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Author: Lydia Bugg
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Nerding Day: Lexx 🌭
You know how sometimes your friend tells you there’s a Sci-Fi TV show about deep space travel where the ship is alive, and you’re like, “Oh neat, what’s it called?”
And then they say, “And the ship has a toilet mouth and eats the passenger’s poop.”
So you’re like, “Stop selling, man. I’ve already downloaded season 3. I’ve already replaced my vision board with Lexx.”
A lot was working against Canadian/German sci-fi show Lexx right from the beginning. I don’t just mean that the script sucked, and the budget was whatever loose change creator Lex Gigeroff had in the sticky cup holder of his Toyota Celica. Yes, the show and spaceship are called The Lexx, and the creator’s name is Lex. Coming up with names for things is a weakness of the series. For example, there’s a planet called Potatohoe.
When Lexx first aired in the US, the Sci-Fi channel only purchased its second season and then started airing the show with season 2, episode 11. They recut footage from the first season, which consists of four movies, into a quick forty-five minute explainer of what was going on and then kicked American audiences into the most chaotically horny episode of Lexx‘s season two, “Nook.”
“Nook” is about a planet full of men who live like monks and have never even seen a woman. So when Lexx‘s resident horny lady lands on the same day of their one-night-only hump purge, hijinks ensue, the planet ends up exploding; it’s very standard stuff for Lexx.
Apparently, in the early planning stages of the show, the creators decided they were sick of seeing noble space missions. They made a show about shitty people traveling through space with a mission of not dying and occasionally getting laid. It’s basically It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia on the most powerful planet-eating, dick shaped spaceship in the galaxy.
The characters on The Lexx are Fran Drescher’s brother, Kai. An undead warrior fueled by a substance called protoblood. I’m pretty sure the protoblood is just Mountain Dew pumped through a bunch of clear tubing, and since I too went through a goth fueled by Mountain Dew phase, Kai is my favorite character.
Getting Kai’s special Mountain Dew is a big driving source for episode plots. Kai runs out of Mountain Dew and has to go to sleep until they find him more Mountain Dew to wake him up. Someone wants to steal Kai’s Mountain Dew. Kai has gone crazy but thankfully doesn’t have enough Mountain Dew to sustain his rampage, etc.
There’s also Stanley, a traitor, security guard, and guy whose main character trait is that he’s sad and horny. While escaped love slave Xev and later her clone, Zev, is just horny. Yep, that’s her entire personality.
If I were to write a summary of any single episode of the show, it would be impossible. The only way I can explain it is… well, you have to get into Lexx-think mode to truly understand Lexx, and to get into Lexx-think mode, you have to watch ten episodes in a row of Lexx, which, believe me, you do not want to do. It’s kind of like looking at a magic eye poster– you have to let your vision get soft, and your brain get fuzzy, and all of a sudden, the plot appears to make sense!
For instance, season three of the show takes place after the entire cast has been in cryostasis for 4,000 years. Many of the characters the crew has met previously who died appear as reincarnated versions of themselves. I saw this and said, “Ah, yes, because the time prophet explained in the first episode that time is a flat circle, and the Lexx has circled all the way around, so it makes sense that Giggerota the cannibal woman is now the first female pope on present-day Earth.”
The weirdest thing about Lexx is that it’s somehow boring. I know, it seems crazy a show with alien robot carrots that fly up people’s asses and control their brain through their spinal cord could be boring, but it somehow is. Lexx‘s budget shrank every season, so while season one had guest stars like Tim Curry, Malcolm Mcdowell, and Barry Bostwick, decent CGI for the time, and plenty of sets, season 4 takes place entirely on Earth due to budget constraints.
You can feel the budget tighten every episode. Lots of planets have no sky at all, just a blank blue void because they ran out of money by the time they got up there. The sets and scenes are so limited in season 4 it starts to feel like a play, but without the strong writing you need to make four people yelling at each other in an empty room with a tarp-covered kiddy pool representing a space bed seem interesting.
Sure, sometimes they did amazing things with their limited budget. I love whatever this is. Put this on every sci-fi show. I would kill to see Sir Patrick Stewart do this shit:
Most of the time it wasn’t human head chess, though. It was more like, “My mom said we could film in her friend’s diner for thirty minuets at 2 AM so it’s the space devil’s office now!”
The funniest part of learning about Lexx is hearing random interspersed plot points and quotes from the show completely out of context. “I want every word of the Lexx Wikipedia article printed out on a wall decal and put up in my office,” I told my husband at one point while working on this article. So, I made a few test mock-ups, and they came out really well!
It was an unfortunate fate for the gay balloonists. I know what you’re thinking: “They couldn’t save one gay balloonist?” Sadly, no, The Lexx ate them all.
Having Live, Love, Laugh stuck on your wall is cute, but I prefer something a little more topical to help me remember to live life to the fullest.
You could put up a quote from Walt Disney about imagination or dreaming, etc. Or, you could have a quote from a brainwashed robot with some human organs that says:
Some might say season four of Lexx got pretty crazy, and what better way to commemorate that than with an inspirational poster devoted to the episode where Dracula first appears!
Or, if you just want to commemorate how much Dracula factors into the plot in mid-season four, you could always go with this country-style look.
It’s really so much Dracula for a sci-fi show. I mean, I love a space Dracula as much as anyone, but it’s like four episodes about Dracula going after Kai’s Mountain Dew. Don’t worry, of course; Kai keeps his Mountain Dew, and things go pretty well for him for the rest of the season.
Lexx‘s greatest accomplishment is that it’s the only show on Earth with fanfic somehow less horny and more plot-driven than the actual show. If it had gotten another season, the budget would have called for the whole thing to be set in a single inflatable bounce house. The plot would have been that the bounce house was full of Kai’s protoblood, and if they ever stopped bouncing Kai would die, and if they did that, I would absolutely watch it. Fine, I guess I’m kickstarting Lexx Season 5.
Lydia will share more random Lexx plot points on Twitter.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Benjamin Sairanen, who is a robot that does NOT want to live in your underpants but in THIS housing market? Wokka wokka!
If there were a Yikes That Didn’t Age Well Olympics, Ally McBeal would be a shoe-in for the gold. Earlier this year, I was so out of feel-good television, and still not at all feeling good, that I thought I should watch the series and write something about this classic ’90s show as a whole. But I only made it through a little over two seasons before giving up completely.
The biggest hurdle on my Ally McBeal triathlon was Season 1 Episode 6: “The Promise,” in which Ally almost lets a man die rather than give him CPR because he’s fat. Then she cock blocks him, and tells him no one will ever love him, so he might as well marry his girlfriend that he’s not attracted to or in love with because she’s also fat. I wish I was exaggerating even a little.
I just want to start with the fact that, in general, there are so many problems with Ally McBeal. No one even Googled, “Law how work?” a single time before creating this show. There’s a weird recurring thing where the entire cast will be out at a bar at night, and someone will get a phone call, and they’ll all have to rush to the courthouse at 11 PM because the judge or the jury has a verdict. Courthouses typically close at 5 PM. No insane judge is forcing everyone into a courtroom in the middle of the night because they thought of a ruling in the shower.
Also, all of the women on the show are famously gorgeous, Lucy Liu, Portia De Rossi, Calista Flockhart, Jane Krakowski, Courtney Thorne-Smith, who you might not have heard of, but she was beautiful enough to play the nagging wife to a male comedian on According To Jim, so you know she’s super hot. The male lead of Ally Mcbeal that everyone calls hot so often that at one point they call him a “Ken Doll,” looks like an extra-large suit salesman who insisted on cutting his own hair for the first two seasons.
The hotness disparity on this show is a travesty. Nell, played by Portia De Rossi, is the acknowledged most beautiful person on the show. She’s got waist-length blonde hair, is super thin, and generally looks like what beer and underwear commercials tell us is the human ideal. This is what women were expected to aspire to, while men get to aspire for mediocrity. If a man has limbs, and a mouth, and 56% of his hair, he’s a God in Ally McBeal world.
If you’re not aware of the overall premise, Ally McBeal was a show where hot lawyers try sexual harassment cases and sexually harass each other. The overarching theme is, “haven’t these silly sexual harassment laws gone too far, and shouldn’t we all just shut up and kiss each other since we are all hot. (Please note once again, only the women are hot, and they do kiss each other occasionally but only for those sweet ’90s Gay Panic laughs). These are the other two men on the show.
Anyway, “The Promise” opens with Ally being told she’s going to court against Harry Pippen, who is described as “a fat man, no wind, moves like continental drift.” So, right away, a very charitable reading of the person whose love life will become the focus of this episode.
Ally meets Harry Pippen, who immediately has a heart attack, which is played for big laughs and then gets weirdly sexual. She tries to give him CPR but isn’t strong enough, so she starts bouncing up and down on his chest with her ass, causing everyone in the gathered crowd to gasp but no one to help.
As this man continues his hilarious heart attack, Ally’s like, “Oh God, oh ick, here we go.” She can’t believe she’s actually going to put her mouth on this loser so he doesn’t die. Luckily she scraped together enough human decency to give this guy CPR even though he’s fat, and she saves his life. Of course, we immediately cut to her gargling just in case you forgot how terrible the experience was for her.
“You saved his life!” her friend says.
“Not before he ate a Spanish omelet. Oh God, the onions!” We all laugh at what a loser this guy is again—eating breakfast? In the morning? Ugh, what a fat person thing to do.
Harry Pippen’s fiancé, Angela, shows up at Ally’s office and thanks her for saving Harry’s life. They’re getting married in a week, and Harry is her whole entire world! That’s probably going to go great for her, as you can imagine.
Angela feels so indebted to Ally for giving her fiancé ass-CPR that she invites her to their wedding! Ally agrees to go, even though she clearly hates everyone in this situation, and we’re all supposed to think it’s funny because, again, I think the punchline is just haha Ally has to go to a fat wedding for fat people. They’re like regular people but fat. It’s hilarious. Maybe I’m not explaining it right.
This is probably a good spot to note that David E. Kelly, the creator of Ally Mcbeal, single-handedly wrote every episode of the first season while also writing for his other TV show, The Practice. That’s a lot of writing to take on. Usually, it takes a room full room of people to write an episode of television, and that’s a good idea because if a single other human person had looked at this script before it went into production, they might have noticed that even in 1997 “fat guy has funny heart attack” was the Yellowstone National Forest of well-trodden comedic territory.
We cut to the C-plot for a while, which is about how all of the men in the office think the mail girl is so hot they can’t stop staring at her open-mouthed when she’s around. The other women in the office blame the mail girl for being too hot and want her fired. It sucks!
Then Harry comes to Ally’s office and says he’s called off his wedding because “he’s never been kissed like that before.” He was literally completely unconscious during their “kiss”, yet it has changed his life. Previously he was marrying Angela only because they were “good friends with limited options.” Kissing Ally while nearly dead has made him believe in love again! For some reason? Not in an “I can only get a boner if I’m in danger now” way either; he’s just in love with Ally.
Of course, Ally tells him to get the hell out of here with that love shit. She tries to picture the two of them on a date, and the fantasy sequence is the car tipping to the side when he gets in. The joke is, in a hilarious turn of events, that this man is fat.
Harry accepts Ally’s rejection at first but then returns, asking for her advice. He explains that he’s considering marrying Angela after all because he wants kids and she’ll make a great Mom, plus she’s a nice person, but she’s never made his heart bounce, and he doesn’t even think about her during sex. “Do you think it’s wrong for a person to marry someone not because she’s the one but because she’s the only?” He asks.
“Why the fuck are you asking me, a plucky TV lawyer and not like, I don’t know a therapist or someone you’ve known longer than three seconds while you were actively dying, Harry?” Is not what she says, which is a real bummer.
Instead, she comes down hard on the side of waiting for true love. She makes a big speech about it. Love is the most important thing! It’s very on-brand for the show. Ally McBeal is obsessed with two things: the sanctity of love and her married ex-boyfriend Billy “The Ken Doll.”
So, Angela comes back and tells Ally that Harry broke up with her to hold out for his one true love. She’s not super thrilled about Ally ruining the wedding she JUST got invited to.
Angela tells Ally that no one else is going to want to take care of Harry and, “Sometimes when you hold out for everything, you walk away with nothing.” A pretty big dunk on the guy she wants to marry.
“Remember that the next time a fat man walks in asking you for advice,” Angela says before sadly walking out to a Vonda Shepard song. Don’t worry, Angela; this show is never allowing a fat person on it again unless it’s to comically roll down a staircase with their hands full of jelly donuts. Sorry, I’m looking at a list of bits cut from the show David E Kelley released with the script notes entitled “groundbreaking bits from visionary genius David E. Kelley.”
Ally sees Harry flirting with a client of hers who is a sex worker at the courthouse between cases and immediately cock blocks him. “Hey, remember all that stuff I said about how love is the most important thing, well apparently, you didn’t hear me whisper (for skinny people). You should marry Angela!” She says. This is creative paraphrasing, but she literally does say, “last night, I was thinking of all of my friends who might be right for you, and I realized none of my friends would go out with you.”
Yay! Ally successfully bullies this guy into settling for a woman he doesn’t love by telling him that, realistically, no one else will ever love him. I’m sure this set them up for a long and happy marriage, Mazel Tov!
He looks up at Ally like he’s very much still in love with her and regrets his decision.
Ally flashed him the peace sign because she’s completely checked out of this entire situation. She’s planning her grocery list right now. She has not a care in the world about ruining this man and woman’s life. PEACE!
This might not actually be the worst episode of Ally McBeal. It’s insane to think about, but I have no idea what lies in the black hole of episodes beyond season two. I vaguely remember something about Christina Ricci having a diving board in her bedroom for sexual purposes? And I know there was an episode that mixed the happy vibe of small town Christmas with a 9/11 tribute, so…it definitely doesn’t get better.
Lydia will never ever discuss this again, but if you want to hear her talk about other TV shows, check out her Twitter.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Adrienne Hisbrook, who has never been called on to revive a life with their ass, but is pretty sure they would if nobody else stepped forward.
