Friend in Need Part II

I'm so glad we had this time together,
Just to have a laugh or sing a song.
Seems we just get started and before you know it
Comes the time we have to say, "So long."
   -- Carol Burnett

The last episode starts in the same place the first episode did, with Xena burying her armor and sword. This time she actually goes through with her suicidal plans, but she decides at the last minute not to bury the chakram. That gets passed on to Gabrielle, a fitting legacy.

Those were some hellacious taiko drummers - for a minute I thought the Japanese army had resurrected Gareth from A Day in the Life. Historical points for the XenaStaff: taiko drums really were used in battle to stir up the armies and shake up the enemies.

The whole "three armies" business was pretty useless. Of the three armies, we saw a few get blown up and a couple dozen get slaughtered by Xena... and then none of them are heard from again. While everyone's worrying about Yodoshi, is anybody taking care of these three mythical armies that are knocking on the door?

I'm very glad that this episode opened with Gabrielle getting a clue about Xena shipping her off. How many times could she have possibly fallen for that "look, a bright shiny object! And now, I'm off" trick?

The mushroom cloud business was weird, bizarre - how many incendiary devices could that army have had, and how was anyone left standing after it was over? But I took it as a sign of the episode setting. People get easily offended by generalizations, but I'm going to make one and hope no one gets peeved: Japanese entertainment seems chock full of mushroom clouds. Godzilla and a dozen other monsters were born of them, and most of the japanimation I've seen can't let an explosion NOT form a mushroom cloud. So I guess it makes XenaVersian sense that if there's a big explosion in Japa, it forms a mushroom cloud. It's a bold choice for an *American* show to use in Japan, but whatever.

So I was wrong last week: Xena's bikini samurai outfit isn't convenient for seppuku, it's convenient for being made into a pincushion. She got five - count 'em five - arrows in her before going berserker on the soldiers. I can't imagine how much swinging a sword with arrows in both shoulders would hurt. Xena's reactions throughout that final battle are of more and more determination as she knows the fight's really going down like she planned and this was going to be it. Holy shmoly.

Xena goes down screaming Gabrielle's name in battle. In a way, she does get to live the last 30 seconds of her life looking into Gab's eyes... in a twisted, hallucinogenic kind of way.

Xena's hell on the wardrobe department! She gets nekkid twice in five minutes, with red kimonos reappearing just fine after Yodoshi fire-whipped the first one off of her. Thank goodness for those gremlins with the sewing kits!

Sign of the show: When Gabrielle realizes she's talking to a ghost, she's more peeved than anything else. "Geez, AGAIN?!?" Xena immediately points out that they've dealt with death before, which is a good thing, because if she hadn't, every member of the viewing audience would have.

I thought Gab's next line was telling: "How could you have let yourself be killed?" Even standing in front of her ghost, Gabrielle has absolute faith that Xena could only be killed if she had allowed it.

Xena can't touch the chakram, but can hug Gabrielle. I guess being a soulmate has its privileges.

Loved it that when the ghost-killer showed up, Gab turned into a guard dog in a heartbeat. Rruff!

I realize that Akemi's tattoo was a wonderful thing she did for Gabrielle. But I couldn't help chuckling when old galpal meets new and offers "There's something I'd like to give you"... a few hours of scarring pain with a bunch of needles. Ain't that the way!

Gabrielle wins the award for the absolute coolest look of the past season or so. I thought the tattoo was sock- knocking, then they wrapped it up in that blue and black samurai outfit. Lordy, that was so awesome it was nearly illegal.

What a difference a few short years make. Back in the first seasons, even when Gabrielle was as macho as she could be, it was more like watching a kitten spitting. Now, when she makes short work of a camp and screams "GIVE ME HER HEAD!!!" into the rain, I believed without a doubt that entire armies better tremble before this chick.

Finding Xena's corpse was majorly disturbing and gross, especially the shot of the body dropping from the ropes. Let's all make a pact to just tell the kiddies that Xena lived happily ever after. But now with that said, I gotta point out: the wounds were wrong. Xena was shot in the right arm and the left knee, but the body had those wounds switched. (Flipped image?)

Awesome sound work during the "sounds behind the sounds" showdown between Gabrielle and the "you're not a samurai, you're a fraud" dude. Kudos to the foley artists! And to Gabrielle: she takes him down with one swing, then refuses three times over to give him a warrior's death. Do NOT piss off the bard, especially when she's in a hurry.

Slaughter in the tea house! The ghost killer and the monk bite it most gruesomely with barely a moment to see it go by. Which, in a twisted way, I liked, since that would be the way something like that would go down in a real battle.

One confusing moment in the tea house slaughter: can you drown a ghost? What the heck was Akemi so worried about?

Yodoshi loses an arm and takes two sword thrusts to the gut, but he's the Black Knight of Japa. "It's only a flesh wound! I'll breathe your kneecaps off!"

Enduring image of the episode #1: Gabrielle standing alone in a forest over Xena's funeral pyre. Ouch, my heart.

They never said this specifically, but I assumed that Gabrielle took that non-samurai guy's horse after she defeated him. Which means he speared his own horse to stop her. JEEZ, what a creep!

The non-samurai and Gabrielle's second fight was a really neat boxing match. Cool fight.

The kiss was a very strange rendition of the age-old "are they or aren't they" game. This time (right up to the very end of the show) they continue to dance around the possibilities, but with a new twist: the motivation for the kiss is purely platonic, but the photography of the kiss is purely erotic. If I had seen that kiss without the plot explanation, I would have said that if that was for any medical reason I would eat my fedora. Chomp, chomp.

Gabrielle uses the chakram! Backlit for heroic coolness and everything! And she looks just as shocked as I was that she did it. Yet another advanced telegraph that Gabrielle is going to be the hero next.

And in the very end, the story is kneecapped by a last- minute switcheroo. Xena is redeemed NOW? I thought that issue was settled a couple of seasons ago. And we just now decide to mention that the souls have to be avenged by Xena's death? Permanently? When Yodoshi and Akemi, the two who are the real forces behind all the nastiness, are now shuffled off the mortal coil? It was a real shame, but I spent the last five minutes yelling "WHAT!?!?!?!? Come AGAIN?!?!" at the screen.

We also get swamped in the end with the mulligan stew that the show has made of religions and the afterlife. Xena stays a ghost? Whatever happened to tartarus, the Amazon land of the dead, reincarnation, and heaven? Are all of those trumped by the latest version of an afterlife we've seen, or does she visit each in turn?

Enduring image of the episode #2: Gabrielle alone on the boat. Ouch, my heart again.

So, depending on your frame of mind, there's two possible ways to view this ending. The nice way: Xena's story is closed, she's found her meaning, she got a great warrior's death, Gabrielle stands proud as a complete hero herself, and the soulmates will continue together as always. The nasty way: Xena bit it because she tripped over a plot device, died horribly, and now Gabrielle's left alone and everyone else thinks she's a lunatic because she's talking to the air. I've bounced between these frames of mind a lot the past few days.

Is this really Xena's permanent end? Of course not; I still don't buy that. There's no such thing as death on Xena. Maybe six months from now, Gab will find a way to bring Xena back anyway. And it's certainly not the end of Gabrielle's story, regardless. So I don't see this as the end-all book- closing event. Just another chapter. A major one, but a chapter.

Ending an amazing show like Xena is tough to do. I think I would have had mixed feelings no matter what they did. Everybody lives: cheesy and too trite. Everybody dies: too depressing, and been done already. I have to hand it to the Xena folks: One dies, one lives was the riskiest way to end it. I don't think that risky automatically equals good, but it was gutsy. And could have been much worse. If Xena had stayed dead because Gabrielle failed to get her to the fountain, there would have been a one-woman riot through the streets of Columbus.

It's strange to be writing my last wool-gathering. I'm really not sure how to wrap it up. Xena has brought me a lot of great things, beyond just six years of cool entertainment. I've been lucky to be a fan, and lucky as a fan. My thanks one more time to everyone who's ever written about one of my wool-gatherings, even if they were to nitpick my nitpickings, but especially the ones that encouraged me to keep it up. I'm going to miss the show like crazy, but I'm also taking a lot away from it that's going to last beyond the reruns. I hope all the rest of the hardcore diehard nutballs can say the same.

Some people have asked me what I plan to do next, so I'll post an answer here. The Rate-A-Xena site will stay up and running until the votes dwindle down to a trickle. Once that happens, I'll shut off the voting booths and not update the site any more, but the ratings, wool-gatherings, and convention reports will remain for time immemorial. Myself, I'm going to be turning my attentions back to the site that I used to work on until Xena showed up, throttled it dead, and demanded my attention instead. I used to write movie reviews and weekly updates at http://www.bethgriese.pair.com/dark.htm. The site's full of cobwebs now, but within a month it'll be shining like new, I swear it! Feel free to visit; fellow Xena alums are always welcome.

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