XWP: A Good Day
I was writing a riff about Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra but I deleted it all because I realized it was better saved for Endgame, while I'll review in a couple weeks (maybe sooner if I can pick up my snail pace). I have no fun riff for A Good Day which makes me sad because, well, I quite enjoy this episode.
I suppose I could talk about my good day. The scale said I lost one pound so that was kind of cool. Violet was at daycare all day so my day was less annoying. I bought (or, I should say, my mom bought) a bunch of tank tops from Target, just in time because it's 96 degrees out here today. I'm also half way through an application to teach in recovering school districts from Hurricane Katrina, specifically New Orleans.
Not a bad day. One might even say . . . Good day.
/Riff.
1) Caesar's up to his old tricks again, though it's a lot more destructive for the greater Greek world because he and Pompey are taking their civil war and migrating to Greece where they're busy raiding villages for food and supplies and basically laying waste to the land.
So not kosher, you know?
There's this man named Phlanagus who rides in just as, uh, Caesar's (I think) army begins to raid. He's a member of the army, too, though he's technically a mercenary because he's Greek. (Though many of the soldiers who fought for Rome back then were mercenaries, their loyalities tied to the general who paid them the best.) The Romans are about to burn his village to the ground which also happens to contain his wife and young son.
Good thing he has such great timing.
Before the Romans kill him (because he's Greek they kind of automatically outrank him and because he's Greek they kind of automatically hate him), Xena and Gabrielle come running in and save the day.
It's what they do and they're great at it.
2) Xena's concerned about Phlanagus and his village but she's kind of excited that Pompey and Caesar are fighting each other. She wants them to continue continuing on because the more they fight the more they deplete each other's army.
3) So, in an epic plan to cause more damage to the two Romans, Xena convinces Phlanagus' village to raze it. Burn it to the ground, kill all the animals and spoil all the meat, basically making everything within its limits completely worthless to the Romans.
This isn't unlike what Xena and Gabrielle came across way back when in One Against An Army when they made it all the way to Tripolis and found it was burned to the ground in order to detract Persian interest.
The less worth the village has the safer the people will be if they could only make it out and past the mountain pass, which Pompey's army currently has guarded.
4) Gabrielle, still in the dark about Xena's ultimate plan (because she's the sidekick and she doesn't really become fully involved in the plans, from start to finish, for another season or so), asks her, "Are you sure about this?"
Xena, with no hesitation, tells her, "Yes." Xena, aside from being an amazing fighter, is an amazing tactician and what made her so successful as a warlord was this strategic ability. I mean, let's get real. She was a great fighter in her past but she was so out of control and undisciplined that someone would have gotten her eventually. What made her successful, at least in my estimation, is her ability to out think her opponents. Evil or not, she's got a pretty good brain in that head.
5) So Xena gets a bunch of faux Roman uniforms and sets about screwing with some heads.
And can I just say how adorable Xena is in her Roman uniform? With that hat on? Because she was adorable.
6) The gist of the plan is to fake out Pompey and Caesar, basically getting them to think that she and her men are both of their armies. That means convincing Pompey that she's with Caesar and convincing Caesar that she's with Pompey. She sets her men up on a hill that has little to no strategic value and sets up a double sided flag: one side with Pompey's colors and other with Caesar.
After that, she waits for both armies' scouts to do their job and, as both armies start to mobilize, she and her men get the hell out.
Caesar comes over the ridge just as Xena leaves and, as expected (because, again, Xena is a fucking genius), the two sides fight.
Caesar manages to figure out that something is amiss pretty soon, though, because his scouts come back to tell him about their progress capturing Pompey's catapults. They were prevented from getting them by a tall woman with long black hair with a bitchin' side kick. Now, since there weren't too many people in the known world with those characteristics and because Xena has a tendency to foil Caesar's best laid plans, he figures it out right away.
7) So Caesar's spies are pretty sure that Xena is, at this point, working with Pompey as an ally, which isn't too strange of a dealing because as much as Xena dislikes Pompey, it can't hold a candle to her hatred of Caesar.
As Caesar's figuring out how to deal with this new addition to his war woes, Xena and Phlanagus sneak into his camp so Xena can try to figure out what he's going to do next.
She does pretty well, too, hearing him talk about a reserve set of troops he has on hand but before she can hear what he plans on doing about her, Phlanagus gets himself captured and, because she kind of needs to make sure he lives through this whole thing, she has to rescue him.
8) It's okay, though. Xena's gears are turnin', turnin', turnin', and she arranges a meeting with Pompey.
9) Before she leaves, she asks Gabrielle to take command of their forces.
It's a really interesting moment that really shows how far Gabrielle has come in terms of her knowledge about war and how far Xena has come in trusting anyone who isn't her when it comes to war.
Xena thinks Gabrielle is the perfect choice to take over in her absence and I have to agree with her. After all, as Xena points out, Gabrielle knows Caesar and she knows how Xena thinks. I think Gabrielle would also make a good choice because she's smart, aware, and very intuitive. Her gut feelings usually turn out right.
Gabrielle won't do it, though. She won't give the command that will lead those men to their deaths.
And there's kind of the crux of Gabrielle's problem, a problem she's been dealing with the whole series, really, but especially since we last met Caesar in When In Rome back in the third series: She wants to help Xena and she's incredibly knowledgeable about war but she can't put it to use if it means death, which is usually the outcome when it comes to things. She's tethered herself to a warrior who kills all the time but she can't really truly deal with the lifestyle she set out to learn.
10) So Xena puts the men under the leadership of Phlanagus and goes to meet Pompey in the forest.
I love this scene. I love that Pompey's second in command lets Pompey know that he has two guards around the perimeter for protection just as Xena emerges with the helmets of those guards, both of whom she obviously dispatched.
Pompey tells her, "Just a precaution. There were only two guards."
"I know," Xena says. "Otherwise I would have had more helmets."
So matter of fact and so true and both of them know it. A nice light moment.
11) Before Pompey and Xena can make much head way, Caesar and some of his men bust into the meeting.
He thinks he and his spies have broken up Xena's plans but Xena counted on Caesar finding them. She is, after all, the perfect distraction for Caesar. He can't really help but engage her just as she can't really help to engage him. With Caesar and Pompey occupied (with each other and with her), she gives Temeculah (an archer Gabrielle meets in the village) the word but him to fire the signal to her men to start fighting.
To make matters better as it relates to keeping Pompey and Caesar away from their forces, the three of them fall through a hole.
Which makes me think of Scully in the season five episode of The X-Files called Detour when she says, in a hilarious way that always makes me laugh, "I fell down a hole!"
I digress.
12) Now, some fighting stuff happens and I'm not sure I caught all the intricacies of it, but Caesar's forces fight Phlanagus' but Caesar's army starts to retreat. Phlanagus thinks that this means that they've won but Gabrielle recognizes this as ridiculous. It was too easy and likely that Caesar's army was told to do this in order to mess with them.
Phlanagus immediately turns over command of the men to Gabrielle. Xena had told him before she left to listen to Gabrielle.
It's interesting to think about. Xena obviously knows Gabrielle very well. She knew not only that Gabrielle would recognize Caesar's strategies and know how to react to them but she obviously knew that Gabrielle would ultimately be compelled to take over. Because, I mean, she could have just said, "You know, Phlanagus, I don't feel comfortable. You lead them" but she didn't. She did exactly as Xena predicted.
13) Back in the hole, Xena, Pompey, and Caesar are sword fighting.
I'd like to state for the record how much I love Pompey. Jeremy Callaghan, who plays him, kind of gives him this rather flamboyant kind of air that reads kid of gay, but more than that, he got this kind of . . . I don't know. Joie de vivre about him. And he's so incredibly impressed by Xena. He's delighted to watch her work and I think he gets a serious kick out of her hatred of Caesar.
14) Okay, so there's more army fighting that I think I have straight: Gabrielle leads her forces to go after Caesar and, while they're fighting, Pompey's army, seeing that Caesar's army is coming and fighting, goes to engage.
Gabrielle's intent is to pull back because her "army" was there only to get Caesar and Pompey's army to fight but, bastards that they are, the other armies start to pull back, which basically defeats the purpose of everything they've done so far. So, she has no choice, if she wants to honor the intent behind the plan, to continue to lead her men to fight, hoping to get the two sides to lay waste to each other.
15) Back in the hole, Caesar reveals that he set up the retreat trying to bait Gabrielle (he probably assumed she'd be taking over in Xena's stead) into following, knowing that it was kind of insincere. The idea was to lead them into a trap.
I think it was pretty clear that Gabrielle understood that their retreat was kind of a trap but I don't know. Either way, Xena was pretty concerned over it and escapes, leaving Caesar and Pompey to fight each other.
16) Xena searches for Gabrielle in the field.
Perhaps she didn't anticipate the retreat and figured getting Pompey and Caesar's armies to fight would be easier done, but she's kind of surprised by the complete and total battle that's going on and she knows that Gabrielle's right in the middle of it.
17) Phlanagus manages to get himself into some trouble (after gloating about killing one of the enemy, which is never a good idea because gloating always means certain death on television).
Gabrielle has the opportunity to save him. There's a spear nearby she grabs. She throws it at the guy who has his sword over Phlanagus and . . . misses.
She missed really bad.
Now, Renee O'Connor has said (apparently) that the original intention was that Gabrielle tried to actually kill the Roman soldier and just happened to miss, but it's been said that, in the editing process, they tried to make it more ambiguous.
I mean, it's hard to believe, with the way it's cut, that she didn't miss intentionally because, after she throws it, her eyes land on the spear where it landed on the dirt and then her eyes shift in a completely different direction to Phlanagus, meaning that she didn't just miss but she missed in the opposite direction she was throwing.
This from a woman who has been training alongside Xena for three seasons. I don't believe for a second that she can't throw.
18) So the Roman soldier kills Phlanagus and Temeculah, the innocent archer Gabrielle tried to shield from the realities of war earlier in the episode shoots the soldier with his arrow in retaliation.
This opens up an interesting dilemma (I think, at least): Gabrielle inability to save Phlanagus (if we're to assume it was an intentional miss) lead another to kill. Gabrielle told Temeculah that killing changes everything and she kind of created a situation for him to find out. She's not really responsible for Temeculah's action, but she did create the situation.
19) Pompey and Caesar put down their swords against each other in the hole when they realize the fighting is over. They emerge onto a complete wasteland, bodies all over the place.
Caesar's reaction is kind of dazed but cold. "Well," he says, "Back to Rome. Back to the drawing board . . . This is just a minor set back, Xena. You can't change my destiny."
I mean, thousands of soldiers just died but, eh. Oh well.
20) Xena finds Gabrielle. Like Caesar, she's kind of dazed but instead of a completely cold response, she ends up breaking down in tears, realizing that she could have saved Phlanagus' life but failed to do so. Not to mention, you know, following a plan that lead to all the deaths out on that field.
Xena holds her as she cries.
21) Phlanagus has a funeral pyre at which Xena sings.
Xena tells Phanagus' widow that he gave his life fighting for peace.
Another interesting idea: Can you fight for peace?
In the world history class I taught we talked a bit about the Korean War and the United Nations. The United Nations was designed to prevent another war on the scale of WWII from ever happening again. It was, essentially, a peace organization. Keep the peace, dammit! But when troubles broke out in Korea, the United Nations sent an army to fight alongside the US. And I asked my students, "Can you fight for peace?"
It was interesting. Their answers were split down the middle. Some said that no, you can't fight for peace, because fighting begets more fighting. (Okay, they didn't use the word "beget".) Other said that fighting can help in the long run because you can kind of weed out the ones creating the violence in the first place.
I had some pretty smart students, right?
22) Gabrielle's having a bit of a crisis now, though. I'm just going to go ahead and quote Xena's entire speech to her because I really love it.
She tells her, "You want to know that what you did was for all the right reasons but with that pain in your gut and that weight on your shoulders the best you can come up with is that it was a good day of fighting.
"I've seen so many changes in you, things I could have never expected. But as hard as the changes have been, you have got to know that it's for a reason. All of this is for a reason. Otherwise, what's the point? I was asking myself the same question when I first met you."
I don't really have anything else to add. Well said, Xena. Well said.
So that was A Good Day. I think it's a pretty damn solid episode that really gets into some of the major issues of war and peace. There are a lot of battles on Xena but very few moments where the realities of war are really an issue. I like to see this more realistic aspect with these characters. That means I'm going to give A Good Day 4 out of 5 airlocks.
I suppose I could talk about my good day. The scale said I lost one pound so that was kind of cool. Violet was at daycare all day so my day was less annoying. I bought (or, I should say, my mom bought) a bunch of tank tops from Target, just in time because it's 96 degrees out here today. I'm also half way through an application to teach in recovering school districts from Hurricane Katrina, specifically New Orleans.
Not a bad day. One might even say . . . Good day.
/Riff.
1) Caesar's up to his old tricks again, though it's a lot more destructive for the greater Greek world because he and Pompey are taking their civil war and migrating to Greece where they're busy raiding villages for food and supplies and basically laying waste to the land.
So not kosher, you know?
There's this man named Phlanagus who rides in just as, uh, Caesar's (I think) army begins to raid. He's a member of the army, too, though he's technically a mercenary because he's Greek. (Though many of the soldiers who fought for Rome back then were mercenaries, their loyalities tied to the general who paid them the best.) The Romans are about to burn his village to the ground which also happens to contain his wife and young son.
Good thing he has such great timing.
Before the Romans kill him (because he's Greek they kind of automatically outrank him and because he's Greek they kind of automatically hate him), Xena and Gabrielle come running in and save the day.
It's what they do and they're great at it.
2) Xena's concerned about Phlanagus and his village but she's kind of excited that Pompey and Caesar are fighting each other. She wants them to continue continuing on because the more they fight the more they deplete each other's army.
3) So, in an epic plan to cause more damage to the two Romans, Xena convinces Phlanagus' village to raze it. Burn it to the ground, kill all the animals and spoil all the meat, basically making everything within its limits completely worthless to the Romans.
This isn't unlike what Xena and Gabrielle came across way back when in One Against An Army when they made it all the way to Tripolis and found it was burned to the ground in order to detract Persian interest.
The less worth the village has the safer the people will be if they could only make it out and past the mountain pass, which Pompey's army currently has guarded.
4) Gabrielle, still in the dark about Xena's ultimate plan (because she's the sidekick and she doesn't really become fully involved in the plans, from start to finish, for another season or so), asks her, "Are you sure about this?"
Xena, with no hesitation, tells her, "Yes." Xena, aside from being an amazing fighter, is an amazing tactician and what made her so successful as a warlord was this strategic ability. I mean, let's get real. She was a great fighter in her past but she was so out of control and undisciplined that someone would have gotten her eventually. What made her successful, at least in my estimation, is her ability to out think her opponents. Evil or not, she's got a pretty good brain in that head.
5) So Xena gets a bunch of faux Roman uniforms and sets about screwing with some heads.
And can I just say how adorable Xena is in her Roman uniform? With that hat on? Because she was adorable.
6) The gist of the plan is to fake out Pompey and Caesar, basically getting them to think that she and her men are both of their armies. That means convincing Pompey that she's with Caesar and convincing Caesar that she's with Pompey. She sets her men up on a hill that has little to no strategic value and sets up a double sided flag: one side with Pompey's colors and other with Caesar.
After that, she waits for both armies' scouts to do their job and, as both armies start to mobilize, she and her men get the hell out.
Caesar comes over the ridge just as Xena leaves and, as expected (because, again, Xena is a fucking genius), the two sides fight.
Caesar manages to figure out that something is amiss pretty soon, though, because his scouts come back to tell him about their progress capturing Pompey's catapults. They were prevented from getting them by a tall woman with long black hair with a bitchin' side kick. Now, since there weren't too many people in the known world with those characteristics and because Xena has a tendency to foil Caesar's best laid plans, he figures it out right away.
7) So Caesar's spies are pretty sure that Xena is, at this point, working with Pompey as an ally, which isn't too strange of a dealing because as much as Xena dislikes Pompey, it can't hold a candle to her hatred of Caesar.
As Caesar's figuring out how to deal with this new addition to his war woes, Xena and Phlanagus sneak into his camp so Xena can try to figure out what he's going to do next.
She does pretty well, too, hearing him talk about a reserve set of troops he has on hand but before she can hear what he plans on doing about her, Phlanagus gets himself captured and, because she kind of needs to make sure he lives through this whole thing, she has to rescue him.
8) It's okay, though. Xena's gears are turnin', turnin', turnin', and she arranges a meeting with Pompey.
9) Before she leaves, she asks Gabrielle to take command of their forces.
It's a really interesting moment that really shows how far Gabrielle has come in terms of her knowledge about war and how far Xena has come in trusting anyone who isn't her when it comes to war.
Xena thinks Gabrielle is the perfect choice to take over in her absence and I have to agree with her. After all, as Xena points out, Gabrielle knows Caesar and she knows how Xena thinks. I think Gabrielle would also make a good choice because she's smart, aware, and very intuitive. Her gut feelings usually turn out right.
Gabrielle won't do it, though. She won't give the command that will lead those men to their deaths.
And there's kind of the crux of Gabrielle's problem, a problem she's been dealing with the whole series, really, but especially since we last met Caesar in When In Rome back in the third series: She wants to help Xena and she's incredibly knowledgeable about war but she can't put it to use if it means death, which is usually the outcome when it comes to things. She's tethered herself to a warrior who kills all the time but she can't really truly deal with the lifestyle she set out to learn.
10) So Xena puts the men under the leadership of Phlanagus and goes to meet Pompey in the forest.
I love this scene. I love that Pompey's second in command lets Pompey know that he has two guards around the perimeter for protection just as Xena emerges with the helmets of those guards, both of whom she obviously dispatched.
Pompey tells her, "Just a precaution. There were only two guards."
"I know," Xena says. "Otherwise I would have had more helmets."
So matter of fact and so true and both of them know it. A nice light moment.
11) Before Pompey and Xena can make much head way, Caesar and some of his men bust into the meeting.
He thinks he and his spies have broken up Xena's plans but Xena counted on Caesar finding them. She is, after all, the perfect distraction for Caesar. He can't really help but engage her just as she can't really help to engage him. With Caesar and Pompey occupied (with each other and with her), she gives Temeculah (an archer Gabrielle meets in the village) the word but him to fire the signal to her men to start fighting.
To make matters better as it relates to keeping Pompey and Caesar away from their forces, the three of them fall through a hole.
Which makes me think of Scully in the season five episode of The X-Files called Detour when she says, in a hilarious way that always makes me laugh, "I fell down a hole!"
I digress.
12) Now, some fighting stuff happens and I'm not sure I caught all the intricacies of it, but Caesar's forces fight Phlanagus' but Caesar's army starts to retreat. Phlanagus thinks that this means that they've won but Gabrielle recognizes this as ridiculous. It was too easy and likely that Caesar's army was told to do this in order to mess with them.
Phlanagus immediately turns over command of the men to Gabrielle. Xena had told him before she left to listen to Gabrielle.
It's interesting to think about. Xena obviously knows Gabrielle very well. She knew not only that Gabrielle would recognize Caesar's strategies and know how to react to them but she obviously knew that Gabrielle would ultimately be compelled to take over. Because, I mean, she could have just said, "You know, Phlanagus, I don't feel comfortable. You lead them" but she didn't. She did exactly as Xena predicted.
13) Back in the hole, Xena, Pompey, and Caesar are sword fighting.
I'd like to state for the record how much I love Pompey. Jeremy Callaghan, who plays him, kind of gives him this rather flamboyant kind of air that reads kid of gay, but more than that, he got this kind of . . . I don't know. Joie de vivre about him. And he's so incredibly impressed by Xena. He's delighted to watch her work and I think he gets a serious kick out of her hatred of Caesar.
14) Okay, so there's more army fighting that I think I have straight: Gabrielle leads her forces to go after Caesar and, while they're fighting, Pompey's army, seeing that Caesar's army is coming and fighting, goes to engage.
Gabrielle's intent is to pull back because her "army" was there only to get Caesar and Pompey's army to fight but, bastards that they are, the other armies start to pull back, which basically defeats the purpose of everything they've done so far. So, she has no choice, if she wants to honor the intent behind the plan, to continue to lead her men to fight, hoping to get the two sides to lay waste to each other.
15) Back in the hole, Caesar reveals that he set up the retreat trying to bait Gabrielle (he probably assumed she'd be taking over in Xena's stead) into following, knowing that it was kind of insincere. The idea was to lead them into a trap.
I think it was pretty clear that Gabrielle understood that their retreat was kind of a trap but I don't know. Either way, Xena was pretty concerned over it and escapes, leaving Caesar and Pompey to fight each other.
16) Xena searches for Gabrielle in the field.
Perhaps she didn't anticipate the retreat and figured getting Pompey and Caesar's armies to fight would be easier done, but she's kind of surprised by the complete and total battle that's going on and she knows that Gabrielle's right in the middle of it.
17) Phlanagus manages to get himself into some trouble (after gloating about killing one of the enemy, which is never a good idea because gloating always means certain death on television).
Gabrielle has the opportunity to save him. There's a spear nearby she grabs. She throws it at the guy who has his sword over Phlanagus and . . . misses.
She missed really bad.
Now, Renee O'Connor has said (apparently) that the original intention was that Gabrielle tried to actually kill the Roman soldier and just happened to miss, but it's been said that, in the editing process, they tried to make it more ambiguous.
I mean, it's hard to believe, with the way it's cut, that she didn't miss intentionally because, after she throws it, her eyes land on the spear where it landed on the dirt and then her eyes shift in a completely different direction to Phlanagus, meaning that she didn't just miss but she missed in the opposite direction she was throwing.
This from a woman who has been training alongside Xena for three seasons. I don't believe for a second that she can't throw.
18) So the Roman soldier kills Phlanagus and Temeculah, the innocent archer Gabrielle tried to shield from the realities of war earlier in the episode shoots the soldier with his arrow in retaliation.
This opens up an interesting dilemma (I think, at least): Gabrielle inability to save Phlanagus (if we're to assume it was an intentional miss) lead another to kill. Gabrielle told Temeculah that killing changes everything and she kind of created a situation for him to find out. She's not really responsible for Temeculah's action, but she did create the situation.
19) Pompey and Caesar put down their swords against each other in the hole when they realize the fighting is over. They emerge onto a complete wasteland, bodies all over the place.
Caesar's reaction is kind of dazed but cold. "Well," he says, "Back to Rome. Back to the drawing board . . . This is just a minor set back, Xena. You can't change my destiny."
I mean, thousands of soldiers just died but, eh. Oh well.
20) Xena finds Gabrielle. Like Caesar, she's kind of dazed but instead of a completely cold response, she ends up breaking down in tears, realizing that she could have saved Phlanagus' life but failed to do so. Not to mention, you know, following a plan that lead to all the deaths out on that field.
Xena holds her as she cries.
21) Phlanagus has a funeral pyre at which Xena sings.
Xena tells Phanagus' widow that he gave his life fighting for peace.
Another interesting idea: Can you fight for peace?
In the world history class I taught we talked a bit about the Korean War and the United Nations. The United Nations was designed to prevent another war on the scale of WWII from ever happening again. It was, essentially, a peace organization. Keep the peace, dammit! But when troubles broke out in Korea, the United Nations sent an army to fight alongside the US. And I asked my students, "Can you fight for peace?"
It was interesting. Their answers were split down the middle. Some said that no, you can't fight for peace, because fighting begets more fighting. (Okay, they didn't use the word "beget".) Other said that fighting can help in the long run because you can kind of weed out the ones creating the violence in the first place.
I had some pretty smart students, right?
22) Gabrielle's having a bit of a crisis now, though. I'm just going to go ahead and quote Xena's entire speech to her because I really love it.
She tells her, "You want to know that what you did was for all the right reasons but with that pain in your gut and that weight on your shoulders the best you can come up with is that it was a good day of fighting.
"I've seen so many changes in you, things I could have never expected. But as hard as the changes have been, you have got to know that it's for a reason. All of this is for a reason. Otherwise, what's the point? I was asking myself the same question when I first met you."
I don't really have anything else to add. Well said, Xena. Well said.
So that was A Good Day. I think it's a pretty damn solid episode that really gets into some of the major issues of war and peace. There are a lot of battles on Xena but very few moments where the realities of war are really an issue. I like to see this more realistic aspect with these characters. That means I'm going to give A Good Day 4 out of 5 airlocks.