I ran into this old post archived on my private blog on August 31, 2006. I'm pretty sure I wrote it quite a bit earlier, possibly back to 2005. I didn't save anything else that I know of before I kaboomed my old Lexx stuff, so this is a rare blast from the past. Images click back to original sources.
In my opinion, Lexx is the only scifi show that never wimped out. All the rest deal with humanity against evil, and I was always disappointed in the endings. Stargate truly wimped out when the Ancients AND Anubis all turned out to be humans. They had me hanging on to the edge of my seat until then, and suddenly it was just ordinary again. Babylon 5 stuck with their aliens, Vorlons and Shadows, but in the end they were just lonely children and made up and left the galaxy after a few words. All that tension built up, and they just reconciled and went away. Same with all the Star Trek shows. It's always humanity against some other race, or Q, and humanity always reasons its way to the side of right and good. Battlestar Galactica, yeah, humans created their own problem and now it's turning on them and they are barely surviving. Boring, boring, boring.
Lexx was never afraid for the bad guy to be truly TRULY evil, so awful that humanity was losing for millenia, and not only losing, but going along like sheep to the slaughter of the masses. And the humans that were evil, were evil, no reasoning with them, no fighting them. Mantrid actually destroyed an entire universe. Throughout Lexx there is no compassion for the ones who lose, no whimpering and moaning about what it's doing to humanity, no noble attempts at morality and happy endings. The more minor evil characters are still really evil, into cannabalism and perverse tortures and selling their prey to the highest bidder. That our main characters survive at all is hair raising, and then accidently making things worse as they go is the perfect ironic twist. Actually meeting Prince and discussing the afterlife (seeing Stanley fail to escape from Prince!) was a step above and beyond everyone else's false gods and technoweenie explaining away of human myth and religions, and then coming to earth in the 4th season and being absolutely real with just how nasty human nature can get (Xev nearly losing her organs to the black market, for crying out loud!), and still everything goes horribly wrong but somehow they survive...
Is it any WONDER that Kai and Stan and Xev are latched onto as the ulitmate 'heroes'? They are so real, like us. They are up against everything all by themselves, with no guide of any kind, no Federation to fall back on, no Q to reset the balance, no one to tell them how they are doing in all of this. In the end, they are the only ones they can count on to get each other's backs against two whole universes.
Anyone who doesn't like this show, in my opinion, is afraid of facing the sheer high cliff of hopelessness and making the decision to go on anyway. This show doesn't hand out answers to the problems in life, just slaps you around with them and makes fun of it all, and then dares to throw you right off the cliff when it's done, case in point, what happened to Kai in the last show, hate to spoil it if you've never seen it. If you are a wimp, you can't handle watching Lexx.
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