For the last couple of years I’ve been re-watching the LEXX series, apart from Season Four (which isn’t on Amazon Prime for some reason) and microblogging about it on Facebook. And then I got asked by a friend if I could make the reviews generally available so he could read them while doing his own re-watch.
So, a new periodic blog feature: LEXX capsule reviews. I’m editing and expanding these from the original microblogs to fit the new format, obviously, but the reactions are more or less the same.
I Worship His Shadow is the first 90-minute (plus adverts) telemovie, which I initially watched on first broadcast on CityTV in Canada. Rewatching, it’s actually a lot better than I remember it being. My past impression had been that it was just a lot of gratuitous schlock, but watching it again there was a lot of wit and subversion of narrative tropes and expectations (it builds and builds towards a story about heroic naughty-but-likeable outlaws with the most powerful ship in the universe…. and abruptly tears that away), casual bisexuality, and surprising gender egalitarianism (I’d been worried about the premise of Zev’s character– an ugly, fat woman given a beautiful thin body and sentenced to life as a love slave– but it winds up being less about the fat-shaming and more about the insidiousness of patriarchy).
There was also a whole lot of really graphic body horror, and (mild spoiler) I’m amazed that they got away with a sequence of multiple child murder on network television.
My summary of LEXX as a whole is: “Blake’s 7, reimagined by Lars von Trier and Ken Russell.” I Worship His Shadow is pretty much that.
A Doctor Of Many Things 
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