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 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 gleefully as she laid waste to sweet little villages. Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurks doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules her spin-off was an instant certainty--and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on a journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled by the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard, Gabrielle, her constant friend. 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. In the second series (first aired US 1996-97) Xena and Gabrielle (plus goofy side-sidekick the Joxer) meet the Fates, the (surprisingly Gothic) Bacchae, Ulysses, Cupid, Goliath, Santa Claus and (perhaps) the baby Jesus, as well as full-on Xena foe Julius Caesar and her former healer-mentor M'Lila. While filming this series, Xena actress Lucy Lawless was thrown by a horse on Tonight with Jay Leno, and injured: hence a sudden slew of swapped-body stories (Callisto, Autolycus and Gabrielle each have to mimic Xena for an episode), while domestic comedy and/or parody stories contribute to the medically advisable action-lite plotlines. Meanwhile, Callisto murders Gabrielle's hubby-to-be, and the narrative tension deepens. --Honey Glass
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