![[Mantrid]](mantrid.jpg "[Mantrid]")
2.1:
Mantrid
-- C5, Friday 14 May 1999
The crew meet evil genius Mantrid [Dieter Laser] and his loathsome assistant. The insect Shadow is controlling Kai, making him get Mantrid's help to revive an insect larva left over from when Lexx destroyed the Giga Shadow. Kai and Zev go down to Mantrid's planet, leaving Stan on the Lexx. Once the Shadow aura leaves Kai for the larva, he realises what he has done, and Zev tells Stan to destroy the planet immediately, but he rescues them first. That gives the Shadow, Mantrid, and a machine body, time to fuse into one being, which survives.
Zev wants to speak to Kai, but when Stan makes a mistake in the waking-up order, Kai comes awake as an assassin, and accidentally shreds Stan's heart. At the point of death, Stan transfers the Lexx's key to Zev, and is then frozen, while the others search for medical aid. They find a hospital station, who agree to repair Stan, but only after witnessing the Lexx blow up a small planet. But the spooky doctors really want the Lexx, so capture Zev and try to extract the key from her by torturing her to the point of death. They are afraid of assassin Kai, so try to kill him in a plasma blast. At the point of death, Zev's non-human DNA takes over, and she metamorphoses into a cluster lizard, slaying the doctors. She rescues Kai, but is caught in the plasma bolt herself. She just has time to transfer the key back to the now-recovered Stan before she is rendered down into a bowl of protein soup. After they leave, Mantrid and the arms destroy the hospital station.
![[Stan and Lyekka]](lyekka.jpg "[Stan and Lyekka]")
2.3:
Lyekka
-- C5, Friday 28 May 1999
A strange plant spore invades the Lexx and discovers Stanley dreaming of an old flame, Lyekka. The spore grows into a copy of Lyekka. Stan realises she is not really who she looks like, and rouses Kai. Meanwhile, a trio of bumpkin astronauts from Potatoho discover the Lexx. Lyekka is really a man-eating plant, and eats the three astronauts and Zev's bowl of protein. This gives her enough energy to recreate Zev from their memories -- a rather altered Xev, that is. Meanwhile, Mantrid and all his many arms destroy Potatoho.
Stan and Xev pick up a broadcast advertising the Luvliner -- a ship devoted to pleasure. They decide to go there, but reality is grungier than the ad. They have to blow up yet another moon to convince the management they don't need to pay for their stay -- yet again this leads people to try to steal the Lexx. The thieves know what Kai is, so throw him towards the sun. They demand the Lexx's key from Stan by threatening to kill Xev. But she is rather harder to kill than they thought, and fights until Kai, woken by the heat of the sun, returns to save the day.
Two planets have destroyed each other in a war over TV ratings. The Lexx crew discover a place where they can appear in various still running TV series as part of a ratings game show. Xev goes in to play. Stan complains that "she never learns", but then sees the pair who are inviting him in to play. What the crew don't know is that, if their shows' ratings drop, they get relegated to daytime TV, and finally to the special program, which features decapitations...
Stan is arrested in a "sting" operation, and put on trial for the crime of killing over 600 billion people on the 94 planets that destroyed by His Shadow using the data found in Stan the Courier's tooth. He is found guilty, and the Grand Prosecutor argues for sentence to be carried out using nerve bore worms, but Kai successfully argues for mercy: a quick and painless death. However, the Prosecutor intends to use the nerve bore worms anyway -- death turns her on -- and also to kill Kai and Xev as collaborators. This fact encourages Kai to save them all. As they speed off in the Lexx, loads of arms eat the space station.
Lexx mistakes a spaceship for food. [I missed this episode, due to poor TV reception.]
Stan discovers an unpleasant "white trash" family of stowaways hiding out on Lexx. They take over, and force Stan to travel to their home planet. The daughter seduces Stan, and the father catches them, and forces Stan into a shotgun marriage. But there's an argument, and the daughter falls down that big unguarded hole in the centre of Lexx [which is there just for people to fall down]. Meanwhile, Xev and the older son go down to the planet to "party", but the son is met with less than friendliness by his cousin clans. Meanwhile again, the younger boy, Norb, makes a deal with 790: 790 will help him repair his (real) father's spacecraft if the boy will wake up Kai. So Kai rescues Xev, then Stan destroys the planet, and the Lyekka plant eats the last stowaway.
[Lexx is made by a German/Canadian consortium -- which might explain why it portrays the worst US stereotypes -- "white trash" here, and country bumpkin farmers in Lyekka .]
The crew receive a distress signal. 790 wants to ignore it, because distress signals always lead to trouble, but the others decide to investigate, and find a spaceship crashed on an uninhabitable planet. 790 gets his head attached to a cyborg body, thus he hopes enabling him finally to consummate his passion for Xev -- but the body has a mind of its own, and instead tries to rape Stan. Kai and Xev finds a prisoner of the original crew, who seems to be a slave. She is trapped in her prison, a giant pod, because her heart has been removed; Kai restores it, and then she turns into a psychopathic assassin. Fortunately, Lyekka is hungry, and eats her. They all escape as the ship self destructs. [The various Alien references add to the fun.]
The crew rescue five teenagers who have been in suspended animation for the last 300 years due to a programming error. One of the unpleasant teens vandalises Kai's cryochamber, and then, as a sick joke, "instructs" the apparently dead Kai to go on a psychopathic killing spree. But Kai awakes, and does. All the teens die. The last one was escaping in a shuttle-insect, but Kai was on board too. Stan orders Lexx to destroy the shuttle. But then Kai reappears on board Lexx. " I missed. " Just a split second before Kai can kill Stan and Xev, he runs out of protoblood. They get to "reprogram" him before giving him more blood. " Be careful how you wake me. "
![[Stan]](stan.jpg "[Stan]")
2.11:
Nook
-- C5, Friday 23 July 1999
The crew discover a planet that has only one island -- and which is transmitting no signals. Stan warns about landing on such a primitive planet, but Xev is adamant -- she is getting desperate. She bribes Stan into accompanying her. They discover a community of monks worshipping Father Nook -- living their unchanging way of life, in harmony with nature, ever since the Landing. But the brothers find Xev to be a strange kind of man they have never seen before, and she has an unsettling influence on them. Soon it is to be the solstice, when all rules are in abeyance, and the brothers can indulge in brotherly love. But the brother of brothers is acting strangely -- he disables Kai, kills a monk, then tries to get the visitors blamed for it. He has realised that the visitors, especially Xev, have forever changed their way of life, so decides to destroy the planet.
The crew re-encounter the young space pilot Norb . But Norb isn't what he seems -- he's previously run into Mantrid, who has absorbed him, and the young boy is now made out of Mantrid arms. Once aboard, these arms start multiplying, by eating the Lexx. First they disable 790 -- the only one who knows how to destroy them -- by removing his small portion of human brain, the part of him that allows him to love Xev. Kai manages to mend 790 [bio-tech seems to require very few connections in this universe], but then the arms force him, Stan and Xev to abandon 790 and Lexx. 790 manages to tell them how to destroy the arms [by reversing the polarity of the stardrive], but Xev won't let them do this before they've rescued 790. At the end, Mantrid -- half human, half insect and half machine -- appears to them, and tells them his mission is to destroy all of humanity. He's leaving them until last, as their "reward" for creating him.
[This is a much better episode than some of the more recent ones -- more SFnal, more arc, and less grunge. The characters are less irritating -- and the scene where the newly restored 790 starts insulting Stan again is spot on.]
When Stan doesn't wake up, Xev puts out a distress signal. [I missed this episode, due to poor TV reception.]
Stan has been having nightmares about the cannibal Giggerota. In an attempt to make himself feel better, he threatens a robot mining planet with destruction unless the robot leader tells him something that will make him feel better. He is told of a place where he can live his dreams. He cancels the destruct order -- but Lexx blows up the planet anyway, not knowing the meaning of "cancel". Meanwhile, at dream land, Fruitcake has offered the owner a Mantrid arm to let him dream, and has shown him the Patches in the Sky -- galaxies are steadily vanishing, and the Universe will be gone less than a year. [Given light travel times from galaxies, they must have finished being eaten eons ago, but never mind. I expect that brass telescope uses FTL technology.] The Lexx crew proceed to dream land, and Stan enters his dream, only to be plunged into a nightmare of fear and guilt with Giggerota and the Robot leader. The guy running the dream machine, realising the world will end soon, is by now too stoned to pull Stanley back out to safety. So Xev enters Stan's dream to protect him while Kai tries to get them all out to safety.
790 is in despair -- he programmed an expiry date into Xev when he created her as a love slave, and now she has just 79 hours to live. [Given that the current Xev is only an imperfect one recreated by Lyekka from Stan's memories, and he didn't know about love slave expiry dates, I'm surprised there is a problem...] The only way to save her is to find another love slave conversion machine; the only one of those left is on Woz -- a planet plagued by twister storms. Their moth lands and kills a Sister, and so the Wozard refuses to help Xev unless Kai agrees to kill the Dark Lady. All is not as it seems, however, and while Kai and Stan are off to see the Dark Lady in her tower, Xev gets converted back into her original bloated body shape, but no change to her expiry date. Eventually Kai steals the key to the converter machine, the Wozard kills the Dark Lady and himself, and Xev is restored, with a new 79 year expiry time. Back on the Lexx, she announces that "there's no place like home". Mantrid arms destroy Woz.
Stan has two big problems: the universe is being turned into Mantrid drones and will have completely vanished in about another 30 days, and he has lost his hat. In an attempt to escape the fate of being turned into drones themselves, the crew try to flee to the Dark Zone, but all the contact points have disappeared. Kai suggests they should travel to the centre of the universe, where the Greater Uncertaintly Principle holds. No-one has ever travelled there and returned to tell the tale, but it's surely a better bet than the certain fate that awaits them otherwise. Two days out from the centre, they are ensnared in a giant web. They lose their memories of the event, and so it takes them some time to realise what has happenened, that they are trapped, and to escape [ or have they ?...] They continue on the the centre, Xev finds Stan's hat under his chair, but Stan is acting strangely...
The universe is rapidly disappearing. [I missed this episode, due to my intermittent inability to program a VCR.]
The crew is caught in a musical. [I missed this episode, due to poor TV reception.]
Stan tries to bring Mantrid into the open by calling him a coward, and challenging him -- but it doesn't work. Then the dying Brizon contacts them -- he's an evil high level servant of His Divine Shadow: Mantrid's old teacher, designer of the Lexx, and controller of the assassins. He tells the crew he knows how to defeat Mantrid, because he has a trapdoor in Mantrid's machine. All they have to do is capture a Mantrid drone arm, and he can use it to trigger the trapdoor. They do, but before he will switch off the arms, he insists that Xev donate some of her liver to keep him alive. She doesn't want to, but Brizon takes control of Kai, and forces her to comply. She ends up attached to him by a tube, keeping him alive. He switches off the drone arms, and they then travel to Mantrid's machine. Brizon intends to take the machine for himself, so he and Xev travel to the machine. But it's a trap. Xev breaks the tube and escapes, Brizon is destroyed, but the crew are no closer to defeating Mantrid.
Mantrid has already turned more than half of the Light Universe into Drones. The crew of the Lexx are desperate to do something to fight back, and Stan decides to investigate the deactivated drone arm they have captured. Several Mantrid arms appear on the Lexx, and while fighting them off, Stan attaches the captured arm to 790. During the fight, Lyekka appears, and says that her pod has been terminally damaged. 790 can now make "790 drones" who all "fight for Xev", and manage to convert a lot of Mantrid arms. Lyekka can locate Mantrid, because there is no-one else in the Universe dreaming. They go and have a big fight, during which Mantrid is badly damaged and Lyekka is killed. Mantrid stages a recovery, but the Lexx crew trick him into chasing them with all his arms -- causing the Universe to collapse. He is defeated, but the crew escape back into the Dark Universe.