In the first Lexx movie, we meet the players, the good ship Lexx, and bear witness to the fulfillment of a prophecy of destruction.

Written by Paul Donovan, Jeffrey Hirschfield and Lex Gigeroff
Directed by Paul Donovan

Barry Bostwick is best known to fans of erotic science fiction as the talented "Brad Majors" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Kai leads the Brunnen-G against the ForeShadow, the Divine Order's mobile weapons array. Their attack fails.

The ForeShadow obliterates Brunnus-2 and Kai crashes his ship into the weapon's control pod. Wounded, he confronts His Divine Shadow and promises that the Brunnen-G will defeat his order.

Inevitably, I Worship His Shadow suffers from pilot-itis. First episodes of any show are saddled with the responsibility of introducing the main characters and establishing the series' basic sensibilities.

This doesn't leave a lot of room for subtle or unique plotting; the challenge lies in making this formula interesting. I Worship His Shadow does an adequate but unspectacular job of rising to this challenge.

I Worship His Shadow is all about Kai. Although the film introduces Stan and Zev and offers some broad hints about their respective characters, they remain ciphers.

Zev is particularly underdeveloped. This due to slipshod editing during Tales From a Parallel Universe's transition from the original unrated format to commercial television: we see her as a prisoner, but the film offers no details about her supposed crime.

Lexx devotees know that Zev was imprisoned and bound over for the love slave treatment for failing to perform her wifely duties. This information is absent from I Worship His Shadow.

Perhaps this was deemed too politically incorrect for basic cable, but whatever the reasoning, the omission detracts even more from Zev's already miniscule development.

I Worship His Shadow is visually impressive. The production designers know and revere their science fiction antecedents -- the scene introducing the Cluster owes an obvious debt to Blade Runner.

The script picks up where the imagery leaves off -- while the Cluster looks and sounds like a steroid-enhanced version of Ridley Scott's Los Angeles, it operates like the senile dystopia of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Stan is punished for the non-crime of adhering to rules that no one bothered to inform him were no longer in vogue.

Ultimately, Tales From a Parallel Universe is a unique science fiction vision. Love it or hate it, the series doesn't simply stand on the shoulders of giants; it uses this rarified perspective to map out its own landscape.

Compared to some of the wackier episodes of the regular series, I Worship His Shadow is oddly restrained, but it carries a germ of what Lexx will become.