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!