XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS. Saturday, 8 p.m., WPIX/Ch. 11
If you haven't seen the syndicated action series "Xena: Warrior Princess" in a week or two, you've missed a lot. Actually, 25 years.
Things in the "Xena" universe have been altered considerably.
Two episodes ago, Xena (Lucy Lawless) concocted a scheme to shelter her newborn, Eve, from the gods who wanted her slain.
Xena (Lucy Lawless) finds that kids grow up too fast in this week's episode. Convincingly faking her own death as well as those of her child and her partner, Gabrielle (Renee O'Connor), Xena fooled the immortals. Even Kevin Smith's Ares, the god of war who has a love-hate relationship with Xena (he loved her, she hated him), was taken in and entombed the seemingly lifeless bodies of Xena and Gabrielle in an isolated icy shrine.
Last week, Xena and Gabrielle emerged from their frozen isolation and learned, to their shock (a shock echoed by most viewers), that they had been on ice for 25 years.
Eve, the infant daughter who had been taken to safety by a Roman ally, was now a full-grown warrior princess of her own — and, like the rest of Rome, knew herself only as Livia, a ruthless woman who slaughtered entire villages for sport.
In Saturday's episode, written by George Strayton and Tom O'Neill and directed by Mark Beesley, Xena and Livia (Adrienne Wilkinson, an unfamiliar but very compelling actress) meet on the battlefield, with memorable results. Next week, Xena confronts the gods on their home turf of Olympus — setting in motion a "twilight of the gods."
This 25-year fast-forward trick is quite a bold move for the "Xena" writeer-producers. Yes, Xena and Gabrielle look the same, because of their flash-frozen hilbernation, and the various gods they encounter will look the same, because immortals don't age. The other continuing and recurring characters, though, will be either retired or very wrinkled.
Joxer (Ted Raimi), the comic sidekick, is indeed a generation older now — old enough to have married Meg (one of Xena's look-alikes, now looking a lot more portly) and to have sired a strapping son named Virgil (William Gregory Lee). Xena, Gabrielle, Joxer and Virgil all take to the battlefield to combat Livia — and one of them is felled in the process.
With Livia hating Xena and threatening to kill all of her loved ones, this story line is especially dark, fittingly tragic and excitingly unpredictable.
"How does it feel, Xena," Ares asks her harshly, "knowing the person you love despises you?"
For Xena, it feels terrible. The action sequences pitting mother against daughter are bursting with subtext. When Lawless, the star of the series, hurt her back years ago, the show's producers wrote around her injury by having the spirit of Xena transferred into the bodies of others. When Lawless became pregnant in real life, the writers found a way to write a pregnancy, and even a baby, into the story line.
And now, rather than have Xena lug around a baby, or shift her to some other horse like some medieval Murphy Brown, "Xena: Warrior Princess" skips a generation.
It's a major turn that came without warning, and just might turn out to be one of the best surprises of the season.
Original Publication Date: 05/10/2000
