Xena: Warrior Princess

_*½

Former warlord Xena renounces her past in an effort to repent for her sins, but the bravery of a young peasant girl makes her realize how much good she can do to become the hero she should always have been.

I used to sneak out to the living room at three in the morning and watch this and other like-minded shows until I fell asleep in front of the television. Immediately I fell in love with the highly comedic aspects of the show, the mythological arcs that were played with, and the great figures of history that were constantly toyed with. Xena, as a series, carries a certain stigma due to the varying nature of it's genre and the constant fluctuation of it's quality, but I will always remember it for it's theme of redemption, it's definition of heroism, and it's views on the nature of good and evil.


The humanization of Xena, played by Lucy Lawless, is well-handled; where most shows would present her as a fully-reformed individual, completely free of the evils of her past, the producers here choose to show her flaws, they own up to the terrible things she has done, and they force her to prove her worth. The conflict between Xena and her mother could have been incredibly cheesy, but it plays naturally considering their history, and, while it's Hercules' forgiveness that has set the character on the path of righteousness, it is her mother's forgiveness that sets the tone for this spin-off. Xena is not a victim, and she will no longer make a victim of others, nor will she let others be victim-makers, and this is a tone that will set this show apart from its brother.

Renée O'Connor's farm girl Gabrielle is a brilliantly strong character with a tongue of pure silver; she does everything from convincing an unwilling trader to give her a free ride into town to talking an angry giant into releasing her from captivity. When she manages to get a mob of angry villagers to let Xena leave unharmed, it becomes clear that she'll be able to make the warrior princess believe in her capacity for good. Xena's mother may have been the catalyst for the over-arching theme of forgiveness in this series, but it will be Gabrielle that sustains it.

The choreography in this show is ridiculous; it's a strange game of telephone, where the writer has described something in the script that the director ended up interpreting in the strangest of ways, somehow allowing it all to make it to the final cut. It's plainly obvious that no punches land, no two takes sync up, and it's questionable if the actors are even hitting their marks.

Pacing seems to be something of an issue in this episode, as though the writers had a set number of beats that they wanted to hit during the episode, but couldn't be bothered to plot them out in an organic manner; the episode instead came off as a series of events, each starting as soon as the previous ended, and it's a little jarring.

Lawless doesn't quite have a handle on her character yet, and sometimes struggles to maintain her accent. Every turn Xena makes is so over-dramatic it becomes comical and would be better suited to the dance floor than to serious acting.  Jay Laga'aia as Draco is so buffoonish that he's more cartoon than man, and it's impossible to consider him an actual threat to the characters in the story. O'Connor is the saving grace of this episode, clearly the most capable of the entire cast; not only does she carry this episode, but she elevates the other actors when they appear with her.

Xena's director Doug Lefler would have us believe that ancient Greece has a lower level of gravity than modern-day Greece, or that these characters all have hollow bones, because they defy all laws of physics. Some shots linger far too long on their subject, others cut away so quickly that the audience can't fully process the action, and there are a number of tracking shots whenever something is thrown or shot that are just awful, as though the object is hovering in place before a Flintstone's background. During crowd scenes disembodied voices of villagers can be heard shouting random phrases, and it serves only to distract from the plot.

Robert Tapert and R. J. Stewart team up to write this episode, and my first question is how it took two men to write this mess. My second question is how that giant manages to get sneak up on anyone, seeing as how he's a giant and quite incapable of camouflage. Most of the dialogue in this episode is  written as either a pun or double entendre without the set-up to make it funny or clever, and the actors all deliver said lines with such sincerity that I'm left wondering if even they understood the context of what they're speaking.

Xena is an extremely campy series with the capability of being very good and exceedingly bad. At any given time it can be both ridiculously stupid and awe inspiringly poetic. In this early edition of the series the writers try to develop a balance between lunacy and high fantasy, and while it's not always the most high-brow of shows, it's not always intended to be.

Xena: Warrior Princess is in the running to become the feature for Wednesdays. The series ran from 1995 to 2001 in syndication with a total of 134 episodes.