Well, I liked Deja Vu. As a matter of fact, I liked it quite a lot. For me it was the best comedy ep that they've done in a long while, beating out The Play's The Thing (which I also found very funny) as my favourite comedy ep of the fourth season. And since I liked it even better on re-viewing than I did the first time through, I think it's unlikely to fall from that estimation.
It had it's flaws here and there... but what, in this imperfect world, doesn't? Most notably there were quite a few lines, thrown in for the sheer "one-liner impact", the potential to get an instant laugh, which just made no sense at all in the context of the supposed character uttering them and the situation they were in.
Also, I've spoken before about how the comedy eps seem to have moved more and more to existing "out of the world" of the show as a whole, not so much creating comic situation within the imaginative world of the show, as early comedies, such as Warrior...Princess did, but rather relying for their comedy to a large extent on the fact that we know that we are outside the world of the show, and that the show *is* "just a show". Deja Vu, of course, very much continued in this trend... and most of the ep's own internal inconsistency came from the fact that it didn't seem able to settle firmly upon an attitude to the "world of the show" - is it "just a show", subject to the demands of the market and the whims of the writers and producers, or is it a contiguous part of the reality in which this ep takes place, which would presumably be necessary for the characters in this ep to actually be reincarnations of characters from the show (to say nothing of Ares' little shape-changing and dematerialising tricks)? The script of this ep, if you actually listen to it carefully, can't seem to make up its 'mind' about this question, at points clearly implying one answer, at other points the opposite. Personally I regard this lack of internal consistency as a flaw... although I suppose one could argue that it is a legitimate literary technique, something along the lines of Brechtian 'alienation' or postmodern subversion of the narrative. Of course, one would then have to ask, *why* is it being done... the reasons could hardly be the same as Brecht's, nor even really the postmodernists'. I suppose the obvious answer is that it creates a sort of self-aware, shape-shifting comedy which is appropriate in our media-savvy, endlessly reflexive and ironic world (which in a way, I suppose, is to say it's all of a piece with the postmodern view, where irony reigns supreme). Or, it could just be that they thought it was funny, and they couldn't be bothered about the other stuff.
I've been wrestling somewhat, recently, with the whole question of how committed the creators of the show are to things like overall consistency, or the idea of sustaining an imaginative vision into which all of the episodes of the show can be seen to fit. Sometimes, notably watching something like Ides, one wonders if they really take things like consistency and overall imaginative vision seriously at all. It almost seems that they've been moving increasingly to a position where they don't - each ep is just a drama and a spectacle in its own right, and may well say things about the characters and the world they live in which make no sense whatsoever in terms of things shown in other eps. I used to think that, with a bit of stretching, you could just about see a consistently imagined world and a consistently imagined set of characters being portrayed over the length of the series (and over HTLJ as well - which, after all, is explicitly set in the same universe, and shares characters). Recently I'm almost forced to the conclusion that this is not so... the universe and the characters can be arbitrarily recast to suit the needs of a particular episode, it appears... which means that trying to make any kind of coherent sense of the show as a whole is perhaps a futile exercise. Perhaps one can expect no more from a commercial TV show. And I suppose such an approach (each ep is a new exploration, growing out of the format of the show, but not obliged to maintain actual narrative and character consistency with what went before) could well be defended, even on purely artistic grounds... So we would have to "start afresh" with each ep, treating it as a new thing, rather than part of a single extended imaginative world. So then, watching a new X:WP ep becomes more like, for example, reading a new book about King Arthur... we expect it to take some elements from the Arthurian legends as we know them from other books, but we don't expect it to actually restrict itself to any complete consistency with the 'narrative facts' or characters of any other book. *Is* this how we should look at an X:WP ep now? Each ep is a new interpretation, with no obligation to adhere to the narrative or characters established in other eps? Of course *between* books, particularly if they are by different authors, this sort of thing is regarded as perfectly normal; however, a book which did it internally, from chapter to chapter as it were, would still be regarded as something of an experiment in postmodernism, rather than the norm (well ok, it would be nothing startlingly original in a literary novel, but still fairly 'out there' for genre fiction).
Anyhow... sorry to rabbit on. Back to Deja Vu. For all the questions it raised in my mind about intra- and inter-episode consistency, I still really liked it. It met my self-defined criteria for a great X:WP ep - it gripped me all the way through, it made me laugh, and it made me cry (in this case sometimes both at once, which is quite a remarkable trick). Of course these criteria are rather simplistic, based, as they are, simply on observing my own, more or less involuntary, reactions to the experience of watching the ep. Obviously these reactions don't exist in a vacuum... and in the long run, if the creators of the show don't sustain my imaginative involvement with the characters, my empathy, my human feeling for these people I'm watching, clearly the show won't be able to continue to draw these kind of reactions from me. In other words, irony and novelty can't be simply ends in themselves. Even if narrative consistency isn't there, there has to be some kind of consistent reference to human realities in terms that are experientially coherent to the audience, or else the audience's investment in the show is bound to ebb away. In some ways I think the show's creators are somehow "spending their capital" these days, if not, sometimes, frittering it away. That is to say, they are building on an investment we as audience have in characters and a world which they portrayed... but are they continuing to grow these assets so they will have something to build on in the future? Well, I suppose they are trying... although I fear the lack of consistency and coherency in their recent efforts means they haven't been generating the returns they did in former periods.
Sorry... I am doing it again! See, I really thought Deja Vu was an excellent ep, and hilarious too. But I'm still in rather a sombre, reflective mood after what I saw as the complete catastrophe of Ides.
On a totally different tack, one more thing, before we take a wander through the details of Deja Vu... just to speculate: what do you think they did between when they were first going to air Deja Vu and the version we got now? I mean, it's been widely theorised that the reason they had to pull it back was that, being a clip show, it originally had material involving The Way, and that, having withdrawn The Way, they felt that they had to redo Deja Vu to eliminate this. Now, I should say clearly that I do not know whether this is true. However, it sounds reasonable and likely, and it's sort of interesting to speculate about. As it is, the ep has quite a few references to karma and reincarnation, but really absolutely *nothing* that even the most fanatical Hindu fundamentalist could manage to work up a protest about. I hardly think this is an accident. So what was in the first version? Perhaps one or two clips from India eps, and some sort of additional stuff about the karmic cycle? I can well see, especially within a satirical context, how that wouldn't have gone down well with the Vaishnava hardliners and their assorted pals. Ah well, on the bright side, I seriously doubt that the ep is much the worse for any changes made. For me, at least, it works very well as it is, aside from some quibbles about consistency... oh, and wishing they hadn't dragged the dreadful In Sickness And In Hell in.
So... let's take our wander... for the last time this season (and we shall just have to see what next season brings)...
***
Well we start with the ladder fight from Callisto...and you couldn't start in a much better place than that! This one got into The Xena Scrolls too. But this is only sound judgement on the part of TPTB - it *is* one of the finest scenes they've ever done, and I don't blame them at all for wanting to get more mileage out of it.
*
"This was not a nightmare, Harry - it was an epiphany!" "In a time of ancient gods... I was Xena, the Warrior Princess!" Got to admit, I'm loving this stuff already. More than anything else, I guess, Lucy's Annie was what *made* this ep for me. She was just brilliant. No doubt about it, even as the "Joxer" character, she was still the indubitable star and focus... if this ep itself went to a series, clearly that series would be The Adventures Of Annie Banannie, *not* Harry The Warrior Princess!
*
"That does it - I'm cutting you off! No more internet chat rooms... and I'm dumping this thing!" "Get ya hands off that, Harry!" Yeah, you go girl! Anyone tries to trash my stand-up, I'll take my sword to 'em too! (Though I only have the mass-produced stand-up, not the rarer Pepsi one, like Annie's, and I sure don't have a fancy prop sword like hers...) And what *is* this patronising crap from Harry anyway? "I'm cutting you off" indeed!
*
Annie says she thinks she must have played the Xena Vigilante on the nights when Harry was "working late at the hospital". What? So this particular incarnation of Xena is a doctor? Presumably... after all, if Xena's working in a hospital, what else is she going to be? And it always was very much one of her many skills...
*
"... but when my body is taken over by my previous life spirit, Xena Warrior Princess, I clearly become a very dangerous woman!" I *loved* the way Lucy did this, standing in front of the cut-out and all. In fact I thought Lucy was *terrific* in this ep overall... it was probably her finest comic performance yet (and we do know that she likes to do the comedy...)
*
And it's off to see the "Past Lives Counsellor"! Does Reneé have some sort of yen to be a counsellor? Camp counsellors... Past Lives Counsellors... Or is this just how the writers see her?
*
"And you said that dressing the part was silly.... Well these people don't seem to think it's silly at all!" "Who could argue with them?"LOL! I liked Lucy in the Halloween costume too!
*
"Joan of Arc? Xena... of Amphipolis." "Huh! Bet my sword's bigger than yours!" More good stuff. "Yu are obviously a luvvair not a fattair..." Apparently this Joan of Arc is related to Inspector Clouseau! (Or that guy on the battlements in Monty Python And The Holy Grail...)
*
How come Annie gets to see the doctor first... everyone else was there before her?
*
"Joan... new armour! Ah... looking sharp, George!" Nice little 'Hollywood manner' Reneé has there! But how can that guy on the couch think he's a reincarnation of General George Patton... I mean he looked old enough that you'd have thought he was born before 1945, which was when Patton died - and I didn't think you were allowed to have two incarnations that overlapped?
*
Interesting little bit of 'quasi-Indian' music used here... tabla (Indian drums), sitar, bansuri (Indian flute), with finger chimes and guitar. Presumably intended to evoke a sort of 'hippy' atmosphere... Makes one wonder again if they might have originally planned to play up the Indian connection considerably more in this ep, which is, after all, basically about reincarnation...
*
The Doc asks who Harry is, and he says "Annie's boyfriend" - isn't this rather Sandy Wilson? I mean, do people in modern California still introduce themselves this way? It reminded me a bit of Frau Blucher's great revelation in Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein: "Yes... he vas my Boyfriend!"
*
"I'm sorry, but it's in Annie's best interest that her first past life voyage be by herself." So... Reneé finally gets to *play* one of those dubious gurus she otherwise usually seems to find herself falling for.
*
Lava lamps, candles *and* incense! There weren't exactly going for subtlety, were they? I bet the set dressers had fun with this one!
*
The "Doctor's" hypnotic technique was a bit simple, wasn't it? Heck, if it were that easy, we'd all be doing it (only in the best of causes, of course ). Still, I suppose they didn't really have time for anything much more complicated. But wouldn't it have worked better if they'd given her some sort of doohickey... a magic crystal, or a patterned wheel, or something?
*
Actually, I thought Annie had just gone to sleep the first time the Doc hypnotised her.
*
Ye gods, they certainly weren't pulling their punches in the clips they used, eh? Throwing in the actual 'sacrifice' scene from last year's season finale, for example. My, that seems like a long while ago...
*
It's ok, Annie, you're in your present body!" Hmm... novel way to reassure someone.
*
"I saw Hope and Gabrielle fall into the pit... I experienced the whole thing, and... it broke my heart! I am Xena!" Lovely performance from Lucy there... and honestly, second time round, knowing she was Joxer, I liked it even better.
*
"You didn't make a soul meld." "Is that bad?"
*
And when we see the waiting room again, Harry is there with the wild west guy (Custer?), and Patton, Joan of Arc and all seem to have gone. Huh?! So what were they waiting there for?
*
Bit of a weird trick Harry did with the "woo woo" thing. And did native Americans really ever do that? I sort of thought it was more just a Hollywood invention. But then the woman playing cards with Joan (Pocahontas) was pretty much a "Hollywood Indian" too... the real Pocahontas was a woods Indian not a plains Indian, and not much more than a child when she married John Smith (after which she was more or less forcibly converted to Christianity and shipped off to England, where she died of smallpox when she was about 21... not really a very happy story). Mind you, if we're talking history, neither Custer nor Patton would be people I'd much want to share a room with...
*
And the Doc's hypno technique gets even *more* basic on subsequent iterations...
*
When Annie went under the second time at the Doc's I thought at first we were getting the scene from Orphan Of War where Xena give up Solan - it looked like that, with Xena advancing in the dark wearing some kind of cloak. But then we jumped into A Family Affair instead. Were the first shots from AFA too? I guess so, but I don't remember the 'cloak'...
*
"Police have no idea who the Xena Vigilante is, but do theorise it's an over-exuberant fan of the show." Now... don't you even *think* about it, no matter how over-exuberant you are!
*
"Ye gods, the horror!" Nice scream from Annie.
*
An *awful* lot of whooshing in this ep... for all sorts of things - people shaking their fingers, people putting their heads round doors... Does this mean that Reneé *really* likes whooshing (well, in a comedy ep, anyway)... or is that sort of post-production thing not under the director's control?
*
"He's the comic relief!" *Loved* the way Lucy said this. But how do you reconcile such a comment with believing that Joxer was real? I mean, if Annie thinks she is the reincarnation of Joxer, then presumably she must think Joxer is real, non-fictional... but surely saying he's "the comic relief" clearly implies that he's *not* real, fictional?
*
"They should never have introduced his character in the first place!" OK, I nearly hurt myself laughing at this (sorry... I actually like it when the show makes fun of us - especially when they do it well). *But*, again... if Annie thinks she *is* Joxer, *how* can she talk of him as a "character" who was "introduced"?
*
"He's a deluded idiot!" (I had trouble catching this comment...)
*
When Rob Trebor's character told the western guy to get lost, I thought he said "Get lost, Frampton!" Which confused me, because I thought the guy was supposed to be Custer. But I took the tape to my son's (I don't have CC), and the CC just says "Get lost, freak!" Plus the disclaimer mentions Custer, so I guess that's confirmed.
*
Did they *have* to put in a clip from In Sickness And In Hell? I still think that was the *worst* comic ep they've ever done... it just totally trashed the characters, especially Xena's, with no real excuses (no spells, no alter-egos, no reincarnation), and offered nothing in compensation but a bunch of feeble gross-out comedy. Frankly, I could have done without seeing it again! (Well... I could have done without seeing it the first time - which is why it's the only comedy ep that I rate "better not made".)
*
"Was I Joxer or not?" "I'm going to get you a sedative..." Loved the way Reneé did that. BTW, does this mean she's a *real* doctor, legally licensed to prescribe drugs and all...?
*
"No, I don't watch that show - bunch of chop-socky crap! Besides, this was so repulsive. It couldn't have been an episode." "A-ah, you never know with that show... they're sneaky. They'll try anything. One week they're melodrama, the next week they're Three Stooges. And they're *way* too serialised!" Hmm... well, this brings us rather back into the territory I was maundering on about in my introduction, doesn't it? Of course the "chop-socky crap" thing is just a joke, and a good one at that... I've heard lots of people dismiss the show in very similar terms - although the emphasis is usually more on pulchritude than percussion - "Baywatch BC" I've heard, amongst others. This sort of thing is clearly just people responding to superficial appearances without ever having really watched the show receptively, and is a perfectly legitimate target for flippancy. Marco's comments, however, are a little closer to the bone. See, I don't actually have anything against the particular things he points to... the shifting in tone from week to week, even the mixing of tone within episodes, I see as a strength, rather than a weakness of the show. (Although I must admit, I honestly don't find the Three Stooges funny, really, not at all, and when the show's humour wanders too far in that direction, it tends to lose me...) And I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with an episodic show becoming 'serialised'. But... I do think the show currently has some real problems around these issues. Mixing tones is fine, but mixing elements which just can't be reconciled as part of the same imaginative world, OTOH, *is* something of a problem for me, as is jerking the characters around so that they seem to be totally different people in some eps to they are in others. You can make the 'postmodern, ironic' argument, as I discussed in my introduction to this ep... but I'm still not comfortable with where they've gone, in quite a few cases. Too often I've felt alienated from what they've done with their vision in a way which I can't see as in *any* sense constructive, a way which just has me rebelling against what feels like their perverting the original imaginative gift they gave me. And similar things might be said on the serialisation issue. By all means introduce elements which have an ongoing reality in the world of the show... nothing wrong with that. And their earlier efforts, largely focussed on developing Xena's back story, and charting Gabrielle's development as a bard, an Amazon, a traveller dealing with the challenges of her life... these things worked very well, for me. However, their latter efforts have been less successful... not because they were too serialised, but because of *what* they chose to introduce. The dominant "serialisation" of season three was the Hope / Dahak plot, which, to me, was a Big Mistake... not because it was serialised, but because it was based upon entities and moral principles which I personally found morally repugnant, and I simply could not relate to either the imaginative existence of the axioms of this plot within the Xenaverse, nor to the roles the characters were called upon to play in it. So essentially, I had no choice but to simply reject a large part of this core plot of the season... I treat The Deliverer, Gabrielle's Hope and Maternal Instincts, at least, as eps that simply did not happen. So far as I'm concerned, in order to continue to relate to the Xenaverse and the characters of Xena and Gab at all, I have to basically say that these eps were "misreported"... that whatever happened at that point in Xena and Gab's lives wasn't what we were shown in those eps, because that was repulsive nonsense. Something happened... but I just vaguely imagine a non-specific, clearly tragic "something" which precipitated following events. And then the principle "serialised" elements of the fourth season have been the crucifixion as foretold by Alti, and the whole karmic, vision-of-future-lives thing. And these again, were both, in my estimation, mistakes. The idea of karma is fine... but *knowing* where your karma is leading is clearly contrary to the whole essence of the concept, as well as, IMO, just fatally bad story-telling. And as for the crucifixion thing... well the endless repetition of the vision was largely just annoying. And the payoff was, for me, as most of you probably know by now, obscene garbage, which I certainly won't allow into any imaginative universe I intend to inhabit. So... let's just say Marco's speech aggravated some wounds for me.
*
Sorry... back to the ep again! (Well... it *is* the end of the season, so I hope you'll forgive my retrospective discursions to some degree...) "On the count of ten, we'll find ourselves in another body." Not all three in the same one, hopefully...
*
When Annie and Harry and the Doc all went under together for the first time, Xena and Gab and Joxer were fighting a bunch of soldiers dressed in black in a village, parts of which were burning. What ep was that from? I couldn't place it. I couldn't see any principal villain in any of the shots, and I can't remember those soldiers. I thought perhaps Sacrifice... but surely they mostly fought Dahak priest types there? Or perhaps In Sickness... but Xena and Gab didn't look stupid in the clip. Now it's bugging me...
*
I think Robert Trebor likes playing villains - they always seem to make him the bad guy when he's not Sal, and he takes to it with gusto.
*
"A bomb! Why, Marco?" "Cause boiling oil is to difficult to rig in this day and age. Now, you've got about ten minutes before this thing blows your heads off." Hmm... the classic bad-guy "leave the good guys so they can escape" modus operandi. May we all have enemies with such a sense of style!
*
"This is a karmic catastrophe... I'm gonna come back as a worm... or a cockroach. No! A TV evangelist!"
*
And next we get Spiny Norman and Hope's death scene from A Family Affair. Somehow it seemed clearer this time. Did they re-edit it, or is it just hindsight...?
*
"You were Xena, right?" "Yes." "OK, then I must have been one of the two blondes."
*
"Take us back, Mattie!" What? Suddenly Harry is on first name terms with the Doc? How does he even *know* her name? (Read it off the diploma, I guess. Though "Mattie" is an odd name to put on a diploma. Mind you, I once had a dentist called Babs Cohen...) I do realize they're supposed to be bonding here. And actually, in terms of the acting, I thought it was quite well done.
*
The kiss scene from The Quest! Oh yes! Well, if they wanted a 'bonding' scene, that's a good place to start, eh? *Great* scene! I thought they were going to cut before the kiss itself, but no, they went back.
*
"Maybe I was the guy with the moustache?" "Botchkalis... or something..." Poor old Auto - sounds like a disease!
*
I didn't care at all for Harry whacking Annie. "I'm sorry, sweetheart, I couldn't let you chew on those wires" is all very well and good... but I'm afraid they should have rethought this. To me, it came across far too much as condoning a guy whacking his woman in the face when she was mouthing off to him. Not a pretty image. Of course you could say "well, Annie is Joxer, so this is just Joxer getting whacked again". But then I've always found the way Joxer is abused unpleasant and distasteful too.
*
Really, although it was nice seeing the clips, Harry's idea that the best way to deal with being tied up next to a bomb was repeated self-hypnosis seemed rather hard to believe in...
*
Oh yes! The Return Of Callisto 'rescue' scene - another great one!
*
Seeing all these old clips only reinforced my feelings that the show was basically better when it was somehow simpler. It's all very well talking about 'ambition' and 'scope', but I find it very hard to doubt that the net effect of the increasing emphasis on 'arcs' and complex pseudo-metaphysics has been to weaken the show, so that neither the characters nor the world they live in seem to have the resonance and power they once did. I remember finding out in kindergarten that if you just keep mixing in more colours all you end up with is a muddy brown...
*
"I *was* Joxer!" "I was the sidekick." "I know who the Xena Vigilante is." Nicely done...
*
"Have you done this before?" "No. But I have many skills."
*
"It's the red wires!" Oh come on! They couldn't let Gab be right for once? I think they were just pulling our chain. (And anyway, if the timer is a simple circuit closer, surely cutting *either* wire going to it would be just as good?)
*
I thought Ares got shut back in the tomb at the end of The Xena Scrolls... so how come he's out?
*
Hmm... so Ares still wants Xena, even in a body that looks like Joxer? Nice to see he's flexible and open minded...
*
I gather that some people have been complaining that Ted didn't quite pull off becoming Xena. Well, I guess there's some truth in that... he didn't totally bring Xena to life the way Lucy does. But hey, that's a very tall order! I thought he gave it a pretty good shot. I certainly didn't think he disgraced himself, even if he couldn't quite get it (which would have required something close to magic).
*
I can't say I was too impressed with idea of Ares as the inspiration of the Y2K problem. Of course, perhaps I'll feel differently next year - but I certainly hope not.
*
That scene from The Reckoning was good. But it's kind of hard to take the way they made Ares look back then... somehow he seems geeky, kind of 70s, compared to his current style.
*
"Are we gonna fight again?" I liked it! Innovative use of a beanbag as a weapon, too! It seemed a tad unlikely, though, that an umbrella, after being used to fence strenuously with a sword, would still open perfectly with nary a nick in its fabric. Also, in the next fencing shot, the umbrella is furled again - when did Harry / Xena find time to re-furl it?
*
And Annie seems to have decided she's not giving in, even if she *is* Joxer. "I decked the god of war!"
*
"You know, I think I knew it was going to work out this way." "So why'd you come back for me?" "Like I said - I'm a sentimental guy." Now *that* to me was consistent with the way Ares has been, right since we first saw him. And I still think there's more strength in consistency than in any "sensation of the week" strategy.
*
And Annie fancies Ares? ("Great big hunk of god...") It really gets hard to keep track of who fancies whom...
*
"Annie. Annie... I, uh" "Harry, I got some bad news for ya. You and I aren't made for each other. She's your soulmate." "My soulmate?" "If you could just stay awake through one episode, you'd know these things." Honestly, this is probably the first scene in X:WP, perhaps the first scene in anything, that actually made me cry and laugh at the same time. Truly. And not crying because of laughter... crying at the actual pathos and sentiment of it, but still laughing at the same time. And I have to say, I'm a great admirer of such mixed messages... somehow laughing and crying at the same time seems almost the quintessential reaction to life, although it so rarely happens. I mean, that scene from One Against An Army that they used was a tremendously moving scene in its original place. But myself, I think I found it even *more* moving the way it was seen in this ep.
*
And I *loved* the next bit about Joxer too... about how he saved Xena and Gabrielle from Callisto, and how he had the heart of a lion (which is basically true, IMO)... and then "And he was a very underrated fighter!" Oh gods... I nearly wet myself. And Lucy was *brilliant* here.
*
"Oh, um, Harry... I've been aware for some time that you've been going into my underwear drawer at night and um... it's nice to know it was in a good cause." LOL! I'm sorry, but I have to admit I liked this too. So Harry needed Annie's underwear to play the Xena Vigilante... I almost wish we could've seen that.
*
"I think I remember... when we first met." Oh yes, I'm a sucker for that one. I have a blow up of Xena and Gab on that horse right over my computer, in front of me while I work.
*
OTOH, I'm afraid I found Gab / Mattie's final monologue a bit over the top... a little too much like new age greeting card verse.
*
And what about the kiss? I try to avoid reading too much before I write up my own reactions, but I know there's been some controversy about this. I can understand people's frustration about the fact that it's ok to show "Xena" and "Gab" kissing if "Xena" happens to be in a man's body at the time, but not when they're both in women's bodies. And I agree. It's silly and backward that it's somehow a big deal to show something as simple as a kiss between two people. We're still a long way from all people really being treated equally in the media. *But* whilst it may make us aware of things that we don't have and should have, I don't think there was anything actually wrong or false about this kiss in itself... for me, at least.
*
And I really *loved* Annie's final coping with "who she used to be"! For some reason (feel free to psycho-analyse me, if that's your thing) this made me cry more than anything else in the ep.
Annie banannie
She kicks fannie
Dangerous with sword and knife
Learned her skills in that past life
Never will you outfox her
She's as good as old Joxer
Aa-ah!
I'm Annie, I'm Annie the Mighty!
You go, girl!
***
So, who was who in Deja Vu All Over Again?
There's not really an awful lot I can say about this ep.
I'm not going to attempt to summarise the accomplishments of Lucy Lawless, who did a superlative job playing Annie in this ep, or of Reneé O'Connor, who both played Dr. Matie, and directed the ep... keeping track of their doings is something of an industry by itself in the Xenaverse, and it would futile for me to attempt to cover the ground here.
* The Doc's sleazy and duplicitous (and it turns out ultimately, divine) sidekick Marco was played by Robert Trebor. This is the first time that Robert Trebor has played any role other than Salmoneus on X:WP (although you could almost say that Salmoneus himself is many roles in one...) Over on the Herc side, Robert first appeared, along with Reneé O'Connor, as Waylin in the pre-series TV movie Hercules And The Lost Kingdom. He was also seen as Waylin in Hercules In The Maze Of The Minotaur, which was basically just a clip show of the previous Herc movies, and for which Robert did no new scenes. Subsequently, besides playing Salmoneus in *many* HTLJ eps, Robert also played Francois Demarigny in Les Contemptibles, and the nasty studio head B.S. Hollinsfoffer in Yes Virginia There Is A Hercules and For Those Of You Just Joining Us. Robert also went behind the camera to direct the HTLJ ep A Rock And A Hard Place.
Outside the Xenaverse, Robert pops up all over the place. He appears as a guy in a taxi in 1994's The Shadow. He's a motel owner in 1992's Universal Soldier. Also in 1992, he played Buddy in The Nutt House. He was in Talk Radio in 1988. In 1987 he appeared selling tuxedos in Making Mr. Right, and was also seen in My Demon Lover. He had quite a meaty role as a snivelling villain type in 1986's 52 Pick-Up. He was a copy boy in 1985's Turk 182, and the same year appeared as a reporter in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, and in the TV movie Out Of The Darkness. He also appeared in 1982's The First Time, and Gorp (1980).
On TV, Robert has guested on Night Court and Miami Vice... and I suspect I'm missing some others.
* Once Marco dropped his disguise, Ares was played once more by Kevin Smith. Apart from playing Ares on HTLJ, X:WP and Young Hercules, Kevin can be seen in Channelling Baby (together with Joel Tobeck and Danielle Cormick), in the TV movie Flatmates (also featuring various other Xenaverse faces), in the NZ movie Desperate Remedies (ditto), and in the TV feature "McLeod's Daughters". He's also, apparently, signed up to do a couple of new shows in NZ, in one of which I heard that he is featured as a detective of some sort... and the name of the show is apparently to be "Lawless"!
* Xena's latest incarnation Harry was, of course, played by Ted Raimi. I won't go over Ted's *many* roles again, since I went through them at length recently, when he appeared as Joxer in If The Shoe Fits.
* The only other credited role in the ep was Tammy Barker as Matie Acting Double - presumably this means that she stood in for Reneé as Dr. Matie whilst Reneé was working behind the camera. Tammy first appeared as a Gabrielle look-alike (the one who got to speak) in The Play's The Thing. And coincidentally she was in this week's HTLJ ep, Revelations, playing the rescued virgin sacrifice Penelope. This is about the only case I can remember of a supporting actor being credited on both shows in the same week, unless you count the week that Karl Urban did Julius Caesar in Render Unto Caesar and A Good Day.
* The ep was written by R.J. Stewart, who still holds the record as the most credited writer for X:WP... he wrote The Titans, Prometheus, ACAOTPB, AFOD, MB, Callisto, RoC, Warrior...Princess...Tramp, ADITL, Ulysses, The Furies, Gabrielle's Hope, Forgiven, Crusader, The Way, and Ides Of March plus being credited as Teleplay Writer for SOTP, Destiny, The Debt 1 & 2, and AITST 1 & 2, and as Story Writer for The Quest, both Debts and both parts of AITST.
* As already noted, the ep was directed by Reneé O'Connor, taking control behind the camera for the first time.
***
The disclaimer was:
No Sword-Wielding, Card-Playing, Therapy-Seeking French Freedom Fighters were deflowered during the production of this motion picture.
However, rumours of Custer and Pocahontas remain unconfirmed.
***
And what about the Herc ep, Revelations?
Well I quite liked it actually, mainly because I found it very *funny*. Now whether an ep about war, famine, pestilence and death, and the end of the world *ought* to be funny is another question.
And what a pompous prat of a Cecil B. DeMille escapee the 'servant of the light' Michael was, eh! Are we *really* meant to take this jerk seriously as a representative of ultimate goodness and truth? And if not, just what are they playing at? And why did he keep speaking Latin?? I mean Latin got to be the language associated with the European Christian church because the church became enmeshed with the Roman Empire, which made Latin the standard language throughout Europe. But this meshing of church and empire happened *way* after Herc's time. Why the heck would this angelic berk be speaking Latin around Herc?
The title, incidentally, is presumably intended as a reference to the book of Revelation in the Christian bible, which is where the 'four horsemen of the apocalypse' may be mainly seen as coming from (although John the Divine, who wrote the book, might have been drawing on older legends). John's horsemen, however, are a bit different to Michael's, which seem to owe more to medieval adaptions. In John's Revelation the horsemen aren't actually given names, other than death... the first is described as carrying a bow and wearing a crown and riding out to conquer, then the second is red, with a sword, and spreads conflict; the third carries a balance and is associated with scarcity, whilst the fourth is Death, riding a pale horse. So John's horsemen could be seen as conquest, war, famine and death... which may not make such a good set, but makes a kind of narrative sense - conquest leads to war which is followed by famine and death... which is probably all that John was implying (well, inasmuch as he could be said to be implying anything, since allegedly he wrote mostly from visions he had). Anyway, the whole plot was a little odd. And it brings up what I was saying about consistency before... are we now supposed to take all this "guardian of light" stuff on board as canonic to the nature of the Xenaverse and hence applying to all eps of HTLJ and X:WP? I don't really think so. And frankly these 'guardians of the light' didn't seem very enlightened... not much better a bet than the Greek gods in fact, indeed maybe worse.
So... if you're asking me to take the ep seriously - no thankyou. But Bruce really didn't seem to be directing it that way.
I liked Herc's "Whoa! No more possum stew for me!" I think maybe there's been altogether too much possum stew eaten in the Xenaverse in the last couple of years! (BTW, this is a Kiwi joke, isn't it... the possum being the ubiquitous roadkill of NZ?)
Nice to see Ares again... but I thought he faded out of existence in the last ep he was in...?
I also liked Iolaus' "I'm back... and I'm not 'Oo..urgh.. I'm gonna kill you' or anything like that..."
And of course "Have you ever been wrong?" "I thought so once... but I was wrong." Nothing like a little paradox, eh. Maybe they're trying to tell us something (like 'stop trying to make sense of this show', for example...)
***
And who was who in Revelations?
* You may well have found the heavenly poseur Michael hauntingly familiar. He was played by the versatile Charles Mesure, who we last saw as the aspiring actor Johnny Pinto doing a really *bad* audition for the role of Hercules in Yes Virginia There Is A Hercules.
But, of course, there's more reason than that for Charles' familiarity. We first saw him as the ill-fated Mercer in X:WP's The Price (he should have gone north through the woods as Xena told him to... but he headed straight for the river, and we all know what happened to him). And subsequently he reappeared as the hirsute and preening (and apple eating) Darnelle in The Dirty Half Dozen.
Charles also appeared in the NZ TV series City Life, together with Katrina Browne (Mendala in When In Rome, Thelassa in Locked Up And Tied Down), Lisa Chappell (Daughter #1 in Hercules And The Circle of Fire, Lydia in Pride Comes Before A Brawl, Dirce in The King Of Thieves and The Wedding Of Alcmene, Princess Melissa in War Brides, Queen Melissa and Dirce in Hercules On Trial, and Melissa Blake in Yes Virginia There Is A Hercules and For Those Of You Just Joining Us), Peter Muller (Deric in As Darkness Falls, The Outcast and The Wedding Of Alcmene, Dustinus Hoofmanus in The Play's The Thing), and Donogh Rees (Frigga in Norse by Norsevest and Somewhere Over Rainbow Bridge, the voice of Mnemosyne in Let There Be Light, the Cabiri in My Best Girl's Wedding).
* Ares was played once more by Kevin Smith. Apart from playing Ares on HTLJ, X:WP and Young Hercules, Kevin can be seen in Channelling Baby (together with Joel Tobeck and Danielle Cormick), in the TV movie Flatmates (also featuring various other Xenaverse faces), in the NZ movie Desperate Remedies (ditto), and in the TV feature "McLeod's Daughters". He's also, apparently, signed up to do a couple of new shows in NZ, in one of which I heard that he is featured as a detective of some sort... and the name of the show is apparently to be "Lawless"!
* The rescued virgin sacrifice Penelope was played by Tammy Barker. Tammy hasn't appeared on HTLJ before, but she appeared as an auditioning Gabrielle look-alike in the X:WP ep The Play's The Thing, and although you couldn't really identify her, she was credited as the acting double for Reneé O'Connor in the role of Dr. Matie in this week's X:WP ep, Deja Vu All Over Again.
* Paul Norell once more appeared as Falafel. He has also appeared over on X:WP in the very Falafel-like roles of the Street Vendor in Cradle of Hope, Statius, the vendor of souvenirs and other dubious artefacts in Prometheus ("Is anyone going to buy anything?"), and the Peddler in The Quill Is Mightier. Paul can also be seen playing a "Bohemian" in the movie An Angel At My Table.
* Did you think you'd seen the priest of Ares who was so keen to get on with the sacrifice somewhere before? Well you might! He was played by John Watson, who is a regular trouper in the Xenaverse's little repertory company, having previously appeared as a Temple Priest in Hercules And The Circle Of Fire, a Pilgrim in The Wrong Path, a Hawker in What's In A Name, Taphius in Let The Games Begin, and Sokar in Mummy Dearest. John also appeared as Arben, the Centaur lieutenant of Tyldus, in the X:WP ep Hooves And Harlots.
Outside the Xenaverse, John can be seen in 1983's Strata, along with Norman Forsey (King Lias in W.P and W.P.T1, Casca in BTDT, Megas the old prisoner in Key To The Kingdom, Tiresias in The Road To Calydon, The Festival Of Dionysus and The Outcast, Old Merlin in Once Upon A Future King), and (presumably playing a juvenile role) in 1975's King Arthur, The Young Warlord, which featured Brian Blessed.
* And what about Penelope's kid sister Mia? Yes, we've seen her before too! She was played by Chelsea Howell, who previously appeared as one of the little rapscallions giving Iolaus 2 a hard time in The Academy.
* King Lineas (the one who got the arrow through him) was played by Lex Matheson, as best as I could read the credit. I don't believe he has appeared in a credited role before. There is a Lee Matheson who played a Constable in the 1987 NZ movie Starlight Hotel which featured Donogh Rees and Norman Forsey (see above), and I wonder if this might be the same actor.
* Likewise Lineas' Aide was credited to David Buckley, who appears to be new to us. There is a David Buckley who appeared in the TV movie Lie Down With Lions and in an episode of Dracula: The Series, but I'm not sure whether this is the same person.
* For the remaining credited actors, Hugh Porter as Lineas' opposite number King Valtel, and Tony Forster in that ever popular role 'Man', I could find no prior credits at all.
* The ep was written by George Strayton and Tom O'Neill, who are a new team to us. George Strayton apparently works (or worked) for Renaissance Pictures as Director of Marketing. He was also involved in the production of the Hercules, Xena and Men In Black ARC system and role playing games, and has worked on Star Wars RPG books. I'm not sure about this Tom O'Neill... unfortunately it's a fairly common name.
* The ep was directed by Bruce Campbell who previously directed the HTLJ eps The Vanishing Dead, What's In A Name, For Those Of You Just Joining Us, Redemption, and Stranger And Stranger, and the X:WP eps Key To The Kingdom and The King Of Assassins.
Bruce is, of course, very familiar to us as Autolycus, the king of thieves, a role he had played in *many* episodes of both HTLJ and X:WP. He also played the man himself, Rob Tapert, in the HTLJ eps Yes Virginia There Is A Hercules and For Those Of You Just Joining Us.
Outside the Xenaverse, Bruce has an *enormous* filmography, which I summarised just recently, when discussing the cast for the X:WP ep Takes One To Know One.
***
The disclaimer was:
Iolaus got a new lease on life during the production of this motion picture.
