aka Lexx: 2.0
aka Tales From a Parallel Universe
1996, d. Ron Oliver - Tubi
At the start of Lexx's second tv movie/episode, we see a pod containing a single humanoid life form floating in space. It's emanating a message, on repeat, advising of this life-form's mission. His people are dying, their children are dying, and they need help from outside to help save them. He's floating in space in cryosleep hoping to encounter someone, anyone who might receive the message and be able to help him and his people in their most desperate hour. Then, enters the frame the giant dragonfly spaceship,the Lexx. We know this set up from countless Space Journey shows... he is rescued and the next course of adventure for our cast of characters is chosen. Except the message is not heard, and the life pod smashes into the Lexx and explodes leaving nary a scratch and no one inside the ship is even remotely aware of what might have been. For Lexx's second episode, it's the creators yelling at the audience "we are not that".
Instead inside the Lexx, 790 rhymes off love poems about his dear "Zev Zev" while scanning the star charts for Kai's home planet of Brunnis. Zev wants Kai, but he is dead, so he does not want. She hopes his home planet can somehow return him to full life. Stan meanwhile propositions Zev while she's showering (while nudity in TV has become exceptionally normal in a post-Game of Thrones world, in the 90's it was still a bit sensational for any TV to have breasts or butts or whatnots), intoning that she's a love slave and he has needs... but he is resoundingly rebuffed. "Realistically Stan, there's not much to like about you. You're old, unattractive...self-centered, vain, weak-willed, treacherous...." Zev may have been programmed for love, but she still has standards.
Kai is awakened by the insatiable cannibal Giggerata who they rescued last episode. She has designs to eat his cold meat but he gets the best of her. He directs Stan and crew on where to find Brunnis. Landing on the planet they discover the planet is deserted, and Kai directs them to the archive, the reservoir of the planet's knowledge. Only the AI that operates the reserve has been hijacked by Poet Man (Tim Curry), the one left behind when the Brunnen-G all left Brunnis.
Inside Zev, Stan and Kai each are transported into a memory machine that manipulates them based on their memories and desires. Zev sees snippets of her history - her parents abandoning her and the matron of the holocare home guiding her through wifely lesson - before Kai emerges, alive and they perform a romantic duet. Stanley, meanwhile, is tempted by lust, only to find him a prisoner of an impregnation scheme (that mistakenly identifies him as female). Poet Man has turned the archive into a house of torture.
While the crew is on the planet, Giggerata has free reign on the Lexx where she meets the Divine Order (the collection of all the telepathic brains that had once inhabited His Divine Shadow) and, after she attempts to eat one or two of them ("Too salty!") they lure her to their side by promising her the location of the planet of milk-fed boys. She needs Stan to pilot the ship to her new feeding grounds. The storylines thus intersect as the Divine Order advise Giggerata on how to destroy Brunnis and Kai -their greatest threat- in the process.
Once again this Lexx installment feels exceptionally random, as if constructed by free association. While "I Worship His Shadow" was off-beat and took a lot of strange detours, it was still propulsive, and its ability to link the disparate characters it introduced together happens rather organically. "Super Nova", on the other hand, seems a bit lost for purpose. The intent of the episode is the get more into the characters and their motivations, but they're so thin (or non-existant) that it doesn't have enough to really explore.
It's the problem with Kai being undead, and not having and wants or desires or really any feelings at all...the return trip to Brunnis is at best observational. He has no attachments. It's only Zev's very limited want to find a way to restore life to Kai (something he repeatedly intones is impossible) that moves them to explore the planet.
All this leads to a largely tedious and repetitive episode with almost no stakes that doesn't demand the 90-minute runtime it has. Giggerata is the episode's highlight throughout, just a delightfully weird, angry, vengeful and hungry character (played by Ellen Dubin).
While the previous instalment hinted at the idea of cycles of existence, and prophets who can see the past cycles in order to predict the future, there's a short sequence here that touches on it again, although rather than imparting anything new into the operatic elements of the story, it's restricted to the threats immediately at hand. And it doesn't help anything that the episode's climax, what saves our waylaid crew from an otherwise hopeless situation, is a complete deus ex machina.
Where "I Worship His Shadow" was bristling with ideas and energy, "Super Nova" seems largely devoid of them. As far as the creators knew, they had an order for four 90-minute episodes, so it's entirely too early for this kind of filler.
I was wrong twice with my review of that first installment of Lexx. First I said that Stanley Tweedle will never show any growth in this series, and immediately, in this second episode Stan rejects Giggerata's proposition to turn the Lexx into a love-ship if he abandons Zev and Kai, and instead stands by his friends instead of fulfilling his own needs. But maybe that's all the growth we ever get out of him. Second, I said I was as sucked in as I was 30 years ago. This episode kinda put the 'suck' into 'sucked in'. It has its moments, but they're few and far between.
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