Recap / Lexx S 01 E 03

Season 1, Episode 3

Eating Pattern

Lexx's food is growing thinner and less palatable, due to his own malnourishment. 790 interrupts Stan and Zev's attempts to get a decent meal from the kitchen by reporting that he's found a signal. The signal originates from a remote probe, but advertises Claggia, a "secondary-resource planet" where "healthy tourism is always on the menu." It was located near two other planets that have since been destroyed The man delivering the speech has a stutter and a bloody neck bandage over a shifting lump. Zev thinks that they should try to find Claggia, in the hopes that it has food, but Stan is too unnerved by the transmission.

Weeks later, the food situation has grown even more dire. Zev tells Stan that they're going to have to find their own food, so they visit the Divine Predecessors, one of whom they attempt to cook on a hot plate; however, the screaming and burning put Stan off his meal. Still hungry, Stan decides to see if Kai knows anything that could help them locate food.

Kai's body has freeze-dried, a condition that Stan saw many times in prisoners transported to the Cluster, and which he thinks means that Kai has gone from "alive-dead" to "dead-dead." Zev tries to jump-start Kai with electricity, but he still doesn't wake up.

A series of bumps draws them to the bridge. The Lexx has found the system containing Claggia and is eating rocks on his way to the planet, which appears deserted. The decayed organic material on the surface should satisfy his nutritional needs.

Zev insists on burying Kai, a local practice with which Stan is not familiar. After the improvised funeral, she and Stan get back in their moth, allowing Zev to take in the sights. She explains that Cluster lizards are naturally curious, and that, since her transformation, she needs to explore. When she sees a person on one of the structures, she lands, over Stan's objections. Stan says that he'll leave in ten minutes, with her or without her.

Aided by 790's heightened vision and hearing, Zev explores the dark, dusty corridors of the building. She's delighted to find, and steal, a box of powdered food, which she pronounces "really good!" She and 790 hear someone coming and try to hide, only to fall into a trap: An animated dust-bunny grabs her by the leg and drags her away, then green dots scan her and print a pattern of her on the floor. Zev stumbles away and retrieves 790. Before they can get back to the moth, someone approaches and knocks her unconscious.

Stan starts to leave Zev behind, but can't go through with it. Instead, he enters the building himself, calling for Zev. He meets an aggressive man carrying a partially-butchered human corpse, then a beautiful young woman, called Wist, who seems to guide him to relative safety. Wist pronounces him "clean" and kisses him, which allows a parasitic worm to enter his body and settle in his neck and brain. Stan turns into a giddy maniac who obeys all her instructions and doesn't see anything wrong with his situation.

The person who knocked out Zev was an old man named Shnick, who wants to trade her to a gang for "pattern." He tells the doorman that he has a "clean" specimen, but the man laughs and says that Wist would have already brought such a specimen to them. Shnick pleads with the doorman and gets a promise of pattern if he provides them with Zev's head.

Wist brings Stan to the gang's gathering-place. He watches without concern as people play a "Wheel of Fortune"-style game in which the place the wheel stops determines which body part a contestant will lose. The highest-status individuals in the gang are Wist and Bog, the man from the transmission.

Having learned from Stan that a "clean" woman is in the building, Wist's men storm Shnick's room and take her, while Shnick pleads for pattern. Shnick collapses and dies screaming, his eyes shriveling in their sockets, and the gangsters take the body to make pattern.

It turns out that "pattern" is a green liquid made from human body parts and craved by the parasitic worms. A large, rusty machine converts the bodies to pattern in a matter of minutes, although only Bog shows proficiency in using it.

Seeking a host, worms break into Kai's coffin and test his suitability by spitting an enzyme on him, which wakes him up. The worms determine that he is not alive and reject him. Kai heads into the building to find his crewmates.

Stan tries to help Bog and Wist by bringing them to Kai's body, and is baffled by its absence. However, he does remember the existence of the Divine Predecessors. Deeply moved, Bog hugs Stanley and tears up as he imagines the quality of the pattern he can make from the brains. Wist studies the bridge and promises the others that they will leave Claggia soon, after they feed. Bog's workers take a bag full of Predecessors back to their "home."

In Bog's absence, the gangsters decide to make pattern out of Zev and 790. Zev uses 790 to block the machine's blades. Bog returns, along with the others, and upbraids the minions for their incompetence.

Kai finds a recording of Wist, explaining Claggia's story. The two planets missing from the system destroyed one another in a war, during which one side created the worms as a biological weapon. Most of the Claggian population had succumbed, and Wist herself had been scanned and possibly copied in a process she did not understand. Wist knew that a queen controlled the worms; she intended to find and attack the queen, but expected to lose. She hoped that her message would someday help someone else.

A copy of Wist finds Kai watching the recording. She persuades a disinterested Kai to kiss her, but, like the worm outside, realizes that he is not a suitable host for the worm. Kai stabs her in the abdomen, revealing a mass of worms, and continues his search for Stan and Zev.

The gang throws a party to celebrate new pattern and their departure from Claggia. While staggering about drunkenly, they ask Wisk for permission to visit "the hole." Most of the minions, now including Stan, leave Zev tied to the pattern-making machine.

Kai allows himself to be beheaded at the door to the pattern-making room, then throws the gangsters off their guard by making cooking suggestions. He remote-guides his body into killing both a minion and leader!Wist, reattaches his head, and unties Zev. They follow Bog's group to the hole, a room with a large pit, into which the worms spit pattern. Except for Stan, all the hosts are dying as their worms crawl out and drop into the hole.

Kai, who suspects that Stan will die if they remove his worm before killing the queen, tells Zev to take Stan back to the Lexx, but to keep him from leaving the planet. Along the way, Zev manages to reactivate 790 and rescue the surviving captive Predecessors. Kai jumps into the hole and observes the current queen dying and being replaced by a "daughter" in the form of an enormous Zev; he injures it, but it transforms into the form of Wist and escapes to the surface.

Stan gets away from Zev and orders the Lexx to leave and destroy Claggia. Just as the Lexx take off, the queen attaches herself to the Lexx and begins growing tendrils throughout the ship. Zev wrestles with Stan until the tendrils invade the bridge and force her to use a moth evade them.

Kai weakens the queen, and a rock from Claggia's explosion crushes her head. The Lexx reports that it feels better. Stan and Zev pull the worm out of Stan, who is disgusted but mostly unharmed by the incident.

The crew gathers in the now-fully-functional kitchen. Stan orders a selection of foods which reference Earth cuisine, including a "sweet Cluster fry" and chocolate, before changing his order to "everything you've got." The Lexx showers Stan in pink cream, to his delight, and Zev looks on in amusement.

Tropes present in this episode include:

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: Locals who want pattern can volunteer to be strapped to a wheel surrounded by signs, one of which depicts a glass of pattern, the others depicting any of a number of easily-chopped-off organs. If a spin lands you under the image of pattern, you get a dose of real pattern... but if you wind up under an organ, you lose the real organ.
• After the End: For Claggia. The planets it shared a system with (and that it presumably processed garbage for) obliterated one another in a war, then parasites killed or possessed the entire population. By the time the Lexx detects Claggia, its technology has regressed to the point that there are no artificial signals coming from the planet's surface.
• Alien Blood: The queen bleeds green.
• Alien Invasion: Played with. The worms aren't native to Claggia, but they were created by (probably) humans on another planet.
• Alien Sky: Claggia's sky is orange.
• Arc Words: "It's okay. Everything dies," uttered by Bog, the real wist, leader!Wist, and the queen.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The worm queen.
• Ax-Crazy: The first person Stan meets on Claggia takes one look at him and before trying to chop him up.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The worm is spread by kissing, sometimes develops rootlike tentacles in the host's brain and sometimes swarm in their abdomen, emerge from a hole in the person's neck to eat, and are telepathically connected to a giant queen that they feed with their vomit.
• Bound and Gagged: Wist's minions store Zev this way.
• Combat Tentacles: One chases Zev around the Lexx.
• Conscience Makes You Go Back: Stan starts to leave Zev behind when she doesn't come back to the moth on time, but quickly returns.
• Crown of Horns: Bog wears one when he shows up to preside over the game.
• Cryonics Failure: Due to faulty cryopod controls, Kai winds up freeze-dried instead of just frozen.
• Dressed Like a Dominatrix: Wist, in a catsuit of flesh-toned cloth and widely-spaced black leather whorls.
• Due to the Dead: Zev insists on burying Kai, a B3K tradition that she considers "more respectful" than putting the dead in the protein bank.
• Dumbass Has a Point: 790 invokes this when he admits to agreeing with Stan about the dangers of exploration: "The fool is correct, dearest."
• Femme Fatale: Wist spreads the worm by persuading men to kiss her.
• Great Offscreen War: Is responsible for Claggia's devastation.
• Hero of Another Story: The real Wist.
• Human Resources: The monster of the week uses a machine to extract a pale green liquid from humans.
• Ignore the Fanservice: Zev tells Bog that she has a perfect body and can do anything he wants if he frees her. Since his urges have been overwritten by the worm's, her offer falls flat.
• Landfill Beyond the Stars: 790 describes Claggia as "an orbiting dump site used for generalized waste disposal. Your basic garbage planet."
• Last Disrespects: Stan eulogizes Kai by saying it's probably better that he's dead, given how many people he killed.
• Losing Your Head: Kai's severed head can still talk, blink, and control his body.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: There's not much finesse to the dismemberment of competitors in the local game of chance.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: Stan and Zev consider dining on the Divine Predecessors.
• Nude-Colored Clothing: At first glance, Wist appears to be wearing nothing between the black leather whorls of her catsuit.
• Percussive Maintenance: How Zev brings 790 back online.
• Pie in the Face: When Stan tells the now-fed Lexx to give him everything he's got, the Lexx responds by squirting pink cream all over him.
• Poverty Food: The Lexx produces some truly unappetizing food when malnourished.
• Pulling Themselves Together: Kai puts his own head back on.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The worms control their hosts' behavior.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Stan and Zev mistakenly believe that Kai can't come back from being freeze-dried.
• Scavenger World: The only high-tech device still in use on Claggia is the pattern-maker. Meanwhile, everything from minions' hats to Bog's sled appears to be made from junk. Not surprising, given that they're living on a giant landfill.
• Sniff Sniff Nom: Zev does this when she finds a cache of food.
• Speech Impediment: Bog's stutter.
• Synthetic Plague: The worms were originally engineered to serve as biological weapons in a war between planets.