It compresses a lot, like having Gabrielle get fight training and tattoos right in the first episode, while still having her basically true to her character as a pacifist wannabe bard. Xena is darker here, but her reform is better justified than it was in her original Hercules guest appearances, and presumably her relationship with Gabrielle would’ve further redeemed her over time. Revising Hercules into her enemy and making Gabrielle, rather than Herc, the one who redeems her makes sense in a standalone reboot, streamlining things and tightening the focus on the X/G pair. It’s also truer to the mythical Hercules, who was quite the misogynist. The very first Sorbo Herc movie, Hercules and the Amazon Women, started Herc out as a typical Ancient Greek sexist pig but had him get woke through his experiences with the Amazons (including Lucy Lawless in the first of her two pre-Xena roles in the franchise) and he was a modern sensitive guy for the rest of the series. This is basically stripping away that revisionism, replacing Sorbo’s superhero with someone closer to the myths.
Gabrielle being a Scythian who becomes an adoptive “princess” is an interesting choice, since the Scythians are one of the suspected bases for the mythical Amazons, and the original show had Gabrielle become an adoptive Amazon princess. That’s another way this version tries to be closer to the original myths and history.
My main issue is that it’s too much in the modern serialized form, so a single episode can’t really tell a complete story. Since the one script is all we get, that leaves it unfinished, which is a bit frustrating. I miss the way TV writing was done around the time of the original series, where you had serialized story threads and character growth over time, but each individual episode was still a complete piece with a proper ending, aside from the occasional 2-parter.
It’s also unclear how far it would’ve gone into the fantasy element with gods and monsters. There’s a mention of the Hydra as something Herc & Iolaus have actually fought, but we don’t see anything supernatural onscreen; even the “giant” at the beginning is just a 7-foot-tall person. The gods are talked about but unseen, and even Hercules’s divine parentage is called a claim rather than a proven fact.
