Happy New Year 2018

Shared with permission courtesy of creator Andrey Lake Gladilin

see what one little book can do

My stats are LEXXploding this month, and it's been interesting watching them. Current top ten all-time is being rapidly taken over.

Zev vs Xex 1327

Lexx season 5 greenlit by Showtime 910

Giggerota the Wicked, Part One 705

Heresy in the First Degree- Thodin of the Ostral-B Pair 693

Lexx Collectibles 619

LEXX Unauthorized- a book review 618

Bunny 600

Lexx fans on Facebook 584

It's Good to be Queen- Giggerota, Part Three 575

Ellen Dubin interview 510

Top ten visiting countries all-time.

Compare that to top ten over the last 30 days. I haven't seen anything like this happen in a long time.

And here is where the interest is coming from.

In one scant week, a world fandom contorted itself over a book about Lexx. Keep in mind that blogger stats are super vague. I get much better incoming from statcounter, which is also impressive.

I just demonstrated why a Lexx reboot would be profitable. Lexx is 20 years old and is still being monitored by a world fandom. This may not look like big numbers, but having been in and out of fandoms since 1994, I guarantee you this is impressive for a 20 years old cult show that went out of print and disappeared for awhile and has absolutely no representation outside of a fan network. One week.

This fandom will never die.

LEXX Unauthorized- a book review

click the snip to get to this link share on Facebook

The earliest documentation of Den Valdron writing a Lexx book that I've found goes back to the SadGeeezer site.

• Lexx books??- "The Valdron book has a release date of August 23, 2002" You can read further history about what happened in that forum thread.
• Valdron's Lexx Book on Ebay- More info about the history. I think this was a one-off bound copy, with hopes it would still one day be available to the entire fandom.
• Lexx Book Series- Since then, fans have inquired from time to time over the years across several forums.

Since then, that book has been talked about around the world for about 15 years. So now this book is finally available! 😁I bought mine from Smashwords for $2.99, a very reasonable price after waiting 15 years since I first found out about it, lol.

Besides blogging about Lexx, a few readers might know I occasionally do film and book reviews and splash them around haphazardly because I'm not a serious monetized blogger. I have friends who do that, some of them doing well and publishing their own books now, and one even being quoted on a movie jacket. Valdron's Lexx book has my full attention, and I have no doubt that I just hit gold.

"So, in a way, this is where it all really begins, with a couple of computer nerds sitting in an office, brainstorming about who they could interest in their supercomputer, in order for them having to justify it in the first place."

Some of you know I'm a little bit obsessed with film history across fandoms, and I'm already riveted. The first couple of pages might not feel necessary to average Lexx fans, but feel vital to some of us who soak up IMDb with coffee drips in our IVs kind of thing. Lexx was known to be cutting edge with its CGI at the time of filming, so I'm finding it really cool getting so much background on the tech that inspired the Beans- "Later, when LEXX was being written, one of the guidelines that Gigeroff and Hirschfield got was not to worry about limitations of CGI but just to write anything they could imagine. There's a kind of unfettered freedom there that's both exhilarating and scary. It's definitely working without a net. But at the same time, it opened the door for an explosion of creativity."

I am quoting for non-English fans to read through translator softwares. I'm not sure yet if the book will download and translate, or whether it will become available in other languages. I've already been privately asked about this by non-English fans, and right now I don't know. Much of Lexx fandom is in Russia, Germany, France, Brazil, and surprisingly, China. I've documented over 100 countries coming in from direct search engine hits to my Lexx blogs here and on my GrandFortuna Xanga site.

I won't comb through and quote a lot from here on, not rewriting the book for you guys through my own translator widget, sorry. 😊 If you'd like more info about language options, please contact Den Valdon on Facebook.

One note of interest, according to Valdron's interviews, was that a Lexx computer game was already being tossed around and in partial development before any of the movies were filmed. Fans around the world have asked why there was never a computer game, which would have been a great marketing angle. Computer games and film cross over all the time nowadays, as do comics, so Lexx was ahead of its time with their techability.

I'm reminding myself not to spoil the book. You guys really need to get this and read it yourselves. I've barely gotten started, so I'm going to have to really hold back. The rest of this is review-only, no more paraphrasing or reveals. I'll come back and assess after I'm done with the whole book.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Ok, no I won't. I can't help it. Still reading.

I'm liking Valdron's writing style. He's got great sentence structure and good command of language. A bit of back and forth in verb tense and a few typos that get missed by software checking might make translation a little wonky in a few places, but for the most part, this is a very good read.

I very much loved finding out that part of Paul's inspiration for the Lexx was simply liking bugs, and that bug motifs are popular in anime and manga. That explains some of the incoming I get on my blog posts. The variety of interest in this show really does shine across cultures around the world.

Ok, I've gotta quote this one, part of their mission statement- "They wanted to get completely away from the benevolent mediocrity of Star Trek." 😁 How many times in my own Star Trek review rants have I complained about explaining everything out in conference rooms? I've said over and over, you hit the ground running with Lexx and they don't stop and wait for you to catch up, which I find extremely refreshing and a pleasurable nod to viewer intellect. They definitely didn't dumb it down.

I'm currently at the idyllic Monty Python inspiration slash small group hanging out at the beach thing, "plotting away to revolutionize science fiction and upset all the apple carts", and I'm wondering what it must've been like being Stephen Turnbull's kid growing up around that. I would have been in heaven.

The "Show Me the Money" section is wonderful, my aspienado bread and butter kind of info obsession. And of course, Lexx fans all over the globe have researched and schemed themselves silly trying to get this show back out into reboot. I still find it difficult to believe Lexx completely disappeared from print for several years, given its worldwide interest.

This just snipped from my Lexxperience blog tracker map. Click it to see live stats better.

I used to get stats from sitemeter for my other blog on Xanga long after sitemeter stopped site support, but I think that site is finally permanently down now.

I shared that to back up the fandom support still going on long after Lexx was over and the property sold off. The interest is still very real.

Back to Valdron's book.

Valdron's Viacom, Inc history is excellent, but I'd like to add that Viacom was part of the Vivendi reduction in the media monopoly around the time of Lexx. Anyone else notice that the original Salter Street prints include French in the language options? Vivendi shows up in the credits in my original VHS recordings, and Vivendi is brought up in relation to the SciFi channel in the SadGeezer forum around the time of Friday Prime, the lineup of which included Lexx. In his book, Valdron expands on the continuing media aquistion history behind Lexx launching into film, which I especially appreciate. There is a lot of confusion in the fandom around how the Canadian-German production worked and who all had hands in the the project. I think this will greatly help fans understand why it's not so simple getting a reboot back off the ground.

By the end of Chapter One I was on the edge of my seat, visually riding along. Valdron seems especially gifted at breathing life into the mundane background paperwork info, making it so human that I caught myself holding my breath as I read up to the green light. Every bit of this was worth waiting 15 years to read. And there's more!

Chapter Two- Every time I see Les Kriszan's name I remember that's Sylvia's DAD, and I'm friends with her on facebook. Haven't seen her in awhile, but I love that I got to be friends with her. We get more background about the demo reel and the reason why the TV show title was changed a couple of times.

Chapter Three is Paul Donovan candy. So many fans have wanted more about Paul Donovan. I think he's as popular as the actors with the older Lexx fandom, if not more so. He's a Canadian film maker Cinderella story, absolutely charming. The way Valdron tells it sounds very much like Paul's story would make a great Lifetime MOW. Buy this book. Valdron also touches a bit of Halifax history, a name held in reverence in the Lexx fandom, along with putting a short spotlight on Canadian film funding history leading up to Lexx, resulting in a very important visual coming through about Donovan's history in filmmaking that gratuitously exposes the question "But why?", especially on a few of the more inside jokes filmed during season 4 of Lexx. Since I'm a film history fan, I immensely enjoyed the pre-history before Lexx was born into film, and I guarantee it helps make sense for fans who to this day scratch their heads wondering what in the world was in Paul's head. At that point, I realized that Donovan has left the same kind of time stamped cultural mark with Lexx that Rocky Horror did in its time, a glance through a time tunnel of vision, as it were. No wonder Lexx has become the cult classic that it is, kept alive for decades in a worldwide underground fandom.

I was well into Chapter Four before I remembered I'm writing a review, very swept along, but this bit grabbed me by the collar and I need to share it- "The script for Gigashadow wasn't approved until December 22, 1995, but the episode was shot in January, 1996. It seems insane to try and budget and plan, cast, costume and build sets for a four million dollar film with less than two weeks script approval." (Approval had to come from Showtime.) "On the other hand, Paul Donovan was practically a guerilla film maker, used to just going ahead and doing it. Now he was getting continually dragged off to meetings and story conferences in Los Angeles, meeting with people who knew less about his project than they did about their morning espresso..." Guys, this is competitive with Sam Raimi level film history, and my respect is growing exponentially as I'm reading. What makes and breaks in the entertainment industry has come to hold quite a lot of water in developing world political history as it marches across borders and takes over diplomacy with sales, Marvel lately being a great case in point. As Canada had a strong foot in the door of world military history, so have they apparently had a foot in the door of world entertainment history. We hold film creators on pedestals in the United States, so how did Paul Donovan slip past us? I'm still stunned that Lexx disappeared from the Friday Prime lineup on the SciFi Channel, never to be mentioned by SyFy again. What happened???

Sorry, I'm so Lexxcitable. Back to Valdron's book. By the middle of chapter six I was nearly crushed thinking how sad it feels to see such wonderful review writing coming out so tragically late to a world that no longer cares what was breaking through entertainment ice 20 years ago. Reviews and recaps are a dime a dozen nowadays, not even worth that because everyone and their dogs are doing it and you can find a hundred free quickies per TV episode with the push of a little search engine button now. Entire paragraphs in this book would have been gilded in gold and translated and quoted lovingly across a world of fan sites two decades ago, and today they are like finding treasure that barely anyone will notice in a thick soup of automated media bots regurgitating algorithmic overkill. Go. Buy. This. Book.

You can find out more about Den Valdron at

• ERBzine's Den Valdron's Fantasy Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Friday 13 with D.G. Valdron
• Robert Hood's D.G. Valdron Q & A

and you can find books by D.G. Valdron on-

• Goodreads
• Smashwords
• Amazon
• Five Rivers Publishing
• OverDrive
• Indigo Books & Music, Inc

A sample excerpt from LEXX: Unauthorized Back Stage at the Dark Zone can be found on Smashwords.

I paused there because I keep saying go buy the book, well, you can EASILY go get that book now. If you clicked some of those links you probably discovered he's a scifi superfan with other great stuff, too. Ok, back to this book.

I've arrived to a section called Taking it the Lexx Level, and I'm reliving scenes as set design discussion rolls into my eyes. This is the kind of stuff I love eating for breakfast. One of the reasons Lexx delightfully intrigues me is exactly what Valdron is saying here, and if this book had been out years sooner, I can already tell you I'd have been satisfied enough not to feel the need to create a fan site to talk about this stuff myself. I'm especially loving the words 'brutality' and 'functionality' and the way Valdron is kicking the tires on spaceships in other shows. The love that went into the realism in Lexx is, point blank, what makes the show for me. They don't flinch. I'm pretty sure Lucas didn't have the ocular parabolae (see what I did there) to muss up his sets, but Valdron is kinder than I am about it. Sort of. I mean, it would've been kinder not to bring it up, but what the hell, let's drag Star Wars into this, too. We've already mocked Star Trek, so why not, right. Comparing Jean Luc Picard and Han Solo to Stanley Tweedle immediately demonstrates why fans personally identify with the harsher realities of Lexx. That Valdron is able to give us visual inspirations around the Salter Street region gives thinking about Lexx and the Dark Zone so much more depth. "Walking around Halifax or St. John you see homes and buildings that are centuries old, you see cities that are built in forced compromise with their geography. This forced compromise appears endlessly in LEXX's interiors, and in the mechanical and biological design of the series." Like Lexx says, "Ouch."

I wanna quote the entire Big Hard Bugs... section and I'm totally holding back. How many fans have worked on backstory for Insect culture and the Insect Wars? I feel like this is Paul Donovan's personal Galaxy Quest hell, frenzied fans wanting more canon, more story, more information, and the Beans all like Yeah, we just thought it up one day *take swigs of beer*. And then Valdron comes along and whispers a disturbing paragraph about the sheer alienness of Insects and suddenly I want time travel to be possible so we can all go back and gang up in Halifax and make it happen, dammit.

*sigh*

Because no one else seems to be making it happen, do they? 🙄

Back to the book.

K, now I'm cheering. Valdron just compared the Gigashadow to the Death Star, omg. 😁

I would love to see a review comparison to other living ships, like Moya from Farscape. Moya had restraints, Lexx's entire physiology is forcibly jutted and hoisted. Sorry, getting carried away. Valdron is to Lexx what Poe is to Halloween. I never want this to end.

Chapter 7 is like finding the original tablet with the ten commandments on them. The Snarkalecs have a set of guidelines for watching scifi shows, and I feel like I just found the Original Gods of SciFi Snark or something. We get a complete set of The Rules regarding filming written by the Supreme Beans themselves, and yes, I was loling. 😂 I'd personally like to get this entire set of rules printed onto a poster and hang it on a prominent wall in my home. If I ever get the spare cash, I will.

I am currently about halfway through the book. Some of you have already thrown things at your screens because I'm not really telling you much, and some of you are struggling with international purchases and feeling frustrated. I might come back and add more later on, or I might move on, but if you are combing the internet for Lexx and actually found this post, there is much better info in Valdron's book, so go hit some links. He put an amazing amount of work into it and then had to work around publishing walls, so thank goodness the world is changing so fast and ebooks are everywhere now, right?

Speculation on Boron-7, Insect technology, and the scientists who engineered the political lockdown through religion

I mean, what else could the title even be, lol.

click for a cool pinterest search

I prodigiously use the Lexxicon throughout my blogging as point of reference info. It is Lexxcellent for tiny canon details when one is doing research, and very useful to anyone wondering anything about the show.

All pix click back to their sources.

I have brought up that I think Boron 7 was likely a lab planet used by His Shadow's scientists to experiment on manipulating DNA in every way possible. The only things we know about the Boron system are that Giggerota came from Boron 7 and that the Luvliner was near Boron 13, a big moon.

One of the bigger picture conundrums with the Lexx series is that one Insect managed to subjugate a League of 20,000 Planets and further terrorized an extensive part of the Light Universe. We see at the beginning of season two how Rockhound became the first His Divine Shadow, and I have briefly speculated on both motive and method. I have thought quite a lot on how the subjugation actually happened, and I'm about to point some fingers.

Using what we know about Bio-Viziers and especially Grand Bio-Vizier Mantrid and Supreme Bio-Vizier Brizon, it seems obvious that scientists were the key to His Shadow's rule across a universe. These scientists not only knew everything about Insects and His Shadow's ultimate goal to bring a race of Insects back to life, but helped him do it in such heinous ways that one must necessarily wonder why.

We find out in season two that both Mantrid and Brizon were far older than Kai, who was over 2000 years old as an undead assassin. They were both experts on Divine Assassin creation and maintenance. In the very first movie I Worship His Shadow, we see humans were obviously repurposed in a variety of ways even before they were dead as part of their judicial sentencing. The scientists behind this were geniuses, able to manipulate human body parts like toys, and quite able to make them function in any capacity. This observation lends to the conclusion that His Shadow chose a unique quality in his scientists that enabled them to not only stomach what they were doing, but delight in it. They were carefully chosen psychotic geniuses given promises of eternal life, and naturally they excelled at reestablishing a new Divine Order so that they could play without hindrance.

Among their genetic manipulations were bioships using lost Insect technology, human species reorientation, robotic humans, and reusable dead humans. We know by season one's fourth movie Giga Shadow that the last Insect had been kept alive and growing, and that its Essence, protoblood, and probably tissues were used to integrate technology and humans into a new strictly governed society.

The Cluster was the seat of judgement for His Shadow, a small planetoid that deceptively housed a hugely growing Insect that eventually broke free. Think about how many 'big bugs' must have been attempted, and where the Megashadow and Foreshadow were grown, along with the Lexx's DNA being perfected. The massive experimentation had to have happened on another planet, and I can imagine huge hangars, warehouses, labs, and clinics filled with coding tech specialists and equipment, bio coding specialists and equipment, and likely extensive 'housing' for potential subjects. Using Giggerota as an example, evidently inter- and extra- species manipulation and breeding programs were under way in attempts to design a new Divine Assassin, hungry for meat, alive and programmed to reproduce. We don't know if Giggy was a prototype gone wrong or one of many, but she was a problem. It's possible Brizon designed her, or that competitive Mantrid ventured out on his own and designed her, but we never find out. We do know Mantrid was banished at some point and that Giggy was taken to the Cluster for execution, so it's possible these two characters have everything to do with one another (indirectly), and that these particular experimentations might be part of the big personal problem between Mantrid and Brizon. The only problem with this line of thought is the time jag, since Mantrid has apparently been banished for quite some time by the beginning of season two, and Brizon seems to have been semi-retired later in season two. Mantrid and Brizon could have had their own factions of loyal followers in the psychotic science arena that carried on their work. Sorry, this paragraph is turning into its own muse, I need to refocus. Lexx is like that, so much going on that backstory could go on for years.

Back to Boron 7 and government over the League.

Robotic drones in any other type of government on our own earth would be a huge industry of wealth, either for capital venturists or socialist agendas. In the League it had nothing to do with wealth, and the only power allowed at all was Divine Order. In this light, it would seem that top scientists were allowed more freedoms than any other humans in any other capacities. They were free to dream, invent, argue, and corrupt as long as they did it in the name of Order. As long as they helped keep Order rigidly established, they were granted long life, authoritative positions, and all the access to service and equipment that their psychotic hearts desired. So, they became experts at replacing human heads with robot heads, integrating software into scraped out human bodies, growing city sized spaceships that fed on human flesh, you name it, they could find a way to do it. And the more they did it, the more society became clamped down into obedience in lieu of a stunning variety of punishments.

Imagine not knowing if the robotic drone walking by you had been a friend of yours, a coworker, or a family member. That might be their living body, but their head has been replaced with a robot head. Imagine raising your children in a society where you'd never know at any moment whether your future is secure, and that all it would take to lose your life would be to refuse the simplest expectation. Without those psychotic scientists enabling the last Insect, this level of Order could never have been established. Watching both Mantrid and Brizon, they clearly had free will, they clearly didn't feel any regret or shame, and they clearly knew they helped bring all this about. There was no waste on guilt, only on winning at any cost. They were coworkers turned rivals and hellbent on beating the other, no matter how many lives were lost, no matter how horrific their crimes. And surely they were not the only two psychotic scientists in the League of 20,000.

One of the weird fallouts they created was a small planet full of former Divine Shadow host bodies, which would never die but remain zombies forever without a brain or Essence to guide them, since the brain was removed from every host as a Divine Predecessor and the Essence passed on to each new Divine Shadow. We find out in season four that His Shadow had the Time Prophet killed and reconstructed (by scientists, undoubtedly) into the first of many vampires, more deadly than Divine Assassins since they were created specifically to hunt and destroy them, thanks to Kai fulfilling the prophecy. Seasons one and two were rife with convoluted corruption serving Order, including a fully condoned and thriving sex slave business stretching across the Light Universe, along with mercenaries and cabals, often working together for Order as we see in season two's "Stan's Trial".

The sex slave business relied on an amazing machine called a lusticon that could scan and reconstruct entire bodies in one visit without invasive surgeries and recovery time. That machine alone is so over the top that it's too much to think about and easily dismissed. Genetic manipulation theories and applications must have been shared from the Insect to the scientists, because the technology is so advanced and the idea so extreme that I don't think normal psychotic humans could have thought up and conquered that level of planning and execution. Remember, Insects could pass along a sort of programming software via Essence which would allow them to travel dormant over great sweeps of time across swaths of space and pass on information to others or to offspring without having to teach first. Essence would allow for an endless accumulation of knowledge across the universe. We know very little about the Insect Wars, but we do know some Insect technology was adopted by the Brunnen-G after they finally defeated the Insects long before Kai was born.

Lusticons allowed Order to use humans as still-living sex slaves stripped of their wills without transforming them into robotic drones. These slaves were used to manipulate and elicit others' behaviors per temple brothel conduits throughout the League and beyond, and likely part of the vast mercenary trade Order used to hunt and capture enemies of Order. Included in the DNA manipulation were expiry dates, which necessarily created a demand for more.

Robotic drones were everywhere throughout the Light Universe. On the Cluster we see security drones, and across the Light Universe we see other types of robotic drones that look like they came off assembly lines. 790 was one model, 791 and 792 models were briefly shown in a couple of episodes, and 790 created a 769 in season four. The 700 series were all designed to be attached to still living human bodies, as was the security model. Robotic drones were so common that they were simply part of everything, nothing to turn a head and elicit response. Humans grew up surrounded by and interacting with integrated tech for thousands of years. We don't have a timeline between Rockhound becoming the first His Shadow and Brunnis-2 being destroyed, so we don't know how much time as passed as the League of 20,000 planets was being established. This leaves us to wonder how very long ago Kai's people migrated from Brunnis-1, and how in the world they defeated Insects to begin with, after arriving in the Light Universe, and then how quickly after that defeat the last Insect drifted and then burrowed into what would become the Cluster. If you think about it, the Brunnen-G were indirectly responsible for the League being created, because that last surviving Insect wanted revenge. And if you think even more about that, you can imagine the Brunnen-G being the flag of vitriol behind everything His Shadow did, and that might be why they were so famous that Thodin recognized Kai even after he'd been converted into a Divine Assassin.

Aaaaaand this just turned into a think piece. Moving on.

Thanks to protoblood, His Shadow's collection of psychotic scientists were able to resculpt dead human flesh into interactive programmable machinery used as Divine Assassins. Kai is a very good example, as we see in season three. What was left of his body was so integrated with hardware that he obviously couldn't survive long if he were somehow able to come back to life. The protoblood forced his tissues into a sort of unalive living state, an undead state, if you will. His dead body was coopted into an ironic repurposed usefulness, and even after he got his memories back, he could not initiate his own will upon his own body because his will had been severed for vast software storage upgrade. His programming and the will of others was all Kai had as motivation to do anything. A fun example of this is season three's "Tunnels". He simply engaged his programming in order to facilitate being able to accomplish other actions the Lexx crew expected of him. One of his overriding commands in any capacity was to protect the key to the Lexx, along with its crew. (Kai means "Keeper of the Keys" in Scandinavian, for unaware fans. Cool, huh? See more meanings at Behind the Name. This is completely unrelated to Lexx canon, but I searched it since Kai and key are such similar words.)

I've seen and read loads of science fiction over several decades, and I have never seen anything that comes close to the technological horrors in the Lexx series. The Borg are a problem, yes, but they are barely investigated compared to the technological grip over humans in Lexx. The Borg are simply a runaway program, and with time travel introduced, the solution might be simple enough- go to the origin (non-canon but written by Shatner himself) and change history. There is no time travel in Lexx. The Sith are a problem in Star Wars, and the tech somewhat rivals Lexx, but it's missing the more horrific level of what they call the Dark Side. I know, I dare to impugn. I've had a running list of other scifi atrocities compared to Lexx in my mind for years, and I have yet to see another show cross the lines Lexx crosses into true despair, which feels so much more honest to me. I think painting the bigger picture of humans vs technology reaches a superior intellectual level in Lexx that is too easily dismissed, and the crucial point behind it all is innocent humans being so strapped into a locked position in government that there is no wiggle room with rights and wrongs, no way to survive but to obey, no way to fight and win. The root of the science fiction premise shines in Lexx. There is no prime directive, no Asimov's laws of robotics, only horrors and death and the sheer human will to survive. I think the closest an author has come that I've read is Greg Bear. His visuals are fantastic, and he dares to step into despair. I have compared Lexx material to Tim Burton, George Orwell, Dante, and Satre style storytelling. Edward Scissorhands could easily fit into the Light Universe.

And what else do psychotic scientists do when they get bored? They twist the human brain into even more toys. Shreds of brains were used to interface programming, brains were fed to Cluster lizards in a stadium filled with screaming fans loyal to His Shadow, brains were nonchalantly wiped and reprogrammed over minor misdeeds. Any brain lesser than a psychotic genius was subjugated, point blank. It didn't matter the perceived freedom or rank, all brains must serve Order or suffer the consequences. The question of human souls and wills, rights and dignities never even came up. Brains were usable and expendable, like any other human part, and that was all. A sense of self was allowed only in relation to obedience to Order.

Ultimately, the brains of His Shadow's former hosts, the Divine Predecessors, were enshrined, but both Brizon and Mantrid realized that at some point, their own brains would become useless, as well. Mantrid came up with a plan to evacuate his own brain as software into better hardware, and Brizon intended to simply outlast everyone in his own brain. The fate of the Light Universe boiled down to two human brains duking it out, long after His Shadow was destroyed. Well, actually, part of the perversion of Mantrid's transference was being incorporated via Essence, so a copy of His Shadow continued in a corrupted form through him. (One must wonder if Kai were ever purged completely after season two. Also, Vlad lived on into season four.)

This has gotten terribly long, but you can see how much I've thought about this TV show. I know others have spent considerable time writing up backstory, prequels, sequels, spinoff ideas, character synopses, etc. One of the latest to come out is Sanguinessa's fanfic Tales from a Parallel Universe series going deeper behind the scenes with more characters humanizing the extreme conditions we see in the Lexx TV series (click to purchase from Amazon, I receive no compensation for that). I know of other fans who have constructed entire histories around the brief blurbs we see in the show, so they probably think about all this at least as much as I do, if not more.

Lexx is currently owned and distributed by Echo Bridge Acquisition Corp LLC.

Syfy channel's connection to Echo Bridge Home Entertainment can be made through Asylum. Echo Bridge acquired Alliance Atlantis in 2008. Alliance Atlantis purchased Salter Street Films in 2001.

My blog is protected under Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

I repeat my DISCLAIMER- This Lexx blog is a fan blog. I make no money here, and I have nothing to do with potential Lexx projects that spring up in rumors every little bit. I am not staff to anyone, nor an employer. I do not represent anyone who has ever been involved in the making of Lexx or merchandise associated with the Lexx property. I am not currently selling merchandise or receiving compensation for link swapping and sharing. I will never ask for or accept donations for anything I do online. If you find a site asking for money in my name, that is NOT me. I will continue to be a Lexx fan and keep building this fan blog, all cost here coming straight out of my pocket. Lexx is a hobby I enjoy, and like many fans I hope to see more Lexx one day.

I'd like to add that my stats are going crazy this year. A lot of fans out there seem to be in a tizzy over Lexx, many of the hits coming from new searches and then methodically reading this entire blog. Since I'm not seeing this level of activity in the older fandom groups and forums, I conclude this is a new generation of fans, possibly who grew up with their parents watching Lexx, possibly running into more accessible film merch now, possibly wondering what that weird sex in space show is all about.

The Lexx cult continues. Hats off to Paul Donovan and the Supreme Beans.

• interviews

Oh, yeah, meant to bring up the mothbreeders. Maybe another time.

a fondness for balloons

Well, someone's a Lexx fan, my Lexxperience dotcom is popping. Numbers doubled this month. From the beginning of this blog to now, which will be 3 years old next week, statcounter has logged 1,589 cities from 105 countries, and since I've rigorously blocked pingbacks and totally crunch spam, those are mostly real people. You guys see me struggle with bots on Pinky blog, well, Lexxperience gets way less app spam to the point of being almost negligible.

I apologize profusely for not being more involved with the fan base. If you are keeping up as a reader on my blog hub, then you know why, so I'm not going to drag it out here.

Yes, I still have every intention of continuing the review posts. Again, thank you so much for reading.

Also, since I'm pointing out that this blog will be 3 years old next week, I may as well bring up that my original GrandFortuna's League of 20,000 Planets fansite on Xanga will be 13 years old in September. I lost loads of stats during 2 sitemeter crashes and then the big Xanga server move, but at one point I was clocking 3000 hits a week, and one post had over 10K hits before the server move.

some of you might remember how this all got started

And amazingly, I STILL run into Lexx fans all over the world on twitter, tumbr, facebook, and other places who say they thought they were the only one in the world who liked Lexx. I just wanna say to all the TV review sites who thumbed this show down, my stats beat yours and you can suck it. Also, hazing a show for kneejerk hits is a dick move and only shows your low IQ for missing all the deeper backstory and innuendo that opened up and exposed reams of delicate religious and political controversies before it was fashionable to do so on social medias.

Lexx fans will never die. Keep looking for each other, guys.

:edit: By the way, this Lexxperience blog is now registered and verified with trustedsite.

The Wheel, It Turns

Originally posted on PinkRobotSox and copied to SyfyDesigns. Permission granted to translate and repost. Please link to an origin source, thanx.

Feature films are the most powerful and insidious shapers of public perception, because they fly under the radar of conscious exclusion.

That was in Julian Assange's letter to Benedict Cumberbatch.

I woke up out of a full musical belting out The Internet: Give me  your naaaaame and thinking "Benedict is no Charlie Sheen." Too bad I can't rewind because not a clue what in the world was even going on. Yes, the internet was a seedy character in a 1950s suit and hat, and his character was black and white. Charlie Sheen and Benedict were both wearing bright yellow like Charlie Day in The Nightman Cometh. (Trivia- the play actually came through Springfield.) "The title of Charlie's play sounds like the title of Eugene O'Neill's classic play The Iceman Cometh. O'Neill's play is a searing existential drama in which a group of patrons of a bar are forced to confront the reality of their meaningless existence, while Charlie's play is more about a princess in a coffee shop who wants to bang a little boy."

And off we went into free association land. It's raining out so my internet is blinky, I have coffee percolating through my brain, just waiting for sunup so I can go to town.

Anyway, the wheel. From a post on Sadgeezer about a Lexx episode, quoting Kai, the Divine Assassin (already dead himself) going wonky on a planetoid full of zombies (previous Divine Shadow host bodies that had been discarded).

The billowing clouds. The burning hills. The billowing clouds that puff and flower, Are calling me to an ancient bower. I must sing my song. The wheel. Swings. Spins. Turns. Where no thing is, shall nothing be. Only then will I be free. The wheel, it turns, it comes around. It makes an ancient rumbling sound. The wheel, it turns, it comes around. It makes an ancient rumbling sound. The wheel doth turn, it rolls around. Gather ‘round the wheel, my friends, And make amends, and make amends. All this is about to end. The night doth bleed into morn, Sunlight seeping through the dawn, Decayed, forlorn. The wheel doth turn, it rolls around. It makes an ancient rumbling sound. The wheel, it turns, it spins around. Fellows, come, come. Share with me your tired tales, And let my windy words fill your empty sails, As you travel across gray hills and brownish dales. Around the hub we The grinding wheel It makes an ancient rumbling sound. Around the wheel we lightly prance, Around its hub we sprightly dance. The grinding wheel, it rolls around. It makes an ancient rumbling sound. The fickle fates, the cosmic grind, Conspire to leave our friends behind.

Who knows what it all means, but for me, the internet being the wheel fits perfectly. It's both alive and not alive. It will go on long after us, like a dead planet full of server activity. The grind will go on, and the answer to the question about whether a tree falling in the woods really happened if there was no one there to hear it will finally be answered, but who will be the one who gets that answer? In science fiction, humans have encountered this very thing, and humans are the ones who find out the answers. And basically, it's about whether the robots really care, can they care, do they even want to care, and what does caring actually mean anyway when you can't feel the existential conundrum.

I know no one will take me seriously. I know I've presented with all honesty about my psychological challenges, so anyone could brush me off as delusional. It won't matter that I've openly challenged an industry with my own allusions to murder and mass brain training via entertainment as a social control mechanism. None of that will matter. Everyone knows I'm ill. On meds.

It's cute when it's Jennifer Goines. It's not cute when you're a meemaw blogging about philosophers and l'histoire and openly sharing statistics.

Here's the thing.

Everything on Friday Prime made it big worldwide. Farscape fell off because it was bizarre, so everyone missed what it was saying, although it was as close to MK as it gets on television. Stargate never stopped. Pyramids, stars and gods, symbols- all this is still going on in real life in the form of conspiracy theories around everything from the U.S. govt to CERN's hadron collider, NASA programs are named after gods kind of thing. There is even an episode where one of the aliens living on earth created a TV show about the Stargate. Interestingly, people who've never seen Stargate and don't have a clue what the franchise even is are speculating that television is actually showing us truthful stuff in fictional form so that we won't be so shocked when the real truths come out. They are keeping us panicked about things we dread so we'll be more accepting of change once we realize it's already here, because it's not nearly so bad as what we keep seeing on television. This is a very real philosophy of thought across the internet. I'm not the only one saying it, certainly not the first, but I'm openly blogging and even mocking.

Lexx disappeared. Why? It was part of the Friday Prime lineup on a station owned by the people who also own our biggest news and entertainment media. Why did Lexx disappear like that, and why is it so hard to reboot?

Lexx tells the real story, and it's not cute. Lusticons. Sex slaves. Human savagery on a multi-galactic scale. Cannibals. Bureaucracy. Hell itself. All these things go on behind the scenes in all religions on our planet, even in the religions that kill women for the faintest thought infidelity in the form of being kind to a stranger. If you do not think your nation,  your city,  your church is infiltrated,  you are super dense. The underground is all around us. This has been going on for time out of mind, and we are not that far in history from legalized cannibalism and slave ownership in a number of countries around the world, definitely within some of our lifetimes. Whatever cushion of comfort and safety you think the world is because you are allowed to live like that for awhile, remember that most of the world is still fighting for freedoms that already hold us to a new kind of slavery. We are born citizens, we are owned.

Back to the panacea of the mind. Amid all the vampires, werewolves, Satan spawn, and whatever else plethora of shows gorging our brains on entertainment (ultimately creating a callous area in your brain where you'll blow taboo off as fiction, even when it's real and right in front of your eyes), Lexx disappeared. Why?

Lexx held out no hope, no happy endings, no moral to the story. Lexx was brutal and graphic and ultimately rested on everything and everyone simply being evil. Our people who hung on and escaped and even blew up evil over and over simply hung on. They created their own family apart from any authority. They navigated their way through psychological and physical labyrinths with nothing more than each other and a stolen key to the most powerful weapon of mass destruction in two universes. They could have done whatever they wanted with the Lexx. They could have become a reign of terror themselves, but they didn't.

Lexx didn't do it right. Entertainment is supposed to be about alternating a current between brain yanking and brain numbing. Entertainment is supposed to be about moralizing and platitudes. Entertainment is supposed to be about pulling all our brains into sync, like the world premiers of certain shows do nowadays, called global events.

Lexx immediately made fans more aware of govt atrocities and human history and a severe lack of morals all around us in real life. Lexx fans spent hours and months and years underground discussing real philosophies and human conditions. Lexx, as a TV show, clearly failed in its mission to subdue the human mind, instead waking it up, stimulating it, and even making public stands against groups and govts for 'being like Lexx'.

Now it's just a relic, an old TV show that is no longer ahead of its time. It's a story lain dormant so long that it is now dying off with older fans, and all the cries for more are lost in the long, dark night of the internet. The underground that understands is wilting away while the brains above lustfully throng around fictionalized murders.

It's really too bad if you haven't seen Lexx, because you don't get the portent of what that last paragraph just said.

All the best shows have 'wheels' of some kind in them, and they all have strange symbols on them. Pay attention. (*cough*Xena*cough*) The wheel, it turns. Even the Mayans had a circular calendar. Wheel of Time in history- this is actually worldwide on our own planet in our very real history. Anything that is a wheel is a big deal. The invention of the wheel was not about round tires, guys. The wheel of time is the key to civilizations and power structures. Lexx blew all that up.

I'm a worse crackpot than my dad... But then, so is Julian Assange.

Anyway, yeah. Pinky blog dared to whisper 'Vivendi', and the stats shook even more. I'll go back to regular Pinky silliness now, but I doubt my stats stop for a long time.

Mantrid- or, celebrity boxing gone really wrong, Cluster style

note

{I mentioned on Pinky blog way back in fall of 2015 that I had started working on this post, and that was true. A lot of this was already written. Thanks to tech fail and Windows 10 upgrade, DVD software must be purchased now to operate the hardware, and I'm frightfully frugal and a bit peeved about this. I've decided to go back to how I started- taking pix of my TV on my phone. Both my TV and phone are much better than my first review post in 2012, and despite becoming a prolific live tweeter in the meantime, this still doesn't fix the HD loss I'd have gotten with screen shots on a very nice laptop. In the end, reason finally said "Just share the story. The story is important."}

~~~~~~
BASIC INTRO- Mantrid was played by Deiter Laser, who enjoyed a stellar 2016 via Human Centipede stuff. You can follow him on twitter and find him on facebook.

As baddies go, Mantrid reigns supreme. Or grand, actually. He was a Grand Biovizier for the Divine Order, ranked just under Supreme Biovier Brizon. Long story short, this is what happens when your weirdo lover uses your science kit to download you into tech during a crisis, so don't try this at home, kids.

Vigl was played by Holder Kunkel

I know, that guy, right? Before we even get to Mantrid we've got to get past that emotionally twisted crazy in love assistant who can't help crying over every drop of a pin. Or arm. Whatever. It's like Frankenstein's assistant helping Frankenstein turn himself into the monster, with the warmth of rainbows and kittens somehow hiding under that jerkin. He loved Mantrid. Someone actually loved Mantrid. Wrap your brain around that one for a few minutes while I go get some screen grabs.

Originally, pix on on this blog have been hosted at LexxPix for film review study and so that fans translating across borders could hotlink the pix. However, ongoing photobucket issues at large are preventing this even on my pro account (troubleshooting, supported browsers, user feedback...), and after 10+ years of paying for photobucket hosting, I can barely even get it to load most days, even though it still functions fabulously sharing hosted pix to old posts. I'm uploading straight to blogger today, which goes against better intuition, so I'll repeat- "Screencaps are used in not for profit episode and character reviews and film study. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use." Also see my disclaimer in the right side column. If you grab and share this post, please be advised that hotlinking the pix might not work across international internet, but you're welcome to download them. Anyone can take pictures of the TV they are watching and immediately share them across all media, which is what this post contains. By the way, this is a very loaded post, so heads up if  your internet is slow.

Mantrid is well preserved for his age. Get it? Well preserved.

Y'all are going shtap already, this is not naht okay. Ok, fine, throwing puns out the window. But I won't hold back if I feel limericks coming on.

Let's start at the beginning. Lexx is currently being distributed through Echo Bridge Entertainment and can be widely purchased in the U.S. now thank goodness, and you can also find Lexx at Amazon. I am using the original Salter Street/Acorn Media version.

I began the season 2 Mantrid review with the opening narrative from episode 1 "Mantrid" in my post His Divine Shadow- Prelude to a Kiss. We now continue. I'm starting out kind of backwards and using the pix to straighten it all out. If you haven't seen Lexx,  you need to go purchase it right now and get all over this.

Kai wanted to look for a dormant roly poly space baby floating around in the jagged chunks of what was left of the Cluster, which they had the Lexx blow up at the end of season one. The Giga Shadow had been growing inside the Cluster all that time and was likely the progenitor for a revived race of extinct Insects. Kai was needing to find a protoblood source and the crew was hoping maybe somehow something in all that rubble survived, because, remember, the Divine Assassins were all stored underground and hooked up to protoblood lines, as we saw in the very first episode I Worship His Shadow. During storage, Divine Assassins were drained of their protoblood, and reactivated by pumping more in through tubing that clicked into little ports, kind of like IVs only a bit bigger. Anyway, Zev was determined they should find more protoblood to keep Kai functional, so there they went, crossing back into the Light Universe to search some out.

Some of you are wanting to know more about protoblood. Before we really get started, it's important to note that protoblood and Insect essence are not the same thing, even though they come from the same source- Insects. Protoblood is the life force manufactured by the Insects' bodies, essence is the programming that is passed on from one generation to another. Protoblood is a syrupy white goo that reanimates dormant flesh, essence is a sort of biometaphysical dark matter that seeks a host.

When Kai got his memories back from a Divine Predecessor, we saw him get not only his own memories back, but the memories of everyone that Predecessor had killed and absorbed, plus the Predecessor himself and those Predecessors before him. The glowy memory transference we saw happen didn't look anything like the Insect essence passed from one host to another and is its own thing apart from protoblood and Insect essence as far as we know. However, we do see Kai's eyes turn dark a couple of times, first during a memory review and later as Zev is kissing him at the end of season one, both times happening during the season one fourth movie Giga Shadow, so we're already getting hints that Kai contains Insect essence along with all those extra memories. We never find out whether memory transfer and essence are linked, but just know Kai is a carrier.

Now let's see this roll out in pix. When we left the Lexx at the end of season one, it was in the Dark Zone. Season two is about getting back to the Light Universe.

We learned in season one that the Lexx can transverse between the Light Universe and the Dark Zone via a particularly situated and apparently permanent wormhole. We also learned that His Shadow cannot cross this boundary with the Lexx, and that the Lexx can cross using survival skills since it's a bioship. I know what you're about to say- How can Kai be a carrier crossing universes? Let us remember that he is *dead* and evidently rigged up by bioviziers to be able to carry Insect Essence, a form of dark matter programming the Insects use to info-share over large distances during dormancy. Kai being dead might be crucial to this possession in combo with protoblood. Nice back up plan, kudos to a nearly extinct race of bugs for that.

Kai makes a case for returning for protoblood, since he is nearly out. Little do we know, he has ulterior motive.

Stan questions Kai's sudden motivation, since Kai is dead and has no motivation of his own at all.

Naturally, Zev is on board with this plan and helps make the case for Kai's continuing usefulness via more protoblood.

790 proclaims his love for Zev, no matter which side of the fence he must defend, and he almost immediately has to waffle.

While Stan keeps arguing, Zev keeps her eye on the viewscreen, promising Stan a sex deal if he tells the Lexx to cross over to the Light Universe.

It's too late when Stan notices they are already being pulled in, and now he must command the Lexx to go through the wormhole to survive being ripped apart. This voids Zev's deal, of course.

The Lexx maneuvers into position.

The crew's point of view watching the Lexx plunge into the wormhole on a viewscreen.

A strangely satisfied looking possessed Kai.

Here we go! Lexx gets sucked in as correctly positioned as possible amid flying debris and energy bolts.

Once they've entered the wormhole, Stan commands the Lexx to fire its weapon. We aren't really told why or how he knew when, but I suspect that this was a counter burst against all the forces around the Lexx that protected them in a sort of bubble as they passed through.

Gratuitous Zev satisfaction at this sequence of events, since she doesn't have to do it with Stan to get what she wants.

Close up on the Lexx's ocular parabolae. From the Lexx wiki- "The Lexx has a more highly advanced weapon system than the Divine Shadow's previous flagships. Also it uses a different design of weapon, as the two previous ships utilized a highly amplified version of the Black Pack weapon system. This weapon system uses The Lexx's ocular parabolae (it's insect "eyes") to fire a concentrated horizontal beam of energy (a ring of energy in the later seasons, though was shown to once again use the horizontal beam of energy during the destruction of earth in season 4,) which has the ability to destroy any planet (including anomalies like fire and water). Though the weapon system is not without limits, and was shown to not be able to penetrate the shell of the Giga Shadow when he fully resurrected (It is unknown if this applies to all insects, or just ones of a certain age.)"

This weapon can apparently manifest a collection of energy and direct it in several ways. Talk about a bug zapper. (I know, that was boo worthy.)

Which came first, Star Trek's energy ribbon from the Nexus or Lexx's particle weapon? (Star Trek wins this round.) Fun fact- Malcolm McDowell was in Generations and found a way to steer the energy ribbon to him as Dr. Soran, and as a priest named Yottskry he was also incorporated into the Giga Shadow in the fourth Lexx movie, which was partly destroyed by a baby cluster lizard and finally blown apart by the Lexx's weapon.

Personal opinion- I've seen a lot of spaceships go through wormholes through the years. I think the CGI on Lexx is fantastic, especially for the digital era at the time. My phone pix here don't do it justice at all. Can you imagine the CGI on it *now*?

Whew, they made it!

Arriving at the rubble from the blown up Cluster. Bits of Giga Shadow exoskeleton and other pieces can be seen drifting around in the mess.

Despite Kai's inability to feel or care, he sounds very excited to be looking for Insect larvae that could have escaped the worst of the damage and still be salvageable. This is terribly ironic since he originally gave up his life quite violently trying to stop this very evil.

Stan makes it absolutely clear he's not cool with this plan, and thinks they're all crazy for even suggesting it.

So, of course, he winds up being talked into flying a moth around to help them look through the rubble. They each take a moth, so there are three flying around. My moth pix wound up blurry.

So it would be Stan who runs right into one.

Right there with you, pal. A larva the size of a small car isn't my idea of a good thing.

Um, no...

Yep, Kai totes brought that thing on board. "Is it not beautiful, Stanley?" O_O

All the wtcrazyf right there in that face.

Kai explains- "If anyone can help us obtain protoblood from this larva, it is Mantrid. He was one of the Divine Order's greatest bioviziers. No man ever had a more insatiable hunger for knowledge and experience, a brilliant scientist and a truly dangerous human being, so dangerous he was imprisoned by the Divine Order."

Love when Stan gets all serious removing his hat. He'd been imprisoned himself for years, he knows nothing good can come of this.

Personal note- I've watched a *lot* of scifi in my life, and there is more believeability in this face than in most I've seen.

But it's really hard to argue against this beautiful face standing up for something. Sorry it's blurry.

And professor Kai here was unrelenting, another unusual behavior in his undead state. Red flags going off right and left, Stan's all "Nope!" and it's just going to happen anyway.

Zev was all set to cut that dormant baby right up and dig around for the protoblood until Kai stopped her, pointing out that protoblood production is possible in a dormant specimen, but not a dead one. Irony keeps abounding. A dead human protecting a baby Insect. That is some awesome Essence programming right there. Remember this later about the programming.

Later, back on the bridge, Stan says Kai is acting weird, Zev argues that he's acting more alive.

790 observes that Kai's behavior is clearly inconsistent.

Meanwhile...

Kai is updating his programming.

There is no way I can squeeze any more into one post. This will be continued until s2e1 is covered, then I'll do a season 2 overview post, and finish up with a season 3 reflection on everything Mantrid.