Xena: Warrior Princess Season 2

Xena: Warrior Princess

Xena: Warrior Princess Season 1

SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.

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201: Orphan of War 1996 September 30
(First watched 2025-08-17) Me two episodes ago: "They've gotta be running out of family surprise episodes by now?" Well damn, how much wronger could I have been. They just dropped the secret son card.

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202: Remember Nothing 1996 October 7
(First watched 2025-08-18) For a moment I thought they'd say her younger brother had somehow survived until she stabbed him at the beginning of this episode, but nope, they went a different way about bringing him onscreen.

It's A Wonderful Life, warrior style. I feel like this concept had enough ways to play with it that this episode alone couldn't do it justice. Like, the limitation placed on Xena was that things would go back to the way they were if she spilled blood in rage. Now, that leaves a lot of room for possible technicalities and workarounds! If she calms her emotions so her blood-spilling is cool and collected, does that count? If she kills people by burning them to death, poisoning, strangling, or other ways that don't technically spill blood, does that count?

It also only allowed a pretty shallow view of the differences. Basically she was able to see the difference it made on her immediate family and friends and decided that the "real" history was better. But we get no glimpse of the potential differences in the world due to Xena not being a warlord for a decade! Maybe hundreds of people are living happier healthier lives! Maybe other warlords just did the same damage! We don't know. We know some people like the centaurs and Amazons are worse off, but we still don't get the big picture. If the world was better for many people in this version, she could've found some other ways to positively influence things without returning the original history. She could take on the role of teacher, influencing others to do good in the world though she is by godly trickery unable to get involved.

I'll also note that just an episode after introducing her son, she never had a moment of pause about "Oh, in this alternate history my son doesn't even exist."

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203: The Giant Killer 1996 October 14
(First watched 2025-08-23) This is I think the third time they've run into the one-god types, though they all seem to be pretty independent groups. Last time we had a story heavily based on Abraham and Isaac, but this time they're straight up identifying as Abraham's people. This time we get an extended version of the story of David and Goliath, with the twist that Goliath is an old friend of Xena's... but again, wasn't this another friendship forged in her warlord days when she was an asshole?

Moses or whoever was writing all these stories down in what became the Bible sure had some sort of anti-Xena bias to keep leaving her out.

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204: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun 1996 October 21
(First watched 2025-08-26) Without researching I don't know if popular knowledge is off or they took more liberties than usual... I thought Bacchus was a god into wine and stuff? But here he's basically the devil and creating straight up vampires?

Ted Raimi's Joxer is back, now a barely-competent ally rather than a totally-incompetent adversary.

Most shows I watch have more... cohesive special effects so it's enough to easily suspend my disbelief throughout. But in this case it was kind of fun to consider from shot to shot how they were dealing with having one character just being a disembodied head. Like, here they're clearly just covering up his body. Here his head is somewhat poorly superimposed into the shot. Here they're holding a physical prop with mechanical mouth movements.

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205: Return of Callisto 1996 October 28
(First watched 2025-08-31) When a major character goes through some big life change in what's not something like a season opener or ender, something is probably doomed by the end of the episode. But even by that standard, this was pretty rushed. Gabrielle went from newlywed to widow in about 5 minutes of screen time. I wonder how this will change her character going forward? Like will she not so easily fall for a new guy every other week?

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206: Warrior... Princess... Tramp 1996 November 4
(First watched 2025-09-05) Three episodes in a row with Joxer... I didn't realize he'd be so recurring. But he's fun, so.

A followup to last season's episode where there's a princess who looks just like Xena, only now there's additionally a _third_ person who looks just like Xena. They play this off as just some coincidence, but you've got to start wondering if they've all got a father who was sowing some wild oats a few decades back.

This episode was more work for the viewer thanks to this strange premise. Any time the camera shifted or lost track of Lucy Lawless, you have to try to quickly ascertain: Which character is this? Which character are they trying to pretend they are at this moment? Which character do the OTHER people in the scene currently think they are?

I was going to note that becoming a widow has made no change to Gabrielle, but I see it stated that this was originally intended for earlier in the season, so it makes sense that it wouldn't even have been a consideration.

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207: Intimate Stranger 1996 November 11
(First watched 2025-09-07) Joxer four episodes in a row? I don't think Salmoneus has managed that. I don't think Iolaus has managed that.

Feels a little weird to have two episodes in a row where Lucy Lawless is playing not-Xenas that look and dress like Xena. At the end of the episode she and Callisto remain bodyswapped with Xena's original body now in Tartarus. If I didn't know better I'd say this was a creative way to do a mid-show recasting of the title character, but I presume this will get straightened out soon enough.

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208: Ten Little Warlords 1996 November 18
(First watched 2025-09-09) Five consecutive for Joxer. When does he get added to the opening credits?

So Sisyphus didn't look like he did on his previous appearances. Is he supposed to have stolen someone else's body while getting out of the underworld too, or is it just a normal recasting?

So it seems Sisyphus made a deal with Hades, where he'd become the new god of war once he provided Hades with 10 warlords, but... why? Wouldn't Hades already have plenty of dead warlords in the underworld? What's he need another 10 for?

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209: A Solstice Carol 1996 December 9
(First watched 2025-09-15) What a weird mish-mash of an episode. Extremely silly even by my standards. Part Dickens transposed to classical Greece, part Santa Claus origin story (took me a while to catch on with the character named Senticles), part standard Xena beat-em-up. And they weren't given names, but the people they met at the end seemed stand-ins for Mary/Joseph/Jesus.

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210: The Xena Scrolls 1997 January 13
(First watched 2025-09-19) Over the years I have learned to generally dislike clip shows, but episodes like this make me think there should be further classification. If an episode is 80% clips and 20% uninteresting framing story, like how TNG season 2 ended? That's bad. But an episode like this was probably a third or less reused clips, with a very fun framing story. Entirely different beast.

The whole thing is unabashedly Indiana Jones pastiche, which... good! Closer to Indiana Jones movies than Young Indiana Jones got to be most of the time. That separated by thousands of years each of several notable characters has exactly 1 notable descendant is a trope that doesn't make much sense, but in a story not meant to be taken seriously at all I'll allow it. Even Joxer is at this point considered notable enough for his also-Ted-Raimi descendant to be important here.

The bit at the very end where this stuff is being proposed for TV/movie is also a well-worn trope, but I liked the gag about how it didn't need to be big budget, they could produce it in some third world country for cheap!

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211: Here She Comes... Miss Amphipolis 1997 January 20
(First watched 2025-09-21) Hey, they finally gave Ted Raimi the week off. Salmoneus was around, so I guess he took up the recurring guest star budget.

When one of the contestants was a "Miss Artiphys" I noted the similarity to "artifice" but wasn't sure if it might be an actual place name. But when they reveal that Miss Artiphys is actually a drag queen, their wordplay became apparent.

Naming the winner "Miss Known World" is kind of funny, but they sure know a lot more of the world than the piddly number of local villages that sent contestants.

I read on the wiki this is Salmoneus's final Xena appearance. That's too bad.

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212: Destiny 1997 January 27
(First watched 2025-09-2X) I found it hard to care much. The biggest problem I've had with Xena as a character is her shift from asshole warlord to do-gooder felt too fast and simple, so having a flashback to the asshole warlord days... why should I care? Great, here's how the asshole warlord learned how to incapacitate and kill people with pressure points. Here's the asshole warlord taking Julius Caesar prisoner, then feeling betrayed when his promises of a future together are lies.

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213: The Quest 1997 February 3
(First watched 2025-09-30) Part of my problem with this episode is my own problem. I thought it pretty strange that it just started with Xena dead and no explanation of how she ended up that way, or in a... spirit state. Buuuut that's how the last episode ended. I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention or was tired, because I thought after she had her ~NDE it was just a given that she'd wake up.

Unusual use of Iolaus, just being there for one scene. It's a believable thing in the world of the franchise as we know it, just unusual for a show to do. I guess he had to stay out to leave some room for Autolycus.

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214: A Necessary Evil 1997 February 10
(First watched 2025-10-06) OK, so until she was needed for the events of this episode... Hercules and Xena were just going to leave Callisto where she was? That seemed a pretty low security place to keep someone that dangerous. She was in an underground area with a hole in the ceiling. All it would take is one person with a rope to get her out. Or one trapped person with all the time in the world to fashion some sort of ladder. Luckily it seems they didn't press their luck for more than a few weeks.

Still, by the end of the episode both Velasca and Callisto are gods. They've trapped them, but... those things don't tend to go for eternity like Xena was wishing. Whenever she shows up next, she'll be more of a danger than when she was purely an immortal in an easy-to-escape underground room.

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215: A Day in the Life 1997 February 17
(First watched 2025-10-11) Another episode directed by Michael Hurst.

So this was a more comedic episode than usual. But it didn't play with the structure as much as I expected given the unusual addition of the... chapter titles or whatever.

Lightning really took down the giant Gareth in a big way. When Iolaus got struck by lightning he just got cartoonishly disheveled.

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216: For Him the Bell Tolls 1997 February 24
(First watched 2025-11-10) More Xena-lite... did she get another injury.

Joxer is back, and now he's got a cool theme song.

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217: The Execution 1997 April 7
(First watched 2026-04-04) This was a pretty good episode, though it seems the kind that wouldn't work as well on rewatches. There's a lot of mystery as to what has actually happened, and that having been solved won't be so mysterious next time around.

One thing it shows well is how easily our heroes can go bad. Like, Gabrielle assumes she's always right and her friends must always be innocent, so she feels there's nothing wrong with her taking a man found guilty of murder, breaking him out of prison, and helping him escape.

I did find it kind of sketchy that when they came to town and Meleager had already been found guilty, with the judge saying there was evidence... but all it was was one old woman's eyewitness testimony of what she thought she saw in the night? That wouldn't hold up in a court today.

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218: Blind Faith 1997 April 14
(First watched 2026-04-20) Felt built around some tropes, buuuut when you're making hundreds of episodes that's not so unexpected. A guy tries (sort of) to kill Xena for the glory, then they're forced to work together to save Gabrielle and give him another chance at killing Xena. But by the end of it he's acknowledged that he's not really the killing type and maybe being more Modern Xena rather than Warlord Xena is a good thing.

So Gabrielle ended up faux-royal (again) in a weird plot to marry her to a corpse so the royal succession would go one way instead of another. The conspirators really seem married to the bit (HA). The public didn't know the king was dead and couldn't see the wedding, but they still went through with propping up the corpse and having a ceremony and everything.

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219: Ulysses 1997 April 21
(First watched 2026-04-27) I'm most familiar with John D'Aquino as the neighbor from That's My Bush!, so to see him in a heroic role like Ulysses felt kind of funny.

As ever, Xena (the show) plays fast and loose with source material. I remembered The Odyssey taking place over 10 years, but this episode compresses some of its events and Ulysses's Xenaverse odyssey comes to an end only about a season after the end of the Trojan War.

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220: The Price 1997 April 28
(First watched 2026-05-05) As a character concept, a fair enough idea... just not one that made for what I'd consider a very entertaining episode. But I generally prefer this franchise lighter.

We've seen people fail to try to get Xena to return to her bloodthirstier warlord days before, but here she's caught in a situation with an army barely hanging on and a great force coming for them, so her brutal old ways seem the best way to deal with the situation, without her considering it a turn from good. But Gabrielle is less willing to be flexible in this way, and provides the breakthroughs necessary to lead to a less-deadly outcome for the battle.

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221: The Lost Mariner 1997 May 5

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222: A Comedy of Eros 1997 May 12

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Xena: Warrior Princess Season 3