Xena: Warrior Princess: A Few Reflections

Reading of STARZ's revival of its Spartacus television series put me in mind of that first big Sam Raimi-Lucy Lawless period drama collaboration, Xena: Warrior Princess. A spin-off of the then recent hit Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (where the Xena character first appeared) the Hercules/Xenaverse would seem emblematic of the contrast between television in the '90s and television today--not least in the existence then of a market for first-run syndicated drama that was often filled with relatively low-cost genre fare, and the tendency of such to unabashedly presenting the public with unpretentious light entertainment.

I imagine that it was mainly as such that most people came to enjoy those two particular shows, though there were differences, not least in how each show handled the darker elements in its premise. Hercules' backstory, consistent with the most well-known version of the mythology, makes the starting point of his adventures his murdering his wife and children in a fit of madness caused in him by his father Zeus' wife Hera in the course of her unending war on all the children he had sired in the course of his adulteries (the gods "petty and cruel" as the narration over the opening credits sequence had it). However, the backstory stayed in the back for the most part as the hero, if having tragedy behind him (and some tragedy ahead of him too), was just about always the uncomplicated, upright, pure-hearted champion of all that is right and good bounding knight errant-style from one adventure to the next fighting and defeating divine and human tyranny up to the last episode--and beyond.

By contrast the darker side of the tale is foregrounded in Xena's story because of what she had been before, a warlord with a long record of atrocity behind her who is now trying to move on from that and not finding the going easy, not least because the war god Ares was constantly trying to lure her back to her old ways, and because the consequences of her actions keep catching up with her, not least as former victims of hers become victimizers, and often came after her personally--most implacably, Callisto. Meanwhile, even where this is not the case Xena's particular adventures often denied her a way of saving the day through uncomplicated heroism, the character constantly having to choose the lesser of two evils, with the grimdark last season (the season of episodes like "Who's Gurkhan" and "Legacy," and "The Abyss") frequently not giving her much to choose between one and the other--such that if the end of Xena along with the end of her epoch was a controversial choice with fans it seems that that was the only credible one given where the producers had already decided to go with the series.

Looking back at those seasons after many decades of grimdark being so fashionable and so pervasive, what are we to make of that choice? Especially given how much of what David Walsh called "market pessimism" we are subject to--unearned pessimism, pessimism taken up as a style choice, however far from innocent taking it up may be politically--one may wonder if this is what went on here, especially given that this was, at least at the start, a lightweight adventure. However, a glance at, for example, the episode "To Helicon and Back" gives me pause here. After all, after the show's nearly six seasons of feminist Rah-Rah generally and regarding the Amazons particularly (a thing the makers of the show would not trifle with lightly given not just what a big piety this was then and since but how much that feminism did to lend Xena some cachet as more than "just another action hour" in the identity politics-obsessed '90s), here we saw a demigod lure the Amazons into a military trap so bloody the show's own makers called the Saving Private Ryan of the series and then, after the Amazons' ultimate victory over their foe, the survivors looking about themselves and seeing very few of themselves left, after which these few survivors each in succession get a close-up in which they look at the camera and say "To a strong Amazon nation" as the bitter irony hangs over all of them that an Amazon nation is what no longer exists as the episode draws to a close, and with it the last appearance of any "Amazon nation" on the show. Where previously the show had, rather light-mindedly, celebrated the idea of women living by the sword, here it showed them suffering what happens to all who live by the sword, their dying by it, in a tale of the futility, destructiveness and ultimate emptiness of war and revenge--not telling, showing. Looking at it it seems that rather than bleakness being an unearned style choice what we actually get is tragedy, and the charge of market pessimism that so many do deserve unwarranted this time around in a show that, at least by that stage of things, was rather more ambitious than non-fans generally seem to have recognized it for being--especially when we consider that the tragic course is not inappropriate for those telling a tale ultimately inspired by ancients who "clear in thought, but poor in technique," had a "faith in inevitable fate" to which humanity could do nothing but submit.