YMMV / Lexx

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • Bunny. Her season 2 incarnation, while nowhere near as evil as the show's villains, comes across as 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?
• Awesome Music:
  • The Brunnen-G anthem.
  • 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.
    • Much of the music in "Brigadoom" counts as this as well.
  • The Lexx Theme.
  • The ending credits theme, "Battle of the Universe".
  • The Season 2 opening theme.
• Base-Breaking Character
  • 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.
  • 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.
• Broken Base:
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The episode 'Bad Carrot' It's hilarous to see Kai perform a carrot-probe scan by pronging Prince's buttocks, or it's an example of Villain Decay.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Publicity for the show tended to focus on the skimpy clothing more than the satire and special effects.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The show peddles absurdity and surrealism on a daily basis, but even by its usual standards some things are just downright bizarre.
  • 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 Star Trek, 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.
  • 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.
  • 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."
• Complete Monster: Season 1: 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 every living being in his domain is killed and their meat sent to feed his true form, Giga Shadow. Returning to life, His Divine Shadow proclaims he will annihilate humanity and create a new insect empire, obsessed with his own glory and magnificence.
• Contested Sequel: 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.
• Deus ex Machina
  • In the episode 'Magic Baby' 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.
• Fan Nickname: "Supreme Beans," or just "the Beans," for the people behind the show, after a fan misspelled "beings" on a forum when referring to them.
• Fanon Discontinuity: 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 Space Opera, and for 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.
• Fight Scene Failure: Happens when Kai takes out the mooks on the gondola in "May".
• Genius Bonus: The Higgs Boson apparently can't be measured without causing a planet to implode into a stranglet.
• Growing the Beard: Xenia Seeberg's performance is pretty wooden at first, but she improves a lot by the time season 3 rolls around.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Pretty much everything, your second time through the show, due to the constant Apocalypse How.
  • Those lusty babes looking for love at the end of "Love Grows"? If they weren't converted into Mantrid drones, they surely died when the Light Universe collapsed.
  • But at least there's an afterlife, so they can live on after their death....! Oh, no, wait, that got blown up by the Lexx.
  • 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? Destroyed by a jealous robot head, and right after one of the heroes sacrificed himself to save it!
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Rutger Hauer and Brian Downey have essentially the opposite roles in "Eating Pattern" that they do in Hobo with a Shotgun.
• Hollywood Homely: The female Hooker with a Heart of Gold in "Luvliner", others.
• Hollywood Pudgy: 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.
• I Am Not Shazam: You'd be amazed by how many people thought that Zev/Xev is named Lexx.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • 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.
  • 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 gets Stan eternally condemned to the Fire Planet.
• 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 Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable during ostensibly dramatic scenes. Xenia Seeberg had the lion's share of these moments (since she was a regular, obviously). However, she was surprisingly outdone by Dieter Laser, who made every single Mantrid line sound like Dolph Lundgren on ketamine chewing rocks and finding a strange fascination in puckering his lips repeatedly.
• Narm Charm: This show is quite possibly the living embodiment of Narm Charm. 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.
• Paranoia Fuel: Pretty much the entirety of "Norb".
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: In Brigadoom, Stan is inspired by Kai's story and spontaneously grows a spine.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The credits list Colin Cunningham as a digital animator for the original miniseries. Two decades later, he would become internet famous as frequent RedLetterMedia collaborator "Colin From Canada".
  • The businessman Xev eats in "Fluff Daddy" would later play the alien Prime Minister in Doctor Who's "Aliens of London".
  • Hammer in "Girltown" is played by Diane Langton, who would later be best known for playing Nana McQueen in Hollyoaks.
• She Really Can Act: Xenia Seeberg in "The Key". Your first time through the episode, she seems oddly stiff and lifeless, without any of Xev's natural spark or warmth. 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.
• Seasonal Rot: 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.
  • 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.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • 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 Chroma Key sequence when the crew are escaping from Mantrid's prison in the second season opener). As mentioned above, however, some see it as Narm Charm.
  • The interior of the Lexx was originally this trope, until Season 2, in which the show got a higher budget, resulting in a complete overhaul of the sets. This is even explained in-universe, as the Lexx was still growing during Season 1, but has fully matured by Season 2.
  • 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.
• Spiritual Successor: According to Lex Gigeroff, the show was a Take That! to Star Trek: The Next Generation and its preachy moralizing, and an attempt to return to the campy fun of Star Trek: The Original Series.
• Squick: Whatever is not fetish for you ends up here.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: "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.
• Ugly Cute: Squish.
• The Woobie:
  • 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 Spoiled Brat 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 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.
  • Cleasby in "Prime Ridge". He overlaps with Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds given how much he loves his guns.
  • Brother Trager in "Nook".
  • The Dark Lady in "Woz".

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