Sorry, this is a long one! I might have to start doing one post per episode if they get any longer…

3.5 – Gabrielle’s Hope.

Yes, it’s been a long time between drinks. I think I put this one off because it’s a very emotionally tough episode, and one I never particularly enjoyed. Apart from anything, there are – violence and pregnancy and baby themes in this one. When it comes to SF/fantasy TV, that’s rarely a good thing.

The episode opens with a moment of deep hurt/comfort. Gabrielle is disturbed by dreams of her first kill from the previous episode – and has turned the whole thing around in her head so her victim was a sweet, innocent flower as opposed to a calculating religious obsessive who tricked Gabrielle into taking her life. Gab’s reaction is not just emotional, but physical – she keeps feeling nauseated. Xena is certain this is a normal part of the healing process.

But then things start getting screwy. Banshees attack them, only to profess worship of Gabrielle. Villagers gather, determined to burn Gabrielle as a witch… and, oh yes. She has food cravings. Weird, icky food cravings.

Can anyone else see where this is going?

Yes, Gabrielle is great with child – one of those speedy demon babies who whips through the system in under 24 hours (oh, the STRETCH MARKS) and isn’t going to stick around long. Unlike Deanna Troi in Star Trek: Next Gen though, this one is going to have long, long ramifications.

[Note to all, the review for this ep was written a million years ago, or possibly about six months, but it ties in beautifully with the discussion we had on the last Galactic Suburbia about mystical pregnancy, so yay!]

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Season Three is upon us! Is it me, or is Gabrielle’s top getting tinier? Also, her boots this season are awesome.

3.1 – The Furies

Unlike last season, which ran through a few ‘meh’ episodes before hitting its stride, season three opens with a bang, presenting us with a powerful story that shows Xena in a whole new light, and potentially adds a whole lot of baggage to her mythos, while drawing a sharp line under one previously important element of her backstory.

Ares, that sexy snarky bastard, sics the Furies on Xena. Reimagined as a trio of New Romantic stripper babes with spiky hairdos, the Furies curse Xena with madness until she brings justice against a member of her family whose death was never avenged: her father.

The madness plotline is where the story could really have gone off the rails. Indeed it looks at first like they are going that route, with Lucy Lawless enacting her “madness” in a manic eyerolling, pantomime style. They make up for this unpromising start with some quieter scenes between Xena and Gabrielle as Xena tries to make sense of what is happening to her, and particularly where Gabrielle takes on the role of carer to her confused, hallucinating friend.

It is worth noting that, as with Callisto, Xena’s state of sanity/insanity is conveyed through the degree to which her hair is unbrushed.

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2.20 The Price

This is an episode I remember hugely disliking and being bored by on my first run through season 2, and never watching again. All I remember is it being one of those that’s all peril and no humour, but looking at it now I can see other reasons that would have turned me off, even if I wasn’t alert to the reason why.

The Horde are basically voiceless savages, and while I enjoy Xena facing her past and a bit of grim backstory, I much prefer it when she has to face antagonists with personality to them. And, you know, dialogue. I am a fiend for awesome dialogue and I have a tendency to bounce completely off stories that have none. This is a very male-heavy action story which has nothing about it that feels especially ‘Xena’ and offers nothing to our female leads other than the opportunity to act tough or look horrified.

Also there’s something grotesque and pretty damned offensive about the racial stereotype of the growling, murderous savage, and little is done to mitigate the using of this antiquated trope. (this is I think later addressed in the far better episode Daughter of Pomira though I didn’t love that one either) I found it interesting that the use of Maori costume and iconography with the all-male Horde is used to emphasise them as being violent, ugly and terrifying – the contrast being the way that the costume and iconography were used to add to the mystique of the Amazons, who also have a scary, dramatic appearance but are shown to have complex characters, a history and society rather than just being “monsters”.

Okay, it is kind of cool to see Xena taking on the responsibility of yelling at a bedraggled, heartsick Athenian troop of soldiers to shape them into a force capable of fighting the villainous Horde, and I can see the main point of the story is how easily Xena can slip into her own war-hungry maniac self when the threat is bad enough. Seeing Gabrielle’s calm competence in getting a sickbay organised, and later standing up against Badass Xena to be merciful to the wounded Horde, effectively shows how far she has come. But the whole thing is so shouty and violent, I still can’t love it.

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2.16 For Him the Bell Tolls

This is the episode that really shows what Ted Raimi can do – a homage to Danny Kaye’s classic performance in The Court Jester, it sets up a situation where Joxer is charmed to become a Hero with a capital H every time a bell rings – and then returns to his own bumbling self when it rings again.

Ted Raimi carries the story off with aplomb, making it that bit more special than its Hercules-lite plot really deserves, and his ‘swashbuckling hero’ persona is both hilarious and weirdly convincing.

Also, damn that man can fence.

This episode also marks the first appearance in Xena of the goddess Aphrodite played by Alexandra Tydings, whose bubbly, bitchy surfer babe persona was one of the highlights of the Hercules series from quite early on, along with her cranky, who-oiled-those-chest-muscles, bleached blond son Cupid, played by… um, Karl Urban.

One of my favourite things about the Herc-and-Xenaverse is the way that the same actors appear over and over, often playing several different characters. It lends a certain theatre rep feel to the whole production, and there is great fun to be had in spotting the reappearance of a favourite performer. Sometimes an actor used in a minor role is cast later in a major or more iconic one (Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor, for example, both played less significant roles in the Hercverse before being cast as Xena and Gabrielle) and often it ends up that the same actor plays a different major roles in each “verse”. The actress who plays Gabrielle’s sister, for instance, has a recurring role as the daughter of one of Hercules’ Argonaut friends, and Gina Torres appears as Cleopatra in the Xenaverse, and pirate/Sumerian queen Nebula in the Hercverse.

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2.12 Destiny

As far as best episodes of Xena ever go, this one makes a good case for itself. In the pre-credits sequence, Xena does her usual thing of trying to save a bunch of villagers (and Gabrielle) from some big meanies. Only this time, she manages to get herself seriously wounded. To the show’s credit, they don’t let her fall thanks to an ordinary fight, or an error in judgement.

No, to get the better of Xena it takes a massive great tree on a pulley system cracking her against another massive great tree.

In any case, she manages to give Gabrielle instructions on where to take her to get help (a mountaintop, that won’t be hard at all!) and lapses into unconsciousness.

As Gabrielle struggles to get Xena to her destination, we are treated to a flashback story about how Xena crossed over from a bad-ass woman with a mission to protect her village, to an evil warlord who cared about nothing but power and screwing people over and KILL KILL KILL.

Naturally, it’s because of a bloke.

At this point, if someone were describing it to me, I would be very annoyed that our major subversive feminist hero went to her darkest place ever because of a man. I might in fact want to kick, bite and break things. But we are not just talking about any man here. We are talking about (drum roll) JULIUS FREAKING CAESAR, thank you very much, and as the episode demonstrates, it’s not just any love story gone bad. It’s far more interesting than that.

My favourite Caesar anecdote of all times, made especially glorious in Colleen McCullough’s retelling in (I think) Fortune’s Favourites (a novel rumoured to have inspired this very episode), is about how as a young man he was captured by pirates. He not only demanded that they ask a much higher ransom than they originally intended, but also promised that he would come back and capture them all in return, and that when he did, he would crucify them honourably rather than selling them as slaves. They laughed good-naturedly, knowing he could never find their secret cove again, but he was true to his word, much smarter than they gave him credit for, and duly had them all executed.

In this version, Xena is the pirate captain. And Caesar is devastatingly charismatic, while at the same time giving the overall impression that he is a smug, privileged private schoolboy with delusions of grandeur. Caesar is played by Karl Urban. He is smarmy, irritating and supremely confident, and Xena pretty much wants to rip the clothes right off him. So she does.

[FAR TOO MANY SPOILERS FOR THIS ONE, COULDN’T HELP MYSELF]
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2.9 A Solstice Carol

I’ve talked before about the weird juxtaposition of Christian mythology in with the ancient Greek stories in Xena. Peter M Ball also singled it out as one of the aspects of the Xenaverse that jars badly. This episode is the worst offender, and it is the closest I have come to skipping one in this rewatch. I was determined to find some redeeming feature, though I figured a naked fish fight was too much to hope for…

What I did find was an answer to why, perhaps, the more Christian/Biblical stories of these early seasons don’t work. I think it’s because they’re just so BADLY WRITTEN. In particular, they tend towards sentimentality, as if they’re so desperate not to offend that they end up being like one of those awful moralistic made-for-TV Christmas movies.

In this case, we actually have a Christmas story, something I think was only done this once, and thank Ares for that. Apart from the substitution of language so we get ‘winter solstice’ instead of Christmas and ‘fates’ instead of spirits, it’s basically an amalgam of all those really bad 80’s holiday movies and Dickensian cliches, complete with ragged, good-hearted orphans, a sad old toymaker, and a mean king who needs to be taught a lesson. Yes, really.

At the episode’s lowest point, we have Santa Claus using a crossbow armed with candy canes, Gabrielle bell-ringing on the helmets of the naughty guards, an unhappy ex-wife forgiving her husband with very little reason to do so. Oh yes, and a gratuitous Mary & Joseph cameo.

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2.5 Return of Callisto
This episode is a real game-changer.

Gabrielle marries her childhood sweetheart Perdicas (yes we’re still forgetting what she said about him in episode one) and leaves her life with Xena to be a wife; meanwhile, Callisto escapes from her life imprisonment even nuttier than before, and goes on a fairly singular killing spree, leaving Gabrielle widowed after less than a day. Xena and Gabrielle fight over whether Gab can take revenge herself and ultimately Xena is the one who does it, allowing Callisto to die rather horribly in a swamp of sadness – sorry, quicksand!

There’s a lot of interesting material in this episode. Gabrielle is unsure about whether she is going to accept Perdicas’ offer of marriage, but his story of how he has tired of being a soldier-for-hire moves her, and later when she sees him freeze in horror after killing a man in a battle, she decides her answer is ‘yes.’ The irony is that Xena had to rescue Gabrielle in that battle BECAUSE Perdicas froze up – if we read this episode (which we are invited to) as being about Gabrielle choosing between two life partners, it leaps out at us that Xena’s competence in battle is what rules her ineligible for Gabrielle’s heart, even as she saves her life. Meanwhile, Perdicas on his knees staring into space is what makes Gabrielle go all soppy.

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A few key points of art direction as we groove our way into Season 2:

While the production team in Season 1 seemed to go to great lengths to avoid any night shoots at all (do we remember the scene in which Gabrielle & Diana lie down to sleep in the middle of the day?) this new season features night scenes in nearly every episode, as well as many more sunrise and sunset shots. This also leads to the iconic ‘full moon’ shot which used to cause me much merriment. It’s always full moon in Xena. Every single time.

Also, Gabrielle is now wearing her classic outfit which was to represent her character over the next two and a half years: teeny sage green top showing off midriff, low-slung plum suede skirt, fighting staff. I love this outfit of hers, which still sums up ‘Gabrielle’ to me and it took me a long time to come to terms with her later style changes, especially the cutting of her hair. It was an important change, though, marking her ascension from Xena’s junior assistant to her partner.

2.1 Orphan of War

This episode is notable for introducing us to Solan, Xena’s long lost son. It’s also the first time we hear the name of Borias, Xena’s lover and the father of her son, the warlord who turned his back on evil before she did, who will come to be such an iconic part of her backstory. Solan has been raised by centaurs, and while he takes pride in being the son of Borias he has no idea who his mother is.

It’s an interesting enough insight into Xena’s past, but the episode itself don’t have much to it apart from the scenes with Xena and Solan. There’s a shiny evil stone, one of Xena’s former lieutenants wants it, lalala. Disposable ep. (though to be fair the Ixion stone will be highly relevant in a major two parter within a year or so – but not a Xena one!)

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1.21 – The Greater Good

We’re getting to the pointy end of the season now, and it’s clear that the year has had a powerful effect on both Xena and Gabrielle. This episode answers the question of how far Gabrielle has come under her mentor’s tutelage, and whether she could actually replace Xena. A poison dart weakens Xena, and eventually kills her, and Gabrielle has to literally don her armour to pretend to be Xena, to save a village from warlord attack. This leads to a very cute riff on the famous panning-up shot of the opening credits, as she armours up with rather less elan than we are used to.

This is a powerful episode, particularly from the performances of Xena, Gabrielle and Salmoneus. While Salmoneus is mostly a comic relief character in Hercules, his most powerful serious moments have been in episodes with Xena – first in the Herc episodes that introduced her character, and then in his two appearances in this season.

The death of Xena (first of many) is quite gut-wrenching and almost believable. Though of course, she gets better through sheer force of will.

1.22 – Callisto

It could be argued that this episode is the point when Xena (the show) completely comes into its own. For the next two seasons, one character would dominate. A great hero needs a great nemesis, and Callisto is the final piece in the puzzle that makes Xena a fantastic piece of heroic fantasy. I have a friend who loves Xena but basically is only interested in watching the Callisto episodes. It’s hard to argue with that!

When we first see Callisto, she is laying waste to a village, and calling herself Xena. Later we discover that as a young girl, she lost her family under Xena’s sword. Xena’s evil past is literally coming back to bite her, and Callisto is determined to make Xena suffer – not least by becoming a monster herself, and one whose every crime can be blamed directly on the warrior princess. The “I made you” villain/hero relationship is a classic – think the Joker and Batman in the first Tim Burton movie – and it works viscerally for Xena’s nemesis to be a waif-like blonde woman.

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1.17 – A Royal Couple of Thieves

If you love Bruce Campbell, and you have never seen his Autolycus, you are seriously missing out. His King of Thieves, a character that originated in Hercules, is a pleasure to watch – he flirts and steals his way through life like a dark version of Errol Flynn and while he is fun in Hercules, he takes on a new dimension when performing opposite Lucy Lawless. Their interactions are so sexy and fun, and her tolerance for his foibles is far more entertaining than the same moralising stance coming from Hercules. He also brings out her devious side, and the fact that neither of them can entirely trust each other seems to be something that they really enjoy.

1.18 – The Prodigal

Even more than with the clip shows, the production team behind Xena developed a tradition of pulling out all the stops when it came to a “Xena-lite” episode, and almost all of the Gabrielle-solo episodes make my favourites list. This one has Gabrielle returning home to Potidaea to lick her wounds after she freezes and panics in the middle of a fight. Once there, she is faced with the anger of the sister she left behind, and also a crisis situation as her home village is about to be attacked by a party of warlords.

The village have solved the problem themselves, pooling all their money to hire Meleager the Mighty, a warrior with such a reputation that his mere name strikes fear into the heart of wrongdoers. Unfortunately, Meleager turns out to be a washed up and drunk old has-been. Gabrielle manages somehow to repair her relationship with her sister, to train and coax the village into defending themselves intelligently, and to restore Meleager’s faith in himself. And of course, she earns a new respect for her own capabilities and what Xena has taught her.

That all sounds very worthy and po-faced, but there’s some great humour in this episode too. The actor who plays Meleager carries the different sides of the character off very well, and he has an entertaining rapport with Renee O’Connor. Willa O’Neil, playing Gabrielle’s sister Lila, is touching and funny as well, and was understandably brought back, time after time.

I have to give a mention to the awfully dubbed pan pipe playing at the beginning of the ep, and the equally badly dubbed whistling without pan pipes at the end. Even when she’s PRETENDING, Renee is obviously tone deaf. Which only gets funnier later with the musical episodes…

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