In these three very different episodes, we get the second sequel to “The Debt,” a comedy episode, and the next instalment of the seasonal arc, in which Eli returns and the Twilight of the Gods is teased. Highlights include the last episode set in Chin, a very young Rose McIver, Alex Tydings in a blooper so funny they left it in the episode, an answer to what’s going on with Xena’s pregnancy, and the swansong of both Eli and Callisto.
Let’s get to it…
Back in the Bottle
Plot: Xena, Gabrielle and Joxer are still in Chin, but trying to make their way home when they come across some refugees that’ve been forced to leave their homes. K’ao Hsin is among them, and explains that a warlord called Khan is marching on their village, armed with black powder. Xena realizes there’s only one way he could have the formula for such a thing – the evil spirit of Pao Ssu gave it to him.
As it turns out, the warlord is being assisted by both Pao Ssu and Ming Tien, the Green Dragon, last seen in The Debt (they even got the original actor to reprise the role). While Gabrielle teams up with a local man called Lin Qi to help the refugees, Xena tries to reclaim some of the powers she manifested the last time she was in Chin.
In a direct follow-up to the previous episode, “Back in the Bottle” remains in Chin, with Marie Matiko still guest-starring in the dual roles of Pao Ssu and K’ao Hsin. Both episodes are sequels (or legacyquels since we’re dealing with Lao Ma’s three children) to the two-part episode “The Debt,” which may just be the show’s finest hour(s). Which means of course, that contrasts are inevitable – and though this is at least better than “Purity,” it still pales in comparison with its distant predecessor.
Unlike The Legend of Korra episodes, which actually hold up well when compared to the Ba Sing Se episodes of the original series*, Xena’s return to Chin and the ongoing returns of old villains (first Alti, now Ming Tien – these guys just can’t stay dead!) makes it feel as though the writers are running out of ideas and just trying to replay the show’s greatest hits.
The gist of the story is that an evil spirit fused from siblings Ming Tien and Pao Ssu has shared the secret of black powder with a local warlord, who is now using it to wreak havoc on defenceless villages. Despite the admittedly cool visuals (see above) on the double-faced spirit, who repeatedly turns to display either Ming Tien or Pao Ssu’s front, it’s a fairly generic story. The bad guys make deranged speeches, Xena and her assorted allies come up with a plan, there’s a lot of screaming, fighting and running around, and then Xena transforms an entire army into the terracotta warriors.
Okay, THAT was certainly out of left field (despite an attempt to foreshadow it by having Xena accidentally-on-purpose turn various dead rabbits into stone at the beginning of the episode) and it’s clear at this point that Lucy Lawless’s pregnancy is forcing the writers to make some fairly drastic leaps in order to keep her the star of the show.
Here it results in her regaining her mystical powers, doing elaborate windmill gestures in the middle of a field, and having the newfound ability to change people into stone. It raises the question of why Xena even needs to be a warrior anymore when she has the ability to simply think her enemies into submission, and the rather worrying fact that she’s just defeated an army of thousands all by herself. Sure, they try to explain it away by having her state that “something was working through me” but surely wielding that level of power should be of some concern to her friends.
Just to spice things up a little, Xena has a vision of Joxer and Gabrielle getting blown up by black powder, a prophecy that is verified by her seeing Lin Qi (a young man trained in combat) being killed alongside them before he turns up in the flesh. It’s a little too reminiscent of the vision that haunted her throughout season four, though in this case, she manages to avert it. And like so many other things, it felt like a recycled idea.
The episode was on more solid ground when it came to the smaller character beats. I like that Gabrielle asserted herself before the battle and told Xena it was totally infeasible for her to go running around while pregnant. Joxer gets a few sweet moments with a little girl who loses her family in all the confusion, and is reunited with them before the end credits.
And as minor guest-stars we’ve never seen before or will again go, Lin Qi wasn’t bad. He actually served as a nice reminder of how much Gabrielle has grown up: a few years ago she would have been fawning all over him. Now she enjoys a mild flirt but obviously has no real interest in him.
(Though all that said, why they didn’t form a romantic connection between him and K’ao Hsin is a bit of a mystery, since she’s the girl that’ll be sticking around).
But much like the last episode, it was just sort of missing something. It felt like they were sincerely reaching for a tentpole event episode, and just not hitting the mark – though in saying that, it’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly they’re not grasping. At least we have Gabrielle uttering the line: “I used to think love was enough [to win a war]. I was wrong,” for if nothing else, this feels like a direct thoroughfare into the themes of “Seeds of Faith,” the episode that comes directly after “Little Problems.”
*This review was written years ago, and posted on a message board in which myself and others were watching The Legend of Korra concurrently with Xena Warrior Princess – just in case you were wondering why I added such a random comparison.
Little Problems
Plot: While visiting Aphrodite’s temple and the hospice she’s recently set up inside it, Xena makes an impulsive wish that she might switch places with a sick little girl called Daphne. Aphrodite promptly grants her request, but doesn’t get around to putting Daphne’s spirit into Xena’s body, leaving Daphne and Xena sharing a child’s body.
After hiding Xena’s body, Aphrodite and Gabrielle team up to track down a magical oil that will separate the two spirits, while Xena accompanies Daphne to her home, where she and her father grapple with the recent death of her mother – all the while trying to evade the warriors of a disfigured warlord who is out for revenge on Xena.
Eventually Daphne learns she was responsible for her mother’s death and reconciles with her father, while Gabrielle retrieves the oil and Aphrodite returns Xena’s spirit to her own body – though not before we get to see Xena-in-Daphne kick some ass from within a little girl’s body.
This was a very light episode, but with a few good nuggets amongst all the not-so-good stuff. The idea of Xena being trapped inside a child’s body isn’t a bad one, but the contrivance to get her there is rather eye-rolling, and the subsequent stakes so low that it was difficult to muster up any sort of investment in Daphne’s safety. Maybe if they had connected her mother’s death with the warlord’s rampaging?
For all that, it was fun seeing Rose McIver as Daphne. She’s a well-known kiwi actress who has since made it pretty big on shows like iZombie and the American remake of Ghosts, though when I originally wrote this review, she was probably known best for playing Tinkerbell on Once Upon a Time. This is the youngest I’ve ever seen her, and she’s pretty good at channelling Lucy Lawless in her speech and mannerisms. Child actors are always a bit of a risk, but she’s naturalistic without being too precocious.
The storyline was divided into two distinct plots. After Aphrodite transfers Xena’s spirit in to a little girl (which relies on her being even more ditzy than usual and having her godly powers mysteriously malfunction) Xena goes home with Daphne and her father, while Gabrielle and Aphrodite try to get their hands on an oil that will reverse the spell. I honestly can’t recall what contrivance they came up with to prevent Aphrodite from simply waving her hands and returning Xena’s spirit to her own body like, immediately.
Oh, and there’s also some random warlord who wants revenge on Xena for disfiguring his face years ago. Have we ever seen him before?
The Gabrielle/Aphrodite team-up is pretty amusing, with them posing as Swedish Siamese twins in order to infiltrate a twin-only fight club to retrieve a magical oil from Castor and Pollux, who Aphrodite openly lusts after despite them all sharing a father. But hey, I guess it’s not that big a deal in Greek mythology. It’s safe to assume Alex Tyding’s helmet slipping down over her eyes was unrehearsed, as you can see Renne O’Connor forcing back a smile. The two of them had great chemistry when it came to their bickering/reluctant teamwork.
That said, I had to roll my eyes at Gabrielle’s admonition that the club was all about “the shameless exploitation of the female form” AFTER the script has her oil wrestle in a boxing ring with Aphrodite and a couple of buff dudes. Dear show, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Or in this case, you can’t shamelessly exploit the female form of your actresses and THEN have one of them scold the audience for enjoying it.
For this episode, Xena was pretty much playing the role of a guardian angel. Like I said earlier, a Body Swap into a little girl isn’t necessarily a bad idea, though there was plenty of contrivances along the way. First of all, as fun as it was to see a tiny little girl beating up full-grown men (complete with the Xena theme music) it really made no sense this would be possible. Xena may remember all her skills in battle, but how on earth can she force a little girl’s body to perform them for her? Surely it would have been more interesting and suspenseful for Xena to utilize other methods to defeat her enemies in lieu of her strength: like cunning and strategy for example.
The other thing that grated was the device of Xena’s reflection appearing in various pools of water to speak to Daphne. This may have worked the first couple of times to drive home the point that two spirits are inhabiting one body, but after a while it felt like Xena was stuck behind a mirror as opposed to inside Daphne’s body.
Oh, and I really can’t express how little I cared about the whole “Daphne tries to reconnect with her father” business. I mean, wow. I just didn’t care. Given her name, I was actually under the impression her missing mother would end up being a wood nymph of some kind that had turned back into a tree.
Finally, there’s that random warlord lurking around, whose terrible disfigurement is eventually revealed as a mild sunburn. Again, I can’t even remember what happened to him, and I only watched this episode last night!
A moderately fun filler episode, but its biggest attraction is a blooper (Aphrodite’s helmet falling over her eyes) and Rose McIver at the beginning of her career.
Seeds of Faith
Plot: Xena and Gabrielle reunite with Eli, whose preaching about the “way of love” is gathering many followers, much to the displeasure of Ares, who is afraid it heralds the Twilight of the Gods, in which the Grecian pantheon gods will perish. He decides to attack the village where Eli is staying and slay the man himself.
Eli is visited by the spirit of Callisto, now an angelic figure who encourages him to die for the sake of his beliefs. While Xena heads out to face the approaching army by herself, Gabrielle attempts to physically defend Eli from Ares, only for him to ask her to stand down so that he might die at the god’s hands. Ares duly stabs him to death, and tension builds between Gabrielle and Xena since the latter cannot understand why Gabrielle would simply stand by and let Eli be killed.
After Eli’s cremation, Xena is visited by Callisto, who tries to explain why this had to happen. In response, Xena demands that Callisto take her to the dagger of Helios, the only artefact that can kill a god. Meanwhile, Gabrielle is mourning her mentor’s death, and Ares tries a “join me on the dark side” pitch, giving Gabrielle a taste of what it’s like to be a god.
Ultimately Gabrielle rejects his offer, and when Xena returns with the dagger, a glimpse of Eli in its blade is enough to make her realize that his death only strengthens his cause. Eli and Callisto appear for one last goodbye, and Callisto reveals she’s not only responsible for Xena’s pregnancy (somehow…) but is also going to be reborn as Xena’s child. Just go with it.
We jump back into the overarching storyline of the season with an episode that suggests a massive game-changer is coming for the underlying backbone of this show in its entirety. It turns out that something called The Twilight is coming (clearly the writers have been reading up on their Norse mythology) and that it heralds an end to the petty, tyrannical, feuding Olympian Gods – presumably in favour of this newfangled monotheistic God and the “way of love” everyone’s been talking about.
In a nice continuation from their very brief interaction in “Chakram,” the conflict plays out between Eli and Ares: the former ready and willing to be martyred for his beliefs, and the latter all too happy to oblige him without giving much thought to any long-term consequences. As they say, when a tyrant dies, his reign ends. When a martyr dies, his reign begins.
Starting out with a sequence that seems borrowed from Clash of the Titans (though the hubris of the townsfolk in preaching they don’t need the gods is put in a much more positive light than the bragging of the King and Queen of Aethiopia), Xena and Gabrielle find themselves momentarily at odds when a “trigger happy” Gabrielle leaps into action and starts a fight over something that turns out to be a simple handkerchief.
On the one hand, it’s easy to see why Gabrielle is a little jumpy given she’s travelling with a heavily pregnant woman. On the other, Xena is concerned that Gabrielle is losing her pacifist streak. The theme continues when they reunite with Eli, who is busy ordering his followers to burn all their weapons because – you know, love and all that.
The role reversal comes to an end when Xena heads out to face an army (courtesy of a threatened Ares) that’s about to march on the peaceful villagers, while Gabrielle bows to Eli’s request for absolute pacifism when it comes to his decision to die at Ares’s hands.
There is some genuinely compelling stuff here when it comes to the choices and challenges our two protagonists must face, though as is the way of Xena Warrior Princess, plenty of it came across as deeply muddled. Let’s take Eli. Is he meant to be an analogy for Jesus? I know it’s hard to tell with this show (and we’ve already had a cameo from Joseph and Mary a few seasons ago) but he certainly looks the part, and is being visited by angels, persuaded to martyr himself, and preaches love and peace and non-violence throughout. But is he a Jew? A Christian? A Hindu? Can he still heal people? What exactly is being taught here beyond the rather wishy-washy: “love will be our shield” nonsense?
The character seems to exist in a vortex of early Christian/Eastern mysticism, and though the grab-bag world building has never been this show’s strong suit, we’re heading into really weird territory now. Eli kept referencing “faith” (it’s even in the title) but faith in WHAT? Without that, it’s difficult to really understand what he’s so happy to die for, or why it’s so important that he does. The imminent end of the gods, I suppose?
And to top it all off, Xena is told that he’s going to reincarnate into a new body after his death. I mean, they established that was a thing during the India arc, but it still feels weird in a season that has introduced things like Heaven, Hell, Lucifer and the Archangel Michael.
The episode is on much stronger ground when it explores the differences between Xena and Gabrielle’s reactions to Eli’s death. You can’t really argue with Xena’s tactics when it comes to fighting an army to protect a group of unarmed people who have helpfully just destroyed all their own weapons (though I do wonder why she didn’t just destroy the bridge instead of fighting on it for several minutes), but she’s pretty harsh when it comes to blaming Gabrielle for Eli’s death. Girl was just doing what he told her to, and it’s not like she didn’t try to protect him several times before Ares made the fatal stab.
Gabrielle’s ensuring confusion over what just happened leaves her wide open for some prime manipulation from Ares, while Xena decides to continue in her warrior ways and kill Ares with the dagger of Helios, roping in an angelic Callisto along the way, who has already appeared to Eli and encouraged him to accept martyrdom. She doesn’t really trust her old foe, and Callisto is clearly working on some other agenda, but she nevertheless takes Xena to the weapon she needs.
The show has dealt with tough moral decisions before, but this one comes down to Xena deciding not to kill Ares since Eli’s message will live on forever due to his willing sacrifice. Um – okay. I’m not entirely sure how that prevents her from killing Ares beyond the principal of the thing (which doesn’t mean much when you take into account all those men she turned into terracotta a couple of weeks ago).
I guess the idea is that Ares can’t simply go around killing all of Eli’s followers. Except that he totally can. That would absolutely strike fear into the hearts of the people, wipe out Eli’s memory, and force people back into the temples of the Greek gods.
But I guess at this stage we’re contracting several thousand years’ worth of religions conversion into forty-five minutes of a swords n’ sandals television show made in the nineties, so I’ll just consider this a symbolic turning point in history’s swing towards monotheism.
The real talking point of the episode is the reveal that Callisto is the father (relatively speaking) of Xena’s child and her soul is about to be reborn within the infant. Wow, that’s… something alright. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this, though I suppose there’s a nice symmetry to it, especially given all the terrible things Xena and Callisto have done to each other. That Xena is responsible for the deaths of Callisto’s parents, and now is going to be her mother, certainly has a full-circle quality about it.
That said, it’s still pretty damn weird, not least because an angel is reincarnating herself into human form after impregnating a woman.
Miscellaneous Observations:
Like I mentioned, there are plenty of good ideas raised. Is might right, even if it’s wrong? Did Gabrielle do the right thing, or should she have defended Eli? Heck, did Eli do the right thing? Should you give up your life for the sake of a spiritual cause? Or should you seize power in order to do good with it? I liked the musings on Gabrielle’s complicated relationship with violence and her worry that she had disappointed Eli by picking up the sword again. For a while she renounced all violence, only to pick up her staff again when Xena’s life hung in the balance. As she said, she’s now caught between two paths, her heart and her rationalism telling her two very different things.
In an interview, the director mentions being frustrated at not being able to give Xena, their main character, something more substantial to do in this episode than simply fight an army in a meaningless conflict whose outcome meant nothing, while all the juicy stuff (Ares and Gabrielle struggling with Eli’s death) went on without her. And yet I find I don’t mind it. She’s doesn’t have to be front and centre all the time, and it was thematically fitting that her warrior approach in fending off Ares’s army were ultimately meaningless. I mean, wasn’t that the argument that the episode was trying to make? This time around the supporting cast carried the story, and that’s okay.
The episode also had some great images, from Eli’s Garden of Gethsemane scene with Callisto, to a grief-stricken Gabrielle throwing her sais at the dead white tree in the desert.
Hudson Leick obviously had the time of her life playing the deranged Callisto, but just as obviously has no idea what to do or how to act as a doe-eyed angel. Surely she should have been allowed to play this new role with a little world-weariness or spiky humour. After all, even angels can be sardonic now and then. As is, she just comes across as insipid.
Ares is also a bit ho-hum here, though perhaps that was the point. Xena was quick to point out that it seems a bit beneath him to turn up at simple village squabbles, and his antsy behaviour is reminiscent of his thinly-veiled fear over Dahak’s imminent arrival.
It’s a shame that this Twilight idea wasn’t introduced much earlier, as it was dropped into proceedings out of practically nowhere. But as an aside, I’m currently reading a book that skewers several fantasy tropes, including one called the E.K.T. Field, which is the Everyone Knows That Field. It nicely explains how Xena knows about the Twilight of the Gods, since it’s described as: a hypothesise in which certain Quest Objects cast a field around them, like a magnet or a planet – an Everyone Knows That Field. When an E.K.T. Field is in effect, everyone within its power will know a good deal about the Object, even if they can't say where they heard about it or why it's so deathly important. They'll chat about it with any passing stranger like it’s sizzling local gossip.
In all, this was an interesting and important episode, one that resolved a longstanding question (“where did Xena’s baby come from?”) and certainly moved things into the next phase of the season’s storyline. In terms of its central philosophy, I’m not entirely sure what point it was trying to make. The show used to be really good at raising murky ethical conundrums, but now that it’s trying to answer them as well, it’s struggling a little.
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