The Starlost, Episode Fifteen: The Beehive

The hero trio find a lab full of apiculturalists (beekeepers to you and me) and before long we’re in not one but two bonkers bee B-movies, as one of the scientists, attempting to communicate with the bees, winds up pissing them off mightily, and then we discover the whole hive is being controlled by four giant telepathic mutant bees who are mind-controlling the leader of the project.

One of the giant mutant telepathic bees is on its coffee break right now.

This really ought to be wonderfully insane, along the lines of one of the more balls-to-the-wall LEXX episodes or possibly a late 1970s Hammer movie, but this is The Starlost, so it’s curiously flat.

There are two good guest star performances (sadly there are four guest stars), and some really appallingly badly researched biology (the scientist who’s trying to communicate with the bees thinks they communicate by humming, for a start, and that’s before we get into the whole impossibility of giant bees), though there’s a nice shoutout to the then-ongoing Washoe experiment when one scientist observes that chimps are good at sign language.

Continuity: the hero trio are wearing brown velour jumpsuit or leisure-suit combos, like “Gallery of Fear”, with no real explanation why, or what they’ve done with their usual outfits. Once again the scientists know about the accident (which is firmly back 200 years in the past again), but don’t seem inclined to try and do anything about it.

The Starlost Episode Three: The Goddess Calabra

Our trio come to the society of Omicron, a name which seems more on the nose in 2022 than it presumably did in 1972, and there, good heavens, they encounter actual acting. John Colicos and Barry Morse are guest starring, and they show up the regular cast something rotten as they deliver a masterclass in how to do space melodrama.

Omicron is an all-male society, which loses its collective mind at the sight of Rachel. This was the premise of one of my favourite episodes of LEXX, but sadly this is The Starlost, so instead of throwing a joyous life-affirming bisexual sex party, they want her to marry John Colicos.

The script is also at pains to assure us there’s nothing remotely gay about Omicron, well, apart from John Colicos watching lithe and handsome young men perform aerobics displays, but there’s nothing gay about that at all, no, no.

This story actually has a narrative heart, namely a power struggle between charismatic strong-man leader John Colicos, and Barry Morse as a seemingly feeble peacenik high priest who is nonetheless rather cleverly finding ways of undermining him. Including manipulating him into fighting a duel over Rachel with Devon, who wins (through the power of his plot armour), and the society winds up taking an unexpected turn.

Good actors and bad CSO.

Which just goes to show that in the hands of the right performers, this series could be not half bad. My theory is that the director was mostly leaving the actors to themselves, the two junior members of the hero trio were taking their cues from Keir Dullea’s monotonous performance, and the guest stars were either underplaying it, as in most episodes, or thinking, “screw it, let’s milk this to the hilt,” as Colicos and Morse are clearly doing here. With hindsight, this is quite possibly my favourite episode of The Starlost, inasmuch as terms such as “favourite” apply in this case.

This episode was “based on a story by Ursula K. Le Guin,” who went on to write some other things.

The Starlost Episode Two: Lazarus From The Mist

Looking for the cryogenic suspension facility so as to revive someone who can help them, the hero trio are set upon by a band of aggressive tribespeople. “I’ll be all right!” shouts Garth as the other two escape to safety leaving him facing the enemy horde, and indeed they believe him, it’s a full six minutes and fifty seconds before Devon says “…and we’ve got to get help for Garth.”

Anyway, the A plot is that Devon and Rachel manage to revive an engineer, only to find that 1) he’s the wrong kind of engineer, and 2) the reason he’s in suspension is because he was exposed to a “radiation virus” (how very 1973) and has two hours to live. Again, this is an interesting enough idea which could have been quite powerful in the right hands, but this is underplayed so awkwardly that there’s no emotional heft to what ought to have been a quite tragicomic situation. At least he manages to infodump a lot about the ship and what they need to do next.

LEXX might have got away with this.

The B plot is, of course, the tribespeople, who are dressed in the rags of crew uniforms, are apparently descended from surviving security personnel, and are the sort of thing LEXX would have been able to get away with. There’s two ways you can go with this sort of setup, and, to its credit, The Starlost goes with the optimistic version (befriending the tribespeople and helping them find a home in an abandoned dome). We’re never going to see them again, of course, but it’s just as well.

LEXX: 3.13: Heaven and Hell

If last week was Ingmar Bergman, this week is what you’d get if you handed Ingmar Bergman a tab of acid and a copy of the script for “Journey to the Far Side of the Sun”. Before you can say “aren’t the planets Fire and Water metaphorically like Hell and Heaven?” we discover that not only is this literally true, but a) you can’t have one without the other, b) Prince is Satan (leading to some nice speculation on what motivates him and why he even exists)… and c) in the season-ender cliffhanger, both he and the LEXX have now been unleashed onto the Earth.

Oh, and Xev gets dry-humped by a skeleton. Just in case all the metaphysics was getting to be too much and you needed to go back into the Pornography Zone.

I’m probably not going to cover LEXX season 4, because 1) it’s not on Amazon Prime, so I’d have to buy a box set, and 2) it’s Season 4, which I remember as not being remotely good in the slightest, and I have yet to see any evidence that it’s worth a re-visit, except possibly to be amused when various German actors who have since become known for other things turn up as guests. So my next set of TV reviews for this blog, at least, will be “The Starlost.”

LEXX 3.12: The Beach

Stanley is stranded in the sea on Water, and before you can say “he’s in the opening credits so they can’t kill him off,” they do. It’s obvious from early on that this is a clip-show episode, but the framing premise is better than most such stories, as Stanley discovers where people in the LEXX-verse go after they die. At first it seems like he’s going to be judged for the same crimes that kept haunting him in Season Two, but in the end what damns him is something much more personal and relatable.

The premise is reminiscent of the Red Dwarf episode where the characters are judged by versions of themselves, but there’s also an eerie Ingmar Bergman element to the staging and the imagery of Stan walking along a beach in the company of Prince and the mysterious judge.

LEXX 3.11: Girltown

Gigguratha’s back! Hooray! My favourite recurring grotesque is-this-clever-or-is-this-offensive character! And before you can say “I wonder what form she’ll take in the Dark Zone?”, we learn that she’s Queen, ruler of Girltown, where men toil over sewing machines and women form a parliament that’s less useful than Boris Johnson’s government.

The other guest star this week is Jimmy Somerville. Jimmy. Somerville. Of. Bronski. Beat. This is what I love about LEXX, it casually drops in an appearance by major figure in the history of techno music and LGBT+ rights, like it was nothing.

This is another of those episodes where I’m not sure if it’s exploitative and crass or clever and subversive, but Jimmy Somerville’s participation suggests that any potential homophobia or gender-shaming is to be taken ironically. Plus there’s a techno-dance-party sequence that, if I’m reading it right, says that in a world full of totalitarian fascists, the way to true freedom is to stop playing their games, don a frock and boa, and dance.

LEXX 3.10: Battle

Before you can say “is this another filler episode?” the series, recognising that we’re going into the end game, ramps up the tension to give us the sort of corking, brain-twisting action we’ve been missing for the past couple of episodes. Prince kidnaps Xev, Kai and Stan stop lotus-eating in the Garden (euphemisms!) to give chase in a balloon, and airborne steampunk mayhem ensues.

This is also a great characterisation episode for Xev, as she gets to explore her feelings about her upbringing in the Wife Bank, and reflect on the way in which everyone in the empire of His Shadow was, to a greater or lesser extent, exploited, while also kicking a satisfying amount of ass. Prince also gets to come into his own as a villain, verbally sparring with her during the balloon chase.

In sum, Xev gets all the lines but Prince gets (almost) the last word.

LEXX 3.09: The Garden

The crew find themselves in a magical garden that’s uncomfortably like an X-rated version of a children’s show, and before you can say “that sounds like a lot of fun,” I’m here to warn you that it really isn’t. While that could be the premise for one of LEXX’s more audacious soft-porn romps, in fact we’re really in filler episode territory, with 45 minutes of not much happening. Not sure what the optimal length for a LEXX story is, really; 2 hours is too short, 22 episodes is way too long, and even 13 episodes seems to contain a fair bit of hang time. The main thing this episode has going for it is a welcome return cameo for Lyekka, but unfortunately she doesn’t do much more than titillate Stan and eat a few of the people of Water.

LEXX 3.08: The Key

Stan wants to feed the twin planets to the LEXX, and before you can say “hang on, this is a thirteen-episode season, there’s no way he can go through with that,” Xev apparently decides she’s going to relieve him of the key to the LEXX, since it seems it can transfer during orgasm as well as on the death of the possessor (would have been interesting if they’d known about that in Season Two).

Initially I thought this was another dragged-out filler episode, but five minutes before the ending there’s a twist that retrospectively justifies the slow build up and makes you want to watch it again with the knowledge of what’s actually going on. It’s also definitely one of those episodes where “unbelievably clever” and “unbelievably offensive” overlap on so many levels.

LEXX 3.07: Tunnels

Kai is stuck in Hogtown, a city of tedious bureaucrats and insurance claims people, and before you can say, “isn’t Hogtown one of the less flattering nicknames for Toronto?”, the rest of us have noted that LEXX is one of the three pieces of filmed theatre for which Nova Scotia is famous (the other two, if you’re interested, are Trailer Park Boys and Hobo With A Shotgun, both of which, incidentally, feature Brian “Stanley Tweedle” Downey), so yes, this is undoubtedly a swipe at the city Canadians love to hate.

Meanwhile Xev, Stan and Prince escape K-Town through the eponymous tunnels, ducking madly sadistic ballerinas and transvestites (stay classy, LEXX: it really was not a simpler time).

A pretty boring episode, so I’lll just say that Prince is shaping up to be a really good character, who I’m never sure whether I want to love or hate.