Yes, my Xena Warrior Princess posts are back! For those not in the know, I actually wrote these years ago for a fan-site while watching through the entire series from start to finish for the first time, and I’ve been gradually transcribing them over to this blog ever since. They’re grouped into three episodes per post, with a brief synopsis for each one since I don’t really talk about the plot in the actual reviews.
Season three is generally regarded as the best of the six seasons, and it’s easy to see why: there was a strong blend of comedic episodes with standalone and Myth Arc episodes, the supporting cast was utilized excellently as a variety of foils to the two protagonists, the writers fearlessly delved into some seriously dark subject matter (including the murder of children) and the production values were impressive for a low-budget swords-and-sorcery show airing in the late-nineties. There was even a musical episode, a full three years before Buffy the Vampire Slayer did it.
Going forward, it’s clear that most of the best material has already been mined, and the attempt to keep things fresh involves the writers borrowing (and at times, downright appropriating) other cultures and religions in order to play with Xena and Gabrielle across an assortment of “exotic sandboxes”, while slowly but surely culling the original supporting cast in favour of new characters that aren’t half as interesting or likeable.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t good stuff here. The overarching character thread for each protagonist in season four is fairly solid: Gabrielle goes on an experimental journey of self-discovery and Xena broods over a premonition that foretells their impending deaths. I’ve always liked the Rome-centric episodes and there are plenty of them in season four, and I didn’t dislike the India arc as much as most viewers did at the time (though there are definitely some questionable things there). New villains such as Alti and Najara are good without being great (let’s face it, no one can compare to Callisto) and there’s a scattering of fun comedy episodes in there as well.
So let’s get started...
Adventures in the Sin Trade: Part I and II
Learning from Hades that because Gabrielle’s soul is not in Elysium due to the fact she’s an Amazon, Xena travels to Siberia to reach the Amazonian Land of the Dead. Performing shamanic rituals along the way, Xena recalls her past with Borias in the years following their departure from Chin, specifically his attempts to forge an alliance with the Northern Amazons, and her first meeting with a shaman called Alti.
Alti gets Xena’s attention when she reveals the latter’s pregnancy, a secret she has not yet divulged.
In the present day, Xena is approached by the Northern Amazons, and one of them – Otere – recognizes her as the terrible warrior from her youth, who destroyed her village and killed her parents. It was Borias that saved Otere’s life, and the Amazons watch as Xena performs another ritual to enter the Land of the Dead.
Once there, she’s reunited with an Amazonian Queen called Cyane, who tells her that Alti has cursed her and the other dead Amazons to wander this netherworld forever. Xena’s spirit reacts as Otere moves her body to a safer location, and she is told by Cyane that she’ll find Gabrielle’s spirit at the Gates of Eternity – but foregoes the opportunity to go there in order to help the Northern Amazons, both living and dead.
She returns to her corporeal form to find herself with Otere, and promises to lead her Amazons against Alti and her warrior: the Berserker. The fight goes well until Alti uses her magic to make Xena relieve her injuries at the hands of the Romans, but with seemingly-broken legs, Xena manages to defeat the Berserker and his steed (which was being possessed by Alti).
Xena, Otere and the other Amazons recuperate in a steaming banya, planning to use purging techniques to fight Alti on the spiritual plane. Xena recalls learning about these methods when – in the flashbacks – she fought Cyane and found her to be her physical and spiritual match. Just as Cyane is about to finish Xena off, Borias appears and talks her out of it for the sake of their peace treaty.
Xena leads the Amazons in a ritual that will allow their spirits to leave their bodies, just as Alti performs a similar rite to call up the recently slain and turn them against her enemies. Xena manages to free the Amazonian bodies from possession, realizing as she does that Alti’s whereabouts must be close to the Amazon Resting Place, from whence Alti draws her power.
Before their final showdown with Alti, Xena confesses to the Amazons that it was she who murdered Cyane all those years ago, leaving the entire Amazon Nation vulnerable to enemies such as centaurs and mankind. It was this act of violence that gave Alti such incredible powers, but after merging her spirit with those of the young Amazons, Xena battles Alti and defeats her – though not before Alti shows her a vision of Gabrielle dying at some point in the future.
Regalvanised by the logic that Gabrielle must still be alive in the present if she’s to die in the future, Xena leaves the Northern Amazons to the leadership of Otere and heads back home to Greece...
The season four opener, Adventures in the Sin Trade, was definitely not what I was expecting. It's worth saying that my foreknowledge of Xena pretty much ends at the end of season three, so I have no clear idea about what happens next. And this two-part episode was different. Not bad different and not unrecognizably different – but very different.
And it's hard to put my finger on why: I suppose it's got to do with the lack of Gabrielle and the change in setting, but also a certain shift in the mode of storytelling that came as a surprise. At certain points there were no less than three separate plotlines going on, and much of it was a lot more complex than usual. I’m not going to complain that the show was ambitious enough to tell a story that was epic in scope and which trusted the audience to keep up, but maybe there was a chance they bit off more than they could chew?
There were flashbacks, flash-forwards, the introduction of a new villain and a handful of minor characters, a few strange little subplots, a lot of weird shamanism we haven't seen before, Gabrielle kept just out of reach...
The direction felt odd as well – a lot of sweeping shots of the landscape intercut with extreme close-ups of people's eyes and faces, with a soundtrack was downright bizarre at times. All that moaning and ululating. I definitely liked it, but it was a little disconcerting.
Regarding the flashbacks, there's always the risk that the writers could dip into the well once too often with this sort of thing, but for now everything remains consistent. Alti and Cyane were good characters (not great, but good) and I like that once again a dichotomy has been set up between Xena's good and bad mentors. We can add Alti/Cyane to the contrasting figures of Lao Ma/Boreas, M'Lila/Caesar and Ares/Gabrielle, though this one was interesting in that for the first time it was a woman who was tempting Xena towards the dark side. Or should I say, more towards the dark side given that this comes post-Chin and Xena's decision to reject Lao Ma's way of life.
And the writers added an extra dimension to Xena's temptation by making Alti a shaman rather than a warrior. Xena very much relies on her prowess in combat, and so Alti had to work a different angle in order to lure Xena to her side, especially when she grows visibly impressed with Cyane's skills.
It all comes down to providing yet another opportunity for Xena to change her ways that she ends up rejecting, though to a much worse degree given her butchering of the Amazonian tribe. I felt the greatest weakness in this episode was in not giving me enough of a reason to believe that Xena would side with Alti over Cyane – not even that, but that she'd commit such a heinous crime on Alti's behest. Why would she just commit mass slaughter?
And it was a shame that the writers didn't delve a little more deeply into what made Cyane tick. I thought the actress was perfectly cast as an Amazon Queen, but she wasn't nearly as three-dimensional as Lao Ma, and didn't have the same investment in Xena that her predecessor did. When Xena turned her back on Lao Ma, it really hurt. When Xena murders Cyane and the other Amazons, I was left thinking: "huh? Why'd she do that?"
I suppose what I'm saying is that it was hard to get a fix on Xena in the flashbacks. She's still eager for a fight, with no real ambition beyond causing trouble, but also thirsty for knowledge no matter where it comes from. Yet that she would embrace such an opposing ideology so soon after Lao Ma and seeing Cyane beat Alti in their staring competition/battle of wills means that I wasn’t sufficiently convinced that Alti’s promises and dubious charisma could win Xena over.
And how did Boreas react? We don't see him post-massacre, though I suspect he'd have something to say about it. And what did Xena and Alti do after Cyane's death? Presumably it was Alti who taught Xena all the shamanistic techniques that she was using in the present-day storyline, so hopefully there's going to be a bit more light shed on this particular development. At this point in the flashbacks Xena is in such a dark place that it's difficult to see how she was able to be redeemed.
It was also interesting to see Boreas here: in the Chin episodes he was someone who was undoubtedly bad for Xena. Here (as Cyane herself points out) it's Xena who is holding him back, as he tries to forge alliances and prepare for a child. It's interesting how that balance has tipped more in his favour. I don't think that Xena is quite so feral as she was prior to their experiences in Chin, but she's clearly still a wild-card and I get the feeling that if it weren't for her pregnancy, he would probably ditch her again.
Based on my comments so far, it would appear that the complexity of these episodes derives from the flashbacks, as the present-day storyline was quite simple (lead the Amazons to Alti's lair and use their spirits to defeat her so that the souls of the deceased could move on). It was the shifting perspectives of the flashbacks that demanded a viewer’s attention, and a couple of bits seemed oddly irrelevant and strange.
For instance, I'm not sure that Alti's curse on Solan to “never know the love of his parents” was strictly necessary. Sure, I bought her reasoning that a baby might draw Xena back toward the light, but it didn't really add much to the story or come up again in the plot. (It felt a bit like a tacked-on retcon, to be honest). And her words: "son of darkness, enemy of the land, curse Xena's child." What was that about? What went into her stomach?
I recall at least one on-line friend who hated Alti’s curse on Solan, since it turned his death from a very human tragedy into preordained mystical mumbo-jumbo, though I didn’t quite have the same read on it. Alti’s words didn’t make Solan fated to die young or be murdered by evil forces, they just “cursed” him. There was bad luck hanging around the poor kid for most of his life, but it’s likely that all the stuff with Hope probably would have happened anyway.
At other points we were seeing and hearing things from the point-of-view of Otere as a child, and that whole "this child will take your power" prophecy fell completely flat. I don't think I've ever seen a blander resolution to such a completely unnecessary plot-thread.
The Berserker also seemed a little superfluous (though I suppose it introduced Alti's ability to call up the past and future) and only really existed to give Xena someone to fight, and the dead girl that Xena cremates (and who was her initial companion in the land of the dead) felt like a completely needless addition.
But strangest of all would have to be Anokin (I had to look up the name), Alti's original apprentice. What was that all about? Alti's entrance into Xena's tent was certainly memorable, what with her practically offering up Anokin as some sort of offering, followed by a scene in which Xena mourns her death so much that Alti takes her into the afterlife where Anokin tells her: "you poisoned my soul" and walks off.
I suppose in a way it was simply meant to provide a degree of Sapphic subtext that the writers didn’t necessarily want to delve into too deeply; something to leave to audience speculation – but on watching these episodes for the first time, I was having trouble figuring out what was important and what wasn’t.
That said, I loved the moment when Xena is caught between the two worlds: purgatory with the Amazons and the promise of eternity within the volcano... only to put a reunion with Gabrielle on hold in order to do what she knew was right and fix the mistake of her past. I also liked the contrast between Xena realizing that she had her own inner light yet delving back into dark magic in order to get the desired results.
Miscellaneous Observations:
That was a nice Hades cameo at the start of the episodes, and he certainly opens up new possibilities when it comes to the afterlife: that the Greek gods are only responsible for Greek souls, and that there are potentially hundreds of afterlives that a person could end up in.
I'm not really sure what to make of that. In terms of world-building, it's quite a dizzying prospect to take on, though these writers have hardly been concerned with consistency in the shaping of this world, or even in keeping the mythology confined to the Greek myths.
I’m not sure how it was received at the time, but by today’s standards there would have been no small amount of backlash at the amount of cultural appropriation on display in these episodes, what with Asiatic/First Nation clothing, customs and names being attributed to an array of white actresses.
I thought it was a nice touch that Alti dubbed Xena "the destroyer of nations" in the same way that Lao Ma called her "my warrior princess." Slowly but surely the parts of her mythos are being built up.
I wasn't sure what to make of Xena/Cyane's strange naked/stripping/stealing each other's clothing scene, though in terms of utter ridiculousness it was a coin-toss between Gabrielle's little head appearing on that spider, and Alti/Cyane's over-the-top facial contortions when they mentally battled each other.
I wish we'd gotten a bit more of Cyane, though I loved the actress's stature and physicality. She looked like a genuine Amazon, not a scantily-clad waif.
It occurred to be afterwards that this entire two-parter had only one significant male character. Wow.
Xena's sardonic salute to the Amazons was pretty funny; unfortunately the massacre that followed robbed it of its comedy.
All the flying about in the trees was a bit much, though I liked the detail of the bodies twitching when their spiritual selves were injured.
Who was fighting Xena in the future? I'll no doubt find out in time...
Basically, this look at Xena’s past managed to be much more convoluted than the elegance of the Chin storyline, what with flashbacks within flashbacks, shifting perspectives, and the added complication of present-day Xena constantly leaving her body to go a-wandering on the spiritual plain. Still, I liked that the show tried to be bold and different and ambitious, even if it didn’t quite hit the mark in some areas – it’s much preferable to playing it safe.
A Family Affair
Xena returns to Greece, reunites with Joxer, and heads to Potidaea, convinced that Gabrielle is alive and that she’s returned to her family. It’s there that the two women are reunited, though their joy is short-lived considering there’s been a spate of grisly murders in the area.
That night Xena is attacked by a monster that she identifies as the Destroyer – which means that Gabrielle isn’t Gabrielle at all, but Hope. After Gabrielle’s sister Lila tells Hope that the Destroyer was injured, Hope goes to check on her son in his lair. Meanwhile, Xena is reunited with the real Gabrielle in the forest, and we get an incredibly vague explanation as to how Gabrielle survived the fall into the lava pit.
Hope takes Joxer hostage after realizing that her son is unharmed and that Xena is trying to set her up. Threatening the lives of Gabrielle’s family leads to Xena rushing off to save Joxer, while Gabrielle secretly approaches Lila and tells her that Hope is impersonating her.
Joxer is sent to defend the villagers, while Xena returns to Gabrielle’s home where she and Hope are having a final talk with each other. Xena runs into the barn with the Destroyer right behind her, and thinking that Gabrielle is Hope, he embraces her as Xena stabs him in the back. Hope arrives to find her son mortally wounded, but believing that he’s been deliberately betrayed, he plunges one of its quills into Hope’s chest. Mother and son die together, locked in an embrace.
Okay, this episode was just bizarre. So bizarre that its bizarreness spills out into the previous episodes and makes THEM bizarre by proxy.
Hopefully this won't come across as too negative, but... wow I barely understood any of this.
So first of all...Gabrielle's not actually dead? I thought it was fairly safe to assume that she WAS dead and that her return to the show would involve a resurrection of some kind. How on earth did she survive? Something about a niche in the wall? Waking up in a hospice? Did Dahak save her for whatever reason? Did she just climb out of that big hole again? Do you mean to tell me that Xena has been searching between worlds and Gabrielle was right there in Greece the entire time? Honestly, this is up there with Anakin not realizing that Luke and Obi Wan were on Tatooine.
Having her just be... perfectly fine like that was really weird. It also rendered the first two episodes somewhat null and void. When Alti showed Xena the visions of her future, I assumed it meant that at some point Gabrielle would be brought back to life (as has already happened so many times before on this show) and that she was currently hovering somewhere between life and death.
I mean, we heard Gabrielle's voice in the spirit world. It was framed as a big deal that Xena turned her back on re-joining her in eternity in order to help the other Amazons. That Gabrielle was in some sort of limbo would have constituted a fairly long and difficult journey back to each other, but one that would have ultimately all been worth it. To have the situation resolved by saying "oh, she never actually died" just feels like a weird cop-out, and renders Xena's tribulations in Adventures in the Sin Trade pretty pointless – not to mention Gabrielle sacrificing herself to kill Hope in the first place.
Sorry about all the italics, but yeesh.
The episode itself starts with a sweet scene involving Joxer dropping flowers down the hell hole – only for Xena to pop out. What the heck was SHE doing down there? At first I got a bit muddled and thought "oh, she's used that as a short-cut from the land of the dead", before remembering that in the last episode she returned to her body before leaving the Amazons. So how'd she get down there? And if it was that easy to scramble up and down, why didn't she do that in the last season finale? Where'd all the boiling lava and fire go? Why has a gaping maw leading into hell just been left there for anyone to stumble into?
I suspected that the first Xena/Gabrielle reunion would be a false alarm, because after all, if Gabrielle survived so easily then so must have Hope. Weirdly, Xena didn't come to that same conclusion, and it takes a tussle in a barn with a prosthetic porcupine while Gabrielle stands there all slack-jawed for Xena to realize that maybe this isn't her trusty sidekick. Duh!
Seriously, if they were going to go the whole "Hope is pretending to be Gabrielle" route, wouldn't it have been more rewarding for Xena to immediately been able to tell that it was Hope, then desperately try to cover her realization, knowing that her only chance to see Gabrielle again would be to play along? They could have maintained some great tension by playing a double-bluff.
After the low-key and awkward Xena/Gabrielle-who-is-actually-Hope reunion, we discover that Hope has been hanging out with Gabrielle's parents and sister (technically her own grandparents/aunt) whilst her son the Destroyer kills various things in the neighbourhood. Um...why? I thought the idea beyond Dahak's plans for world domination would involve... you know, world domination. Not picking off random farmers in a backwater hamlet. Seriously, what is Hope trying to achieve with all this? Is the Destroyer still young and therefore weak? (Because they could have said so). Where's Dahak in all of this? What are his plans?
And why is Xena and Gabrielle so surprised that Hope is still alive? I mean, Gabrielle once poisoned her and cremated her remains. If she can come back from that, I think it's safe to say that she can manage a dive into a lava pool that her Daddy owns, especially if – and I know I’ve said this before, but I can’t stress it enough – Gabrielle also survived the fall.
Then we get the very Hammer Horror fight scene in the barn, complete with bloodied bait and creepy windmill – which is a rather odd tone to strike when you're juxtaposing it with emotional scenes involving Xena and Gabrielle's long-awaited reunion, but whatever. For some reason Hope is clever enough to trick Gabrielle's entire family, but not to cover her blasé attitude around the Destroyer, thus tipping Xena off. At this point I thought: okay, this is good. Now Xena is going to have to play a tricky balancing act to fool Hope, lead her away from Gabrielle's family (who in a nice touch, don't trust Xena) and try to find out whether or not Gabrielle is still alive.
But in stalking Hope through the forest, Xena stumbles across the real Gabrielle. Bwuh? It was at this point that I got REALLY confused. In hindsight, it's obvious that they employed the Cut Apart technique in which you think one thing is happening when in fact two things are occurring in completely different locations (with Joxer stalking Hope while Xena runs into Gabrielle) but for a hot second I was left thinking that Hope and Gabrielle were sharing the same body and that Gabrielle had finally managed to push aside Hope's personality and gain control.
Don't ask me how or why I came to that conclusion, though I like to think that despite how crazy this theory is, it STILL makes more sense that Gabrielle just popping up out of nowhere.
So we get the real reunion, I'm still no closer to understanding how Gabrielle survived, where she's been, or how she was sending "messages" to Xena while she was off having outer body experiences in Siberia, and the two realize that Gabrielle's family is now in danger. Hope has already staged an extremely clumsy attempt on Lila's life (how exactly does one switch places with another person on the edge of a bridge?) but the Gabrielle manages to warn Lila in a scene... that goes absolutely nowhere. The entire family just disappears after this.
And knowing that Gabrielle is back and that Xena knows who she is, shouldn't Hope just be killing everyone in sight by this point? Wouldn't that be a good start to the whole "taking over the world" thing?
Finally Xena and Gabrielle manage to take out the Destroyer and Hope, for what is the last time, making this a bafflingly anticlimactic finish to the whole Dahak saga. Seriously, this was the Story Arc that formed the narrative backbone of season three, and it ends with the equivalent of a casual shrug.
Miscellaneous Observations:
Okay, so to offset all this complaining, here are some of the things I liked about this episode:
Joxer dropping flowers into the hole was very sweet, though I bet the shippers hated him when he got in the way of the first Xena/Gabrielle reunion (even though it wasn't really her).
The Destroyer, strangely enough. The FX wasn't that bad, as the face was pretty expressive and the double-jointed legs were a nice idea. More so, it packed a surprisingly emotional punch when it came to trying to coax affection out of Hope, and the show hit an ironic note over the fact that Hope (despite demanding love from her own mother) didn't really care too much about her own offspring, save as a tool of her father's plan.
Hope levitating the swords behind Gabrielle's family was a neat scene, as were her interactions with Gabrielle, and it was with interest that I noticed Hope's attempts to guilt-trip her mother no longer worked. Gabrielle knows that even though she loved Hope, she's a threat to the entire world and needs to be stopped. It was fun seeing Hope come up against that wall, and I only wish it was delved into more. Hope playing with the doll was cute as well, perverse and innocent at the same time.
A short but sweet scene between sisters Gabrielle and Lila. Again, I'm just sorry it didn't amount to much.
That Hope and the Destroyer essentially killed each other was another good conceit, and one that was at least foreshadowed with Hope getting cut by one of its barbs earlier in the episode. That twisted mingling of love and hate and maternity and destruction coming together in one deadly embrace was a pretty elegant way of ending Hope once and for all, at least in theory if not in the awkward way it was staged.
A good final moment between Xena and Gabrielle, even though it didn't really seem to have anything to do with the rest of the episode.
Ultimately, I really don’t know what to make of this. Everything about this episode just felt off. You can't point to any one thing and say it didn't work, as it was an accumulation of deeply strange choices topped off with the fact that this was a baffling way to conclude a long-running story arc. The pacing was off, the acting from Gabrielle's family bad, the constant switching between comedy and tragedy bizarre (so much that the serious scenes felt funny and the comedy scenes felt random) and the fact that the writers offered no real explanation for how on earth Gabrielle is still alive was just plain weird. The more I think about it, the more I feel that this point was the rock upon which the whole episode floundered.
How do you end your previous season on the tragic death of a main character, and then revolve that plot-point by saying “uh, she didn’t actually die but we’re not going to bother to explain that”?
I can understand why they would want to get Xena and Gabrielle back together ASAP, since their rapport is the entire heart of the show – but honestly, if it were up to me, I would have dragged it out a while longer. Make the road back to each other as difficult as possible, make the audience pant for it, which in turn makes the reunion all the sweeter.
If Renee O'Connor's contract required her to be on-set, then have her stand-in as Hope for a while, playing mind-games with Xena and the audience. Perhaps Gabrielle could have been saved and held hostage by Dahak; perhaps Xena could have negotiated a trade using Hope or the Destroyer as bait (along with the Hind's Blood Dagger). And wouldn't Ares have had something to say about all this considering the Destroyer was his child as well?
Oh, and I knew that Serafin would have no part to play in any of these episodes, but she too could have been utilized here, perhaps as a way of finding Gabrielle or mediating with Dahak or being used as a necessary sacrifice or whatever.
There was a lot of opportunity here to finish things off properly; as it is, Xena and Gabrielle's reunion felt oddly bereft of any emotion and it made for a very odd coda for Hope. If this is her final episode, I would have preferred her to have been finished off for good in Sacrifice.
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