Stanley Tweedle is writhing in agony over a horrible conundrum- one to three organs when he reports to the corrections center versus termination if he doesn't turn himself in. General guess, he probably had about 20 minutes left on the clock and has been wandering around since then trying to make up his mind what to do. Escape is out of the question, being in the heart of His Divine Shadow's League of 20,000 Planets on the Cluster itself, trapped in a judiciary structure to make all your worst nightmares look like rainbow colored kittens. I wonder what that screen with a face on it is for.
If you think about it, this 20 minutes is probably the very last of any kind of freedom Stanley Tweedle will ever know again. While he's walking around in between places, still fully corporeally intact, no one is bothering him or bossing him around, and when he pauses to think to himself, no one questions him or gives him trouble. That big robot looks pretty innocuous. Remember that when we see it again.
In this moment with the distant chime marking the quiet passing of time in this in between place, we get an almost beautiful view of the Cluster far below while Stanley wrestles with the hardest choice he's ever made in his life. "One to three organs?"
"Better than termination!" Quiet thoughtful time is suddenly over, now it's panic time, and Stanley realizes he's got seconds left to report in before he gets stuck with termination. He turns immediately and starts running.
That's the correction center he needs to get to down that hallway. Look very closely. We hear the bug bomb report in, "Bug bomb searching..." as it zips through that gateway. Watch the green dot, like a teeny tiny remote controlled helicopter buzzing around. Remember, you can click on thumbnails to see them better.
Stan is running really fast, jumping over and dodging zippy little robot servos on their little carts. I can't help thinking how the shadow patterns on the floor look like he's in prison wherever he goes. It even looks like his own shadow is trying to get away.
With all that jumping and dodging and utter panic rising up, the last thing Stanley needs is a teensy airborne mechanoid buzzing around crashing into his face and slowing him down.
Uh oh...
UH OH. Yeah, Thodin is hearing all this on his relay.
"Bug bomb... malfunction..." Definitely one of those 'Oh crap' moments. He's still bolted to that little bug carrier in the middle of Cobalt Stadium with a hundred thousand bloodthirsty fans screaming for his brain to be fed to cluster lizards.
Here's the holo-judge talking again. "Thodin of the Ostral-B Pair is accused of heresy in the first degree.."
"...of 26 counts of piracy..." Despite the danger and the bug bomb malfunction, Thodin seems to be enjoying his sentencing.
"...of influencing the minds of the People..." The cluster lizards are getting crankier.
"...of questioning His Shadow's truth and wisdom..."
"...of destroying 231 military vessels loyal to His Shadow..."
That's turning into quite a list. Starting to wonder just what all Thodin has really done, who he really is, and what in the world kind of outfit that is and do all the heretics wear them?
Meanwhile, the clock is counting down and Stanley Tweedle is running for dear life.
Automated voice- "This correction center is now closed." The gate was automated, as well.
Alas, Stan is too late.
"It's me!"
"I'm here!"
But of course, it's truly too late.
There is no one around to hear him.
The bug bomb malfunctioned and Stanley is too late, looks like this story is almost over...
Lexx means a lot of things to a lot of people. At first glance it's just another space show that's a little on the raunchy side, but viewers who get caught up enough in Lexx to see more than one season seem to develop much deeper feelings that border on fanaticism. Lexx has its own loyal cosplay fans and collectors, despite the lack of vendor support at conventions and the disappearance of distributor support for several years (thank goodness that last has changed).
Someone on twitter asked me a few months ago which Lexx episode is my favorite, and after a little thought, this is what I wrote back.
After that, I realized I have some pretty deep feelings associated with Lexx that I don't really talk about. I've been called a Lexx super nerd by a number of people and I've never said why I'm so attached to this show. So here it is, the way Lexx found and pushed all my buttons and why I think Lexx is good for the world. I don't like to talk about my 'stuff', and I'm sure I'll come across as a weirdo to some people when I say it. But fans of any show know that the characters and events that happen in a show can become symbolic of personal stuff, and as we displace our emotions into the stories, we unconsciously learn to deal with our own stuff. Stories give us situations to think about, characters give us relationships to relate to. As we become more involved in a show, we become more emotionally invested.
The biggest obvious impact Lexx had on me was near the beginning of season two, during an episode called "Terminal". In this episode there was a terrible accident when Kai was incorrectly awakened and he automatically braced Stanley right through the heart. Kai and Zev got Stan into the cryopod to put him into stasis before he actually died and found doctors to fix him.
I was completely stunned when that brace hit Stanley's heart, and very upset, almost wasn't able to continue with the show. I had been living with a heart condition called superventricular tachycardia since high school until well into my thirties, and by the time I saw this episode, a surgeon had been trying to talk me into surgery for nearly two years already because it was getting worse. My condition was becoming alarming, but I was terrified to have the surgery done since I was told I'd have a one in five chance of dying during surgery. Those are worse odds than Russian Roulette with a six shooter. A 20% chance might not sound like a big deal, but once it's your turn, that becomes 100%.
As ridiculous as it sounds, just making it through that episode changed everything for me. I held my breath every time they showed Stanley wrapped in plastic, and I was so relieved when his heart got fixed and he was fine. But that wasn't the end of the show, not by a long shot. Although it was hilarious seeing 790 pilot Stan's hospital bed with Stan in his underwear, something else terrible was going on. Zev and Kai were taken prisoner for sinister medical experiments, and by the end of the episode Zev gave her life to save Kai and left me curled up bawling my eyes out.
Within days I called my surgeon and set up the surgery. I faced the fact that this could be it and told all my family I love them. When I woke up, still very loopy from the anesthesia, I sang Kai's "I'm Alive" song to my daughter. I never would have done that if I'd been in my right mind, but drugs have a way of helping us express feelings more easily, and it was a very emotional moment for her, not even 20 years old yet, way too young to lose her mom.
There are other things in Lexx that speak to me deeply every time I see them. In Supernova we learn that Zev was raised in a box by holograms and trained for the wife bank. How many women in Earth's history have gone through the humiliation and degradation of never being more than that? Or being sex trafficked into slavery? It still goes on, all over the world. Zev is the unloved child that parents gave away, the love slave who actually escaped and wound up with the key to the most powerful weapon of destruction in two universes. She could have run away with a doctor and become a queen of terror, but she chose love and loyalty to Stan and Kai, the first people who ever treated her with kindness, even if it wasn't perfect. As a person, Zev was pretty clearheaded about reality, where she fit into it, and what she wouldn't tolerate in an amoralistic society. She could be girly and still command respect.
I grew up in an ultra conservative household where girls could never earn the status boys have just for being born boys. I was never given to feel worth my presence in this world no matter how hard I worked, nor forgiven for being born the way I was (I'm ASD). I grew up emotionally neglected and bizarrely treated, so when I saw Zev, it totally clicked. Many girls grow up feeling ugly or like they can't earn the love missing when their parents have their priorities mixed up, and then they feel pushed to perform 'wifely duties' and other behaviors attempting to earn that love. Growing up with a Mennonite father might be the same as growing up in any religiously repressed household where women have a 'place'. What very little we see of what happens to Zev in the first and second movies screams loads about third class citizens under the thumb of His Divine Shadow, and speaks loudly to repressed women watching the show. That so much could be implied in so little film time for her character is overwhelmingly poetic. All the sadness she grew up with, I have felt.
I just got this tweet as I was finishing that sentence.
I'm sitting in a public library bawling because of that. Was managing to hold it in till then. No idea if anyone is looking at me, staying focused on my writing.
Moving on.
It's not real often I run into a show where all the core characters have so much meaning for me. I'm not trying to hog the fan feels, in fact, I've kept all this in for many years. This is the first time in the years since Lexx first aired that I'm talking about this next bit to anyone in context of how it affects me personally.
Everybody loves Kai. The girls, the boys, the robot heads- everybody either wants to love Kai or to be Kai. Kai is just that cool. My initial reaction to Kai was repulsion. I couldn't explain it, still can't. It has nothing to do with sex or looks or that he was a killer or that he's dead. None of that. I think it's his conundrum between being able to intellectually know something and being unable to emotionally feel it. While other fans mooned and anthropomorphized, I just very simply got it. I'm stuck, too. I've had a pretty big challenge most of my life making the leap from processing information to feeling something about it, especially to being aware of having feelings and what to do with them. Michael himself has talked about the mandatory autistic nature of his character in interviews, especially during one scene in season three where Kai tried to bury himself and Xev asked him what he's doing buried in the dirt. I've gone weeks and even months not contacting family and feeling very content just to be left alone. It doesn't mean I don't like people, I actually like people very much. But I suffer an emotional disconnect that I don't see demonstrated very well in fictional characters, and I guess this hit pretty close to home for me. So much of my life I have simply just not reacted to people or events happening around me, and I come across to others as strange, cold, or uncaring, when really everything is going through an intellectual filter first. Much of the reactions I've learned to mimic are contrived for the sake of not being willing to die alone. I've been working very hard on social interaction and communication skills for several years, and I'm getting better and better at it, but in an eyeblink I could just turn into a statue and stare if I weren't self monitoring. I do a lot of thinking during those moments. I've wondered a lot about the reanimated state of Kai's physical brain, how the protoblood affects his actual synaptic processes, the locality of the 'me' point of view still being present either by simple function or by intellectual reaction to self observation. I have a sociology degree and aced classes in social psyche and brain studies, so the whole Kai experience thing really intrigues me. While other fans shipped him into fanfictions, I tore every scrap of that character apart in my mind trying to figure out the meaning behind his being, if there is any, and whether that kind of existence is horrifying. To never be able to turn all your memories off, to know the horrors of your body being severed into pieces and put back together like toys, to live with the idea that your body was raked out and rebuilt with foreign parts- who would want to own that? Would coming back to life somehow bring unbearable pain to all that scar tissue? For the life of me, I could never figure out how in the world people couldn't see that he had to reach through all that maddening static to interact with the others. To keep it all together in a dead brain and still be a 'nice guy' of a sort is a real icon for living with depression, when everyone around you still gets to enjoy food, enjoy sex, enjoy anything. I wonder if that's why so many fans might be subconsciously attracted to Kai, because in spite of his whole world being utterly black, he still finds a way to make a choice (through others) to do the right thing. *wow* He's darker than Batman could ever hope to be.
I love Stanley Tweedle. From the first time I saw him, I recognized the whole rebellious wimp thing as my favorite character type, because you never know what guys like that are going to do, and sometimes they pull through in ways you don't expect in the face of really big crap, and the way they do it may not always be cool, but it becomes cool. Stanley never gave up, even when everything sucked and everyone was against him, and that's what I'm like when everything sucks, I get cranky and rebellious and turn my crap day into something cool, because I want to. I hate depression. I've lived with ridiculous amounts of depression nearly my whole life, and as a way of life I like to twist it into a pretzel and throw it back at the universe. Stanley Tweedle is my all-time favorite scifi character because the twisted irony that swims through spacetime around that guy makes me laugh and want to hug people for all the suckiness they go through, even when I'm feeling crabby. If anyone could finger His Shadow, I'm really glad it was him, because he's like the rest of us, stumbling through our days and stubbornly hoping for the best even if the only way we can get it is to make it up.
And what about the Lexx itself? It all started for me with the big bug on Showtime. I saw the interview promo about a spaceship designed like a bug, a biomechanoid that was genetically designed and then grown to a monstrous size. As a living ship this space bug could carry a city-sized amount of crew and materials and interact in a simple way to a commander who had direct control over it via a 'key'. This key was a bio coded interface program that enabled conversation between bug and captain, and that was the cutest thing I ever saw in a space show. I grew up disgusted with bugs but have come to see them differently since I first encountered Lexx. Now I see them as tiny little bio machines that follow simple genetic codes, with simple feelings and thoughts like Lexx had. I don't know whether that's true, but I think it's better than hating bugs just because they're bugs. Lexx is also terrified of spiders, like I am, but I seem to be dealing with my arachnophobia a little better since my view on bugs has changed.
I could write a whole book on the characters and stories in Lexx, but this is already pretty long, and all that can go into more posts later. One last thought- Lexx has a real Don't Fear the Reaper feel to it, and I guess that's why I love it so much. No matter how awful everything gets, no matter how real and big and dark, the Lexx crew struggle with the real and big and dark and come through intact, themselves, knowing who they are and what they want.
:edit: 5-23-14 Another code integration update during this lengthy Xanga migration to new servers wiped all my videos from my posts, and since I can't remember the one I had here, I'm replacing it with my two fave Zev/Xev vids. You're welcome. Carry on.
I found this saved on my private blog, must have double posted it. I originally had it posted on my old Lexx fan blog, all that stuff is gone now, including the Xenia picture I used, so it's now missing from this post. I can't find it online any more, but it's an almost identical picture. :edit: 6-26-13 You know what, I found that picture at http://www.norajean.com/Biz-Archive/LEXX-Home/LEXX-001a.htm, huzzah!
Thursday, August 31, 2006
I have my own little Xev. She could care less about Lexx and thinks I'm crazy to watch it. She has no idea who Xenia is. Xenia has no idea who she is, either, so they're even. I just ran into that Xenia picture down there.
Ok, this is 2013 again, she's much older now. I wanted to add this to why Lexx is personal for me, because it's important.
'Twink' (my online nickname for her, after she scolded Scott one day about something, saying before she was even a twinkle in his eye), is my step daughter. I met her before she turned two, married her dad a little before before she turned five, and have pretty much been full time parent for her nearly all her life. Any step parent will appreciate how stressful it got at times since we live next door to her gramma and had somewhat regular contact with her mom. I come from a very different lifestyle background and the first five years in this house were challenging. One of the key things I learned was 'child first', and I made it through some tough emotional roller coaster years because I firmly believe in that.
A really eye-opening year was when the third season of Lexx aired. Both Xev and Twink had changed. Twink was just hitting her teens about the time Prince woke Xev up out of the cryopod, and the timing was so perfect for me. When an adolescent not of your own body lives in your house and you feel like the whole world is against you being the parent figure, a marriage can rock completely apart. Ours didn't. In fact, I suddenly felt a renewed compassion for my Twink, thanx to Xev that year. For one thing, Twink suddenly looked like one of my fave science fiction characters, a strong woman of misfortune, beautiful and committed to finding real love in her life. That character represented so many things I admire in strong women, like solid friendship through thick and thin, not being intimidated by what others think, knowing herself and sticking to her guns. I was able to transfer those feelings onto a step child who really needed a break. Life sucks when you first hit your teens, and you don't need other people's emotional baggage dragging you down. Because Xenia played Xev in the third season of Lexx, I was able to love a child through a very difficult year.
I come from people who don't believe in putting ourselves into spotlights for attention, and think striving to be 'pretty' leads to being sinful. I don't agree with this. I think people need to feel pretty in many ways, because feeling pretty means feeling like someone likes and accepts us. 'Pretty' is a metaphor, the opposite of 'ugly'. We feel ugly when we feel unwanted. The prettiest person in the world feels ugly if something is wrong in their emotional life, and there is nothing you can say to convince them otherwise.
My Twink is a very pretty person, especially on the inside, and I'm very proud of her. Be Lexxy with each other.
I have been looking high and low for a good Stanley Tweedle music video, and it was right under my nose right here on xanga. There are a couple more posted by LexxAddict, if you want to check it out, plus lots more goodies when you click to her main page and go through her posting calendar.
This is a LEXX 'poster' page and will be updated any time I make something LEXX until it gets hard to load, then I'll make another post for more. All are made by me, hosted by me, and anyone has permission to direct link, just click the pix to get the address or grab for your own download. New ones will get stacked at the top. Thumbnails will click out to full size.
4-9-13
I was named honorary "Snarkalec" several weeks ago and temporarily added to one of their member twitter lists after I hacked their logo onto Kai and joined in a live tweet Syfy watch party. Although I'm not an official member, here are a few links that are fun to check out. You can grab this pic with a highlight rollover for cut and paste.
I'm watchingApocalexx Nowbecause I cross posted the link over on twitter (always fun to find Lexx tweets), which I guess is timely since we just went through what some tweeps are calling the Worst Apocalypse Ever since nothing happened, and it got to the river part and I'm like 'Oh, yeah'- Kai on the River Kwai.This episode was filmed in Thailand, and Kai was piloting the boat on the River Kwai. If you remember the old movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, a very little of the weird stuff going on in Apocalexx Now is kinda vaguely twisted off that, along with Apocalypse Now. Knowing film history really helps you get the inside jokes and nods going on in Lexx.
Images click back to original source at The PIC Bug.
Escapism is becoming a global concept that drives media sales, and I'm full on board with it. At first you think video games and tv shows are just ways that people avoid real life, but that's not true. In the really old days of mythology, people used stories full of heroes and villains and dire situations and sparkling rewards not only to entertain, but to structure a belief system to model their lives on. Escapism provides that same opportunity to investigate the possibilities of making choices and taking actions, exploring beliefs in the moralities and motivations of characters, opening our minds to much more than the redundancy our lives sometimes feel like.
Lexx as a story introduces us to the same kinds of horrors we've heard of before in both our world history and in our libraries full of thousands of years of stories, but on a scale that instantly transports us into a new way of looking at the human condition. The story of the Lexx does not originate on Earth, and is not tainted with any of our preset belief systems or histories. Humanity is stripped of all earthly assumptions and is reconstructed into an entirely new mythology asking the viewer what would really happen if... How would characters really behave if... What is so refreshing about Lexx is that it not only dares to strip away our presuppositions, but dares to do so with a combination of grimness and flippancy that will change the way you look at human history on Earth.
The first season of Lexx is four movies, set in the Two Universes over a 6000 year time span, and largely centers on the Cluster, the home planet to His Divine Shadow who governs the League of 20,000 Planets. His Shadow makes Darth Vadar look like a cute little kitten with a ball of yarn. His Shadow makes Hitler look like a 14 year old novice. His Shadow is so evil that I would dare to quip even Satan is envious and aspires to be like him. Basically, the first season of Lexx is like Orwell on steroids. If you like dark *anything* in literature and other media, be it dark humor or dark situations or dark characters, it is here on the Lexx. But be warned- you cannot come into the Lexx assuming these humans have ever known your viewpoints on life. They haven't. They will not behave in any expected way that humans behave in any other media. Lexx as a four-series story often mystifies audiences because they don't understand that these characters have never known life as we've known it here on this earth. There is no such thing as psychological health, basic human rights, freedom of choice, or even just shopping. These things have never existed, and I know it's difficult sometimes for the audience to realize the depth of that.
The second season of Lexx is pretty much everything you wanted to see go horribly wrong in Star Trek or any other scifi show you might have watched. There is no happy ending, good doesn't triumph over evil, selfishness can sometimes be the only salvation, but it is awesomely funny and awful and cute and dark. This season is like a Lexx comic book on video, and I think it's probably vital to see it that way if you don't understand or appreciate the 'point'. The point is always our core four on the Lexx, nothing else. This is their story, and like our own lives, their stories don't always have a moral. What I get out of season two is that the characters lives are like my life, and the lives of people I see around me- random and chaotic, happenstance and chance, and what meaning we draw from our experiences is our own and very personal. As we follow Stan, Xev, Kai, and 790 on their journey, we feel drawn into them because they are more like our real selves than any characters we've ever known.
Stan is the Everyman, the average person who winds up caught in the stuff all around him everywhere he goes. He'd *like* to be the hero, but he's a normal person with normal flaws, and it's easy to see how we might also be just like him. Stan feels jilted by circumstances beyond his control, and takes them personally. He accidentally winds up commanding the most powerful weapon of destruction ever built in the Two Universes. He's not an evil man, but he's a nearly broken one who survived what other people didn't. Throughout the show we see how his simplest sadness has blown up into a wretchedness that must still be lived with somehow, as we get the hint that his one special love (possibly never realized beyond the crush stage) died as a result of his failure in the war against His Shadow. (If you're a Lexx fan and didn't catch this, you need to go rewatch the whole thing *right now*.) If we don't know these things about Stan, it's easy to blow him off as shallow and cranky, and I think some men can really empathize with that.
Zev is that sweet dream that never quite comes true, a love slave who missed her programming, beautiful and strong and yet sadly alone, smarter than she should be but seduced by her own weaknesses, and ultimately the product of the society around her. A lot of people can identify with feeling caught in this kind of flux, at odds with their physical and emotional needs and duped at every turn by users. "Life is not fair. I know that well." Raised in a box and schooled by holograms for the wife bank, absurdity of being takes on a unique glimmer in Zev/Xev. All she wants is to love and be loved, but alas, she cannot love Stanley Tweedle, although their relationship grows into something more like brother and sister during their journey on the Lexx. They do care about one another, and are the only family each other has.
Kai, well, he's had his life completely stripped away and is forced to commit horrible deeds, then has to 'live' in an animated state with the terrible memories and no way to feel passionately upset about it. The conundrum of feeling intellectually disgusted or upset with no emotions is a very difficult one for many fans to grasp, and it's very hard not to anthropomorphize one's own feelings onto his character. So many of us feel drained of our wills in the machine of society, forced to carry on without the dreams we once had or the feelings we once cherished, any noble efforts dashed down without our being able to stop it. Kai is a glaring reality, a souvenir of the Cluster, someone who triggers spontaneous empathy in others simply by being a walking scar, and there is no way to save him. What I especially notice about Kai is that he evokes the same kinds of imagery used in Native American and Asian storytelling about heroes who become tragically separated from their people and are forced to wander alone.
As for 790, who wouldn't want a sassy robot head zooming around the house on his little cart? I'm not a big fan of robots in general, in spite of all the scifi I watch, but I ~love~ 790, he's awesome. He has a scrap of human brain in his noggin, but we're not clear whose (possibly originally female in a vague teaser extra), and since it is only used to interface his programming instructions to a body he no longer has, we're never sure whether his growing inclination toward jealousy and evil near the end have anything to do with somehow being human. 790 robot drones are used on the Cluster and throughout the League of 20,000 Planets to carry out a variety of jobs, most noticeably escorting humans through procedures, rituals, and trials. They operate machinery and pretty much do all the mundane menial stuff humans can't tolerate long or well without causing problems. Such as executing death sentences... They have no minds of their own because their heads have been replaced with robot heads, but still retain human bodies, which are probably easier on upkeep and maintenance and can be recycled back into the protein bank. Our 790 is the perfect human joke back on His Shadow, if you want to take it so far as noting that even a tiny shred of human brain slipped through the cracks and helped create havoc for His Shadow.
The third season of Lexx goes all Dante and magnificently carries scifi into an artisan world of philosophy and even religion. I don't think any other scifi show has dared to take on anything this deep and still stubbornly retain its integrity through its characters, and manage to stay true to its original underlying theme. The Lexx itself doesn't lose any significance as the star of the show while our characters are faced with all new challenges and *finally* a real question of morality and ethics, which I think is a natural progression when we remember they came from such an utter lack of fortitude and grace in philosophical thinking. The Cluster allowed no education in Thought or the development of critical thinking, so Xev and Stan are almost like intellectual babes up against the very essence of evil incarnated, and all his cruel and subtle trickeries. This season is almost painful to watch in a good way, if you have the sort of mind that enjoys gnawing the bones of philosophical debate. Fortunately, this season is also easy to digest, the intellectual being so layered into our characters' foibles and desires. I am enamored of season three's astonishing level of storytelling, and the characters were all played so well, to me watching season three of Lexx is like the best of theater and commands a deeper level of respect.
The fourth season of Lexx is difficult to quantify, so my favorite way of defining the whole season is "omg, they found Earth". And it is super weird because the final situation in season 3 carries over and modifies what happens to the Earth, bringing the inhabitants of Fire and Water with them. The philosophical theater of season three erupts into political vaudeville on Earth, with morals and ethics exploding into a comical mockery. I think this is the perfect way to end their journey on the Lexx, if you consider that our heroes escaped from despicable evil on the Cluster and somehow still retain a certain naivete about despicable evil happening around them on Earth, even when Xev becomes overwhelmed by her Cluster lizard DNA and starts eating people. Nothing is sacred as our heroes take on everything unholy Earth has to offer.
One key element to the entire series is that the Lexx escapes from evil, outruns evil, blows up evil, defeats evil, runs into more evil, is used by evil, and dies during a war with evil- through everything, Stan, Xev, and Kai never experience a real relief from evil. They face it head on everywhere they go, and deal with it only as denizens who have escaped from His Divine Shadow can. I don't think they ever questioned the existence of evil, it's just everywhere you go, and you do what you've gotta do to survive it. Somehow that puts the human ingredient back into scifi storytelling for me. I don't know about other scifi fans, but I think that's such a nice change from the way other shows take the time to draw the line between ~metaphorical~ good and evil with rules and regs. Forget political correctness, forget tiptoeing around, forget the intellectual elevation above basic instinct. There is no rule book with Lexx. They blew it up.
Years ago I used to be able to find Lexx ecards, and wondered ifanyone out there still hosted this service. Here we go.
Hi Janika! Janika (janikabanks@aol.com) has sent you an eCard:
hello
This eCard was sent to you through SciFiUpdates.com the home of all things Sci-Fi.
If you'd like to check out sending Lexx ecards for Christmas, go toMedia and Download Sectionsto theLexx Gallery, choose the image you want, then in the upper left menus (they are tiny) choose 'item actions', and 3rd up from the bottom is 'send as ecard'. Easy peasy. My Hanukkah-Christmas-Kwanzaa-whatever holiday, birthday, or non-holiday present to you. It's all good on the Lexx.
One more little film study before the rest starts exploding into its legendary sex and violence, which, if you aren't yet familiar with the Lexx movies and series, is intro'd nicely with an interview atPart 1 - Dark Zone Adventures. Remember how in part 4I was a little obsessed with all the shadows they created with their lighting and how that played so nicely into His Divine Shadow's theme? This time, if you've got the dvd and can watch this, the shadows and weird lighting with the background sounds brainwash you right onto the Cluster.
Yeah, I got 97 screen shots for this one. Because I love Stanley Tweedle. Because I've felt just as sick to my stomach as that character has, and I'll bet some of you have, too. We may not have been told what he was told, but it may have been terrible for ~us~. And we can see in his face how incredibly awful his day is getting. And we know how it must feel....
As you recall frompart 3, Stanley is in very bad trouble and has to report to Correction Center Number 40 after shift change. He's already been demoted to the lowest class (4th) and has accrued 991 demerits. Our scene opens in a hallway with the correction center just ahead. And here our journey with Stanley Tweedle truly begins. That hallway is so cast in shadow that much of Stanley's walk is through dark patches, and ominous shadows are splashed across the floors and walls. As he walks we hear the play of odd chimes and soft gongs (the sounds of time, as it were), footsteps of people crisscrossing without talking, the gears of little mechanical servos buzzing around. It all looks like mechanical interplay, like the whole building is a big wind up mechanism running on a preprogrammed schedule. In the center is a looming desk, and over it an illuminated clock. The scene is clockwork in every sense, like a living piece of artwork. And more subtly you hear the screams of agony coming from somewhere close by, almost like music mixed in with the chimes. There is no escape.
Stan approaches the desk run by a busy looking Class 2 Data Clerk (you can tell by their hats what class they are) and says, "I was supposed to escort a prisoner here, Stanley Tweedle 467329 dash four-three department five-one-one level four." "Yeah?" The clerk just looks at him. Stan starts again- "He is refusing to turn himself in." "Yeah?" "I thought that if you told me what his punishment would be for not showing up, that might help persuade him." "Oh, eh. Give me that number again?" "467329 dash four-three department five-one-one level four?"
Anyone else catch that? One of the numbers is transposed frompart 2, when we got this, in case you keep track of bloopers.
"Good morning. Security Guard Class 4, number 47632943, Department 511, Level 4. This is your third wake up call. If you are late, you will receive 7 demerits. You already have 991 demerits."
Ok, so the clerk is typing away, stops, snickers. "If he's not here when we close at watch change, termination order will be issued automatically." Smiles. Seems like a friendly guy, helpful. You can see in Stanley's eyes he wasn't expecting to hear a *termination* order. The clerk goes on- "It's about, uh, 20 minutes." There's that smile again.
"Termination???" This is unbelievable. "That's what it says, termination." Again with that smile. You get the feeling that anything is fine as long as it doesn't affect him. The chimes in the background don't change, but in the mind they start sounding like death knells.
Stanley blurts in shock. "But he's a Designated Data Cooperator, he can't be terminated because he might be needed someday for important information!" He looks and sounds terrified. He was riding along for years on this one fact.
"DDC, eh?" You can tell this man enjoys his job. I couldn't help getting almost frame by frame on his demeanor. "Oh, sorry. That expired five months ago." Stan is stunned to get this news flash.
The clerk keeps going. "Let's see, he's a Level 4, Class 47 Transgression, normally -zzzt- cauterization." Yes, he actually added his own sound effect. Stan looks like he could live with that. "But, he's got 991 demerits and there's a special notation, so it looks like- one to three organs." Delivered with a smile.
"One to three organs???" Stan's shadow lurches up the side of the desk in all directions.
The clerk says, "Yeah. He'll have to donate one to three organs, depending on demand." "Demand?" "Demand for soft organs is red hot right now, so he's pretty well sure to be a triple donor." "But he didn't even do anything, it's just a mixup!" Stan is barely holding back his panic. The background screams become more noticeable here, and the clerk says with his biggest grin yet, "Life's a mixup." Smile, chuckle, laugh. This guy thinks he's a riot. He probably hasn't had a conversation this long in awhile. And he's not getting involved in this one with a 30 foot pole. If he has a clue Stanley is really talking about himself, he's not showing it.
But Stan doesn't crumble. Even in the face of immediate death and dismemberment, his mind is struggling for a way to deal with this, and to keep acting cool about it. "What organs?" "Usual combo...
...eyeball, kidney, testicle." Another big smile.
Stan looks pretty sick.
"If they want bone they'll take an arm or a leg, but we haven't done a limb cut in days." There's that smile again. So reassuring. "I'd suggest he turn himself in. After all, triple organ's better than a termination, huh?" Almost got a wink there.
Stan makes a flimsy attempt to heh heh back and fails. He just looks sick, there is no way out of this. "May His Merciful Shadow fall upon you," he tries to say but winds up in a whisper, and he can't make his arm go through the salute. The clerk is already typing away, but glances up long enough to give Stan another winning smile, a quickie salute, and looks back down again at his monitor as he grunts out a mangled, "Yeah", which feels like 'Yeah that bogus stuff, I hear ya, but I'm busy, see ya.' Stan is just another dead man talking to him in that hollow place, and there is no way he's going to let that dampen his good mood, which is probably even better now that he feels safer on his side of the desk.
Stan turns and exits dejectedly back out of the correction center, same angle, same shadows, same clockwork going on around him, his horrible moment swallowed up in bureaucracy. I think the glowing clock above their heads and the soft chimes still going on in the background along with the muffled screams and the barred shadows along the floor near the sickly dull red lighting makes a perfect picture for what must be going on in Stanley's head and chest about now. He kicks a servo going by, which flies into pieces, and the person nearest him jumps nearly out of his skin as if nothing that violent ever happens in that place. Or perhaps, because they all tiptoe around the constant violence ripping people apart in the next room. Stan walks into the blackness all alone in a giant crowded trap...
And isn't this the ultimate nightmare that bureaucracy is, a mockery of humans being... (I'm a Van Halen fan, that's a cool song. No, they had nothing to do with Lexx.)
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My first tracker was installed in 2004 and broke several times before moving to a new server, which lost a few months of stats, and then Xanga moved to new servers and I lost more stats for more months before the page came back up, so I've lost a total of about two years' worth of stats. The second was installed 2-22-14 and is considered very conservative by business owners who use analytics, which itself is very conservative, estimates being that roughly one third to one half of hits by real live people aren't even counted, most likely due to javascript discrepancies. Actual hits on several posts here are in the thousands now, and the Lexx Index in the ten thousands. I've got pingbacks turned off, so spam isn't counted at all within the Xanga internal tracker, and most direct post hits can be correlated to my real time linking activity on twitter and other social media. When I did Google Analytics beta testing I got to see how search engine performance compares to tracking. I believe live feed linking sources to various social medias are key to a future where search engines are more about performance than cataloging, which has been confirmed to me by coders who create bot algorithms as I was beta testing paper.li. I've fought hard through redundant age-old stacks to make my way to the google front lines again, so my Lexx work shows up faster on Chrome searches now. This has been a really interesting ride. At any rate, my point is, I can still go back 6 years on my original tracker and I can still see that in 2013 just before the last big blog server move, I was getting traffic like this (and since then, the tracker may have been abandoned, we can't tell). Click the thumbnail to see full size.
My original tracker also still lets me see the latest 500 visitors on a map. I once counted over 80 countries among the total visits. You guys are not alone. Click the map to see it better.
Besides Lexx, the most common search phrases that bring new visitors here are variations on 'huge spaceship'. The most seen post from a phrase search is How Big is the Lexx? My biggest Lexx referrer is Lexx Domain. Most of page views per person count comes from the Lexx tag on Tumblr. Visitors who stay the longest come through URLOpener and are pinged through the Google translator server in Mountain View, CA.
Lexxy holidays!
