Krishna, Srinivas

Lexx Series One "1.0: I Worship His Shadow"

Lexx Series One - 4.0 : Giga Shadow

Lexx: Series 2, Vol. 5

Once you've been bitten by the Lexx bug, wacky wonders await you with every new episode. This volume compiles the last four episodes of the show's second season (1998), and you'll marvel at what this Canadian-German coproduction gets away with, given its modest budget and the ingenuity of its three-man creative team of "Human Beans" led by creator and frequent writer-director Paul Donovan. The show's eagerness to experiment is proven in "Brigadoom," a sci-fi musical that tells Kai's backstory entirely in song--with surprisingly impressive results. "The Net" finds the Lexx trapped in a giant spiderlike snare, leaving Stanley (Brian Downey) under a dangerous alien influence. "Brizon" and "End of the Universe" end the second series as the Lexx is inexorably drawn into the Dark Zone after an epic fight with Mantrid's multiplying drone arms. Confused? Don't worry--with enough teasing sex talk, offbeat humor, and wild special effects, Lexx can seduce even the most resistant sci-fi purist. --Jeff Shannon

Lexx: Series 3, Vol. 2

We've seen Xev in the shower, Stanley without his hat, and even the inside of 790's head. So seeing Kai in the nude was only a matter of time. Following the dilemma of "Gondola," Stan and Xev are lost among the schizophrenic denizens in "K-Town" and eventually found by a dead assassin whose biomechanical systems are malfunctioning. It takes a shock reappearance of season 2's universe-destroying Mantrid to make sense of his groin-located repair mechanism. In "Tunnels" Kai, Stan, and Xev are split up, with Kai suffering the red tape of petty bureaucracy in Hog Town and Stan and Xev descending 39,000 steps. Stan bumps into show writer Lex Gigeroff making a cameo as insane surgeon Doctor Rainbow, and escape is determined by another death and resurrection from the enigmatic Prince (Nigel Bennett). At this halfway point in the season, the viewer should be carefully questioning this season's premise. --Paul Tonks

Lexx - Series 2, Vol. 1

A crew of misfit outlaws wanders the galaxy in a living ship. Sound familiar? Doomed to live in the shadow of cable TV's science fiction class act Farscape, the Canadian-German coproduction Lexx takes a completely different trajectory as a tongue-in-cheek, sci-fi sex farce. Sad sack pilot Stanley Tweedle, coquettish love slave Xev, reanimated corpse Kai, and lovesick robot head 790 wander the galaxy looking for food, people, and (most importantly) a little nookie. Shot on the cheap with loads of flashy (if often unconvincing) digital effects and a rather claustrophobic series of studio-bound sets, the show launched with a quartet of TV movies before settling into a weekly series with its second season. Mantrid launches the Lexx into a funhouse galaxy of wacky worlds, where the dreaded insect king awakes and begins his bizarre reign of terror. Terminal takes them to a mercenary deep space hospital where the doctors' specialty is saving the patient's money and discarding the useless body. The hilarious Lyekka guest stars Stephen McHattie as a drawling, hick astronaut and introduces the pixielike Lyekka, a curvy little plant girl with an insatiable appetite for human flesh (bye-bye astronauts), but most importantly it replaces platinum blonde Eva Haberman with the impishly flirtatious, full-lipped redhead Xenia Seeberg, the show's instant cult pinup queen. Just so its audience wouldn't get the wrong idea, Luvliner drops the crew into a dilapidated deep space cathouse.

Each DVD features a different 10-minute, behind-the-scenes featurette, short cast and creator interviews, and a chapter of Rated LEXX, a TV special created for the Sci Fi Channel to introduce the characters and recap the origins. --Sean Axmaker

Lexx: Series 3, Vol. 3

By now Lexx aficionados know what to expect from this rather odd sci-fi series: instead of thrilling action and fancy special effects, the show offers relatively low-rent technical values, acting that's less than Emmy-worthy, and loads of sexual innuendo, often with pretty humorous results. This third volume of episodes from the show's third series is no different. Our heroes, such as they are, are still stuck somewhere between (and occasionally on) the planets Water and Fire, while their organic mother ship, the eponymous Lexx, steadily weakens from lack of food. "The Key" is built around little more than the endless lascivious repartee between the irresistible Xev (Xenia Seeberg) and the clueless Stan (Brian Downey), along with 790's (the tiresome robot head voiced by Jeffrey Hirschfield) crush on Kai (Michael McManus). Stan's puerile preoccupation with sex also drives "Garden"; meanwhile, it's no coincidence that "Battle," the most enjoyable of the three episodes contained here, has the most action and the fewest phallic symbols. --Sam Graham

Lexx: Series 3, Vol. 4

By now it's obvious that each community on the planet Fire is a thinly veiled satire on an aspect of modern society. In the superior episode "Girltown," a splendidly theatrical cameo from Ellen Dubin as Queen allows the viewer to question feminism, bureaucracy, and why the heck Giggerota has been reincarnated to taunt poor Stanley H. Tweedle (Brian Downey). Then, in what might as well be a two-part finale, all questions are at last answered. "The Beach" would for any other series be considered the clips show: on an idyllic yet purgatorial stretch of sand, Stan is forced to account for his life by viewing events of the past. Judged by his harshest critic--himself--he then suffers all that Prince (Nigel Bennett) has promised and more as the true meaning of "Heaven and Hell" is revealed. Creator Paul Donovan clearly maintained a strong hand in every aspect of the third season, but in directing his own work with these last two episodes we witness a genuinely rare example of personal vision. The narrative has been consistently surprising, but the twist left for last is literally breathtaking. TV sci-fi has never been so sexy and intelligent at the same time. --Paul Tonks

Lexx: Series 3, Vol. 1

Lexx drifts into new territory in the third season when the giant insect-ship and its motley crew awaken from a 4,000-year hibernation circling a pair of planets locked in orbit and gripped in war. Hot-blooded Xev (Xenia Seeberg, the show's answer to Angelina Jolie) falls for the cunning Prince (sinister and seductive Nigel Bennett) of the desert planet Fire, while dead-man-walking Kai is adopted by the passive, pleasure-loving inhabitants of cool, clear Water. The four uncut episodes in this collection launch a season-long interplanetary epic of love, war, betrayal, and seduction, the latter complete with nudity unseen on TV broadcasts. The writing is inconsistent, but the goofy humor and villainous plots add enough odd bounces to keep it interesting, and the inventive set designs and digital effects (more imaginative than convincing) create a unique world for the series. The final episode ends on a cliffhanger concluded in Lexx 3.2. --Sean Axmaker

Lexx - Series 2, Vol. 2

Lexx is neither the most creative nor the most clever sci-fi series to hit the air, but it has no illusions of greatness. This is a show with nothing but sex on its mind, with a shamelessly brazen parade of T&A, an unending stream of suggestive dialogue and hilarious sexual metaphors (many of them concocted by the lovesick robot head in his erotic odes to Xev), and a tongue-in-cheekiness that manages to spoof its own sex-mad silliness. At times it can even be inventive: Lafftrak, set on a dead planet where interactive TV shows still run on auto-pilot, puts the crew through its own season of hell in front of a brain-dead studio audience, and Love Grows exposes the crew to a virus that puts an unexpected twist on their sexual cravings. But it's a maddeningly inconsistent show that often stumbles over its own humor, as in the shrill hillbilly cannibal episode White Trash (guest starring a hysterical Maury Chaykin), and sometimes reaches for a seriousness it can't pull off, as in Stan's Trial, where Lexx's dorky pilot is accused of the deaths of billions by a sadistic prosecutor. True to form Stan is captured on a bordello ship with a giant condom.

The DVD features a 10-minute, behind-the-scenes featurette (mostly covering the special effects), short cast and creator interviews, and the second chapter of Rated LEXX, the TV special created for the Sci Fi Channel to introduce the characters and recap the origins. --Sean Axmaker

Lexx: Series 2, Vol. 4

Space nerd Stanley Tweedle and the motley crew of the simpleton living ship Lexx continue to wander around a video-game galaxy as the universe is devoured around them by the voracious Mantrid and his army of disembodied arms. They fight off the hungry undead corpses (who look suspiciously like the zombie Templars of Tombs of the Blind Dead) in "Twilight," take a trip through Stanley's guilt-riddled dreams in "Patches in the Sky," meet the not-so-wonderful Wuzzard when they attempt to reset Xev's expiration date in "Woz," and slam into an interstellar net spun by a monstrous mind-controlling spider in "The Web." Behind the farcical black humor and morbid running gags (does Stanley have to blow up every planet he sees?) is an increasingly melancholy edge as the universe disappears around the crew and Stanley faces up to his cowardice and irresponsibility. For Lexx, that's almost deep. --Sean Axmaker