A crew of misfit outlaws wanders the galaxy in a living ship. Sound familiar? Doomed to live in the shadow of cable TV's science fiction class act "Farscape", the Canadian-German coproduction "Lexx" takes a completely different trajectory as a tongue-in-cheek, sci-fi sex farce from a three-man team of "Human Beans" led by creator and frequent writer-director Paul Donovan. Sad-sack pilot Stanley Tweedle (Brian Downey), coquettish love slave Zev (Eva Habermann), reanimated corpse Kai (Michael McManus), and lovesick robot head 790 wander the galaxy looking for food, people, and (most importantly) a little nookie. Shot on the cheap with loads of flashy (if often unconvincing) digital effects and a rather claustrophobic series of studio-bound sets, the show launched with a quartet of TV movies before settling into a weekly series with its second season (1998). \n In the first of 20 episodes, "Mantrid" launches the "Lexx" into a funhouse galaxy of wacky worlds, where the dreaded insect king awakes and begins his bizarre reign of terror. The hilarious "Lyekka" introduces the title character, a curvy little plant girl with an insatiable appetite for human flesh, but more importantly it replaces platinum blonde Eva Haberman with the impishly flirtatious, full-lipped redhead Xenia Seeberg, the show's instant cult pinup queen. The show's eagerness to experiment is proven in "Brigadoom," a sci-fi musical that tells Kai's backstory entirely in song--with surprisingly impressive results. "Brizon" and "End of the Universe" end the second series as the "Lexx" is inexorably drawn into the Dark Zone after an epic fight with Mantrid's multiplying drone arms. \n Each DVD features a different 10-minute, behind-the-scenes featurette, short cast and creator interviews, and a chapter of "Rated LEXX", a TV special created for the Sci Fi Channel to introduce the characters and recap the origins.
