Stan has been sent to Fire forever, but Xev is determined to get him back, causing Kai to leap down into the centre of the planet.
It’s all lead up to this, and it has to be said, it wasn’t really worth the wait. You see, after all the hints about just what the twin planets were, I thought it might not be as obvious as it seemed and there was a big twist coming. Not so. The planets are, as the title subtly hints at, Heaven and Hell. Now, the biggest problem with this episode is that I’m not convinced it explains everything that’s gone before.
The people the crew recognized were being punished for their good or evil. Okay, fine. Giggerota ate people, so her body has been eaten away. Mantrid wanted to rule everything, so now he has no idea who he is, and neither does anyone else. Lyekka is on Water because, presumably, she did good, along with Bunny, and Fifi seems to be on the wrong planet. Water has places of fun (Gametown, Boomtown) and Fire has places of pain (Girltown, K-Town) where the damned are forced to produce the means for Fire to battle Water forevermore. Fire never wins because its infighting always destroys its plans, therefore the status quo remains the same. What I still don’t get is how the LEXX got there, whether Prince is the Devil, who Duke and May were (presumably just minions wanting to be the leader of Fire) and what happens if you destroy Hell.
It’s been a heavy-handed allegory from the start, when you look at it. And although Xev doesn’t feel she has the right to destroy a planet, her blowing up of Fire seems an odd idea. Kai doesn’t seem to be so much in the centre of the planet as in the afterlife, so it seems odd that the worlds have any real physical presence. The fact that Kai has been proven this series to be able to get broken, yet somehow survives a planet blowing up around him is extremely odd. Plus, Stan returning to life is weird as well; he died legitimately, and just because his body still exists, that doesn’t mean he should escape his punishment.
Hopefully some of this will be sorted out in the next series, which looks like it involves the LEXX crew reaching Earth. Now, on the one hand I like the idea of all the dead souls of the Light Universe making up the population of our planet, but on the other it detracts from what LEXX has been doing to date ie building a weird and surreal world all of its own completely separate from ours. By bringing ‘reality’ into it, it somehow kills the concept of the show. Still, I’ll be interested to see where it goes from here. Will the crew make their home on Earth or will LEXX eat it? We’ll just have to wait and see.
And thus the experiment ends. As an idea, it wasn’t big enough to stretch over 13 episodes without a break. The season was too slow and in places incoherent, but it still had flashes of brilliance. It could have ended better, but it shouldn’t be ignored that LEXX has never had much luck being consistently good, more consistently odd. I await the next phase…
***
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