4.12 If the Shoe Fits

You can tell this one is a comedy, because the camp factor is dialled up to 150% which with Xena seems somewhat unnecessary. There’s also an extra layer of Extreme Comedy Sound Effects. While it’s less scatological than In Sickness and in Health, If The Shoe Fits does continue the running joke about Gabrielle and Xena misusing each other’s belongings. In this case, Xena steals Gabrielle’s “favourite top” to tie up a warlord in the absence of rope, and um. That top, which Gabrielle has been wearing for more than a year? I LIKED THAT TOP. Proving that she has no other clothes, she wears a sack for the rest of the episode. But there’s a new costume change coming on the horizon…

Oh, and Aphrodite is officially Miss Piggy now. “Moi?” But I’m okay with that.

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4.9 Past Imperfect

While I haven’t loved many of the episodes so far in Season 4, I do appreciate that there’s more of a sense of an ongoing arc than ever before – and not just over a couple episodes. At the very beginning of this one, we see Gabrielle and Xena actually have the conversation they need to have about the vision Xena had of their deaths (and has been keeping secret from Gabrielle since they were reunited).

The conversation doesn’t actually solve the problem, but discussing the issue makes their relationship feel more equal. Gabrielle is very much Xena’s partner now, not her junior sidekick.

“Xena is challenged by an opponent who represents a reflection of herself” is certainly looking like the main theme of this season, as the plot is once again about a female antagonist who once learned destructive lessons from Bad Hair Xena and now uses them against her present, Awesome Hair self. As Xena battles her past and people who represent that version of herself, over and over again, Gabrielle’s own theme for this season is her growing realisation that she might have learned all she can from Xena. It’s time she stepped up as an adult to figure what OTHER things she wants from the world.

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4.5 A Good Day

Any episode with Caesar and Pompey is worth watching. Right? This one also has the bonus appearance of Max from Neighbours who would later take on the role of Hades, but for now is playing a random deserter soldier with a family to protect. The “filthy civil war” of the Romans has come to Greek territory (repeat after me, “anything BC is good”), and a lone village has to muster the troops to defend their own land, with the help of Xena and Gabrielle.

There are plenty of dull bits in the first half of this one but Karl Urban’s Caesar more than makes up for it – and while it feels like we have to wade through a lot before we get to enjoy him on screen against Jeremy Callaghan’s Pompey Magnus and Xena herself, it is worth it.

It looks like a by the numbers story right up to the point where Xena, Pompey and Caesar all fall into their own bottle episode down a deep dark well, leaving the armies to fight without them.

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4.1 Adventures in the Sin Trade Part 1

Ahh, those same old opening credits from Season 1, becoming less and less relevant.

Season 4 is the one I liked least of the entire Xena run, but given how long it took me to make my way through Season 3, previously my favourite, I am hoping to have my preconceptions challenged a little!

This episode is off to a good start, with an angry Xena chasing down the distracted and overworked god of the Underworld, Hades, across a battlefield which looks remarkably vivid for a single scene. The visuals of this season certainly have kicked it up a notch!

When she realises that Gabrielle’s dead spirit has almost certainly been filed with the Amazons, Xena ditches her beloved horse Argo and rides off across the Steppes (their ancestral land, apparently), burying her grief in a series of flashbacks about the last time she had anything to do with the Amazon afterlife…

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Let’s just say I meant to make this a separate post, and didn’t completely forget to add it to the end of Rolling Around Like Weasels.

Season 3 was always my favourite season of Xena, the one where the concept for the show really came together with some brilliant, epic stories. It’s also the season where the production team seemed to relax into trusting just how good their main actors were at handling comedy, drama, fight scenes and sometimes all three at once.

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3.20 – Vanishing Act

“Somewhere in this castle he is chained up with two hundred locks… it’s going to take him at least an hour to get out of them.”

Another Autolycus episode! OK it’s been nearly a year for me because for some reason Season 3 got the better of me, but it does seem odd to have two apparently unlinked episodes with the same guest star right next to each other. Even odder that the only reference to previous episodes is that time Xena borrowed his body, and not the time they saw each other just last week. But of course as I keep reminding myself, this is the 90’s model of television, before season-long arcs were officially encouraged, when the ideal was to have episodes that could be shown in random order.

I especially shouldn’t complain about this because thanks to the marvels of Australian television, I did indeed watch most of Xena in entirely the wrong order. As of this rewatch there are still a couple of essential episodes I am yet to see!

In any case, this is a good old fashioned Autolycus romp, in which he is taking one of his rare tourist trips to the right side of Xena’s moral line, which means she has an excuse to enjoy a mad heist with him. (And indeed the whole question of moral lines is explored further, as it turns out that Auto is firmly in the ‘no killing people’ camp while Xena only draws the line at profiting from crime (okay, and cold-blooded execution).

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It’s been a while again! Apparently I don’t have the stamina to watch my way through all six seasons of Xena in one go. Before I move on to finish off the last disc of Season 3, though, there’s a crossover I need to discuss from Xena’s parent/brother show, Hercules the Legendary Journeys.

Hercules had got pretty awesome by its Season 4 (concurrent with Xena’s Season 3), moving away from dull monster-or-god-of-the-week stories to make the most of its adaptable, talented New Zealand cast and crew. Season 4 was when they really started having fun and experimenting with the format, not only in the outrageous comedy and musical episodes, but also with some audacious and epic drama. Yes, really, Hercules.

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Over at SF Novelists, Marie Brennan talks about why ‘competence is hot,’ about the portrayal of various careers/jobs in fiction, and which ones work better than others. She also talks about wanting more heroines who get to be good at their job instead of merely hot.

Which is true, absolutely true, that there aren’t enough of those women in TV and especially movies. It reminds me of how excited the internet got about Women Fighters in Reasonable Armour and, in fact, that if you take a very attractive actress and put her in a practical outfit, and make her good at her job, she’s actually still going to be very attractive, in many cases MORE attractive than the glamorpuss in the tiny, implausibly unprofessional outfit, because it doesn’t look like she’s trying so hard.

In other words, you can have hot women on TV who are also fantastic role models for women, merely by putting more clothes on them, and treating their characters seriously. Who knew?

Some examples of iconic women in science fiction and fantasy television who are, in fact, awesome at their jobs:

Uhura (Star Trek) who may have mostly sat there and pushed buttons, but always looked like she was taking her job as communications officer seriously. Her aura of professional competence was impressive considering she was often given little to do in the script, and that’s down to the gravitas of the brilliant Nichelle Nichols, who gave a generation of African American kids hope that there was a place for them in the future. One of my favourite things about the movie remake of Star Trek is how they added weight to the job that Uhura (now played by Zoe Saldana) did – how much education she was required, and why she in particular was qualified for that really important position on the flagship. (in comparison, Kirk crashed into his job on a wing and a prayer, and seems to have been picked for “leadership qualities” that include “being a complete tool”).

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3.16 – When in Rome

Pompey the Magnus. Oh my yes.

I was excited to see this was a Rome episode and even more excited to realise it features Crassus, a historical character who has always interested me. But then Caesar turned up, stealing all the oxygen in the room, except that which is pinched by his rival and “ally,” Pompey THE Magnus. And I really stopped caring about Crassus.

Jeremy Callaghan, who will always be Brian from Police Rescue for me (last seen in an earlier Xena episode as a thug who might possibly have a heart of gold under his grubby armour), does a good job of balancing out Karl Urban’s shall we say High Acting, and has good sinister chemistry with Xena, too. He takes it a bit too far at times with the grape sucking and furniture chewing, but that sort of thing is what Xena is all about.

“So why do they call you the Warrior Princess?”
“Because ‘Caesar’ was taken.”

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3.12 – The Bitter Suite

I have listened to the soundtrack to this episode so many times that I think it’s imprinted on my skin somewhere. Fair warning, I really love this one, and it’s probably one of the episodes I have most rewatched, though not in recent years.

Xena and Gabrielle are broken apart, forever. Both are lost in grief and despair. What could possibly heal the rift between these two?

A kooky comedy musical!

No, seriously.

In an era of brilliant kooky musical episodes (and other kooky gimmick episodes, remember Farscape’s animated episode, or the Angel muppet experiment), The Bitter Suite leaves Buffy’s Once More With Feeling in the dust. The music is bizarre and beautiful, the imagery is surreal, and the characters drag themselves through every painful emotion that they have.

We see Joxer come into his own in the opening scenes, trying to protect Gabrielle from a murderous Xena, who actually goes so far as to rope Gabrielle’s ankles and drag her in the mud behind her horse. But when they stop on a cliff’s edge, it’s Gabrielle – in touch with her own previously-suppressed anger thanks to her inner Callisto – who pushes her friend over the edge…

And into the pretty, song-obsessed fantasyland that is Illusia.

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