| Kai 3 Wow, ran into more stuff. I musta started writing this ~ages~ ago, probably back in '06 or something, and never finished it. Going to put it on here so I can let it go out of the leaf pile. At the risk of earning the irk and ire of a few diehard Kai lovers and role players out there, I'm feeling another compulsion to again establish my position on our denominational differences, specifically the dichotomy on Kai's state of being and self. As anyone can see from my last two Kai posts (navigational links in the left hand column), I believe Kai's soul was scraped right out of his body when His Shadow killed him and turned what was left over to the bioviziers to manipulate into a killing machine. I'll attempt to avoid redundancy as much as possible, since I've touched on this before, but I think revisiting a few key points will be helpful, as will a little bit of Kai history. Just before season one (we find this out in season two, actually), Kai, of course, was a hotheaded youth who took it upon himself to find answers to questions that resulted in the obliteration of his entire planet, culture, and people. He definitely had passion, for good or ill, and we see that passion played out to his dying breath as he crashes his tiny little fighter kama-kazi style into the Foreshadow's control pod and then quotes the prophecy to His Shadow seconds before a knife is plunged into his heart. We next see Kai 2008 years later, awakened from cryosleep and instructed to kill heretics who were about to steal the Lexx, the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes. Kai responds to this command in the fashion of someone who has been brainwashed, with no memories or questions of justice or feelings of regret. He simply obeys, as though mechanized. During the struggle for domination of the Lexx and protecting the Predecessors on board, Kai stumbles into getting his memories back from the brain who had hosted His Shadow and killed him so long ago. Does he get 'himself' back? He clearly gets personal memories, along with memories from the other thousands His Shadow had killed while occupying that host. We can begin our logic with this-- if Kai got his own 'self' back during that transition, then he surely got other 'selves' also. Alas, though, throughout the 4 seasons of the show, Kai continues to look for the rest of himself, so we can safely assume he is not completely intact at this point of receiving his memories back into his own brain. What is still missing? What makes a self 'self'? What makes Kai the person he was before he was killed? Simply owning the memories of everything he did and who he was, along with the memories of his motivations, desires, and feelings, didn't make Kai the person he was before. This remains a mystery throughout season two, although we do get a few more clues. We find out that Brizon actually designed Divine Assassins, and that Kai 'belonged' to him through a student named Mantrid. Brizon has thorough knowledge of how Kai 'works', and easily controls him, but doesn't share with the crew (or the audience) anything in the way of real details to satisfy our questions. Again, Kai becomes very mechanized in Brizon's hands, with no will of his own to fight it or attack Brizon over it, even when he is no longer being controlled by Brizon. Kai relies on the commands of others, even though he seems to intellectually understand Sorry, that was it. Not really in the mood to finish it right now, but at least it's in the right place. |
Everything Lexx.
Lifetime
