A Good Day

War isn't just hell. According to Xena, it's a bitch. We get the message in wide-screen, super-scope technicolor, with lots of nasty battles, good people dying and suffering, explosions... the works. And just in case we didn't catch the idea, our buddy Phlanagus gets cuts down in the one moment he looks like he might be forgetting that there's "no glory, no honor" in the monster of battle. Whew!

This episode offers an interesting look at how Xena and Gabrielle's teamwork is changing. In the first fight in the village, things are pretty much like they always have been - Xena takes the front line, Gabrielle gets the innocents to safety (of course, the bard is evermore kick-butt, wacking people into next Tuesday with that staff, and now even knocking spears out of the air). By the end of this episode, there are no innocents to protect, and Gabrielle is leading squadrons while Xena sets plans in motion. They're on more equal footing, offering support to each other now instead of just Gab following Xena's ideas and getting out of the way when things get really nasty. She's neck-deep in the nastiness herself now, too, for better and for worse.

We've seen Xena head-butt plenty of guys before. We've even seen her head-butt guys with helmets before. But the village fight is the first time I remember it being accompanied with a soup-pot metal KLANG! sound. Ouch! The Warrior Princess must have a steel plate in her forehead.

Caesar's standard is different from the purple and black one we saw him use in Deliverer. Maybe he's changed over to summer fashions.

The burning of the village (let's remember again: war's a bitch) was the first of the death visions that Alti showed Xena. She had a teeny role, but I really liked the stoic determination Phlanagus's wife showed when she picked up the first torch, and the respectful near-attention stance she got from Xena for it.

We are in serious need of a Roman scorecard to keep these armies straight. I kept losing track of who was supposed to be a squad of Caesar's, of Pompey's, or of Xena's. (Of course, in Xena's case, that was the plan.) I have no idea how those guys kept from skewering each other when the swords started flying. And did anybody else notice that the Roman tunics look a lot like Gabskirts? Every time they showed legs running by I thought "there goes Gab... no, wait... that's Gab... hold on, they're ALL Gab!"

Pompey got good clues to figure out that Xena was now part of the game - the list of tall Grecian warrior women who can kick half a squad's butts has got to be pretty short. But wow, Caesar has a HECK of a Xena radar - one look at a double-sided standard and he knows Xena's involved? Is everybody else in the Xenaverse that unimaginative that no one else would have come up with it?

Blood innocence theme alert! Gabrielle tells Tamecula that when you kill, "Everything changes... everything", the same line used in Dreamworker and Deliverer. And each time it has marked a major look into the wide-reaching effect that killing someone has. Funny that Tamecula lost his blood innocence in the same way many of us would have guessed that Gabrielle would lose hers. (Although Tam killed the centurion AFTER he had done his damage to Phlanagus; was it a vengeance kill, or was he protecting Gabrielle?)

But even to protect a friend, even after the kills she's already been involved in, Gabrielle can't shoot a man down, and the conflict that's been simmering for a while now between the Greater Good and Do No Harm comes to a full head. Gabrielle is having to fully face now that sometimes killing someone IS for the greater good, and the consequences of choosing not to kill someone leaves her screaming in frustration and pain over Phlanagus's body. When Xena finally finds Gabrielle after searching for her through the battle and tries to take the reins back from her and comfort her, they drop-kicked my heart across the battlefield.

All of the maelstrom in this episode seems to be surrounding Gabrielle and her growth and changes, but look at how much Xena has changed, too. She decided to serve (or maybe ignore) the greater good by rescuing Phlanagus instead of hearing the rest of Caesar's plan. She shows genuine grief at the funeral of Phlanagus and the other villagers and offers words of condolence to his wife. She takes Gabrielle aside to gently suggest that Gab command the battle and takes her refusal to do so without question or reproach, but leaves the door wide open if Gabrielle spots the problem and moves to solve it, which is exactly what the bard ends up doing. (Ever get the feeling someone knows you TOO well, Gabrielle?) Xena wouldn't have done any of these things a few years (or maybe even one year) ago. She would have sacrificed Phlanagus to foil Caesar's plan, wouldn't have understood Gabrielle's reluctance, and wouldn't have given much thought to who died in order to repel Caesar and Pompey's armies.

Speaking of that command business, Gabrielle offers one piece of advice and suddenly she's in the driver's seat. Guess there's no halfway point. Gabrielle carries a sword when she leads the first charge; THAT was a strange sight. But she quickly throws it aside before they actually start meeting baddies.

Xena snatches the Line of the Episode award with aplomb:

"There were only two guards."
"I know. Otherwise I would have had more helmets."

This episode probably has the biggest body count we've seen yet, both generally and personally for Xena. Caesar had 15 legions. A Roman legion was 3,000-6,000 soldiers. Total that and assume that Pompey had about as many men, and you end up with somewhere around 135,000 dead. And Xena was slicing through baddies like butter - she ended up with quite a death toll on her personal tote board, too. She even ends up with her sword stuck in somebody's body and pulls out a dagger to keep slicing up bodies. I'm surprised that this wasn't enough to bring Ares out of hiding to dance with glee.

I love the three-way brawl between Xena, Caesar, and Pompey, but you gotta feel a little sorry for Pompey. He's obviously outclassed in that group. Which makes me wonder a bit how he managed to hold his own so long against Caesar. Caesar's brash "Rome has won" line when he realizes the battle is over and the outcome has been decided must have tasted like ashes when they got to the top and realized he was wrong. Rome didn't win - Greece did. No more armies.

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