Alexander Kier Gigeroff (June 29, 1962 – December 25, 2011), , known professionally as Lex Gigeroff , was a Canadian television writer and actor best remembered as a co-creator of the science fiction series Lexx . He also appeared in the comedy series Liocracy and the short film Treevenge .
120-424: Lexx (also known as LEXX: The Dark Zone Stories and Tales from a Parallel Universe ) is a science fiction television series created by Lex Gigeroff and brothers Paul and Michael Donovan . It originally aired on April 18, 1997, on Canada's Citytv as four made-for-TV movies. Beginning with season two, the format changed to a traditional TV series with each episode running 45 minutes long. The series follows
240-438: A 2Dimensional plane , the entry and exit points could be visualized as spherical holes in 3D space leading into a four-dimensional "tube" similar to a spherinder . Another way to imagine wormholes is to take a sheet of paper and draw two somewhat distant points on one side of the paper. The sheet of paper represents a plane in the spacetime continuum , and the two points represent a distance to be traveled, but theoretically,
360-426: A Minkowski spacetime contains a compact region Ω, and if the topology of Ω is of the form Ω ~ S × Σ, where Σ is a three-manifold of the nontrivial topology, whose boundary has the topology of the form ∂Σ ~ S , and if, furthermore, the hypersurfaces Σ are all spacelike, then the region Ω contains a quasi-permanent intrauniverse wormhole. Geometrically, wormholes can be described as regions of spacetime that constrain
480-454: A Penrose diagram of a Schwarzschild black hole . In the Penrose diagram, an object traveling faster than light will cross the black hole and will emerge from another end into a different space, time or universe. This will be an inter-universal wormhole. Theories of wormhole metrics describe the spacetime geometry of a wormhole and serve as theoretical models for time travel. An example of
600-402: A World War I film using computer-generated imagery which had now become financially viable, but did not possess the estimated $ 35 million he needed to create it. In 1993, Donovan created a four-minute short film with a large amount of CGI and demonstrated it to international broadcasters to seek funding. The tape, titled The Dark Zone , featured security guard Stanley Tweedle refusing to let
720-521: A charged black hole . While such wormholes, if possible, may be limited to transfers of information, humanly traversable wormholes may exist if reality can broadly be described by the Randall–Sundrum model 2 , a brane -based theory consistent with string theory . Einstein–Rosen bridges, also known as ER bridges (named after Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen ), are connections between areas of space that can be modeled as vacuum solutions to
840-607: A cult following . The main characters of the series are the Lexx and its crew, consisting of security guard (class four) Stanley H. Tweedle; the love slave Zev (later Xev) Bellringer; the undead former assassin and last of the Brunnen-G, Kai; the love-crazed robot head 790; and the powerful but simple-minded Lexx. Centuries prior, mankind was nearly destroyed in a war with the Insect Civilization, where both sides sought
960-501: A spacetime foam in a general relativistic spacetime manifold depicted by a Lorentzian manifold , and Euclidean wormholes (named after Euclidean manifold , a structure of Riemannian manifold ). The Casimir effect shows that quantum field theory allows the energy density in certain regions of space to be negative relative to the ordinary matter vacuum energy , and it has been shown theoretically that quantum field theory allows states where energy can be arbitrarily negative at
1080-453: A "wormhole". Wormholes have been defined both geometrically and topologically . From a topological point of view, an intra-universe wormhole (a wormhole between two points in the same universe) is a compact region of spacetime whose boundary is topologically trivial, but whose interior is not simply connected . Formalizing this idea leads to definitions such as the following, taken from Matt Visser's Lorentzian Wormholes (1996). If
1200-684: A (traversable) wormhole metric is the following: first presented by Ellis (see Ellis wormhole ) as a special case of the Ellis drainhole . One type of non-traversable wormhole metric is the Schwarzschild solution (see the first diagram): The original Einstein–Rosen bridge was described in an article published in July 1935. For the Schwarzschild spherically symmetric static solution where d s {\displaystyle ds}
1320-504: A distribution of energy that violates various energy conditions , such as the null energy condition along with the weak, strong, and dominant energy conditions. However, it is known that quantum effects can lead to small measurable violations of the null energy condition, and many physicists believe that the required negative energy may actually be possible due to the Casimir effect in quantum physics. Although early calculations suggested
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#17327755884901440-484: A dying star from becoming a supernova . The trio become separated from each other and discover the Time Prophet's prophecy of Kai destroying the insect civilization. Giggerota disables the towers, but the crew escapes aboard the Lexx without her. She and the planet are destroyed in the supernova. After some time, the Lexx runs low on organic fuel and lands on the nearby planet of Klaagia to feed. The group discovers
1560-490: A few months after Schwarzschild published his solution, and was rediscovered by Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen, who published their result in 1935. However, in 1962, John Archibald Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable if it connects two parts of the same universe, and that it will pinch off too quickly for light (or any particle moving slower than light) that falls in from one exterior region to make it to
1680-418: A free-falling particle (following a geodesic in the spacetime). In order to satisfy this requirement, it turns out that in addition to the black hole interior region that particles enter when they fall through the event horizon from the outside, there must be a separate white hole interior region that allows us to extrapolate the trajectories of particles that an outside observer sees rising up away from
1800-436: A given point. Many physicists, such as Stephen Hawking , Kip Thorne , and others, argued that such effects might make it possible to stabilize a traversable wormhole. The only known natural process that is theoretically predicted to form a wormhole in the context of general relativity and quantum mechanics was put forth by Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind in their ER = EPR conjecture. The quantum foam hypothesis
1920-452: A group of mismatched individuals aboard the organic spacecraft Lexx as they travel through two universes and encounter planets, including a parody of Earth . The narrative includes irony , parody , and sex comedy , and explores ideas of fatalism , reincarnation , the afterlife , and the paradigm of good and evil . The series is a Canadian and German co-production with some additional funding from Channel 5 . Sci Fi Channel purchased
2040-461: A group of psychotics obsessed with "pattern", a liquid made from organic material that parasites within their bodies feed on. Stan, Zev, and Kai inadvertently awaken the parasite queen, who attaches itself to the Lexx and pursues them off the planet. The Lexx fires on the planet and destroys it, using the meteors to kill the queen. Meanwhile, Kai is running low on protoblood, which he needs to function in his undead state; protoblood can only be found on
2160-458: A heart attack. Wormhole A wormhole is a hypothetical structure which connects disparate points in spacetime . It may be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime (i.e., different locations, different points in time, or both). Wormholes are based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations . Specifically, they are a transcendental bijection of
2280-471: A hyperplane r = 2 m {\displaystyle r=2m} or u = 0 {\displaystyle u=0} in which g {\displaystyle g} vanishes. We call such a connection between the two sheets a "bridge". For the combined field, gravity and electricity, Einstein and Rosen derived the following Schwarzschild static spherically symmetric solution where ε {\displaystyle \varepsilon }
2400-411: A model of closed timelike curves can have internal inconsistencies as it will lead to strange phenomena like distinguishing non-orthogonal quantum states and distinguishing proper and improper mixture. Accordingly, the destructive positive feedback loop of virtual particles circulating through a wormhole time machine, a result indicated by semi-classical calculations, is averted. A particle returning from
2520-431: A more realistic black hole that forms at some particular time from a collapsing star would require a different metric. When the infalling stellar matter is added to a diagram of a black hole's geography, it removes the part of the diagram corresponding to the white hole interior region, along with the part of the diagram corresponding to the other universe. The Einstein–Rosen bridge was discovered by Ludwig Flamm in 1916,
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#17327755884902640-530: A potato planet, a planet that creates sitcoms , a vapour that changes sex organs into their opposite, a crashed prisoner transport captained by a gay cyborg, a graveyard planet for priests of the Divine Order, a cult led by the Wozzard who seeks to turn all beautiful women into ugly ones, and an island of secluded, illiterate monks . Eventually, the crew learns that Mantrid has been using drones to consume
2760-473: A programming manager from 1987 to 1989. While performing a sketch in a radio comedy show he was noticed by Paul Donovan who invited Gigeroff to act in several of his movies. In 1993 he wrote and starred in a one-man stage show, and after Donovan saw it he shared his idea of a science fiction TV show with Gigeroff and Jeffrey Hirschfield which would eventually develop into the Lexx series. Filming began in
2880-458: A sex slave. I like the part because she's not quite what she seems. She's tough, and people underestimate her because of her new appearance. And that's what makes it funny." After season one, Habermann would go on to other projects, leaving a gap in the show for her character after the end of season one; this was alleviated by having Zev die and later revived into Xev, now played by Xenia Seeberg . The character of Thodin (played by Barry Bostwick )
3000-501: A ship dock because of an invalid security code, then being reprimanded by his superiors. This scene would be reworked and included in the first episode of Lexx . Broadcast companies were impressed, prompting Donovan to build off the demo tape and abandon his original World War I idea. The first season was greenlit in Summer 1995 with a budget of $ 13 million, barely three months before filming began. Donovan had trouble finding writers for
3120-441: A simplified notion of a wormhole, space can be visualized as a two-dimensional surface. In this case, a wormhole would appear as a hole in that surface, lead into a 3D tube (the inside surface of a cylinder ), then re-emerge at another location on the 2D surface with a hole similar to the entrance. An actual wormhole would be analogous to this, but with the spatial dimensions raised by one. For example, instead of circular holes on
3240-551: A single blast. The energy Stanley absorbed is revealed to be the key to the Lexx, making Stanley its captain. As Stanley instructs the Lexx to fly off the Cluster, they are cornered by Kai who throws Giggerota off the bridge. Before Kai can execute the others, he instead heads to the ship's hold to protect the Divine Predecessors who are being attacked by a Cluster Lizard. After saving them, Kai regains his memories from
3360-448: A surgical implant or artificial limb, saying "it's functional, but it sure doesn't look good up close." According to set designer Nigel Scott, "Our world is chaotic. All the cars and buildings are designed by different people, so nothing really matches. And Lexx is exactly the same - it's just chaos." The insect wars and the biological designs of the ships were made a central part of the story after they had been designed, with writers using
3480-400: A theatre format. Many of the themes from this episode are based on German nursery rhymes with new lyrics. The usage of existing musical themes as well as the addition of an outside choir has placed these tracks into a legal grey area; as a result, they have not been officially released. All tracks are written by Marty Simon All tracks are written by Marty Simon Lex Gigeroff Gigeroff
3600-509: A three-dimensional (3D) object. A well-known analogy of such constructs is provided by the Klein bottle , displaying a hole when rendered in three dimensions but not in four or higher dimensions. In 1995, Matt Visser suggested there may be many wormholes in the universe if cosmic strings with negative mass were generated in the early universe . Some physicists, such as Kip Thorne , have suggested how to make wormholes artificially. For
3720-424: A time span of over six thousand years. Kai's "death" occurs 2008 years before the beginning of the main events of the series. For Seasons One and Two, each episode is focused on space travel and usually one different planet. Seasons 3 and 4 have a single general location for all episodes. At the beginning of Season 3, the crew spends 4000 years in cryostasis before arriving at twin planets Fire and Water. In Season 4,
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3840-411: A tool for teaching general relativity. For this reason, the type of traversable wormhole they proposed, held open by a spherical shell of exotic matter , is also known as a Morris–Thorne wormhole . Later, other types of traversable wormholes were discovered as allowable solutions to the equations of general relativity, including a variety analyzed in a 1989 paper by Matt Visser, in which a path through
3960-410: A traversable wormhole might hypothetically work in the following way: One end of the wormhole is accelerated to some significant fraction of the speed of light, perhaps with some advanced propulsion system , and then brought back to the point of origin. Alternatively, another way is to take one entrance of the wormhole and move it to within the gravitational field of an object that has higher gravity than
4080-428: A trial over the destination of his soul, revealing Fire and Water as the afterlife. All his bad decisions are weighed against his good deeds and he is ultimately sentenced to eternal punishment on Fire. Enraged over Stanley's death, Xev orders the Lexx to destroy Fire, releasing all of its tortured souls. Consequently, Prince possesses the Lexx and uses it to destroy Water. Stanley is released and returns to his body aboard
4200-475: A very large amount of negative energy would be required, later calculations showed that the amount of negative energy can be made arbitrarily small. In 1993, Matt Visser argued that the two mouths of a wormhole with such an induced clock difference could not be brought together without inducing quantum field and gravitational effects that would either make the wormhole collapse or the two mouths repel each other, or otherwise prevent information from passing through
4320-435: A wormhole could connect these two points by folding that plane ( i.e. the paper) so the points are touching. In this way, it would be much easier to traverse the distance since the two points are now touching. In 1928, German mathematician, philosopher and theoretical physicist Hermann Weyl proposed a wormhole hypothesis of matter in connection with mass analysis of electromagnetic field energy; however, he did not use
4440-414: A wormhole to travel back to a time earlier than when the wormhole was first converted into a time "machine". Until this time it could not have been noticed or have been used. To see why exotic matter is required, consider an incoming light front traveling along geodesics, which then crosses the wormhole and re-expands on the other side. The expansion goes from negative to positive. As the wormhole neck
4560-443: A wormhole whose length is shorter than the distance between them outside the wormhole, the time taken to traverse it could be less than the time it would take a light beam to make the journey if it took a path through the space outside the wormhole. However, a light beam traveling through the same wormhole would beat the traveler. If traversable wormholes exist, they might allow time travel . A proposed time-travel machine using
4680-470: A writer for "Super Nova", says "When I first got the script, it was all over the place because the writers had hit a wall with it. The main characters were these buffoons. That probably works on paper, but the audience needed something to hold on to. So that had to be tidied up a bit by adding some motivation for these characters." Scripts for season two were commissioned before season one premiered. Although our characters will try, in their own bumpy way, to do
4800-480: Is a solution manifold of Einstein's field equations for a vacuum spacetime, modified by inclusion of a scalar field minimally coupled to the Ricci tensor with antiorthodox polarity (negative instead of positive). (Ellis specifically rejected referring to the scalar field as 'exotic' because of the antiorthodox coupling, finding arguments for doing so unpersuasive.) The solution depends on two parameters: m , which fixes
4920-426: Is inhabited by evil people. During Prince's first encounter with the crew, 790 is damaged and falls in love with Kai rather than Xev, and gradually behaves much more erratically. Prince seeks to destroy Water and attempts to win the crew over to his side, especially Xev. Believing that the Lexx is "the grain of sand that will tip the scales", he tests their sense of morality through various temptations, including taking
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5040-420: Is more of a path through time rather than it is a device that itself moves through time, and it would not allow the technology itself to be moved backward in time. According to current theories on the nature of wormholes, construction of a traversable wormhole would require the existence of a substance with negative energy, often referred to as " exotic matter ". More technically, the wormhole spacetime requires
5160-510: Is of finite size, we would not expect caustics to develop, at least within the vicinity of the neck. According to the optical Raychaudhuri's theorem , this requires a violation of the averaged null energy condition . Quantum effects such as the Casimir effect cannot violate the averaged null energy condition in any neighborhood of space with zero curvature, but calculations in semiclassical gravity suggest that quantum effects may be able to violate this condition in curved spacetime. Although it
5280-403: Is possible with R gravity, a form of f ( R ) gravity . The impossibility of faster-than-light relative speed applies only locally. Wormholes might allow effective superluminal ( faster-than-light ) travel by ensuring that the speed of light is not exceeded locally at any time. While traveling through a wormhole, subluminal (slower-than-light) speeds are used. If two points are connected by
5400-406: Is possible. A possible resolution to the paradoxes resulting from wormhole-enabled time travel rests on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics . In 1991 David Deutsch showed that quantum theory is fully consistent (in the sense that the so-called density matrix can be made free of discontinuities) in spacetimes with closed timelike curves. However, later it was shown that such
5520-621: Is sometimes used to suggest that tiny wormholes might appear and disappear spontaneously at the Planck scale , and stable versions of such wormholes have been suggested as dark matter candidates. It has also been proposed that, if a tiny wormhole held open by a negative mass cosmic string had appeared around the time of the Big Bang , it could have been inflated to macroscopic size by cosmic inflation . Lorentzian traversable wormholes would allow travel in both directions from one part of
5640-431: Is the electric charge. The field equations without denominators in the case when m = 0 {\displaystyle m=0} can be written In order to eliminate singularities, if one replaces r {\displaystyle r} by u {\displaystyle u} according to the equation: and with m = 0 {\displaystyle m=0} one obtains The solution
5760-573: Is the proper time and c = 1 {\displaystyle c=1} . If one replaces r {\displaystyle r} with u {\displaystyle u} according to u 2 = r − 2 m {\displaystyle u^{2}=r-2m} The four-dimensional space is described mathematically by two congruent parts or "sheets", corresponding to u > 0 {\displaystyle u>0} and u < 0 {\displaystyle u<0} , which are joined by
5880-482: Is wiped. The Lexx destroys the remnants of His Shadow's fleet that followed them through the portal. The three then begin searching the Dark Zone for a new home, away from His Shadow. During their search, they encounter Kai's homeworld and explore it for insights into his past. Finding the planet abandoned, they are pursued by Giggerota who attempts to destroy the planet by disabling a series of towers that are keeping
6000-601: The Liocracy series, a number of short films and children's shows he created with Jason Shipley, a stage play Conrad and Barbara and a short comedy movie Benoit he wrote and directed in 2010. He was also working on his first feature film Gillian and Giles as a director which was to be shot in the Dominican Republic . Gigeroff died at his home in Fredericton , New Brunswick on December 25, 2011, from
6120-489: The Einstein field equations , and that are now understood to be intrinsic parts of the maximally extended version of the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole with no charge and no rotation. Here, "maximally extended" refers to the idea that the spacetime should not have any "edges": it should be possible to continue this path arbitrarily far into the particle's future or past for any possible trajectory of
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#17327755884906240-597: The United Kingdom , and the British Virgin Islands . Lexx had very different tones throughout its run. While the original TV movies and the second season were mostly science fiction drama with dark comedy, season three was more serious and explored themes of life, death, and reincarnation. The show's final season – set on Earth in the early 2000s – took many turns into pure farce and introduced magic and other new elements. The series has garnered
6360-540: The World Championship of 1834 . In this show it's not a friendly marriage of man and dragonfly. I compare it to the old high school experiment where you make the dead frog's legs move with a small battery. Nigel Scott, stage designer Donovan rejected the sleek, futuristic look common in science fiction in favour of organic, fleshy materials. Many of the creatures and machines are a hybrid of organic material and technology. Producer Bill Fleming compares it to
6480-420: The torsion tensor , as a dynamic variable. Torsion naturally accounts for the quantum-mechanical, intrinsic angular momentum ( spin ) of matter. The minimal coupling between torsion and Dirac spinors generates a repulsive spin–spin interaction that is significant in fermionic matter at extremely high densities. Such an interaction prevents the formation of a gravitational singularity (e.g. a black hole). Instead,
6600-529: The Cluster Lizard reaches the Giga Shadow's brain and consumes it, killing the Giga Shadow. With a fresh supply of protoblood, the crew returns to the Dark Zone to search for a new home. Before the Giga Shadow's destruction, the last remnant of His Shadow possessed Kai. Kai lies to the crew and states that he requires more protoblood to survive, leading them to the imprisoned supreme Bio- Vizier of
6720-428: The Cluster as a prisoner and is sentenced to be turned into a love-slave, after failing to perform her wifely duties and assaulting her fiancé. Other prisoners, including a group of Ostral-B heretics and their leader, Thodin, are sentenced to be publicly executed. Thodin attempts to use an explosive device to free himself, but the device malfunctions and releases giant Cluster Lizards from containment, wreaking havoc across
6840-476: The Cluster. The group returns to the Cluster to find it abandoned, learning that the entire population of the League of 20,000 Planets was culled to feed and awaken the immense Giga Shadow, the last remaining insect. With help from a defecting priest of the Divine Order, they stall the Giga Shadow's awakening long enough for Kai to plant a baby Cluster Lizard inside of it. As the Lexx and its crew are almost destroyed,
6960-401: The Cluster. Thodin escapes and frees the other heretics, and reluctantly rescues the cannibal Giggerota. During Zev's transformation into a love-slave, she is attacked by a Cluster Lizard, turning her into a love-slave/Cluster Lizard hybrid. Before the brainwashing portion of the transformation begins, Zev frees herself and places the 790 droid in charge of her transformation in her place, causing
7080-460: The Dark Zone through a portal as Xev and Kai destroy Mantrid and his final drone. Without any other nearby planets and the Lexx running out of food, the crew place themselves into stasis and the Lexx goes dormant while 790 reactivates annually to search for nearby planets. After four thousand years in cryostasis, the crew reaches the twin planets Fire and Water. All of season three takes place on these two planets. The crew meets people they knew from
7200-529: The Divine Order, Mantrid and his servant. During their meeting, His Shadow transfers his essence into an insect carcass, resurrecting it and attempting to kill the crew of the Lexx. Mantrid is gravely wounded in the attack, and his servant transfers his consciousness to a spaceship he had created to save him. Kai kills the insect, resulting in His Shadow's essence becoming mixed with Mantrid's. Mantrid, now intertwined with His Shadow, swears revenge on humanity as
7320-404: The Divine Order, resulting in the deaths of billions. Stanley, subsequently captured by the Divine Order and after undergoing interrogation, is made a class-four security guard on the Cluster, the capital planet of the Divine Order and League of 20,000 Planets. After being reprimanded for insubordination and failing to turn himself in, he becomes a fugitive on the Cluster. Zev Bellringer arrives on
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#17327755884907440-486: The Divine Order. 2008 years later, Stanley H. Tweedle is an assistant deputy backup courier for the Ostral-B heretics, a resistance group fighting against the Divine Order. After unknowingly leading His Divine Shadow to an Ostral-B outpost, resulting in its destruction, he is captured by the mercenaries Feppo and Smoor who extract information from him on the locations of other Ostral-B planets. They sell this information to
7560-501: The Earth to the size of a pea in the process. As Lyekka's asteroid attacks Earth, the crew flees with the particle accelerator to destroy the asteroid. As they leave Earth, Prince appears to Kai and fulfills his promise to him, restoring Kai's mortality. 790, now completely insane and still madly in love with Kai, takes advantage of the Lexx's senility and has it destroy Earth to kill any potential "competitors" for Kai. With Earth destroyed,
7680-461: The Halifax film community about the sexual content, joking "God, you can't even show a woman as a sex object without someone thinking it's bad." The Lexx's name was formed by finding a word that would work well in all languages without translation, and it doubled as a pun on Lex Gigeroff's name. The scripts for "Super Nova" and "Feeding Pattern" were changed several times during shooting. Ron Oliver,
7800-484: The Lexx dying, and no other habitable planets nearby, the crew decide to sacrifice themselves to destroy Lyekka's asteroid. They travel inside the asteroid, but Kai becomes separated from the others as he is trapped inside with the particle accelerator. In a final sacrifice, Kai crashes into the centre of the asteroid as the accelerator calculates the particle's mass, destroying the asteroid. The Lexx's senility becomes terminal as it disintegrates. Xev and Stanley discover that
7920-527: The Lexx had created another ship within it before it died, "Little Lexx". Little Lexx gives Stanley its key as they search for a new home. Salter Street Films' first sci-fi production, Def-Con 4 , had been a moderate success and showed Paul Donovan that there was a potential market for similar material. Salter Street's next projects did not enjoy the same degree of success: George's Island , Buried on Sunday , and Paint Cans received praise but were not financially successful. Donovan then sought to create
8040-468: The Lexx reaches Earth in the early 2000s. Kai and a small group of other Brunnen-G warriors mount a last stand against His Merciful Shadow as their planet, Brunnis-2, is destroyed. In a final act of defiance, Kai crashes his ship into the control pod of His Shadow's flagship, the Foreshadow. He is killed by His Shadow, his memories are taken from him, and he is forced to serve as an undead assassin in
8160-417: The Lexx was outfitted with easily removable "skin", allowing it to be shot from any angle. This skin would later be removed entirely after season one. The food that the Lexx produces for the crew was mashed yams in season one, and rice pudding for the rest of the series. The Season two episode "The Net" is largely made up of recycled footage from the previous episode "The Web". Director Chis Bould says this
8280-438: The Lexx's showerhead "is this luminous pink tube that's a little too interested in its work... It'll snake all over you if you're not paying attention. It's quite frisky." Sources have also pointed out the Lexx's seemingly phallic appearance. Writer Jeffrey Hirschfield only incorporated the bare minimum of "accurate" science when absolutely necessary. Lexx is a very complex build of elements to create final effects scenes. With
8400-469: The Lexx, while Prince and the other souls reincarnate on a nearby blue planet . The Lexx travels to Earth looking for food. 790 informs the crew that it is located in the very centre of the Dark Zone and assumes that it must be a very dangerous place. The crew again meet people they knew from the Light and Dark Zones and from Fire and Water. Only Prince and Priest can remember their previous lives. On Earth,
8520-427: The Light and Dark Zones who cannot remember their past lives, though their personalities are the same. Fire is ruled by the charismatic Prince and his lackey Priest, while Water does not have a ruler. The inhabitants of both planets live in isolated towns. On Water, they live on islands in a huge ocean; on Fire, they live on massive towers separated by long stretches of desert. Water is inhabited by good people, while Fire
8640-518: The access to live action background plates, greenscreen and bluescreen foreground plates, motion control and model elements, as well as 3D and 2D computer animation, we have the thread with the AVID Illusion compositing package to put these pieces together. Brian Howald, VFX Supervisor Computer-generated imagery for season one was created by twenty animators over the course of fifteen months. For "Super Nova", matte paintings were used as
8760-497: The brain of the Divine Predecessor who killed him, prompting him to turn against His Shadow. The Lexx is pursued and boarded by His Shadow, who attacks Kai for turning against him. Stanley and Zev distract His Shadow long enough for Kai to destroy him; his essence retreats from the ship as it travels through a portal into the Dark Zone. While traversing the portal, the Lexx's memory of His Shadow and its allegiance to him
8880-524: The collapsing matter reaches an enormous but finite density and rebounds, forming the other side of the bridge. Although Schwarzschild wormholes are not traversable in both directions, their existence inspired Kip Thorne to imagine traversable wormholes created by holding the "throat" of a Schwarzschild wormhole open with exotic matter (material that has negative mass/energy). Other non-traversable wormholes include Lorentzian wormholes (first proposed by John Archibald Wheeler in 1957), wormholes creating
9000-442: The concept art as a basis for the plot. Head art director Mark Laing says that the design of the Cluster was based around medieval cities, explaining how "the whole city is built on top of a ruin built on a ruin. Buildings are built on top of buildings, incorporating still standing structures into their own structures, which are also somewhat run down." The Lexx itself has sexual undertones as part of its design. Laing points out how
9120-458: The crew about to be overwhelmed by Mantrid drones, Kai employs a last-ditch strategy to destroy Mantrid. Kai taunts Mantrid into pursuing the Lexx towards the centre of the universe with all of his drones. The resulting movement of mass creates a big crunch , which Mantrid, the drones, the Lexx, and the rest of the Light Zone are pulled into and destroyed by. However, the Lexx rematerializes in
9240-402: The crew escapes. The rest of the season involves the crew searching for a new home. During their adventures, they encounter Lyekka, a plant that can transform into a human appearance and feeds on living beings. During their adventures, Zev is killed but later reincarnated by Lyekka as Xev. The crew has various encounters with strange creatures and civilizations, such as a group of astronauts from
9360-453: The desensitization of violence in Halifax, citing clubbing harp seals as an example. They rejected making the series scientifically accurate or logical, with writer Hirschfield explaining, "We only wanted enough science to get us through the stories. The Lexx has a particle accelerator , and that's all you need to know. We don't want to bother with dilithium crystals . The Lexx gets its fuel from eating. Simple enough." They openly acknowledged
9480-500: The event horizon. And just as there are two separate interior regions of the maximally extended spacetime, there are also two separate exterior regions, sometimes called two different "universes", with the second universe allowing us to extrapolate some possible particle trajectories in the two interior regions. This means that the interior black hole region can contain a mix of particles that fell in from either universe (and thus an observer who fell in from one universe might be able to see
9600-482: The fall of 1995 and the series was released by the Showcase channel in 1997; with strong ratings it lasted for four seasons and sold to over 100 countries around the world. Apart from writing, Gigeroff also starred in various roles while his name became an inspiration for the show's title. He continued his writing and acting career, working in theatre, film and TV. Those included The Real Howard Spitz comedy and
9720-728: The final shots contain CGI in some form. The scene where the Lexx destroys the customs station was a model that was blown up in the parking lot of the VFX studio. Animations were done through three production houses, including C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures in Toronto and Berlin and pixelMotion in Halifax. Models and animations were created using Silicon Graphics Indigo workstations, as well as Avid 1000 and 8000 series workstations. Modelling and animation software such as Prisms, Flint , and PowerAnimator were used to create digital imagery. A render farm that
9840-413: The forms of other crew members to deceive them. The crew are frequently separated from each other, forcing them to act individually. After jumping from the Lexx to the surface of Water, Kai has trouble functioning normally without the other crew members. Deep beneath Water's surface, Kai encounters his soul essence awaiting rebirth. During one of Prince's attacks on Water, Stanley is killed and Prince holds
9960-749: The future does not return to its universe of origination but to a parallel universe. This suggests that a wormhole time machine with an exceedingly short time jump is a theoretical bridge between contemporaneous parallel universes. Because a wormhole time-machine introduces a type of nonlinearity into quantum theory, this sort of communication between parallel universes is consistent with Joseph Polchinski 's proposal of an Everett phone (named after Hugh Everett ) in Steven Weinberg 's formulation of nonlinear quantum mechanics. The possibility of communication between parallel universes has been dubbed interuniversal travel . Wormhole can also be depicted in
10080-464: The incremental deformation of closed surfaces. For example, in Enrico Rodrigo's The Physics of Stargates, a wormhole is defined informally as: a region of spacetime containing a " world tube " (the time evolution of a closed surface) that cannot be continuously deformed (shrunk) to a world line (the time evolution of a point or observer). The first type of wormhole solution discovered
10200-576: The insect civilization and eventually became hopelessly depressed at their immortality, waiting for the forces of His Shadow to come and destroy them. Kai, refusing to surrender, led a small group of rebels against His Shadow in a final act of defiance. Reinvigorated by Kai's story, the crew decide to stop running and face Mantrid. With the help of 790, the crew finds that they can convert some of Mantrid's drones to fight for them. During their attack on his ship, Lyekka boards Mantrid's pod and disables him, but Mantrid kills her before she can finish him off. With
10320-419: The large amount of sex and violence present within the script, with Gigeroff admitting that he "[wants] teenage boys to pull off to Zev's poster." When asked about Zev's appearance and the amount of sexual content, Gigeroff responded that "I think we have far too puritanical notions about sex. Sex is fun, sex is good, and I hope we can get a lot of it in the show." He also addressed the criticism he received from
10440-431: The light that fell in from the other one), and likewise particles from the interior white hole region can escape into either universe. All four regions can be seen in a spacetime diagram that uses Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates . In this spacetime, it is possible to come up with coordinate systems such that if a hypersurface of constant time (a set of points that all have the same time coordinate, such that every point on
10560-474: The locals and in Prince's continuous attempts to take control of the Lexx. Although the crew keeps swearing not to return to the planet, they constantly find themselves back on Earth for one reason or another. Kai's soul is trapped in limbo because he is undead, and he decides to regain his mortality. He makes a wager with Prince in a game of chess and wins, but Prince does not immediately fulfill his promise. In
10680-473: The other entrance, and then return it to a position near the other entrance. For both these methods, time dilation causes the end of the wormhole that has been moved to have aged less, or become "younger", than the stationary end as seen by an external observer; however, time connects differently through the wormhole than outside it, so that synchronized clocks at either end of the wormhole will always remain synchronized as seen by an observer passing through
10800-475: The other exterior region. According to general relativity, the gravitational collapse of a sufficiently compact mass forms a singular Schwarzschild black hole. In the Einstein–Cartan –Sciama–Kibble theory of gravity, however, it forms a regular Einstein–Rosen bridge. This theory extends general relativity by removing a constraint of the symmetry of the affine connection and regarding its antisymmetric part,
10920-403: The others into the ship. Inside, the heretics are attacked and killed by a Cluster Lizard. Before his death, one of the heretics releases a form of energy into Stanley. Stanley, Zev, 790, and Giggerota reach the ship's bridge. The ship introduces itself as the Lexx, a machine-insect hybrid and "the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes", capable of destroying an entire planet in
11040-587: The reincarnated souls cause chaos across the planet. Priest is elected President of the United States and acts as a puppet ruler for Prince, who is now the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms . Giggerotta becomes a Florida real estate agent and is elected pope , and the Wozzard becomes Dr. Ernst Longbore, a paraplegic rocket scientist. The crew attempts to settle in and make Earth their home, but keep getting caught up in absurd situations with
11160-515: The right thing, basically they're just in it for themselves. If a planet deserves to be blown up, it's blown up. Paul Donovan, co-creator Brian Downey had worked with Donovan previously on Norman's Awesome Experience and portrayed Stanley Tweedle in the original demo tape. Downey describes his character as having "some heroic qualities, but it's always a surprise when he does something heroic." Eva Habermann portrayed Zev after her love-slave transformation, saying that "She doesn't see herself as
11280-427: The robot head to be programmed to be a love-slave. Upon seeing Zev, 790 immediately falls in love with her and pursues her as she escapes. His Shadow awakens Kai from cryostasis to protect the secret weapons laboratory. Stanley and Zev meet up and make their way towards the secret weapons laboratory, where they find several Ostral-B heretics attempting to board a ship. They are pursued by Kai, who kills Thodin and chases
11400-492: The series finale, Earth is threatened by plants resembling Lyekka. The crew discovers that the fake Lyekka have destroyed other planets on their way through the Dark Zone and flooded the Earth with alien probes to sample the taste of its lifeforms. Furthermore, Dr. Longbore has created a rocket to escape Earth and, out of spite, leaves behind a particle accelerator to determine the mass of the Higgs boson particle , which will shrink
11520-733: The series from Salter Street Films and began airing episodes from seasons one and two (the former under the name Tales From a Parallel Universe ) for the United States audience in January 2000. Lexx was co-produced by Salter Street Films, later absorbed by Alliance Atlantis . In Canada, Lexx aired on the Alliance Atlantis -owned Showcase network. Lexx was primarily filmed in Canada and Germany , with additional filming on location in Iceland , Thailand , Namibia , New Zealand ,
11640-595: The show as " Dirty Dozen meets Alien or Beavis and Butt-Head ". He also found inspiration in Fires on the Plain and Dark Star and considers the show to be a homage to Space Precinct . Many of the crew were also fans of Red Dwarf . Donovan found that many science fiction films and shows at the time were too serious and wanted to create something more "fun" with a higher production value, sexual motifs, and aspects of dark humour , which Hirschfield says comes from
11760-468: The show as most resided in Hollywood and outside of his budget. He eventually came across Lex Gigeroff and Jeffrey Hirschfield , calling them "gems in the rough". Jeffrey had a background in theatre and acting, but was unable to find work and on the verge of abandoning the industry entirely until he met Paul, while Lex was working odd acting jobs in Halifax. Donovan described the thought process behind
11880-404: The show was quickly going over budget for CGI work. Bob Munroe, president of C.O.R.E Digital Pictures , states that CGI shots get expensive very quickly. "So when the script said 'a brand new planet you've never seen before,' that's a lot of work, and it may translate into $ 200,000. It got to the point that it was easier to do matte paintings than five people building this whole world." Up to 70% of
12000-464: The spacetime continuum, an asymptotic projection of the Calabi–Yau manifold manifesting itself in anti-de Sitter space . Wormholes are consistent with the general theory of relativity , but whether they actually exist is unknown. Many scientists postulate that wormholes are merely projections of a fourth spatial dimension , analogous to how a two-dimensional (2D) being could experience only part of
12120-469: The strength of its gravitational field, and n , which determines the curvature of its spatial cross sections. When m is set equal to 0, the drainhole's gravitational field vanishes. What is left is the Ellis wormhole , a nongravitating, purely geometric, traversable wormhole. Kip Thorne and his graduate student Mike Morris independently discovered in 1988 the Ellis wormhole and argued for its use as
12240-421: The surface has a space-like separation, giving what is called a 'space-like surface') is picked and an "embedding diagram" drawn depicting the curvature of space at that time, the embedding diagram will look like a tube connecting the two exterior regions, known as an "Einstein–Rosen bridge". The Schwarzschild metric describes an idealized black hole that exists eternally from the perspective of external observers;
12360-491: The term "wormhole" (he spoke of "one-dimensional tubes" instead). American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (inspired by Weyl's work) coined the term "wormhole" in a 1957 paper he wrote with Charles W. Misner : This analysis forces one to consider situations ... where there is a net flux of lines of force, through what topologists would call "a handle " of the multiply-connected space, and what physicists might perhaps be excused for more vividly terming
12480-401: The total annihilation of the other. Although the Brunnen-G led humanity to victory, they were later enslaved by the Divine Order, a religious cult centred around His Shadow, a mystical being who seeks to enslave the two universes . It was foretold to Kai by the Time Prophet that one day his people would destroy His Shadow and the last remnants of the Insect Civilization. The plot unfolds across
12600-402: The universe and convert its matter into more drones, quickly bringing the Light Zone to an end. The crew attempt to flee by travelling to the centre of the universe , where the rules of causality are different, offering them a potential hideaway from Mantrid. During their escape, they encounter an interdimensional theatre crew that tells the full story of the Brunnen-G, including how they defeated
12720-490: The universe to another part of that same universe very quickly or would allow travel from one universe to another. The possibility of traversable wormholes in general relativity was first demonstrated in a 1973 paper by Homer Ellis and independently in a 1973 paper by K. A. Bronnikov. Ellis analyzed the topology and the geodesics of the Ellis drainhole , showing it to be geodesically complete, horizonless, singularity-free, and fully traversable in both directions. The drainhole
12840-427: The wormhole can be made where the traversing path does not pass through a region of exotic matter. However, in the pure Gauss–Bonnet gravity (a modification to general relativity involving extra spatial dimensions which is sometimes studied in the context of brane cosmology ) exotic matter is not needed in order for wormholes to exist—they can exist even with no matter. A type held open by negative mass cosmic strings
12960-415: The wormhole, no matter how the two ends move around. This means that an observer entering the "younger" end would exit the "older" end at a time when it was the same age as the "younger" end, effectively going back in time as seen by an observer from the outside. One significant limitation of such a time machine is that it is only possible to go as far back in time as the initial creation of the machine; it
13080-463: The wormhole. Because of this, the two mouths could not be brought close enough for causality violation to take place. However, in a 1997 paper, Visser hypothesized that a complex " Roman ring " (named after Tom Roman) configuration of an N number of wormholes arranged in a symmetric polygon could still act as a time machine, although he concludes that this is more likely a flaw in classical quantum gravity theory rather than proof that causality violation
13200-615: Was 10 he wrote a play for Cub Scouts which was picked up as a project for a youth group in Toronto and eventually staged. In 1985 he graduated from Dalhousie University with a major in English; during the last year he served as the president of the Dalhousie Student Union. He also worked as an announcer at the CJLS radio in the late 1970's and became actively involved with the campus-community radio CKDU-FM , serving as
13320-415: Was 60 times faster than the industry norm was used for rendering animations. Two official Lexx soundtracks have been released. The first album, Tales from a Parallel Universe , consists of music from Season One. The second album, Lexx: The Series , consists of music from Seasons Two through Four. "Brigadoom" (S02E18) is a musical episode that tells of the destruction of Brunnis-2 and the death of Kai in
13440-407: Was also attracted to the part of Bog because of the script, saying "It takes a lot of liberties – but in a good sense. This goes farther than anything I've ever done." Tim Curry's character as Poet Man was filmed on the final day of shooting entirely in front of a green screen. He compared the series favourably to his time on The Rocky Horror Picture Show , saying "I'm grimly aware that Rocky Horror
13560-590: Was born in Ottawa . His father Alex K. Gigeroff (1931–2016) was a prominent artist, playwright and writer on criminology and the law who belonged to Macedonian Canadians : both of his parents were poor immigrants from Macedonian villages and "Gigeroff" was his father's immigrant's assigned name. Lex's brother Andre Haines is an artist and musician who also contributed to the Lexx series as an actor and songwriter. Gigeroff grew up in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia . When he
13680-417: Was created to subvert the audience into believing he was the hero and main character of the series, only to have him be killed off by Kai in the premiere. Malcolm McDowell agreed to play the part of Yottskry after a previous film he was scheduled to star in fell through, saying that he was drawn to the script because of how "peculiar" and "weird" it was and that he had wanted to visit Nova Scotia. Rutger Hauer
13800-462: Was done due to production constraints, as both episodes had to be shot in nine days as opposed to the regular schedule of one episode over eight days. In the Season Four episode "The Game", Kai plays a game of chess with Prince to win his soul back. Their game is a move-for-move recreation of the first casual match played between Louis Charles Mahe De La Bourdonnais and Alexander McDonnell in
13920-541: Was done on a non-existent budget over three weeks in a tiny theatre. Yet it was a good idea. Sometimes it's important to show up for guys with really good ideas." Nigel Bennett had previously worked with Donovan on Paint Cans and was approached to play the role of Prince in seasons three and four. He liked the character "because he didn't say a word for 20 pages". As part of his character, Bennett had at least three different outfits and would have his hair and eyebrows bleached "about every ten to fourteen days". Season one
14040-430: Was hoped recently that quantum effects could not violate an achronal version of the averaged null energy condition, violations have nevertheless been found, so it remains an open possibility that quantum effects might be used to support a wormhole. In some hypotheses where general relativity is modified , it is possible to have a wormhole that does not collapse without having to resort to exotic matter. For example, this
14160-529: Was put forth by Visser in collaboration with Cramer et al. , in which it was proposed that such wormholes could have been naturally created in the early universe. Wormholes connect two points in spacetime, which means that they would in principle allow travel in time , as well as in space. In 1988, Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever worked out how to convert a wormhole traversing space into one traversing time by accelerating one of its two mouths. However, according to general relativity, it would not be possible to use
14280-505: Was shot in Halifax, Nova Scotia , primarily at a repurposed Volvo plant on the waterfront. Additional scenes were shot at Babelsberg Studios in Berlin . The "protoblood" that Kai lives off of was a combination of honey and hand lotion. One hallway set for the Cluster was so long that it extended outside the studio, through a dressing room, and into another studio. The command "chair" for
14400-668: Was the Schwarzschild wormhole, which would be present in the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole , but it was found that it would collapse too quickly for anything to cross from one end to the other. Wormholes that could be crossed in both directions, known as traversable wormholes , were thought to be possible only if exotic matter with negative energy density could be used to stabilize them. However, physicists later reported that microscopic traversable wormholes may be possible and not require any exotic matter, instead requiring only electrically charged fermionic matter with small enough mass that it cannot collapse into
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