Line #23 YMMV/Lexx


1	* AlternateCharacterInterpretation:
2	** Stan in spades. Is he a dirty coward who will occasionally do the right thing when he thinks he has nothing else to lose? Or a hero whose resolve is weakened by self-hate?
3	** Kai, albeit more of his psychology than his morality. Is he telling the truth when he claims to be incapable of any feeling, or are his feelings just deeply repressed? His instant affection toward Squish, expressions during Zev's death scene, and determination to fight for Xev in Battle, even knowing that if Stan died beside him the Key would go to the bad guys, all seem indicative of feeling. Further, Vlad, who is just as dead as Kai, talks a lot about how much she enjoys hunting and killing, and she notes that Kai acts as if he cares about his crewmates.
4	** Bunny. Her season 2 incarnation, while nowhere near as evil as the show's villains, comes across as [[TeensAreMonsters irresponsible, petulant, and a borderline bully]]. Season 3 presents her as a saint who loves ''everyone she meets'' enough to sacrifice her life for them. In season 4, she flips sides, joining Priest as a minion of Prince. Does she have an independent moral compass, or does she just submit to the dominant views of whatever society she's been born into?
5	* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic:
6	** The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYoq6sovr8Y Brunnen-G anthem]].
7	** If this should be our final stand / we will stand together with pride / we will honour the past / and fight to the last / it will be a good way to die.
8	*** Much of the music in "Brigadoom" counts as this as well.
9	** The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXxY8DYPLu4 Lexx Theme]].
10	** The ending credits theme, "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNHvRqNHn8w&feature=related Battle of the Universe]]".
11	** The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znlMR6Q9J9w&feature=related Season 2 opening theme]].
12	* BaseBreakingCharacter
13	** Stanley Tweedle, a underdog, every day man who makes heroic decisions when push comes to shove, or a lecreous, gullable, whiny coward. Stan either deserves to be damned on Planet Fire or he's a hero for his role against fighting Mantrid who plans to destroy both universes.
14	** 790 an hilarious love-strucken useful robot head assistant, or an gimmick character whose schtick gets old fast, and ends up being an annoying love sicken psychopath who should be thrown off the Lexx bridge, before his worse attributes are fully unleashed.
15	* BrokenBase:
16	** The episode 'Lyekka', introduces two key characters with Lyekka and the second incarnation of Zev. The hallucination sequences where Lyekka eats the Eagle 5 crew are either brilliantly surreal or just a bore to get through until the key conclusion. The end scene with top less Xev covered with protein juice received some criticism for being grautious.
17	** The episode, 'A Midsummer's Nightmare' Either an hilarous romp, parody of Shakespeare, or an episode so absurd it encapsulates everything that is wrong with season 4's focus on parodic storylines. Includes such memorable scenes such as Kai transformed into a dancing, singing tree, and where the cast disguises themselves in a circle as Stanely Tweedle, dressed as a fairy queen. Also of note it's written by Jon Spira & Andrew Selzer who never wrote another episode.
18	** The episode 'BadCarrot' It's hilarous to see Kai perform a carrot-probe scan by pronging Prince's buttocks, or it's an example of VillainDecay.
19	* BestKnownForTheFanservice: Publicity for the show tended to focus on the skimpy clothing more than the satire and special effects.
20	* BigLippedAlligatorMoment: The show peddles absurdity and surrealism on a daily basis, but even by its usual standards some things are just downright bizarre.
21	** At the beginning of "Supernova", the episode spends several minutes dwelling on a cryopod containing a cosmic drifter, complete with voiceover explaining that he froze himself and launched himself into the vast reaches of space to save his dying civilization. In an average episode of ''Franchise/StarTrek'', this would kick off the plot. However, since this is emphatically '''not''' ''Star Trek'', he awakens from cryosleep just long enough to be eaten by the Lexx. It has nothing to do with the rest of the episode, other than establish the show is an irreverent parody of ''Star Trek''.
22	** At the end of "Supernova", as Brunnis is about to explode, the planet's two stars reveal that they're both self-aware and can somehow speak to the main characters from orbit, before they merge together in the titular supernova. Although the show isn't particularly grounded, nothing like this ''ever'' happens again and at no other point is it implied that stellar objects possess any kind of consciousness.
23	** In "Brigadoom", the main characters discover an opera house floating in space filled with performers who put on an opera about Kai's life. The only explanation given for this is that "the laws of reality break down near the center of the universe."
24	* CompleteMonster: Season 1: [[DarkIsEvil His Divine Shadow]] is the one survivor of the Insect Civilization possessing human bodies, and starts the series by annihilating the Brunnen-G species and taking over the Light Universe. Running a nightmarish regime where executions and harvesting of people for their meat is commonplace, His Divine Shadow commissions the creation of the Lexx, a planet destroying superweapon with intent to annihilate everything outside of his domain. Upon his seeming death, His Shadow initiates the Cleansing where [[OmnicidalManiac every living being in his domain is killed]] and their meat sent to feed his true form, [[OneWingedAngel Giga Shadow]]. Returning to life, His Divine Shadow proclaims he will [[KillAllHumans annihilate humanity]] and create a new insect empire, obsessed with his own glory and magnificence.
25	* ContestedSequel: Either you love season three for its tightly crafted season-long epic arc, worldbuilding, and new villain, or you hate it for ditching the planet of the week formula and all the storytelling variety and opportunities for situational humor that goes with it.
26	* DeusExMachina
27	** In the episode 'Magic Baby' [[spoiler: Stan of all people killing Vlad with a druid's staff they pick up. After Vlad's arc of several episodes it was anticlimactic introducing this plot device in the final one. "The Staff has the power" the druid says, for some unelaborated reason.]]
28	* FanNickname: "Supreme Beans," or just "the Beans," for the people behind the show, after a fan misspelled "beings" on a forum when referring to them.
29	* FanonDiscontinuity: Season 4 was very, very poorly received by most fans, who see the overemphasis on crude comedy, lack of effort put into the writing, {{Flanderization}}, and treatment of Americans a massive letdown compared to the previous seasons. Season 3 is also disliked by some for its focus on a single planet, being mostly fantasy instead of SpaceOpera, and for [[{{Retcon}} retconning]] a lot of the worldbuilding regarding the Time Prophet and the fate of souls in the first two seasons. It's also hated for the fact that it brought Earth into the formula. Part of the lure of the series had been, before season 4, that it never addressed Earth as a thing that existed, setting it apart from a lot of other Sci-Fi.
30	* FightSceneFailure: Happens when Kai takes out the {{mooks}} on the gondola in "May".
31	* GeniusBonus: The Higgs Boson apparently can't be measured without causing a planet to implode into a stranglet.
32	* GrowingTheBeard: Creator/XeniaSeeberg's performance is pretty wooden at first, but she improves a lot by the time season 3 rolls around.
33	* HarsherInHindsight:
34	** Pretty much everything, your second time through the show, due to the constant ApocalypseHow.
35	** Those lusty babes looking for love at the end of "Love Grows"? [[spoiler: If they weren't converted into Mantrid drones, they surely died when the Light Universe collapsed.]]
36	** But at least there's an afterlife, so they can live on after their death....! [[spoiler: Oh, no, wait, that got blown up by the Lexx.]]
37	** Do you like your home planet of Earth, its thousands of years of culture and history, and all the quirky characters who live on it? [[spoiler: Destroyed by a jealous robot head, ''and'' right after one of the heroes sacrificed himself to save it!]]
38	* HilariousInHindsight: Rutger Hauer and Brian Downey have essentially the opposite roles in "Eating Pattern" that they do in ''Film/HoboWithAShotgun''.
39	* HollywoodHomely: The female HookerWithAHeartOfGold in "Luvliner", others.
40	* HollywoodPudgy: A research assistant who is smitten with Kai in Season 4, the disciples of "Woz", others. Tended to meet bad ends of the innocent victim variety, whereas anybody with supermodel proportions meets a bad end due to bad choices.
41	* IAmNotShazam: You'd be amazed by how many people thought that Zev/Xev is named Lexx.
42	* MoralEventHorizon:
43	** [[spoiler: 790 comes close in ''Haley's Comet,'' but he finally crosses the line between unhealthy obsession and outright evil when he takes advantage of the Lexx's senility to trick it into blowing up the Earth, to prevent anyone on the planet from ever making eyes at Kai.]]
44	** Stan does this when he decides to blow up the Water Planet in Season 3 all to save the life of one woman. Prince even proves this when it becomes the act that [[spoiler: gets Stan eternally condemned to the Fire Planet.]]
45	* {{Narm}}: Sometimes when the German actors and actresses get emotional, their thick accents make them sound less like they're impassioned and more like they're recovering from a stroke. This leads to plenty of slurred line deliveries and AccentUponTheWrongSyllable during ostensibly dramatic scenes. Creator/XeniaSeeberg had the lion's share of these moments (since she was a regular, obviously). However, she was surprisingly outdone by Creator/DieterLaser, who made every single Mantrid line sound like Creator/DolphLundgren on ketamine chewing rocks and finding a strange fascination in puckering his lips repeatedly.
46	* NarmCharm: This show is quite possibly the living embodiment of NarmCharm. It's not "good" in any classical sense; its entertainment value comes exclusively from how much you enjoy its winking-at-the-audience brand of sleazy, cheesy, ridiculous sci-fi schlock.
47	* ParanoiaFuel: Pretty much the entirety of "Norb".
48	* RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap: [[spoiler:In ''Brigadoom,'' Stan is inspired by Kai's story and spontaneously grows a spine.]]
49	* RetroactiveRecognition:
50	** The credits list Colin Cunningham as a digital animator for the original miniseries. Two decades later, he would become internet famous as frequent WebVideo/RedLetterMedia collaborator "Colin From Canada".
51	** The businessman Xev eats in "Fluff Daddy" would later play the alien Prime Minister in ''Series/DoctorWho'''s "Aliens of London".
52	** Hammer in "Girltown" is played by Creator/DianeLangton, who would later be best known for playing Nana [=McQueen=] in ''Series/{{Hollyoaks}}''.
53	* SugarWiki/SheReallyCanAct: Creator/XeniaSeeberg in "The Key". Your first time through the episode, she seems oddly stiff and lifeless, without any of Xev's natural spark or warmth. [[spoiler: Your second time though, when you know it's really Prince masquerading as Xev, marvel at how Seeberg subtly nails Nigel Bennett's cold, haughty aloofness and his catlike sense of amusement as he toys with his prey, without making the big reveal obvious at all.]]
54	* SeasonalRot: Season 4 has its episode count extended to the longest episode count of 24, but it was criticised by a subset of fans for being a drag, all set on Earth and a lot of the extential, otherworldy concepts took a backseat in favour of satire, and pop culture parody of earth society.
55	** To a lesser extent Season 3 made a divisive choice to go for a series long arc of 13 episodes set on the warring planets of Fire and Water.
56	* SpecialEffectFailure:
57	** Most of the CG and blue screen effects in the first season are not convincing, and the same effects from the later seasons have not aged well (not to mention an extremely bad ChromaKey sequence when the crew are escaping from Mantrid's prison in the second season opener). As mentioned above, however, some see it as NarmCharm.
58	** The interior of the Lexx was originally this trope, until Season 2, in which the show got a higher budget, resulting in [[SugarWiki/VisualEffectsOfAwesome a complete overhaul of the sets]]. This is even [[LampshadeHanging explained in-universe]], as the Lexx was still growing during Season 1, but has fully matured by Season 2.
59	** Special mention for "End of the Universe," which features a drone cloud obviously made of the aluminum panels that were standard for pickup toolboxes at the time.
60	* SpiritualSuccessor: According to Lex Gigeroff, the show was a TakeThat to ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' and its preachy moralizing, and an attempt to return to the campy fun of ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries''.
61	* {{Squick}}: Whatever is not fetish for you ends up here.
62	* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot: "Eating Pattern". In a four episode miniseries, this third entry is pure filler. It has nothing to do with the overarching plot about the Divine Order and the Time Prophet's prophecy, doesn't develop the characters or their backstories in any meaningful way, and--despite involving mind controlling alien bugs--does not provide insight into the Insect Civilization and the Brunnen-G war against them. It's the kind of episode you can get away with during a regular season, but for a feature-length miniseries it just doesn't cut it.
63	* UglyCute: Squish.
64	* TheWoobie:
65	** Zev/Xev. For starters, her parents sell her to the Wife Bank as an infant, resulting in her spending her life being raised "in a box" by a hologram instructing her on how to be a submissive but sexually aggressive wife. When she is released, she is purchased by the parents of a SpoiledBrat to be his wife, but after hearing his insults directed at her appearance, Zev lost it and punched him in the face. She was then arrested and put on trial for "failing her wifely duties" and sentenced to be transformed into a love slave, and [[LateArrivalSpoiler we all know how that turned out]]. To top it all off, the only man she's ever loved is incapable of returning her affections, both physically and mentally.
66	** Cleasby in "Prime Ridge". He overlaps with WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds given how much he loves his guns.
67	** Brother Trager in "Nook".
68	** [[spoiler:The Dark Lady]] in "Woz".
69

Context YMMV / Lexx