| A "Light Universe" and a "Dark Zone" keep good and bad apart for the characters of Lexx, even though it's often hard to tell the difference between the two in this offbeat and unique sci-fi show that delights in its own nastiness. The show's Canadian creators, "Supreme Beans" Paul Donovan, Lex Gigeroff and Jeffrey Hirschfield intended every episode to be, in their words, "a nasty adventure". With flashes of nudity and surgical gore, and a collection of extreme hairstyles and accents, the overall look is often akin to a sci-fi Eurotrash. Event Horizon and The Fifth Element seem to have taken something from the show, and despite a whole team of designers it in turn owes something to David Lynch's Dune. Aboard the stolen 10-kilometre-long spaceship Lexx (designed to look like a dragonfly) are the "Dirty Three-and-a-Half": insufferable coward Stanley H Tweedle (Brian Downey), the Edward Scissorhands clone and 2000 years-dead Kai (Michael McManus), decapitated and lovestruck robot head 790 (voiced by writer Hirschfield) and the skimpily dressed Zev (19-year-old Eva Habermann). It's with the last of these characters that the show generated its main audience and proved itself totally indifferent to regular boundaries of TV formatting. After four 90-minute-long movies (really just an extended pilot), it took time for a financial commitment to secure a second season. Then Habermann took on other work, leaving the show without its central babe allure. The creators' answer was to kill off Zev and then immediately resurrect her as Xev (Xenia Seeberg) in a manner far more inventive than Dr Who or even Dallas! A disregard both for genre conventions and good taste makes the show a constant series of surprises: by the time of the third season, the expression "anything goes" had long passed being understatement. On this tape: Hunting for Kai's homeworld, the Lexx crew are drawn to a planet by a holographic message from Poetman (Tim Curry). There's a fantastic notion about how the planet and its sun are kept from going "Super Nova", surrounding an expansion of Zev's feelings for Kai. All the while, Stanley is dogged by the cannibal Giggerota who stowed aboard during the pilot episode. Essentially, the story has little to do with the overall arc, but is an experiment in format and testing boundaries. The most obvious example of this is Zev's naked shower scene. There's also a nutty song and dance moment for Kai and Zev, a cameo of the director floating in space, and Curry chewing scenery with gusto. A second documentary looks at the enormous CGI work put into the first season. --Paul Tonks |
