His Divine Shadow
Now that I have seen the third season, I have come to see His Divine Shadow in a different light. He is a great character, a symbol of [i]Lexx[/i]’s golden age. [i]I Worship His Shadow[/i] and [i]The Giga Shadow[/i] are powerful allegories parallelling religious cultism and pedagogery that has existed and continues to exist on Earth. His Divine Shadow isn’t God, he’s someone pretending to be God.
Prince, on the other hand, [i]is[/i] the Devil, a shocking plot twist that seems to take away from His Shadow’s importance in the previous seasons, and implies (however much the creators try to tiptoe around the subject) the existance of an actual supreme deity in the [i]Lexx[/i] universe. In other words, the metaphysical elements of the third season tears down the pseudometaphysical elements in the Divine Shadow episodes and [i]Woz[/i]. Now I worry that Prince will dominate the fourth season, a bad thing for [i]Lexx[/i].
His Shadow is a much better villain than Mantrid or Prince. Prince is the ultimate evil, and Mantrid is just nuts. But there is a bit of sympathy in His Shadow. There is a human element to him that makes him a more believable and more powerful figure. He’s a mortal who tried to be God, but fell short. He’s a victim who became a victimizer so slowly he never realized it. His Shadow in itself was never that evil, until the essence passed into the body of an uncleansed human. It was humanity that began and ended his crusade.
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Lee P. Sherman, code name DalekTek790
Whovian, Froudian, Lexxian, etc.