791 (LEXX episode)
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791 is an episode of the science-fiction TV series, Lexx. It was the ninth episode of the show's second season.
[edit] Summary
The crew of the Lexx get a distress signal from a planet incapable of supporting life. They deduce that the signal must be from a crashed ship. Stanley Tweedle refuses to go down to investigate, but Lyekka insists that she needs food, and if she doesn't get it she'll be forced to eat the crew. Kai warns her that he'll kill her before he'll let her eat the crew, but Lyekka demonstrates that she's very hard to kill. Lyekka wants to eat whatever survivors are down on the surface, but Xev understandably has some moral qualms about this. Kai privately suggests to Stan that they should leave Lyekka on the planet.
Xev, Kai, Lyekka and 790 go down to the surface in a moth. The surface is indeed inhospitable, and Xev wears a flimsy breathing apparatus. Lyekka wanders off alone.
Once inside the crashed ship, they find jars containing still-beating hearts. They find the pilot, a muscular, male cyborg who is missing his head. 790 is delighted, and plans to attach himself to the body so he can finally act on his passion for Xev, but once he switches the body on it begins violently smashing him against a console. Kai and Xev have wandered off elsewhere in the ship, and don't know that 790 is in trouble.
As 790 struggles to get control of the body, Kai discovers a large egg that contains a living, human woman. With only her head protruding through the egg, she tells Kai and Xev that she is a prisoner, and her only crime was "being in the wrong place at the wrong time." She says that a group of prisoners on the ship killed everybody aboard, and she can't leave the egg because her jailers took her heart. If she leaves the egg, she'll die. Xev is worried about Lyekka finding the girl, and goes to the bridge to get the girl's heart. Meanwhile, Kai opens another egg and finds a hostile, raving lunatic.
On the bridge, 790 announces he is now 791 and is ready to pleasure Xev. Unfortunately he does not have full control over his new body and during a glitch his voice changes and he announces, "New orders: Dispose...None left alive."
790 tells Xev he can get complete control over his new body if she hooks some cables into the back of his head. But when she does so, he has a seizure and becomes unresponsive. Xev goes to retrieve some hearts, and talks with Stan over their communicators. Stan is curious about the woman they found, and Xev tells him he should just come down and see for himself. When Xev isn't watching 791 comes back online, but now the graphics on his face display crazy, bloodshot eyes and a mouth full of sharp little teeth. After Xev is gone, 791 calls Stan, imitating Xev's voice, and tells him the distress call was actually "a beacon of desire sent by lusty, sex-starved sirens." Stan, predictably, makes plans to come down right away.
Xev and Kai discover that Lyekka has eaten all of the prisoners except the girl. Xev and Kai prepare to restore the girl's heart.
Stan takes another moth down and arrives in the crashed ship, discovering a bunch of skeletons lashed to a railing with their pants down. 791 turns out to be a ghastly, crazed rapist, killer and sadist, and he forces Stanley to dance with him to sexy techno music. A terrified and appalled Stanley can only comply. The cyborg explains that once it was a human man with "uncontrollable urges", urges that led to him being remade into a cyborg. But when the prisoners reprogrammed him, all the old urges came back. Now 791 tries to kiss Stan, and as Stan struggles he pulls one of the wires out of 791's head. 790 briefly regains control, meekly telling Stanley, "I'll never tell if you don't."
Stan runs away as 790 and 791 struggle for control. Finally 791 gets control, roaring, "I smell your funk, Stanley Tweedle, and I'm coming to stick my face in it!"
Once the prisoner's heart has been restored, she slithers out of the egg and is revealed as a shapely woman in an sinister-looking, tiny black costume. Her release triggers the ship's self-destruct, and she tells Xev and Kai that she was on her way to be executed, and she was the one who reprogrammed the cyborg. With Kai and Xev trapped on the ship, the prisoner takes a space suit and escapes.
Meanwhile, Stan has been cornered by 791. Stan straps himself to a chair and opens an airlock, and the cyborg is almost sucked out but manages to close the lock. Just when 791 is about to rape Stan, Kai knocks 790 off of the cyborg's shoulders, opening the airlock briefly so the cyborg is sucked out. The crew manages to escape just before the crashed ship explodes. 790 tells Xev, "I am totally, completely and utterly humiliated."
The crew returns to the Lexx, and Stan ignores Kai's advice and takes Lyekka back to the ship with them.
[edit] Notes
- Elements of this episode parody the Ridley Scott film, Alien. The abandoned ship with its dead pilot and the enormous eggs are elements that appear early on in Alien, when the crew of the Nostromo arrive on the alien world and discover an enormous, dead pilot and a hold full of large eggs. The scen where Stan attempts to shoot 791 out through the airlock is also a parody of the end of Alien, where Sigourney Weaver succesful dispatches the Alien this way. Lexx featured episodes parodying several classic genre films, such as Woz's parody of The Wizard of Oz.
- This episode reveals that Kai apparently couldn't kill Lyekka. While this version of Lyekka would continue to be a friend to Stan and the rest of the crew, in season four another plant alien, also calling herself Lyekka and claiming to be this Lyekka's sister, would prove to be very dangerous to the Lexx crew and the Earth itself.
