Xena - Warrior Princess - Series 3

Xena--you gotta love her. After all, she could snap your neck just by straightening her knees. She sprang fully armed from producer Sam Raimi's head in March 1995 to flesh out an otherwise routine episode of the television series Hercules: a 5' 10" high-kicking, horse-riding, chakram-throwing ancient-Greek-warrior princess, who mustered armies the way some women shop for shoes, turning heroes against one another as gleefuly as she laid waste to sweet little villages.

Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurk doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules that her spin-off was an instant certainty--and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard, Gabrielle, her constant companion. Set in a lush New Zealand doubling for the pagan Mediterranean, as misruled by Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the rest of the Mount Olympus gang, Xena: Warrior Princess recounts these exploits as the duo confront gods, monsters, warlords, idiots and anachronisms, as well as their own flaws and desires, at the hilarious and sometimes unsettling mythological crossroads where touchy-feely Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao. --Honey Glass