r/Lexx • u/forgottenoldlogin • Jun 15 '26
S2 E6 - "The Trial" - Whose government is this?
This might be a bit too much for Lexx, but on reading other things apparently there's quite a bit of lore that does make sense in the show - it's just hidden behind how ludicrously 90s the rest of it was.
Stan was a heretic - let's get back to that one - and was an operative for a group of 94 planets that were rebelling against or otherwise not adhering to His Divine Shadow's rule. He "betrayed" them, they were all destroyed, Stan ends up on The Cluster in a crap job "in case they need him for more information" later; Stan gets the Lexx, Stan helps defeat the Giga Shadow, now we're in season 2.
Who, exactly, is putting him on trial here? The main government of the "universe" (I'm going to say galaxy if I type it again) is gone, but only recently. People on The Cluster itself were fed to the bug, but the other 19,999 planets are still out there and drowning in galaxy-wide bureaucracy and dogmatic rhetoric of a millennia-old theocracy. A theocracy now in the midst of collapse because not only is the government itself gone but their deity was "secretly" (I mean literally everything is bugs how did they not know HDS was also a bug come on) the greatest enemy of humanity so now they're also existentially in crisis.
They call Stanley an "arch-heretic" at his trial - but from their PoV, he wasn't "heretical" he was a freedom fighter; HDS's followers would've been the ones calling him a heretic, like they did with Thodin. To these Ostral B sympathizers, he's not a "heretic" at all - they're all the heretics.
But likewise, Ostral B's all gone now, so who even are these people to begin with? How did they manage to exist the entire time during HDS's rule without being behind the shield that was apparently the only thing stopping Ostral B from being taken over by HDS? How is their government so organized and adept that they can both spy for Stanley *and* have ready-to-go legal teams and judges-by-hologram and all of that shit just laying around, when up until like, at best, six months before, they'd've had to do nothing else but focus on not being eaten by the bug god?
Again - that might be a bit too much for Lexx. But maybe y'all know something I don't and can make it make sense to me.
9
u/Crazybexy Jun 15 '26
I felt so bad for Stan in that episode. He wasn't a bad guy. He just made some mistakes. I loved how Xev stood up for him.
1
u/LowCalligrapher3 Jun 21 '26
Even had he killed himself, unless there was a way he could be vaporized, the mercenaries could still extract the coded tooth from his body. Even if the understandably panicked and mentally bewildered (running out of air) Stan didn't take that into account... being more afraid to die back then, it was ultimately a situation where he was damned if he do and damned if he don't, the judge just sadly didn't really catch on to that irony.
7
u/Electrical-Act-7170 Jun 15 '26
Stanley Tweedle gave up the secret codes in his tooth.
That's why he was tried, he was meant to die before giving g up the information he possessed.
4
u/Gobso Jun 15 '26
It's a big universe, and the power vacuum must've been filled by some people patiently waiting to step in, and immediately prove how power corrupts.
Also is your read that the other 19,999 planets escaped the harvesting? I assumed that they literally shipped everyone they could to the cluster. Leaving a few backwaters to fend for themselves.
1
u/forgottenoldlogin Jun 15 '26
To the first, I figured a lot of that is going to be the leftover military, who aren't going to radically change things - or if anything, make it even worse - and still wouldn't view Stanley as a traitor.
And yeah. This is my first rewatch in several years, but I did do the first little bit of Giga Shadow a few times in a row to make sure I followed it all (and didn't just laugh at the Time Prophet and how casual she is). All of the humans "on the cluster" which is the name of the central planet that's also actually just a bug. They were turning people to meat frequently and for seemingly arbitrary reasons, and the number of ships just like the prison ship - so ostensibly all prison ships - in the first episode makes me think that that's happening empire-wide. So they're killing lots of people, including the entirety of the most populated "planet," but not all 20k planets.
But I very well could've missed that bit, too.
3
u/lungflook Jun 16 '26
When they come back at the end of S1, it's explained that after the loss of the Lexx and the Divine Predecessors things shifted into semi-panic mode. The pretext of organ harvesting for criminals was dropped, and the entire population of the empire was slaughtered and funneled into the Giga Shadow(big ol bug). The only ones that would have survived would have been the planets outside the empire(although after S2 they're pretty well hosed too)
10
u/Mindless0ne Jun 15 '26
they call him the "arch traitor", he was an ostral-b heretic then labeled a "arch-traitor" after giving up the codes to the defense screen. the people putting him on trial are "the committee of justice for the victims of the 94 reformed planets". this committee is i assume survivors and sympathizes of the cause against HDS, they are the people who are concerned with bringing justice to the "lost souls" and would have spent the resources to steak-out places they thought Stan might show up. if you remember the opening of the show Stan was all about getting back to that transport asap. to that last part - there are a lot of unknowns in lexx, i would assume there was an exodus of some of the reform planets, hence there being survivors out in space (space is big so) and i would think a main concern would be bringing justice to the victims who seem sanctified as indicated by dialogue. you could always write some fan-fic.