Lexx (television)

Lexx. TV show, Sci-Fi Channel, Jan. 2000. Canada: "Salter Street Films & TiMe Film-und-TV-Produktions GmbH, in Association with Screen Partners." Paul Donovan and Wolfram Tichy, exec. prod. Norman Denver, prod., "Creative Producer." David Hackl, design. Gary Mueller, visual effects coordinator.

See in this section, Adventures in The Dark Zone. TV show retains the space-going Lexx as "a bug kind of thing" as one character puts it. Initial voice-over has LEXX introducing himself: "I am Lexx. I am the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes." Donald Palumbo points out that while LEXX looks like a big bug--sort of a dragonfly with big fly eyes--LEXX's landing vehicles look like little bugs--ornithopters, certainly, a la DUNE. The organic ship idea is becoming an SF space-opera cliche, cf. the ship in Farscape, which is organic, if not particularly bug-like, and the Vorlon ships in Babylon 5. Cf. and contrast R. Scott and H. R. Gieger's alien ship in ALIEN (film). In the episode aired 21 Jan. 2000, "Lexx 2.7 Love Grows," we hear Lexx speaking to the captain in a voice very like the voice HAL in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film) speaking to Dave, and get Lexx's gender stressed when he is trans-sexed briefly into a female. We also see a robot head that looks like a death's head and serves as a supplementary computer. In the process of being severed from its body, the robot head--whose "gender" is male--was programmed to fall hopelessly in love with the first organism it saw, which turned out to be Xev, the "love slave" who was supposed to be the recipient of this programming. So the robot head is a horny, love-starved, sex-obsessed robot head. The TV show is satiric, "recombinant television," mixing the SPACE ODYSSEY allusion with the living dead from the British TV show Red Dwarf (and DARK STAR, q.v.); the show is significant for showing the biomechanical theme permeating SF even unto a cheap operation like LEXX.

(RDE, Don Palumbo, 22/I/00, 23/I/00)