Mantrid

Mantrid before his transference into a computer, accompanied by two drone arms

Mantrid was the main antagonist of the second season of Lexx. He was played by Dieter Laser.

When he was alive, he was the supreme Bio-Vizier of His Divine Shadow (though remaining in rivalry with his teacher, Brizon), until His Shadow exiled him to a barren snow-covered world. His physical appearance was that of a head situated on top of a large hovering jar that contained all of his organs. For limbs he had several robot arms, each mounted on an antigravity drive, that could fly around independently. Mantrid was also accompanied in exile by a fellow prisoner named Viggo, heavily implied to be either a child molestor or/and child murderer, his only living companion.

Plot details

After the destruction of the Gigashadow, Kai (secretly possessed by His Divine Shadow's essence at the time) claimed that he was nearly out of protoblood. Since a living Insect is the only known source of protoblood, they recovered a dormant infant Insect from the Gigashadow's remains and brought it to Mantrid for him to revive and extract a fresh supply from. Mantrid agreed, but had his own designs on the infant Insect. Insects possessed the ability to transfer their minds, essence, into other life forms as a means of immortality and Mantrid wanted to extract the organ responsible for this so he could transfer his mind into a computer on board a small spacecraft he had specially prepared for this purpose.

Once the Insect began to revive under Mantrid's ministrations, however, His Divine Shadow caused Kai to kill Mantrid by smashing his organ-jar and then abandoned Kai's body to move into the Insect. Mantrid's head remained alive, though rapidly dying, and in desperation Viggo, ordered the drones to immediately remove the infant Insect's essence-transfer organ so that he could perform the procedure on Mantrid himself. Viggo was successful, but since the organ had been removed after His Divine Shadow had already moved into the Insect's body it was "contaminated" with some of his Insect mentality. He inherited from his new Insect side their deep hatred of humanity. As a result of this, upon waking in his new body Mantrid killed Viggo.

To ensure that the Insect would not escape the Lexx crew destroyed Mantrid's planet, but Mantrid survived and departed taking his remaining drone arms. The drones had a von Neumann probe-like ability to manufacture more of themselves entirely from local raw material, so soon his ship was accompanied by a substantial number of these drones. Mantrid sent some of his drones to follow the Lexx over the course of many episodes to toy with them, destroying any place they visited shortly after they departed and using the raw materials to manufacture more drones. Soon with billions of drones at his disposal, Mantrid begins tearing apart planets, stars, and even dark matter for raw material. By the end of season two Mantrid's drones composed of over 64% of the mass of the entire Light Zone and were poised to rapidly finish consuming the rest of it.

The crew of the Lexx tried several gambits to defeat Mantrid once they became aware of his activities. They located Brizon, his old teacher, who attempted to "hack" the distributed control network of the Mantrid drones to shut them down. Mantrid tricked Brizon into thinking he had succeeded, then when Brizon attempted to transfer his own mind into Mantrid's machine to take his place, Mantrid killed him. The crew of the Lexx subsequently attempted to construct their own more efficient version of a Mantrid drone with the intent of setting them loose to feed exclusively on Mantrid's, but by that point the numerical superiority of Mantrid's drones meant that no matter how efficient the new drones were they would still be completely overwhelmed and destroyed in battle. Finally the crew attempted to locate and destroy Mantrid himself, using Lyekka's telepathic abilities, who could locate Mantrid's mind with relative ease now that most other life in the universe was gone. This too failed when the Lexx found that Mantrid's ship was hidden in a swarm of millions of identical decoys, preventing the Lexx from destroying it before Mantrid was able to summon drones to defend him.

This last gambit turned out to be Mantrid's ultimate downfall, however. Kai contacted Mantrid during the battle and taunted him to the point where Mantrid summoned all of his drones to deal with the Lexx, sending the universe's mass streaming inward from all directions towards that single point in space. An unstoppable Big Crunch is set in motion as a result, the drones' gravity drawing the remaining unconsumed matter of the universe in along with them. The Lexx manages to escape moments before the end of the universe through a natural portal to the Dark Zone that always existed at the center of mass of each universe, which thanks to Mantrid's overkill was moved to their location.

Mantrid also managed to slip through the portal as the Light Zone ended, his own ship destroyed so that only a small computer core attached to a single drone arm was left of him. Rather than immediately begin rebuilding his swarms though, he first slipped aboard the Lexx and attempted to kill the crew. Kai destroyed the drone arm, leaving Mantrid's computer brain lying helplessly on the floor screaming "I destroyed a universe!" until Xev crushed it under her heel.

Mantrid makes an appearance in the third season as well, resurrected on the desolate planet Fire to suffer punishment for his choices. This version of Mantrid had a full and seemingly healthy body, but he was dazed and seemed to have great difficulty remembering his past. (He was also dressed in a black cloak with a black headscarf, leaving only his face exposed.) Finally he was killed once again, this time by Kai. Feigning an interest in repairing him, he inadvertently caused Kai to kill him. His dying words were, "I destroyed a universe! And my suffering is over... for now." (On the hell-like planet Fire, those who were killed were always resurrected soon after to begin their punishment again.)

When Fire and Water were eventually destroyed, Mantrid presumably was sent to Earth, along with the other souls who had been on the two planets previously. He was never shown on Earth, however. His final fate remains unknown.

Visual effects

Mantrid's drone arms were achieved through three different special effects techniques. For many shots, computer graphics were used. For others, an actor's arm was dressed up with props and makeup. Finally, for some scenes of malfunctioning arms, a cheap toy hand with a swirling middle finger, widely available at gift shops around North America, was used. One of these can be seen in the episode Brizon.

External links

• Mantrid at the Internet Movie Database