One month, the writer left the hero at the bottom of a well with no apparent means of escape. The walls were too slick to climb, there was no rope - well, you get the idea. It was an impossible escape.
The fans held their collective breath waiting to see how the hero would escape. When the new issue arrived, the story opened with the line, "After he escaped from the well..."
Such was the situation with the shift from season three's Sacrifice to season four's A Family Affair. Gabrielle takes a fatal plunge with Hope, and reappears later with no explanation of how she escaped. Fans have speculated for years on how the two survived. Now, nearly three years later, we have our answer.
And this is it?
For only the second time in my history of watching the show, I wondered what was on other channels while Xena was airing a new episode (the other time was the abominable Life Blood which almost put me to sleep). It wasn't that this episode was particularly bad, I just felt that the story didn't work particularly well for me on any level.
There are two possible reasons for this. The first is that it is very difficult to retroactively fit an explanation into an old established storyline - how do you add to the tale without dramatically altering what would have followed (but is already written)?
The second is that we have yet another episode that is loaded with in-jokes and nods to the fans. I don't have a problem with this (indeed, the few bright moments in this dull story were the result of in-jokes and fan nods), but how many "fan tribute" episodes does that make this season?
The internal consistency was all off. Ares saves Gabrielle to use as a bargaining chip against Xena. Are we supposed to think that Ares released Gabrielle shortly after this, and that is when Xena finds her wandering in the forest? If Ares saved Hope as well, why wasn't he involved with the goings-on during A Family Affair?
A possible explanation is that he was making up the entire story about saving them, but that doesn't seem to work either. He knows too much, and we are left in the same situation we were before this episode. Maybe I am over analyzing the story, but even with this show, I expect a certain degree of... sense?
