A Tale of Two Muses

Bard & warrior going down the dusty path, as Gab reads from her latest epic. Xena likes it. I bet I woulda too, but I didn't hear it due to extraneous noise from the chicas sharing the couch I was on. (This is not a dig at them; I chatter as much as any of 'em, and to even less purpose, but I don't got no idea what Gab was going on about and I'm pretty sure it was something of substance that tied the whole ep together, cause without it, the ep lacked... plot. That must be the reason not a lot made sense. I didn't hear the Gabpoem.)

Anyway, the late afternoon sun was really heating them up (Xena's getting a bit ripe), even as the dust of the road worked its way through the well-worn boots of the travelling bard. That last is a plot point, children, as much of one as we'll get this week.

Switch camera to A Cave. Or possibly A Grotto, where we see a cockfight? No... kickboxing in a ring of headlights? (Where'd that come from? Nothing to do with this ep. Sorry) What could it be, then, this driving force that sends its practitioners underground?

Dancing. (o, the horror!) Led by Tara, the Good Witch of the SlamBangDriveThruGang. Somehow, she has found her way there and is living with a father/son combo in ways that we really don't want to explore in a family tv show. This little illicit clambake is broken up by the town militia, and next thing you know, Tara's up on the scaffold in the main square of this Little Town in the Desert, about to get her heiny whupped for violating some weirdo town edict against dancing and thus offending the local incarnation of Calliope. (I have personally never thought of Calliope, Patron Muse of Pipe Organs to judge by the background music, to be against a little fun, but this is the same Xenaverse that can take a sweet, happy-go-lucky god like Bacchus and turn him into a bloodthirsty demon from Transylvania, so I guess I'll just have to go with it.)

Enter our heroines, who spy the situation immediately and begin kicking butt and taking names. (A bit on the presumptious side, perhaps, but it's a neat fight scene since it has them working from both ground and scaffold level.) Tara is freed and only then do X&G think to ask what her crime was.

QUIBBLE: for heavens" sake, can't any gathering of citizens go about their business running their own towns and meting out punishments and rewards without having to justify themselves to every wandering warrior princess in the land? Where does Xena get off wading in like that?! X&G didn't even know it was Tara up there till the fight was pretty much over. What about local autonomy? Respect for foreign customs?

Enough of that—Xena is obviously the unacknowledged ruler of all of Greece and the little people just have to get used to the idea of answering to her.

X&G negotiate a banishment thing for Tara and the town agrees since it means no more black eyes and busted bones for them and the trio wander off back out into the desert. Where Tara, her hormones raging, tries to go back. She misses her new family already.

So here's the dramatic conflict: Tara must dance, she can't keep still, her toes start tapping when she hears the wild siren-song of the bongos and the pipes and her body just follows. The only problem is that she also can't stand to leave those guys (they're really nice to her) and they just happen to live in a town where dancing is verboten. (It can't be because of Calliope, that must just be a kind cover on the part of the magistrate, who doesn't want to give the real reason, that he's the preincarnation of Alvin Ailey and feels physical pain every time he spies that troupe of 100% left-footed peasants shimmying through the marketplace, so he made up that thing about Calliope to spare their feelings.)

Here's where it gets a bit confusing for those viewers who don't have my eagle eye and my patented Five Mile Belief Suspension Hoist. X&G, instead of minding their own business and letting Tara work out her own destiny, decide that it is their Mission of the Week to force the town into repealing Prohibition. Cause, you know, it's just plain wrong to forbid harmless amusements. So Xena conceives a Plan (remember, this is all for the Greater Good), and let's see if we can hit its main points:

1. She sends for Autolycus to impersonate a Holy Man, a la The Rainmaker, who is even more holier-than-thou than the magistrate. This takes some doing, since the mag wears a pimple cap on his head tied under his chin and binds his tunic to his torso with many wrappings of string, which fairly shouts "This man does not embrace new ideas, or bathe very often." So Auto shows up looking like a beekeeper in mourning and does his damndest to preach the revival of Calliope worship in his best foot-washing style. (I kept waiting for him to speak in tongues, but he doesn't. Shame, that.) Why does Xena want Auto to do this? Oh, because he thusly gains the confidence and support of pimplehead, and then convinces the latter to let Xena put into motion Plan Point 2. I think. Can't have anything to do with Bruce Campbell's screen time contract.
2. Xena undertakes to drill the youngsters in the Arts of Warfare, ostensibly to distract their impressionable minds from the folly of dancing, but really to shock their parents into realizing there's lots worse things in the world their kids could be doing. This drill stuff is enough like dancing so the kids go for it. Fun, fun, fun—don't they have chores?

This all works really well, just peachy. Ignore, if you can, how there's an election coming up apparently (no mention of this till the second half of the ep, unless the Gabpoem was all about extolling the virtues of democracy and free elections), and the magistrate's office is up for grabs, and how pimplehead's main reason for stamping out dancing is so he can run as a law -n- order candidate, and how he's running unopposed so why bother? until Tara's father-substitute tosses his headwrapping into the ring in desperation at the effect this no-dance crackdown is having on his already dysfunctional family life (His son tries to run away with Tara, Xena catches up with them and says lots of sage stuff about fighting for what you believe and they go back), and on election day there's an assassination attempt on Auto's life that Xena Mason exposes as being the work of pimplehead's henchman through shrewd questioning in front of the whole town, who then embrace their congo line of young 'uns, entering the square on cue and forming a phalanx of Oklahoma! barnraisers.

I mean, none of this stuff is nearly as important as how Gab gets her boots repaired with steel tappy toes (remember the worn out boots on the road? See? The writers can do continuity. So there.) and reacts to the edict against dancing by shaking her booty every opportunity, and how when they bed down for the night in the grotto instead of in Tara's "daddy's" nice house (Ve vant to be alone) that Gab can't stop wriggling in response to her inner muse and Xena has to hold her down to get any sleep, and how the ep ends with a free-for-all dance mob with everyone hugging and laughing joyously.

Lots of good stuff. Shame about the plot, but some weeks are just like that.