Warrior... Priestess... Tramp

What do you get when you cross a Hestian Virgin with a brothel? A great excuse for forty minutes of wink-wink nudge-nudge jokes, if you're a Xena episode.

OK, first the bad news: this story stunk. It had holes you could drive busses through, and stood on a twig-thin leg. How did Meg get from being a cook in Lias's castle to owning a brothel? And what was up with Bailius's weak plan with the scroll? He didn't know the Hestian language, but got a Hestian scroll that instructed virgins to drink poison? He handed a scroll in an arcane language to an illiterate woman and didn't think until *afterward* that if she could read it, she must be the real priestess? Oy.

The good news? The jokes were funny enough that I wasn't worried about the story. This was a popcorn episode: pop a bowlful, make like a couch potato, and be careful of when you take a drink, or your cat may end up with Pepsi on her back. Don't try to engage the brain, and it won't complain.

This season has definitely been straying from the kiddie market. When we're not creating a wall of severed heads and exploring childbirth in painstaking detail, we're cracking wise about virginity and hickeys. This episode kept up the trend: line of the episode goes to Renee for her deadpan delivery of "If I have to go the rest of my life without companionship, knowing myself won't be a problem." Between that and the "sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands" advice for the virgin who's hung up on the summer squash, we have what I believe Ms Lawless would term a "wanking theme" for this episode. Mercy.

Once again, Lucy Lawless has just TOO much fun with character switching. It was great to see ol' Meg again. The string of reactions as Leah searches the brothel bedrooms are fabulous. "I hope that's a petting zoo... Oh, please let that be a petting zoo!"

More fun with lookalikes trying to impersonate lookalikes. The dead giveaway for Leah: the lisp. Meg and Xena never get that lisp once, and no matter who Leah tries to impersonate, the slurs slip through. Likewise, Meg's wide, rolling eyes are usually her signature (although Xena has been known to get that pretty close), and of course, Xena's many skills are her telltale sign. (I counted three "Hello/Hi Xena"s when she showed off what she could do.)

Gabrielle gets to kick some tail this episode - she does a great job of getting her and Leah out of the village and manages to wipe up quite a lot of baddies over the course of the show. (Nice board bouncing - I was tempted to give her an Animaniacs-style "boinsey, boinsey, boinsey!" soundtrack.)

Speaking of tail-kicking, where on earth did Meg learn to fight like that? I can understand a little tavern brawling, but she was taking on three soldiers at a time! Xena had serious body count competition from both the bard and the tramp. Even Bailius did a lot of hefty sword-swinging for a priest; that was the most trouble anyone's given Xena in a good while. Suddenly everybody's a warrior.

Watch the... hem... ladies... of the tavern as they sing for Joxer and Leah. One of them is Jodie Dorday, who played the amazon Solari (the one that generously provided the lockpick for Autolycus in The Quest). She sits on the far right of the "Onward Virgin Soldiers" choir.

And speaking of those two songs, listen to the fanfare when "Joxer the Mighty" begins - it's "Onward Christian/Virgin Soldiers."

Apparently, Xena's armor, sword, and chakram are surprisingly easy to duplicate. Like in Warrior... Princess... Tramp, lookalikes have no problems getting that unusual outfit. Who would have thought that Xena buys off the rack?

Joxer reaches near-studliness a couple of times: having a bevy of women singing his praises behind him must do him good. He gets a nice melodramatic moment before he runs into a door, and has an impressively-delivered "unhand that virgin!" line before getting knocked cold with one punch. Ah, that's our Joxer. Did everyone catch his "woman I love" reference to Gabrielle? (Followed quickly by his ponderance of the possibilities if she took up work in a brothel - down, boy!)

XenaStaff's getting pretty good with the duplicate effects: lookalikes are flipping over lookalikes, the back of somebody's head really looks an awful lot like Lucy's, and the mixing effects to put three lookalikes side by side are being done very smoothly. I'm reasonably impressed.

"Heathens to the left of me, infidels to the right." Another X:WP campfire scene for the history books, this time as Leah tries to convert Xena and Gabrielle and expresses shock at their religious views and the astounding fact that they aren't virgins. Watch this scene twice: once for the primary dialogue, once for the reactions of Xena and Gabrielle as the other is getting buttonholed by Leah.

Return to the Wool-Gatherings.

	Web www.bethgriese.com