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scifi_rewatchI appreciate this episode for its continuity. Since “Xena” started, we’ve seen the gals involved with many a guy—sometimes quite seriously, like with Gabrielle and Perdicas who were engaged, and Xena and Petricles who were married. But this episode brings not only one but two people back—Xena’s lover Marcus and enemy Toxeus! Both of whom are dead. :P Which might give you a little hint about this episode.
It had a good heart—some noble character twists, supernatural elements and a decent shot at tv CGI. :P So, without further ado!
A woman is walking alone in the woods when she hears a spooky “help me…” A shadowy man appears in several places and she screams, running to town and talking of ghosts. Guess who’s in town and willing to check it out?
Xena travels alone to the woods where the girl had her experience, and the spooky voice calls out to her by name! The shadowy figure appears and then solidifies into Marcus. Xena attempts to hug him, but the dead and the living can’t touch, apparently. “I’ve missed you so much,” Xena confesses. Marcus has missed her, too…but pressing matters are at hand. Something has gone wrong in the underworld, leaving good souls in danger! Marcus is able to guide his lover to the Alconian lake before more ghostly figures appear, beating and dragging him off as he disappears. Yikes. Must have been tough for Xena not to be able to fight.
Gabrielle isn’t amused by this turn of events, but she and Xena find themselves at the lake. He didn’t finish his instructions, Gabs reminds the warrior princess. And that lake is known to be unusually deep. Will you have enough air to make it there and back again? Xena quips this means she’ll definitely make it to the underworld, which only sours Gab’s mood. Time for new tactics. “The man I love has asked for my help to save good souls.” Ah, the good ol’ righteous pitch. Gabrielle concedes and agrees to wait by the edge. Xena, stripped of all her metal but the chakram, dives in and heads toward the bottom.
Lava boils and Charon, aka a heavily made-up Michael Hurst who plays Iolas, is singing to himself. Xena wants to cross to the underworld but wait, she isn’t dead yet! “Ay-ay-ay. What’s it all coming to?” Charon groans. He gives her the intel that the good souls have somehow ended up in Tartarus while the baddies are enjoying an afterlife of ease in the Elysian Fields. “And now we got tourists already.” This whole exchange kinda reminds me of Billy Crystal in “The Princess Bride.” :P Anywho. Xena wants to help set things right, which amuses Charon since Hades isn’t even able to do anything. So he ferries her across, even without a coin. Such a mensch.
Xena finds herself in Tartarus, reaching out to scared women and children who wander around the barren landscape. Then there’s Marcus! The couple shares their first post-death hug. “I thought about you a lot,” Xena confesses, which Marcus knows about since the dead can hear when the living think about them. Good to know! Anywho. It’s time for the rest of the story. Ever hear of a guy named Atyminius? Yeah, Xena says. Legend has it he used to kill brides before their weddings. Worse than that, Marcus says, he cut them into little pieces. AKA he’s sort of the worst of the worst. And somehow he got hold of Hades’s helmet of invisibility! This apparently also gives him the power to banish the good to Tartarus and lead his buddies to paradise. Marcus agrees to take her there, since that’s likely where invisible Atyminius is hanging out.
The Elysian Fields are filled with high pitched music, beautiful fields…and the wicked cackling and brawling. Even when they have everything they still want more, Xena remarks, which sounds like a good pitch for a study on warlord psychology. :P She’s interrupted by a warlord she once killed—Toxeus! He was living on borrowed time earlier this season when Celesta’s imprisonment prolonged his life. He’s overjoyed that Xena ended up with the wicked and wants to know who killed her. “No one—my horse threw me and I broke my little neck,” Xena snarks. Ah well. At least she didn’t get to go out like a hero. :P Toxeus is actually pretty ok with Xena right now. Once the big switcheroo happened, “it’s great to be wicked and dead!” He admits that Atyminius is a sicko, though Xena reminds him that the warlord in charge of the underworld could be standing anywhere invisible. “I meant that as a compliment, of course,” Toxeus quickly asserts himself, looking around. :P
Toxeus leaves Xena with another piece of intel—the good are stuck in Tartarus and the evil can go wherever they want. So what does that mean about Marcus being able to travel so freely? :-/ “It’s hard to make up for a lifetime of evil with a single good deed at the end,” Marcus shrugs. But this means that if their plan to set things to rights works, then Marcus will spend eternity with the folks he just screwed. Xena suddenly has her doubts about the whole operation, but Marcus stands firm. “I died doing a selfless act. You taught me how sweet that could be. And I knew you’d do the same thing if you were in my place.” Damn. Talk about the perfect guy.
Anywho. Time for the main villain! Atyminius takes off the helmet of invisibility; he’s in jolly spirits, and he’s also throwing around his power. “You’re my slave. It’s Lord Atyminius to you!” he tells Toxeus. But then he sniffs around…he smells someone mortal! It’s Xena! Let’s kill her! Dum dum duuuum!
Luckily, Xena is quick on her feet. You just want to distract people from the real issue at hand, She presses. Marcus steps in with why do you get to keep the helmet for all eternity? Aty is getting annoyed. Someone put a sword in her! That’s what you want, Xena steps in, to have us fight among each other rather than going after the helmet. This whole exchange comes off as a little hammy, but it does the trick! Brawling ensues, wherein invisible Atyminius beheads Toxeus to spend eternity in two pieces. Damn, so much for his happy ending. Xena and Marcus are able to escape amidst the fray.
Back by the Alconian Lake, Gabrielle waits for Xena while some travelers come up, asking if she’s going to the festival. She says no and they move on. They’ll re-enter the story a little later though, hee. The water is still and lifeless.
Xena thinks their next goal should be to talk to Hades. Atyminius has imprisoned him in his towering, CGI palace. :P Crazy humanoid bat creatures fly down to attack—Marcus calls them the harpies. The twosome get their swords out to swing at Harpie tails. Xena also gets to do her fire trick, booyah. That repels them and they explode against the side of the palace. Yowza. Only one remains—it grabs Marcus! Luckily Xena is able to grab onto him and pull him down. They run to the doors, barricading themselves inside where Xena notes Marcus has lost weight. “It gets hot down here,” Marcus replies. Ta da ching.
A weary, unkempt Hades is surprised to see the twosome come in. He’s useless without that helmet, which basically has all his power stored inside of it. Not quite smart, really. Xena has a theory that Aty wants to go back to the world of the living to send more good souls to Tartarus. Hades perks at that—might there be a fatal (excuse the pun) flaw here? The helmet will make Aty mortal in the land of the living, not an intangible ghost like Marcus was. But if he’s killed, then the helmet will return with him to the underworld. So you just gotta kill him to set things right.
Xena’s ok with all of this, but she wants Marcus there with her. As a ghost he’s not much use…Xena wants Hades to give Marcus his life back. The god goes :-O but after having his masculinity threatened (“has the great god Hades become so powerless that he can’t do this one small thing to save his kingdom?”) he agrees to give Marcus 48 hours. He directs them down a helpful path away from the harpies, and he lets them know that Aty probably came out of the underworld in the same place where Xena came in. Which means…uh oh. Gab’s in trouble!
Sure enough we check in with her and her firewood by the lake where the water is bubbling… “Is that you, Xena?” she asks. There are footprints in the sand and an ominous voice before Aty reveals himself. She isn’t a bride, is she? Oh well. “You’ll do for a start.” Gabrielle tries to fight him off but once he’s invisible he overpowers her with a knife. Marcus and Xena walk out of the water and see the abandoned firewood…Aty is standing over Gab’s body! Xena lets out an angry sound of pain. She runs towards him with a sword, so Aty of course puts the helmet back on. As she flails, Atyminius starts monologing—“How does it feel? Your fear excites me.” Classic villain mistake, as it gives Xena time to decipher his foot prints so she can attack him.
She’s about to run after him but turns out Gabrielle is alive! Yaaaay! They discuss Atyminius briefly—“did you see the nosebleed I gave him?” Gab presses—before Xena introduces the sidekick to her old love. “I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet before you were killed…you’re dead!” Gabrielle realizes aloud. Xena has a lot of explaining to do.
A hawk flies overhead as Xena, Gabs and Marcus walk through a forest. Looks like Atyminius has a good start on them, despite a minor wound from the warrior princess. They decide to keep tracking him until nightfall, when they figure he’ll be more cautious as well. “Who’s going to sleep with that monster roaming around?” Gabby protests, which of course leads to our next shot of her being her snoring on the ground. :P Marcus is too humbled by his second chance to sleep. “You don’t realize the kinds of things the living take for granted until you don’t have them anymore,” he explains, like the evening air. But, of course, what he misses most is Xena. “My death was not your fault,” Marcus presses as the warrior princess looks pained. She blames herself for not saving him from his evil ways sooner. It’s a miracle she got him to change at all, Marcus asserts. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. And don’t give up on love.” Apparently, Xena’s been secretly hurting over the fact that once she realized how important Marcus was to her, she lost him. Is it worth it to care about others that much? Marcus says it is. “My feelings for you were the only thing that kept me going down there in Tartarus. It was like I was carrying my own Elysian fields around inside of me.” They kiss to mellow music as the moon sets and the sun rises. I have to give props to the actors for making this genuine. It’s certainly a theme that will continue throughout the course of the show.
The trio continues to travel in the day, coming across the folks that ran into Gabby several scenes back. They’ve been attacked by some “invisible power.” Xena takes care of them and then learns the ominous truth—the “festival” they’re heading to in Pylos is a wedding. The bride is in great danger! …and so are the partygoers, apparently, as invisible Atyminus pulls a bunch of silly pranks like bumping into people. One of the men he attacks is a juggler, a profession Aty hates. “Be glad you’re not a mime,” he threatens.
Xena, Gabrielle and Marcus come into the upturned Pylos, looking for the bride’s father. They knock on his door and explain the terrible news that Atyminius has returned from the dead. Pretty easy to get the dude to cooperate now. Xena proposes that she take the bride’s place during the ceremonial bathing where Aty is likely to strike. Thanks to a traditional veil her identity will be kept secret until she and Marcus can strike. As for the real bride, she can remain safe and sound at home. “No one will suspect that the bride is home in bed on the night of her bathing,” Xena concludes. Daddy seems to buy into it.
That night, a veiled figure amidst a gaggle of young maidens walks through the trees, Marcus trailing behind. Gabrielle attends to the bride who is already covered up in bed, hmmm. The bridal party approaches the water, and the veiled figure is helped to the edge where she slowly dips her foot in just up to the toe. Damn, is this considered bathing in Xenaverse? I already know it’s usually more substantial on this show. :P In the bride’s room the window curtains flutter…and there’s Atyminius! He walks towards the bed with a knife in his head…and of course the person there turns out to be Xena. “I knew that you’d hear every word,” Xena gloats. “How I’ve waited to send you to Hades forever!” Aty snarls, putting the helmet back on. But Xeen’s got some tactics in mind; she’s able to throw her bedspread over him so she knows where to stab. Bye bye, Atyminius. (Kind of seems too easy, but eh.) She grabs the helmet from his now-visible corpse and goes off to meet Marcus.
Marcus is having a crisis of faith. “We could live out our lives together,” he tells Xena. “Without the helmet of invisibility, the wicked have no power over Hades.” Basically, he could take care of his problems, leaving Marcus for his own. “Is that what you want?” Xena presses, drawing Marcus back to his newfound beliefs. “You taught me that life—and death—is not about what I want. It’s about what is right.” Xena seems disappointed in her own teachings. She can’t stand the thought of him in Tartarus; “you are a good, good soul.” They kiss and hug to the mournful music Xena sang at Marcus’s funeral. Woe.
In happier news, they have a reunion with funny Charon again! Xena asserts that neither she nor Marcus are dead, though Marcus used to be dead. Bemoaning the lack of rules, Charon insists on a gold coin or else he’s not taking anyone across. In response, Marcus holds up the helmet. “Welcome aboard!” Charon changes his tune quickly. “Hope you have a great time,” and he starts his tour guide schtick about “the caves of despair” and “the hanging gardens of disgusting diseases,” hee.
They approach Hades’s castle where Xena gets a bad feeling. Swords out…but the Harpies grab Marcus! Marcus cuts the Harpie’s foot so it drops him to a castle wall where he has to hang on for dear life. Yikes…doesn’t sound much better. A fiery chasm is underneath! Xena flips over, kicking some banshee butt while Marcus falls and has to grab onto an even narrower ledge. Time for a repeat of Xena’s fire trick, complete with harpy explosion. :P And, of course, a warrior princess’s work is never done until she can help her man back up to safety as well.
Xena approaches Hades with a trade. Put Marcus in the Elysian Fields or you may never see it again, god. Hades protests—that’s impossible. “Every man and woman can be judged only once when they die.” But Xena’s found the loophole; Hades gave Marcus life again, after all. He deserves another judgment. The warrior princess goads Hades with his lost helmet again before the god ultimately bends a little. Marcus’s past bad deeds will still be stacked against him, he warns. “I want to speak on his behalf,” Xena insists, though Hades deems it unnecessary. He already knows what Marcus has done. But that’s not what Xena wants to talk about anyway. “I want to talk about what’s in his heart.” Aaaw. Now for the helmet. Marcus, invisible but in the room, was wearing it this whole time. “Your time is up,” Hades tells Marcus as he hands the helmet over. Ouch. The couple holds each other, kissing…and then Xena stabs Marcus! Pretty shocking, though I guess the woman is a control freak, hee. She looks horrible, dropping the blade as he faints dead.
“He could have kept the helmet and lived out his life,” she tells Hades, the trembling emotion evident in her voice. “He was tempted, but in the end he did the right thing.” He’s also a lover, Xena persists, relaying to Hades that Marcus believed he carried a bit of the Elysian fields within himself. “Let him bring that love to paradise where it belongs.” Aaw. Good speech.
We are back in the pretty Elysian fields…with the happy, good people restored to their rightful place. And among them is Marcus! Hades appears, back to his oiled up finery now that the helmet is back on his head, and tells Xena it’s time for her to leave. “Keep thinking of me,” Marcus says to his lover. Sounds really sweet in an episode that affirms this will keep them connected. They make out one last time, and Marcus looks at her longingly, music straining, as she walks away.
Back in the land of the living, Xena and Gabrielle share their weekly thoughts. “You’ll be together one day,” Gabs promises. “We’ll never be apart,” Xena responds, pointing to her heart. “He’s in here, forever.” A lovely show theme.
The disclaimer is no winged harpies were harmed or sent to a fiery grave during the production of this motion picture. Thank goodness. Xena was looking like a bit of a pyromaniac there. :P
This is a sweet episode, for a character relationship that doesn’t make it past season one. Yet the theme of love connecting people across death definitely does. And it’s certainly nice to know that Marcus’s quite admirable deeds at the end of his life rightfully earned him a place with the good folks. Certainly gives us some hope for some other late bloomers, hee. A nice way to reinstate the message that it doesn’t matter when you decide to turn your life around—it should still go celebrated.
___
It had a good heart—some noble character twists, supernatural elements and a decent shot at tv CGI. :P So, without further ado!
A woman is walking alone in the woods when she hears a spooky “help me…” A shadowy man appears in several places and she screams, running to town and talking of ghosts. Guess who’s in town and willing to check it out?
Xena travels alone to the woods where the girl had her experience, and the spooky voice calls out to her by name! The shadowy figure appears and then solidifies into Marcus. Xena attempts to hug him, but the dead and the living can’t touch, apparently. “I’ve missed you so much,” Xena confesses. Marcus has missed her, too…but pressing matters are at hand. Something has gone wrong in the underworld, leaving good souls in danger! Marcus is able to guide his lover to the Alconian lake before more ghostly figures appear, beating and dragging him off as he disappears. Yikes. Must have been tough for Xena not to be able to fight.
Gabrielle isn’t amused by this turn of events, but she and Xena find themselves at the lake. He didn’t finish his instructions, Gabs reminds the warrior princess. And that lake is known to be unusually deep. Will you have enough air to make it there and back again? Xena quips this means she’ll definitely make it to the underworld, which only sours Gab’s mood. Time for new tactics. “The man I love has asked for my help to save good souls.” Ah, the good ol’ righteous pitch. Gabrielle concedes and agrees to wait by the edge. Xena, stripped of all her metal but the chakram, dives in and heads toward the bottom.
Lava boils and Charon, aka a heavily made-up Michael Hurst who plays Iolas, is singing to himself. Xena wants to cross to the underworld but wait, she isn’t dead yet! “Ay-ay-ay. What’s it all coming to?” Charon groans. He gives her the intel that the good souls have somehow ended up in Tartarus while the baddies are enjoying an afterlife of ease in the Elysian Fields. “And now we got tourists already.” This whole exchange kinda reminds me of Billy Crystal in “The Princess Bride.” :P Anywho. Xena wants to help set things right, which amuses Charon since Hades isn’t even able to do anything. So he ferries her across, even without a coin. Such a mensch.
Xena finds herself in Tartarus, reaching out to scared women and children who wander around the barren landscape. Then there’s Marcus! The couple shares their first post-death hug. “I thought about you a lot,” Xena confesses, which Marcus knows about since the dead can hear when the living think about them. Good to know! Anywho. It’s time for the rest of the story. Ever hear of a guy named Atyminius? Yeah, Xena says. Legend has it he used to kill brides before their weddings. Worse than that, Marcus says, he cut them into little pieces. AKA he’s sort of the worst of the worst. And somehow he got hold of Hades’s helmet of invisibility! This apparently also gives him the power to banish the good to Tartarus and lead his buddies to paradise. Marcus agrees to take her there, since that’s likely where invisible Atyminius is hanging out.
The Elysian Fields are filled with high pitched music, beautiful fields…and the wicked cackling and brawling. Even when they have everything they still want more, Xena remarks, which sounds like a good pitch for a study on warlord psychology. :P She’s interrupted by a warlord she once killed—Toxeus! He was living on borrowed time earlier this season when Celesta’s imprisonment prolonged his life. He’s overjoyed that Xena ended up with the wicked and wants to know who killed her. “No one—my horse threw me and I broke my little neck,” Xena snarks. Ah well. At least she didn’t get to go out like a hero. :P Toxeus is actually pretty ok with Xena right now. Once the big switcheroo happened, “it’s great to be wicked and dead!” He admits that Atyminius is a sicko, though Xena reminds him that the warlord in charge of the underworld could be standing anywhere invisible. “I meant that as a compliment, of course,” Toxeus quickly asserts himself, looking around. :P
Toxeus leaves Xena with another piece of intel—the good are stuck in Tartarus and the evil can go wherever they want. So what does that mean about Marcus being able to travel so freely? :-/ “It’s hard to make up for a lifetime of evil with a single good deed at the end,” Marcus shrugs. But this means that if their plan to set things to rights works, then Marcus will spend eternity with the folks he just screwed. Xena suddenly has her doubts about the whole operation, but Marcus stands firm. “I died doing a selfless act. You taught me how sweet that could be. And I knew you’d do the same thing if you were in my place.” Damn. Talk about the perfect guy.
Anywho. Time for the main villain! Atyminius takes off the helmet of invisibility; he’s in jolly spirits, and he’s also throwing around his power. “You’re my slave. It’s Lord Atyminius to you!” he tells Toxeus. But then he sniffs around…he smells someone mortal! It’s Xena! Let’s kill her! Dum dum duuuum!
Luckily, Xena is quick on her feet. You just want to distract people from the real issue at hand, She presses. Marcus steps in with why do you get to keep the helmet for all eternity? Aty is getting annoyed. Someone put a sword in her! That’s what you want, Xena steps in, to have us fight among each other rather than going after the helmet. This whole exchange comes off as a little hammy, but it does the trick! Brawling ensues, wherein invisible Atyminius beheads Toxeus to spend eternity in two pieces. Damn, so much for his happy ending. Xena and Marcus are able to escape amidst the fray.
Back by the Alconian Lake, Gabrielle waits for Xena while some travelers come up, asking if she’s going to the festival. She says no and they move on. They’ll re-enter the story a little later though, hee. The water is still and lifeless.
Xena thinks their next goal should be to talk to Hades. Atyminius has imprisoned him in his towering, CGI palace. :P Crazy humanoid bat creatures fly down to attack—Marcus calls them the harpies. The twosome get their swords out to swing at Harpie tails. Xena also gets to do her fire trick, booyah. That repels them and they explode against the side of the palace. Yowza. Only one remains—it grabs Marcus! Luckily Xena is able to grab onto him and pull him down. They run to the doors, barricading themselves inside where Xena notes Marcus has lost weight. “It gets hot down here,” Marcus replies. Ta da ching.
A weary, unkempt Hades is surprised to see the twosome come in. He’s useless without that helmet, which basically has all his power stored inside of it. Not quite smart, really. Xena has a theory that Aty wants to go back to the world of the living to send more good souls to Tartarus. Hades perks at that—might there be a fatal (excuse the pun) flaw here? The helmet will make Aty mortal in the land of the living, not an intangible ghost like Marcus was. But if he’s killed, then the helmet will return with him to the underworld. So you just gotta kill him to set things right.
Xena’s ok with all of this, but she wants Marcus there with her. As a ghost he’s not much use…Xena wants Hades to give Marcus his life back. The god goes :-O but after having his masculinity threatened (“has the great god Hades become so powerless that he can’t do this one small thing to save his kingdom?”) he agrees to give Marcus 48 hours. He directs them down a helpful path away from the harpies, and he lets them know that Aty probably came out of the underworld in the same place where Xena came in. Which means…uh oh. Gab’s in trouble!
Sure enough we check in with her and her firewood by the lake where the water is bubbling… “Is that you, Xena?” she asks. There are footprints in the sand and an ominous voice before Aty reveals himself. She isn’t a bride, is she? Oh well. “You’ll do for a start.” Gabrielle tries to fight him off but once he’s invisible he overpowers her with a knife. Marcus and Xena walk out of the water and see the abandoned firewood…Aty is standing over Gab’s body! Xena lets out an angry sound of pain. She runs towards him with a sword, so Aty of course puts the helmet back on. As she flails, Atyminius starts monologing—“How does it feel? Your fear excites me.” Classic villain mistake, as it gives Xena time to decipher his foot prints so she can attack him.
She’s about to run after him but turns out Gabrielle is alive! Yaaaay! They discuss Atyminius briefly—“did you see the nosebleed I gave him?” Gab presses—before Xena introduces the sidekick to her old love. “I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet before you were killed…you’re dead!” Gabrielle realizes aloud. Xena has a lot of explaining to do.
A hawk flies overhead as Xena, Gabs and Marcus walk through a forest. Looks like Atyminius has a good start on them, despite a minor wound from the warrior princess. They decide to keep tracking him until nightfall, when they figure he’ll be more cautious as well. “Who’s going to sleep with that monster roaming around?” Gabby protests, which of course leads to our next shot of her being her snoring on the ground. :P Marcus is too humbled by his second chance to sleep. “You don’t realize the kinds of things the living take for granted until you don’t have them anymore,” he explains, like the evening air. But, of course, what he misses most is Xena. “My death was not your fault,” Marcus presses as the warrior princess looks pained. She blames herself for not saving him from his evil ways sooner. It’s a miracle she got him to change at all, Marcus asserts. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. And don’t give up on love.” Apparently, Xena’s been secretly hurting over the fact that once she realized how important Marcus was to her, she lost him. Is it worth it to care about others that much? Marcus says it is. “My feelings for you were the only thing that kept me going down there in Tartarus. It was like I was carrying my own Elysian fields around inside of me.” They kiss to mellow music as the moon sets and the sun rises. I have to give props to the actors for making this genuine. It’s certainly a theme that will continue throughout the course of the show.
The trio continues to travel in the day, coming across the folks that ran into Gabby several scenes back. They’ve been attacked by some “invisible power.” Xena takes care of them and then learns the ominous truth—the “festival” they’re heading to in Pylos is a wedding. The bride is in great danger! …and so are the partygoers, apparently, as invisible Atyminus pulls a bunch of silly pranks like bumping into people. One of the men he attacks is a juggler, a profession Aty hates. “Be glad you’re not a mime,” he threatens.
Xena, Gabrielle and Marcus come into the upturned Pylos, looking for the bride’s father. They knock on his door and explain the terrible news that Atyminius has returned from the dead. Pretty easy to get the dude to cooperate now. Xena proposes that she take the bride’s place during the ceremonial bathing where Aty is likely to strike. Thanks to a traditional veil her identity will be kept secret until she and Marcus can strike. As for the real bride, she can remain safe and sound at home. “No one will suspect that the bride is home in bed on the night of her bathing,” Xena concludes. Daddy seems to buy into it.
That night, a veiled figure amidst a gaggle of young maidens walks through the trees, Marcus trailing behind. Gabrielle attends to the bride who is already covered up in bed, hmmm. The bridal party approaches the water, and the veiled figure is helped to the edge where she slowly dips her foot in just up to the toe. Damn, is this considered bathing in Xenaverse? I already know it’s usually more substantial on this show. :P In the bride’s room the window curtains flutter…and there’s Atyminius! He walks towards the bed with a knife in his head…and of course the person there turns out to be Xena. “I knew that you’d hear every word,” Xena gloats. “How I’ve waited to send you to Hades forever!” Aty snarls, putting the helmet back on. But Xeen’s got some tactics in mind; she’s able to throw her bedspread over him so she knows where to stab. Bye bye, Atyminius. (Kind of seems too easy, but eh.) She grabs the helmet from his now-visible corpse and goes off to meet Marcus.
Marcus is having a crisis of faith. “We could live out our lives together,” he tells Xena. “Without the helmet of invisibility, the wicked have no power over Hades.” Basically, he could take care of his problems, leaving Marcus for his own. “Is that what you want?” Xena presses, drawing Marcus back to his newfound beliefs. “You taught me that life—and death—is not about what I want. It’s about what is right.” Xena seems disappointed in her own teachings. She can’t stand the thought of him in Tartarus; “you are a good, good soul.” They kiss and hug to the mournful music Xena sang at Marcus’s funeral. Woe.
In happier news, they have a reunion with funny Charon again! Xena asserts that neither she nor Marcus are dead, though Marcus used to be dead. Bemoaning the lack of rules, Charon insists on a gold coin or else he’s not taking anyone across. In response, Marcus holds up the helmet. “Welcome aboard!” Charon changes his tune quickly. “Hope you have a great time,” and he starts his tour guide schtick about “the caves of despair” and “the hanging gardens of disgusting diseases,” hee.
They approach Hades’s castle where Xena gets a bad feeling. Swords out…but the Harpies grab Marcus! Marcus cuts the Harpie’s foot so it drops him to a castle wall where he has to hang on for dear life. Yikes…doesn’t sound much better. A fiery chasm is underneath! Xena flips over, kicking some banshee butt while Marcus falls and has to grab onto an even narrower ledge. Time for a repeat of Xena’s fire trick, complete with harpy explosion. :P And, of course, a warrior princess’s work is never done until she can help her man back up to safety as well.
Xena approaches Hades with a trade. Put Marcus in the Elysian Fields or you may never see it again, god. Hades protests—that’s impossible. “Every man and woman can be judged only once when they die.” But Xena’s found the loophole; Hades gave Marcus life again, after all. He deserves another judgment. The warrior princess goads Hades with his lost helmet again before the god ultimately bends a little. Marcus’s past bad deeds will still be stacked against him, he warns. “I want to speak on his behalf,” Xena insists, though Hades deems it unnecessary. He already knows what Marcus has done. But that’s not what Xena wants to talk about anyway. “I want to talk about what’s in his heart.” Aaaw. Now for the helmet. Marcus, invisible but in the room, was wearing it this whole time. “Your time is up,” Hades tells Marcus as he hands the helmet over. Ouch. The couple holds each other, kissing…and then Xena stabs Marcus! Pretty shocking, though I guess the woman is a control freak, hee. She looks horrible, dropping the blade as he faints dead.
“He could have kept the helmet and lived out his life,” she tells Hades, the trembling emotion evident in her voice. “He was tempted, but in the end he did the right thing.” He’s also a lover, Xena persists, relaying to Hades that Marcus believed he carried a bit of the Elysian fields within himself. “Let him bring that love to paradise where it belongs.” Aaw. Good speech.
We are back in the pretty Elysian fields…with the happy, good people restored to their rightful place. And among them is Marcus! Hades appears, back to his oiled up finery now that the helmet is back on his head, and tells Xena it’s time for her to leave. “Keep thinking of me,” Marcus says to his lover. Sounds really sweet in an episode that affirms this will keep them connected. They make out one last time, and Marcus looks at her longingly, music straining, as she walks away.
Back in the land of the living, Xena and Gabrielle share their weekly thoughts. “You’ll be together one day,” Gabs promises. “We’ll never be apart,” Xena responds, pointing to her heart. “He’s in here, forever.” A lovely show theme.
The disclaimer is no winged harpies were harmed or sent to a fiery grave during the production of this motion picture. Thank goodness. Xena was looking like a bit of a pyromaniac there. :P
This is a sweet episode, for a character relationship that doesn’t make it past season one. Yet the theme of love connecting people across death definitely does. And it’s certainly nice to know that Marcus’s quite admirable deeds at the end of his life rightfully earned him a place with the good folks. Certainly gives us some hope for some other late bloomers, hee. A nice way to reinstate the message that it doesn’t matter when you decide to turn your life around—it should still go celebrated.
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