quirks, motivations and goals. They aren't cardboard cutouts, they aren't perfect Mary-Sues or author-mouthpieces. You watch them, alone or interacting with others, and you immediately see that these are people, reacting as people would. They never act in service to the plot, one of my most hated things in any form of fiction, everything they do is a result of them as a character. I'd go through everyone in the series if I could, but I'll settle for the main four...
Stanley Tweedle: It's pretty obvious from the start that Stan's supposed to be the character that the viewers can relate to, the interactive viewer to the Lexx universe. He's not hero material, not very brave, has some technical skills but nothing phenomenal, likes the simple things in life such as sex, good food, and a safe place to catch a nap. He's the Everyman. Yet despite this, he's not a blank slate. You can see, despite the cowardice and the fact that he's easily distracted by even the mere mention of sex, he genuinely wants to be a good person.
Whenever things are on the line, and there is a true threat to his friends' lives, Stanley will not hesitate to put his own life on the line for their sake. Some notable examples include when he immediately volunteered to let a momentarily psychotic Kai kill him instead of Xev, when he took the Lexx back to the Cluster so that Kai could get more proto-blood to lengthen his own undead existence, when he stood up to Gigerata the Wicked to save Kai and Xev from an impending supernova, and when Stan re-entered the Lexx while it was heavily infested with Mantrid drone-arms to save 790.
Xev: Xev's main influences in her life were that she spent a majority of it growing up in a box completely isolated from direct human contact, and that she received physical conditioning which gave her a libido from hell. While these traits do dominate a lot of her actions, she still manages to show some very relatable human traits through it. Namely the traits of self-determination, selflessness, and an insatiable curiosity.
After growing up in a box and narrowly avoiding being mentally transformed into a slave, Xev is determined first off to make her own decisions and live with the consequences of them, second to do everything she can to prevent others from going through what she did, and finally to explore the universe she's been denied her whole life. She tends to react quite violently when denied any of these. While easily the most 'noble' of the main characters, she's also the most dangerously impulsive, her natural curiosity, her love-slave urges and the instinctive predatory needs of her cluster-lizard side combining to lead her into some very rash and short-sighted decisions. Some of these include volunteering for a game-show that would result in her decapitation if she lost, accidentally releasing a psychotic killer from a prisoner transport, and literally having a romantic fling with the devil.
790: 790's case is interesting, because while all the other characters are human in their own ways, he goes so far in the opposite direction he's a character in his own right. 790's easily the most intelligent thing on the crew, capable of interacting and controlling nearly any piece of technology he's attached to, as well as having general information on nearly every explored location in the known universe.
Unfortunately 790 is also a complete sociopath. Designed to be an information-processing automaton, the love-slave mental conditioning he received caused him only to develop enough sapience to properly express his complete singleminded devotion to Xev. Everything else in the entire universe he puts into one of three categories: Something that will bring him and Xev closer together, something that's a threat to his pursuit of Xev and must be destroyed at all costs, or something that's completely unimportant.
Thankfully the main things stopping him from happily killing off the rest of the crew are Xev's constant orders for him not to, the occasional necessity for them to get Xev out of trouble, and the fact that in the end, he is just a robot-head incapable of self-propulsion or any motion at all.
Kai: Kai is a very interesting case. While he got the memories of his life back when he destroyed the brain of the Divine Predecessor that had killed him, he didn't get his soul back (we find out later it had already gone off to be reincarnated). Because of this he has no wants or desires, no true emotion at all, his actions are guided purely by intellectual curiosity, a basic sense off pragmaticism and utilitarianism, and nothing more. At least that's what he tells us... a lot.
While not having the sheer processing power of 790, Kai was a scholar and artist in his own right during life, and a highly efficient, indestructible killer in death. While he will act as nearly unassailable voice of reason, he usually won't do so unless asked, as he has no motivation to. Instead Kai often prefers to watch how things play out, only acting if there is a threat to the crew, not out of loyalty or friendship, but simply because he seems most interested in watching how their stories play out.
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2) Selfish Motivations
This directly ties into the characterization of point 1, but deserves its own mention do to how much it impacts the story. The main characters are not heroes in any classical sense of the word. They are quite selfish, and generally apathetic to the needs of the universe at large. Xev, the most noble of the bunch, can be counted on to generally do the right thing if she takes a moment to think about it, but more than once her impulsiveness gets in the way of it, and in the end she still does value the lives of her friends over strangers, and has threatened to kill (and followed through) to those ends.
Stanley, unless his friends are in direct, obvious danger, needs some very hard pushing to get off his ass and do the right thing, and even then he'll complain the entire way. 790 would happily watch the universe burn if it meant he got some robot-on-Xev action. Kai has no motivation one way or the other. In the end it gives you a group of horny assholes and sociopaths in command of the most powerful force of destruction in the two universes. And this is the thing that creates beautiful drama and storylines, it ends up with character decisions that are interesting and believable.
In the end the series has only two real 'heroes' in the classical sense of the word. The first, Kai when he was alive, is a vibrant warrior-poet who led an incredibly brave but ultimately suicidal attack against the Foreshadow, the ship which destroyed his entire race and his home planet, and he dies about five minutes into the series. The second is Thodin, the Astral-B heretic whose actions set the series of misadventures which give Stan, Xev, Kai and 790 the Lexx. Thodin is essentially Buck Rogers personified: Rugged, heroic, always with a snappy one-liner for the ladies, selfless to his crew and his cause...
...and he dies at the hands of Kai about an hour into the series, unable to even finish his moving last words.
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3) Strong female characters (and male ones too, but mostly female)
One thing science fiction, hell, even fantasy in general, lacks is strong female characters. It's not for lack of trying, it's just that no one ever seems to know exactly what makes a strong female character. Many have hit upon things that definitely don't make strong female characters, to many also seem to have trouble recognizing that simple fact. Making your female a man-hating lesbian does not make her a strong female character. Making your female a tough-as-nails fighter does not make her a strong female character. Making your female a poster-child for whatever interpretation of feminism you happen to hold does not make her a strong female character. Making your female character a two-dimensional sex symbol definitely does not make her a strong female character.
So what actually does make a strong female character? Well, pretty much the same thing that makes a strong male character. Full 3d characterization. Great strength of personality that, while it isn't devoid of weakness or flaws, shows they have the strength to overcome and minimize them. A strong sense of self-actualization and willingness to pursue not the goals of their designated-love-interest, not the goals of the author's soapbox rant, but their own goals, created naturally by their own personality.
Lexx hits you with two stunning examples of this pretty much right off the bat. The first, obviously, is Xev Bellringer. She's a character who has every reason not to be strong: She has a libido that gives her the strong urge to jump any remotely good looking man and a body to let her get most any she would want, she's not the brightest and is rather impulsive. Yet at the same time, she takes her newly granted freedom in a stranglehold and never lets it go throughout the entire series. She makes it clear that she is going to explore everything that was denied to her and no one is going to get in her way. She admits she has a sexual drive that would kill most lesser people, yet she rigidly, sometimes even painfully makes sure she keeps her standards regarding it, refusing to sleep with known evil men, or knowingly sleep with men in a fashion that would lead to others getting hurt no matter how attractive they might be.
The second character is more of a bit-player in the series, but she makes such a huge impression and shows up at least once in every season. Gigerata the Wicked, in my opinion, is one of the most wonderful characters to ever grace sci-fi. First off, she's a villain. Not a major villain as she doesn't have those sorts of ambitions, but a villain nonetheless because her own goals necessarily result in the deaths of many people, and she just doesn't give a damn.
Gigerata likes to eat meat, the fresher the better, the more human the better. She's not a joy-killer, she just realizes that in order for her to satisfy her tastes, a lot of people are going to have to die, and she's perfectly alright with that. She's even rather proud of it, as the number of people she's killed is a testament to how successful she's been at the buffet line that is humanity. When captured for her crimes by the Divine Order and having them read to her, her only response to the claim that she's devoured the populations of eighty-four member worlds is a proud, haughty, "More like a hundred and eighty four!"
She's not the brightest, but she's incredibly cunning, arrogant to the point of megalomania, and completely confident and comfortable with who she is as a monster. The world is her lunch, and she's confident she has the strength to force the issue if anyone disagrees. Even up to the point of her death, when she stares directly at a star undergoing a supernova and demands that it put on a good show for her.
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4) Great villains
As above, Gigerata is a wonderful villain, yet she isn't the main threat of season 1. All four seasons have wonderful, genuine threats. Season 1's main villain, His Divine Shadow, is actually (in my opinion) the weakest of these. Not because he's poorly explained or anything, but simply because he's too inhuman to add that extra horrible touch of relatability.
You find out at the end of season 1 that His Divine Shadow, throughout the entire history of the Divine Order, was actually merely the projected consciousness of one of the last surviving members of the Insect Civilization. When it realized it couldn't defeat humanity through sheer force, it decided instead to manipulate humanity into destroying itself, and damn near succeeded through the Divine Order, if not for the intervention of the crew of the Lexx, particularly Kai.
Season 2, after the first season made a threat that could wipe out humanity, had to up the ante. And it did in spades, in the form of Mantrid. This time, an insane bio-vizier accidentally fused his soul with the last offspring of His Divine Shadow, and now part human, part Insect, and mostly machine, sets out to complete the job the Insects started, with interest. With the help of the Von-Neumann machines that are his drone-arms, Mantrid has the goal of devouring the entire universe... and he actually succeeds. It's a phyrric victory, however, as the crew of the Lexx tricks him into a position where his own gravitational pull causes him to collapse into himself while they escape into the alternate Dark Universe.
But it's not just the sheer threat that makes him such a great villain, it's him as a character. Mantrid was played by Dieter Laser, who is slightly better known for his role as the evil doctor in 'The Human Centipede', though this is definitely not a good thing. Either way he does incredibly well playing off an exceptionally creepy godlike being with an insatiable urge to destroy everything, yet have some fun while doing so
Seasons 3 and 4 feature the same character as a villain, yet he manages to top even Mantrid. Nigel Bennett enters the series as, quite simply, 'Prince'. Ruler of an eternally burning planet that, the crew of the Lexx discovers, contains the reincarnations of everyone they've known who was evil in life... alright, it's Hell in all but name, and Prince is obviously the devil. An incredibly sexy devil, who is friendly, relatable, and in his own words, 'Very good with pain'.
Nigel Bennett, through Prince, simply does the impossible. A big no-no in any serious piece of fiction is to write a character who is evil for the sake of being evil. It's usually a quick way to break suspension of disbelief because, in the end, no human, no matter how depraved, truly believes they're evil in their own view. Yet this is exactly what Prince is, and he does it so believably well. In his own words, "It's my job to punish those who are bad, and tempt those who are not. I don't know why, it's just the way things have always been. Is it so wrong to enjoy my job?"
Well, that's pretty much all I have for the moment. I'm thinking about doing more of these, as this is the series I fanwhore over everything else, and there does seem to be a lack of in-depth analysis of the Lexx-verse. I think I'll start doing different looks into the cultures, technologies, organizations, general themes, science and philosophy, all of it.
This isn't a rant about any perceived injustice in culture. I really don't care enough about popularity or social acceptability to place that much importance on it. It's more of a poorly constructed segue into my main point:
Any given example of sci-fi is, at best, an unexpectedly popular phenomenon in general culture, to be enjoyed, but a further study and obsession with looked upon as unusual. Being human with an insatiable need to categorize things, I tend to put science-fiction into three levels of popularity. The highest tier is that sci-fi which manages to become popular in general society and, at least for a while, become a regular fixture in pop culture. This is the level inhabited by things such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and arguably series like the new Dr. Who and the latest incarnation of Battlestar Galactica.
The second tier is occupied by those series and creations which, while having strong followings of their own, aren't generally well known among popular culture. A bit above cult, a bit below mainstream. A few good examples of this are series and movies like Babylon 5, Red Dwarf, The Fifth Element, the old Battlestar Galactica, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (any version, really), and Mystery Science Theater 3000, possibly even Farscape.
The third tier is pretty much anything below this that has seen international release. The 'cult' stuff that is not quite popular enough to even achieve the level of 'cult classic'. In my own ranking, Lexx falls somewhere near the top of this tier. It ran for four seasons on both Showtime and the Sci-Fi channel, had very brief bouts of popularity, but if you ask any non sci-fi fan, and even a decent number of sci-fi fans, they've never heard of it.
It's also easily my favourite sci-fi series in the history of ever. I fell in love with it back in my teenage years when my parents happened to watch portions of seasons 1 through 3, then re-discovered my love for it when Rhi and I went through an extended marathon through all of it. Now, being the prying little twit I am, I'm going to try and figure out just what it is about this series that so completely earned by love.
****MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD, JUST A WARNING FOR ANYONE WHO EVENTUALLY WANTS TO WATCH, OR HAS ONLY WATCHED PART OF THE WAY THROUGH****
Background: Lexx is a sci-fi series, hell, it's arguably a space-opera in the purest sense of the word. It takes place not so much on a universal scale as a multiversal scale, involving the rise and fall of empires, love, heroism, evil and revenge spanning millenia, transcending space and time.
Lexx takes place in a futuristic universe/multiverse (though as we discover late in season three, it's not quite as far in the future as we were originally led to suspect), split into two halves: The Light Universe and the Dark Universe. The Dark Universe is the realm of chaos and depravity, a place of anarchy with no centralized system of control, where every system fights for itself and is at the whims of a callous universe at large. The Light Universe is a place of order, a place of sanctuary and safety where people have a better chance of long-term survival and prosperity.
At least that's what the propaganda tells everyone in the Light Universe.
The history of both universes is foggy, at best. Humanity has thoroughly colonized both the Light and Dark universes, and it has remained this way for countless millennium. At some point, possibly tens of thousands of years in the past, humanity was driven nearly to the point of extinction by a universe-spanning war against something known only as 'The Insect Civilization'. In this war, a certain human culture, originally from the Dark Universe, known as the Brunnen-G led humanity back from the brink of defeat to eventual victory against the Insects, nearly destroying the entire civilization.
Rebuilding in the aftermath of the war, humanity was forced to rely on Insect technology to recover, and many of the Insects styles remain to this day. The Brunnen-G, described as a race of warriors, dreamers and poets, turned insular and eventually separated themselves from the rest of the Light Universe, where they now lived. During the rebuilding, a new power arose. Over the course of thousands of years, there came an empire known as the League of Twenty-Thousand Planets, led by a religious sect known as the Divine Order. This aggressively imperialistic power was led by a figure known only as His Divine Shadow, directing the expansion of the empire from its seat of power, a world known as The Cluster.
Eventually the Divine Order set its sights on Brunnis-2, the homeworld of the Brunnen-G, and set out to destroy it and the race that had once saved humanity from extinction. The Brunnen-G, by this point entirely decadent and insular, offered no resistance, aside from a small group of rebels led by a young spirited scholar by the name of Kai. Their attempt to save their planet failed, and all of them, including Kai, died at the hands of His Shadow.
Fast forward two thousand years, and you've reached the universe as it stands when the series opens. The League of Twenty Thousand, led by the Divine Order, are the dominant force in the Light Universe, having wiped out all resistance aside from a pocket of resistance known as the Astral-B Heretics. The Cluster is now a super-fortress, where prisoners, heretics, and virtually anyone who doesn't worship His Divine Shadow are delivered for execution, dissection and placement in the protein bank.
His Divine Shadow, an immortal figure who has ruled the League for thousands of years, is building something, a superweapon that will finally cow all the heretics and rebels into submission. The Lexx, the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes.
Now, writing it out like that makes it sound a hell of a lot like Star Wars, but I promise that is not the case, I'll show more of why as I go along.
The series itself follows the four main characters who, through a series of misadventures, managed to gain control of the Lexx: Stanley Tweedle, Xev Bellringer of B3K, 790 and Kai. The Lexx itself qualifies as one of the main characters, as it is sentient, if quite singleminded and not very bright.
Stanley Tweedle: Stan is someone who just couldn't seem to catch a break in life. He made a decent living as an assistant deputy backup courier for the Astral-B Heretics, until he was captured by the infamous sub-nebulae mercenaries Beppo and Fip, tortured, then sold to the League of 20k where the information he was carrying in his tooth was used to launch a surprise attack on nearly 100 allied planets. Since then he was assigned to the Cluster and forced to work as a security guard, class 4, just in case they wanted him for further questioning.
Things turn south as he fails to report in for disciplinary organ-harvesting for annoying a superior, and he is then branded a heretic. Through a series of unlikely coincedences, he ends up gaining control of, and subsequently escaping the Cluster on the Lexx.
Xev Bellringer of B3K: Life sucks when you grow up in a box, and Xev can attest to it. Sold to the wife-bank before she could walk, she was trained to be a loving and devoted wife to whoever ended up buying her. Unfortunately all her training broke down on her wedding day, and she punched out her husband. She was promptly arrested and sent to the Cluster to be mentally re-conditioned and physically transformed into a love slave.
During the same set of coincidences that put Stan in charge of the Lexx, Xev's reprogramming ran into some problems, while her body was altered to a suitable form for a love-slave, her body got mixed with some DNA from a cluster-lizard, a quite nasty creature with an appetite for brains. Also, while gaining the body and libido of a love-slave, she managed to avoid the mental re-conditioning, and escaped with Stan.
790: At one point 790 was a human being, then he did some random thing which annoyed the League of 20k enough to have him arrested and his body harvested for the protein bank. Some small slice of his brain now acts as part of the processing source for a 790 class cyborg, the general automated workforce and information processors for the League of 20k.
He was assigned to conduct Xev's love-slave transformation when a cluster-lizard interfered and attacked him. Xev, in a fit of curiosity, placed his severed head on the table where it received the love-slave mental reconditioning. As she was the first thing he saw after this, he immediately became completely devoted to both serving her every wish and getting into her pants, and instantaneously developed the necessary sentience to follow these desires through.
Kai: As stated in the backstory, Kai died two thousand years ago in a suicide attack against the Divine Order. After his death, however, His Divine Shadow devoured his soul and memories, then had his body de-carbonized and transformed into a divine assassin, a nearly indestructible automaton sent to personally kill those who displease the Divine Order.
During the misadventures that ended up giving Stan control of the Lexx, Kai was sent to intercept and kill him. Due to more misadventures, Kai accidentally ended up regaining his memories from the preserved brain of the former host body of the Divine Shadow that killed him. With these memories, he regained enough willpower to break free of the Divine Order's control and join Stan, Xev and 790 in escaping the Cluster.
All four are now on the run, with the entirety of the Divine Order's forces trying to hunt them down because not only did they steal the most powerful force of destruction in the two universes, but there is also a certain prophecy that states that the last of the Brunnen-G would bring down the reign of the Divine Order, a prophecy that seems to be on the verge of coming true.
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Now that everyone's up to speed, why exactly do I love the series so much? Sure, there's the obvious things, such as a fantastic, beautiful setting, a very insectile theme to the architecture and technology, rather blatant sexual innuendo appearing every minute or so, weird as hell storylines and dialogue, and more. But Lexx is far from the only series that has this sort of thing, so why did I fall so completely in love with it? I've come up with a few possible reasons:
1) Genuine, three-dimensional characters
Almost every character with even moderate screen-time in Lexx is a fully fleshed-out personality with their own quirks, motivations and goals. They aren't cardboard cutouts, they aren't perfect Mary-Sues or author-mouthpieces. You watch them, alone or interacting with others, and you immediately see that these are people, reacting as people would. They never act in service to the plot, one of my most hated things in any form of fiction, everything they do is a result of them as a character. I'd go through everyone in the series if I could, but I'll settle for the main four...
Stanley Tweedle: It's pretty obvious from the start that Stan's supposed to be the character that the viewers can relate to, the interactive viewer to the Lexx universe. He's not hero material, not very brave, has some technical skills but nothing phenomenal, likes the simple things in life such as sex, good food, and a safe place to catch a nap. He's the Everyman. Yet despite this, he's not a blank slate. You can see, despite the cowardice and the fact that he's easily distracted by even the mere mention of sex, he genuinely wants to be a good person.
Whenever things are on the line, and there is a true threat to his friends' lives, Stanley will not hesitate to put his own life on the line for their sake. Some notable examples include when he immediately volunteered to let a momentarily psychotic Kai kill him instead of Xev, when he took the Lexx back to the Cluster so that Kai could get more proto-blood to lengthen his own undead existence, when he stood up to Gigerata the Wicked to save Kai and Xev from an impending supernova, and when Stan re-entered the Lexx while it was heavily infested with Mantrid drone-arms to save 790.
Xev: Xev's main influences in her life were that she spent a majority of it growing up in a box completely isolated from direct human contact, and that she received physical conditioning which gave her a libido from hell. While these traits do dominate a lot of her actions, she still manages to show some very relatable human traits through it. Namely the traits of self-determination, selflessness, and an insatiable curiosity.
After growing up in a box and narrowly avoiding being mentally transformed into a slave, Xev is determined first off to make her own decisions and live with the consequences of them, second to do everything she can to prevent others from going through what she did, and finally to explore the universe she's been denied her whole life. She tends to react quite violently when denied any of these. While easily the most 'noble' of the main characters, she's also the most dangerously impulsive, her natural curiosity, her love-slave urges and the instinctive predatory needs of her cluster-lizard side combining to lead her into some very rash and short-sighted decisions. Some of these include volunteering for a game-show that would result in her decapitation if she lost, accidentally releasing a psychotic killer from a prisoner transport, and literally having a romantic fling with the devil.
790: 790's case is interesting, because while all the other characters are human in their own ways, he goes so far in the opposite direction he's a character in his own right. 790's easily the most intelligent thing on the crew, capable of interacting and controlling nearly any piece of technology he's attached to, as well as having general information on nearly every explored location in the known universe.
Unfortunately 790 is also a complete sociopath. Designed to be an information-processing automaton, the love-slave mental conditioning he received caused him only to develop enough sapience to properly express his complete singleminded devotion to Xev. Everything else in the entire universe he puts into one of three categories: Something that will bring him and Xev closer together, something that's a threat to his pursuit of Xev and must be destroyed at all costs, or something that's completely unimportant.
Thankfully the main things stopping him from happily killing off the rest of the crew are Xev's constant orders for him not to, the occasional necessity for them to get Xev out of trouble, and the fact that in the end, he is just a robot-head incapable of self-propulsion or any motion at all.
Kai: Kai is a very interesting case. While he got the memories of his life back when he destroyed the brain of the Divine Predecessor that had killed him, he didn't get his soul back (we find out later it had already gone off to be reincarnated). Because of this he has no wants or desires, no true emotion at all, his actions are guided purely by intellectual curiosity, a basic sense off pragmaticism and utilitarianism, and nothing more. At least that's what he tells us... a lot.
While not having the sheer processing power of 790, Kai was a scholar and artist in his own right during life, and a highly efficient, indestructible killer in death. While he will act as nearly unassailable voice of reason, he usually won't do so unless asked, as he has no motivation to. Instead Kai often prefers to watch how things play out, only acting if there is a threat to the crew, not out of loyalty or friendship, but simply because he seems most interested in watching how their stories play out.
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2) Selfish Motivations
This directly ties into the characterization of point 1, but deserves its own mention do to how much it impacts the story. The main characters are not heroes in any classical sense of the word. They are quite selfish, and generally apathetic to the needs of the universe at large. Xev, the most noble of the bunch, can be counted on to generally do the right thing if she takes a moment to think about it, but more than once her impulsiveness gets in the way of it, and in the end she still does value the lives of her friends over strangers, and has threatened to kill (and followed through) to those ends.
Stanley, unless his friends are in direct, obvious danger, needs some very hard pushing to get off his ass and do the right thing, and even then he'll complain the entire way. 790 would happily watch the universe burn if it meant he got some robot-on-Xev action. Kai has no motivation one way or the other. In the end it gives you a group of horny assholes and sociopaths in command of the most powerful force of destruction in the two universes. And this is the thing that creates beautiful drama and storylines, it ends up with character decisions that are interesting and believable.
In the end the series has only two real 'heroes' in the classical sense of the word. The first, Kai when he was alive, is a vibrant warrior-poet who led an incredibly brave but ultimately suicidal attack against the Foreshadow, the ship which destroyed his entire race and his home planet, and he dies about five minutes into the series. The second is Thodin, the Astral-B heretic whose actions set the series of misadventures which give Stan, Xev, Kai and 790 the Lexx. Thodin is essentially Buck Rogers personified: Rugged, heroic, always with a snappy one-liner for the ladies, selfless to his crew and his cause...
...and he dies at the hands of Kai about an hour into the series, unable to even finish his moving last words.
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3) Strong female characters (and male ones too, but mostly female)
One thing science fiction, hell, even fantasy in general, lacks is strong female characters. It's not for lack of trying, it's just that no one ever seems to know exactly what makes a strong female character. Many have hit upon things that definitely don't make strong female characters, to many also seem to have trouble recognizing that simple fact. Making your female a man-hating lesbian does not make her a strong female character. Making your female a tough-as-nails fighter does not make her a strong female character. Making your female a poster-child for whatever interpretation of feminism you happen to hold does not make her a strong female character. Making your female character a two-dimensional sex symbol definitely does not make her a strong female character.
So what actually does make a strong female character? Well, pretty much the same thing that makes a strong male character. Full 3d characterization. Great strength of personality that, while it isn't devoid of weakness or flaws, shows they have the strength to overcome and minimize them. A strong sense of self-actualization and willingness to pursue not the goals of their designated-love-interest, not the goals of the author's soapbox rant, but their own goals, created naturally by their own personality.
Lexx hits you with two stunning examples of this pretty much right off the bat. The first, obviously, is Xev Bellringer. She's a character who has every reason not to be strong: She has a libido that gives her the strong urge to jump any remotely good looking man and a body to let her get most any she would want, she's not the brightest and is rather impulsive. Yet at the same time, she takes her newly granted freedom in a stranglehold and never lets it go throughout the entire series. She makes it clear that she is going to explore everything that was denied to her and no one is going to get in her way. She admits she has a sexual drive that would kill most lesser people, yet she rigidly, sometimes even painfully makes sure she keeps her standards regarding it, refusing to sleep with known evil men, or knowingly sleep with men in a fashion that would lead to others getting hurt no matter how attractive they might be.
The second character is more of a bit-player in the series, but she makes such a huge impression and shows up at least once in every season. Gigerata the Wicked, in my opinion, is one of the most wonderful characters to ever grace sci-fi. First off, she's a villain. Not a major villain as she doesn't have those sorts of ambitions, but a villain nonetheless because her own goals necessarily result in the deaths of many people, and she just doesn't give a damn.
Gigerata likes to eat meat, the fresher the better, the more human the better. She's not a joy-killer, she just realizes that in order for her to satisfy her tastes, a lot of people are going to have to die, and she's perfectly alright with that. She's even rather proud of it, as the number of people she's killed is a testament to how successful she's been at the buffet line that is humanity. When captured for her crimes by the Divine Order and having them read to her, her only response to the claim that she's devoured the populations of eighty-four member worlds is a proud, haughty, "More like a hundred and eighty four!"
She's not the brightest, but she's incredibly cunning, arrogant to the point of megalomania, and completely confident and comfortable with who she is as a monster. The world is her lunch, and she's confident she has the strength to force the issue if anyone disagrees. Even up to the point of her death, when she stares directly at a star undergoing a supernova and demands that it put on a good show for her.
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4) Great villains
As above, Gigerata is a wonderful villain, yet she isn't the main threat of season 1. All four seasons have wonderful, genuine threats. Season 1's main villain, His Divine Shadow, is actually (in my opinion) the weakest of these. Not because he's poorly explained or anything, but simply because he's too inhuman to add that extra horrible touch of relatability.
You find out at the end of season 1 that His Divine Shadow, throughout the entire history of the Divine Order, was actually merely the projected consciousness of one of the last surviving members of the Insect Civilization. When it realized it couldn't defeat humanity through sheer force, it decided instead to manipulate humanity into destroying itself, and damn near succeeded through the Divine Order, if not for the intervention of the crew of the Lexx, particularly Kai.
Season 2, after the first season made a threat that could wipe out humanity, had to up the ante. And it did in spades, in the form of Mantrid. This time, an insane bio-vizier accidentally fused his soul with the last offspring of His Divine Shadow, and now part human, part Insect, and mostly machine, sets out to complete the job the Insects started, with interest. With the help of the Von-Neumann machines that are his drone-arms, Mantrid has the goal of devouring the entire universe... and he actually succeeds. It's a phyrric victory, however, as the crew of the Lexx tricks him into a position where his own gravitational pull causes him to collapse into himself while they escape into the alternate Dark Universe.
But it's not just the sheer threat that makes him such a great villain, it's him as a character. Mantrid was played by Dieter Laser, who is slightly better known for his role as the evil doctor in 'The Human Centipede', though this is definitely not a good thing. Either way he does incredibly well playing off an exceptionally creepy godlike being with an insatiable urge to destroy everything, yet have some fun while doing so
Seasons 3 and 4 feature the same character as a villain, yet he manages to top even Mantrid. Nigel Bennett enters the series as, quite simply, 'Prince'. Ruler of an eternally burning planet that, the crew of the Lexx discovers, contains the reincarnations of everyone they've known who was evil in life... alright, it's Hell in all but name, and Prince is obviously the devil. An incredibly sexy devil, who is friendly, relatable, and in his own words, 'Very good with pain'.
Nigel Bennett, through Prince, simply does the impossible. A big no-no in any serious piece of fiction is to write a character who is evil for the sake of being evil. It's usually a quick way to break suspension of disbelief because, in the end, no human, no matter how depraved, truly believes they're evil in their own view. Yet this is exactly what Prince is, and he does it so believably well. In his own words, "It's my job to punish those who are bad, and tempt those who are not. I don't know why, it's just the way things have always been. Is it so wrong to enjoy my job?"
Well, that's pretty much all I have for the moment. I'm thinking about doing more of these, as this is the series I fanwhore over everything else, and there does seem to be a lack of in-depth analysis of the Lexx-verse. I think I'll start doing different looks into the cultures, technologies, organizations, general themes, science and philosophy, all of it.