Lexx

The hallmark of science is asking a question, setting up an experiment to find the answer, then writing down what happens as a result. So naturally, the same should apply in science FICTION. This usually comes in the form of cause and effect; something like "If we destroy this destructive life form to protect the people it's destroying without trying to communicate with it first, will someone see us do it, think WE'RE the destructive life form, and do the same to us?" Poignant stuff.

But occasionally, there comes a type of sci-fi that gets tired of waxing philosophical and focuses on asking simpler but equally important questions, more along the lines of "How do you poop when you're on a spaceship?"

The answer is, of course, VERY CAREFULLY.

Lexx is a weird little sci-fi show running from the late 90s to the early 00s that starts with the question "What if Star Trek were actually allowed to be horny"? The simple premise is that a group of total misfits meet up due to haphazard circumstances that end up toppling a zealot priest dictator's regime and stealing his all-powerful spaceship, which they then use to look for a new home to settle down in. The format of the show teeters between serial story arc and random one-off adventures depending on which season you're watching, but generally focuses on our crew of antiheroes travelling from planet to planet, crossing paths with fringe dwellers and eccentric ne'er-do-wells, wandering aimlessly in search of shelter, security, and the chance to score some ass.

Sci-fi could ALWAYS stand to be a little hornier in my opinion.

Let's meet our ragtag cast. Xev (sometimes spelled Zev) is a former "Love Slave" who escaped a mandatory bimbofication brainwash session after a convenient accident, and her only goal is to find a new home away from her life of servitude. A severed robot head (Serial Number 790) ended up receiving said Love Slave reprogramming during said accident and now has eyes only for Xev, and will do anything in its limited bodiless power to remain by her side.

A disgraced security guard by the name of Stan begrudgingly joins the group after a series of catastrophes ends up accidentally endowing him with the biological key to the most powerful spaceship in the known universe, essentially making him the (unfit) captain of the group. And finally there's Kai, the undead, nigh-immortal assassin who, after breaking free of his enslavement under the zealot priest, doesn't really have a choice but to tag along, as he must wait for the "proto-blood" that keeps him undead to eventually run dry in order to actually die.

If he wanted to, Kai would make a killer sports star. Literally.

The titular Lexx itself is a massive bug-shaped cyborg of a spaceship, capable of obliterating entire planets at the press of a button, yet it mostly only houses the four main crew members and a few random stowaways. But the crew are far from lonely, as they regularly encounter a host of freaks and geeks on their travels. Some want to steal the Lexx, most want to get in bed with Xev (she WAS a Love Slave, after all), some just want to torture Stan, and there are still a handful of devouts trying to bring back the zealot priest somehow. Bandits, escaped convicts, teenagers who fell asleep in cryo after stealing dad's space van for a road trip, you name it. This is a universe chock full of weirdos, and it's awesome.

Warning, watching this show might very well awaken some unusual dormant kink inside of you.

The crucial thing here is that, as a show, Lexx uses an effective combination of satire, dark comedy, sexuality, and earnest indulgence to create a unique identity for itself in the sci-fi community. At its best moments, it perfectly strides the line between that which makes a good science fiction story, and that which makes a good crude comedy. It accepts the stuffy high-concept nature of speculative fiction and embraces the down-to-earth "low-concept" sex and violence we love to see in a good show, even one that was clearly burdened with an ever-shrinking budget between seasons.

Don't worry, this little brat got what he deserved.

With that in mind, one genuinely interesting thing the writers did was use the recurring theme of reincarnation through out the series. Somewhere in the middle of the show's run, possibly as a way to lampshade the continued appearance of the same few actors reappearing as different characters across multiple universes, even after their previous characters die, the crew would sometimes point it out in a fourth-wall break-y way. Season 3 revolved around this binary system of planets orbiting around each other, loosely assumed to be Heaven and Hell. When people died on either planet, their soul would try to escape to reincarnate elsewhere, only to be locked into the pull of these two planets by an arbiter of souls (the self-proclaimed Devil), and they would "wake up" in a new life again on one of the two. Very Iifa Tree from Final Fantasy IX.

It was cool watching the crew encounter such characters with dialogue like, "Oh god, that’s Giggerota, the cannibal killer! Why is she here, I thought she died?!", and this new not-Giggerota would experience a brief deja vu, like, "Giggerota? Who's that?...and yet...it sounds familiar somehow?", before simply chalking it up to beind out of her mind and resuming with torturing Stan for fun. A neat way to poke fun at having a small cast and turning it into an actual story element!

This girl started as a humanoid plant monster, then came back as a porn star, and later a giant woman rampaging in downtown Japan. I guess in a way she was always eating something...?

However, all said and done, the charm of Lexx eventually wears thin as the seasons change. Toward the end of season 4 it actually got pretty frustrating to watch as the weird-ass space adventure dropped its sense of nuance and mellowed out into a more straightforward, mean-spirited "comedy" like many of its contemporaries. If you remember the general level of homophobia in mainstream TV in the early 00s, you can pretty much guess how it went down. Despite previously featuring a regular host of gay freaks that would have been right at home in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, it felt like Lexx eventually stopped representing queerdos in favor of just making cheap jokes about them. There are still some cool ideas and great moments in the last season, but for me, all the brightest moments happened in the first half of the show, and they continued to stray away from that toward the end.

This gif keeps getting flagged by Tumblr for pornographic content.

I’ve said this before though, and I’ll say it again. Imperfect shows that COULD have been great are my favorite type of show to watch, because nothing inspires me more than wanting to "fix" a piece of media I otherwise mostly enjoyed. Lexx is a prime example of this. I have a lot of cool story and universe concepts I’ve been fleshing out over the years, and maybe one day I'll finally take the time to make them a reality. And if I do, you can bet I'm going to come back to Lexx as a source of weird and horny inspiration, just to prove that I can take these ideas and turn them into something better.

After all, art is best judged NOT by how "good" it is, but by what it inspires inside of YOU!

Anyway, back to interrogating carrots.