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This belongs in the category of Xena fandom memories, because this was my go-to "most embarrassing moment" story at all the conventions.
My favorite Xena storyline was fan-dubbed "The Rift" arc. I saw this before I had any experience with the Xena fandom itself, so I was completely unspoiled, and I was -- and am -- in awe.
Obviously I wasn't here for the original run-through, but during one of his panels that I did get to attend, Steve Sears described his original presentation of season 3 to the con audience. He said, 'We're going dark." He went to one side of the stage. "Here's where you think we're going." He went to the other side of the stage. "Here's where we're actually going."
The storyline starts out with Xena and Gabrielle rescuing Khrafstar, who you are meant to assume is a Hebrew messiah character. Xena forms an alliance with an approaching army. So far, pretty typical (and I'm not telling this very well -- it's been a long time since I've seen it.) There is some backstory revealing that at one point during her warlord days, Xena was allied with Caesar, who betrayed her. In the present, Xena's so preoccupied with leading this army against Caesar that she doesn't notice that Gabrielle and Khrafstar are in one of the nearby temples performing a sacrifice. This is one of the absolutely brilliant aspects of the show. They make you think that it's going to be this huge battle episode. But the second Xena realizes how much trouble Gabrielle is in, she dashes off the battlefield, and that's the last you see of either army. You don't know who wins and you don't care. They also make you think that Khrafstar worships the One God of the Israelites (who has already made at least one appearance on the show -- and in a way that's respectful to both Christianity and Judaism). The seeds were all planted when Khrafstar told Gabrielle about his god giving him the strength not to take vengeance. But suddenly in the temple, Khrafstar reveals that he worships Dahak, the evil Babylonian god (and debatably the scariest villain on either "Xena" or "Hercules"), and referring to the One God of the Israelites, "he will be taken care of too."
The end result of the sacrifice scene is that it was orchestrated to make Gabrielle take a human life, in doing so sacrifice her "blood innocence," and that sacrifice bring Dahak back into the world. Xena arrives too late to stop Gabrielle from killing. The very end of the episode has Gabrielle sobbing and repeating what Xena had said earlier, "everything's changed," while rocks from the battle and the collapsing temple fall all around them. I think it's the most haunting and beautiful image in the entire show. Yes, I'm an angst addict. We all knew that. Moving on...
The concept of "blood innocence" is itself one of my favorite elements of the show. And after all the different threads I've participated in on the subject, you'd think I'd be able to at least define it. The plain factual definition is that a person who still has his or her blood innocence has never taken a human life. Causing or willing someone to be killed does not count -- an emperor could order the execution of an innocent man and be morally culpable but still retain his blood innocence. Unintentional killing or killing in battle does count. Gabrielle was in no way morally culpable for the life she took -- the willing sacrifice pretty much shoved the dagger into Gabrielle's hand and then threw herself on it, while Gabrielle was standing there immobilized with shock.
Even though on the show, they called Gabrielle's former blood innocence her "innocence of evil," I think this was a case of an unreliable narrator (or rather, a narrator with an agenda -- they're the bad guys!) We speculated on the board that perhaps loss of blood innocence wouldn't have been so important if Xena hadn't made such a big deal over it. I can understand the members' points, but I disagree. We also speculated that maybe blood innocence was like virginity. But ummm... sex is good and murder is bad, y'know? So that can't be the whole story either. The way that I view it is that blood innocence is one aspect in the larger concept that we call "innocence" in the childish sense, not the moral sense. Before the sacrifice, Gabrielle did not experientially know the kind of damage that her hands and weapons were capable of dealing. After the sacrifice, she did know. And everything changed. (If we're doing reminiscing-type tangents ... I got very frustrated when the prevailing mood of the board was that Xena had a slight Madonna-complex about Gabrielle, that Xena was the one defining blood innocence and doing it for selfish reasons -- because she couldn't stand seeing her idol morally tarnished. It's a purely intellectual frustration. I sometimes think that the board in general was too hard on Xena because they assumed -- with Xena herself -- that Xena was already damaged, and that Gabrielle somehow deserved to be spared. At one time, Xena was a punk kid who led her townspeople into battle, got someone she loved killed, and killed in battle for the first time and had her entire way of seeing the world changed. She wanted to spare Gabrielle that pain. She didn't succeed, but she tried really hard, and I think Gabrielle took that in the spirit it was intended.)
BTW, I'd intended just to define what the Rift was, and I'm nowhere near the concept anymore!
Besides losing her blood innocence in the temple, Gabrielle was magically-impregnated with arguably the most ambiguous character in the entire show, Hope. It became almost a joke that board members started Hope Wars when we were bored. I got involved at the beginning before I knew any better, but once I understood the depth of feeling that people on both sides of the Hope Issue held, I stayed out of it too.
Xena tries to kill baby Hope. Gabrielle defends her and eventually sends her away in a basket, then lies to Xena about Hope being alive. Xena takes off to go assassinate a Chinese boy-leader. Gabrielle betrays her to stop her and nearly gets Xena executed. Xena assassinates the Chinese kid anyway and lies to Gabrielle about it. (The kid was pure evil. Really. I don't actually fault Xena for what she did, just for lying about it.) Hope, who grows at the magical-baby rate, shows up as a young child and kills Xena's eleven year old son. Gabrielle poisons Hope and then debates drinking the poison herself.
And as you can see, Steve Sears certainly wasn't kidding about going dark!! That's actually the second-most beautiful haunting image in the whole show, in my opinion -- Gabrielle holding the flask to her mouth, Xena watching her from the forest with those empty eyes, Gabrielle finally setting the flask down.
And then we have the Xena Musical (sorry to the Xena creators, but the only real one in my opinion). It's brilliant and scary and ridiculous in places and Gabrielle's parts are very obviously dubbed (and also too pretty for what she's going through) and it contains one of my favorite songs in the world. And no, actually, it's not "Love of Your Love" -- that's my second favorite song. My favorite is the end of "Hate is the Star" where Gabrielle starts out with "I never thought that we'd be distanced by a hate," and the horror of what their friendship has become and the realization that they still need each other and what they have still exists even behind all the impossibilities and ... love triumphs. (Missy Good's fanfic "Darkness Falls" used the same concept only without all the supernatural singing -- what if Xena and Gabrielle only had human methods to use to do it, could they still have found their way back to each other? The story's answer is "yes," just involving way more time than would have worked for TV. I got Missy Good to sign a printed chapter from "Darkness Falls" at the last convention I went to. I'm very proud of that.)
I believe in fandom terminology, The Rift is over after the musical episode. But I consider The Rift to have stretched through the beginning of season 4. In the last two episodes of Season 3, it's revealed that Hope is still alive, and, in order to kill her / beat her and keep Dahak from rising again, Gabrielle throws herself and Hope together into a flame pit. So season 4 starts out with Xena questioning Hades about where Gabrielle is. They're finally reunited in the third episode of season 4, "A Family Affair."
Okay. So, when I was attempting to convince my mother that "Xena" was an awesome show, I sent her some episode choices. Basically, by season 3, "Xena" switched between episodes that furthered the overall story and episodes that didn't (so even though The Rift lasted more than a season, maybe a third of the episodes were all about The Rift -- maybe a bit more than that; again it's been so long I can't remember very well). I took out the discs that had Rift episodes on them, mailed them to my mother, and told her which episodes to watch.
She just watched all the episodes on the discs that I sent. Oh, well. They were mostly clustered anyway.
The last episode that I'd intended for my mother to see was "A Family Affair" with the reunion between Xena and Gabrielle. Mom backed up and watched all three episodes on disc 1 of season 4 of Xena: Warrior Princess.
I'm writing this as if my audience hasn't ever seen "Xena," but if you have seen season 4, you'll know that the first two episodes are mostly flashbacks from Xena's time with Borias, and then there's that spiritual battle with Alti at the end. From my reading of my old Xena board: fan favorite part: Borias is hot, fan least favorite part: Xena looks like she's on drugs the whole time. I actually adore those episodes, flaws and all. I don't think Alti is necessarily a well-rounded villain, but I think she's an example of a very real possibility of what a human being can become with enough dark magic. It's Xena's choice in particular that kills me: go forward to eternity and abandon her mission in this life, or go backwards and leave Gabrielle behind -- maybe not forever, but at least for the rest of Xena's life. I know that sounds confusing since Gabrielle wasn't really dead, but Xena didn't know that, so in her mind that was the choice before her, and it is just SO beautiful.
So. My mother watched those episodes instead. My dad chose that particular moment to walk into the living room.
My conservative Protestant minister father's only glimpse of "Xena: Warrior Princess" was Xena and Borias humping under the bear rug. Probably the most explicit "they got away with that on television?" scene in the entire show -- well, at least explicit Like That; they pushed the violence boundaries a lot farther later on. With all the blurriness and the drugged camera angles and, um, certain noises so you didn't see anything but you didn't have to.
Chances that my dad will EVER watch "Xena" again: zero!
My favorite Xena storyline was fan-dubbed "The Rift" arc. I saw this before I had any experience with the Xena fandom itself, so I was completely unspoiled, and I was -- and am -- in awe.
Obviously I wasn't here for the original run-through, but during one of his panels that I did get to attend, Steve Sears described his original presentation of season 3 to the con audience. He said, 'We're going dark." He went to one side of the stage. "Here's where you think we're going." He went to the other side of the stage. "Here's where we're actually going."
The storyline starts out with Xena and Gabrielle rescuing Khrafstar, who you are meant to assume is a Hebrew messiah character. Xena forms an alliance with an approaching army. So far, pretty typical (and I'm not telling this very well -- it's been a long time since I've seen it.) There is some backstory revealing that at one point during her warlord days, Xena was allied with Caesar, who betrayed her. In the present, Xena's so preoccupied with leading this army against Caesar that she doesn't notice that Gabrielle and Khrafstar are in one of the nearby temples performing a sacrifice. This is one of the absolutely brilliant aspects of the show. They make you think that it's going to be this huge battle episode. But the second Xena realizes how much trouble Gabrielle is in, she dashes off the battlefield, and that's the last you see of either army. You don't know who wins and you don't care. They also make you think that Khrafstar worships the One God of the Israelites (who has already made at least one appearance on the show -- and in a way that's respectful to both Christianity and Judaism). The seeds were all planted when Khrafstar told Gabrielle about his god giving him the strength not to take vengeance. But suddenly in the temple, Khrafstar reveals that he worships Dahak, the evil Babylonian god (and debatably the scariest villain on either "Xena" or "Hercules"), and referring to the One God of the Israelites, "he will be taken care of too."
The end result of the sacrifice scene is that it was orchestrated to make Gabrielle take a human life, in doing so sacrifice her "blood innocence," and that sacrifice bring Dahak back into the world. Xena arrives too late to stop Gabrielle from killing. The very end of the episode has Gabrielle sobbing and repeating what Xena had said earlier, "everything's changed," while rocks from the battle and the collapsing temple fall all around them. I think it's the most haunting and beautiful image in the entire show. Yes, I'm an angst addict. We all knew that. Moving on...
The concept of "blood innocence" is itself one of my favorite elements of the show. And after all the different threads I've participated in on the subject, you'd think I'd be able to at least define it. The plain factual definition is that a person who still has his or her blood innocence has never taken a human life. Causing or willing someone to be killed does not count -- an emperor could order the execution of an innocent man and be morally culpable but still retain his blood innocence. Unintentional killing or killing in battle does count. Gabrielle was in no way morally culpable for the life she took -- the willing sacrifice pretty much shoved the dagger into Gabrielle's hand and then threw herself on it, while Gabrielle was standing there immobilized with shock.
Even though on the show, they called Gabrielle's former blood innocence her "innocence of evil," I think this was a case of an unreliable narrator (or rather, a narrator with an agenda -- they're the bad guys!) We speculated on the board that perhaps loss of blood innocence wouldn't have been so important if Xena hadn't made such a big deal over it. I can understand the members' points, but I disagree. We also speculated that maybe blood innocence was like virginity. But ummm... sex is good and murder is bad, y'know? So that can't be the whole story either. The way that I view it is that blood innocence is one aspect in the larger concept that we call "innocence" in the childish sense, not the moral sense. Before the sacrifice, Gabrielle did not experientially know the kind of damage that her hands and weapons were capable of dealing. After the sacrifice, she did know. And everything changed. (If we're doing reminiscing-type tangents ... I got very frustrated when the prevailing mood of the board was that Xena had a slight Madonna-complex about Gabrielle, that Xena was the one defining blood innocence and doing it for selfish reasons -- because she couldn't stand seeing her idol morally tarnished. It's a purely intellectual frustration. I sometimes think that the board in general was too hard on Xena because they assumed -- with Xena herself -- that Xena was already damaged, and that Gabrielle somehow deserved to be spared. At one time, Xena was a punk kid who led her townspeople into battle, got someone she loved killed, and killed in battle for the first time and had her entire way of seeing the world changed. She wanted to spare Gabrielle that pain. She didn't succeed, but she tried really hard, and I think Gabrielle took that in the spirit it was intended.)
BTW, I'd intended just to define what the Rift was, and I'm nowhere near the concept anymore!
Besides losing her blood innocence in the temple, Gabrielle was magically-impregnated with arguably the most ambiguous character in the entire show, Hope. It became almost a joke that board members started Hope Wars when we were bored. I got involved at the beginning before I knew any better, but once I understood the depth of feeling that people on both sides of the Hope Issue held, I stayed out of it too.
Xena tries to kill baby Hope. Gabrielle defends her and eventually sends her away in a basket, then lies to Xena about Hope being alive. Xena takes off to go assassinate a Chinese boy-leader. Gabrielle betrays her to stop her and nearly gets Xena executed. Xena assassinates the Chinese kid anyway and lies to Gabrielle about it. (The kid was pure evil. Really. I don't actually fault Xena for what she did, just for lying about it.) Hope, who grows at the magical-baby rate, shows up as a young child and kills Xena's eleven year old son. Gabrielle poisons Hope and then debates drinking the poison herself.
And as you can see, Steve Sears certainly wasn't kidding about going dark!! That's actually the second-most beautiful haunting image in the whole show, in my opinion -- Gabrielle holding the flask to her mouth, Xena watching her from the forest with those empty eyes, Gabrielle finally setting the flask down.
And then we have the Xena Musical (sorry to the Xena creators, but the only real one in my opinion). It's brilliant and scary and ridiculous in places and Gabrielle's parts are very obviously dubbed (and also too pretty for what she's going through) and it contains one of my favorite songs in the world. And no, actually, it's not "Love of Your Love" -- that's my second favorite song. My favorite is the end of "Hate is the Star" where Gabrielle starts out with "I never thought that we'd be distanced by a hate," and the horror of what their friendship has become and the realization that they still need each other and what they have still exists even behind all the impossibilities and ... love triumphs. (Missy Good's fanfic "Darkness Falls" used the same concept only without all the supernatural singing -- what if Xena and Gabrielle only had human methods to use to do it, could they still have found their way back to each other? The story's answer is "yes," just involving way more time than would have worked for TV. I got Missy Good to sign a printed chapter from "Darkness Falls" at the last convention I went to. I'm very proud of that.)
I believe in fandom terminology, The Rift is over after the musical episode. But I consider The Rift to have stretched through the beginning of season 4. In the last two episodes of Season 3, it's revealed that Hope is still alive, and, in order to kill her / beat her and keep Dahak from rising again, Gabrielle throws herself and Hope together into a flame pit. So season 4 starts out with Xena questioning Hades about where Gabrielle is. They're finally reunited in the third episode of season 4, "A Family Affair."
Okay. So, when I was attempting to convince my mother that "Xena" was an awesome show, I sent her some episode choices. Basically, by season 3, "Xena" switched between episodes that furthered the overall story and episodes that didn't (so even though The Rift lasted more than a season, maybe a third of the episodes were all about The Rift -- maybe a bit more than that; again it's been so long I can't remember very well). I took out the discs that had Rift episodes on them, mailed them to my mother, and told her which episodes to watch.
She just watched all the episodes on the discs that I sent. Oh, well. They were mostly clustered anyway.
The last episode that I'd intended for my mother to see was "A Family Affair" with the reunion between Xena and Gabrielle. Mom backed up and watched all three episodes on disc 1 of season 4 of Xena: Warrior Princess.
I'm writing this as if my audience hasn't ever seen "Xena," but if you have seen season 4, you'll know that the first two episodes are mostly flashbacks from Xena's time with Borias, and then there's that spiritual battle with Alti at the end. From my reading of my old Xena board: fan favorite part: Borias is hot, fan least favorite part: Xena looks like she's on drugs the whole time. I actually adore those episodes, flaws and all. I don't think Alti is necessarily a well-rounded villain, but I think she's an example of a very real possibility of what a human being can become with enough dark magic. It's Xena's choice in particular that kills me: go forward to eternity and abandon her mission in this life, or go backwards and leave Gabrielle behind -- maybe not forever, but at least for the rest of Xena's life. I know that sounds confusing since Gabrielle wasn't really dead, but Xena didn't know that, so in her mind that was the choice before her, and it is just SO beautiful.
So. My mother watched those episodes instead. My dad chose that particular moment to walk into the living room.
My conservative Protestant minister father's only glimpse of "Xena: Warrior Princess" was Xena and Borias humping under the bear rug. Probably the most explicit "they got away with that on television?" scene in the entire show -- well, at least explicit Like That; they pushed the violence boundaries a lot farther later on. With all the blurriness and the drugged camera angles and, um, certain noises so you didn't see anything but you didn't have to.
Chances that my dad will EVER watch "Xena" again: zero!
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