The Dead Do Push up the Daisies: Kai as the Voice of Ecocentrism in Lexx

Ask a casual viewer the main theme of Lexx (1996-2002), and she’ll probably respond, “sex.” After all, the premise of the Canadian-German science fiction series is that “love slave” Zev (Eva Habermann, “Xev” after Season Two’s recast with Xenia Seeburg) rejects the sexually frustrated Stanley Tweedle (Brian Downey), falling in love, instead, with Kai (Michael McManus), who cannot reciprocate because he is “dead” (his “de-carbonized” body cannot “feel”). But there is more to Lexx than sexual cliché. The series is, indeed, about sex. It is also about death, specifically “dead” Kai’s quest to achieve his final, irrevocable death. Lexx exists at the crossroads between orgasmic intensity of feeling and feeling nothing at all. It proposes that dying and living are the same, two sides of one process that unites all life in webs of ecological relationality. This ecocentric philosophy is illustrated principally through Kai.

The creation of co-writers Paul Donovan, Lex Gigeroff, and Jeffrey Hirschfield, Lexx started as four made-for-television movies (its “first season”) and subsequently ran as a TV show for three years (Seasons Two through Four). The series, which details the adventures of Xev, Stan, Kai, and robot head 790 aboard a living space ship, the Lexx, is more “campy” than dramatic, more irreverent than moralizing. If Star Trek foregrounds human greatness, Lexx foregrounds human failings. Donovan explains, “[T]he certain knowledge that we are a flawed species, fused with endless Monty Python and Star Trek episodes and everything else I watched [as a teenager], resulted in Lexx. . . I think” (qtd. in Gibson 36; ellipsis original).

Yet though the crew of the Lexx is morally ambiguous and often causes more harm than good, the show itself has a definite moral center. The core ethical principles of the series, usually articulated by Kai, are “nature” (in the sense of “living in accord with one’s nature”) and “balance.” Kai appeals to nature to justify tolerance for life forms that would ordinarily be considered inimical. In the fourth TV movie, “Giga Shadow” (1.4), for example, he allows a newly hatched Cluster Lizard to imprint on him as its “mother,” even though Cluster Lizards are aggressive, brain-eating predators. The crew should accept the Lizard, Kai argues, because “[i]t’s a baby, an innocent.” It is not culpable for its natural inclination to eat brains. The narrative endorses Kai’s choice: the Cluster Lizard ultimately saves much of the Two Universes by eating the brain of the genocidal Giga Shadow.

Similarly, when the crew befriends Lyekka (Louise Wischermann), a carnivorous plant in the shape of a woman from Stan’s dreams, they reconcile themselves to her consumption of human prey on the grounds that it is her nature to eat living flesh. In Lyekka’s introductory episode (“Lyekka” 2.3), the plant woman devours three astronauts who are guests aboard the Lexx.¹ When Stan asks if Kai will protect the third, Moss (Stephen McHattie), Kai replies, “I have no motivation to save Moss from Lyekka. Or Lyekka from Moss.” Lyekka must eat to survive, while Moss to survive must avoid being eaten. Though Kai protects Stan out of personal loyalty, he will not otherwise interfere in natural predator-prey relations. Lyekka ultimately does eat Moss, yet the crew of the Lexx coexists with her by finding her food before she gets hungry enough to eat them.

The crew’s interactions with Lyekka’s species, however, are not always so congenial. Though Lyekka herself dies protecting her companions at the end of Season Two, the Lexx encounters her people again in Season Four, this time as an invading force bent on devouring twenty-first-century Earth. Whereas one plant person’s appetite can feasibly be sated, thousands become an intergalactic plague of locusts. Kai expresses this concern to the new “Lyekka,” the plants’ representative:

KAI. Eating everything on the planet is unbalanced. What will you do afterwards?
LYEKKA. Eat another tasty planet.
[. . . .]
KAI. And when the universe runs out of planets, Lyekka will starve to death.
LYEKKA. This universe has lots of yummy planets. (“ApocaLexx Now” 4.20)

Lyekka assumes that resources will always be available to accommodate growth -- or, at least, that their exhaustion is so distant as to be functionally irrelevant. Kai, in contrast, argues for sustainable living. If the plants to do not moderate their consumption so that life can regenerate, they will turn food into a nonrenewable resource, thereby destroying the ecological base their own lives depend on. Lyekka is, of course, correct that a whole universe -- as presented in Lexx -- contains many planets harboring organic life. Thus, the plants might persist for a long time stripping planet after planet of life. Yet Kai’s assessment of the plants’ fate is ultimately valid. Even a universe does not contain infinite resources.

A species that does not live within its ecological means will die. But death, in Lexx, is not only the decomposing state of an organism no longer living; it is also “life” stretched beyond its normal limits, a consciousness and activity disconnected from the ecosystemic “circles” of life and death that perpetuate organic living. Kai is the show’s prime example of this living death. A once-living human who has spent two thousand years as a “de-carbonized” Divine Assassin, Kai is adamant that he is “dead.” Lexx expert D. G. Valdron, under the pseudonym “Darrow,” challenges Kai’s assertion.² Playing on Kai’s stock phrase, “The dead do not feel,” Darrow argues, “[H]e’s not dead. The dead do not make dry witty comments, the dead do not do contortions to evade moral responsibility, the dead do not get up and walk around. There is a long list of things that Kai does that the dead do not do” (“Living”). Indeed, Kai’s claim to “deadness” is challenged not only by his behavior but by the claims of other “dead” characters to life. Most notable of these is Mantrid (Dieter Laser), whose physical state is akin to “dead” Kai’s.³ After surviving an attack by Lyekka, Mantrid proclaims, “I am alive” (“End of the Universe” 2.20). Yet later in the same episode, Kai counters, “I know I am dead, but you believe you are alive [. . .]” (my emphasis). His contrast between his “knowledge” and Mantrid’s mere “belief” rejects Mantrid’s claim to living status. But though Mantrid is not an admirable character, his description of his self-conscious and purposeful state as “living” seems as reasonable as Kai’s professions of “deadness.”

Darrow posits that “Kai is a sort of alive that he does not understand or recognize, so he thinks it’s death.” (“Living”). Lacking the original’s biochemical systems, the dead Kai is incapable of feeling in a recognizable way: “[Kai’s] emotions feel distant and far away, faint, as if a person was shouting at him from across an abyss” (Darrow, “Living”). But while Darrow’s analysis of Kai’s physical state is cogent, it does not account for his tenacity in clinging to his deadness. Indeed, much as Judith Butler contends that gender is not a biological imperative but a “performance” based on social expectations, we might say that Kai “performs” death -- and with ever increasing scrupulousness (Butler 25). As the series progresses, he flattens his affect and reiterates more frequently his catch phrase: “The dead do not [do various things].” Although his physical being is both “living” and “dead,” he systematically accentuates his deadness.

Kai’s insistence on his deadness can be traced to his identity as a living person. He was born into a human society called the Brunnen G, which had discovered how to halt the aging process. By Kai’s time, only a handful of people, like Kai, were their “natural age,” born presumably to replace those who died of accidental causes. But being human, the Brunnen G were not mentally constituted for immortality. Instead, their long lives provoked a fear of death so intense that most of them rejected all hazardous activities. Moreover, their brains appear to have been overloaded with too many years of information: the elders could scarcely remember who they were.

Disdaining this enervation, Kai attempted to revive his society’s glorious warrior past. Yet when he tried to rally the Brunnen G to defend themselves against the Divine Order, most soon came to view their impending destruction as a release from an intolerable immortality. Only a few newborns, led by Kai, battled the Order. They failed, and their civilization was obliterated. Kai himself was killed and reanimated as a mindless assassin.

But even after his mental faculties are restored, the dead Kai contrasts starkly with his living self. While the dead Kai professes to feel nothing, want nothing, and “not meddle in the affairs of the living” (“ApocaLexx Now” 4.20), the living Kai was an emphatic participant in life. He liked balloons and fishing and had a tempestuous romance with a woman who could not appreciate the sense of adventure that urged him to explore beyond his home planet. He was a lover, a leader, a warrior.

He defined himself and his activities against the stagnation of his elders. Whether they hid indoors to avoid disease or waited gladly for death, the Brunnen G refused to participate in the actions that make life meaningful. For Kai, conversely, to be alive was to accept that life brings death. This philosophy survives in the dead Kai millennia later. In “The Key” (3.8), Kai invokes the clichéd -- but in this case highly significant -- analogy between orgasm and dying. He states that while the sensations are akin, dying is far more intense: “The point of death is the point of joy,” he says, the moment of one’s most passionate participation in life, the antithesis of the Brunnen G elders’ long living death.

Yet dying not only occurs at a single moment but throughout the process of living: all organic bodies degenerate, finally decomposing into basic nutrients, which are essential to new life. In keeping with Kai’s analogy between life and sex, the living/dying must participate in the universe, not only for the experience of living but for the continuance of life. In “Garden” (3.9), Kai attempts to nurture life by burying himself in a flowerbed. Returning to the earth, he explains, “is the natural way of all dead things.” Alive, Kai participated in life; dead, he is still dedicated to doing so -- in the way proper to dead things -- by literally pushing up the daisies. Ironically, the flowers planted next to him shrivel and die, apparently poisoned by his de-carbonized body.

Since Kai defines life in terms of ecological relationality, he cannot define himself as “alive” because he is not an ecological participant. Likewise, in Kai’s philosophy, Mantrid cannot legitimately claim living status without participating in ecological processes. Events of the series support Kai’s position: Mantrid shows more contempt for ecological relationality than any other figure in Lexx. In Season Two, he attempts to transform everything in the Two Universes into self-replicating drones. As Darrow observes, Mantrid’s goal is “simply to replace all the matter in the Universe[s] with himself [. . .]” (“Mantrid”). Mantrid is the ultimate solipsist, literally seeing no value in anything not Mantrid. He wishes to eat without being eaten, to live without dying. Kai notes the futility of this aim: “And after destroying all of humanity and converting an entire universe into Mantrid drones, then what do you do, Mantrid?” (“End of the Universe” 2.20). Mantrid answers that he will eat the second universe, then rest. His aim is the extermination of all the interconnected diversity of life. Fittingly, his final words proclaim a nihilistic triumph: “I destroyed a universe!” (“End” 2.20).

These “dead” figures are juxtaposed to the emphatically living Xev and Stan. The series begins with the two of them being released from prison: Stan from enforced service as a security guard for the Divine Order, Zev from her upbringing in a box and subsequent imprisonment for insulting her husband. For both characters, their newfound freedom excites a jumble of emotions: fear, courage, strength, hunger, sexual frustration, anger, friendship. Stan and Xev’s exuberance is inseparable from their existence as living bodies. Their lives are constantly threatened: by the Divine Order, by Mantrid, by carnivorous plants. The very tenuousness of their existence energizes them: when death looms, every moment of living matters. Even Stan, who is terrified of death, ultimately recognizes that death makes life worthwhile. In “Brigadoom” (2.18), a theatrical reenactment of Kai’s life, the performers offer the Lexx crew a chance to escape Mantrid by joining the troupe. Stan refuses, “’[c]ause they [the troupe] don’t live; they’re not real. They are just like the Brunnen G: not alive, not dead.” Facing death -- just as Kai did long ago -- is being alive, being “real.” Fittingly, the series closes, in the midst of death, with the living. In the final episode, Prince (Nigel Bennett) brings Kai back to life, thus enabling him to truly die. The Lexx dies of old age but not before producing a baby Lexx, which carries Xev and Stan out into the universe, still alive in the cycles of life that surround them.

¹ Lyekka’s hunger is, of course, a metaphor for sexual appetite. Yet this sexual dimension exists alongside the motif of literal eating, with an attendant ecological concern for finding food. In Lexx, sex and food are linked as two manifestations of the appetites that define living.

² Darrow was mentioned as a possible author for an official companion book to Lexx (Donovan, Interview with the Frey). Donovan, endorsed the potential project, stating, “I am very pleased because Darrow knows the show better than anyone” (Interview with the Frey).

³ Both originally human, Mantrid and Kai retain what Mantrid calls human “programming” (“Norb” 2.12) within bodies that are inorganic: Mantrid a computer, Kai de-carbonized. Both are also linked to the Insect race: Mantrid fused with an Insect essence, Kai requiring protoblood -- a byproduct of Insect metabolism -- as an energy source.

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Darrow [D. G. Valdron]. “Living Dead Guy....” 2001. The Darrow Files. Lexxplorations. WordWrights. 22 Jan. 2005. .

. . . “Mantrid -- A Character Study.” 2001. The Darrow Files. Lexxplorations. WordWrights. 22 Jan. 2005. .

Donovan, Paul. Interview with the Frey [Internet pseudonym]. Sadboard. The SadGeezer’s Guide to Cult TV Sci Fi. Salter Street Films, Halifax, Can. 4 Oct. 2001. 26 Jan. 2005. .

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Lexx. Prod. Paul Donovan and Wolfram Tichy. Perf. Brian Downey, Eva Habermann, Xenia Seeburg, and Michael McManus. 1996-2002. DVD. Salter Street, 1996-2003.