LEXX: Biography: Mantrid

Mantrid is a wonderful character and one of my favourite nasties. He was once the Divine Orders greatest Bio-Vizier. He is most certainly a baddie, but he’s sooo weird that you almost get to like the geezer. He was a brilliant scientist and a genius but unfortunately the Divine Order also thought him to be dangerously brilliant and imprisoned him.

If you were to meet him in a pub you would probably be mildly shocked at his appearance and make a mental note not order a cheese and pickle sandwich with your beer.

Mantrid looks really hoopy! His head sits on top of what looks like a large ornate pickle jar. The jar contains some roundish objects that we assume are his vital living organs (but they look like big pickles to me). He has no legs or arms but does have the ability to hover and manoeuvre. He is able to manipulate objects with the use of many small detached arms (most of which are right handed).

Mantrid is also completely bonkers! The guy has no grasp of reality whatsoever. Mind you, he’s been locked away on his own little world for years with no-one to talk to except his pickles and a trusty sidekick that doted on his every whim. Personally I think he became mad because he played with his own pickles! – I mean, look at the guy! how else can you explain such madness and all those right handed arms!

Kai (while possessed by His Shadow) killed Mantrid when, with his handy wrist gadget, he smashed the pickle jar. The LEXX destroyed Mantrid’s planet, but he and His Shadow’s essence managed to escape in Mantrid’s spaceship.

Splarka put me right on a few points. Now this is complicated. Are you sitting comfortably? Right, then I’ll begin.

Mantrid as he was (ie. the geezer sat on top of a pickle jar), is dead! And the transference organ from the insect is also dead! However, Mantrid’s essence and the essence of His Shadow, are now fused together and in the ship’s computer (the one that looks like Sputnik’s mum!).

Mantrid’s head and the blue insect transference organ (that contained His Shadow’s essence) are currently devoid of any essence and are therefore quietly rotting in a smelly heap in the spaceship. Mantrid’s ugly mush decomposing in a putrefied mess with that that large blue insect thing rotting alongside must make the smell unbearable – in fact, I think there may even be maggots and stuff in there and the flesh would be all oozy and discoloured. erm…..

So, Mantrid AND His Shadow’s essence became a new entity in the spaceship (designed to carry and keep alive Mantrids brain after his death) and it is the spaceship that is the arch-baddie of the series.

In the episode Norb, we see Mantrid return as a rejuvenated computerised life form. This new healthier looking dude, tells our heroes of his plans to destroy all of humankind.

Now if yer computer turned round and said something like this to you, you might give out a little snigger. Mantrid however has some significant resources at his erm…. fingertips to assist him in his dastardly plan.

He has a number of quite miraculous arms, millions of them in fact! The guy is well armed!

At first these ‘drones’ for that’s what they are, handy robots, look pretty harmless. But there is more to them than meets the eye. They are very advanced mechanical devices. They can change shape (at least the top half of them can) with the use of a group molecular machines capable of changing the shape of the arm by rearranging it’s molecular consistence. In this way, it can also rearrange the shape of other living or non-living objects to make the raw materials for the construction new Mantrid Drones.

The more arms it makes, the more it is able to destroy and therefore, the more it is able to make new arms!! Frightening huh!? Mantrid arms can disassemble whole planets in seconds and double their number at the same time!!

All this micro-atomic stuff may seem, at first sight, to be complete and utter bollocks! But it isn’t as far away from reality as you might think!

At some point for instance, we will all have our own food machine! Imagine going out into the garden and helping yourself to a plate of soil, leaves, treebark and rotting vegetable matter from the compost heap! Then you place the plate into an appliance that looks much like a microwave. You push a button and out comes a piping hot rump steaks with chips and gravy!

Ok, I know it sounds far fetched, but based on the thinking of people such as Nobel prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman and the remarkable Eric Drexler, such technology is only tens of years away and not hundreds as you might think.

Fundamentally, the technology relies on a community of tiny programmable robots called assemblers, so small that they can work with individual molecules of matter. A group of these assemblers or nanobots could be programmed to produce any structure or entity allowed by the laws of nature.

Significantly, the limiting factor in this technology is it’s ability to change or create large structures quickly! If you imagine that you were able to have ten thousand million nanobots all working for hundreds of years, they would still only manage to build an object the size of a tiny grain of sand! And as some of you scientists would agree, the kinetic energy of atoms is positively awe-inspiring! All atoms vibrate at certain temperatures, and what may seem (at macro-level) to be utter calm and stillness, would, in reality be the scene of the worst cosmic thrashing imaginable! Living at a molecular level would be like living in a boulder storm.

Nevertheless, IBM managed to place 35 xenon atoms to form their logo, maybe this technology is not too far away.

To make things even more implausible, a whole host of Mantrid Drones are able to gobble up stars! 790 explained that, “…a concentration of approximately 14.2 quadrillion quadrillion Mantrid Drones with the combined mass greater than the combined mass of the star, could create enough gravity to draw material away from the star and as it passes through space it cools.” This would allow the Mantrid Drones to use it for the production of more drones.

When we consider the miraculous abilities of the Mantrid Drones, maybe we should not dismiss this as fantasy, as the scientist Ralph Merkle once said, “Oh, fantasy, is that like going to the moon?”

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This review is © 1999-2019 Tony Fawl.
Not for reproduction without the authors express permission

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