Cradle of Hope

Okay, has everyone reading this ever heard a baby cry? If not, or if your memory's a little shakey, go find the nearest baby and poke it. Quit whining, there's bound to be one around somewhere. I'll wait.

What a racket, eh? Glad I'm not there. Okay, now go find the nearest cat and — no, don't poke it! Sheesh, ain't you got no finer feelings? Just hover a bit till suppertime, it'll yowl all on its own. Come to think of it, that would've worked with the baby as well, but I don't have all day.

Anyway, did you detect any glimmerings of a resemblance between the two sounds? Me, either. I'll skip rousting a griffon, unless you're in Wales and want extra credit, but the rest of us can take it as read that whatever noises a testy griffon makes are uniquely griffonish.

(Feed the cat, it'll never shut up until you do.)

Our story today opens with another five hundred or so lit candles, driving fire marshalls between Auckland and Christchurch to strong drink, surrounding an old woman telling a king his fortune. She's tossing stones on the floor and calling on Almighty Zeus, as if this would persuade him to take time out from wenching, and the gist of her prophecy is that some newborn baby would one day sit on the king's throne, and this babe ain't in any way related to the current king, Gregor, which is just as well else it might have inherited the king's squirrel teeth. As said king is widowed and his only child dead, I think maybe she couldn't rouse Zeus after all and is winging it. Besides, she never looks at the stones.

The king's advisor, Nemos, is all over this, he doesn't like it, I think he wanted to sit on the throne his own self, and Gregor agrees to his plan to find the baby. A servant woman overhears the whole thing and runs off to where there is a newborn baby, born on the right day, its mother is dead and it's being cared for by a friend of the family, who hands it over to the servant woman to hide.

She puts it in a basket that night, the moon is Not Full which doesn't bode well for anyone, and floats it down the river, giving new meaning to the word "safe," and for a wonder no predators snatch it during the long night, it doesn't even get mosquito-bit, or hit a rock and tump over, or get rained on or nothing. Instead, it fetches up against the bank near where Xena and Gabrielle are camped out, inflates its wee lungs, and lets forth a cry much as a well-mannered diner will cough to attract the sommelier's attention.

Gabrielle thinks at first that this noise comes from a cat, or possibly a griffon, which as we know from our recent fieldwork is absolute bollox. She and Xena investigate, and there we are: two women, a horse and a baby, just in time for the titles.

When we return, Gabrielle is ga-ga about the baby and wants to keep it, but Xena insists they need to find its mother and return it, maybe so she can try again, this time with a motorized basket, and so they head for the nearest village.

Back in the castle, the king is mooning over a fragment of a mural painted, if the wear is any indication, some two hundred years previously by someone who should have been cleaning brushes instead of wasting valuable pigment. Gregor seems to think it has something to do with his dead wife, he misses her, maybe it was her favourite mural or something, and Nemos interrupts to tell him that he's gotten nothing done since the last time they spoke.

Nemos tries to persuade Gregor to let him kill the baby when they find it, personally, I think he should find it first before bothering the king wanting extra privileges, the king agrees with me, yay! though he only says Nemos should just bring the kid to him like he was told to do the first time. Seems also that all the people in the kingdom have heard about the prophecy (who spilt the beans on that, then, eh?) and are all running around counting tiny button noses.

On the road to the village, a mob of really very scruffy peasants are trying to hang a woman, they've got a noose around her neck, so far so good, she's sitting on a gorgeous horse and where they got it (it's worth everything they possess put together) is never adequately explained, maybe it's Zeus, and the only idea they're having trouble hooking up with is the part where they remove the horse from under the woman. They're chucking rocks and mud at her, so of course the horse is just standing there.

Xena drives them off, she uses her whip to strangle the leader, it's pretty cool, and then they all go off to a cave since it's starting to rain. Now it's three women, a horse and a baby (the other horse ran off, Argo doesn't like sharing the spotlight). The woman they saved has some heavy baggage, she's carrying a box in a rucksack that Gabrielle can't hardly lift while they were on the road, but as the box gets tossed around pretty easily throughout the rest of the ep, there must be something else in there. Maybe her lunch. Anyway, her name is Pandora, and the box is The Box (she's not The Pandora, only a granddaughter), she seems to think that the box still has Hope in it, and she has to keep it with her the rest of her life and can't do anything normal, like have kids or go to the movies or Disneyland or anything. Xena doesn't point out that the first Pandora managed to have kids and do stuff and take care of the box, so did this Pandora's mama, and maybe she's being just a little obsessive here, but she does get Gabrielle to give the baby to Pandora, who has to let go of the box to take it, and you can tell Xena thinks this is the first step on a long road to complete box-independence.

Meanwhile, out in the blazing sunshine, Nemos and henchmen are still looking for the baby. Nemos tells them they can kill the kid if they want to, this cheers them right up, they probably had lots of baby brothers and sisters.

Xena and Gabrielle, with Pandora, who's still holding onto the baby, this may be a successful transference, wait, she's still got the rucksack, too. Oh well, you can't rush these things. Anyway, they're in a pub and the proprietor makes Xena hang up her weapons before he'll serve them. Charges them six dinars for a bit of milk and port, sounds inflationary to me, especially since it's only mid-afternoon at best. He secretly sends a boy to fetch Nemos before he serves them. Gabrielle takes the baby from Pandora, who immediately pulls out her box and plays with the handprint design on its front, then takes the baby back, she's making a real effort here. Apparently, having milk sitting in a bowl on the table is all they need to do about feeding the baby, if my mother had known that trick she wouldn't have spent so much time heating formula, I blame the burning of the library at Alexandria for this loss, and while she and Gabrielle are cooing over it, Nemos and Friends burst into the tavern and demand they give up the baby at swordpoint.

And there Xena is, weaponless. Shucks. Guess that's game over for her, that's what Nemos thinks, except she uses the port goblet plus a handy torch to breathe fire over the boys, and then fights her way to her weapons, whereupon she's disarmed by Nemos. I won't keep you in suspense, she gets her sword back, uses her chakram a bit, wins the fight and the bad guys that are still alive run away. This includes Nemos, and seems like he didn't want to leave empty-handed, he ran off with the box.

Pandora may be on the road to recovery, but it's a little soon yet for her to do without the box entirely, so she's pretty upset. Xena puts the Pinch on the innkeeper and he tells her about the prophecy and Gregor and that Gregor wants the baby killed.

In the castle, Nemos has given the king the box, they both know what it is and that it shouldn't be opened, and Nemos uses the moment to chew scenery like a beaver on a Mardi Gras holiday. He still wants Gregor to let him kill the baby, forgetting yet again that he hasn't actually got any baby, but they're interrupted by a message. It's from Xena, she wants to meet Gregor.

Meanwhile, Xena and Pandora are in a stable or something, hiding out. Xena's pacing and Pandora is sitting with the baby, staring into space, in major box-withdrawal. Gabrielle arrives, she's been off finding stuff out and incidently delivering Xena's message. The king will meet Xena. Pandora finally lets on that she has to reset the lock on the box every few hours or so, or it will open by itself, that's why she's so upset about it being gone. Box-junkie. They're all alike.

Xena meets the king (he's with Nemos, who's still working on the cud of scenery he chewed earlier), and talks to him long enough to find out that he's not a bad guy, but he still demands she give him the baby if she ever wants to see the box alive again.

That night, with the help of the servant woman from the opening (Gabrielle found her, she's getting good at finding stuff), Xena gets into the castle disguised as a festival dancer. Gabrielle and Pandora hide out nearby, within sight of a mob of people searching for the baby, but they're distracted by false alarms and don't notice the baby in Pandora's arms. Xena's in Nemos' dining room, dancing, he has the box right there, she almost gets it while he's distracted, but the king comes in and rather snottily takes it away with him to his own chambers.

Outside, Pandora is fully bonded with the baby, in spite of the box thing. You can tell that someday she'll go out on tour, doing PSA spots on How I Kicked The Box, And You Can, Too. She'll probably get a book deal.

Nemos orders someone to take Xena to his room, he does women after all, who'd a thunk it? and once there she knocks him out and sneaks off to the king's chambers, where there is a severe guard shortage and she gets in easily, only to find him mooning over an empty cradle much as he wept over the mural fragment earlier. She knocks him out, too, in a fit of kindness, and takes the box.

Nemos didn't stay down long, he's got a cadre of guards together and they burst into the king's room, but Xena bungie-cords (not a lot of bungie in that cord, it's a sash pull, and if she hadn't had warrior princess knees they'd be dislocated by that dive) out the window with the box and blunders her way back to where Gabrielle and Pandora are waiting, and Pandora resets the lock Just In Time, Hope was about to escape and if you've seen any of the third season, you know why this would be a Bad Idea.

So, neener neener to Nemos, but Xena sneaks back in the castle at dawn and gives the baby to Gregor and they have a sensitive chat about what the prophecy really means, that he's supposed to adopt the baby and make it his heir. He's totally cool with that, it hadn't occured to him before this, but Nemos comes in (did I mention earlier how silly Nemos looks in pointy hat armour? It's the cheek flaps that gild that lily, he looks like, with a bit more flannel, he should be dandling a line into a hole in the ice of a northern lake) and he isn't happy. Xena snatches the baby back from Gregor and does a bit of broken-field running back out into the courtyard, where the guards follow her, and in between fighting them she and Gabrielle play baby-toss, but it works out, he's not brain-damaged much, well, we hope not, he does look a little shell-shocked, he even shuts up for a moment, and Xena guts Nemos right in the middle of him sneering at her, so all is well.

Pandora and Gregor end up really friendly over the baby, since she's now so attached to it she can't bear to leave it, so if Gregor wants it he has to take her, and that means he has to take the box as well, but she's almost free of it, so they can now leave it in a room out of her sight and she only sweats a little bit. Xena gets them to promise to name the baby "Gabriel", and on her way out she goes to fetch Gabrielle, who's been off looking at the box, I'd have thought they'd seen enough of it by now to know how dangerous that is for the unwary, but no, and as they leave Gabrielle accidently knocks it off the wobbly perch it was sitting on, you'd think it was the One Ring the way it keeps pushing itself into the forefront, and it busts open when it hits the ground. Turns out it was empty and had been empty all this time, having wasted the lives of three generations of Pandoras, all I can say is, lesson for the kidlings: don't listen to the box-pushers on the schoolyard, they're up to no good.

Xena says they'll just have to tell Pandora they broke her box and that Hope wasn't anywhere inside, must be because Hope lives in all of us, if that were so bloody apparent you'd think they'd have known it already, especially after rattling the box a few times and hearing nothing, not even a tiny tinkerbell voice swearing at them to let her get some sleep.

Either way, Xena gets Gabrielle out of that room and back on the road before she starts needing regular box-fixes, and all's well once again.