Xena Warrior Princess: Fallen Angel, Chakram, Succession

After a long hiatus, I’m back with the Xena Warrior Princess reviews.

Ah, season five. Shit gets weird. I’ve talked before about the grab-bag of world religions that get thrown into this show, and now it’s Christianity’s turn to get ticked off the list. I supposed it’s handled a modicum better than Hinduism, but not by much.

Fallen Angel

Plot: Xena and Gabrielle are dead for like… the eighth time, and their spirits rise from the crucifixes into a spiritual plane. They’re surrounded by angels and begin to ascend into a white light, when a number of demons rise up from below and attack them. Gabrielle falls into darkness, but Xena’s pursuit of her is interrupted when a demonic-looking Callisto grabs her in midair.

Xena is only rescued when an archangel called Michael intervenes, telling her that Gabrielle has been taken to hell. She can be retrieved, as long as she doesn’t eat any of the fruit that’s offered to her.

When Gabrielle wakes up in a dark hellish cavern, Callisto almost immediately tries to tempt her into eating the fruit laid out on a banquet table before her. Meanwhile, Michael is guiding Xena through a purification ritual so that she can become an archangel (sure, why not?) She walks through a passage of fire, and is then submerged in water; when she emerges she’s clad in armour and has a pair of dark wings.

Michael tells Xena that she can sacrifice her own light in order to save Gabrielle, but it means Xena will lose the chance to be reborn and condemn her to spend eternity as a demon. Meanwhile, Gabrielle has been force-fed some of the fruit, and then partakes of it herself, growing horns and taking the opportunity to throw some harsh truths in Callisto’s face.

Xena and Michael attack the demons; while Michael drags Gabrielle back up to heaven, Xena takes on Callisto who insists she’ll hate her forever because of what she did to her family. In response to this, Xena performs an act of grace and shares her inner light with Callisto.

Gabrielle is purified by the waters of heaven, and is told by Michael that Xena gave herself up to save one of the damned: Callisto, who is now clad in white and looking very confused as to her whereabouts. She doesn’t remember any of the carnage she caused while she was alive, though Gabrielle isn’t buying her act. Meanwhile, Xena has now asserted herself as the leader of the demons, and is planning an assault on heaven – something that worries Michael.

As Xena and the other demons prep their attack, Gabrielle goes through the ritual to become an archangel and finds it in herself to forgive Callisto. During the attack, she tries to distract Xena so that Michael is spared, and Callisto gets an idea…

While all this has been happening, Joxer has arrived in Rome to find Xena and Gabrielle, only for Amarice and Eli to show him their crucified bodies. The trio overpower the Roman centurions, and bring the bodies of the women down off the crosses, planning to take them home to Greece. Some discussion between them all takes place in an abandoned Roman villa (Amarice blames Eli for their deaths given his pacifist stance, Joxer regrets never telling Gabrielle that he loved her), and Eli goes off alone to pray.

There he’s found by Callisto’s spirit, who tells him to go to Xena and Gabrielle’s bodies. Eli places his hands above them, with Callisto’s hands alongside his, just as the demonic and angelic versions of Xena and Gabrielle plummet off a cliffside into hell, with Michael attempting to save them both. Before they hit the bottom, all three disappear.

In the mortal world, Xena and Gabrielle are resurrected. Michael and Callisto watch invisibly, and he encourages her to do something mysterious over Xena’s body before she’s reunited with her long-dead parents. In the closing scene, Xena and Gabrielle, surrounded by Joxer, Eli and Amarice, quietly process their return from the dead.

Okay, so this season five premiere was – a little strange, to say the least.

I’ve talked before about my feelings on the grab-bag of religion that the writers throw into this show; I think it’s confusing and weird, but it’s also something they’ve been doing for a while now, to the point where it feels like a major overarching motif of the show: Xena and Gabrielle try to find themselves by dipping their toes into every ideological belief system under the sun. And here, we finally get to Christianity.

At least we have to assume it’s Christianity as opposed to Judaism. A few seasons back Xena and Gabrielle passed what was obviously supposed to be Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem, and there were a couple of allusions to it during the Dahok arc, but then this show has hardly been consistent about this sort of thing.

So if I can get my head around the cherry-picking that this show does with the religions of the world, Xena and Gabrielle end up in heaven, with a host of angels flying down to carry them further up into the light (apparently, at some point God exerted his authority over Hades and the god of the Amazons and decided to take the pair to His version of the afterlife?) But a group of demons attack the pair of them, and the women are separated, the irony being that Gabrielle ends up in the Bad Place while Xena remains in the company of angels that have black wings instead of white (which I assume was to establish them as belonging to more of a warrior contingent than the white-winged ones).

Here’s where it got a little screwy, in which our three main characters (Xena, Gabrielle and Callisto) all got to try their hand at being pure good or pure evil, with the prosthetics and make-up to match. Gabrielle becomes a demon, Xena becomes an angel, and then Xena turns Callisto into an angel and becomes a demon herself, while Gabrielle is healed and also gets turned into an angel, and then Xena and Gabrielle fight each other before Callisto goes to Eli and helps him resurrect them both. Was she allowed to do that? Michael didn’t seem to mind, but it felt like some serious law-breakage might have been happening there.

But at least there were some interesting character beats. I liked that Gabrielle finally forgave Callisto for the murder of her husband, even though Callisto had no idea who she was or what she’d done wrong (though I was left wondering about how Gabrielle feels about never seeing Perdicus again consider they’re now in different afterlives). I also liked the yin-yang qualities of Xena and Gabrielle’s journey – even though Gabrielle is easily the gentler, more pacifist one, she’s willing to put the greater good first and destroy demonic Xena if she has to, whereas Xena the ruthless warrior prioritizes her bond with Gabrielle before anything else, even when she’s in the guise of a demon.

I also had to laugh that Xena pretty much took over hell immediately after becoming a demon. Makes you wonder where Lucifer was in all this.

This also feels like the end of Callisto’s storyline. I see no possible way for them to bring her back after this (at least not in a way that doesn’t feel like a horrible asspull) but for a final swansong, it was reasonably satisfying. I enjoyed that she got more than she bargained for after Gabrielle became a demon and confronted her with the possibility that she only used her family’s death as an excuse to be a bitch, and though her transition into her innocent young self felt a bit abrupt, at least she was reunited with her family at last. That hug with her parents has been a long time coming.

Maybe a bit of an anticlimactic end for such an iconic villain, but one can hardly complain that she’s been forgiven, healed and redeemed, and is now at peace.

The strongest part of the episode was definitely Joxer, Eli and Amarice dealing with the deaths of Xena and Gabrielle, particularly that it took the time to portray their grief and reverence instead of rushing straight to the resurrection process. Between Joxer’s reaction to see the crucifixion, to the gentle way the trio removed their friends’ bodies from the crosses, to each one talking about what they planned to do next, it all felt more real and emotionally weighty than the heaven-and-hell shenanigans.

More than that, it was just interesting to see the sidekicks interacting with each other without the two protagonists present. I especially liked Amarice taking a lock of Xena’s hair and vowing to fight on in her name (not that this will come to anything – she’s only got a few episodes left).

All things considered, it was a strange episode; at times like some evangelical story that wasn’t particularly helped by the bad CGI and obvious wire-work. They’ve already established that Xena and Gabrielle are in a reincarnation cycle (Michael even said that being reborn into a new body was next up on dead Xena’s to-do list), though that’s an Eastern idea which felt totally at odds with the whole Christian good-versus-evil deal. They even threw in a bit of Greek mythology by establishing that if Gabrielle ate the food in hell, she would become a demon, much like Persephone being doomed to stay with Hades if she ate the pomegranate seeds.

I also thought it was a bit strange that Dahok and Hope weren’t anywhere to be seen in hell, though perhaps they’re in another place entirely (and this episode was already pretty busy).

Yes, all this mish-mash is impossible to figure out, but I’m happy enough to just roll with it. They’re Greeks who become part of the Christological pantheon and get brought back to life by Hinduism. Why not?

Miscellaneous Observations:

Gabrielle’s willingness to go along with Michael’s plan to lure Xena into a trap and cut her into pieces to prevent her from taking over heaven was a bit of an eye-opener. I’ve occasionally said that Gabrielle doesn’t really have a dark side, but perhaps her goodness is her dark side. If the stakes are high enough, she’s always willing to put the greater good before personal attachment, though there’s no doubt that if Xena was faced with the choice between saving the world and saving Gabrielle, she would choose Gabrielle.

Charles Mesure was really well-cast as Michael. He looked like a warrior angel and he acted like a leader, with a fair amount of inscrutability to boot. I hope we see him again.

Lucy Lawless’s screechy demon voice took one straight into Wicked Witch of the West territory, and I wasn’t that keen on Hudson Leick’s rather insipid take on “redeemed Callisto” either. As Lucy Lawless proves in the very next episode, you can play naïve and confused without sounding like a literal child.

Some lovely stuff from Joxer, whether it was the care and pain with which he had to cut down the woman he loves from a crucifix, or the way he touched her face so tenderly at the end. Which makes it all the more confusing when about halfway through the episode he throws the shroud over Gabrielle’s face with complete indifference.

I always laugh when I see Amarice’s little booty pants. She must have been freezing!

Chakram

Plot: Ares and Kal, another god of war, argue about Xena and her new alliance with Eli, as well as the fact that Ares once stole the “dark chakram” and concealed it in a temple where it cannot be accessed by any but the purest of hearts. Kal has been sending hapless villagers in to try and retrieve it, and his latest victim is a monk called Calib, who doesn’t get far into the temple before he’s engulfed in flames.

Still, at least we get a look at the altar where a second chakram lies on the light half of a yin-yang sign, waiting to be claimed.

In the snowy reaches of the Roman outpost, Xena and Gabrielle gradually come back to life after their resurrection. Amarice returns Xena’s broken chakram to her, and Xena confesses to Gabrielle that she feels like something is missing within herself… and she has no idea what the chakram is.

It soon becomes clear that she’s lost her combat skills, and it’s up to Gabrielle with a new pair of sais to defend the two of them when they’re attacked by Kal’s men in a market place. The group decide to head for the home of Eli’s friend Calib, who has access to a wide range of scrolls, to provide them with some answers. On the way, Amarice grows frustrated with Xena’s newfound innocence and naivety, while Gabrielle confesses to Eli that she can no longer follow the Way of Love (that is, pacificism).

Elsewhere, Ares and Kal agree to work together in order to keep Xena in this new passive state, and the latter’s men manage to take her captive while she’s out hunting with Amarice. While Ares and Kal fight each other, Xena becomes entranced by a mural depicting a chakram on the wall of the temple, which sets off flashbacks of her violent past. While the gods are distracted, she escapes.

Everyone meets up at Calib’s home, and Xena breaks the news that Eli’s friend is dead. Joxer approaches her in search of advice on how to tell Gabrielle that he loves her, and Ares approaches while she’s in the bath for another of his patented seductive pitches on how they can rule the world together. Gabrielle walks in, and is furious that Ares is trying to take advantage of Xena while she’s in this vulnerable mental state.

Having trawled through Calib’s scrolls, Eli comes to the conclusion that the only way to bring Xena back to herself is for her to claim the chakram of light. It turns out to be an artefact that can kill a god, which explains why Ares and Kal are so eager to get their hands on it.

Xena has her doubts about whether or not she should restore her dark self, but on asking for a sign from whatever power brought her back from the dead, Gabrielle appears and tells her that only by embracing her darkness can she protect the innocent. That’s a good enough sign for Xena, and the gang storm the temple, the combined forces of Ares and Kal’s men in pursuit.

Although Xena successfully claims the chakram, she’s still unable to use it, even when her friends are in mortal peril. She retreats to the altar and puts the chakram of light and her broken chakram onto the two halves of the yin-yang sign. Just as Kal is about to kill Gabrielle, Xena grabs the light chakram destroys him with it, then combines the two chakrams into an unbroken whole. Kind of like a Sailor Moon weapon upgrade.

As the two chakrams are now one, the light half has lost its god-killing ability, which Xena states was too much power for anyone to wield. Eli opts to stay in Calib’s home and study his scrolls further, and Joxer confesses his love for Gabrielle, telling her he just wants her to know how he feels – no strings attached. With her memories, fighting prowess and groove restored, Xena is ready to return to Greece.

I liked this episode for the fact that Xena and Gabrielle don’t immediately bounce back to normality after being raised from the dead. You can tell they’re a bit shell-shocked, and they’ve got all that heaven-versus-hell afterlife conflict rattling around in their heads, and for most of this episode they just feel a little unsteady – which perfectly suited what they were going through.

There were two major goals in the storyline here: to fix Xena’s broken chakram and to restore her lost memories. The former was a perfectly reasonable problem that needed addressing, though the latter was another Easy Amnesia plot that’s been done countless times on the show before… though at least it was selective memory this time around, which gave us a chance to see Xena as an intelligent, functioning adult, but without the violent past that informs so much of who she is.

So on the one hand, she doesn’t recognize Ares; on the other, she can give Joxer and Eli emotionally intelligent advice about what they should do about Gabrielle and their newfound calling in life, respectively. It also plugs into the ongoing theme of both protagonists trying to find their path in life: Gabrielle has realized she can’t walk the Way of Love since she needs to be able to protect Xena should the need arise, and Xena requires her dark side intact if she’s going to be effective as a warrior.

All the restoration of the chakram stuff felt like something out of Sailor Moon. That anime was constantly gifting its heroine with all sorts of gadgets that could be powered up by totally arbitrary rules when the need arose, and the idea of putting two chakrams together to make a brand new one was definitely reminiscent of that. They kept throwing all sorts of random rules in: that no one but the pure of heart could touch the light chakram, that it could kill the gods until it was merged with another one, that it was all somehow wrapped up in the yin-yang symbol. Okay, whatever.

Amarice and Eli make for reasonably interesting additions to the team. Thankfully they’re given something to DO (which is often the struggle when you start piling on new team-members) but Eli had some important exposition to share, and Amarice had a neat little action sequence with Gabrielle, in which they were surprisingly in-sync.  

I guess Gabrielle’s pacifist stage is over; in fact, she’s levelled up – switching her staff to a pair of sais, and switching into her third and final long-term outfit (she’s had about six, but only worn three for long stretches of time. It’s interesting that her second one; the short green top and miniskirt is remembered as her most iconic costume, perhaps because it was worn when the show was at its most popular).

Meanwhile, Joxer finally tells her that he’s in love with her, but doesn’t wait around for any reply. That was a nice little scene that recognized nothing is going to ever happen between the two of them, but that he just wanted to get it off his chest.

It was nice to see a return from Kevin Smith as Ares, as he was absent throughout the entirety of season four.

This episode left me with a lot of questions about the chakram. As it happens, Xena’s original acquisition of her chakram is the only element of her dark past that flashback episodes never elucidate on. We know where she learned about pressure points (M’Lila), we know where she got the moniker “warrior princess” (Lao Ma) and we know all about why she became a warlord in the first place (the death of her brother). But on the chakram – nada.

So now I’m wondering – who made these chakrams in the first place, and why’d they make a matching light/dark set? Why does the chakram of light kill gods, but not the dark one? How did Ares steal the chakram of dark, and is he the one who originally gave it to Xena? If only a pure soul can take the chakram of light, does the dark one have to be claimed by a completely impure one? Is that why it was in Xena’s possession all these years, if we assume that Ares gave it to her? So many questions!

Eli’s backstory has been reconfigured a little bit; he mentions that he would often read the scrolls of his monk friend Calib, which doesn’t sound like the guy who started this show as a street magician who was only tangentially connected to spiritual matters. Still, he’s more appealingly unsure of himself now, with absolutely no idea how he managed to raise Xena and Gabrielle from the dead.

He also gets the episode’s best blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene, in which Ares casually reaches out to shove Eli out of the way, only to meet his gaze, stop dead and quickly release him. In that moment, Ares is confronted with a power he doesn’t understand, and which he’s clearly very intimidated by. It reminded me of the first episode of Penny Dreadful, in which Vanessa stops a vampire dead in its tracks by just staring it down, no other explanation given. Only much later is the audience given an indication as to why a vampire would be so struck by a young woman (all do with looking into the void and the void looking back) but here it’s Ares (darkness) looking into Eli (light) and finding something equally incomprehensible.

In both cases, it makes for a great scene, and the lingering question of what exactly they saw in each other’s eyes.

Despite the confusion around the nature and background of the chakram, this episode achieved a lot. Gabrielle’s maturing outlook regarding Xena’s dark side (and the necessity of its existence), Xena’s sense of incompleteness and whether she even wants to welcome back her violent tendencies, Ares and his ongoing quest for power (which is forever wrapped up in drawing Xena back to his side, but now complicated by his fear of what Eli represents) and Eli’s spiritual journey to find his proper role. For now he’s opting to stay at Calib’s house and further his studies, but I’m pretty certain we’ll be seeing him again…

Succession

Plot: Ares is searching for a successor, though the person he’s got his eye on is not who you initially think it is. After Xena and Gabrielle are attacked by another warrior woman called Mavican who wants to win the respect of Ares, he transports all three of them into another world (I’m not sure “pocket universe” was a mainstream term back in the nineties) where they can pit themselves against each other.

But there’s a catch: Xena and Gabrielle are now sharing the same body. During the day, Xena is in control, and at nighttime, Gabrielle takes over. Yeah, like Ladyhawke. With limited means of communicating with each other, the two have to use their wits as much as their fighting prowess to defeat Mavican – after which, Ares reveals that he’s interested in Gabrielle becoming his right-hand woman. All she has to do is kill Mavican to save Xena’s life, though of course they find a loophole.

Xena pulls Mavican into a fatal stalemate, forcing her to call out to Ares for help – something that automatically spells her defeat, since Ares could never respect anyone that asks for his assistance.

This is an episode that starts off fairly average and then gets progressively better, which is a change from what usually happens (namely, starting with a good premise and then taking a nosedive in the third act – I’m thinking specifically of Najara’s second episode and the first episode of the India arc). It’s an Ares-centric episode, which means our heroines get caught up in another one of his elaborate mind games, but there’s a twist this time around: he’s more interested in Gabrielle.

I can’t say I fully understand his desire to have: “a mortal to carry on my name” (why would an immortal god want or even need this?) or why he picked Gabrielle for this dubious honour (she’s certainly improved her combat skills since the beginning of the show, but she’s hardly in Xena’s league) but that’s because the whole thing was an Excuse Plot to put Xena and Gabrielle in the ring with Mavican.

My opinion was split on this character. Jenya Lano wasn’t a great actress, but she wasn’t bad either, and the script itself didn’t give her a lot to work with. Also, the pigtails made it hard to take her seriously. But she got more interesting as the episode went on, having started off as yet another “look at me, look at me!” protégé of Ares. I thought for a while that perhaps Gabrielle would be able to talk her down from the usual demonstration of ambition-fuelled villainy, but she ended up being totally committed to her attempts at impressing the God of War.

Her best scene was when she confronted Xena about the nature of fame and how attaining it would make her immortal. In that light, it was fitting that she was given a very Callisto-esque ending (trapped in a cave, rocks falling down), all the more so because I had totally forgotten this episode even existed. Mavican hoped she would become famous for having killed someone famous; now she’ll be forgotten entirely.

It concludes with Ares not having gotten what he wanted, but still managing to derive some enjoyment out of the proceedings. It was a nice twist to have him target Gabrielle this time around, as there’s a growing darkness in her that can’t be denied (though still hasn’t been fully articulated) which he obviously recognizes. In fact, their conversation sans Xena at the start of the episode was very reminiscent of their interaction on the docks in season three while Xena was sailing for Chin, which very much put Ares in the role of a serpent tempting Gabrielle into making a bad choice.

Miscellaneous Observations:

A solid conceit was the way the “battle arena” was structured, with Xena and Gabrielle alternating between night and day and having to find ways of communicating with each other. The cave with the single spotlight shining down was an effective visual, and like I said – very Ladyhawke.

That was a pretty cool throne that Ares was lounging on. I don’t think we’ve ever seen it before, and I don’t think we sever ee it again either. What a waste of a good prop!

I’m also glad they all seem to be back in Greece (though Xena/Gabrielle have ditched Amarice and Joxer, at least for this episode). I can understand why the show enjoys visiting other countries and cultures, but it does seem more “right” when it’s set in Greece.