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Final Tributes - Page 5

© Michael Martinez

Giants, centaurs, gods, demons, angels, djinn. Xena has visited her wrath upon mythology after mythology. Nothing is sacred in a show which has been treated with reverence and credited with inspiring pagans around the world. The homages, inside jokes, gentle pokes at fan issues, eye-winking references to the Subtext "which was never really there", "wasn't important", and "has long been put behind us", the bizarre attempts to write a history that has always followed the show 10 (or 35) years in the past, the strange inconsistencies...they've all combined to produce a show which has established formulas only to break them. Just when we think we knew where the characters stand with respect to one another, one of them develops an issue. And they're off again on some mad dash across the landscape to find deeper meaning in the choices they make.

We were treated to the drunken ramblings of Tim Thomerson as Meleager the Mighty, Gabrielle's surrogate father. We followed Salmmoneus through slimy scheme after slimy scheme (well, okay, mostly on Hercules). But the most outrageous character of all has been Ares, god of war. Or is that god of lust? Has there ever been an episode where he didn't come on to Xena or Gabrielle? It's hard to imagine what the storylines would have been like if he hadn't tried to seduce one or the other to the darkness. Or whatever it is that he represents. Order from chaos. That is what Ares promises. But he is always at the heart of chaos. How did Xena and Ares ever get together in the first place? She didn't know what he looked like until he framed her for murder, but by season six they were hanging out like old friends and lovers. And Ares is the one god whom Xena never killed in battle. Why?

There are surely some moments in the show's history that I would rather not dwell upon. Bad moments, sad moments. Moments of bad acting, moments of good acting despite bad writing, moments where good writing was wasted. But there are also sad moments, moving moments, touchy-feely moments. It's hard to forget them. When Salmoneus found Xena lying dead (or nearly dead) in "The Greater Good", Robert Trebor showed us that the old boy wasn't always just out to make a precious dinar. When Gabrielle took out her frustration on a tree in the same episode, it was obvious even an Ent would have stayed his wrath out of sympathy for her loss. And when Xena walked away from Solan at the edge of that magical lake which appears in so many parts of her world, the pained expression she bore was timeless.

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