Oh dear, it’s been almost a whole year since my last post on Xena Warrior Princess, so I’ll understand if you’ve forgotten I was even doing this. And looking back, I can see that I started these posts way back in 2018!
But hey, that’s what tags are for. Just press a single button and you can see all my posts on this subject as though I wrote them over the course of a single weekend instead of a number of years.
We’re still at the beginning of season five, in which Xena and Gabrielle have just been resurrected for what feels like the dozenth time – although this time around, Xena has come back from the dead with a little something extra in the oven…
Animal Attraction
Plot: This is in one which the writers take the opportunity to get their cards on the table, shuffle the deck, and lay it all out for the rest of the season. The gang (still comprised of Xena, Gabrielle, Joxer and Amarice) arrive in Spamona to rest and recuperate for a while. There, Gabrielle tries to win over the injured horse that they found on the road, Joxer deals with the emotional fallout of telling Gabrielle that he loves her, Amarice runs into Arman and sparks fly, and Xena discovers that she’s pregnant.
This is a bit of a weird episode – not bad, just so filled with subplots that it’s difficult to focus on whatever’s meant to be its most important narrative. The gang seems to have gone back in time since the last episode, as not only have Amarice and Joxer reappeared (having been mysteriously absent from the previous episode) but everything is covered in ice and snow, as though they’ve just left the Roman encampment in the north. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn there was a last-minute change in the episode sequencing.
In any case, the companions reach Spamona, a settlement renowned for its hot pools (Spamona, get it?) and immediately separate into their own plotlines: a) Gabrielle tries to tame the injured horse they rescued on the road, b) Joxer attempts to get a reaction from Gabrielle regarding his confession of love, c) Amarice falls in love/hate with Arman, the young man whose warlord father was killed by Joxer in “The Convert,” d) Xena learns she’s pregnant, and e) the one-shot character played by frequent Xena guest star Alison Bruce deals with her outlaw ex-husband, during which everyone partakes in a Wild West-style shootout.
It’s a scattered episode to say the least, so I guess I’ll tackle all the subplots one at a time, in order:
a) This was probably the thinnest plot, but at least Gabrielle gets to ride beside Xena instead of just legging it everywhere. When the episode opened with her trudging along next to Argo, I was actually wondering why they never got this girl a decent mode of transportation. But sorry Joxer and Amarice; you two are still going to have to walk.
b) despite telling Gabrielle that he expects nothing from her after telling her he loves her, it’s clear that he is going to get push and obnoxious over it. The squabble over the apples was a visual metaphor for guys wanting what girls aren’t prepared to give. Get a clue, Joxer.
That said, this is the only subplot that trails off without any sort of closure. The writer Chris Manheim had this to say about it: “Every character has their own thread and somehow, they have to weave together to make a tapestry that's complete at the end. The only lost thread was the Joxer story. I'll always be sorry we had to cut for time scenes that fleshed out his relationship with Gabrielle.” So, there was obviously more here that we just didn’t get to see.
c) I’m not entirely sure why Amarice needed this storyline – in what world do you introduce an Amazon warrior and then decide: “what she needs is a male love interest!” What makes it especially weird is that after all the squabbling and making out, she and Arman just go their separate ways at the end of the episode. What was the point of it all? It’s like watching one of those dating shows where the Bachelorette finally settles on what guy she wants to date, and then they break up two seconds later.
Also, Amarice was right to be furious when Arman and Joxer start laughing at her when she slips in the spa. That could have been a serious injury, and they don’t even stop to check if she’s alright before erupting into laughs. Why even include Belligerent Sexual Tension anyway? It would have worked just as well as a sweet little side romance, if the point was to demonstrate Amarice’s more vulnerable side. As it played out here, the two of them just came across as weirdoes.
d) This was very strangely played. It’s Xena’s turn to get mystically pregnant (a trope I despise, though we have to take into account that Lucy Lawless was pregnant at the time) and the tone was all over the place. For a while it was played for laughs, up until the moment Xena announced it to the group, at which point a giant sign saying HOPE, HOPE, HOPE starts flashing over Gabrielle’s head.
And… they’re not going to have a conversation about the last time this happened? It’s a bit rich of Xena to say “it’s good” after all the pain and grief that went down concerning Gabrielle’s mysterious pregnancy, and though I liked Renee’s stunned reaction, it was a little strange that she never confronted Xena about what exactly is going on. Since there’s no obvious father, they should be dealing with the question of whether the baby is dangerous or not.
Maybe she just didn’t want to open old wounds… but still. Hope was a pretty big deal.
e) All of this was just filler and an excuse for a fight scene. There’s not much to say about it except that Alison Bruce has already appeared in the show as Queen Melosa (and Hercules as Postera, a villain) and I’ve no idea why they included an extended scene of her getting on her horse and galloping out of the village. Where was she going? What was the point of that?
For me, bringing characters back from the dead should always come with some sort of consequence. For example, the process is very traumatic when it’s in something like the Lazarus Pits of the DCU, or when the First took advantage of Buffy’s return to life in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (though I can’t recall how exactly, I’m sure there was something mentioned on how it gave the First some sort of edge). In this case, Xena’s consequence is that she’s brought new life back with her, and no one knows entirely what to expect.
Why was Spamona designed as an old-timey Wild West township? It was completely superfluous to the content of the episode, but hey – it made for some fun costumes and set design.
Somewhat amusing that Gabrielle’s theories for Xena’s pregnancy involve either a tryst with Hercules or a trick courtesy of Ares.
That this episode involved so many subplots all squished together is simply not something that you see anymore, not least because television shows simply don’t have time for these sorts of character-heavy side quests. Honestly, can you imagine an episode like this on House of the Dragon or The Wheel of Time? A whole episode devoted to table setting, horse shenanigans, filler and character development? Yes, we’ve gained a lot when it comes to tight, epic overarching stories, but boy – we’ve lost a lot of downtime as well.
So, more of a transitional episode than anything substantial, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they’re going to deal with this pregnancy (and what exactly is in there). But… did Xena and Gabrielle just leave Joxer and Amarice behind? They certainly didn’t leave Spamona together.
Them Bones Them Bones
Plot: Deep into her pregnancy, Xena starts feeling terrible pains. She opts to seek out Yakut of the Northern Amazons in the hopes the young shaman will have answers, and discovers that her baby’s soul is being attacked by the spirit of Alti. Though Gabrielle goes into the spirit world to fight her, Alti proves too strong. Alti demands that Xena help her return to the mortal world in exchange for her unborn child’s soul, though the Amazons manage to trick her into entering another plane of existence instead. There Xena battles her, while Gabrielle and Amarice pour a magical amber powder over Alti’s bones to destroy her once and for all (or for a little while, at least).
I enjoy the Alti episodes – though she’s a rather one-note villain, actress Claire Stansfield always puts on a good show, and for a character that didn’t turn up until season four, she left an indelible mark on the show as a whole. Of all the villains in the rogues’ gallery, it makes sense that Alti would be the one to take an interest in Xena’s unborn child.
It was also fun to catch up with the Northern Amazons again, even though the justification was a bit wonky. Apparently, Xena wanted to consult Yakut’s expertise on spiritual matters, even though I’m pretty sure it was Xena who taught Yakut everything she knows. Also, where was Otere? She was declared leader of this particular Amazon tribe the last time Xena visited them in “Adventures in the Sin Trade,” but in this episode she wasn’t even mentioned.
But Alti is back, which comes as no surprise since we already know that Xena and Gabrielle will be fighting her reincarnated spirit throughout the centuries. That she wants to return to the physical world by taking the soul of Xena’s unborn child hostage is a fairly solid plan (given what we know about how she operates) and there’s a lot of skipping back and forth between different planes of existence to deal with her.
As psychedelic as all the special effects were when various characters took the drugs they needed to get into the spirit world (the director really decided to get experimental here – those sequences could have triggered epilepsy!) I did love the visuals once they were there: the muted colours, the frozen fire and water, and the way Alti could manipulate the place so that Gabrielle appeared in two places at once. It was like nothing we’ve ever seen on the show before.
Meanwhile, Amarice is watching the dancing Amazons with a fairly priceless WTF expression on her face.
There were two twists that actually caught me off-guard: firstly that Yakut screwed up by removing Alti’s skull to enhance her own power (thereby releasing her spirit), and secondly by the double-bluff that Xena pulls by taking Alti into another reality instead of the real world (and it was pretty neat that all the Amazons were working together to create and sustain it in their minds).
I suppose fighting skeletons is one way of getting around Lucy Lawless’s current inability to partake in fight scenes, though the poor CGI quality of the time definitely demanded a hefty price. (Though do CGI skeletons ever look good? They tried it on Merlin decades later, and it looked pretty bad there as well).
If there’s one thing that still bugs me, it’s the attitude between Xena and Gabrielle regarding this magical pregnancy. I mean, now Xena is having gruesome, violent dreams about the birth, and they’re still not going to address the elephant in the room? Or act just a little bit perturbed about what might be happening here? And I can’t understand why the writers wouldn’t want to explore the juicy fallout of Hope’s legacy.
Instead, the women are being so chill about the mysterious origins of this baby. Gabrielle’s assertion that she loves it and would do anything for it rang completely false, while Xena is coming across as a bit hypocritical. That she can just state the baby is good after condemning Hope immediately and expecting everyone to just go along with it without even the slightest bit of investigation as to what’s really going on is a bit much, not to mention a wasted storytelling opportunity. As a narrative arc, the writers seem to be interested in developing the conflict Xena feels between being a mother and being a warrior, but surely the nature of the child she’s carrying is the more pressing (and compelling) conversation.
There’s no Joxer this time around, which makes me wonder where these sidekicks go when they’re not with Xena and Gabrielle. Is there some sort of waiting area where they get picked up later? I mean, our two protagonists happily trotted out of Spamona in the previous episode without either Joxer or Amarice, and when Xena wakes up in the healer’s hut, Amarice rushes in and tells her: “a trader told me he saw you come in here.” So wow, they really did ditch her.
As it happens, this ends up being Amarice’s last episode, and if I hadn’t known Jennifer Sky was leaving for another show (Cleopatra 2025, along with Gina Torres) then this abrupt closure on her character would have caught me completely off-guard. It’s hard to tell whether there was any long-term plan for her character when she was first introduced, but between her act-first, think-later attitude and this episode’s reveal that she’s not really an Amazon at all, it’s clear the writers still had a lot of material left for her, which all has to come to a screeching halt when she opts to stay with the Northern Amazons.
At least she’s left in a good place I suppose, but she was starting to grow on me. And for a character who was only around for six episodes she made quite a big impact on the lore of the show (though I took a glimpse at Jennifer Sky’s IMDB pages, and she hasn’t worked in about twenty years). Also, what was with Gabrielle’s hilariously casual goodbye? Her actual line was: “okay, see ya!” which is still more than Xena gives her, which was nothing at all.
And one more thing: how was it that she wasn’t an Amazon after all? I mean, she lives and fights and talks and acts like an Amazon, so why exactly isn’t she one? We know you don’t have to be born an Amazon, so what exempts Amarice? Are there special rituals you have to go through that she just skipped? Ah well, it’s a moot point now, as we never see Amarice again.
I had to laugh at the beginning when Xena had Gabrielle looking for a mushroom to ease her morning sickness. That HAD to be a reference to all the crazy stuff that follows right?
Already the show is having to deal with the one major problem of introducing children/babies into storylines: they have to become the number one priority of the characters, or else they’re terrible parents. It’s the reason why so many child protagonists are orphans, and why so many adult protagonists (at least in these types of stories) are childless. Because they mess up the dynamics of the cast! See also: Dawn and Connor in Buffy and Angel. Once those titular characters were parents, their entire worlds had to revolve around their offspring (and yes, I know Buffy was an older sister, but she was still point in a parental role, to the detriment of all her other relationships).
One last thing: it takes a while to notice, but there were no male characters in this episode. Not a single one.
In conclusion, I liked this episode. It was something a bit different, though at the same time it drew on a lot of familiar characters and picked up story threads that hadn’t been dealt with in a while (namely, Alti). Rewatching this show in its entirety, I’m again struck by how television episodes were structured back in the day – though this uses established characters and is part of a long-running story-arc, it still feels very self-contained, and is written in part to cover for the lead actress’s pregnancy. Meanwhile, it completely ignores stuff like the spectre of Hope hanging over the proceedings, and an important guest star is written off so casually you barely notice she’s gone. For better or worse, they just don’t write television like this anymore.
Just try to imagine how this material would be handled today, and you can grasp how profoundly things have changed.
Purity
Plot: At the end of the last episode, Xena mentioned that she’s heading east. That is, East – back to the Land of Chin. She, Gabrielle and Joxer discover a dying monk with a message: “the hawk and the dove must become one with wisdom.” Xena deducts this was written by Lao Ma and refers to her book of wisdom, which she left at the monastery the last time she visited Chin.
The trio find a village devastated by explosives, and are joined by a young woman called Pao Ssu as they fight off an army. Routing the warriors, Pao Ssu introduces herself as Lao Ma’s daughter, telling the others that the formula to black powder has been rediscovered by a vicious warlord. While Gabrielle and Joxer are sent off to discover the secret ingredient to the black powder formula, Xena and Pao Ssu search for Lao Ma’s book, which is currently missing from the monastery.
They trace it to a nearby cave, where another young woman is guarding it. She is Pao Ssu’s identical twin K’ao Hsin, who is trying to protect it from her ruthless, ambitious sister. Pao Ssu attacks Xena and manages to escape with the book, not realizing it’s a fake Xena has planted. Still, she soon gets the upper hand when she takes Gabrielle and Joxer prisoner, bartering their lives for the real book.
While Pao Ssu learns to blow things up with her mind (just go with it), K’ao Hsin realizes that “the hawk and the dove” refers to herself and Xena, and that together they can deflect Pao Ssu’s power. Meanwhile, Gabrielle and Joxer discover the formula to black powder and use it to make explosives of their own, destroying Pao Ssu’s army and eventually Pao Ssu herself.
So… that was a strange one. It’s difficult to put my finger on why, but I suppose it comes down to the fact it should have been more important than it felt. I mean, “The Debt Part I and II” is one of the all-time greatest Xena offerings, so any follow-up had some big shoes to fill. And instead of a triumphant encore, this felt rather inconsequential.
Not only that, but I have a real aversion to the idea of the gang returning to Chin at all. It just doesn’t feel right, like when Robin Hood and company on the BBC show went all the way back to the Holy Land for just a single episode. In both cases, that part of their lives was over and done with, and it feels narratively clumsy to keep going back to the well.
And once we get there, Xena discovers that Lao Ma had twin daughters. This feels like a massive retcon, and there’s a strange lack of questioning from Xena when it comes to proving their credentials. One of them turns out to be evil, there’s a huge squabble over the book, and it ends with Joxer/Gabrielle discovering the secret of gunpowder while Xena/Good Daughter wave their hands around in order to deflect energy bolts bursting from the hands of Evil Daughter.
But the plot holes! How did Xena know that letter came from Lao Ma? Was it a trap set by Pao Ssu? But if so, why include the “hawk and the dove” riddle? Who fathered these girls? How did they know Lao Ma was their mother? Why did Pao Ssu bother introducing herself to Xena at all? And how did Xena twig to the fact she was up to no good? Everything here was amazingly random.
I also question the creative decision of giving Pao Ssu those pigtails. They didn’t exactly scream “threat.” On the other hand, I do like Gabrielle’s jacket. Obviously, Renee O’Connor had enough of wearing skimpy clothes during a New Zealand winter.
I guess I did like the scene in which Gabrielle and Joxer are strapped to barrels of explosives since a) Joxer managed to communicate that Xena should save Gabrielle, and b) there was never any doubt that she’s who Xena would have run for anyway!
There have been good episodes and bad episodes of Xena, but this one just felt uninspired. And given the subject matter, they really should have put more effort in. That Lao Ma had more children should have felt like a much bigger deal than it was, and each one should have been a more interesting character than what we got. The actress was quite good at differentiating between the twins, but apart from that, Pao Ssu and K’ao Hsin were just blah. We’ve had much better guest stars than these two, and surely Lao Ma’s legacy deserved better. Heck, even that evil handmaiden who was hanging around when Solon was born was more interesting than these two.
Ironically, the most notable thing about this episode was just how forgettable it was. And you would think that an episode that’s a sequel of sorts to the best couple of episodes they ever did would have more going for it than total blandness.
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