written by Steven L. Sears
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 28
SD: Can we hazard a guess from the title, “The Dirty Half Dozen,” what the genesis of this script was?
Steve: When I first came in to talk to Rob and RJ, I came up with about 5 or 6 different ideas for episodes. One was about an older man, a simple villager. He was the best swordsmaker in the world and nobody knew who he was and where he was. But people who had his swords could not be defeated. And then Xena found him. The idea was do you kill him to prevent these swords from being made again or what do you do with this guy? That was part of the genesis of “The Dirty Half Dozen.” When the idea came up to bring in other characters and I was trying to come up with a suitable plot, knowing that we'd done Hephaestus' metal, I thought, what if I try to bring this old man in now and have him working for Slammer, which was Agathon's original name. That's why he's an important character in my original story notes. In the final version of the episode, the theme and the character are entirely gone!
Now we come to the present version of this story. The idea was that this was a group of misfits like The Dirty Dozen movie. The fact that I only had six people to play with gave me the title. You had these people who were all connected by one thread which, in this case, is Xena, and all of them are criminals in their own right and they’re going to try to become a team so they can go up against Ares and stop the metal of Hephaestus from being used by Agathon.
In The Dirty Dozen, the reward was those people would get their freedom and that was the same with our story. But in the movie, the reward that Lee Marvin's character offered was only their freedom. In “Dirty Half Dozen,” it was the idea that after they were free, hopefully, they would make better choices and go on to lead good lives. That moral theme was something you needed for our show. What was played between Xena and Gabrielle was that question. Xena possibly took away what these criminal’s good choices could have been by being in their lives. When she showed up and influenced their lives, they became bad. In one sense, she’s trying to go up against Ares and has put together the right people for the job. But the larger story is that she’s trying to fix what she did many years ago.
SD: People wondered why Xena would work with a group when she's always worked alone and why she chose criminals to help her instead of good guys?
Steve: The story could have been written that way, but the idea that she was redeeming people from her past worked better from a story aspect. As opposed to getting to know people she’d never met before. Or if she did decide to do it on her own, I would have had to find another “heart” for the story.
And there was a practical aspect to this story that we discussed internally. By season three, Lucy had been in every episode, except when she was injured during the second season and when she went to NATPE once a year. It’s hard for any one actor to carry a series’ load and she was carrying quite a bit of it. There was a series I worked on before, with a lead actor from the feature world, and you could see how the pace of the show was wearing him down. We were worried about that with Lucy, that it would start running her down.
It was probably Rob who asked if there was a way to give her some kind of relief. We did some Gabrielle stories, but we decided to look at some other characters that we could possibly bring back and have Gabrielle go off with them for part of the story. You'd never eliminate Xena completely, but you could limit her part of the episode by having her go off “to the city” or have a parallel storyline which would give her half the time off. This would also work for Renee. So it was a chance to try out some new characters and see if we liked any of them enough to bring them back. Structuring it the way I did with four characters, I hoped to have two of them left over at the end that we might use later on.
What we discovered was that no matter how interesting the guest characters were, we really wanted to see Xena and Gabrielle together. Both Glaphyra and Darnelle were wonderful. I liked both of them and would have loved to bring either one back. But we never found a script that organically required their presence. And we decided to see what happened day by day instead of planning to separate Xena and Gabrielle because that’s not what our series is. It is about these two characters.
SD: I wonder if any lead actor dealt with the situations Lucy and Renee had every day - action, outdoors, skimpy costumes, in frequently inclement weather.
Steve: I hate to make broad statements about nationalities where the business is concerned, but there is a different mindset between different countries as far as television. I’ll say this as a generality. If we had been shooting Xena here, in the US, with an established American actress, I think we would have had more problems in that regard. In general, from my experience with different shows, you do run into a point where the person will say, “I demand that I be given three days off a week or I won’t show up.” With Lucy, she was always game. And Renee.
I had a conversation with Karl Urban once about the differences between working in the US and New Zealand. Karl said, in New Zealand, acting is not a flighty profession. It’s not like here where all people think about is the glamor and not the hard work. In New Zealand, they think of it as a nine-to-five job. You go in, you do an honest day’s work, you go have a beer and you go home. It’s honorable work.
SD: How did you see the character of Agathon?
Steve: He was hip and grainy. I wrote in the script, “Picture Kurt Cobain on adrenaline and you’ve got him. A Mycenean slamdancer with tortured eyes.” I was going for that teen angst except Agathon was given an opportunity by Ares to get what he wanted. He had that cocky confidence of youth. He wanted to take over the world.
SD: Some people asked why would Ares go with such a loose cannon? But Ares says Agathon reminds him of Xena.
Steve: Ares respects individual strength. For Ares, the ultimate is to be able to control that. Everything Agathon said to Ares was not necessarily confrontational, but he didn’t back down. He wasn't a yes-man. He told Ares, “We're using each other. I want to get the world and you’re going to give it to me. In return, I will rule it for you.” Ares respects that. And this is one of many people Ares has tried out to replace Xena. There’s an aspect of that I haven’t spoken about before in interviews because it’s something I had taken for granted. That's Ares' desire to get Xena back for personal reasons.
There are two things going on with Ares. One is that, yeah, he’d like to find someone to replace Xena. You’ll notice, however, that he finds these people and then throws them up against Xena under the guise of testing them. Well, that’s only half true. The other side is that he’s saying, “Hey Xena, look what I've got. Aren’t you jealous? Don’t you want to come back to me now?”
SD: Lure her back by using her ego?
Steve: Yeah. He keeps bringing these people to Xena. If you notice, at least in the way I've tried to write the episodes I did, he does it in such a way that he gives Xena every chance to intervene. Not just confrontationally, not like, “You’ve gotta fight this person.” But he goes to her and talks to her and says, “This one is better than you.” But then Ares leaves the door partway open by saying, “But if you want your job back, it’s there.” Of course, that doesn’t work on Xena because she won’t give in to his seduction anymore.
SD: You have Ares say to Agathon, “Xena’s time with me has ended.” Does he mean that?
Steve: No, he doesn’t mean it. Otherwise, he’d just kill her. He’s just saying that to Agathon. But if Agathon can defeat Xena, then it would show Ares that Xena isn't what he thought she was either. Maybe there's a part of him that hopes that will happen, so he won't desire her so much.
SD: You have Xena start a fire in an innocent town to make it possible for her to rescue Walsim from beheading. Wasn't that a little bit drastic?
Steve: Actually, that was done on the set, not in the script. (laughing) Our crack stunt team thought this would be cool. However, we can say the fire was set as a distraction and didn’t burn the entire town down. It was easily put out while Xena and Walsim made their escape. I mean, hey, we didn't actually see the ashen remains did we? Besides, they were stunt flames. They go off clock early.
SD: In the opening fight with the guys in that armor with the points sticking out, Xena and her gang, entirely unprotected, defeat those baddies by beating them up. Why couldn’t the Athenian soldiers use that tactic?
Steve: First off, they weren't led by Xena. Heroes have to be special in some way. But, more to the point, the Athenian soldiers tried to use military tactics - their swords and their shields. Xena tried that and her sword broke. Walsim used his crossbow and fired an arrow in-between the joints of the armor. That was effective. All the other characters threw away their spears and swords because the armor can't stop physical impact.
At one point, you see Darnelle jumping on a bad guy. That's Newton, you can't stop the laws of physics. Gabrielle is able to use her staff. I always thought it was interesting that her staff was the only really effective weapon because it was an impact weapon - hitting them, sweeping their feet out from under them. So, because Xena's team weren’t soldiers and weren’t structured by tactics and weaponry, that helped them. They were street fighters.
SD: Someone said that when Xena’s gang sent Agathon’s men hightailing it for the castle, it diminished their threat potential.
Steve: Yeah, I don’t disagree with that at all. As I watched the episode, one of the things that bothered me was that, at a certain point, you still have five or six of Agathon’s men who say, “Run away!” They weren't losing the battle. At worst, they were holding their own, but they shouted, “Back to the castle!” In my mind, when I was writing the script, there were only one or two who ran off, if any. It does look weird. Xena’s saying, “They have this secret weapon and there’s no way we can defend against it,” and yet Xena’s gang ran the bad guys off. But the script does say, “Finally, the warriors retreat to the woods.” So I can't blame the people on set for that. I saw it differently in my mind, but the script was ambiguous. That’s one I’ll certainly cop to. Whoever made the observation is correct. It does diminish the threat potential when the big superhuman bad guys are…
SD (laughing): …knocked over by Gabrielle. Darnelle was hitting one of the baddies in the “face” with his fists right on that pointy armor. That’s gotta hurt!
Steve (laughing): It does, but consider who Darnelle is - and we didn't show the injuries on his hands. And consider this - when you see Darnelle jumping on the guy, even if those points were made out of plastic, they still hurt and Charles Mesure actually did that stunt himself.
SD: Onward to the Battle of the Sexes in this episode between Darnelle and Glaphyra. Was this essential to the plot? How did this become an aspect of the story?
Steve: It was a natural progression. I liked Katrina Hobbs, who played Glaphyra, and I thought Rick Jacobson did a great job keeping all the characters at a certain level. But there were times where she said some of the sexist dialogue a little too intensely. At a certain point, it can sound like someone whining for their rights as opposed to asserting their rights. When reading the script last night, all the lines should have been underplayed because the interaction I was going for between Glaphyra and Darnelle was Hepburn and Tracy. I wanted that dynamic because both of them were right and both of them were wrong.
Darnelle was certainly wrong in his macho “this is the world” attitude. But Glaphera was also wrong in believing men are the source of all problems. The interesting thing about all of that was I gave Xena, the female lead, the role of going to Glaphyra and saying, “You’re wrong about men.” A lot of other shows might have gone the other way and had Xena say, “Yeah, yeah, we know they’re bad, but you have to deal with them.” If you remember back in “Hooves & Harlots,” it's the same thing Terrais said, “It’s not a man's world. They didn't take it from us, we gave it to them.” She was the moderate voice and so was Xena in “Dirty.” The scenes between Glaphyra and Darnelle, quite honestly, are right out of the nineteen fifties.
SD: Was there any discussion about whether that portrayal of their relationship would play to a nineties audience?
Steve: I think the war of the sexes always plays. The cool thing that I was able to do here was use extremes because those extremes are still with us today. You still have the ultra-feminists and the macho jocks. In my personal life, any time I hear either gender asserting their gender rights, I automatically play the other side. I don’t care if it’s a guy or a woman. There’s a bumper sticker on a car in my neighborhood that says, “Adam was a rough draft.” And when I read it, I say to myself, “And Eve was a spare rib.” And if the Eve line had been on the car, I would have come up with the Adam line. I play both sides because I find the gender war to be interesting and ridiculous at the same time. So writing Glaphyra and Darnelle was quite fun because I could keep it balanced within their own particular prejudices.
SD: At the last convention, I asked Charles Mesure about Glaphyra sucking on Darnelle's thumb. I wondered if it was an ad-lib.
Steve: I never wrote “she sucks on his thumb.” (laughing) I remember seeing the dailies and wondering how they were going to cut around it. But we went ahead and played it. I did write that she took the apple from him and ate it seductively. (Steve looks through the script and reads to me) “She reaches for the apple, taking his hand in hers, lifting it to her mouth, then bites. Juices run seductively down her chin and his hand. She turns his hand slightly and licks the juice from it.” That's as far as I went.
SD: And speaking of double-entendres, Monlik says to Xena, “Dragging around some kid pretending she’s a friend.” What did you mean to imply about the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle?
Steve: You have to keep in mind that remark comes from Monlik’s perspective, not that of the audience. When he knew Xena, she didn’t have any friends. So obviously she’s up to something. This is what Monlik was thinking. I'll be very blatant when I say this. “Obviously she’s not your friend so she must be your screw buddy.”
SD: Because, in his experience, Xena only uses people.
Steve: That's right.
SD: Xena sends Monlik and Walsim off to infiltrate Agathon's castle and come back with a map of the inside. Xena kills Monlik and now they don't have a map. Why didn’t Xena check Monlik's body for a map? And if Walsim was with him, why doesn’t he also know the inside of the castle?
Steve: The map was in Monlik's head. He’s the one who actually went inside the castle. When Xena was Introducing everyone in the beginning, she introduces Monlik as a thief. That’s not in the script. He's a spy. It's an important difference. I didn’t think about it at the time, but when I was watching the episode last night I realized that was an important change someone made on set, probably without realizing the impact.
Xena originally knew Monlik because he was a spy for her during the Battle of Corinth. He was the one who got inside the castle and figured out the way the water ran through it.
And there’s a scene that was deleted which was between Monlik and Walsim as they were looking at the castle. Walsim says, “How are you going to get in there?” Monlik replies, “That’s my business. I used to do it all the time for Xena. Get in, get the info, get out.” Walsim says, “Well how come I’ve never heard of you?” Monlik replies, “Because I’m good. Remember Xena’s attack on the Corinth Centaurs? Guess who told her where that line was weakest?” You just published this script, right?”
SD: Yes, at the last convention.
Steve: One of the things I never had to worry about before was other people reading the scripts. These days, I have to think, “Did I say anything in there that would offend anyone?” Because when you’re with a production crew, sometimes you’ll put in little jokes. My sense of humor comes out in the descriptive sections. I know in one of the scripts you published - and this wasn’t offensive to anyone - I wrote that Xena had knocked down one of the characters and I said, “He collapses like Eric Gruendemann looking at a budget.” One of the things I noticed at the beginning of Act One of this script, where we find Darnelle, Glaphyra and Monlik in the prison, is the description of the prison dungeon. It says, “We pan along the various cells filled with the dregs of humanity - killers, thieves, writers.” In truth, killers and thieves would have asked to be put in a separate cell.
SD: When did Agathon make the deal with Walsim and how did Xena find out about it? I realize you couldn’t give that away to the audience, but when did it happen?
Steve: Back in the deleted scene we were just talking about, Monlik disappears. He's gone inside the castle. The assumption is that during the time they were both there and separated, somehow contact was made between Agathon and Walsim. Xena anticipated this possibility. Xena always has options. She plays the one that’s available to her. She thought, out of this group of four, there was a good chance somebody would betray her. And she did overhear the conversation they had in the woods. She also looked at them and said, “Who's the one I can trust?” And, interestingly enough, it was Darnelle. That’s interesting because her choice wasn't Glaphyra. And Darnelle is the closest to Ares, in his demeanor and manner.
Xena's plan took the possibility of betrayal into account. Her open plan was to try and sneak into the castle. If she hadn’t been betrayed, she would have succeeded. She backed it up by thinking, if someone does betray me, I'll have Darnelle as backup. When Xena pulled Darnelle aside, she told him what she thought would happen and she asked him to feel out who the betrayer might be. She didn’t think Glaphyra would do it because Agathon's a man.
And Walsim put it out early on by saying, “Let’s team together to go after Xena.” So all Darnelle had to do after his conversation with Xena was go to Walsim and say, “I’ve been thinking about what you said. I’m in.” And Walsim told him the plan.
SD: Just before the castle blows up, Xena’s about to have her downtown with Agathon and she tells Gabrielle and Glaphyra to run to safety. Glaphyra says, “We have to protect our men.”
Steve: That was overdone. It was supposed to be a wry comment. She could have looked at Darnelle with a little bit of a grin and said, “Well, we have to protect our men.” It still worked on its own level, though.
SD: Some fans thought it meant Gabrielle had to stay there and protect her man, Xena.
Steve: That’s interesting. That was not in my mind. That’s funny. Gabrielle not leaving Xena was because Gabrielle does not leave Xena. At that point, Glaphyra cared about Darnelle. She learned her lesson after the conversations with Xena and Gabrielle in the cell. She said to Xena, “Look around you. How many men are in the cell. We were betrayed by men.” When, in fact, no, Darnelle was on their side the entire time. She trapped herself in her own prejudice.
After Darnelle released them from the cell, he turns to Glaphyra and says, “I know you want to apologize.” Which is a very Spencer Tracy type of line. Then he kisses her. That is him saying, “Aha!” The important thing about that is she didn't hit him. And it's not because it’s, “Oh, I’ve been seduced by him.” No, quite the opposite. It was, “Okay, you got me back.”
SD: That kiss caused a lot of discussion on the email lists. The man overpowering the woman. Some people thought it was very misogynistic. They thought the point was Darnelle won Glaphyra over by overpowering her.
Steve: That’s their prejudice. He won her over the moment she realized he didn't betray them. In fact, he was working to try and help them. This goes back to the conversation she had with Gabrielle about Perdicus. Glaphyra was wondering if she was wrong about men. Darnelle has been playful, even with his macho attitude.
The truth is, when you look at their interaction, there is not one physically misogynistic thing he has done until that kiss. And that kiss, in his mind, wasn’t like, “Aha! Once I kiss her she’s gonna fall for me.” It was simply getting her back.
The other side is that we’ve already seen Glaphyra fight, we’ve seen the scene with the apple, we’ve already seen her use her sexuality, then shove the apple into his face. She used her sexuality as a ruse to do physical violence against him. Where are the complaints there? In fact, if you look over the episode and count up the score, you have Glaphyra shoving the apple in his face and punching him in the same scene. You have Darnelle kissing her. At best that’s Glaphyra: 2 Darnelle: 1 So who's really being the “overpowering” one?
But back to the kiss. That kiss would not have happened if she hadn't stopped looking at him like the enemy. Her look after the kiss wasn’t all dewy-eyed. It was exasperated with a bit of confusion and then a smile. “This guy is interesting. He might be a good person to hang around with.” If she hadn't felt that way, it would have been Glaphyra: 3 because she would have belted him.
SD: Gabrielle says to Xena, about the newly-enlisted gang, “Were they murderers before you met them?” Was Xena totally responsible for those four people becoming bad?
Steve: I think all people have to have questions about themselves before they can be seduced by someone else. If you are certain of who you are, then you can't really be drawn off your path. If you’re confused, you can, but you can find your way back. Monlik and Walsim - that's who they were. Darnelle and Glaphyra - that’s not who they were. Gabrielle says to Xena at the end, “You started off with four and you redeemed two. That's a pretty good average. You couldn’t have redeemed those other two. They were who they were before you met them. For Darnelle and Glaphyra, you fixed something you'd done wrong.”
SD: Did you have a back story for Glaphyra about why she hated men?
Steve: Yes. I thought I might explore that in future episodes. Glaphyra saw the way Xena handled men. Xena taught her how to use them. When she and Xena separated, Glaphyra thought she could do the same thing. It ended up being used against her because she didn’t have the same conviction Xena did. Xena's conviction, even in her dark days, was truly from in her soul. Her conviction of who she was and what her destiny was supposed to be. She used both men and women.
Glaphyra tried to use the same tactics, but didn't have the same conviction so it was turned around on her. The idea that she specialized in slavery of men, that started because she was a slave of men. In my mind, she captured the first man who had enslaved her and sold him. Her hatred of men, based on her experience, was very real.
SD: Is Gabrielle looking at Glaphyra and afraid she could turn out like her because she’s hanging out with Xena?
Steve: I think she was thinking she could have become like any of them - distorted, prejudiced, a criminal, self centered.
SD: Gabrielle says to Xena, “What would have happened if I’d met you before, you know, before?” It seems to be the beginning of Gabrielle’s search for her own identity.
Steve: It’s funny, I was watching this part about, “Who am I? Did you change me?” This was one of the first times we addressed that. Looking back on it now, my first thought was, my God did we drive that into the ground over the course of the series. At that time we were finding different ways to state it so it seemed like a new take on the affect Xena has had on Gabrielle's life.
That bit about “If I'd met you before,” refers to the fact that Gabrielle ran into Xena after Xena'd given up that warrior life. I'm remembering a discussion I had with myself or somebody else about whether Glaphyra had started out like Gabrielle - that Xena had rescued Glaphyra from Xena’s own soldiers and taken her as a concubine. Gabrielle's meeting with Xena was similar except for the ending, which was only because of the timing of it. This wasn't in the script, but it was something I'd considered.
Any time I work on a guest character's back story, the first thing I think of is how would it affect Xena and Gabrielle emotionally. Xena might say, “I met Glaphyra because my soldiers were about to kill her and she stood up to the head soldier and I liked that so I pulled her out of the crowd.” Gabrielle’s response would be, “Just like me.” But after that point, the differences would be explored. Was Xena the central thing that could have changed either of them, or was it the individual conviction that Gabrielle or Glaphyra had about themselves?
SD: This was season three and this is a prelude to shows like “The Debt” and “Maternal Instincts.” Someone felt that, in this episode, Gabrielle came into her own as an individual and a fighter. Xena also seems to be aware of the change. This fan went on to say, “Perhaps the growth and inner strength of Gabrielle will be part of the Rift between her and Xena.” Rob has talked about his wanting to have a rift between the characters during this season. Did you know, at this time, about the challenges that their relationship was going to go through?
Steve: In retrospect, there are two different ways to look at the Rift. What Rob was looking at was grand issues. If we set up a huge divisive issue, such as a child and the killing of a child, then we can put the characters at each other's throats. At this point, this wasn’t Rob saying, “Let’s go to a Rift.” This was just my natural progression of the character.
I liked Gabrielle, I identified with her. It doesn't mean I didn't like Xena, I just thought there was so much growth potential in Gabrielle - the naivete, the innocence, “oh the world's a great adventure,” then the wake-up call through her life of being with Xena. One of the things I knew was inevitable was that Gabrielle had to come into her own which meant she had to assert herself. And, ultimately, for us to love this character, she had to assert herself as an individual regardless of Xena. And when that happens, you have to question why two people remain together. Once you say, “I am an individual and I don't need you,” why would you hang around? The answer to that is because you love that person.
Right now, as we're coming up to “The Dirty Half Dozen,” Gabrielle hasn’t been using Xena. That’s the wrong way of looking at it. But there have been other things she’s needed from Xena. Xena got her out of that village. That was a need. If Hercules had come into town, quite possibly Gabrielle would have said, “Hey, Hercules, take me with you.” So Xena performed a function - “I’m going to learn from you. You’re going to teach me fighting.” It's not that Gabrielle was using her, Gabrielle liked Xena. She wanted to understand Xena. She thought she wanted to be Xena.
But, at a certain point, when Gabrielle says, “You know what, I don’t care what you know as far as teaching me how to fight because I don’t want to learn that. I have no functional reason to have you in my life now. But I don't want you to go.” That’s love. In my mind, we had to get to that point eventually, but it wasn't like we had to find it quickly. It was natural. If the character didn’t go to that point, as I've said before, you would have had three years of Xena walking around with an annoying sidekick and we would have killed her off in the third season. But we didn’t. We had a perspective on the character and we had an actress who could pull it off.