Virtue is Its Own Reward [Xena Rewatch 4.5-4.8]
4.5 A Good Day
Any episode with Caesar and Pompey is worth watching. Right? This one also has the bonus appearance of Max from Neighbours who would later take on the role of Hades, but for now is playing a random deserter soldier with a family to protect. The “filthy civil war” of the Romans has come to Greek territory (repeat after me, “anything BC is good”), and a lone village has to muster the troops to defend their own land, with the help of Xena and Gabrielle.
There are plenty of dull bits in the first half of this one but Karl Urban’s Caesar more than makes up for it – and while it feels like we have to wade through a lot before we get to enjoy him on screen against Jeremy Callaghan’s Pompey Magnus and Xena herself, it is worth it.
It looks like a by the numbers story right up to the point where Xena, Pompey and Caesar all fall into their own bottle episode down a deep dark well, leaving the armies to fight without them.
Gabrielle, who has been quietly filed away in a little ‘war and taking lives is bad’ subplot, suddenly comes into her own, leading the villagers into battle, killing with the ruthless calm of Xena’s apprentice, and making the tough calls. She’s scary good at it and here it is, the story of how far she’s come.
The battle scenes are good, far better populated than most of what we got in HBO’s Rome a decade or more later, and appropriately nasty. Gabrielle even gets to see some other kid lose his “blood innocence,” and a family man slaughtered on the battlefield along with everyone else.
Perhaps the most poignant bit is the scene when Caesar and Pompey climb out of their well to discover that both of their armies have wiped themselves out, the field littered with dead bodies in Roman armour. They both shrug, and go back to the drawing board. While Gabrielle and Xena agonise about the real people lost, the two generals are still behaving as if their armies (and anyone who gets in their way) are chess pieces to be lightly sacrificed.
Wonder if any of these themes are going to turn out to be very relevant this season?
4.6 A Tale of Two Muses
What better to wash away all the blood of the last episode but a little dance music?
Tara, the bratty Goth girl who tried to replace Gabrielle as the sidekick back in Season 3 has made a life for herself in a desert town but causes scandal when she breaks the one law in town: dancing.
We don’t know why Xena and Gabrielle are suddenly “so far from home,” and it’s all a bit suspicious that the love of dance is suddenly so essential to Tara’s backstory when it wasn’t mentioned before, but what the hell. This is Xena does Footloose, just go with it.
“Ever since I found out that it’s not allowed… I’ve never wanted to dance so badly in all my life.” (Gabrielle)
A mysterious anti-dance preacher rolls into town, who turns out to be who else but AUTOLYCUS, KING OF THIEVES! For once this isn’t one of his scams – Xena has rolled him in specifically to solve the problem in the town which is making Tara so unhappy.
There isn’t much here, but there is a certain joy in watching Bruce Campbell’s wild evangelist rant against the evils of dance while managing to make it ten times as appealing to the on-the-edge-of-rebellion town. Xena and Gabrielle’s dance routine (while teaching the youth of the town “military training” is pretty entertaining, too.
But mostly it’s fluff.
4.7 Locked Up and Tied Down
It’s amazing this doesn’t happen more often. One of the presumably plentiful arrest warrants out for Xena from her Bad Hair Days finally catches up with her, and she submits to a trial and then to life imprisonment on the charmingly-named Shark Island, a women’s prison.
Yes, it’s Xena Cell Block H!
Grim and relentless as this story is, with emphasis on the personalities of hardened criminals, prison guard abuse and some very doom-laden weather, it’s also an important reminder that Xena’s heroic position in this world is ultimately untenable. She can be as moral and virtuous as she likes, but she has committed some terrible crimes in her past, and you don’t always get to choose your own punishment for your crimes just because you’re the main protagonist.
Gabrielle is pretty miffed about the whole thing, pulling out good old chestnuts like the ‘greater good’ argument, and Xena pragmatically shuts her down because, you know. Guilty as charged.
I do find it interesting that the death used to actually incarcerate Xena is that of a young woman, and one who apparently ‘shone with hope and beauty,’ yet another analogue to Gabrielle. The whole moral distinction about Bad Hair Xena never murdering women or children, and the murder of women and children being considered so much worse than that of men, is really not sitting right with me. I mean, Bad Hair Xena was an invading general, she rode into village after village, attacking civilians in an unprovoked manner.
Sure, you can give some leeway to a soldier who kills as an act of war, but when that person is the one who MADE the freaking war? I don’t think she should be let off for all the untrained farmers and shepherds she killed, really, just because they were men.
In any case, the episode has a great premise, and a powerful one, which is that Xena totally deserves to be sent to prison, and accepts this as her fate. It’s also a bleak episode which includes violence to prisoners, violence between prisoners, and some freakish scenes involving Xena being tortured by rats. Then there’s the murder she went into prison for, which is also delightfully gory. She killed the young woman in question, Thalassa, by cutting her face open and leaving her for some flesh-eating crabs to eat.
Gruesome stuff, but also the literal get-out-of-jail-free card, because it turns out that Thalassa is completely alive, though terribly scarred and mutilated, and running the prison. The whole thing was a scam to see Xena punished for the crime of being a heinous bitch.
Though to be fair, if someone had chained me bleeding to some rocks with flesh-eating crabs, I’d be pretty pissed off too.
Gabrielle tries to free Xena (while managing to soothe Thalassa’s tortured soul along the way), nearly gets herself hanged, and proves a worthy excuse for a prison break out.
Xena wrestles with rats that are trying to eat her alive, remembers at the last minute that she’s actually pro law and order, and manages to save Thalassa from being horribly executed by her own violent prisoners. The whole thing is wrapped up suspiciously quickly, but that came as something of a relief.
The key to this one comes at the end when Gabrielle suggests that it might be time Xena forgive herself for all of her horrible past deeds (seriously, I’d be asking questions about flesh-eating crabs at this point!) and Xena says “I don’t do that.”
Xena can never truly forgive herself for her dark past, and will punish herself sufficiently while riding around having adventures and fighting crime that she doesn’t need to be punished in any official way? Okay, then, if you ARE the show’s premise I guess I can accept it…
I’m almost certain it’s not foreshadowing anything big that’s going to happen this season.
4.8 – Crusader
Funny, I thought to myself. I remembered this season being a lot more annoying and redolent with faux-spiritualism than it’s been so far. And then I saw that the next one up was “Crusader.”
Oh, show.
Having killed off both Callisto and Hope, the production team have obviously been trying out a few different female villain archetypes. And this is one of the glories of this show, of course – LET’S HAVE MANY DIFFERENT FEMALE VILLAIN ARCHETYPES.
Callisto was very much a shadow version of Xena, a monster of her own making, though she had become a rich and complex character in her own right. Najara is also a reflection of Xena, if anything far more precisely than Callisto. She is the anti-Xena, a pious and beautiful blonde woman who rides at the head of an all-male army in the name of pursuing ‘good’ across the land.
She’s sweet, she’s patient, and she has really great hair, possibly because she also has a kicking battle hat. She looks good in armour. Sure, she talks to invisible djinn who live inside her head, but no one’s perfect. Gabrielle, of course, is drawn to her as she often is drawn to powerful women (it’s her type!) and Xena is suspicious but prepared to come along for the ride, for now.
Najara is very much set up as the battle leader who is better for Gabrielle than Xena – light rather than darkness, spirituality and love rather than angst and cynicism. She also offers Gabrielle a chance to genuinely help people her way, instead of by copying Xena’s methods. Talk about killing with kindness!
And of course, Xena has a reason to separate herself from Gabrielle. The vision which gave her hope back when she thought Gabs was still dead is now torturing her – an image of herself and a short-haired Gabrielle tied to crosses, about to be executed by Romans in the snow. Is it any wonder she is tempted to send Gabrielle off with Najara to live somewhere hot, happy and fulfilled for the rest of her days?
Even in the cheeky hot springs & massage scenes, and occasional sly one-liners, there’s always been a sense in the show so far that they’re holding back from making the Xena/Gabrielle relationship overtly romantic. But that has been less and less convincing this season, from Xena’s rampant grief in Adventures in the Sin Trade to her passionate embrace with Gabrielle upon their reunion in A Family Affair (and Joxer’s obvious embarrassment at witnessing their raw emotion).
Never have Xena and Gabrielle been coded so clearly as a romantic couple as in this story, not necessarily because they are doing anything differently, but because of the sizzling chemistry between Najara and Gabrielle, and Xena’s subtle distress upon seeing it. It doesn’t feel like she is giving up her best friend to another woman, it feels like she is leaving her lover because she thinks someone else would be better for her.
But there’s a reason I compared Najara with Callisto. She’s a villain, right? She’s just so NICE, it’s creepy and unnatural. And when Xena realises that the sweet, merry war leader has been running around executing all her prisoners (without a trial! Moral high ground from you, Ms Flesh Eating Crabs?) who do not turn to her “way of the light,” she runs back to liberate Gabrielle with one of those brilliant, classic Xena fights involving gimmickry, Asian movie tricks, and fabulous stunts.
The twist is that Xena loses. Najara kicks her dark side from here to kingdom come, and Gabrielle only saves her unconscious friend by, well, basically promising to love Najara forever. Yep, Najara wins the fight and the girl, and Xena loses everything including one of those good chewing teeth.
But of course Xena wins her girl back, the two of them trick Najara into thinking the rift between them is permanent, allowing Xena to use Gabs as leverage and win the next round. Najara is sweetly simpering, forgiving and convinced she is utterly right even as she’s being taken away by the fuzz for her trial.
XENA: She’s too dangerous a girl to leave on the loose. She likes killing too much.
GAB: But she beat you up so badly!
XENA: Well, that’s another reason.
Zealots. Man, they’re annoying. At least this one is gone and it can’t possibly get worse, right? I mean, they’re not going to spend the rest of the season having Gabrielle take moral high ground over Xena and start preaching about pacifism and ‘the way,’ right?
That would be crazy sauce.
CHAKRAM STATISTICS:
People who want romance with Xena: 13
People Xena allows to romance her: 7
Xena dead lovers: 3
Gabrielle dead boyfriends: 2/7
“Adorable” children: 37
Babies: 5
Babies tossed humorously in the air during fight scenes: 6
Xena doppelgangers: 4
Xena sings a mourning song: 6
Gabrielle sprained ankles: 2
Xena dies: 3
Gabrielle dies: 4
Characters brought back from the dead (incl. ghosts and visits to the Underworld): 50
Ares loses his powers and goes all to pieces about it: 2
Xena or Gabrielle earns money: 2
Xena or Gabrielle spends money (or claims to have money to spend): 7
Out of the Pantheon: Morpheus, Ares, Hera, the Titans, Hades, Celesta, Charon, the Fates, Bacchus, Aphrodite, Cupid, Poseidon, the Furies, Discord,
The Celebrity Red Carpet of the Ancient World: Pandora, Prometheus, Hercules, Iolaus, Sisyphus, Helen of Troy, Paris, Deiphobus, Menelaus, Euripides, Homer, Autolycus, Meleager, Oracle of Delphi, David, Goliath, Orpheus, Julius Caesar, Brutus, Ulysses, Penelope, Cecrops, Boadicea, Cleopatra, Crassus, Pompey
Previous Xena Rewatch Posts:
Warlord is a Lady Tonight
I Don’t Work For Money
Amazon Wanna Take A Ride?
Go To Tartarus!
Swashbuckle and Shams
Death In A Chainmail Bikini
Full Moon It Must Be Xena
How Do You Mortals Get From Day to Day?
The Future is Archaeologists
Divide and Conquer
My Sword is Always Ready to Pleasure You
Hide the Hestian Virgins!
Lunatic with Lethal Combat Skills
Coping with Your First Kill
Sweet Hestia, I’m In a Den of Filth
The Bitter and Sweet of It
Because Caesar Was Taken
Armageddon When??
Rolling Around Like Weasels
You Killed Me?
My Fungus Is Spreading
