The Ring

As my great friend IseQween said a while ago, "Girl, what is WRONG with you? Where's the Low Rents, you slacker piece of lollygagging trash? You wrote more when you was honeymooning than you have in the last year!" She was in a mood, I suspect, but she did have a point. Could be that I was just overcome with the jenny say kwa of Xenastaff's entire penultimate message, which, it would seem, is not "the cycle of violence can be broken by love", but rather something a bit less idealistic. Of course, the show was produced by Rob "Evil Dead is a Cool Title" Tapert.

Well, that's just the way it goes. I got a hell of a lot more out of this show than TPTB even thought to put into it, and if when all's said and done, my montage image of this show and the strenuous, honest efforts of every last person who worked on it is, frankly, a thousand million monkeys typing for a thousand million years, well that's not such a bad pink slip. When you consider that for syndie teevee folks, who got to be basically whoring their nether regions for every dime, saying anything at all that will please the punters, and they still, with bare-bellied sword-swinging women and a bottom-line percentage of buttkicking per ep, commented often, and sensibly, on the eternal conundrums of the human condition, I might have to cut them some slack for falling on their faces sometimes. Heck, they were just trying to offer their best bits.

So, anyway, I kinda left the whole Ring Cycle hanging. Unintentionally, true, but hung is hung and that's just not right. When I last bothered to hit the big green button on the tv and shove a tape into the player, which was lo these many moons ago, I'd spent the evening oohing and aahing over the mystery and magic that was Xena Does Oslo, aka The Rheingold (yah!)

Xena (our heroine) had just gotten her butt kicked by Tree (unblinking evil that sleeps not nor even looks away momentarily, perhaps distracted by a pretty flower or the first robin of spring), though as Tree was wearing The Secret Decoder Ring of the Gods (gives ultimate power to them as has forsaken love, or even them as has been handed their hats by giggling Rheinmädchens) that might've gone a long way toward moving Tree from featherweight to heavyweight class. Gabrielle, travelling with Brunnhilde (hot Northern babe who knows the scorecard from thirty-seven winters ago, when everything happened worth telling), has found the scene of the butt-kicking, as well as a battle-weary Beowulf (second male juvenile lead) with whom Xena had gone in order to confront said Tree in the first place.

Secondary theme worth noting: everyone in the cast of this trilogy thinks Gabrielle is It. The "my sword for you, Devi" crowd would fit right in.

The Ring opens with a few flashbacks from the previous week, raven lock, yadda yadda, Valkyries, Odin, Rheingold, yah, yah, Tree, yah (munch), cute babes forging their way through a misty forest with rack of furs in tow, oops, that's current material. Gabrielle, Brunnhilde and Beowulf are hot on the trail after Tree and Xena, Beowulf thinks it's time to hire another hero but Gab knows Xena's still alive, despite the fresh blood Beowulf finds on a tree (he knows it's Xena's, too, without having to do any analysis or lab typing or anything. We in the modern world have lost so much in the way of how our foreparentalunits did stuff, now when we want to know about blood on doorframes and incidental wall hangings, we have to seal the room and pump SuperGlue™ into the air. Beowulf just tasted a bit of wet bark and knew it were Xena that wetted it. Lesson for the kidlings—pay attention when great-grandma talks.)

Near the tree is one of Xena's arm braces, Gab's insisting that this is where Xena got away, though Beowulf is still betting on Tree. Man's a pessimist, no doubt about it. Anyway, Gabrielle orders them to split up, so as to cover more ground.

Guess who, in this pre-Mycenian easter egg hunt, finds Xena?

She's hiding behind a tree, not Tree, just a regular old tree in the woods. She grabs Gabrielle with a hand over her mouth, Tree might hear them, and pulls her down. Gabrielle tells her not to leave her again, so we have a pretty good idea what's gonna happen sometime in the next forty minutes.

They can't talk, though, cos Tree, aka Grindl, is still out there, we see it in silhouette on the horizon line. It's making good time, wherever it's going. We never find out how Xena got away, maybe she tickled it until it dropped her. Or maybe my hearing stinks and I just missed it.

Meanwhile, Xena dresses in the bits that she left behind, while Beowulf and Brunnhilde jog up. Brunnhilde is overcome with hero-worship, declaring her lifelong goal is to die. With honour and valour, she clarifies, but Xena's ridden the death train enough to know that death is death, and these days death is Pillar Perch Purgatory and listening to Mike and Raph Heavenly Moments for eons, but she doesn't say much, she uses body language to clue in Brunnhilde that Gabrielle, just as she thought, is the One, and Gab is of course all about life and love and happiness and stuff like that. It helps that Beowulf is smitten, too. No matter what Xena says, the two of them will not decamp for safer realms, since, get this, they won't leave Gabrielle.

After the mandatory break for titles, and reassurance that "her courage will change the world," we get back to the action.

Xena leads her merry band to a cave she knows about. I'm thinking there isn't a cave anywhere in the world she doesn't know about, but regardless how she found out about this one, it must be the one she first locked Tree into way back when, she takes them right to it, so they can set up a trap to capture Tree. Finally, we find out where it came from.

But first—That Damn Ring Bit. At the end of it, the melting, the molding, the cooling (not nearly enough cooling for my taste, that sucker should burn off any finger silly enough to probe it, but it's Special Gold, after all), and the triumphal sneering, entereth Grinhilde, Pride of the Valkyries, and challenges Xena for the Ring. She gets it off her, too, and threatens to put it on. Xena says if she hasn't forsaken love, she's in for a bad time, but Grinhilde points out that she'll get a few minutes of Ultimate Power first, and that's all she needs to ruin Xena's day. They fight, much screeching and yah-ing (didn't there used to be witty dialogue during fights? maybe it's the kind of thing you have to grow into.) and Grinhilde fails to make the kill before she transforms into Tree. Xena sneers some more, then lops off the branch with the twig with the Ring and puts it on her own self. Whereupon Tree, showing uncommon good sense finally, flees.

At that point we find ourselves at the top of the last ep, with Xena imprisoning Tree in Yet Another Cave, and Tree steals the Ring back while that's going on, so Xena leaves her there, ultimately thwarted in her whole reason for riding north in the first place. But she doesn't dwell on that, she's an optimist, not like Beowulf at all, he would likely have spent the next thirty-seven years drowning his sorrows and paying passing bards to write him a few heroic stanzas or sixty, come to think of it, that might have happened anyway.

Huh. So anyway, Xena scouts ahead in this cave, it's an abandoned mine shaft, and comes across Tree. She waves a torch under its chin in time-honoured monster-maddening fashion, trying to lure it back to where her gang are poised over the shaft with a rock trap.

It's a good plan, and would work if there weren't so much tape left on the reel, but tape-counters are gods in the Xenaverse, even Xena can't defy them, and so Tree senses the presence of the trap at the last moment and scurries back into the mine, Xena hot after it.

The gang catches up to her, and while they're all distracted with reunioning, Tree attacks!

In the ensuing melee, our side gets their hinder kicked rather soundly, but Xena comes through with a chakram throw that effectively seals the tunnel against Tree. Unfortunately, she's on the wrong side of the seal.

(Both Beowulf and Brunnhilde worry about Gabrielle's safety, comfort and general well-being, before they notice the lack of Xena in their midst. If I were Xena, this would be working my nerves. Luckily, Xena's too busy just now to notice, and her feelings are spared.)

Gabrielle attacks the rockslide and succeeds in shifting several large styrofoam boulders to make a Gab-sized opening toward the top. On the other side, Xena is losing serious style points in the match against Tree. Ignoring the calls of Beowulf and Brunnhilde, who want her to wait, Gabrielle squeezes through and, snatching up the chakram from where Xena dropped it, she dashes up the shaft and leaps onto Tree's back, using the new -n- improved chakram's inner swirly as a grip (which goes to show how improved it is, as she would have cut her hand on the old one) and repeatedly slams its edge into Tree's neck. That woman seriously needs a haircut.

Tree tosses her off, and the chakram falls into Xena's hand. She takes advantage of Tree's distraction to ram the chakram up under its chest bark. Finally, Tree goes down, just as the others jog up the shaft. No idea what took them so long, I'm almost positive they weren't pitching pennies. Probably arguing over who Gabrielle liked best.

Tree was so strong and mean and stuff cos it had the Ring. No wonder it took both Xena and Gabrielle to do for it. Xena pulls the Ring off and then double-takes: Tree has all its twigs.

When Xena first fought Grinhilde-as-Large-Plant, she cut off the twig with the Ring. Said twig was still missing last night, when Grindl beat the crap out of her and Beowulf, the ancient world didn't know about Miracle Gro, which almost makes up for the SuperGlue thing, but not quite.

Xena hustles her gang back out into the forest, and they all hear Grindl, aka the Real Tree, raging in the distance behind them. Guess she slipped into the mine shaft just as they left, cos next thing we see is her bending (swaying?) over the trunk of the fallen. They must be related in some way. Just a guess.

Oh yeah—as the gang is jogging out of the forest (looks like Gabrielle finally got that haircut, it's much tidier now) on the way to the Rheinmaiden's rock, a raven lands on a branch near Brunnhilde and caws at her. This is important, I'm sure of it. Brunnhilde doesn't look glad to see it, and then next thing we know, it's winging its way back to...

A termite hill? Valhalla is a termite hill? Oh, well, nevermind that, the raven's landed on Odin's shoulder and is telling him All while he sits there looking world-weary (it's the beard. trés scraggly.) and like he rather wishes he'd stayed on that hanging tree and let Xena ride past without him all those years ago.

Back to A Bank By The Rhein, Gabrielle and Brunnhilde have a short sensitive chat about what it means to be a true warrior in today's fast-paced modern world. Gab says stuff like love and fighting for what you believe in and the Greater Good are really important, that's what Xena does now, and Brunnhilde says she would never have thought such things could be true before she met Gabrielle. Beowulf doesn't say anything. He just looks at them. Xena does say something. She says, "Brunnhilde, why don't you go scout over that ridge," and you can tell she's pointing toward a ridge somewhere in the south of France, but Brunnhilde instead finds a much closer one.

Xena tells Gabrielle that she doesn't like Brunnhilde, which surprises Gab for some reason, and Xena explains that it's not that Brunnhilde's been making cow-eyes at Gabrielle, or walking really close to her, or complimenting her haircut or staring at her bare belly, but because Xena thinks Brunnhilde is "not what she seems." Xena's De Nile river is in spring flood, if anyone wants my opinion.

Odin and the Valkyries (not yet a better-than-lounge-quality string quintet) surprise Brunnhilde in a clearing and Odin berates her for failing to do what he told her to do—to wit, snatch the Ring from Xena. Apparently, Brunnhilde is really a Valkyrie her own self, guess Xena was partly right about her, she's more than she seemed, true, but she's also got it bad for Gab, even the ravens noticed, they told Odin, and he tells the Valkyries to kidnap Gabrielle and hold her for ransom.

Brunnhilde heads back, but the Valkyries flank her (they're mounted). They attack, zeroing in on Gabrielle and there's more screeching and yah-ing and (from Beowulf) manly grunting, then a rider on a Valk horse gallops out of the trees and snatches Gabrielle before taking off—it's Brunnhilde! Gab calls, "Xena!", Xena calls, "Gabrielle!" and the local station calls commercial.

The fight continues after, with Xena back on top of her form. She and Beowulf don't seem to actually kill any of the Valks, but they do punch them out and Odin stops the fight when he sees it's not going his way. He offers to trade Gabrielle for the Ring, but Xena doesn't believe he can make good on his end of that bargain, she thinks Brunnhilde acted alone, wonder what gave her that idea, and then there's a bit more where Odin reveals how badly he needs therapy since he's still pissed at her for using and losing him. Not for Grinhilde turning into a tree, or even (much) for her stealing the Rheingold, but for dumping him. His HMO might go for group, he should look into it.

He disapparates (Ares and the other Greeks twinkled, it must be one of those stylistic things) and Xena & Beowulf head out on the line Brunnhilde took.

There's a quick bit where Odin pays Grindl a visit and rats Xena out as the slayer of her son (Little Tree was her son, she was pregnant when Xena stuffed her into that cave, which means she was pregnant when she put the Ring on in the first place, which strikes me as just a tad irresponsible since while she might've gotten it off in time if her plan had worked out, still, it's hard to know what its effects would have been on her unborn child. Not a whole lot of studies have been done in that area, how fetuses respond to the lure of Ultimate Power, but it can't be good.)

The horse lands in the middle of some kind of blighted dry swamp or other; Brunnhilde pitches her case to Gabrielle, who turns her down, explaining about the whole soulmate thing she's already got with Xena, and that it's not that she's not terribly, terribly fond of Brunnhilde, and she hopes they can remain friends, but anything more is out of the question.

Meanwhile, Beowulf and Xena are almost caught up; he doesn't like the area at all, but as he explains to Xena, for Gabrielle he would go through the fires of Hell. I'm wondering if next week the show will be renamed Xena: Chopped Liver Princess, but right at this moment Odin apparates into the middle of the path in front of them and smacks Beowulf into a tree with a Magic Missile of skill level +4 (a rough estimate, but he's still alive so it can't be greater). The Valkyries range behind him, every upper lip twisted in a Bad Grrl Sneer. Odin shoots another Magic Missile at Xena, but she dodges it, fetching up against a tree as it flashes past. Unfortunately, the tree turns out to be Grindl, and she wraps her twiggy limbs around Xena, pinning her in place. Gabrielle, from somewhere way offstage, Bermuda perhaps, in a deck chair sipping a Mai Tai, calls, "Xena!" and Odin sends some Valkyries to chase her down and kill her. This last wakes Beowulf up, and he simultaneously takes on a Valkyrie, I think the one with the most seniority, while flipping a dagger to Xena, who stabs Grindl with it and frees herself. Xena sends the chakram flying toward Odin, programmed to keep after him no matter how much he dodges, which keeps him busy while the Valk Beowulf is fighting skewers him. You know, I don't think Beowulf's won a fight yet.

Xena's shocked at his loss, and Grindl uses the moment to whap her into a rock. They surround her and she threatens to put on the Ring. Ooooh, is Odin pissed at that—he orders the Valks (I thought they ran off to kill Gabrielle the first time he told them to, but seems most of them stuck around, they've got to be told stuff more than once, I guess.) to kill Xena AND Gabrielle, and Xena puts the Ring on.

Now she's just chock full with Ultimate Power, and her sword and chakram float into her hands (she'd dropped them when she hit the rock) and her hair goes all windblown and heroic and now when Odin fires Magic Missiles she can catch them and send them back. One smacks into Grindl and then the next pops Odin full in the chest. The remaining Valks go down and the scene cuts to Brunnhilde following Gabrielle and trying to persuade her to do something other than look for Xena, (fly to Cancun with Brunnhilde, perhaps?) since she'd also find Odin and he's ordered her death. A cohort of three Valkyries who apparently do what they're told the first time attack, and Brunnhilde actually kills one as she and Gabrielle beat them off. They hear Xena fighting in the distance and Brunnhilde fears that Xena will be killed before she, Brunnhilde, has a chance to prove her love for Gabrielle by offing the rest of the Valkyries and setting fire to Valhalla, and Gabrielle rounds on her and chews her out for wanting to shed blood in her honour. Brunnhilde is a slow learner when it comes to impressing women, but she might've gotten the idea this time.

Back in the other part of the forest, or dry swamp, or wherever, Odin is back to shooting out Magic Missiles, and Grindl's back on her roots, so Xena's not let to catch her breath. But she hears Gabrielle calling, so despite the Valkyries that join the fight just then, she high-flips over the lot of them and heads down the path. Odin calls off the Valkyries, saying that the Ring is even now killing what Xena values the most. Wonder what that is, eh?

Brunnhilde finds Xena first, but she's had the Ring on too long, just as Odin said. She's lost her sense of self, as Brunnhilde puts it when she tells Gabrielle later, she's lost her memory of Gabrielle and the woman Gab helped her to become. Brunnhilde gets Xena to give her the Ring, promising that everyone will leave her alone if she does, and then (a woman of her word) leaves her standing in the middle of this desolate place, friendless, alone, lost, confused, and runs back to guess who? That's right, Gabrielle.

Brunnhilde gives her the Ring to keep safe, then turns herself into a circle of flame surrounding Gabrielle. Only Gab's true soulmate will be able to pass through the fire, she says, of course that's providing her true soulmate makes it out of the forestswamp alive. Brunnhilde's still got a bit of a mean streak there.

While Brunnhilde is reforming and I'm working really hard to not sing "burning ring of fire", she, and I think this is an afterthought, must've figured out they'd both be there for a while, and she's one who likes 'em kinda femme when push comes to shove, so anyway, she causes Gabrielle's clothes to change to something a little more "comfortable" but which still shows off her cleavage, and a garland weaves into her hair as she falls asleep on a rock platform that just happens to be there.

Brunnhilde says she's doing it all to protect Gabrielle, but it seems a wee bit controlling to me. Well, for her it's a step in the right direction, I guess.

Beowulf finally comes to, he wasn't dead after all, and he finds Xena's chakram and sword right where she dropped them not ten feet away from him, I don't know if someone moved them or if the swamp shrunk. He starts after her.

Cut to Xena, stumbling deeper into the swamp, mists closing round and small voices in it chuckling meanly. She drops to her knees, wailing, "Who am I?" and we're done with Part II!

Okay, so I'd have to say that this is kind of a low point for both Xena and Gabrielle. Beowulf is about as well off as when he started; not a winner but still alive, same for Odin and remaining Valkyries. Grindl's still scoring Little Tree on the "loss" side of the ledger, I wouldn't, but I'm not a mother. Maybe with time she'll come to see the bright side.

Again, very cool ep. Lots butt-kicking, not too many flying horses, and two monsters. This cycle concludes in the next ep, Return of the Valkyrie. I promise I won't take two years to get to it.