Lexx 4.6
featuring the episodes Viva Lexx Vegas, Trip, Lyekka Vs. Japan and Yo Way Yo
So here we are, at the end of the Lexx saga. This final DVD in the series has some of season 4’s best, so it’s not that painful this time around.
If anything, Viva Lexx Vegas may well be the last gasp of the Lexx that I came to know and love - there’s hilarity, absurdity, jeopardy and innuendo all in the right doses. Of course, this would be expected of the crew’s visit to Sin City. Stan stoops to calling on the services of a pair of call girls, Xev innocently turns the odds against the house in a series of staged girl-on-girl cage matches (of course, Xev doesn’t know they’re staged, and refuses to comply when the manager of the matches suggests firmly that she throw the next fight), and Kai uncovers and battles an extraterrestrial mummy whose reawakening could mean the end of all life on Earth. Michael McManus gets the best end of the deal here, with Kai kicking ass and quoting his whole “I’ve killed mothers with their babies” assassin spiel one last time - a far cry from being stuck in the refrigerator earlier in the season - but Xenia Seeberg doesn’t exactly fare badly either, at least not in the costume department. Wish she’d kept the new look!
Trip is just what it implies, one last head trip for our heroes before the season’s two final hours bring the ongoing story arc home. Well, okay, one last overt head trip - the whole show’s a head trip on at least some level. A gift from Lyekka leaves Stan and Xev in their own murderously paranoid states, each out to kill the other before they get killed first. There’s some pretty disturbing stuff here, and 790’s bloodlust to see both Stan and Xev gone reaches its peak here - it’s really the end of any possibility that anyone could have for sympathizing with the robot head. The rest of the story is outrageous and goes for the humorous shock value at every opportunity, including Xev’s paranoid delusion that a revived Kai would take Stan for a lover and the two would plot to get rid of her.
Lyekka Vs. Japan is an affectionate homage to the B monster movie in all of its glory and its excess. It also relocates the action firmly to Earth for the closing episode, and features some unnerving business about organ donation. As you might have expected, we bid farewell to Lyekka in this episode, and not before time - as alluring as I’ve always felt Louise Wischermann is (why oh why didn’t she take over the role of Zev/Xev?), her character had more or less become a one-note joke despite the wonderful ambiguity she had in the second season, even helping our heroes out in the season finale. Her attempt to send the Lexx crew a bit of a trojan horse in Trip, and her actions here, placed her firmly into predictable bad guy territory.
Which brings us to Yo Way Yo, which in an hour has to wrap up… well… virtually every storyline the show has left unresolved. If anything, this story could’ve used two hours - it’s just a bit crowded, and in places just a bit forced as well. The farewell scene on Earth between Xev and Kai just doesn’t hit me the way it should. Kai’s ultimate fate does provide us with a nice, resonant bookend going back to the opening moments of the first TV movie that kicked everything off, but Xev’s reaction to his fate again seems to miss the mark. It’s a highly subjective thing, I suppose, and these are just my opinions. The characters who I find myself most invested in for the finale are Kai and Stan, and, for crying out loud, the Lexx itself. (That plot resolution is, I will admit, both easy and kinda nifty.) Though the major threads of the series are tied off neatly, both heroes and villains are left alive for a rematch, but I doubt very much that we’ll ever see a Farscape: Peacekeeper Wars-style finale for Lexx.
The extras on this volume include the wrap party reel with a selection of the series’ best moments (a largely CGI-focused “greatest hits” compilation set to music) and some of its off moments too (a far-too-short selection of bloopers). There’s also a nice, heartfelt text message from series creator Paul Donovan, openly admitting that the series missed its target about as often as it managed to hit it. Given the extremely mixed bag that the fourth (and longest) season was, I think he’s right on the money. But despite that win-loss ratio, Donovan’s honesty, and his brilliance in crafting the universe that provided the setting for this show and its best stories, endears me to him - I’m eager to see what he and his fellow members of “the Three Beans” will come up with next.