| 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: In "Eating Pattern" the show takes its obsession with gory dismemberment to the edge. There's a little of Soylent Green to the tale of what makes "Pattern" a desirable food-drug on the garbage planet chanced and fed upon by The Lexx. Rutger Hauer plays his leading role of Bog with gleeful camp while the limbs fly. His people are both taunted and haunted by the alluring Wist (Doreen Jacobi) who turns out to be both disease and cure. The episode is not for viewers with delicate stomachs, but there is the "Pattern Song" to enjoy as well as the immortal line: "Your worm is your friend." Another documentary finishes off the tape, but is a little more general than its predecessors. --Paul Tonks |
