Thursday, January 08, 2009

In Half-Hearted Praise of Lexx

I mentioned that I can sing the song Vaiyo A-O, which Theresa Coleman properly recognized as the theme song to the 1997-2001 Canadian science fiction TV show Lexx. Theresa wrote:

I really liked Lexx -- until they went weird with that last season. Like they weren't weird B4.

Lexx was, indeed, very, very weird. Singing brains, love-crazed robot heads, and apocalyptic musicals were only a few of everyday issues in Lexx. The show was wildly original and defied all norms of science fiction.

Its greatest flaw was that the writers did no substantial world-building before launching the show. Consequently, the Lexx universe was a hodge-podge of different ideas and gimmicks tossed in whenever it was time to write a new episode. This led the writers to completely re-invent the show in the third season, and again the fourth, which retroactively attempted to provide some internal consistency.

Nonetheless, the show was occasionally capable of putting out quality stories that made full use of its creators' zany approach to science fiction.

Here is my favorite episode, "Lafftrak", which is a satire of 20th Century television:


[Video Link] Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

I remain baffled as to why my wife refused to place "Xev" on our short list of baby names.

UPDATE: Bad video links fixed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that "Xev" is a perfectly good baby name. I liked this show, too, and can also sing the theme song. The DVDs appear to have gone out of print before I got around to buying them, which is causing me some distress.

John said...

A pity. But most episodes are available on the Internet. Try searching Guba.com for Lexx.