Things to do in the Dark Zone when you're dead with LEXX's Kai

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Readers.

Special announcement regarding TV Zone issue #108

We're sorry but, due to a major printer error, we had to postpone the distribution of TV Zone issue #108 by one week. The printing error involved eight TV Zone pages being replaced with pages which belong to a completely separate magazine, a computer publication not published by us. The error affected pages 38/39, 46/47, 54/55 and 62/63. A new print run was ordered to meet a revised publication date.

TV Zone issue #108 is the November 1998 issue, which was due for publication in the UK on the 15th October, and in the US on 2nd November. A corrected version of TV Zone #108 was published in the UK on 22nd October 1998 and was due in the US on 9th November.

The error was reported initially in e-mails from some prompt and eagle-eyed readers. Here at Visual Imagination we had not even had a chance to inspect a copy, as our advance issues had strangely failed to be delivered! As soon as we heard of the problem at Visual Imagination we instituted a major recall. The majority of copies of the faulty issue will never have reached the UK shops, and none were shipped to retailers outside the UK.

THE FUTURE, ladies and gentlemen, will not be clean, pleasant or even remotely nice. The idealism of Star Trek will not so much have left the building as never been allowed to gatecrash in the first place. Instead, it will if we are to believe the makers of LEXX be dark, nasty and dangerous.
If you haven't seen LEXX, which first aired as a series of four telemovies in 1997, then don't worry. Just imagine Blake's 7 produced by men and women in the midst of acute heroin withdrawal (just past the projectile vomiting stage if you want to be specific), and you'll be somewhere near the mark. However, you don't have to take TV zone's word on this. Canadian actor Michael McManus - who plays the assassin Kai, essentially a 2,000-year-old animated corpse - concurs. "The world is a downright menacing place, the Universe is a place where people don't have any vision," he explains as he talks about the future-world of LEXX. "They pretend to but they don't. They're just looking out for number one in some of the most absurd ways."

Starship Troopers

When it comes to wandering around such an uncertain Universe. Kai and his companions, Stanley Tweedle, Zev and the robot head 790, have one major advantage over most people: the LEXX of the programme's title is a huge, sentient, insect-like starship which is capable of destroying planets. In the first of the four telemovies, Stanley Tweedle, an ineffectual and cowardly security guard played by Newfoundland actor Brian Downey, gains control of the LEXX as the result of an accident. The ship will only respond to his command.
The blond and beautiful Zev, meanwhile, is a 'love-slave' who has fallen big-time for Kai, something of a lost cause as Kai has to be kept in a freezer and can only be re-animated with proto-blood.
Some actors might find playing a dead guy a tad limiting, but, as the first full series of 20 one-hour LEXX episodes nears completion, McManus is more than happy with the arrangement.
"He shouldn't want to be alive or be Human," the actor says. "It's fine if Xev wants Kai to board her and make love to her, but I think Kai's just dead and that's not a possibility.
That to me is a more interesting direction, period. "Wanting to be Human, wanting to be emotional, wanting to be sensitive and sympathetic is a different thing. The way they've set it up and executed it is very interesting; they're not shying away from the various negative aspects of the character which I think is very brave in the television world."



European Values

One of the reasons Salter Street Films. the company behind LEXX, have been able to take so many chances with the series is lack of American involvement. Although the US cable channel Showtime put money into four telemovies, series creator and producer Paul Donovan put together international funding (mainly from Canada and Europe) for the new series which is being filmed in Halifax, Canada and Berlin, Germany. "I don't know all the details but I think the Americans wanted too much control," says McManus. "Paul Donovan, very admirably, resisted and ending up funding it with international money. I think the plan is that now, the Americans will eventually find it irresistible and take it as it is."
If that seems unlikely, it's worth noting that Showtime initially passed on the third telemovie Eating Pattern - an extremely violent film which featured a guest appearance from Rutger Hauer and dealt with addiction - before buying the finished film.
"It had an intensely - from an American tv point of view - problematic set-up," recalls McManus. "I think the Americans would look at the show and say, 'That's degradation of the body, you can't have that. It's absurd. It's so violent, it's so disgusting.' But when they see it - they may not even realise it - it has the charm that a lot of Science Fiction has in that it tends towards the allegorical. You don't think, 'That poor guy has just lost his head because he's addicted to this game where his body parts get made into a drink that he's addicted to.' They go, 'Oh, that's something else. That's like a Bible story, like when the flood happened or something."'

Space to Slash

So, freed of the constraints of pandering to an audience of (quite possibly horrified) US tv executives, what can we expect from the new series? McManus already has a couple of favourite episodes.
"We did an episode recently [Wake the Dead where five teens come on board" he says. "They've been floating out in space for 287 years, or something like that. They were going to summer school and they screwed up their cryogenic freezing so they've been floating around. They get Xev maternal so she brings them over to the ship.
They're sort of stoner teenage partying and a couple of them wander into the chamber, even though they've been to stay away from it. They wake Kai up wrong way and give him all kinds of instructions about killing people. They're just laughing a laugh and they're stoned. Stan comes and chases them away, and the next time they look Kai's not in his cryopod. He stalks them all and kills them according to various Slasher/Horror methods. It's a wonderful episode.
There's another episode [Nook] that's a planet that's been set up without women, just monks. It's this perfect place called Nook, and Father Nook is their god. The main virtue the monks cherish is ignorance and not knowing anything about women. "Xev has a fairly dynamic influence on that environment. They end up getting so confused they take very extreme action. There's something about that episode that's fun, that male fantasy that without women everything would be okay, which is of course absurd. You take a step back from that male society and go, 'Well, actually something's really missing there. You've maybe kind of missed the point of life."'

New characters

Leaving aside the lingering daydream of TNG's Wesley Crusher meeting a violent death at the hands of a crazed murderer, it's definitely clear that LEXX is still pushing at the boundaries of tv Sc-iFi. However, the LEXX team haven't thrown the baby out with the bathwater and broken all conventions. While Wake the Dead and Nook are stand-alone episodes, the series also has some recurring themes, the all-important despicable baddie, and an on-going story arc for fans to follow.
"Some of the Science Fiction stuff is just getting better and better," says McManus. "The opening one is really interesting, but it's kind of difficult to say anything about it because it introduces all the Science Fiction ideas for the series. But, they recur and then there's a story arc which goes along with the introduction of a character called Mantrid."
Away from the main characters and the LEXX itself, Mantrid is one of the main links with the telemovies. Those movies dealt with a Universe of Light controlled by the sinister god-like figure of his Divine Shadow. Although His Shadow is destroyed in the final movie, the influence of a semi-deity who once controlled 22,00 planets doesn’t go away that easily.
"He's a very, very dark, intelligent and nasty character who's in the jail in the Light Universe, " explains McManus. "He was the old Divine Shadow's advisor, and he became too powerful even for the Divine Order so they locked him up in this dome on some planet that's just water and a couple of swampy land-masses. He's been biding his time there, just waiting for whatever opportunity to become very expansive…"

Home Boy

If taking on Mantrid sounds like a job for a bunch of people who just happen to have a staggeringly destructive starship around their persons, McManus doesn't think Kai's ultimate wish is to be gallivanting around the Universe. Rather, he sees his character as one who longs for rest.
"His goal to me is pretty obvious," he says "From that moment of waking consciousness, he's very attached to Zev and Stan, and the idea of getting them a home - which is what they say they want - everything he does is predicated on that. Once thet did, I think he would just be happy to drift off into a black hole somewhere with the destructive LEXX, and just let them have a normal life. He'd finally find some dead-deadness instead of the limbo he now languishes in."

Jonathon Wright