I wouldn’t call Gabrielle’s behavior sanctimonious. It was, rather, complex. On the one hand, she had no small reason to fear that if Xena took a step down the path of murder, she was not going to be able to stop. Xena herself said so when they first met Callisto, but even more significant is the Warrior Princess’s action in the episode in which Ares masqueraded as her father. You may recall that Xena’s reaction to seeing her faux-Daddy having been executed–by the elders of a village which he admitted was justified in killing him–was to immediately order her new army to kill everyone in the village, not just the elders. And recall also that Xena had smacked Gabrielle herself around at least twice before this.
But the main thing that motivated Gabrielle was, I think, jealousy. No matter where you are on the “Are the girls lovers?” argument*, it’s clear that Gabrielle always expected to be Xena’s emotional priority. The realization that Xena loved someone else more than she loved her had to hurt, and she was hitting back.
Oh, take you facts back to Cardiff, where they belong.
I shouldn’t have used the term cold-blooded in the OP. First or second degree would’ve been more apt.
*I’m in the middle; I don’t think they were always lovers, and certainly they weren’t at that point in the story.
In the recent season finale of Weeds, 14 year old Shane Botwin kills the evil Pilar with a croquet mallet; kind of self-defensy, since she had just announced her intent to kill him, but he was in no immediate danger.
Earlier in the season, Nancy caused the death of DEA Capt. Till by turning him over to her future husband, Esteban the murderous drug kingpin. That could theoretically have been avoided by simply calling the police, but that would have involved exposing her extended family to extremely inconvenient legal scrutiny for the sake of saving a man who had almost certainly been planning to kill her.
Of course, you could legitimately question whether either of those characters are really “heroic”…
Bit of a hijack, but since you’re the OP I figure it’s alright.
I’m not surprised that Gabrielle would try to talk Xena out of her assassination plan, that kind of thing was expected of her. But she seemed awfully quick to decide that Xena was wholly in the wrong. I also wasn’t convinced that there was a significant moral distinction between Xena’s plot to kill a a power-hungry despot (one who’d literally murder his own mother if she got in his way) and the kind of bad-guy killing Xena did on a regular basis.*
Worse still, in order to prevent Xena from killing the Green Dragon, Gabrielle made not one but two “deals with the devil”. If you’re really worried about your friend, you don’t make TWO secret bargains that are both likely to result in her death. She ratted Xena out to the Green Dragon without any assurance that he’d let Xena go (not that his word was good for much anyway), and Xena only managed to escape through supernatural means. As for the second bargain, see below.
*IIRC, Gabrielle is forced to confront this fact about herself in the Season 3 episode “Forget Me Not”, which also reveals that she beat Xena to China by making a pact with Ares. This is why I think she was being sanctimonious with the whole “You can’t just murder him!” thing. That may have been part of her motivation, but she was also using it as an excuse to justify her anger and jealousy. Considering what else Gabrielle had been through that season I can’t really fault her for being upset, but she was pretending to have nobler intentions than she really did.
*Good Xena normally only killed villains in hand-to-hand combat, but one look at the Green Dragon should be proof enough that this guy (practically a boy still) would be toast in a fair fight with Xena. So while it would have been more sporting for Xena to give him a fighting chance, it wouldn’t have done him much good. And it’s not like she could just capture him and hand him over to local law enforcement – he was the rightful hereditary ruler and apparently had every legal right to carry out all the brutal executions he liked.
I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not defending Gabrielle here. Though she was, for the most part, more sinned against than sinning in their relationship (hell, you can make a good case that she was an abused wife much of the time), that’s not the case here. I don’t think Gabrielle, in her heart of hearts, truly thought Xena was wholly in the wrong here. Rather, she was jealous and hurt, and pissed at not being in the emotional driver’s seat for once (as Xena was always the one more in love) and in consequence was lashing out. Everything else was a rationalization.
Can I mention a movie that’s on cable tv all the time, Fried Green Tomatoes? Not only is the slimy husband killed by the cook, he’s barbequed. And served to federal officers.
You and I must be among the only serious X:WP fans here. I can’t remember the last time there was a thread that was about Xena at all.
*Ah, I think we’re pretty much on the same page then with regard to Gabrielle’s behavior and motivations in “The Debt I & II”.
I do disagree with the bolded part, though. I think it’s unfair to both women. Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship was unhealthy in a lot of ways (although they did work through some of their issues), but with the exception of Xena’s shocking and IMHO out-of-character behavior at the beginning of “The Bitter Suite” I would not characterize it as abusive. Gabrielle never had much problem standing up to Xena, and she had plenty of opportunity to leave Xena if she was unhappy. It wasn’t even a choice between Xena and going home to Mom & Dad – Gabrielle had several other potential romantic interests, the opportunity to be the first female student at the bard college in Athens, and was always welcome among the Amazons. Gabrielle toyed with such plans several times throughout the course of the show and, again with the exception of “The Bitter Suite”, Xena was always willing to accept Gabrielle’s decision to go her own way. But Gabrielle always decided on her own that she’d rather be with Xena. Well, in the case of her (literally) short-lived marriage to Perdicus then Callisto interfered, but even then Gabrielle wasn’t forced to go back to Xena.
Xena was often insensitive toward Gabrielle and had a difficult time treating her as an equal, tending to see her as either a saint or a child. But the main problem for both of them was that they kept getting sucked into a drama triangle with each other.
I blame Joss Whedon for squeezing us out. Bastard.
Are you disagreeing with **all **of the bolded part, or just **part **of the bolded part? That is, I get that you don’t think Gabrielle was abused, but are you saying that she was not more sinned against than sinning?
It’s trivial to find examples of Xena being physically rough with Gabrielle. Most of the time it’s played for laughs, as when the she grabs Gabrielle to stop her from doing something impetuous or stupid, or handwaved as Xena being mentally impaired or some such. But I don’t think that Xena’s attempted murder in “The Bitter Suite” was atypical. She’s a vengeful type. It was more uncharacteristic of her to let Gabrielle leave the centaur village alive after Hope killed her son.
Having given the matter a bit more thought, I take back the sinned-against remark. Though I’d still say Xena’s treatment of Gabrielle at times bordered on physical abuse–and stepped over that line at least twice–Gabrielle was, if not manipulative, certainly … smug. … about their emotional dynamic. As I may have said upthread, I always saw the relationship was fundamentally unequal. That is, Gabrielle loved Xena emotionally but could take or leave the sex. Xena loved Gabrielle physically as well as emotionally, and was frankly more passionate about Gabrielle in the first place. Gabrielle knew this and enjoyed the unequal power dynamic, even though she also knew it was dangerous. She wasn’t kidding–and wasn’t unreasonable–when she told the Catherine Morris character that she was frequently afraid of Xena.
I wasn’t thinking so much about that part, but it depends on what you meant by that. If you meant that bad things happened to Gabrielle more often than she did bad things to others then I’d agree. If you meant that Xena deliberately hurt her more often than Gabrielle deliberately hurt Xena then I’d say no. It was rare for either to deliberately cause the other pain, more often they either meant well or had not fully thought through the consequences of their actions.
*Well, I don’t think it’s fair to include slapstick comedy as abuse. If we take all the cartoonish elements of the show seriously then Joxer should have been seriously brain dam…okay, not the best example. But the show was usually good about clearly distinguishing between comic violence and serious violence.
And as we saw in The Debt II, Gabrielle wasn’t above striking Xena when she knew Xena couldn’t hit back. Given the situation I don’t blame Gabrielle for cracking, but she was definitely capable of lashing out physically when angry/frustrated.
*That’s a large part of why I think “The Bitter Suite” was out of character for her – I think Xena would have been more likely to either attack Gabrielle immediately or not at all. We saw with Julius Caesar that Xena could hold a grudge for a decade or more, but she didn’t normally need a few days to think about it before she decided she wanted bloody vengeance. At the end of “Maternal Instincts” it seems that Xena simply wants never to see Gabrielle again. I had forgotten that at the beginning of “The Bitter Suite” Ares is egging her on though, so that somewhat explains why Xena gave in to her dark side at that point after controlling herself earlier.
*This is darker than I’d go, but I more or less agree. Gabrielle could be holier-than-thou at times, and although she did genuinely care about other people she could also be very self-centered. (She became almost insufferable in Season Four, when she got taken in by every two-bit mystic who told her she was special.) Gabrielle also demonstrated multiple times that she was capable of walking away from her relationship with Xena. Yet she always chose to return, without being begged or threatened by Xena. So she was getting something out of this relationship that made it worth the trouble.
Xena for her part was apparently willing to accept and sometimes even seemed to expect that Gabrielle would leave her to pursue some other path. But while Xena was prepared to go her own way alone, she never seemed to imagine a happy future for herself without Gabrielle. She attempted to leave Gabrielle several times when she believed this was for Gabrielle’s own good, but the only time Xena really stopped wanting to be with Gabrielle was in “Maternal Instincts”/“The Bitter Suite”. It took the murder of Xena’s child for her to make that choice, and even then she clearly didn’t believe she was going to have a good life without Gabrielle.
It struck me writing this that a big reason why Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship seemed so unhealthy at times was that the writers had to do so much dancing around the “Are they or aren’t they?” question. This was fine earlier in the series, but by Season Three when the writers deliberately set out to cause a major rift in the relationship then I think it was awkward to leave the nature of that relationship ambiguous. I understand why this was necessary, but had the characters been clearly and unambiguously either lovers or close platonic friends in Seasons 3 & 4 then some issues wouldn’t have seemed as problematic and others could have been dealt with more openly. Even having Xena say “I’m in love with you” and Gabrielle saying “I love you, but not that way” would have seemed healthier than leaving these things unsaid.
I like the dancing, actually, because while I think the girls were probably physically intimate at several points in their relationship, it was not an always thing. I doubt they were ever intimate before Gabrielle’s marriage, for instance, though Xena is clearly in love in every sense of the word, and realizes that, early on. Gabrielle is actively surprised (in the way only fictional characters ever are ;)) to realize that she’s in love with Xena after Xena’s first big death* (when she has to be resurrected by ambrosia with a little help from the Amazons). But she’s still ambivalent about making it physical. I imagine a conversation between them in which Xena tells Gabrielle how she feels, and Gabrielle replies that she loves her more than anyone but does not wish to be sexual. Later the bard changed her mind, only to be understandably reticent about having sex after the Rift. I see a lot of ups and downs in their physicality; they were never fucking like bunnies.
As I said upthread, Gabrielle’s emphasis was more on the emotional than the physical. When they discover Xena’s miracle pregnancy, she casually suggests that Hercules might be the father, and nothing about her tone indicates that she’d be surprised or bothered by the idea of Xena having a one-night stand (at least with a man).
The girls had a passionate relationship, but not always a sexual one, and I think that was mostly Gabby’s doing. I somehow can’t see her as wanting monogamy.
*Yes, I am aware of how ridiculous that clause is. Shut up.
Wow all this Xena talk reminds me of the good old days on the Alt-Tv-Xena Usenet group! In keeping with the theme I believe at the end of the second Callisto episode when they are sinking in quicksand Xena throws her Charkram into a tree as an anchor point and uses the whip to pull herself out while Callisto is sinking to her death. I know death does not mean much in the Xenaverse but Xena had enough time to rescue Callisto as well but she just let her sink to her death in cold blood.
That wasn’t murder, though. Xena did not create the situation which imperiled Callisto’s life, and even by modern standards I don’t think she was obligated to attempt a rescue.
Which is not to say that Xena wouldn’t have murdered Callisto in cold-blood anyway.
Even if their relationship status on Facebook would have been “It’s complicated”, I think it would have made for a better narrative if that had been made explicit. I understand why the writers did what they did, but keeping the audience in the dark as to the precise nature of the central relationship in the show isn’t a good long-term storytelling strategy.
To consider a very different kind of show, in The Office (which I’m thinking of because the big wedding episode is tonight) the audience knows from the beginning that Jim and Pam are good friends but also that Jim has secret romantic feelings for Pam. It’s not initially clear whether this is a crush or something more serious. Pam’s true feelings were somewhat mysterious for the first couple of seasons, and she herself didn’t seem sure whether she was really attracted to Jim or not. This love drama was very engrossing, but the writers wisely didn’t try to drag out the ambiguity for six years.
*(Bolding mine.) Interestingly, Gabrielle only seemed to have problems with jealousy when the “competition” was another woman. I don’t think this was necessarily sexual jealousy, especially since she was also upset when Joxer was flirting with the Amazon woman in the second musical episode. I think she had a bit of an issue with wanting people to pay attention to and admire her.
It isn’t murder to fail to save someone’s life, especially when doing so would involve considerable risk for the rescuer. Had it been Gabrielle or even Joxer or a total stranger in the quicksand then Xena undoubtedly would have risked her life to save them, but failing to do so isn’t murder. However…
Xena could have killed Callisto in the episode “Callisto” but refused to do so, and might have done the same in “Return of Callisto” if not for the quicksand. Of course, Callisto had barely gotten started with causing trouble at that point.
By the standards of your OP Xena did murder Callisto at the end of “Sacrifice II”, although this is again what I’d call a “hot-blooded” murder. Since NOTHING could permanently eliminate Callisto it’s somewhat debatable what should really count as killing her, but Xena stabbed her with the Hind’s Blood Dagger fully believing that this would be the last of her.
I think you’re right on the nose. Gabrielle really needed to be the center of attention. Not for EVERYONE in the world, but certainly were Xena and Joxer were concerned.
As to what you said about Callisto, I don’t think the Hind’s-blood dagger stabbing quite counts; it was euthanasia, as Callisto had specifically asked her to do it.
Ah, but she changed her mind. Callisto had asked Xena to kill her, but after Gabrielle (seemingly) died Callisto laughed and said this was the kind of thing that made life worth living. Xena then said “NO SOUP FOR YOU!”* and stabbed her.
I would count Saul. In the latter case it’s less a matter of it being ok if it’s the president and more a matter of if it’s a cylon. I would also count the secret executions. Even though they were theoretically based in law, that was clearly nebulous justification for what was really vigilante vengence killings.
I love that lol. That needs to be on tshirts and fake motivational posters.
