My gripe with Xena/Hercules
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Saying Herc and Xena weren't "historically accurate" is like saying you don't like "The A-Team" because it's not realistic; you have completely missed the point of the exercise. It's supposed to silly, mindless, real-life cartoon entertainment. It's not Shakespeare, nor is it even taking itself even mildly seriously.
The historic inaccuracy is part of its charm. It knows it's stupid, and we know it's stupid, and everyone just agrees to go along for the ride.
I was never a huge Herc fan and never got all that interested in Xena, but I watched a few and liked the friendship between Herc and Iolaus, although sometimes the stories were a bit too stupid to tolerate. I thought the actor who played Iolaus was brilliant and I liked watching him; it was just a mindless, syndicated action show that came on Saturday afternoons, so that was enough.
The historic inaccuracy is part of its charm. It knows it's stupid, and we know it's stupid, and everyone just agrees to go along for the ride.
I was never a huge Herc fan and never got all that interested in Xena, but I watched a few and liked the friendship between Herc and Iolaus, although sometimes the stories were a bit too stupid to tolerate. I thought the actor who played Iolaus was brilliant and I liked watching him; it was just a mindless, syndicated action show that came on Saturday afternoons, so that was enough.
I couldn't ever get into them because they were just too silly.
Fair enough. I have at least one friend, with excellent taste, who just couldn't get past the silliness either . . .
Me, I always thought it was a hoot.
Then again, my one-and-only published XENA story involved a cyclops named Conjunctivitus, so clearly I have a large tolerance for silly . . . .
Yeah I just don't care for camp in my sf/f--that's why I don't watch Dr. Who, any of the Stargates, Eureka, Warehouse 13, Flash Gordon, True Blood, Buffy, Pushing Daisies etc. It is also why I can't stand the DS9 comedy episodes or the Supernatural parodies/comedies.
I like my sf/f to be a bit more serious along the lines of TNG, DS9, LOST, B5, The Vampire Diaries etc.
Whereas I love Doctor Who, Warehouse 13, etcetera. And "Little Green Men" is up there in my Top Ten DS9 episodes.
Science fiction is too much fun to take seriously all the time.
That's overlooking half of what was there. Yes, sometimes it would be wildly, unapologetically goofy, but then the next week (or even the next act of the same episode) it would turn around and do some of the most intense, deep, wrenching character drama you'd ever seen. (There was even a self-referential line to that effect by a character in one of their "present-day" clip shows.) Overall, the thing that unified it all was that they didn't hold back. Whether they did drama or comedy, they dialed it up to 11 and weren't afraid of what people would think.
^My thoughts, exactly. I LOVE LOST and DS9, but I also love Doctor Who, Pushing Daisies and SG1. I love the drama, but it's human nature to try to inject some humor into stressful situations.
Heck, even my beloved ultra-dramatic LOST had character like Hugo and Sawyer to point out the underlying humor of certain situations.
Heck, even my beloved ultra-dramatic LOST had character like Hugo and Sawyer to point out the underlying humor of certain situations.
That's very good way to put it.
At its best, XENA made other shows seem tepid and unadventurous by comparison.
It may have occasional lapses, but Doctor Who's continuity is generally much more self consistent than Xena/Hercules.
Are you talking only about the new show (in which case I'd agree), or the whole thing from 1963 onward (in which case I'd thoroughly disagree)? Overall, a series that gives at least three incompatible fates apiece for Atlantis and Earth and can't even keep its main character's age straight isn't exactly an exemplar of self-consistency.
Well being no-holds barred in what you are willing to do I guess can be admirable and I suppose one can respect it but for me if it just doesn't work or resonate with me in the final product then at the end of the day going all out is irrelevant.
I also never cared when shows tried one week being deadly serious then shifting to a silly comedy. The tone just clashes. I don't mind humor being included in an episode but it should be understated and sprinkled in--not obvious and contrived.
I also never cared when shows tried one week being deadly serious then shifting to a silly comedy. The tone just clashes. I don't mind humor being included in an episode but it should be understated and sprinkled in--not obvious and contrived.
I actually agree that XENA got a little bipolar in its later seasons, swinging wildly from outright slapstick to Greek tragedy from episode to episode, to the extent that it almost felt like two different shows. I think they struck a better balance between action, comedy, and drama in its early years.
But Zeus help anyone who ever expected it to be a historically accurate portrait of the ancient world! It was always supposed to be a goofy lark . . ..
Actually they had a lot of good writing, smart episodes, effective characterizations, high production values, etc. At the time Herc & Xena were on, they spawned a lot of imitators, including a Sinbad series, a Robin Hood series, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, and probably a couple of others, but as is usually the case, the imitators were pretty weak compared to the trendsetter shows they were imitating (though Tarzan: TEA wasn't that bad). Herc & Xena really were the cream of the crop for the syndicated fantasy/historical/action genre of '90s TV.
Exactly. You want atrocious, look at some of the gawdawful imitations, like that terrible live-action CONAN show. Or even mediocre shows like SINBAD. Pulling off XENA's brand of high-spirited swashbuckling fun is harder than it looks.
XENA had great music and production values, clever scripts, an engaging cast, ambitious action sequences, and tons of zest. It was a silly show done by smart people.
There is a lot of doubt that Eli is meant to be a Jesus surrogate. Eli only faintly resembles Jesus. As I mentioned he is first introduced as an avatar - a Hindu concept. He speaks of becoming an empty vessel in order to fill oneself with love - a concept with as many, if not more, Buddhist influences than Christian ones. When does Eli speak of clothing the naked, feeding the poor, or sin? He does none of these things and they were all pivotal parts of Jesus' teachings.
The whole idea that Jesus went about preaching a message of pure love is a fairly revisionist one. Check out the New Testament - Jesus talks plenty about love and peace, but he also speaks of hellfire and wreaks havoc in the temple, something the entirely nonviolent Eli would never do. And Jesus certainly never says anything about becoming an empty vessel.
Like most things in Xena, Eli borrows freely from several mythologies. Christianity is in there, and they obviously wanted to play around with some Christian themes through him, but they also wanted to play around with some Hindu and Buddhist themes through him as well. They were no strangers to eastern philosophies which were also mixed into the show. In The Debt we see Xena instructed by Lao Ma who makes a sideline comment about a book she is writing and crediting to her husband - Lao Tzu. So not only does Xena meet Ulysses, Caesar and Beowulf - she meets the author of the Tao Te Ching. However, it's a bit of throwaway line and if you don't recognize the name Lao Tzu, you'd miss this little tidbit completely.
It's easy to see the echoes between Eli and Jesus in our culture because everyone is at least fleetingly familiar with Christian mythology, but not necessarily Hindu and Buddhist mythology. But they are heavily mixed into Eli as well. And since they are, it's difficult to make the case that he's supposed to be the show's version of Jesus.
An excellent summation.
Well, of course. Obviously they're not going to come out and blatantly say this is Jesus; they're going to fictionalize it, make it just suggestive rather than obvious, so as not to offend anyone. (They got a lot of grief from Hindus over their portrayal of Krishna and Ganesh in the final episode of the India quartet, even though that was the only episode of the four that succeeded in portraying Indian culture and religion in a reasonably authentic and respectful way.) But that doesn't mean there was no intention of having him be similar to Jesus. I mean, he was quite blatantly associated with the monotheistic god of later seasons and the rather obvious Judeo-Christian mythology that took over from the Greco-Roman one.
You're being too literal. You might as well say that the show wasn't meant to be set in Greece because the real Greece looks nothing like New Zealand.
Yes, they made Eli a syncretic figure so as not to offend anyone by making him too similar to any real religious figure. But it's rather disingenuous to think he wasn't meant to be somewhat Jesus-like. I mean, good grief, just look at him. His appearance was blatantly modelled on the traditional Renaissance and modern artistic interpretation of Jesus. His name, Eli, is a Hebrew or Aramaic name meaning "my God," as well as the name of a figure from the Bible. He's obviously meant to be a rough Jesus surrogate, though just as obviously they avoided making him too close a surrogate.
That's just way too all-or-nothing an interpretation. Because he's not exclusively based on Jesus, he's not based on Jesus at all? That makes no sense. That's like saying a cat with black and white and grey stripes is entirely devoid of white. It's self-contradictory.
He wasn't Jesus. He was "Jesus" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge.)
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