After the Fallout, Your Opinions please
quote:
Originally posted by Squishy:
If there is a spin-off then both the elements of the movies and the comedy needs to be combined seemlessly, if it can’t that then it also will be doomed to failure.
Although I admire the beans for doing what they wanted, it worked against the wishes of many fans who wanted Lexx to stand proud.
I couldn’t disagree more. I came into [i]LEXX[/i] with the first season, seeing the first films on pre-release screeners before they became available on home video. While I liked them, I always thought that they seemed forced. The sets, the writing, the acting, the effects, they all seemed edging toward the brink of greatness, but teetering awkwardly on the precipice. It was like they were *just* about to hit their mark, but just kept falling a few paces short. For me, the Beans started hitting their targets with laser precision in S2. The characters (well, Stan and Xev) began being more layered and fully developed and the storylines developed. The new format served the telling of these stories more effectively, allowing for more flexibility in telling a “big” story without the constraints of time, while allowing them to focus on what would have to be relegated to “subplot” status in a feature film-length work, and develop the characters.
For me, S3 worked like gangbusters, despite what I saw as obvious problems that the Beans had in dealing with “cliffhanger” endings (too often, things just *stopped* without any buildup of suspense, like in “Garden” or “Girltown”). More depth was shown in all characters (again, save for Kai, because the dead are not…deep), and the central story was engrossing. It was a break from the comedic aspects of S2, which some saw as a bad thing, but the whole central theme of the story doesn’t lend itself well to humor (though some eps were, indeed, funny). Personally, I liked the alternating currents of the show, switching from seriousness to silliness in mid-stream. S4, despite problems with tight scheduling and hurried production, delivered a number of classic episodes that were as good as anything from the previous 3 seasons. While there are some eps that I don’t like so much, that’s true of *every* season of the show. I only like about 1/2 of the first (and that’s in spite of several other problems I have with it), and there are handfuls of eps from S2 and 3 that I don’t like much as well.
While you may think that [i]LEXX[/i] didn’t stand proud, I have to ask, “proud of *what*?” [i]LEXX[/i] has *never* been a “proud” show. From the first episode, it’s always been willing to dwell in the gutter with the rest of the snipes, and that’s what separates it from the sterile, clinical, “proud” shows like [i]ST:TNG[/i]. To quote Wilde, “We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
–Aleck