story by Robert Tapert and RJ. Stewart
teleplay by RJ. Stewart - Executive Producer
Interview with R.J. Stewart
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 06
SD: Do you know what the most popular one-liner Is from this episode?
RJ: What?
SD: “I hate the dead. You can't take vengeance on 'em.”
RJ (chuckling): I really liked that one.
SD: There are so many stories just begging to be told in these episodes - Alti, Anokin, Cyane, Otere and Yakut.
RJ: We might have been a tad ambitious there. I'm not totally sure we pulled off all the stories, but we sure did make it interesting.
SD: People are hoping they will see more of these characters in future episodes. I noticed the Amazon Queen, Cyane, had the same name as the Amazon Queen in Young Hercules.
RJ: Cyane is the name of the modern day girl that goes back in time in Amazon High. All Amazon queens are named Cyane in her honor.
SD: Who was Anokin and what part did she play in Alti's plans to ally with Xena?
RJ: Alti was a shamaness with the Amazons who was kicked out because she was practicing black magic. Anokin was the girl Alti was using like she ended up using Xena to accomplish her goal of taking over the power of the Amazons. What we were playing with is that Xena always had this yearning for a female companion. This was the dark version of the relationship she eventually had with Gabrielle. Xena cared about Anokin very deeply. She was her first real close friend. Anokin was crazy, but in those days, so was Xena. So they shared that. Just like Gabrielle and Xena now share some values that they both want to do good. It could be that Xena has a need to be a mentor. The positive way of looking at it is that she has a bit of the teacher in her. The not so positive way is she has a bit of the bully in her. Her relationship with Gabrielle is more the teacher and with Anokin, it may have been more of the other.
Keep in mind Xena was a very dark character. I think parallels between her relationship with Anokin and Gabrielle are fairly superficial. But there's no question it was a conscious attempt to establish that Xena had an interest in having young protegees.
SD: I never thought of Xena as wanting a buddy. She seems such a loner. But even a loner has a need for someone to share with.
RJ: Absolutely. I don't want to create the impression she was lying around saying, “Gosh, if I just had a sidekick.” She just took advantage of the opportunity. Anokin was her evil sidekick and Gabrielle is her good sidekick.
SD: Women like to have another woman to talk to so Borias couldn’t fulfill that need in her?
RJ: A lot of questions about Alti and Borias will be answered in future episodes.
SD: I must admit I really love the evil Xena. I don’t think I'd like her as much if it wasn't for the contrast with who she is now. The blacker her past becomes, the more I feel for the vulnerability she has taken on trying to make up for her past.
RJ: I like the evil Xena, but Rob Tapert adores her. You know what I love about it? I love that it's a back story for Xena. I can't imagine the contemporary Xena without that war criminal kind of back story. That’s what makes the modern Xena so interesting.
SD: Some fans said that Xena was getting so black, they didn't think she could possibly be redeemed. Others say that the blacker she gets, the more they appreciate the struggle she’s going through.
RJ: I feel strongly about that. Her past is pretty dark. We don't show even the tip of the iceberg. I really do think she was a monster. Because of our audience having a lot of young people, we always say she doesn’t kill kids and women, but to be honest, it’s a caveat. I think there’s a limit we’ll take her as far as how dark she could be because we don’t want people turning off the tv set. But as far as in my imagination, she was capable of almost anything.
SD: Are you ever told to tone her down by the censors because of the darkness of the character? She is, after all, the heroine.
RJ: Never. We’ve made some cuts for violence or blood, as in “Doctor In The House,” but when people who aren't very familiar with the show see a dark episode, they generally don’t come away disturbed by Xena. There is something storybookish about it. I don't think she troubles people. I think it’s because of the style of the show. It’s a grand tale. It's in the mythology department. What is more brutal and violent than the Greek myths. People accept that Hercules killed his children and still think that's part of a grand tale. Today a killer of children would be totally unredeemable!
SD: Lucy's own innate vulnerability and the way she plays Xena play a part in how people accept the character.
RJ: Absolutely.
SD: You can’t help but feel for her struggle to reconcile her past. The most surprising part of the show for me was when Xena killed the Amazon leaders. I was not expecting that!
RJ: I'm glad. I tried hard not to tip off that was going to happen. I had to let on in the beginning that Xena killed Cyane because you had to understand the hostility from Cyane. But I didn’t want to telegraph the climax. I’m glad it worked.
SD: At the end of “Sacrifice,” Gabrielle falls into the lava pit and you had to get her out. That was the birth of “Sin Trade”?
RJ: We wanted a cliffhanger with Gabrielle dying. The basic idea was to have Gabrielle appear to be dead at the end of last season and do some episodes without her at the beginning to drive home she was gone. Then the obvious story would be that Xena would be looking for Gabrielle and she would go to the Underworld to try to find her. We realized we’d done a number of Underworld stories and, with Rob, any time he can do Xena's back story, he will. He loves the back story and goes to it with great results.
SD: Alti - another terrific female villain. Is it because a female villain plays well against a female protagonist?
RJ: One of the successes of this show is that we can do things by just changing the gender of a character that makes it feel fresh and different. I think female action villains who are considered formidable and scary on a physical level just aren't seen much. That's what makes it so interesting. Originally the character was going to be a shaman. At some point it was changed to a shamaness.
SD: And Alti's purpose?
RJ: Alti's after the ultimate dark power. She wants to control the dark powers. The way to do that, in the world we've set up, is to stop spirits from crossing into Eternity. Then she can live off their spiritual strength. She’s a spiritual parasite. That is the source of her power. When Xena destroys Alti, the Amazons are then able to cross over into Eternity.
SD: Was that Gabrielle’s voice Xena was hearing?
RJ: Here’s the way I see that. She and Xena have such a strong spiritual bond, she could hear Gabrielle's thoughts. But Xena interpreted it as being the dead Gabrielle.
SD: In the psychic battle between Alti and Cyane, Cyane wins. So why does Xena side with Alti when it appears Cyane was the stronger of the two?
RJ: Xena wants ultimate power and she knows Cyane is not interested in that. Cyane's focus is on the Amazon tribe surviving and she would be fine making peace with her enemies. Making an alliance with Cyane is making an alliance with a little tribe in the middle of nowhere. Xena wants to join with someone who has the same grandiose ambitions she has. And that's Alti.
SD: I was interested in Xena's rejection of Borias' declaration of love. Is Xena's learning to accept love a part of the story you are telling?
RJ: I think she understands love, but she expresses it so differently from Gabrielle. When Gabrielle lays out the bedrolls at night, she wants to make sure Xena is comfortable and she doesn’t care whether Xena notices or not. That kind of detail would never occur to Xena. They have both said “I love you” a thousand times. We've been satirized for that. But when I write it, I mean it. Xena accepted love quite a while ago.
SD: For me, you write very well from a woman's point of view.
RJ: I've always enjoyed writing women characters. I've always liked the company of women. My best friend on this show has always been Liz. And I think writing, particularly for the screen, is the art of observation. If I have eyes and I'm sensitive to women, there’s no reason I can't write them. Novel writing, I think, is more of an internal thing. A man writing a woman or vice versa maybe has to go a farther distance to get there. I think with the screen it is behavioral. I can observe female behavior. Therefore, I can love it and cherish it and try to reflect it in my writing. As far as the deeper emotions, I think that’s transcendent. You burrow deep enough into people’s hearts -
SD: - love, fear, hate -
RJ: - and it's universal. I think a tough woman in Xena's situation would probably be very similar to a man in the same situation. In that sense, I think men and women are very similar.
SD: I've ascribed one facet of Xena’s appeal to the fact that the character is genderless. Her qualities are human characteristics and not relegated to one sex or the other. Her battles, fears, loves and desires can be felt by all.
RJ: I read Emily Dickinson and I'm completely in alliance with her. Here's a woman who lived in New England, never went out, never published her works. And you wonder how I could relate to her? She explored death and love her entire life and those are universal things. There's no doubt in my mind she’s our greatest poet. There's something courageous about working in obscurity for yourself just to try to accomplish your art and reading it only to your friends. It's interesting my two favorite American writers are women - Emily Dickinson and Flannery O’Connor. There are not many writers who have “sliced my soul,” as Dostoyevsky would say. but those two have.
SD: What was Xena going to do when she got to Eternity? Was she going to stay there?
RJ: Xena wants to see Gabrielle again. She doesn't know what the course of that may be. She's never passed through to Eternity. Maybe she’ll never come back. But she wants to see Gabrielle again. In the end, she realizes this is such an incredibly selfish thing. She can do so much good on this earth. If she goes into Eternity, she has turned away from everything Gabrielle stood for. That’s why she doesn't do it when she has the opportunity. But her passionate goal to see Gabrielle is her inability to accept Gabrielle's death.
When I realized Xena can't cross over because that would be betraying everything Gabrielle stood for, I found I knew what the two episodes were about. Which is to do your best to help people. She knew she was running away from people she stuck in that Hell just to see her friend and she had to go back and help them
SD: I had a feeling when she turned away that she was never going to go after Gabrielle. She wasn't going to save the Amazons and then go off to Eternity.
RJ: I feel she’d made a commitment to life. Her best friend died and she was going to embrace death if she had to. She was keeping her options open in case her spirit could cross over to Eternity, see Gabrielle, and then come back. She was willing to go with that and still be alive. But if it meant that she couldn't come back, she was willing to die. And, in the end, what she did was embrace life.
SD: That's what Gabrielle would have wanted.
RJ: That’s right. “I realized you gave me a light of my own.” “If the light on your face ever went out, I couldn't go on.” Well, the light did go out, but Xena realized she can go on because she has a light inside herself that Gabrielle gave her.
SD: How much does Gabrielle know about Xena's past?
RJ: I think she knows a lot.
SD: Does Gabrielle know Xena wiped out the Amazon leaders? Does she know why they hate her?
RJ: I would say she doesn't know that. I think they talked about what happened during “Sin Trade.” Xena: “I thought you might be in the Amazon Land of the Dead.” Gabrielle: “That's where I go when I die?” Xena: “Yeah. I guess so.” But we can add to those rules anytime we want. So I think Xena told her something about that adventure. But I don't think she goes into too much detail. You know, you don't tell your loved ones everything. There is a part of Xena, though, that wants Gabrielle to know she used to be very, very bad and she’s capable of being bad again. And, as I had Xena say in “Crusader,” “I hurt her.”