After the Fallout, Your Opinions please

I find it hard to say which is my favorite. I started watching [i]LEXX[/i] with S1, and yet that’s definitely my least favorite. It’s too forced and awkward. The storylines are too disjointed, and they try to do too much in too little time. The acting is well below the level set in subsequent seasons. It sets things up nicely, but — for me — it just doesn’t hit its marks. Plus, there’s the added annoyance of people trying to read too much into the tentative baby steps of the series as a whole: the fact that they hadn’t arrived at a working definition of Kai’s character and the range of emotion he’s allowed to have has caused too much idle speculation along the lines of “Kai must have loved Zev, but never got over losing her when she died.” No, Kai never loved *anyone* after he died. He’s *dead*, fercryin’outloud. The dead do not have emotions to speak of. Anything resembling emotion in Kai prior to his “resurrection” at the hands of Prince is just sloppy writing on the part of the Beans, something that I think they’d readily admit to.

Now that that’s out of the way…

It’s hard to say which remaining season I like best. Overall, I think that the acting, direction and concept was best in S3 (though, like every season, it includes a handful of clunker episodes), but it’s hampered by a problem with sudden, abrupt endings to episodes, which arises from the difficulties in trying to make every episode continuous with the next while still leaving the audience with a climax to the episode as a whole. As a result, the eps don’t flow together as well as they should, and don’t really have “cliffhanger” endings that create suspense and tension and leave me, at least, eagerly awaiting the next episode. But don’t get me wrong — I love just about everything else about this particular season, except for the absence of 790 from the majority of the eps. It’s multi-layered and has a certain rhythm that’s unlike just about anything else.

S2 and S4 both come from the same place — they both concern themselves with making fun of everything under the sun, while having a vague threat link a number of the otherwise stand-alone episodes. S2 is somewhat more successful than S4, only because of the budget and time allowed for the earlier season (I can’t help but think that if S2 had been made under the same conditions that S4 was, that it would be *far* worse than what resulted in S4). S4 has a number of episodes that are, indeed, worse than the worst eps of S2 or S3, but its best episodes (and I’d include “Little Blue Planet,” “P4X,” “Stan Down,” “Walpurgis Night,” “Vlad,” “The Game” and “Yo Way Yo” among them, with a number of them ranking just below these) easily match, IMHO, anything from any previous season (and *every* season had its share of bad eps).

Pressed, I’d have to say that S3 is probably my fave, with S2 and S4 just below it, and with S1 trailing.

–Aleck