Xena: Warrior Princess ended over 20 years ago, but star Lucy Lawless almost returned for a reboot in the s. Xena was a spinoff of the already quite popular syndicated adventure series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys , with Lawless' character originally beginning life as a villainous thorn in Hercules' side. However, her popularity led to a solo series, with Xena looking to change her ways, fight for good and atone for her mountain of past sins.
Along for the ride is Gabrielle Renee O'Connor who starts as Xena's sidekick, before maturing into a warrior in her own right and Xena's seeming soulmate. While each episode featured the two characters battling bad guys, going on adventures and the like, over time Xena: Warrior Princess ' dramatic core began to center on Xena and Gabrielle's relationship. Xena has never really stopped being popular in the decades since its cancellation though, and it's safe to say most of its fans would welcome some kind of revival with Lawless returning.
That's almost what happened in , and the plan was to more fully explore Xena and Gabrielle's romance in a way not really possible in the s, but ultimately, the project ended up failing to get off the ground.
In , it was revealed that NBC was considering doing a reboot of Xena , although without Lawless reprising the lead role. In the group is Gabrielle. Xena saves the young woman and Gabrielle is left in awe of the Warrior Princess' abilities. Gabrielle persuades Xena to let her be her traveling companion, and over time, Gabrielle becomes Xena's dearest friend. Xena also reconciles with her mother, Cyrene. Soon after the start of her journeys with Gabrielle, Xena runs into Ares , who has evidently known her since her warlord days and tries to seduce her into joining him as his Warrior Queen, efforts that she repeatedly thwarts.
Xena's subsequent life is marred by many tragedies. Her son Solan, who never came to know her as his mother, is killed, with the help of Callisto, by Hope , Gabrielle's demoniac child, [11 ] and she nearly loses Gabrielle more than once. Marcus, a warrior, close friend and lover from her warlord days, whom she persuades to follow her in choosing good, is killed while doing his first good deed.
He and Xena spend a night together before Marcus has to return to the other side. On season 5, Eve , the miracle child Xena conceives after her resurrection again through the efforts of the redeemed Callisto , [16 ] is prophesied to bring about the Twilight of the Olympian gods and the birth of the Christianism ; to escape the gods' persecution, Xena and Gabrielle fake their deaths, [17 ] but their plan goes awry when Ares buries them in an ice cave where they sleep for 25 years.
During that time, Eve is adopted by the Roman nobleman Octavius and grows up to become Livia, the Champion of Rome, and a ruthless persecutor of Eli's followers. However, her spirit is seen with Gabrielle in a ship shortly afterwards.
According to the darsham, Naima, [23 ] this is only one of many lives Xena will live throughout the ages. In many of those lives, she will walk a path together with her soulmate Gabrielle furthering the cause of good against evil. They were described as a tribe of warrior women, who cut off one breast to make it easier to shoot arrows — oddly enough, the show left out that detail!
The closest non-Amazon character to Xena is probably Atalanta, a huntress who killed centaurs with arrows with both breasts intact , won a wrestling match against the male hero Peleus, and refused to marry until a suitor could beat her in a foot race, which no one was able to do without cheating. The goddesses Artemis and Athena, who both appear in the series, had traditionally masculine attributes as well, and Athena is especially similar to Xena as she was associated with war as well as the male god of war, Ares , but they were both completely divine beings, and so were considered a bit different to mortal human women.
Numerous Greek gods and goddesses turned up over the course of the show, from famous Olympians like Ares, Zeus, and Aphrodite, to less well known deities like Nemesis goddess of justice , Morpheus god of dreams , and Discord in Greek Eris, the goddess of discord.
Ad — content continues below. For the most part, rather than directly adapting specific myths, the series used characters, elements and ideas from Greek mythology to create new stories. As a s show, the series used the blend of arc plotting and standalone episodes that was common at the time. This meant that the show, like an anthology show, could do different types of stories in different episodes, allowing it to incorporate not just the tragic and dramatic tone of some Greek myths, but the comedic and light-hearted tone of others as well — for in the ancient world, playwrights used mythological characters and themes for both tragedy and comedy.
Ancient Greek playwrights would mess around with the stories people thought they knew to surprise their audience and keep their attention. The famous story of the witch Medea murdering her own children, for example, was an innovation of the playwright Euripides, adapting earlier stories where they were killed by accident or killed by other characters. So what Xena and parent show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys was doing was exactly what ancient Greek dramatists did, taking ideas and characters people know and playing around with them to create something new.
One of the interesting things about Xena: Warrior Princess was the way the show took place in a vaguely described mythical time which seemed to cover millennia of not just Greek mythology and legend, but even well-known, real and dateable Roman history.
For the ancient Greeks and Romans, there was a sense that the distant past was a time of myths, and that gods and heroes and monsters walked the earth long before their own time. However, they also had a fairly strong sense of there being a rough chronology to these stories.
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