Series / Lexx

The main cast, seasons 2-4.(L-R: 790, Kai, Xev, Stan.)

"Comedy, Tragedy, Technology, Sex,
Infinity, Insanity, Intensity, Sex,
Beauty, Savagery, Absurdity, Sex,
Assassin, Love Slave, Idiot... Lexx."

— Self-explanatory commercial

Yo-way-yo...

Lexx (known in its first season in America as Tales from a Parallel Universe), is a German-Canadian co-produced Space Opera. It ran on the Global Television Network and later the Sci-Fi Channel from 1997-2002.

We open in the so-called "Light Universe", which is ruled by His Divine Shadow. He claims to protect the Light Universe from the evils of the "Dark Universe", but it's later revealed that the Dark Universe is our universe. He converts a giant insect into an unstoppable planet-killer called the Lexx. This thing is like a '69 Mustang which he's been restoring, and he can't wait to use it. Then a quartet of idiots somehow steal the deadliest weapon ever made from the most evil being to ever exist, and now must run for their lives.

The show takes Sigmund Freud's axiom that the sex drive and the death drive are the two main forces controlling human nature and plays them to the hilt. Its motley collection of weirdos zoom around the galaxy looking to get laid, never learn their lessons, and blow up every planet they visit. Rinse and repeat. Take the fatalism of Wagnerian opera, the budget of a Sega CD game, and the logic (and sometimes acting) of softcore porn, and that's Lexx.

The show originated as a series of four TV movies, each one featuring a notable guest star: Barry Bostwick, Tim Curry, Rutger Hauer, and Malcolm McDowell. The second season was spent wandering the two universes.

As a cost-saving measure and an opportunity for long-form storytelling, the Lexx spent the last two seasons parked mostly in orbit. Season Three revolved around a new binary system: Fire, a barren wasteland, and Water, a lush paradise. It also introduced Prince, a primeval force of chaos in the shape of Nigel Bennett (of Forever Knight fame). The fourth and final season planted Lexx in present day Earth—as seen through the lens of Paul Verhoeven and David Cronenberg while tripping on LSD. It satirically skewered modern culture, with targets including militia fanatics, pretentious actors, politicians, internet porn, Reality Television, and Kaiju films.

The show was often described as the anti-Star Trek, and, fittingly, you could say the show's five-year mission was to explore strange new worlds and blow them up, seek out the sleaziest and seediest new life and civilization, and to boldly come where no man has come before.

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This show provides examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Oberon for Stan, and Stan for Bunny and Lulu. He might also be this for Zev in the first season, but they settle into a more comfortable platonic relationship over time.
• Absurdly Long Stairway: A big problem for Stan in "Tunnels." One of the stairways that Stan and Xev descend is over 10,000 steps.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: In-universe example. The real time prophet was an unremarkable-looking older woman who didn't show much skin. The reenactors' depiction of her in "Brigadoom" is a young woman in a midriff-baring outfit.
• Aerith and Bob: Everyone on the Lexx has a vaguely foreign-sounding name, except for Stanley H. Tweedle. He's also the only character from the Light Universe who's known to have a middle initial, although we never find out what it stands for.
• Affectionate Parody: A few episodes contain parodies of/homages to certain other types of media:
  • "791" pays homage to Alien with the large "alien" eggs.
  • "Wake The Dead" appears to be a homage to slasher movies and their assorted tropes.
  • They're off to see the....Wuzzard?
  • Brigadoom
  • Xevivior is a parody of Survivor
  • "Prime Ridge" is a parody of American Beauty
  • "Apocalexx Now" is a parody of Apocalypse Now
  • "Lyekka vs. Japan" was a parody of the giant monster movies like Godzilla that came out in the 50s.
• After the End: The Light Universe in season two appears to be this, after the Divine Order's cleansing. Nothing even remotely resembling a civilized world appears, only isolated outposts ("Terminal", "Luvliner"), backwater planets that don't seem to have contact with the larger universe ("Lyekka", "Nook"), and decimated worlds struck by the cleansing and collapse of the Divine Order ("White Trash", "Twilight"). A vibrant, thriving universe this is not.
• Afterlife Antechamber: Before he gets sent to the equivalent of either Heaven or Hell, Stan's soul has to go through a trial on a location between them.
• Alien Landmass: A sizable amount of the Cluster's surface either consists of or is covered in large squares, which resemble the pattern of the rubber harnesses worn by Cluster prisoners.
• Alien Sky: A few. Claggia's sky is orange; Brunnis's contains a bright blue star; and Fire and Water each features prominently in the other's sky.
• Aliens Are Bastards: The Insect Civilization. Insects, by their own admission, have an instinctive, intractable urge to Kill All Humans.
• Aliens Speaking English: Earth appears to be the only planet in the two universes with any languages other than English.
• Allegedly Dateless: Several plots hinge on Stan's desperation for sex. The problem is, for an average-looking, broke, commitment-phobic older man who usually reacts with disinterest if not disgust to any woman not young enough to be his daughter, he's pretty successful: He hooks up with Sissy in "White Trash," a whole bevy of ladies in "Boomtown," and a beautiful college student in "Prime Ridge" (as well as her mother, the only age-appropriate woman he ever deigns to pursue).
• All Love Is Unrequited: A recurring theme, though in most cases it would be more accurate to describe it as "All Lust is Unrequited".
• All Planets Are Earthlike: Averted. Stan and Xev have to wear pressure suits when responding to a distress call in "791," as the survivors had crashed on a planet incapable of supporting human life. However, since humans seem to be the only species with a widespread presence, all of the permanently-populated planets that the Lexx crew visits have Earth-like atmospheres and gravities.
• All There in the Manual: From a DVD feature; 790's chunk of human brain really did come from a woman. Specifically, one who propositioned a young, attractive Divine Order priest only for him to turn her in for breaking the law in doing so; she thought he'd made a pass at her, but it was actually his old and unattractive mentor that did so.
  • This feature was commissioned by the Sci-Fi channel as an introduction to Lexx when they first broadcast the second series since, while they had run on cable years earlier, the original movies were relatively unknown in the US at the time.
• Almighty Idiot: The last Divine Shadow's human component was "a truly vicious specimen," whose brain needed a second vacuuming to ensure compatibility with the Shadow Essence. Unfortunately for the Divine Order, the priests were in a hurry and didn't bother to finish "cleansing" him, leading to this.
• Alternate Universe: The Light and Dark Zones.
• Ambiguously Human: Giggerota, the Cannibal, who wields a long, prehensile tongue, but refers to herself as "human"; notable because Human Aliens are common in the setting and Rubber-Forehead Aliens are practically unknown.
  • A handful of Fire's élite, like Duke and May, know much more about the nature of their world than the average inhabitant, and can retain memories from one life to the next.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • At what point did Kai fulfill the prophecy and the last of the Brunnen-G destroy the Divine Order? Was it the death of the Giga Shadow after the Cleansing? Or Kai using his brace weapon to kill the current host of the Divine Shadow, before he can stop the Lexx from destroying the Divine Order's flagship?
  • What is Prince's relationship with May? Was she a traitor from Planet Water or a plant left behind in a destroyed water town to influence the crew of the Lexx?
• Amputative Sentencing: In the Cluster, many crimes are punished by organ harvesting; the organs are then fed to the Lexx. While it's usually fatal, Stanley Tweedle is told that the penalty for showing disrespect to a noble is usually "just" two or three organs; the guard he asks suggests an eye, kidney, and testicle.
• Ancient Astronauts: Rebels against the Divine Order stored a semi-sentient Bandage Mummy on Earth for later use.
• And I Must Scream: The "permanent studio audience" in "Lafftrack" and the fate of many of those damned to Fire.
• And Show It to You: The prisoners on the crashed transport in 791 have their hearts removed and their bodies put on life support to make sure they can't escape. And they're conscious when their hearts are removed.
• And the Adventure Continues: The show ends with the characters still looking for a new home, but despite the horror and destruction they've seen, they're just as optimistic they'll find it one day.
• Animation Bump: The full-CGI shots in the first season aren't great, but there's a huge jump in quality starting with the second season, and it goes uphill from there.
• Anti-Hero Team: Stan threatens to blow up inhabited planets for frivolous reasons, Xev usually means well but doesn't have any great plan beyond new personal experiences, Kai turns Ax-Crazy if the person waking him up inputs the wrong sequence, and 790 would happily leave everyone in the universe to die if he could stay with his current beloved. Still, they usually pull together when faced with a greater cosmic danger (although 790 becomes less and less reliable as the show progresses), and they collectively save most of the Dark Universe in both season 2 and season 4.
• Anyone Can Die: If an episode has guest characters, chances are they're going to be dead by the end of the episode (or several episodes later). See Red Shirt below.
  • And it's not just for guest characters, even the main cast is fair game.
  • In fact Every character in the show dies at least once.
• Apocalypse How: It's pretty telling of how dark this series is that the very first scene features a Class X, spends the next two seasons running up and down the scale, with at least one EVERY EPISODE, and culminates with a nice big Class X-4.
• Armored Closet Gay: Farley Knuckle, the Jeff Probst-esque reality show host from the Season 4 episode "Xevivor." He is in extreme denial about his erotic thoughts toward other men.
• Arranged Marriage: Zev was bought as a present for an adolescent boy prior to the start of the series, after spending her entire life "in a box" at the Wife Bank after her parents abandoned her to it. The wedding doesn't go well, to say the least.
• Arrows on Fire: Used by raiders from Fire in their attacks on Water.
• Artistic License – Space: The back half of season two involves "patches in the sky" where Mantrid drones are converting the universe into more Mantrid drones. This conveniently ignores relativity, since anything we see happening in a distant galaxy actually happened millions or even billions of years ago according to our local time.
• Ass Shove: The alien probes from Season 4, which look like carrots with mechanical legs, attach themselves to a host by burrowing into an unfortunate person's rectum.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Wist (or, rather, the queen worm in Wist form) in Eating Pattern, Lyekka in Lyekka Vs Japan, the latter of which is an Affectionate Parody of both the western perception of Japanese crazyness as well as Godzilla.
• Attempted Rape: In "791", Stan is very nearly raped by the body of the ship's pilot (after 790 re-animates it by attaching his head - er, himself - to it, and things go very, very wrong), until Kai intervenes just in the nick of time.
  • No fewer than three incidents of this take place in "Luvliner." First, Stan and Xev threaten to blow up a space brothel if the pimp doesn't allow them in for free. Second, when Xev's prostitute instantly decides that theirs is a true love that "cannot be hurried," she resorts to physical force (only to be foiled by attacking space pirates). Third, the assassin holding Xev hostage tries to rape her, but isn't prepared for her Cluster lizard strength or Kai's return.
• Auteur License: Every single one of the show's 61 episodes was written or co-written by some combination of Paul Donovan, Lex Gigeroff, and Jeffrey Hirschfield. When the show was renewed for a fourth season of twenty-four episodes (its longest), a grand total of four had other writers, and even then they were all co-written by one of the original trio. Notably, when Hirschfield temporarily left in season three (while continuing to voice 790), Donovan and Gigeroff wrote all thirteen episodes by themselves.
• Auto-Doc: The protein regenerator can strain contaminants out of blood and reattach limbs; however, its scans require interpretation by one of the crew.
  • The outpost of Ruuma has a robot head with advanced medical knowledge.
• Auto-Kitchen: I suppose you could call the phallic appendages that extrude grey paste that.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Blackpack, a pincer-shaped Disintegrator Ray that always seems awkward to use (and shows consistent Special Effect Failure).
  • The Lexx itself, the only weapon at its disposal is its Wave-Motion Gun, which is ludicrously overpowered for ship to ship combat or self-defence.
• Baby Planet: TV Land in "Lafftrak".
• Bad "Bad Acting": The male porn star in "Fluff Daddy." Averted by Lulu, who, despite working in porn, takes her work seriously.
• Bad with the Bone: Pa Gollean and, later, Xev use a Stock Femur Bone in a couple of fights.
• Badass Boast: Kai has a standard one that he likes to use, that is varied from situation to situation. The vanilla version goes:

  Kai: I've killed mothers with their babies. I've killed great philosophers, proud young warriors, and revolutionaries. I've killed the evil, the good, the intelligent, the weak, and the beautiful. I have done this in the service of His Divine Shadow and his predecessors, and I have never once shown any mercy.

  • A variant of this was used as a hilarious Take That! in "Tunnels":
  Kai: I've killed mothers with their babies. I've killed great philosophers, proud young warriors, and revolutionaries. I've killed the evil, the good, the intelligent, the weak, and the beautiful. But... it's been a while... since I slaughtered a whole roomful of petty bureaucrats!
  • Let's not forget that Kai has more than his fair share of such boasts.
    Kai: The dead do not poo.
• Badass in Distress: Kai in Season 3 when he's "out of alignment."
  • And again in Season 4 when he's running low on protoblood.
• Bald of Evil: His Divine Shadow (underneath a really weird hat), and later Duke.
• Bathos: A lot of this. For example, when Stan asks the Lexx why it blew up a planet of sentient robots, it turns out that the Lexx didn't know what the word "cancel" meant.
  • Zev's incomprehension in the face of death is sad, especially since it stems from her upbringing in a box. However, her smoke-inducing attempts to jump-start dead bodies are comically ridiculous.
  • When people mention that Stan caused the destruction of a hundred Reform Planets, he usually shoots back that it was only ninety-four!
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: While his already being dead explains why space can't kill him, Kai can also talk in space. Possibly justified, since the "bio-scholars" might have given him some sort of synthesizer (although his voice hasn't changed since he was human). Squish also seems unharmed by brief exposure to vacuum.
• Battle Theme Music: "Cleric Theme" plays in the background of most big combat scenes in the first couple of seasons.
• Big Bad: Season 1 has His Divine Shadow, Season 2 has Mantrid who is influenced by His Divine Shadow's essence making him His Shadow's spiritual successor, Season 3 has the Prince of Fire, a being with more than a little in common with Satan. While Prince seems to be this at the start of Season 4, the role eventually goes to the invading, carnivorous plants.

• Big Damn Heroes: Stanley, of all people, gets one of these in "Giga Shadow". Kai, however, is a master of this trope.
• Big Damn Kiss: Xev and Kai in the finale.
• Bio Data: Assistant Deputy Back-Up Courier Stanley Tweedle had vital data about the Divine Order's superweapon, the Lexx, encoded in amino acids stored in a false tooth.
• Bio Punk: One of the more prominent TV examples.
• Bittersweet Ending: The series ends with Kai performing a Heroic Sacrifice to stop the asteroid (presumably saving all life in the universe) and the Lexx dying of old age, but Stan and Xev survive on "little Lexx" and set out to find a home.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Lots, but the Lexx itself takes the cake. It's a Manhattan-sized genetically engineered insect with a planet-killing Wave-Motion Gun, fetish accommodations, and it reproduces by mating with a dragonfly from Holland.
  • The Insect Civilization is also worth mentioning; they naturally secrete a substance that re-animates dead human flesh. They have organs that allow the passing of life-essence from one body to another, and it even works across species, but it isn't without risks; an essence passing to a body that still has a mind of its own combines with it and is permanently altered, as seen by the final His Divine Shadow with its improperly prepared human host, as well as Mantrid.
• Bizarre Alien Locomotion: Cluster lizards curl up and roll like wheels.
• Bizarro Episode: Invoked when the crew tries to reach the center of the universe as a way of fighting Mantrid, solely on the idea that things are different at the center of the universe, and may give them some sort of advantage. All of season three can be seen as this, as it takes place in the afterlife, which is a solar system ours, actually at the center of the Dark Zone. A traditional example comes in form of A Midsummer's Nightmare.
• Bizarre and Improbable Golf Game: Parodied in "ApocaLexx Now." First, a group of long-term POWs, just freed by the Lexx's crew, storms the golf course at an international summit. Then Pope G.G. Rota gets the idea to capture Stan and Priest and aim her balls at gas cans over their heads. The crew of the Lexx never realizes that any of this is outside the rules of the game.
• Black Comedy Rape: A lot.
  • Part of Stan's backstory revealed Gigashadow. It was what broke his will and got him to reveal (part of) the data shipment he was carrying. While Feppo and Smoor are comically-grotesque Depraved Homosexual sadists, Stan's trauma is played seriously.
  • In "Super Nova" the Poet turns out to have rigged the "Love" section of the Chamber of Memory to inseminate the first woman who entered with his semen. Unfortunately, the sensors shorted out and it grabbed Stanley instead.
  • Happens to 790 in "Luvliner".
  • In "791", 790 attaches himself to and reactivates a cyborg body which turns out to contain the consciousness of its original owner, a Depraved Homosexual rapist who goes after Stanley. Once he's about to force himself on Stanley, a helpless 790 briefly takes over to express his utter embarrassment at the situation with the most comically deadpan tone of voice possible.
  • Later in "769," 790 has every intention of raping Kai when Kai doesn't express any interest in taking advantage of his new "parts," and is about five seconds away from doing it right in front of everyone before events conspire to stop him. Kai's reaction to this entire chain of events is hilariously apathetic, while Stan protests that it's Sick and Wrong.
  • Stan in seasons 3/4 repeatedly goes past trying to talk people into sleeping with him and into threats, blackmail or actually laying hands (and tongues, etc) on women who have no idea what he's doing or are visibly disgusted by it.
  • In "P4X" we see a porn site which apparently kidnaps people, chains them up, and then mashes them together in front of the cameras in order to be rape on both sides.
  • Tricking a blindfolded man into having sex with a (semi-sentient) corpse instead of Xev. Not sure if the corpse consented either.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Happens to those possessed by His Divine Shadow. Also, in "Lafftrack", the host has soulless black eyes.
• Bond One-Liner: Kai seems to like these. In Super Nova alone he uses a couple:
  (after subduing Giggerota) "Dinner is canceled."
  (after putting himself back together after being bisected) "I'm feeling altogether better."
  • And after an aerial rescue of Xev with his wrist harpoon:
    "I remember, I used to like fishing."
• Booby Trap: Lomea and her underlings use one to catch Xev in "Tunnels."
• Bookends: Compare the beginning of the first episode to the end of the last.
  • There's a subtle one in the same two episodes; when the Lexx takes its final shot and blows up Earth before it dies, the music is a less hopeful-sounding remix of the track that plays in the premiere when the Lexx first escapes from the Cluster.
• Bottle Episode: Much of "Gondola" is precisely this.
• Bound and Gagged: The residents of Claggia do this to Zev. Brizon forces Kai to inflict it on Stan.
• Brain in a Jar: His Divine Predecessors albeit without support fluid and Lafftracks permanent studio audience mostly decapitated heads again without support fluid.
• Briar Patching: Mantrid is destroyed by triggering his sadistic tendencies, which he predicted would happen.
• Brainwashing: The psychological aspect of love-slave programming consists of two phases, the second of which involves overriding any of the person's other personality traits with an obsessive desire for their master. Zev was subjected to phase one (which accelerated her libido), but replaced herself with 790 in the "lusticon" before the second phase was performed.
  • The Wife Bank is designed for this. "Holo-matrons" raise the girls, from infancy, with the sole purpose of turning them into obedient, sexually-satisfying wives.
• The Bridge: Very different from the typical version. Perhaps because the Lexx does not communicate or take commands from anyone but its current captain, the bridge has only one seat, and the closest thing to a console is some sort of energy/holographic display activated by holding one's hand in front of the captain's chair. Most of the bridge is just a big, empty circle, surrounded by a deep moat of sorts.
• Broken Bird: Stan is revealed as this in the fourth movie, when we learn how he was made to reveal (part of) what he was carrying. He was raped, repeatedly, over a relatively prolonged period, by Sub-Ns Feppo an Smoor. He gets a chance to confront his abusers, but is clearly hesitant and fearful about it.
• Bug War: The war between the Brunnen-G and the Insect Civilization in the Backstory.
• Bury Your Gays: Justified Trope. Aside from the Catholic schoolgirls in Doctor Longbore's ship, every single character in the show has died at least once, including the regulars, and often in a cruel and unusual way.
  • Brother Trager in "Nook" seemed to be Too Good for This Sinful Earth, and moved Stanley to genuine regret that he couldn't return Trager's feelings and genuine remorse over Trager's murder.
  • And when the men of Girltown (Who seemed to be 'guilty' of nothing more than being drag queens) escape their Hell and seem set for a more happy life in Garden, they are promptly consumed by Lexx.
• Butt-Monkey: If anything bad is going to happen, it will happen to Stan. If other crew are affected, it will happen to Stan first.
  • Also true about the Predecessor brains ... eaten, stomped on, continually disconnected from their life support ... they spend more time shrieking in terror than imparting wisdom.
  • 790 gets a lot of this, mostly in the form of being thrown/punted/hurled across the room.
• Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: Lexx is ironically home to many insects one of which was a butterfly symbolizing death and rebirth in the episode "The End of the Universe".
• But What About the Astronauts?: The second season features these types prominently, taking place in the Light Universe After the End. Of course, this being Lexx, and Mantrid consuming the universe planet by planet, most of these astronauts don't survive their introductory episode.
  • "Lyekka" and "Wake the Dead" are both notable, the former featuring the first astronauts from an unincorporated planet being picked up by Lexx right before their world is destroyed and the latter having a group of teenagers who survived the fall of the Reform Planets because their stasis pods never woke them up.
• Call-Back: If you pay careful attention to the credits of Lyekka Vs Japan, you'll notice that the usual blurb about location shooting now says "Filmed on location in Nova Scotia, Canada and Japaneseland," a reference to "Apocalexx Now" where President Priest gives a speech about driving the Japanese out of Vietnam and back to Japaneseland.
  • At the end of season three, we learn that Earth is in the dark zone. The protagonists are from the light zone. So the first season really is "tales from a parallel universe."
    • Or would be, if, of the four movies, they hadn't spent all of two of them and parts of the other two in the Dark Zone.
• Came Back Wrong: Several times in different ways.
  • Kai. He is resurrected by His Divine Shadow as a subservient Soulless Shell, a mockery of the passionate hero he was in life. Of course this was completely intentional as part of His Shadow's attempt to Screw Destiny.
  • 790 was a reasonably contributing member of the crew in season 2, who Zev risked a lot to save. Unfortunately, after a few traumatic reboots and some brain damage, the robotic personality took a turn for the worse.
  • Most of the "life-essences" that reincarnate on Earth after the destruction of Water and Fire seem worse for the wear. The living Kai is an incoherent performance artist whose idea of method acting involves stapling up his feet, Bunny has turned into The Ditz as well as a cheerleader for President Nuke 'em, Moss is a conspiracy nut who thinks that all numbers which can be multiplied or divided to make the number 6 demonstrate evil, and Lulu (likely the reincarnation of either season-2 Lyekka or the human Lyekka that Stan knew as a teenager) steals the Lexx and releases Vlad, who had been trapped in a cryopod.
  • In "Mort," the mortician has been doing Frankenstein-esque experiments attempting to bring back his sweetheart. Thanks to Kai's protoblood he succeeds, but judging by her attitude the process was glitchy. As she strangles him to death, she gasps "I kill you on the name of His Divine Shadow!"
• Camp Gay: A lot, but there was a guy in "Nook" that was actually pretty sympathetic.
  • Puck and Titania from Midsummer's Nightmare.
  • Feppo and Smoor.
• Camping a Crapper: One of the teens from the episode "Wake the Dead" meets his end while sitting on the toilet.
• Candlelit Ritual: Prince's subjects perform one in "May." Bonus points for using Ominous Latin Chanting, too.
• Cannibal Clan: The Golleans kill and, it's heavily implied, eat the last surviving space trucker at the end of "Love Grows." Pa's choice of weapons suggests it's not the first time they've eaten a human.
• Can't Have Sex, Ever: Xev and Kai as a couple.
  Kai: My sex organ has not functioned for over two thousand years.
  Xev: My sex organ has never functioned, so we both have a lot of catching up to do!
  Kai: Xev, you are clearly desirable and beautiful, but to me, sex is just an intellectual concept.
  Xev: [frustrated and upset] I don't care if you're dead! I don't care if you can only appreciate this in your mind! I have a hyperactive libido and I need it now! I can't do this alone!
  Kai: I can't do it at all.
  Xev: [quietly, miserably] ... I hate you. [she walks away, shouting] I HATE YOU!
  • Stan and Lyekka, as she is "smooth around the bend."
• Captain Obvious: Because "the dead do not respond to context," Kai takes most questions at face value, which sometimes leads to this.

  Stan: "Who's Poet Man?"

  Kai: "A poet, perhaps."

• Card-Carrying Villain: Prince gleefully describes himself as "evil" and is out to cause as much suffering as possible just 'cause.
  Kai: Why do you want to destroy the Planet Water?
  Prince: Because it is full of good, and I am full of bad. I think that's all there is to it. I'm not very complicated really.
  • It's heavily implied that Prince is a Satan equivalent and that Planet Water is like Heaven, which would certainly explain it.
  Prince: I tempt those who can be tempted and I punish those who deserve to be punished. That is my function, my occupation. My job. My joy. What is wrong with that? I also punish some who have done nothing wrong. Who slipped through the cracks. But then ... no system is perfect.
  • Grand Prosecutor Jihanna from "Stan's Trial" fits this trope to an extent - she considers being called "an evil woman" a compliment.
• Cartwright Curse: Stan and Xev's actual and potential lovers drop like flies. Thodin, Laleen, Sissy, the priests from "Nook," the prostitutes from "Luvliner," May, Uther, the space truckers from "Love Grows," Rooster, and even the faux Dracula all bite the dust. For starters.
• The Cassandra: Stan. Despite his dire warnings about how wrong everything is going to go coming from a place of deep cowardice, he does live in a very cruel universe, and he knows it.
• Casual High Drop: Kai, a lot. Justified in that he's a decarbonized, undead cyborg built to withstand almost any punishment. It does cause him serious damage one time (although he's still pretty casual about it), when he drops all the way from the Lexx's orbit to a planet's surface.
  • Cluster lizards can pull this off, although possibly not to the same extent as Kai. Even Squish, an infant, survives a fall of hundreds of feet without apparent injury. Once Xev masters Cluster lizard locomotion, she's able to jump from close to the height of a smokestack and roll off the momentum.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: It has to exist in order for the action of the stories to take place, but the exact mechanism is never specified and the Lexx just "slows down" or "speeds up." Several episodes involve presumably sublight spacecraft and Human Popsicle space travelers from more primitive worlds.
• Catchphrase: "The dead do not [insert almost any possible completion of the sentence here]."
  • The dead have no need for completed sentences.
  • Prince has one that doubles as a Phrase Catcher: "(I'm/He's) very good with pain."
• Catholic Schoolgirls Rule: Dr. Longbore thinks so, anyway. Fetish outfits aside, whether or not the girls he places on the Noah after they pass his panty-sniffing "hystamine test" are catholic is not clarified.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The second season gets a lot more serious as the crew realizes how big a threat Mantrid is. Happens again in the second half of the fourth season, with at least half of the jump in the finale itself.
• Chained by Fashion: All of the escaped Cluster prisoners continue to wear at least part of their rubber restraints after breaking free.

• The Chew Toy: Stan. The Divine Predecessors qualify, too (literally, in one case, when Giggerota gets her hands on them).
• Circles of Hell: Specific areas of the planet Fire are worse than others, with the deepest areas generally being the worst and receiving the worst offenders.
• City on the Water: Not surprisingly, every city that we see on the planet Water is one of these.
• City Planet: The Cluster. The city only covers about a sixth of the surface, but is still massive enough to be completely visible from orbit at all times.
• Cleavage Window: Zev's first dress has one. It's also part of the Gametown uniform, with the twist that men's uniforms also include them.
• Cold Equation: In "Gondola," several characters find themselves running out of fuel while floating in a balloon gondola above a sea of lava, and need to shed weight, leading them to vote on who goes over the side.
• Comedic Sociopathy: A feature of many of the series villains.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Field Commander Moss and his men are quintessential '90s Right Wing Militia Fanatics who consider the ATF part of the deep state controlling America ... but they're more than happy to take it over and start running the deep state for their own ends.
• Continuity Drift: Being primarily a sex farce in space, the show was never very tight with continuity when there was so much UST and hanky-panky to dwell over.
  • The Key to the Lexx:
    • In Season 1 it's established the key to the Lexx is transferred from one captain to the next at the point of death, in Season 3 it's established that the most intense of sexual experiences is sufficient, and Prince disguised as Xev spends a big chunk of an episode trying to coax it out of Stan. In Season 4 the fear of impending death (i.e. having a gun pointed at you, or hanging on for dear life above a 50-foot drop), or making out with someone you're really hot for (although the latter primarily happens with Bunny) is enough to cause the transfer. This is strange considering that Stan had been near death countless times and has had sex over the course of the previous seasons, and the key had stayed firmly put.
    • Could be Fridge Brilliance in that as Lexx becomes more and more senile, the key becomes less stable and more prone to transfer.
    • However, in "I Worship His Shadow", Thodin is shown voluntarily transferring the key to one of his rebels before facing off with Kai and it's suggested in "Terminal" that releasing the key could be done voluntarily. It should be noted that there's never a situation where the person with the key actually wants to give it to someone else so the edge of death/absolute sexual pleasure is really more of the circumstances they know will force the key to transfer, not necessarily the only means of transference.
    • The first series also establishes that the key is located in your hand (hence Giggerota and the brains hijacking the Lexx with Stan's), but come the latter series' it is located in the brain.
  • At first, Stan's tooth is stated to contain amino acid codes that helped create the Lexx, but in "Stan's Trial", the amino acid codes were used by His Shadow's forces to pass through the biometric shield protecting the 94 Reform Planets instead.
• Continuity Nod: Things would often come back to haunt the crew to varying degrees.
• Contrived Coincidence: The entirety of "I Worship His Shadow" is one giant Contrived Coincidence, following Stanley Tweedle as he bungles his way around the Cluster at random, stumbles upon his old commanding officer, and gets the Lexx dumped into his lap by total accident.
• Converging-Stream Weapon: The Lexx shoots dozens if not hundreds of mini-beams at a time; they converge in front of the ship to destroy whatever the captain has ordered blown up.

• Corrupt Church: The Divine Order. 'Course this is deliberate, due to the fact that His Divine Shadow is really a survivor of the Insect War.
• Cosy Catastrophe: Played with. The Order didn't bother Cleansing several isolated and low-population groups: A space-station hospital still has the staff to perform bizarre biological experiments, and nobody from Potatoho even knows the Order existed in the first place. Further, the Cleansing stripped planets of humans to feed the Giga rather than of metals, fertile soils, etc., so resource extraction and trade networks haven't completely broken down: For example, there are still manganese mines and garbage transporters. There's even a market for minor luxuries, as we see when Feppo and Smoor visit a massage parlor. On the other hand, a lot of the people who survived were mad scientists, contract killers, cultists, and xenophobes, so they aren't necessarily safe for our protagonists to deal with.

• Covers Always Lie: The Echo Bridge DVDs try waaay too hard to sell the show as being moody and dramatic instead of gleeful schlock. All the main characters (and Malcolm McDowell, who is featured prominently despite being in exactly 1 of the 61 episodes) have extreme close-ups with gritty, determined scowls — except for Kai, who smirks, wears a trenchcoat, and has a sword slung over his shoulder. That's enough to make anybody who's actually seen the show do a spit-take. They also rely extensively on stock sci-fi landscapes that aren't actually from the show, and those that are (like the surface of Brunnis) have space marines with powered armor firing laser chainguns.
• Covert Group with Mundane Front: Played for Laughs with the ATF. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms exists in Real Life; it is an organization within American Law Enforcement with a focused scope of authority. In the show, as in the paranoid ravings of real-life Right Wing Militia Fanatics, the bureau operates vastly beyond this scope.
• Crapsack Universe: The setting is very dark. The first thing Stan and Zev do with The Lexx is flee into space seeking a nice place to live. They never find one.
  • His Shadow's realm. Late fees are paid in organ donations and The Theocracy expects fanaticism. Also, what can one really say about a regime crazy enough to have built the Lexx in the first place?
  • The Divine Order dominates the Light Universe. Their propaganda insists that the Dark Zone is even worse due to its chaotic lawlessness. From the few examples we see of the Dark Zone, it appears the propaganda is true.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Jeffrey Hirschfield, aside from voicing 790, played bit parts throughout the show, such as one of the astronauts in "Lyekka" and porn star Dick Dongler in "Fluff Daddy".
  • Lex Gigeroff as Dr. Rainbow in the Series 3 episode "Tunnels".
• Crippling Overspecialization: The Lexx's only weapon/defense is its Wave-Motion Gun. This has caused its fair share of problems during the series.
  • Point Defenseless: The Lexx's weapon is too slow to fight off anything maneuverable. Smaller spacecraft board it easily.
  • The Wife Bank's idea of an education clearly left a lot to be desired— Zev|Xev is able to make just about any man want her, but she can't read, barely understands the concept of money, and is a horrible cook.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Many - for a good early example, look no further than the several unlucky bastards having their organs harvested from their bodies while they're still alive in "I Worship His Shadow".
  • Earlier in the same movie, one of the pods in the prison transport is buggy and the guard mentions that it's freeze-dried the occupant again.
• Curse Cut Short: A few times with 790's poems:
  790: On a branch there is a fruit, plump and ripe for sucking. In a bed there is a body, hot and ripe for - [he is interrupted by a broadcast]
• Cyborg: Kai has been decarbonized, contains microscopic biomechanical systems, and has metal components in his chest and groin.
• Dark Action Girl: Vlad. Kai is a Divine Assassin, an indestructible cyborg-like being who can survive being blown up with a planet. Vlad is a Divine Executioner, the being created to destroy Divine Assassins who have gone rogue.
  • Made all the worse by the fact that Vlad has gone rogue.
    Kai: If a Divine Assassin is Death Incarnate, the Divine Executioner is the Apocalypse Made Flesh.
• Dark Is Evil: His Divine Shadow is evil. You can tell, because his title has the word "shadow" in it and he and his Mooks dress all in black.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Kai is an undead, de-carbonized Divine Assassin with the blood of millions on his hands. His skin is deathly pale and he dresses entirely in black, giving him the look of a bizarre Edward Scissorhands. Scary, to be sure, but by the end of the first movie he regained his memories and had a Heel–Face Turn. For the rest of the show's run he is a noble, if aloof, hero (except for the episode where the idiot teenagers messed with his protoblood and turned him temporarily into an axe murderer).
  • In the episode "Woz", the crew (and the audience) is led to believe that the Dark Lady (whose real name is never given, and who wears all black, with only her eyes showing) is an evil woman manipulating innocent young ladies into becoming love slaves, selling them into sex slavery, and setting their expiry dates for seven days after their love slave transformations. This couldn't be further from the truth - the women come to her willingly to be transformed into love slaves, and they last a lot longer than a mere seven days after their transformation.

• Death by Pragmatism: While he never actually dies, Stan does tend to be The Chew Toy, even though he's usually the most pragmatic one aboard.
• Deal with the Devil: The Prince of fire is fond of deals. In the finale, he holds up his end of the bargain in the worst way possible, on a deal he'd reneged on in an earlier episode.
• Death Is Cheap: Invoked, subverted and lampshaded; many of the characters who die in the second season are alive on Earth six thousand years later after the Lexx blows up the afterlife. It Makes Sense in Context. Subverted again by Kai, who dies in the first scene and stays dead, but animate, through the whole series until the finale, where he's brought back to life just before an event he can't possibly survive.
• Deep South: The second-season episode that introduces Norb, "White Trash". The funnin's just begunnin'.
• Demon Lords and Archdevils: How and why are never explained, but a handful of individuals on Fire run independent cities, keep their memories from one reincarnation to the next, and/or control sizable armies of their own.
• Demonic Possession: The Shadow Essence can do this, sometimes starting out by using its hosts as People Puppets, as happens with Yottskry. Downplayed when it possesses Kai, in Giga Shadow and "Mantrid, as it has to act with subtlety to get past their willpower.
• Department of Redundancy Department: "I'm Pa, but you can call me Pa."
• De-power: After Fire and Water are destroyed, Prince loses the powers he displays through season three. He later admits that he has no idea if there's anything special about him anymore and he doesn't know what will happen if he dies again in this state. It turns out being killed repowers him.
• Depraved Bisexual: Jihanna is implied to be bisexual - and no-one would dare argue that she isn't depraved.
  • Heavily implied with Vigl: Based on his conversations with Mantrid, Vigl hates himself for molesting young boys; we later see him licking Zev's hand when they meet.
• Depraved Homosexual: The Sub-Nebulae mercenaries in "Giga Shadow", Feppo and Smoor.
• Descriptiveville: The planets Fire and Water, and most of the cities on them (Gametown being dedicated to sports, Girltown being a Lady Land, etc.).
• Destination Defenestration: The factory supervisors in "Girltown" punish a worker with this when they catch him making fancy clothes instead of balloons.
• Devil, but No God: Fire has a ruler who even argues with the deceased and the departed’s double for punishment until the end of time (which would start again in the next cycle of time) Water inexplicably does not. Even weirder, Prince claims that he has no idea how he came into being, or how and why he has his job. Assuming he's telling the truth, God literally does not exist and the Devil is more along the lines of a force of nature. This sets up the later revelation that he's actually Death itself, not just the Devil.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The Giga Shadow is injured before being killed by mere mortals (and a dead guy's pet).
• Diegetic Switch: May's flute piece comes through just as clearly in the distance shot of the group's balloon gondola floating through the upper atmosphere as it does during the close-up of her on the gondola's deck.
  • The finale's version of "Yo Way Yo" starts out as just the crew singing, but a diagetic chorus joins in partway through.
• Dilating Door: The Lexx's exits.
  • This shows up on Brunnis as a piece of the power grid, and, later, in the roof of Vlad's castle.

• Disintegrator Ray: The Black Packs used as guns in early episodes.
• Disney Villain Death: Sissy Gollean and Brud Parsnip meet their ends as a result of being pushed/thrown off the bridge of the Lexx. Subverted by Giggerota, as she turns out to be superhumanly tough.
  • Happens a few times on the planets Fire and Water, where various circumstances force characters to spend a lot of their time high above the land/sea: Bunny, two incarnations of Prince, and a drag queen from Girltown fall victim to this trope. Prince's underlings from "Battle" may or may not qualify, depending on how high their balloons are and how well they can swim.
• Disproportionate Retribution: A lot, especially when the Divine Order is involved. The Lexx was designed to destroy entire planets for harboring heretics, and people receive the sentence of vivisection for trifling crimes.
  • President Priest tends to inflict this with nukes. He demolishes all of Newfoundland because one man who lives there played a Bed Trick on Bunny.
• The Ditz: Stan repeatedly puts himself and the others in danger through his belief that the beautiful young women who hit on him just can't resist his charms, rather than that they're working some angle. Among other misadventures, he loses the Key twice to women who had, until they found out about the sex loophole, shown outright disgust for him. Or, more precisely, to one woman and one shapeshifter posing as a woman who had shown outright disgust for him. Through four seasons of this, he never learns. One Sci-Fi Channel advertisement even described him as the series' "idiot."
• Does Not Like Men: The "shes" of Girltown. Some of them consider even the word "man" obscene.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Season 2 episode 9, clearly a bit of a Alien spoof. Well, other than the sexually deviant robot ... oh wait ...
  • This exchange from the finale:
  790: Lexx, are you feeling rested?
  Lexx: I am still very very tired, but I think that I am less tired than I was.
  790: Is your weapon charged up and ready to perform again?
  Lexx: I don't think I can perform yet, but I think I will be able to in a little while.
  790: That's OK, Lexx, we've got all night.
• Doppelgänger: Prince impersonates both Xev and a living Kai at different points in Season 3 and in Season 4.
  • A human identical to Stan lives on Earth, along with a human whose clothed appearance is identical to Lyekka's.
• Double Entendre:
  Xev: You may still only be a head, 790, but you're the best head I ever had.
• Downer Ending: A few of them. Every season, including the Season One movies, ends with the total destruction of its setting. Yes, that includes the fourth and final season's setting ... and that frees the Big Bad, who gets away scot-free in the end. Also, way too many likable Recurrers wind up Killed Off for Real for a show that's supposed to be comedic.
• Dug Too Deep: How Asteroid Miners found the giga-shadow.
• Dull Surprise: Michael McManus's performance is a purposeful example. The show gets a lot of mileage from Kai's non-reactions to Stan and Xev's shenanigans.
• Dumbass Has a Point: The episode Brizon features Kai hunting for a Mantrid drone to take over seeking a safe straggler in a swarm. Then Stanley mentions that a straggler would be broken and they need a healthy and dangerous specimen.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: The Divine Order keeps the people of the Light Universe in a state of nightmarish subjugation ostensibly to defend against the evil "Dark Zone", but in reality just uses its human population to provide the vast amounts of biomass needed to maintain the Lexx and regenerate the Giga Shadow. Given who ran the League, making humanity suffer endlessly was a bonus.
  • Prince, leader of Fire, does much the same, keeping the entire population laboring in horrible conditions to maintain a war machine against Water. Just like the Divine Order, it really exists this way because Prince is a Satanic Archetype and needs the souls of his world to suffer.
• Eagleland: The setting of much of Season 4. Bizarrely, it's an amalgamation of both flavors of Eagleland.
  • In the second season episode "Lyekka", the Lexx encounters three explorers from the planet Potatoho, which is a Flavor 1 Eagleland (with a potato obsession). So basically, Space Idaho.
  • Vermal is a Planet of Hats of murderous, inbred hillbillies.

• Eat Me: Kai kills a giant people-eater from the inside.
• Eat the Bomb: In "Little Blue Planet," the U.S. government tricks the Lexx into eating a nuclear weapon, which detonates and shakes the bridge. When Stan asks the Lexx what happened, it replies that it thinks it ate something hot.
• Edible Theme Naming: The women Stan meets on Boomtown are named Plum, Peach, Pear, and Olive; Xev's date goes by "Root."
• Eldritch Location: Every place within the atmosphere of Fire and Water. Demolished cities reappear with confusing speed, Prince appears anywhere that he wants (provided that he dies), and a beach somehow exists between the two planets, even though there is no land between them.
• Empathic Environment: As Kai and Prince play chess, the environment turns icier as Prince gains the advantage and greener as Kai does.
  • Also shows up in a dream sequence in "Lyekka." When the girl Stan has a crush on rejects him, the sky behind her turns dark.
• The Empire: The League of 20,000 Planets, a totalitarian theocracy controlled by the Divine Order.
• Empire with a Dark Secret: Everyone knows that the Divine Order is a totalitarian theocracy that destroys whole planets to quell dissent. What they don't know is that it's also a front for a survivor of the Insect Wars, who intends to exterminate all humanity, no matter how subservient.
• Energy Beings: The Key to the Lexx, and later the Key to the Little Lexx, is a living, energy-based organism that enters a physical host through the hand.
• Enfante Terrible: Stan's cellmate from P4X seems like a sweet, nerdy, idealistic kid and a pure victim, but is in fact evil enough to impress Prince. While he's pushing the upper age limit of this trope, the other characters certainly treat him as this.
• Epic Rocking: "Yo Way Oh" is this. "A Good Way To Die" from Brigadoom also counts. Both get bonus points for being Courage Songs.
• Episode Code Number: The sixth episode of season 2 is coded 2.06.
• Erotic Dream: Xev is having a rather prolonged one at the beginning of "Luvliner", though we never get to see who she's dreaming about. The dream is likely brought on due to Xev's sexual frustration.
  • In "Garden," Stan has an erotic dream that devolves into a nightmare.
• Establishing Series Moment: The very first moments of the show are a main character's homeworld and entire race being destroyed, after which he, like a warrior heading for Valhalla, bravely flies his starfighter in a suicide run towards the bridge of the enemy's starship. It's the perfect introduction to the Apocalypse How and constant callous death that follows.
• Eternal Recurrence: Big theme, much of it based on a universe where the Big Crunch will happen to ignite the Big Bang. Prophets don't look forward so much as remember previous cycles.
  • This leads to an obvious example of Fridge Logic: How can the entire history of the universe by cyclical and repeat itself exactly, if people sometimes transfer back and forth between the Two Universes? That would only work if both universes were exactly the same age and cycled concurrently, but since one of them has its Big Crunch in the season 2 finale, and the main characters transfer to the other one, which is still going strong, the two universes aren't the same age.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Longbore pulls this in Season 4 when it's revealed that he's not building the rocketship Noah for him and his science assistants, but for him alone and a bunch of (probably underage) schoolgirls. When the assistants object, he holds them at bay and tries to escape only to be thwarted by President Priest and Bunny.
• Every Helicopter Is a Huey: "Apocalexx Now" has Hueys in the background in Vietnam, where it it appropriate though anachronistic. "Lyekka vs Japan" has Hueys in Tokyo, where it makes considerably less sense.
  • Gigashadow, the fully grown Insect from the eponymous episode, actually propels itself through space this way.

• Evil Gloating: Most of the villains do this. Mantrid, for one, could've succeeded in destroying both universes if he'd just destroyed the Lexx when he had the chance, instead of keeping the crew alive to gloat over.
• Evil Overlord: His Divine Shadow, of the League of 20,000 planets; Prince, of Fire and later Earth.
  • Oberon tries to be one in A Midsummer's Nightmare, but falls flat.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Divine Predecessors reside in a massive, black tower prone to lightning-esque flashes of malicious spirits.
• Exploited Immunity: In an accidental example; Prince shows up to taunt Xev as she's dying in the desert, however he dies of dehydration almost immediately (since she's a Half-Human Hybrid with DNA from a desert dwelling creature and he isn't).
• Explosive Decompression: Averted: Squish, the moths, and the Insects remain intact when exposed to vacuum.
• Exposition of Immortality: The Divine Predecessors have a sort of immortality. During "I Worship His Shadow" the Predecessor who was the host to the Divine Shadow when the Brunnen-G are destroyed shares his memories of the events of 2008 years ago with the other Predecessors.
• Extreme Libido: Zev/Xev. Her Love Slave transformation gives her an amplified appetite for sex, and the infusion of Cluster lizard makes her especially aggressive in seeking it.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Some victims of the bad carrots develop a third eye, in the center of the forehead.
• Face Death with Dignity: Takes long enough but Kai finally dies.
  Kai: I found a good way to die once. I am happy for you to join me.
• "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner: Kai, in "Supernova":
  "Would you care to join me in watching the supernova? It is a once in a lifetime experience."
• Family of Choice: Invoked and comically subverted in "Little Blue Planet." Despite being freaked-out by 790's threats to kill him and Xev, Stan declines Kai's offer to destroy the robot head because he's "become part of our family." Kai responds by asking, "What... Family?"
• Fan Disservice: When Kai is stripped completely naked in the Third Season episode K-Town.
  • Played for laughs a few times on the show, starting with Stan's red rubber briefs and manacles in Giga Shadow.
• Fantastic Drug: The mushroom used to enhance Stan's dreams in "Garden," and the berries that Stan and Xev eat in the aptly-titled episode "Trip."
• Fantastic Medicinal Bodily Product: Protoblood (implied to be produced by the alien Insects) can reanimate the dead as servants of His Divine Shadow.
• Fantasy Sequence: In Super Nova, the Memory Bank triggers a vivid one in Zev, who imagines herself dancing with a living Kai in a sparkling ballroom.
  • "Trip" shows Stan and Xev's berry-induced hallucinations, including each conspiring with Kai to kill the other.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: The Divine Order, to a comical level. Nobody bothers to fix the cryopod that keeps freeze-drying criminal suspects en route to their trials, His Divine Shadow orders devoted minions to commit suicide for his entertainment, and Stan's superiors assess him a fine of three organs for correctly following proper transportation-security procedures. Of course, it turns out that the Divine Order is efficient at obtaining as many body parts as possible to feed to the Lexx and the Insect survivor, it just isn't efficient at anything a sane member of the public might want.
• Femme Fatale: May, Giggerota, Lulu, and the sister-Lyekkas all try to be this to Stan, with varying levels of success.
• Filth: We see some bits of foreplay from in-universe porn in "Love Grows" and "Fluff Daddy."
• Fire-Forged Friends: The entire crew (save for 790), by the end of the series.
• Floral Theme Naming: All the women from "Garden" are named for flowers.
• Foregone Conclusion: Subverted. Kai is dead. Kai needs Protoblood to remain animate. All sources of Protoblood are gone. It's a foregone conclusion that Kai will, eventually, use all of his Protoblood and his friends will have to deal with the fact that he won't be around after that. Until Prince lives up their bet at the last minute and boy howdy, the foregone conclusion doesn't seem like it was so bad ...
• Foreshadowing: Notice that in the first episode, His Shadow makes note of the fact that the Brunnen-G tried to fight him with Insect technology? Notice that the Lexx is, though engineered and thus not a member of the actual civilization, an insect?
  • The ship used by His Shadow to destroy Brunnis-2 is actually called the Foreshadow.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • Brigadoom, the musical episode in Season 2. Incidentally also a minor use of the Vanishing Village trope, surprisingly.
  • The third and fourth seasons depart from the episodic Space Opera format and are centered around one location each.
• Freak Lab Accident: The process to turn Zev into a love slave is interrupted by a Cluster Lizard, and its DNA mixes with hers, making her part-Cluster Lizard.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The season 4 episode Prime Ridge briefly features Xev's hilarious resume on a computer screen during a job interview for the position of stress councilor at a slaughterhouse, including using the Wife's Bank as a High school equivilancy and Kai "ex-divine assassin" as a reference. It also dates the timespan of the series from "20,008 BCE - 2001."
• From Nobody to Nightmare: "Mantrid" establishes that the line of Divine Shadows, God-Emperors of the Light Universe, began when a bored miner named Rockhound, longing for something exciting to happen, ventured into the depths of the Cluster on a mineral survey and was taken over by the Insect Essence.
• Galactic Superpower: The Cluster rules over the League of 20,000 planets. Excepting the internal resistance movement, planets outside the League tend to be relatively low-tech, with little or no political significance for galactic politics.
• Gender Bender: For the episode "Love Grows". But only the sex organs, not the rest of their bodies.

• Genocide Backfire: Even though His Divine Shadow does wipe out the Brunnen-G, the one cadaver he reanimates as a "screw you" to the race ends up bringing down the empire.
  • The plants of Season 4 are ultimately destroyed when the heroes attempt to protect Earth from their appetite; if they'd bypassed Earth (or only eaten Japan as agreed, instead of going back on their word,) they'd have gotten away.
  • The Insect Civilization counts, as the one insect that the Brunnen-G missed slaughtered all of them (even Kai) ages later.
  • Also, the crew of the Lexx missing out on the cleansing might count, as any human resistance should have been eaten by then.
  • The insect war would also count. Humans apparently wiped out the whole insect civilization. Oh wait, there was one survivor, the Gigashadow. Guess how well that worked for humanity. The series seems to like this trope.
• Giant Spider: We see one big enough to threaten the Lexx in "The Web" and "The Net."
• Glowing Flora: The Magic Mushrooms from "Garden" have glowing purple patches on their tops.
• Good Bad Girl: Despite their high libidos, Xev and Bunny are among the nicer people in the show.
  • The women of Boomtown, by definition, since they are highly promiscuous and live in the show's version of Heaven.
• Granola Girl: Vegan, environmentalist, Wide-Eyed Idealist Haley, from "Haley's Comet."

• Grappling-Hook Pistol: Kai's brace is both this and a Precision-Guided Boomerang, controlled by his force of will.
• Gray Goo: The Mantrid drones in season two.
• Greater-Scope Villain: As it turns out, the Divine Order was a front for a survivor from the ancient Insect Civilization, who reappears as the Giga Shadow. Even His Shadow didn't know The Giga's true identity.
• The Grim Reaper: Prince. He always knew what he was supposed to do, but he didn't realize why until the end of the series.
• Groin Attack: Several times. In "769," 790 gets a new body and wants a nice, big willy to go with it. Prince summons a group of servicemen whose below-decks firepower was especially impressive. The one that 790 selects has his removed and it is grafted onto 790's new body. The unfortunate serviceman is thanked for his sacrifice and given a Purple Heart.
  • In "End of the Universe," 790 finds himself in possession of an arm, which he immediately uses to squeeze Stanley's crotch.
  • One aspect of the transformation from human to mothbreeder is the removal of all parts not related to their duties. Apparently the Cluster was big on this trope: "The usual" three-organ fine at Stan's job consisted of an eye, a testicle, and a kidney.
• Gunboat Diplomacy: The Lexx crew will often do then when they don't get their way. They'll destroy some nearby moon or planet to demonstrate to the uncooperative schmuck what will happen if they don't start being more helpful.
  • Subverted in that it usually doesn't work. The witness to the demo will start thinking about what they could do with that kind of power and just pretend to start being more helpful just to get the crew out of the way.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Zev/Xev was turned into one of these when her love slave transformation process went wrong. Her other half comes from Cluster Lizard DNA.
• Healing Factor: Kai is nearly indestructible, and being already dead, returning him to un-life isn't that difficult if he's damaged. Gets cut in half? Put the halves back together and watch his body return to normal in seconds.

• Hell Invades Heaven: Various factions from the planet Fire are constantly planning raids on Water, although the war can never be won until the Lexx arrives.
• Hell on Earth: When Fire is destroyed by Lexx the people who make bad decisions travel to Earth as well as people from Water who would make this Heaven On Earth as well.
• The Hero Dies: Kai, the most heroic character in the series, dies in the first scene. Death is not the end of his story, though.
• Hero of Another Story: Thodin the Heroic Heritic from the first movie.
  • The real Wist from Eating Pattern tried to take on the queen herself, after explaining Claggia's situation on a recording to help whoever came across Claggia later in case they failed; the recording helps Kai to destroy the queen, save his shipmates, and possibly prevent the destruction of untold other worlds.
• High-Altitude Battle: The titular combat of "Battle" occurs between fighters in balloon gondolas.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Quite a few of the villains are done in like this.
  • His Divine Shadow: Tries to grow a genetically engineered planet-killing insect to destroy human planets with, only for it to be stolen by humans who use it to defeat him.
  • Mantrid: Turns the mass of the entire universe into his drones, saving the Lexx and crew for last...but inadvertently causes a big crunch by moving all that mass towards them at once.
  • Giggerota: In Supernova, Gigerota flies around Brunnis in a moth she periodically takes bites out of when she needs a snack. When the moth squeaks in protest, Gigerota tells the "flying meat" to shut up. When Gigerota lands for a moment and gets out, the moth takes off and leaves her behind to die in the supernova, waving goodbye as it does so.
• Homeworld Evacuation: The Brunnen-G moved from Brunnis to Brunnis-2 when their sun's advancing age made their continued existence on Brunnis untenable.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Stanley and Xev meet two in the episode "Luvliner". They are almost immediately vaporized by a villain.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: In the fourth season Lexx is impregnated by a perfectly ordinary Earth dragonfly. The size difference is about the same as between a human and a dust mite.
• Howl of Sorrow: Zev lets out one in "Giga Shadow" when Kai temporarily dies after running out of Proto-Blood. Also, Giggerota does so when things don't go her way, but it's more like a Howl of Rage.

• Human Aliens: The Brunnen-G in particular, but technically any character not native to Earth. They referred to themselves as human despite their planet of origin. However, several clearly nonhuman characters (like Lyekka and the Satellite Worms controlled by Wyst, as well as the evil spirits form the planet Fire) used human forms or were parasites that occupied human bodies.
  • The only possible exception might be a bald, blue-skinned humanoid visible behind Xev in Episode 1.1: "I Worship His Shadow." However, given that Giggerotta was probably a modified human, this person might have been modified as well.
• Human Popsicle: Stan, Xev and Kai place themselves in suspended animation between Seasons 2 and 3 ... and don't wake up until thousands of years later. To a lesser extent, Kai has to keep periodically freezing himself over the course of the series, to ensure that he doesn't run out of Protoblood too quickly.
• Human Resources:
  • In "Eating Pattern", the eponymous Pattern is made from processed body parts.
  • A running theme with Cluster society - harvested organs from criminals are used as components in the construction of bio-mechanical robots, while the remainder of the body and any leftover organs are used as food for the living ships Lexx and, later, the Gigashadow. Residents are not aware of the full extent of this use, instead being told only of a 'protein bank' into which all corpses go and from which robots are produced. Seen in all it's gory detail episodes one and four of Season 1.
  • Brizon's life support methods, especially that tank in his castle. Brrr.
• Humiliation Conga: Hilarity Ensues when Stanley makes the spare Shadow brains sing an ode to him and of how much they suck.
• Hypno Trinket: Brizon carries one with him as part of his preparedness strategy.

• Identical Stranger: There is a casanova that happens to look like Stanley H Tweedle in contemporary earth, theorized to have happened due to a finite number of possible human forms.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: In "Heaven and Hell," Prince tests Xev's ability to be his queen by demanding that she strangle a man to death and eat his brain.
• Ignore the Fanservice: Whenever someone throws themselves at Kai.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Giggerota the Wicked, who dresses in human skin and tends to refer to people as types of meat.
  • On rare occasions, Zev/Xev can involuntarily transform into a Cluster Lizard. While in this form, she has devoured other humans.
  • In "White Trash", the redneck Gollean family are cannibals, and end up killing and devouring the space miners from "Love Grows".
• I'm a Man; I Can't Help It: In "The Beach," Stan invokes this to excuse his behavior toward a female disaster survivor in "791."
• Immortality: Kai was From a Single Cell and His Divine Shadow was Body Surf.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: The Brunnen-G had this. Kai and his attack squadron, being young enough to be their natural age, were considered to be "newborn" when they died.
• Immortals Fear Death: The Brunnen-G discovered how to halt the aging process. Since death was no longer inevitable, most of the Brunnen-G became extremely paranoid of anything that could threaten their lives, to the point that they wouldn't even leave their homes. They were oddly lazy about it, though; they were so confident in the power of the defenses they set up that by the time an enemy actually came for them they had degraded to the point of uselessness through millennia of neglect, and they punished the younger people who tried to warn them about it. Ironically, the same Brunnen-G who cringed in fear of anything that might kill them felt nothing but relief when faced with inevitable death again in the form of His Divine Shadow. It was less death itself and more uncertainty that the Brunnen-G feared.
• Immune to Bullets: Kai. On many occasions, enemies fire Blackpacks at him and are understandably shocked that Kai can No-Sell the Disintegrator Rays without breaking stride. They generally do not keep blasting him after this.
• Improbable Hairstyle: Kai, big time, as well as the rest of the Brunnen-G.
  • Somehow, Giggerota maintains the giant spikes that top off her huge 'do, even while climbing through tunnels, getting soaked in the Lexx's bodily fluids, etc.
• In Medias Res: The show opens with the last minutes of His Shadow's war against the Brunnen-G. We don't hear the rest of their story until Brigadoom at nearly the end of season 2.
• In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face: Every spacesuit scene.
• Independent Limb: Mantrid's drones are basically hands on levers, with computer chips to control them. Bordering on animate body parts, since Mantrid says they have individual self-preservation instincts... although not the free will to follow them.
• Insectoid Aliens: The Insect Civilization, of course, as well as the Lexx itself.

• Insomnia Episode: "Patches in the Sky." The Lexx visits a space station because Stan hopes the technology there can help him with the insomnia caused by his nightmares.
• The Inspector Is Coming: Stan poses as an official "beautification" inspector to threaten the robots mining an ugly manganese planet. Of course, it's just a scam intended to make them do something to improve his mood.
• Intercourse with You: Xev/Zev's theme song.
  • Because you look so DAMN good.
  • 790's poetry tends to follow one particular theme.
  • Uther serenades Xev with this trope in "Magic Baby."
• Involuntary Shapeshifting: In season four, Xev's lizard side enters its estrus, which overcomes her ability to control the transformation.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Many of the musical numbers are actually nursery rhymes from various countries.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Stan and Xev have their moments in different episodes.

• Judgement of the Dead: Played With. Stanley falls off a Moth and drowns on the Planet Water, which the course of season 3 eventually reveals is the in-universe equivalent of Heaven. Its counterpart, Fire, serves as Hell. Stanley is then judged as to which of the two planets his soul should be remanded to. Unfortunately, the judge is Prince the ruler of fire, (and thus, the analog of Satan) who has his own reasons for wanting to condemn Stanley to Fire, effectively making it a Kangaroo Court. At the end of the episode, despite having tried his best in a hard universe and numerous extenuating circumstances, even Stanley himself is convinced he truly belongs of Fire. And then the whole thing gets subverted since souls on Fire and Water are effectively still alive, and Xev is ultimately able to rescue him.
• Jump Scare: Used in "Norb" when one of Mantrid's drone arms suddenly flies past Stanley on the bridge of the Lexx.
• Just Before the End: Season four is this for Earth. As 790 notes, it's a "class-13 planet" which will almost certainly destroy itself within the year, most likely in an accident caused by scientists researching the Higgs-Boson particle. It doesn't help matters that everyone from Fire and Water has reincarnated on Earth, and most of them Came Back Wrong. 790 himself preempts Earth's anticipated fate by having the Lexx blow up the planet, when he decides that one of Dr. Longbore's students is competition for Kai.
• Just Desserts: Double-subverted with Feppo and Smoor. Stanley gets revenge on them by having the Lexx eat their ship, but also has the Lexx spit them back out in a bubble-like capsule. Then they land on a planet inhabited by a giant who looks a little too interested in them...
• Kangaroo Court: The Cluster's courts give the accused a holographic defense attorney which does nothing but enter a guilty plea. The purpose of the court is maximum body count,but the attorney seems to exist just to rub it in.
• Karma Houdini: Prince, at the end of the fourth season. Considering the damage they do, Stanley and Xev may qualify as well.
  • Averted in "Stan's Trial". Just as it looks as though Jihanna, the episode's villain, is going to get away with everything, she - along with everyone else aboard the pleasure cruiser - is destroyed by Mantrid's drone arms.
• Karmic Rape: Well, karmic attempted rape, anyway. While on trial for only caring about a distress signaler's potential as a sex partner, Stan claims that he's already been adequately punished, since that misadventure led to his near-rape by 791.
• Kill All Humans: The Insect Civilization had a primal urge to destroy both humans and their habitats.
• Kill It with Fire: The fate of anyone Duke has executed, including May.
• Landfill Beyond the Stars: Claggia, which 790 describes as "an orbiting dump site used for general waste disposal. Your basic garbage planet."
• La Résistance: The Brunnen-G attack squad led by living Kai and, years later, the Ostral-B Heretics were the only ones to oppose the rule of His Divine Shadow.
• Lampshade Hanging: Several instances. Some of the standouts:
  • Regarding Prince's ability to teleport:
  Xev: How did he do that?
  790: He's an evil spirit.
  Xev: But how can he just disappear like that?
  790: Like I said, he's an evil spirit, that's what he does.
  • Season 2, with its higher budget, sees a complete overhaul and re-design of the cardboard sets making up the Lexx' interior. At the beginning of the episode "Norb", Stanley actually asks the Lexx why it looks different. The Lexx explains that it wasn't quite fully grown when they took off, and the new look means the Lexx has reached full maturity.
• Large Ham: Many, but any role played by Ellen Dubin (Giggerotta, Queen, Pope Geneveive G. Rota) certainly qualifies.
  "Put on a show for Giggerotta. PUT ON A SHOOOOOOOW!!"
  • Mantrid also qualifies, combined with a good dose of No Indoor Voice.
• Last Episode Theme Reprise: The biggest and baddest rendition yet of "Yo Way Yo," it comes complete with an Ethereal Choir joining in, as the Lexx disintegrates, Prince restores Kai's life, and the remaining crew makes its Last Stand. The episode's even named for the song.
• Last Stand: A handful of Brunnen-G made one against the Divine Order, in Kai's backstory. We see the last of it in the series' opening sequence.
• Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: Averted in terms of thickness; the Red-Hot Sea is dense enough for Kai (being immune to the heat) to cross it on foot. However, the other characters' ability to breathe its volcanic gases while floating above it in a balloon gondola is questionable.
• Lava Pit: In "Gondola," the characters are faced with a whole sea of lava between them and the next town.
• Leave the Camera Running: It is painfully obvious second season episodes frequently ran short, and the crew had to Leave the Camera Running throw as much footage as possible into the final edit, no matter how flabby or leaden it made the pacing.
• Lecherous Licking: Stan does this to Bunny in two different episodes. She likes it about as much as you'd expect.
  • Vigl licks Zev's hand on meeting her. She tries to clean it on her dress.
• Legacy Vessel Naming: Little Lexx gets this, although, given who names it, this might be as much a lack of imagination as a tribute to the deceased.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: When 790 transplants his head to the headless body of a cyborg pilot in "791", the sadistic, rapist pilot's consciousness frequently takes over that of 790 and attempts to force himself on Stan. After Stan manages to hold back the pilot's consciousness (or so he thinks...), a horribly embarrassed 790 says "... I won't tell if you won't."
  • After Stan and Xev turn back to their normal selves in "Love Grows", both are deeply ashamed and embarrassed at the fact that they slept together while gender-swapped.

• Lighter and Softer: Season 3 is about the war between versions of Heaven and Hell. By comparison Season 4 is set on Earth, has a few parody episodes, and a new mysterious antagonist is introduced which are carrot probes that climb up people's rectums.
• Location Doubling: In the fourth season, a shot of a meat-obsessed American town was actually a shot of the main street of Wolfville, a small University town in Nova Scotia, Canada.
• Long Hair Is Feminine: Averted. Zev|Xev's hair doesn't go much past her shoulders until the third season, despite her having "been altered by a machine into the ultimate female form," and Bunny sports a pixie cut in seasons 2 and 3. Kai's hair is much longer and more elaborately styled than either of theirs ever is. However, the trope might exist in-universe for the culture of Fire, since May's hair is longer than most of the male characters'.
• Losing Your Head: A cluster lizard knocks 790's head from his body in "I Worship His Shadow"; however, since his personality, memory, and power packs were located in the head in the first place, this only affects his mobility, not his capacity for thought or speech. He spends most of the series as just a head.
  • On Fire, Queen is a talking, separate head, attached to a lever above a vat of boiling liquid.
• Love at First Sight: Well, not necessarily at first sight, but it certainly didn't take long for Zev to fall in love with Kai. Also, in the Season 2 episode "Luvliner", Varrtan, a male prostitute, falls in love at first sight with Xev. The poor guy is vaporised by the episode's main villain just minutes later.
  • 790's first words upon seeing Zev after being programmed with the love slave personality meant for her. Same goes for when he fell in love with Kai who fixed him in Season 3.
• Mad Doctor: Zev and Kai run afoul of a couple of them in "Terminal," and one kidnaps Stan in "Tunnels."
• Magic A Is Magic A: Largely consistent, but if the show had to choose between keeping details in line and being silly, it would choose the latter. Lampshaded in A Midsummer's Nightmare where everyone seems to notice the fact that Oberon and his kingdom don't quite fit into the normal cosmology.
• Magic Mushroom: Used by the gardeners on Water as part of the ceremony that animates plants from people's dreams.
• Magical Land: Oberon's kingdom, where birds appear out of nowhere, the queen lives a thousand years before turning into a flower, and Kai joins a chorus of singing, dancing trees.
• Meaningful Echo: The Hymn of the Brunnen-G is sung several times in the series, always as a beautiful heroic sacrifice. The final reprise itself is just wow ... Heartbreakingly, the first and last times it's heard are the only times where its actual meaning (namely, "Victory or death") comes all the way into play.
• Marshmallow Hell: Once used by Xev to keep Stan from addressing the Lexx.
• Meaningful Name: Doctor Longbore talks in a monotone for long stretches. The First Lady is named Bunny, as in, a Playboy Bunny. The Prince of Fire is Satan.
  • Zev Bellringer is transformed into a love slave for KO-ing her husband when he insulted her appearance.
• Meat Moss: Comprises much of the Lexx. Whether it's played for full body horror value depends on which room you're looking at.
• Meat-Sack Robot: Common in the series' Bio Punk setting.
  • Drones on The Cluster are implied to be mash-ups of machine and organic parts. Prisoners facing execution are consoled that parts of their bodies will live on this way.
  • 790-class androids are robot heads grafted to human bodies.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: The crazed doctor who kidnaps Stan in "Tunnels" explains that his knife doesn't need to be very sharp to cut away Stan's "dirty parts," and adds that all his victims stop screaming when they bleed out.
• Mega-Maw Maneuver: Lexx is capable of actually eating other ships.
• The Men in Black: Season 4 has the ATF under Prince functioning as this. It is lampshaded a few times that it makes no sense for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to be dealing with aliens and making people vanish.
• Mental Picture Projector: Used by both the Divine Order and the former rebels in criminal investigations.

• Mistaken Nationality: One of the raiders that Kai encounters in "May" assumes that he comes from Girltown, perhaps because it's the only city on the two planets where men are likely to have long hair. When he does visit Girltown, one of the locals asks if he's from Water.
• Mistaken for Profound: "Self-important philosopher-poet" Drago wrote such bad verse that even Kai seems angry about it, thousands of years later. However, the Divine Order took his incoherent ramblings seriously enough to order him killed, and heretics bothered to make him undead after his execution.
• Moment Killer: If a couple looks like they're about to get busy, chances are good that something will stop them: The guy's inability to shut up about conquering the universe, a forgotten summit in Antarctica, the impending destruction of a planet... The list goes on. In Xev's case, this is a running gag.
• Monster of the Week: Featured in a couple of season 1 eps, and around half in season 2. By contrast, season 3 consists entirely of arc episodes, and the season 4 weekly antagonists are usually driven by a Big Bad.
• Monster Organ Trafficking: Kai was animated by "protoblood", a secretion from the last of the Insects. Re-animated assassins like him were part of how His Divine Shadow maintained his tyrannical grip on power.
• Mood Whiplash: The show frequently varies between being extremely serious and extremely silly, often multiple times within a single episode.
• The Mothership: Is carrying an unknown number of carnivorous plants toward Earth.
• Ms. Fanservice: Xev/Zev. Justified since she was altered to be a "Love Slave" and meant to look attractive.
• Mummy: They're made by Heretics to be good counterpoints to His Divine Shadow's Divine Assassins but while one was really good at doing a Neck Snap on members of the Mafia it was implied the project was a dead end without proto-blood.
• The Multiverse: The two universes as well as Brigadoom's outside time and space ... place, the other zone, and maybe Oberon's kingdom.

• My God, What Have I Done?: Stanley occasionally has moments of genuine regret and remorse concerning the consequences of his actions and the fact that his incompetence and cowardice have killed billions. The emotional weight of the destruction that earned him the name "Arch-Traitor" is revealed in "Stan's Trial". Giggerota points this out in "Patches in the Sky" when he accidentally blows up a mining planet staffed by robots.
  • Comically downplayed in "End of the Universe," where the crew briefly reflects on the fact that they created Mantrid and thus indirectly destroyed the whole Light Universe, then shrugs it off.
• Naked on Arrival: When Zev is regenerated into Xev, she emerges completely stark naked, save for her old rubber harness (and thick goo to censor her lady parts). Earlier in the same episode, Lyekka is first shown completely naked, although as she possesses neither sex organs nor nipples, no censoring is used (her body is just smooth and blank all over).
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: A lot. Much of the show's comedy is based on the protagonists' habit of causing disasters.
  • The Lexx crew give Mantrid the means to escape from his prison, and in a Humongous Mecha body, at that.
  • Despite Prince's ominous warnings about 'maintaining the balance', Xev insists on blowing up the planet Fire. Prince then hijacks the Lexx and uses it to blow up Water as well, destroying the afterlife forever and condemning every good soul who will ever live to nothingness. Of course, seeing as how the process to end up on Fire is blatantly rigged and a lot of innocent people suffer there (see Girltown), this isn't necessarily the worst thing.
  • In "Apocalexx Now," the crew of the Lexx mercifully releases some prisoners of war who are still trapped in horrible conditions, decades after the war's end. Unfortunately, the crew doesn't understand the dynamics between their countries or the prisoners' level of derangement, and the prisoners (who misinterpret Stan and Xev's comments as meaning that the war is escalating, rather than over) wind up committing a massacre at an international summit.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The tripartite entity known as "Mantrid" is an insane and highly unethical biogeneticist's severed head inside an iron lung, infected with the divine Insect Essence of the Corrupt Church he once served, and digitized into a computer program commanding an arm-y of robot drones. He comes back as a soul wandering the universe's equivalent of Hell.

• No OSHA Compliance: Prince's city provides an extreme example, as workstations on the ninth level include built-in guillotines to behead anyone who gets too tired to keep cycling (which, since their sentence is eternal), means everyone, over and over again. The balloon factory in Girltown is no picnic, either: The drag queens are chained to prevent escape, while working in near-lethal heat.
  • The only sane woman among the Space Truckers transporting "class-13" hazmat in "Love Grows" tries to enforce compliance by threatening to report her coworkers, but it turns out that the regulators are in on their cost-cutting shenanigans. The crew winds up infected with a virus that swaps everyone's sex.
  • The design of the Lexx itself. The bridge is suspended hundreds of feet above an indoor swamp, and there's no railing to catch any clumsy visitors. Really, it's rare for this trope to not be in play in workplaces.
• No Endor Holocaust: Considering that Fire and Water are close enough to share an atmosphere, Xev should expect all the debris that results when the Lexx blows up Fire to have serious consequences for Water. This never occurs to her, even while puzzling over Prince's warning that "the two planets are very close." Since Prince's ghost commandeers the Lexx to vaporize Water a few minutes later, the danger posed by debris turns out to be a moot point, but Xev couldn't have known that would happen.
• No Woman's Land: ZigZagged. The League of 20,000 Planets is supposedly a misogynist theocracy, where unwanted girls are given to the Wife Bank and failing to perform their wifely duties is punishable by forced love slave transformations, yet at the same time they have prominent female lawyers and soldiers, so clearly they don't hold to Stay in the Kitchen either.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: No one seems to notice that the President of the United States has a very noticeable German accent. Lampshaded after several episodes by Colonel Moss, who wonders why no one else has noticed the president's British accent.
• The Nth Doctor: Zev, played by Eva Habermann, dies in the second season and is reborn as Xev, played by Xenia Seeberg. In her pre-love slave appearance, she is played by Lisa Hines.
• Numbered Homeworld: Averted, Brunnis-2 actually was the second planet named Brunnis. The first Brunnis, located in the Dark Zone, was abandoned when its sun entered the final stages of its life cycle and began to go nova. The inhabitants, the Brunnen-G, migrated to the Light Universe and settled on a new world, which they named Brunnis-2.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: A whole roomful of them, in fact, feature in "Tunnels", against whom Kai expresses a powerful desire to slaughter. We can hardly blame him.
• Off-the-Shelf FX: You'll occasionally recognise some every day objects being used as props, such as a bicycle wheel or an N64 controller.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Mantrid.
  • 790 gets this, culminating with him having Lexx destroy Earth because people there potentially wanted Kai for themselves.
• One-Product Planet: In "Patches in the Sky," we see a planet which appears to only be inhabited by manganese-mining robots.
• Only One Name: Kai. He does sometimes add "last of the Brunnen-G" to it, though.
• Opening Narration: in the first two seasons, the Lexx explains its nature and origins.
• Organ Autonomy: Kai can control his appendages remotely, even when they have been severed.
• Organic Technology: most prominently, the Lexx and its moths are all biotechnology, the Insect race seemed to use organic tech (or even be organic technology), the Cluster uses a lot of cybernetic organisms, and several other examples show up.
• Organ Theft: Standard execution method on the Cluster. Harvested body parts are used to build the robots seen around the place.
  "You have been sentenced to have your individual life terminated. However, His Divine Shadow will allow many of your vital organs to live on as components used in the making of robotic drones."
  • Attempted on Xev in the penultimate episode of the series.

• Orphaned Etymology: The main characters of the show were born in a different universe thousands of years before Peter Higgs was born, yet they call the Higgs boson particle by that very name. It's not Translation Convention either, because throughout season four they speak the functional equivalent of English.
• Our Presidents Are Different: President Priest. See the character sheet for details.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Kai the undead assassin is a borderline example. Other than needing "protoblood", being immortal and looking like a vampire, he doesn't have a whole lot in common with them. In fact, he could also be called a revenant-analogue than a vampire. The divine executioner Vlad on the other hand is the real deal: is pretty strong, immortal, flies using batwings, has a haunted castle in Transylvania where she sleeps in a coffin and her bite can turn anyone into her minions. Its unknown if all divine executioners are like her, since she is the only one we ever see.
• Parental Abandonment: Zev's parents sold her to the Wife Bank as an infant because she didn't meet their expectations.
• Persecuted Intellectuals: According to Stan, while the Ostral-B had lots of books, the Divine Order limited their availability on the Cluster. His Shadow even sent Kai on kill missions against heretics. Parodied when we meet an undead former victim, whose compositions approached word salad levels of incoherence.

• Planar Shockwave: Happens to several of the Lexx's targets.
• Plant Aliens: Lyekka's race and the carrots that attacked Earth.
• Planetary Parasite: The Giga Shadow spent thousands of years regenerating under the surface of the Cluster, as well as ruling the Light Universe through His Shadow and feeding on the Human Sacrifices given by his loyal followers.
• Planet Baron: With human survivors being sparsely scattered throughout the universe, many planets are little more than villages or Ghost Towns, run by small-time crooks or long-forgotten governors. In the Season 2 episode "Patches in the Sky", the planet Narco-World is owned by a man named Gubby Mok who rents out the use of the highly addictive Narco-Loungers, specialized chairs which allow the user to live out and control their dreams.
• Planet Looters: The sister-Lyekkas eat every living animal on a planet, then move on to another one.
• Planet of Hats: Surprisingly rare, but played ludicrously straight when it shows up, such as a planet of hillbillies or the planet that is essentially "Space Idaho". Subverted by the Insect Civilization, who are defeated because their methodical nature makes them too predictable, but one Insect thinking outside the box manages to unite humans across 20, 000 planets under an oppressive government that literally feeds its own rebirth, essentially using humans to defeat themselves.
• Platonic Prostitution: In the episode "Luvliner," the crew travel to a brothel IN SPACE, where Xev meets a male prostitute who falls in Love at First Sight with her, and refuses to have sex with her because "[her] first time should be special."

• Plot Hole: In "Woz", 790 reveals that Xev has an expiration date and that he can reset it with a Lusticon. So why the hell didn't he bring that up when they traveled to the Cluster in "Gigashadow" specifically to get a thing one of the crew members needed to survive (more Protoblood for Kai)?
• Pluto Is Expendable: Even included in a planet count of 8, maybe 9 planets.

• Poverty Food: The crew primarily subsists on a grey sludge extruded by the titular Living Ship through a rather disturbingly-shaped dispenser.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: while growing on The Cluster, Lexx was fed with organs harvested from prisoners. It feeds itself in flight by devouring what's left of the planets it destroys.
• Precision F-Strike: Kai in "Wake The Dead", when he is temporarily turned into a crazed axe murderer.
• Prisoner's Work: The Cluster turned Stan into a security guard after he got nabbed for treason. Zev was sentenced to become a sex slave to seminarians, but escaped before it could happen.
  • People who live in Fire's more organized cities perform various kinds of coerced labor, ranging from sewing hot-air balloons to pumping the bellows that cool the cities to fighting in small armies.
• Psychopomp: Prince turns out to be one of these all along in addition to being the Lexxverse's version of Satan.
• Propaganda Machine: On the Cluster, even alarm clocks (well, alarm screens) come with propaganda messages about the horrors that the Divine Order is protecting its population from.

• Pulling Themselves Together: On the occasions that an enemy manages to sever one of Kai's body parts, Kai will simply retrieve and reattach it.
• Purple Is Powerful: The League being a Theocracy under the Divine Order, its priests hold considerable power, and their uniform is a head-to-toe purple robe with a weird, insectoid-looking purple hat.
• Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits: The main characters are unqualified to be the crew of any spaceship, yet they are in control of the most powerful one ever.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Sometimes literally: Pink and shiny things feature prominently in the wardrobes of both living!Kai and Thodin. The Brunnen-G's fondness for poetry can read as feminine to the audience, as well.
• Red Shirt: ANYONE who tries to have sex with Xev, and then delays for ANY reason. Honestly, if these idiots would just get biz-AY, they wouldn't get killed/crushed/eaten/turned into a woman, etc.
  • Actually the Entire Series was a long Running Gag almost solely based on this trope. Lexx's creators were admitted fans of Star Trek and made most of the episodes in the not so subtle gag that ALL of the supporting characters die while only the main cast survives to the next episode. Unfortunately the entire main cast only consisted of 5 characters (including Lexx itself) so the entire universe(s) and their inhabitants became expendable.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: Mantrid chows down on a Creepy Cockroach while on the planet Fire. Zev also tries to eat a roach in season 1, but it's likely that she does so more to unnerve Stan than out of hunger.
• Reign of Terror: Under the surviving Ostral-B, in season 2. According to Jihanna, anyone who lacks citizenship under their reconstructed state has no legal rights, and the police spring to obey her when she orders Xev and Kai executed, without trial, for collaboration. There's some evidence that they may represent an extremist faction, rather than the Ostral-B consensus: The defense attorney warns Kai and Xev that Jihanna plans to circumvent Stan's sentence of "a swift and painless death," and Jihanna avoids threatening Xev and Kai while the judge is watching.
• The Remnant: The American POWs in "Apocalexx Now"- the Fighting 78th, a Marine Platoon that was captured during the Vietnam War and released during the episode, circa 2001 AD, under the impression that the war was still raging.
• Retool: Two. The first two seasons are a picaresque Wagon Train to the Stars travelogue about wandering through a weird, wild universe of lust and death. Then, season three retools the show into a largely stationary Planetary Romance about a binary system that's the show's equivalent of heaven and hell and emphasizes the morality play melodrama over the sci-fi oddity. Then, season four retools the show again to become a skewed, satirical take on modern day Earth and its foibles. While it certainly keeps the show fresh, the three "phases" are vastly different to one another and oftentimes don't even feel like the same series. Not to mention the titular spaceship is basically nerfed at the beginning of season three and remains largely immobile and irrelevant until just before the Grand Finale.
• The Reveal: A few:
  • Season One: His Divine Shadow is actually the last Insect, and he orchestrated the entire run of the Divine Order as a way of using humans to defeat themselves.
  • Season Three: Water and Fire are Heaven and Hell, although it's obvious from early on. The bigger reveal is that they're also Counter-Earth.
  • Season Four: The Lexx has been nearing the end of its natural lifespan since the third season, and it's been pregnant since Dutch Treat. A meta-reveal happens when the mass of the Higgs Boson is shown as .13 repeating; the characters almost certainly know, but no one actually cares and thus, no one says it for the audience to hear.
• Reverse Polarity:
  • In "Norb," the Lexx becomes infested with Mantrid drones, and the only way the crew can think of to get rid of them is by reversing the its polarity; because the drones' electronics are more delicate than the ship's, the reversal will destroy them, but only sting the Lexx.
  • In "K-Town," a diagnostic reveals that Kai's decreased mobility results from polarity problems caused by falling from outer space onto the surface of Water. To get better, he needs to make another long fall and land on his other side. Possibly a case of Continuity Drift, given that he appeared to be in no danger from the Lexx's repolarization back in "Norb."
• Rewrite: In the end of the first season the entire League of 20,000 Planets is stripped of life as part of the Gigashadow's long-panned resurrection, and the heroes happened to return there as a complete coincidence and only arrive after it's been delayed by rebel clerics. The Gigashadow shrugs off the Lexx's attacks and is only defeated because Kai's pet cluster lizard found and ate it's brain. As of season two it's been changed to the crew awakening it prematurely and the Lexx killing it and they visit several former League worlds during the season.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Despite Fire's low level of technological development, Prince manages to get his city rebuilt within weeks, if not days, of its destruction by Duke. Hand-waved by Prince as part of the planet's preternatural stasis.
• Rousing Speech: Brigadoom is a rousing musical episode for one.
• Royal "We": "We are Pope Genevieve I, formally known as G. G. Rota."
• Rule of Symbolism: In the final episode, the image on the Lexx' viewscreen as it dies is a single, bright, completely white star; the light at the end of the tunnel.
• Running on All Fours: Well, Rolling on all fours in Xev's case.
• STD Immunity: Played with. The crew of the Lexx never seems to worry about STDs, whether because Stan and Xev are used to the League's sophisticated medical treatments (as Stan says, "People don't die of infections"), because they don't know about them (Xev was raised in a box, after all) or because they're too horny and shortsighted to care. OTOH, Schlemmi the pimp's complaint about seeing too many "open sores" suggests that STDs are a problem in the less-advanced regions of the Light Universe.
• Sadist Show: If you want every episode to end on a happy note, this is not the show for you.
• Samus Is a Girl: The Lexx is actually female, and gets pregnant after mating with a dragonfly from Holland. Less of a spoiler for German viewers, where the Lexx is voiced by a woman.
  • How can you tell?
    • It very clearly has sex with the dragonfly; not just animal/insect/what-have-you mating, it's a blatant sex scene with a blatant vagina analog on the Lexx. The other characters even realize what's going on.
  • Subverted by 790; the cube of human brain that functions as his CPU is from a woman, and he sometimes cites his femininity when it helps his arguments (like when he needs Xev to sympathise with him) but his personality is male to the point where he doesn't even entertain the possibility of getting girl parts instead of a penis when he gets the chance.
• Sanity Slippage: Dr. Longbore starts out season 4 as slightly eccentric, but focused on the reasonable goal of creating a ship which can carry plenty of breeding humans away from Earth before the planet's looming destruction by particle-collider experiments. However, as his students report, he loses it over the course of the season, to the extent that he ultimately chooses not only to just take himself and a harem of attractive girls off the planet, he actually speeds up its destruction, on purpose, by making his own collider.
  • 790 has been obsessive and callous since the first episode, but several brain injuries, a few thousand years powered down, a couple of reassemblies, and an unknown amount of time spent alone on the Lexx start catching up with him big time in season 3. By season 4, he's moved from mocking and inconveniencing semi-plausible romantic/sexual rivals to aiding assassins' efforts to kill them. Exaggerated in the series finale, when he has the Lexx blow up an entire planet because people there are "actually or potentially" interested in Kai.
• Sapient Ship: Lexx can speak directly to its crew and perceive things happening inside its body. Parodied since, despite being powerful, The Lexx is comically stupid.
• Satanic Archetype: Double-subverted. Prince rules a hot desert planet populated by people who suspiciously resemble ones that the Lexx crew knew thousands of years ago, and throws Stan into a truly hellish level of his city; however, he also makes some reasonable-sounding points about necessary evils, and impresses Xev as "a great man" in his first couple of episodes. He drops the act in "Gametown," and eventually reveals that he does, indeed, consider it his calling to "tempt those who can be tempted and punish those who deserve it".
• Scenery Porn: Most of the time the show was pretty much stage-bound, but a number of episodes in seasons 3 and 4 feature long, narratively-unnecessary shots of beautiful locations. Kai's trek through the desert in "K-Town," Xev's later trek through the desert in "Battle," and the distant shots of Kai and Prince in both "Heaven and Hell" and "The Game" qualify.
• Sci-Fi Bob Haircut: Xev's first hairstyle when she tumbles out of Lyekka's pod is this (and she's depicted on this trope's page).
  • Turns up as part of the uniform for the Dark Lady's servants in "Woz," and in wig form on Lulu in "Fluff Daddy." The fact that she wears it while shooting an SF-themed porn flick suggests that the writers were familiar with the trope.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
  • The show plays fast and loose with the scale of space. The Lexx can get from the League's capital to its frontier in what seems like minutes, even when being chased by a giant insect, yet the prisoner transports to the Cluster from its member worlds require the crew to enter cryosleep.
  • Averted in "Fire and Water." When the Lexx runs out of fuel and food, the crew members utilize cryopods, power-down mode, and, in the case of the Lexx itself, normal sleep to drift until a celestial object draws them into its orbit. Over 4,000 years pass before this happens.
• School of Seduction: The Wife Bank.
• Screw Destiny: Kai and His Shadow try and fail. Then Stanley succeeds. The Time Prophet predicts that after the Gigashadow there is "nothing", and indeed Gigashadow/Mantrid seems well on course to destroy all of creation. Then in Brigadoom Stanley grows a spine,turns around and fights Mantrid successfully, thus saving about half of creation. And it's still there thousands of years later too.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: A survivor of the insect wars was trapped in an asteroid until a miner stumbled on it, thus creating His Divine Shadow.
  • The Divine Order imprisoned Mantrid on a frozen moon with no ready means of escape. Then the Lexx comes along and frees a copy of his personality, combined with the insect essence. He goes on to destroy the Light Universe.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Kai and the Divine Shadow tried to avert the Time Prophet's prophecy for the exact opposite reasons. The prophecy could not have been fulfilled without both of them trying to avert it.
• Sensual Spandex: The uniform of Gametown's citizens. More or less justified in that the main activity in the town is sports. Unusually, the cleavage windows and bare midriffs are standard features of the men's clothing, not just the women's.
• Separate Scene Storytelling: Accompanies the Time Prophet's description of the Cleansing in Giga Shadow.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • In season 1 Zev says that people on her planet don't use protein banks, and bury their dead. In season 4 Xev was unfamiliar with the concept of burial, and thought it was strange.
  • In "Supernova", Kai states he "was not aware" the Brunnen-G had unlocked the secrets of eternal life. "Brigadoom" would later reveal they had.
• Sexual Euphemism: About once a season, Stan will utterly confuse someone with his metaphors for sex, usually while trying to either seduce them or get directions to a Pleasure Planet.
  • Subverted by the inhabitants of Garden, whose ridiculously dirty-sounding descriptions of plants and gardening refer, in fact, to plants and gardening.
• Shiny-Looking Spaceships: The "Little Lexx". It is half-dragonfly, after all.

• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Some episodes amount to this. The crew of The Lexx are not heroes. When the ship arrives at an unfamiliar Crapsack World, they do not save the day—to the contrary, they often make things even worse or get everyone killed in an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. From their misadventures, they usually learn nothing.
  • Especially prominent in the first half of Season 2. Though the crew do not know it, Mantrid is following The Lexx to every place they visit. Everything they do (which is usually nothing good anyway) is undone at the end of the episode as Mantrid's drone swarm destroys the place.
• Shout-Out:
  • Apocalexx Now to Apocalypse Now, though it's mostly In Name Only.
  • More subtly, the chess game between Kai and Prince is copied from a game played by famous players.
  • Super Nova has Tim Curry saying: "So, you're on the slab ..."
  • The episode "Xevivor" contains a quick shout out to The Blair Witch Project.
  • From "Fire and Water":
  The Lexx: I am sorry, Stanley. I cannot do that.
  • When Yottskry pops into the Gigashadow's brain chamber, he says, "What fresh hell is this?"
  • In a bar on Newfoundland, Kai interacts with a drunk priest, played by Frank Kelly.
• Shower Scene: Used to show boobies. About one per season.

• SI Prefix Name: Foreshadow, Megashadow, Gigashadow.
• Skyscraper City: Because of the extreme heat near the planet's surface, most of the cities on Fire have to be this.
• Slasher Smile: Kai sports one when he temporarily goes crazy in "Wake the Dead," and again while under orders from Brizon to smile.
• Sleeper Starship: In "Fire and Water," the crew enters cryostasis and has the Lexx go to sleep, letting him drift until he gets caught by the gravity of a celestial object. When they wake up, over 4,000 years have passed.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Not really idealistic. No, not at all.
• Slut-Shaming: Occasionally happens to Zev, although the characters who do it tend to be Jerkasses and/or villains. Most cultures, excepting those of Fire and Water, demonstrate this when the topic of sex is brought up: The landlord from one of "Lafftrack"'s shows within a show calls his female tenants "sluts," 790 (programmed for the Divine Order) insults Xev and Bunny this way, and Pa Gollean proves downright abusive when he finds Sissy in bed with Stan.

• The Song Before the Storm: The entirety of Brigadoom is this, and above all the song "Final Stand".
• Song of Courage: According to Kai, the Brunnen-G always sang "Yo Way Yo" when they went into battle expecting to die. Xev and Stan join Kai in singing it during his Heroic Sacrifice in the finale.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The early seasons play this straight from His Divine Shadow, to the Gigashadow, to Mantrid who wants to consume two universes (although they're technically all different manifestations of the same being). It's debatable whether or not Seasons 3 and 4 are a subversion. While Prince is physically limited to a single solar system, his influence could be seen as greater than any of the previous Big Bads because he's the devil, and later revealed to be death itself.
• Space Cossacks: Upon gaining control of the Lexx, the fugitives immediately head for the frontier.
• Space Is Cold: Averted. Despite being from a species adapted to a hot climate, even Squish doesn't freeze when exposed to vacuum for several seconds.
• Space Is Noisy: The Lexx's targets tend to make a "boom!" when exploding, and Kai is able to talk in space without communications equipment.
• Space Opera: Of a particular gothic-tinged and cynical kind.
  • And of course literal Opera in the case of Brigadoom.
• Space Romans: The planet of Potatoho is a parody of Idaho, IN SPACE, with no explanation given. The Golleans and their associates are parodies of Appalachians, IN SPACE, also with no explanation given.
• Space Trucker: The episode "Love Grows".
• Spectacular Spinning: The primary form of locomotion for a Cluster Lizard is curling into a circle ouroboros-style and rolling around. As part-Cluster Lizard, Xev also does this on occasion. The baby Cluster Lizard, Squish, also did it once.
• Spiders Are Scary: Lexx is afraid of spiders and wants to change course to avoid one. Stan dismisses this as nonsense until he sees the relevant spider on the viewscreen.
• Spock Speak: Kai does possibly the best Spock Speak in television history, superior even to the Trope Namer. Lexx, the titular ship, does a pretty decent job of it itself. Pretty much the only ones who don't talk this way are the thoroughly human characters of a quite low level of knowledge about things, Stanley and Xev/Zev, the ones who are typically having things explained to them in perfect expository Spock Speak.
• Spoiled Brat: Zev's fiancé, whose parents bought Zev as a present for him. He ends up getting a very satisfying punch in the face from his bride-to-be.
• Star Killing: It turns out the stars have been disappearing because Mantrid's drones are eating them.
• Starfish Aliens: The Insects (including the Gigashadow), the Satellite Worms, the Web that captures Lexx in Season 2, Lyekka's plant species... basically, if it wasn't a Human Alien, it was one of these. The only possible exception might be a blue-skinned humanoid visible behind Xev in "I Worship His Shadow."
• The Stars Are Going Out: The title of "Patches In the Sky" refers to the vast number of stars going dark, as observed by the Narcolounger's manager and ordinary client.
• Stealth Parody
• Steampunk: Most of the third season features goggles, grit, balloons navigated from Fire to Water, and steam. Did we mention goggles? Steampunk is the aesthetic of the planet Fire.
• Stock Legal Phrases: Despite living in an alternate universe with no known influences from Earth, the surviving heretics (and Kai, once he becomes Stan's attorney) use a few of these (e.g., "your honor") in court during "Stan's Trial."
• Stock Sound Effects: Kai's brace shoots with a slightly tweaked version of the familiar Red-tailed Hawk cry.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: An upright variant of this is standard for criminals sentenced to the Cluster's Protein Bank.
  • Zev|Xev, in at least three episodes: "I Worship His Shadow" (for her love-slave transformation), "Woz" (for her unwanted de-transformation), by doctors who want to understand the Key in "Terminal," and by organ thieves in "Lyekka vs. Japan."
  • More upright variants, but the doctors from "Terminal" lock Kai in a tank to study him, Poet Man locks Stan into something resembling a dentist's chair for purposes of insemination, and a very Mad Doctor straps Stan to a board to cut off his "dirty parts" in "Tunnels."

• Suck Out the Poison: Kai does so in Twilight, to cure Xev of her zombie infection.
• Summon to Hand: Kai seems able to recall his weapon by thinking about it.
• Swirly Energy Thingy: The "fractal cores" that facilitate inter-dimensional travel take this appearance.

• Talking Down the Suicidal: Subverted in a couple of different ways in Super Nova. First, Zev declines to intervene; and, second, Stan's "plan" to throw himself off the bridge turns out to be a ploy to get a kiss from Zev, whom he expects will then develop an attraction to him. He winds up accidentally falling over the edge and having to beg Zev to haul him back up.
• Syndication Title: The first season is alternatively known as Tales From A Parallel Universe.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: The Time Prophet relays a message to Stanley Tweedle through a dead miner who had his memory preserved. The tape goes so far as to know that he will forget one of the digits and when he goes back, she yells it at him.
• Tastes Better Than It Looks: The Lexx's food looks disgusting to visitors ("Lyekka"; "Wake the Dead"), but apparently it tastes okay.
• Team Pet: 790, and, briefly, Squish the baby Cluster Lizard.
• Technically-Living Zombie: While the "local" zombies on Ruuma are really dead (being the corpses of the Divine Predecessors, whose brains were removed on death), their bite is infectious, and begins to turn Xev into one of these. Luckily, Kai is able to draw out the poison before the condition becomes permanent.
• Teens Are Monsters: In "Wake the Dead" and "Haley's Comet" teens invade the Lexx and prove themselves to be vacuous, self-centered, sex-obsessed (this is Lexx), and absolutely cruel little shits to the insecure Fat Idiot that enables them to get what they want in the first place. Both episodes also have said fat idiot snapping and causing both the deaths of the other teens and nearly the deaths of the crew, so no one is sympathetic.
  • To be fair, the deaths in "Wake The Dead" actually have very little to do with Gimmel (said fat kid), although he assumes that his actions led to the death of the first kid to die.
• Telepathy: Downplayed. All known examples require touch or very close proximity, and none of the characters treats it as particularly exciting or scary.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Parodied in "Love Grows".
• The Theocracy: The Divine Order rules the League of 20,000 planets.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: When Mantrid promises to save the crew of the Lexx for last, he's not kidding; he waits until he's converted the entire universe into Mantrid Drones, then chases them with those drones. All of them.
  Mantrid: Overkill? It is my style. I think ... big.
  • How big? This big.
    790: It is a concentration of approximately 14.2 quadrillion quadrillion Mantrid drones. The combined mass of the drones is greater than the mass of the star, creating enough gravity to draw material away from the star. As the solar material passes through space it cools, allowing the Mantrid drones to use it for the manufacture of more drones, which you can see leaving the oblong concentration at its opposite end.
    Kai: What percentage of the universe is now converted into Mantrid drones?
    790: Above 64%. It will not take long for the universe's remaining matter to be converted.
    Xev: How long?
    790: I estimate that in 93.6 hours, this universe and all human life in it will be extinguished.
• 13 Is Unlucky: Category 13 biohazards and Type 13 planets are among the most dangerous kinds of each. The mass of the Higgs Boson is .13 repeating, but the process that discovers this will reduce the planet on which the research is being done to an ultra-dense ball of matter the size of a pea.
• This Loser Is You: The portrayal of the United States in Season 4 could be this, or it could be a cruelly Affectionate Parody. It's hard to tell.
• A Threesome Is Hot: When he finds himself on the Lexx with Xev and Bunny for company, Stan immediately tries to talk them into a threesome; however, since neither of the women finds him the least bit attractive, his attempt falls flat.
  • In "Prime Ridge," Stan talks a mother and her college-age daughter into a three-way.
• To Serve Man: Lyekka comes from a carnivorous plant species, and will eat humans if no less-sapient animals are available. Exaggerated by the "sister-Lyekkas," whose favorite food is humans, and who want to eat everyone on Earth.
• Toilet Humor: The show has a lot of it and Bad Carrot is pretty much one big poop joke.
• Tongue Trauma: In "Fire and Water," Stan gets frustrated that his jailers won't answer him. Then he sees that their necklaces have tongues for pendants.
• Too Dumb to Live: If someone discards a warning about basic security procedures, they will wind up as this.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Brother Trager from Nook, and Bunny from planet Water are examples.
• Totally Radical: The teens the crew picks up in "Waking the Dead."
• Transferable Memory: Several times.
  • His Shadow can draw out the memories of whoever he kills, and Kai can extract memories by touching a living or undead brain. How they achieve this is unknown.
  • Prince can find memories with a touch to the face, even if the subject's conscious mind has forgotten them. He doesn't even need to touch the person if they're dead and awaiting judgment.
• Transformation Ray: The Lusticon which alters the mind, body, life expectancy, clothing and libido of the recipient and can also work as a television.
• Transhumans in Space: Zev is a half-human hybrid, Kai has been altered at the molecular level to be a Divine Assassin, and Giggerotta has a prehensile tongue.
• Transparent Closet: Farley Kuckle, the Jeff Probst Expy from Xevivor is obviously gay but in heavy, heavy denial about it, almost but not quite to Armored Closet Gay proportions.
• Treacherous Spirit Chase: A gift from an alien species causes each member of the crew to experience hallucinations designed to evoke jealousy. Stanley discovers Xev and Kai together in bed, while Xev stumbles upon Stan and Kai in the same position. Enraged, they come within seconds of murdering each other before the real Kai intervenes.
• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Stanley Tweedle is known as the "Arch Traitor" (and hated enough by La Résistance that they're more willing to kill him than the Big Bad's guards) because...he got caught by some Space Pirates and gave away some security codes, after being tortured for them. When it comes up, it's usually Played for Laughs.
• True Companions: The Lexx crew (with the exception of 790) slowly becomes this over the course of Seasons 2 and 3 and is this in Season 4.
  • The screwed-up kind, but true nonetheless. Character Development is slow, but it's obvious that by the end of the series, Xev and Stanley have gone from bickering neighbors to actual friends, and both consider Kai as such instead of the eyecandy / useful utility he starts off as. Stanley even seems genuinely broken up when the Lexx dies of old age, although he could just be fretting the inconvenience of it.
• TV Head Robot: 790 he has three screens with multiple functions.
• Universal Universe Time: There's no evidence that the Cluster has been influenced by Earth in any way, yet characters from the League of 20,000 Planets use hours, minutes, and seconds to keep time.
• Villainous Breakdown: Mantrid's final moments. "I destroyed a universe! I destroyed a universe! I DESTROYED A UNIVERSE!!"

• Viva Las Vegas!: Viva Lexx Vegas, appropriately enough, although the plot concerns itself more with the Mafia than the usual sights of Sin City.
• Voice Changeling: His Divine Predecessors and 790 can alter their voices.
• Volleying Insults: The bragging insultfest between Brizon and Mantrid is just downright infantile, especially since Mantrid seems to be doing more than Brizon with his evil.
  • 790 and Giggerota's argument in Super Nova devolves into this.
• Warrior Poet: The race of the Brunnen-G went from Proud Warrior Race to a race of Warrior Poets after the Insects were believed destroyed for all time.
  • Before Who Wants to Live Forever? sets in.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Several, but the most important is that on the Lexx itself.
• Wetware CPU: 790 has a small chunk of human brain matter kept alive with a similar substance to protoblood, when he had a Wetware Body that is what allowed him to control it but nowadays it's used to store Zev/Xev's loveslave programming. And the organs of criminals are used to make most of the Cluster's drones as well.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Stan has a nightmare about this concept after he destroys a planet populated by robots.
  • In "The Beach," Prince calls him out for his readiness to abandon 790 in "Norb."
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: The Brunnen-G are an example of this. After defeating the Insects, they build a new homeworld and put a shield around it and work out immortality. But it's only agelessness, not accident or disease proof, and thus as a culture nearly all of them are so risk averse they don't get out of bed or their bunkers for fear of a germ or a falling brick. They also live far beyond their brains' ability to remember and have problems. They can still breed though, and the younger generations have issues with what has happened.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Woz is The Wizard of Oz IN SPACE! and on drugs. A Midsummer's Nightmare is Shakespeare not in space, but on more drugs.
• Will They or Won't They?: Stan and Xev in the ending of the Grand Finale.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: The Lexx is a Living Ship, so it needs to feed. It would usually eat large inhabited chunks of planets to satisfy its hunger. Since the Lexx provided food for the crew, if Lexx didn't eat nobody ate. Sometimes the search for food would be the plot of an entire episode.
  • Kai, once he was turned into an assassin by the Divine Order, needed proto-blood to survive. Season 1 had an ongoing subplot of trying to locate a supply for him.
• Wizards from Outer Space: Priests of the Divine Order, who wield power over "life-essences" (aka souls), Prince, and the Druids from Earth.
• World Shapes: A few of the one-off planets have unusual shapes, including a synestia and a (presumably) once-round world that's now missing large chunks due to a mining operation.
• Would Hurt a Child: Many. Mantrid proves this with Norb when he tricks the kid into flying into a candy-cane built structure that's really composed of drone arms. When the arms attack him, you never see the death.
  • Played for Laughs in "Lafftrack" when Stan punts the head off of an android child and sends it flying across the room. The difference is that Stan knows the kid isn't a living being in the first place.
• Yandere: 790 shows signs of being this, but thanks to Flanderization, he knocks it out of the park in Season 4.
• You Can't Kill What's Already Dead: Whenever someone expresses happiness that an event didn't destroy Kai, he reminds them that he was not alive in the first place.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The Giga to the Divine Predecessors, Mantrid to Vigl, the Divine Order to virtually everyone in the League of 20,000 Planets, Prince to Priest... The list goes on.
• You Never Asked: After Kai explains the function of 790's brain cube:
  Stan: Well, why didn't you tell him?
  Kai: He never asked.
  • When the moth breeders are introduced.
  Xev: And they were here all along?
  Kai nods.
  Xev: Why didn't you ever tell us about them?
  Kai: You didn't ask.
• Word Salad Philosophy: Considering how incomprehensible the writings of "poet-philosopher" Drago are, it's hard to imagine how the Divine Order guessed a message treasonous to merit his execution.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The Narcolounger is a bed that makes your dreams feel more vivid, with the side effect that, if you die in the dream, you die for real.
• Zeerust: In "Super Nova", the memories on Brunnis are stored on ... compact discs.
  • Several of the spaceship designs.

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"Looking for some strange? Have some Lexx."