Xena: Warrior Princess Normal Size Recaps: Season 6
by Zelempa*** 6x10 Old Ares Had a Farm Xena and Gabby help mortal Ares become a simple farmer.
*** 6x21-22 A Friend in Need (1 & 2) Xena and Gabby travel to Japan to help an old girlfriend of Xena's.
6x10 Old Ares Had A Farm
Xena and Gabrielle help the now-mortal Ares go undercover from bounty hunters by posing as a simple farmer. One of the few comedy episodes of season 5. Xena gradually developed a strong division between comedy episodes and serious epsidoes with serious episodes getting increasingly melodramatic and comedy episodes becoming needlessly silly and lowbrow. This episode commits some of the sins of late-Xena comedy with the sex jokes and goofy sound effects (like a bouncy sound when Ares flexes his chest muscles to impress a girl).
However, the episode does a good job of making Ares likeable. This is definitely the "we have officially given up on ever trying to make this character viable as a villain" episode. He's defanged in the extreme, but he's not good; just impotently bitchy. Xena and Gabby come off as less sympathetic as they order Ares around and make fun of him. They wear cotton dresses, which is a nice change, but their incredibly modern calico cup bras are distracting (because of the anachronism, not the boobies! the boobies are fine), as is Ares' sweatpants.
Highlights: Xena, Gabrielle, and Ares share a bed; Ares literally pets the dog; Gabrielle and Xena stage an argument for the benefit of some bad guy in which Gabrielle plays the woman scorned, claiming Xena has jilted her for Ares, and the verbal argument devolves into a rather impressive fight with sword, staff, and knife.
Slash Watch: Overall, Xena and Gabby come off very much as a couple; though Ares hits on Xena, he seems to know where he stands. At one point he asks Gabrielle "Is there anything we don't disagree about?" and as they both glance at Xena, Ares amends, "Besides her." As Xena and Gabby ride off into the sunset, Xena makes a remark about feeling loved, and we pan out over the scenery to a Brokeback-sounding musical score.
6x21-22 A Friend in Need (Parts 1 & 2)
Xena and Gabrielle are planning yet another trip when they're interrupted by a monk from Japan who tells Xena her friend is in trouble. Because of course Xena spent some time in Japan in her past. Xena and Gabby reroute their journey and we intercut the trip with flashbacks. Early warlord Xena was in Japan on the trail of some fantastic sword, trailed by a very sweet, very pure young princess who thought Xena was just fantastic, which sort of annoyed Xena, because she wanted to be seen as a badass threat, dammit, not a cuddly teacher. Anyway, the girl is dead but she is now being threatened by a demon which can cross into the afterlife and which can only be killed by the magic sword which Xena got in the flashback and I guess still has (where has she been keeping it all this time?)
Xena and Gabrielle have some adventures in Japan and Xena, after teaching a resistant Gabrielle how to do the pinch, allows herself to be killed so she can enter the land of the dead. Gabrielle goes on a mission to save Xena, which involves bringing her ashes to a special lifegiving spring by sunset on a certain day. When she arrives, Spirit Xena and the demon are fighting nearby. Gabby briefly loses the ashes and takes time out from her quest to gratuitously transfer lifegiving springwater to Xena's mouth from her own. This gives Spirit Xena the juice she needs to finish the job. With just a few moments to spare, Gabby is about to put Xena's ashes in the spring, but Xena stops her. Gabrielle returns to Greece by boat with Spirit Xena hugging her and kissing her head and assuring her she'll always be around.
This episode is very beautiful--beautifully shot, beautifully staged--and there are some good epic-adventure, epic-love-story moments. And, hey, they gave us a pretty graphic kiss. However, it's an odd end to the series. The problem of Xena's impossible world travel, both in the past and present, is a recurring one in the series, so I shouldn't hold it against any one episode, but honestly, it's just ridiculous here. It takes them, what, a couple of days to get to Japan? And really, I would have liked the final episode to take place in Greece. Perhaps, in an ideal world, the finale would have to do with characters we have met before. I also feel unsettled about the series ending with one (and only one) of Xena and Gabrielle being dead.
Highlights: Xena lets Gabrielle come up with a scheme for how to save a burning village, and does what she says. They work together well, and in the end, Xena says it wasn't the way she would have chosen to do it, but it worked. They stand together arm in arm all heroic-like. Oh, and the kiss was pretty good too.
Lowlights: During a snowfall the Japanese girl actually utters the phrase "snow falling on cedars."
Slash Watch: Over the top. First of all, we have the flashbacks in part 1, and the relationship between Xena and her pre-Gabby protegee. Despite being in Japan the younger woman's style of worship is very ancient Greek, with her very transparently trying to make Xena into her mentor/lover. In the present day/second part, Xena continually refers to Gabrielle as her "soulmate." Xena and the other girl undress Gabby and paint on her body. And then Gabby chooses to revive Xena with the special lifegiving water by taking taking it in her mouth and then kissing Xena fairly erotically. There is zero reason for her to do this. She had free hands.
I saw this episode after having abandoned Xena in early season 4, during the boring India arc, and not returning to it for about ten years. I loved it passionately during seasons 2 and early 3--it was my first experience of embracing a same-sex pairing of adventurers on the small screen, and by no means my last. Since abandoning Xena going on to eventually enjoy various m/m fandoms, while not really enjoying overtly gay shows because they're about nothing but relationships, I came up with my idea of the ideal show: it would be primarily an adventure show, but the two same-sex main characters would slowly come to fall in love, and it would be subtextual at first, but then they would just be together and that would be that. When I finally at the cajoling of a fellow Slash Watcher caved and watched this finale, I realized that while I was gone, Xena had essentially become that show. I mean, there's no point in looking for hints anymore. It is simply text. And I'm glad for that, though it would have been nice if they could have made the show Slash Watchier without also making it--I don't know--worse? is maybe the word I'm looking for?
Still, though it might have been better, this really wasn't a bad finale and I hope more shows follow in its example w/r/t ending on a note of deep and abiding hero-sidekick love.