XWP: One Against An Army
I'm really happy to be reviewing One Against An Army, which has to be, and correct me if I'm wrong Xenites, the most overt Gabrielle/Xena episode in the entire Xena series, with the possible exception of one or two episodes in the sixth season (where the writers were actually like, "Fuck it. This is our last year and only are hardcore fans are left. And all of our hardcore fans are lesbians. Let's just write them as lovers."). Since the sixth season was, well, the sixth season, any episode preceding it that is as overt is like . . . Rare. And really, really good.
I took more notes for this episode than any other episode so far, which did surprise me. But when I went back and was looking at what I wrote, I realized that a lot of space was taken up by quotes. Because this episode is probably the Gay Lady Queen of subtextual quotes.
So what the hell am I waiting for?!
PS: Brandi Carlile just came up on iTunes. I'm taking this as an omen as to how gay this review will be.
1) Remember when we last saw Gabrielle and Xena? They were finally forgiving each other for past hurts, like Xena taking them to Britannia which lead to Gabrielle getting raped by a scary evil god and giving birth to an evil half god who killed Xena's son.
No biggie.
But One Against An Army open in a really classic, laid back fashion, as Gabrielle attempts to learn Xena's flip. She starts using her staff as a way to get her momentum as she jets forward, but she gets a little cocky and decides to try it without, despite Xena's warnings that the flip can take a lot of practice.
Gabrielle's a quick study though, and not bad at physics, and she's broken down the flip into its relatively simple parts and is sure she has it. Sadly, she doesn't, and ends up landing badly on her ankle, badly spraining it.
Frankly, I think the scene, aside from setting up the rest of the episode, is mostly just an excuse to see Gabrielle's bouncy bits. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Third season Gabrielle finally looks like an adult, so I'm actually pretty sure it's a good thing. But still.
2) So Gabrielle is severely hobbled (and in denial). Xena insists she needs to try elevating it and putting ice water on it. At a spring, they come upon Phidippides, real historical dude who ran the 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens to warn about the Persians.
Since Xena was present at every significant historical event of the past 2-3 thousand years, she's actually the one who realizes what the Persian army will mean for Greece and asks Phidippides to run to Athens to warn them to get their army into shape for the upcoming battle. She'll stay behind so that she can figure out a way to slow the Persians down so the Athenians will have more time to organize.
How does she think she'll do it? Well, you see, there's this pass at Thermopylae you may have heard about.
Her idea is to get to the pass and cause a landslide, making it so the Persians would have to divert from course and head around, taking them to Tripolis before heading to Athens. Well, Xena knows their militia can organize against the Persians, at least giving the Athenians some time, and she has an armory there that she stored up in case she ever had another army.
Good plan!
3) On their way to Thermopylae (Gabrielle, still hobbled, riding on Argo so her foot can remain elevated), they meet up with Dorian, a Spartan soldier who deserted his men, too afraid to fight the Persians and risk death.
He is, quite possible, aside from Joxer and Tara (who appears in two episodes I will definitely not be reviewing), the most annoying character of all time. If only because he's always like, "Damn, I just got Gabrielle shot. I'm sorry Xena. What can I do? You'll never forgive me! It's all about me!"
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
4) Dorian is invited along by Xena to join them in going to Thermopylae as a way to redeem his cowardliness, though Xena remains quiet as to what the plan is to be.
They end up coming across a few members of the Persian Advance Party, riding about a day ahead of the main Persian contingent, and Xena engages them.
Dorian, however, stands there like an idiot. Xena had ordered Argo to take Gabrielle away from the fighting but Gabrielle, being Gabrielle, tries to save Dorian from getting killed for being such an idiot in battle. As she tries to lead Dorian away from the fighting, a Persian arrow hits her in the back, just under the shoulder blade.
To make matters worse? Well, when Xena removes the arrow (in a really well done shot that makes it super believable that she's actually extracting the arrow from Gabrielle's chest), she smells poison. The arrows were designed to do maximum damage.
Fuck. Xena thinks they can get the antidote in Thessaly, but they have to get to Thermopylae first, before even going to Tripolis and that might be too much time. What is a a Warrior Princess to do?
5) Well, lucky for all of them that Dorian makes a really bad Persian spy. The dude is trying to pass for a Spartan but he knows nothing about Spartan geography, his hands are smooth like a baby, and his wounds are superficial at best. And Xena, being Xena, had him figured out immediately.
Figuring out a way for him to get out of their hair (because, again, even if he wasn't a spy for the Persians, he still just got Gabrielle shot with a poisoned arrow), she asks him to go to Tripolis for her to tell them to get their militia ready. She tells him that there's been a landslide at the pass at Thermopylae which means the Persians will be forced to go around.
Dorian immediately sets off to warn the Persians about the landslides, which works for Xena. This means she won't actually have to go there and cause a landslide, which means she and Gabrielle can move to Tripolis much quicker to warn the militia which means they have more time to get to Thessaly to get Gabrielle medicine.
That Xena is so smart!
6) So they get to Tripolis but it's already at worst-case-scenario o'clock because the entire town has been burned down. The residents of Tripolis did it themselves (at least that's what Xena says) because they were looking to avoid having the Persians do it for them. So there are no people and since there are no people, there's no militia.
Xena looks for some medicine, but comes up empty. Which means Gabrielle's in even worse straights and needs to get to Thessaly quick if she has a hope of survival.
But if Tripolis doesn't have a militia to help slow the Persians down, it means the Persians will have the time needed to march to Athens and take the city. And if the Persians take Athens . . . Fuck. Well, there goes Greece.
So what's a Warrior Princess to do?
Fight the Persian army herself, of course. I mean, duh.
7) Well, maybe not. That's the best idea she has to slow the Persians down and Gabrielle is all for it, but Xena isn't sure it's really what she needs to be doing with Gabrielle's condition. Her first instinct is to take Gabrielle and get the hell out of Tripolis so they can book it to Thessaly to get her the medicine.
Gabrielle won't hear of it, though. Xena made a promise to slow the Persians down and she is a woman of her word. Maybe the situation isn't ideal, particularly for Gabrielle, but it is what it is. They can worry about her health later.
8) Xena takes them to her armory.
What I love about the armory is that it contains all of these weapons that Xena stashed away herself. She has little stashes all over the country. Just in case, you know? Which tells us so many things about who this was was/is.
First of all, she stashed these weapons away about three years before. This is after her army deserted her because she said she put them there in case she ever had another army. Which means this is already after she decided to start her quest for redemption (this comes from the episodes she appeared in on Hercules). So she's on her quest for redemption but she's stashing weapons just in case. Which indicates that she wasn't completely serious about changing or that she had little belief that she'd be able to stay on the right path. It tells us so much about Xena's view of herself.
9) Gabrielle is getting worse. She's starting to cough up blood which indicates that the arrow punctured her lung. Xena's pretty much had enough. She wants to get Gabrielle out of there and she wants to get her out of there now.
Gabrielle is stubborn though. About as stubborn as Violet, my basset hound. She insists that there are certain things in the world that are more important than our individual wants, needs, lives.
"Not your life," Xena snaps.
"Why?" Gabrielle asks. "Because I'm your friend?"
"Yes." For Xena, the greater good is Gabrielle. But Gabrielle can't let Xena shirk her responsibilities to what she sees as the greater good, so they remain at the armory.
10) Much of the next act are intimate mini scenes between the two, as Gabrielle's health grows more and more weak and Xena wrestles with herself, internally, over what to do.
At one point, she tries to use the qi she was able to use in The Debt II against Ming Tien, but, as she tells Gabrielle earlier in the episode, using that power requires a purity of essence she no longer as access to. In frustration, she smashes a jar, which wakes Gabrielle into a kind of fugure hallucinatory state, where she begs Xena to take her from Potadeia. She tries to sell her worth to Xena so that she can go with her.
She ends, "I want so much to be like you."
But the real key to the series? The key to their relationship and Xena's motivations? Well, as she tells Gabrielle, "I want to be like you."
Because in Gabrielle Xena sees all she could have been. She's sees a pure soul and essence. Her entire quest for redemption is really an attempt to gain the qualities that Gabrielle has within her. So Gabrielle is this huge symbol to Xena about what she can be and, perhaps more importantly, what people can be to/with each other.
11) Gabrielle has a vision in her sleep. She sees the battle and sees Xena killed in. It startles her awake and she turns over on her side, Xena asleep next to her, and strokes Xena's hair.
How can this relationship be ignored?
12) Xena tries one more time to persuade Gabrielle to let her take her away to Thessaly for the medicine.
She goes so far as to say that she's finished paying for her past misdeeds. This. Coming from a woman who completely hates herself for all the evil of her past.
It's not convincing and Gabrielle, again, won't have it. She accepts her fate. Everyone dies, after all, and this is her time. She tells Xena, "A long time ago I accepted the consequences of our life together . . . I'm not afraid."
This seems to get through to Xena. She says, "You always said that I was the brave one. Look at you now. If this is to be our destiny, let's see it out together. Even in death, Gabrielle, I will never leave you."
Can you repeat that, Xena? "Even in death, Gabrielle, I will never leave you." They are seeing their destiny out together because their destinies are completely entwined. Where one goes, there goes the other. If they stay in Tripolis, it's not that it's just Gabrielle who will die. I mean, Xena has something at stake here, too. it's not exactly easy to fight against the strongest army in the known world.
Xena's motivations for leaving were never about her own mortality, but that of Gabrielle's. Because, even if Xena dies, she'll take comfort in the fact that Gabrielle still lives, can still do good. But this seals it: If they're going down, they'll go together.
13) There's a nice little scene where Xena sends Argo away from the fight for her safety. She tells Argo not to stop for any stallions. It's a nicer small moment that adds a lot of depth to her character.
14) In another mini-scene between Gabrielle and Xena, Gabrielle shrugs away Xena's attempts at helping her wound, bothered that she's more of a burden at this point than anything, unable to help in the fight.
"You're my source, Gabrielle," Xena tells her in rebuttal. "When I reach down inside myself and do things I'm not capable of, it's because of you. Don't you know that by now?"
One of the things that struck me so fascinating about this relationship when I first started watching it was how forthcoming Xena is about her feelings for Gabrielle's. She's so totally open and vulnerable when it comes to Gabrielle and she has almost no problems verbalizing it. Gabrielle often gets credit for being the more touchy-feely one and, I think, the more verbally affectionate because she's the talkative bard, but I think it's mostly just an invention of fandom.
For as tough and stoic and detached as Xena can be sometime, Gabrielle has always moved her.
15) Gabrielle tells Xena about the vision she had of Xena's death in the fight. She warns her to be on the lookout for a man with a double bladed sword.
16) After Xena moves Gabrielle up to the loft. Gabrielle's job is to stay safe and, when Xena tells her, to dump the boiling oil on the Persians.
Before they say goodbye, Gabrielle apologizes for Ch'in, explaining that she never meant to hurt Xena but that she was just trying to do what was right.
Xena's forgiven her: "Gabrielle, that's all in the past. All I want is to be with you right now. You're my best friends, my family. I love you, Gabrielle."
This is a really nice moment in light of the last time one of them declared their love: Maternal Instincts, when Gabrielle told Xena she loved her and Xena ignored her and walked away from her.
So I kind of look at Xena's "I love you" as the final nail in the coffin of The Rift. They're back, now.
She tells Gabrielle, "Until the other side, then. We'll be together."
This is probably even more than the love declaration. I mean, these two are planning on spending eternity together. I'm not quite sure how realistic either are being at that point, since Gabrielle is likely to go to the Elysian Fields and Xena's likely going to Tartarus, but Xena says it so matter-of-fact that I believe they'll find a way.
17) So then there's this huge fight.
No, really, it's super huge. It's a fucking great fight that lasts almost the entire act and Xena basically unleashes all of her tricks on the Persian army.
But what's really great about it? Dorian comes back. He tries to kill Gabrielle, but Xena stops him and ends up stabbing him with a poisoned arrow. She's really scary about it to, because she's in this strange state that she seems to go into when she's fighting a particularly big fight, where she's not quite Xena and she's not quite Evil!Xena, but she's somewhere in between and she tells him, "Poison. Like Gabrielle. I'll let you die quicker but with much more pain."
It's actually really clever, because she has to let him go to fight off more of the Persians, but Dorian drags himself across the bodies to one that contains the antidote to the poison. Xena manages to snag it before Dorian's put down for good.
18) After kicking ass, the Persians are like, "Damn. Who is this chick?"
She has one of the big cool lines of the show when she says, "Go home. There are thousands more like me." And she's got that crazy half-way between two personalities look and she's pointing her sword and she's all sweaty and grimy and god I just kind of want to fuck her a little and the Persians leave like scared little . . . well, Persians.
19) She flips up to the loft to administer the antidote. In one of my favorite moments of the episode, just as she's about to give it to her, a couple random Persians come from nowhere and try to fight her and with a few quick punches and kicks, she knocks them out and without even taking a breath goes right back to Gabrielle to give her the medicine. Like, "Fuck, leave us alone so I can save her already."
And she does! She lives!
These two may be destined to spend eternity together in the afterlife, but they have a lot of things still to accomplish in the land of the living first.
So that was One Against An Army. Such a great episode. Even though it has the most epic battle scene of any Xena battle scene in it, it's actually a pretty quiet, intimate episode, that's really more of a study on a relationship between two women than anything else. And Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor just knock it completely out of the park. No complaints from me over here, so I'm going to give One Against An Army 5 airlocks out of 5.
The next episode I'm going to review is When In Rome. I just thought I'd let you know because it's probably not an episode most fans would count as "essential", but it lays a lot of ground work for some of the bigger arcs in season four with Caesar, Pompey, and Gabrielle, so I thought it necessary that I include it.
I took more notes for this episode than any other episode so far, which did surprise me. But when I went back and was looking at what I wrote, I realized that a lot of space was taken up by quotes. Because this episode is probably the Gay Lady Queen of subtextual quotes.
So what the hell am I waiting for?!
PS: Brandi Carlile just came up on iTunes. I'm taking this as an omen as to how gay this review will be.
1) Remember when we last saw Gabrielle and Xena? They were finally forgiving each other for past hurts, like Xena taking them to Britannia which lead to Gabrielle getting raped by a scary evil god and giving birth to an evil half god who killed Xena's son.
No biggie.
But One Against An Army open in a really classic, laid back fashion, as Gabrielle attempts to learn Xena's flip. She starts using her staff as a way to get her momentum as she jets forward, but she gets a little cocky and decides to try it without, despite Xena's warnings that the flip can take a lot of practice.
Gabrielle's a quick study though, and not bad at physics, and she's broken down the flip into its relatively simple parts and is sure she has it. Sadly, she doesn't, and ends up landing badly on her ankle, badly spraining it.
Frankly, I think the scene, aside from setting up the rest of the episode, is mostly just an excuse to see Gabrielle's bouncy bits. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Third season Gabrielle finally looks like an adult, so I'm actually pretty sure it's a good thing. But still.
2) So Gabrielle is severely hobbled (and in denial). Xena insists she needs to try elevating it and putting ice water on it. At a spring, they come upon Phidippides, real historical dude who ran the 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens to warn about the Persians.
Since Xena was present at every significant historical event of the past 2-3 thousand years, she's actually the one who realizes what the Persian army will mean for Greece and asks Phidippides to run to Athens to warn them to get their army into shape for the upcoming battle. She'll stay behind so that she can figure out a way to slow the Persians down so the Athenians will have more time to organize.
How does she think she'll do it? Well, you see, there's this pass at Thermopylae you may have heard about.
Her idea is to get to the pass and cause a landslide, making it so the Persians would have to divert from course and head around, taking them to Tripolis before heading to Athens. Well, Xena knows their militia can organize against the Persians, at least giving the Athenians some time, and she has an armory there that she stored up in case she ever had another army.
Good plan!
3) On their way to Thermopylae (Gabrielle, still hobbled, riding on Argo so her foot can remain elevated), they meet up with Dorian, a Spartan soldier who deserted his men, too afraid to fight the Persians and risk death.
He is, quite possible, aside from Joxer and Tara (who appears in two episodes I will definitely not be reviewing), the most annoying character of all time. If only because he's always like, "Damn, I just got Gabrielle shot. I'm sorry Xena. What can I do? You'll never forgive me! It's all about me!"
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
4) Dorian is invited along by Xena to join them in going to Thermopylae as a way to redeem his cowardliness, though Xena remains quiet as to what the plan is to be.
They end up coming across a few members of the Persian Advance Party, riding about a day ahead of the main Persian contingent, and Xena engages them.
Dorian, however, stands there like an idiot. Xena had ordered Argo to take Gabrielle away from the fighting but Gabrielle, being Gabrielle, tries to save Dorian from getting killed for being such an idiot in battle. As she tries to lead Dorian away from the fighting, a Persian arrow hits her in the back, just under the shoulder blade.
To make matters worse? Well, when Xena removes the arrow (in a really well done shot that makes it super believable that she's actually extracting the arrow from Gabrielle's chest), she smells poison. The arrows were designed to do maximum damage.
Fuck. Xena thinks they can get the antidote in Thessaly, but they have to get to Thermopylae first, before even going to Tripolis and that might be too much time. What is a a Warrior Princess to do?
5) Well, lucky for all of them that Dorian makes a really bad Persian spy. The dude is trying to pass for a Spartan but he knows nothing about Spartan geography, his hands are smooth like a baby, and his wounds are superficial at best. And Xena, being Xena, had him figured out immediately.
Figuring out a way for him to get out of their hair (because, again, even if he wasn't a spy for the Persians, he still just got Gabrielle shot with a poisoned arrow), she asks him to go to Tripolis for her to tell them to get their militia ready. She tells him that there's been a landslide at the pass at Thermopylae which means the Persians will be forced to go around.
Dorian immediately sets off to warn the Persians about the landslides, which works for Xena. This means she won't actually have to go there and cause a landslide, which means she and Gabrielle can move to Tripolis much quicker to warn the militia which means they have more time to get to Thessaly to get Gabrielle medicine.
That Xena is so smart!
6) So they get to Tripolis but it's already at worst-case-scenario o'clock because the entire town has been burned down. The residents of Tripolis did it themselves (at least that's what Xena says) because they were looking to avoid having the Persians do it for them. So there are no people and since there are no people, there's no militia.
Xena looks for some medicine, but comes up empty. Which means Gabrielle's in even worse straights and needs to get to Thessaly quick if she has a hope of survival.
But if Tripolis doesn't have a militia to help slow the Persians down, it means the Persians will have the time needed to march to Athens and take the city. And if the Persians take Athens . . . Fuck. Well, there goes Greece.
So what's a Warrior Princess to do?
Fight the Persian army herself, of course. I mean, duh.
7) Well, maybe not. That's the best idea she has to slow the Persians down and Gabrielle is all for it, but Xena isn't sure it's really what she needs to be doing with Gabrielle's condition. Her first instinct is to take Gabrielle and get the hell out of Tripolis so they can book it to Thessaly to get her the medicine.
Gabrielle won't hear of it, though. Xena made a promise to slow the Persians down and she is a woman of her word. Maybe the situation isn't ideal, particularly for Gabrielle, but it is what it is. They can worry about her health later.
8) Xena takes them to her armory.
What I love about the armory is that it contains all of these weapons that Xena stashed away herself. She has little stashes all over the country. Just in case, you know? Which tells us so many things about who this was was/is.
First of all, she stashed these weapons away about three years before. This is after her army deserted her because she said she put them there in case she ever had another army. Which means this is already after she decided to start her quest for redemption (this comes from the episodes she appeared in on Hercules). So she's on her quest for redemption but she's stashing weapons just in case. Which indicates that she wasn't completely serious about changing or that she had little belief that she'd be able to stay on the right path. It tells us so much about Xena's view of herself.
9) Gabrielle is getting worse. She's starting to cough up blood which indicates that the arrow punctured her lung. Xena's pretty much had enough. She wants to get Gabrielle out of there and she wants to get her out of there now.
Gabrielle is stubborn though. About as stubborn as Violet, my basset hound. She insists that there are certain things in the world that are more important than our individual wants, needs, lives.
"Not your life," Xena snaps.
"Why?" Gabrielle asks. "Because I'm your friend?"
"Yes." For Xena, the greater good is Gabrielle. But Gabrielle can't let Xena shirk her responsibilities to what she sees as the greater good, so they remain at the armory.
10) Much of the next act are intimate mini scenes between the two, as Gabrielle's health grows more and more weak and Xena wrestles with herself, internally, over what to do.
At one point, she tries to use the qi she was able to use in The Debt II against Ming Tien, but, as she tells Gabrielle earlier in the episode, using that power requires a purity of essence she no longer as access to. In frustration, she smashes a jar, which wakes Gabrielle into a kind of fugure hallucinatory state, where she begs Xena to take her from Potadeia. She tries to sell her worth to Xena so that she can go with her.
She ends, "I want so much to be like you."
But the real key to the series? The key to their relationship and Xena's motivations? Well, as she tells Gabrielle, "I want to be like you."
Because in Gabrielle Xena sees all she could have been. She's sees a pure soul and essence. Her entire quest for redemption is really an attempt to gain the qualities that Gabrielle has within her. So Gabrielle is this huge symbol to Xena about what she can be and, perhaps more importantly, what people can be to/with each other.
11) Gabrielle has a vision in her sleep. She sees the battle and sees Xena killed in. It startles her awake and she turns over on her side, Xena asleep next to her, and strokes Xena's hair.
How can this relationship be ignored?
12) Xena tries one more time to persuade Gabrielle to let her take her away to Thessaly for the medicine.
She goes so far as to say that she's finished paying for her past misdeeds. This. Coming from a woman who completely hates herself for all the evil of her past.
It's not convincing and Gabrielle, again, won't have it. She accepts her fate. Everyone dies, after all, and this is her time. She tells Xena, "A long time ago I accepted the consequences of our life together . . . I'm not afraid."
This seems to get through to Xena. She says, "You always said that I was the brave one. Look at you now. If this is to be our destiny, let's see it out together. Even in death, Gabrielle, I will never leave you."
Can you repeat that, Xena? "Even in death, Gabrielle, I will never leave you." They are seeing their destiny out together because their destinies are completely entwined. Where one goes, there goes the other. If they stay in Tripolis, it's not that it's just Gabrielle who will die. I mean, Xena has something at stake here, too. it's not exactly easy to fight against the strongest army in the known world.
Xena's motivations for leaving were never about her own mortality, but that of Gabrielle's. Because, even if Xena dies, she'll take comfort in the fact that Gabrielle still lives, can still do good. But this seals it: If they're going down, they'll go together.
13) There's a nice little scene where Xena sends Argo away from the fight for her safety. She tells Argo not to stop for any stallions. It's a nicer small moment that adds a lot of depth to her character.
14) In another mini-scene between Gabrielle and Xena, Gabrielle shrugs away Xena's attempts at helping her wound, bothered that she's more of a burden at this point than anything, unable to help in the fight.
"You're my source, Gabrielle," Xena tells her in rebuttal. "When I reach down inside myself and do things I'm not capable of, it's because of you. Don't you know that by now?"
One of the things that struck me so fascinating about this relationship when I first started watching it was how forthcoming Xena is about her feelings for Gabrielle's. She's so totally open and vulnerable when it comes to Gabrielle and she has almost no problems verbalizing it. Gabrielle often gets credit for being the more touchy-feely one and, I think, the more verbally affectionate because she's the talkative bard, but I think it's mostly just an invention of fandom.
For as tough and stoic and detached as Xena can be sometime, Gabrielle has always moved her.
15) Gabrielle tells Xena about the vision she had of Xena's death in the fight. She warns her to be on the lookout for a man with a double bladed sword.
16) After Xena moves Gabrielle up to the loft. Gabrielle's job is to stay safe and, when Xena tells her, to dump the boiling oil on the Persians.
Before they say goodbye, Gabrielle apologizes for Ch'in, explaining that she never meant to hurt Xena but that she was just trying to do what was right.
Xena's forgiven her: "Gabrielle, that's all in the past. All I want is to be with you right now. You're my best friends, my family. I love you, Gabrielle."
This is a really nice moment in light of the last time one of them declared their love: Maternal Instincts, when Gabrielle told Xena she loved her and Xena ignored her and walked away from her.
So I kind of look at Xena's "I love you" as the final nail in the coffin of The Rift. They're back, now.
She tells Gabrielle, "Until the other side, then. We'll be together."
This is probably even more than the love declaration. I mean, these two are planning on spending eternity together. I'm not quite sure how realistic either are being at that point, since Gabrielle is likely to go to the Elysian Fields and Xena's likely going to Tartarus, but Xena says it so matter-of-fact that I believe they'll find a way.
17) So then there's this huge fight.
No, really, it's super huge. It's a fucking great fight that lasts almost the entire act and Xena basically unleashes all of her tricks on the Persian army.
But what's really great about it? Dorian comes back. He tries to kill Gabrielle, but Xena stops him and ends up stabbing him with a poisoned arrow. She's really scary about it to, because she's in this strange state that she seems to go into when she's fighting a particularly big fight, where she's not quite Xena and she's not quite Evil!Xena, but she's somewhere in between and she tells him, "Poison. Like Gabrielle. I'll let you die quicker but with much more pain."
It's actually really clever, because she has to let him go to fight off more of the Persians, but Dorian drags himself across the bodies to one that contains the antidote to the poison. Xena manages to snag it before Dorian's put down for good.
18) After kicking ass, the Persians are like, "Damn. Who is this chick?"
She has one of the big cool lines of the show when she says, "Go home. There are thousands more like me." And she's got that crazy half-way between two personalities look and she's pointing her sword and she's all sweaty and grimy and god I just kind of want to fuck her a little and the Persians leave like scared little . . . well, Persians.
19) She flips up to the loft to administer the antidote. In one of my favorite moments of the episode, just as she's about to give it to her, a couple random Persians come from nowhere and try to fight her and with a few quick punches and kicks, she knocks them out and without even taking a breath goes right back to Gabrielle to give her the medicine. Like, "Fuck, leave us alone so I can save her already."
And she does! She lives!
These two may be destined to spend eternity together in the afterlife, but they have a lot of things still to accomplish in the land of the living first.
So that was One Against An Army. Such a great episode. Even though it has the most epic battle scene of any Xena battle scene in it, it's actually a pretty quiet, intimate episode, that's really more of a study on a relationship between two women than anything else. And Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor just knock it completely out of the park. No complaints from me over here, so I'm going to give One Against An Army 5 airlocks out of 5.
The next episode I'm going to review is When In Rome. I just thought I'd let you know because it's probably not an episode most fans would count as "essential", but it lays a lot of ground work for some of the bigger arcs in season four with Caesar, Pompey, and Gabrielle, so I thought it necessary that I include it.