Amazon.co.uk Review
Xena--you gotta love her: after all, she could snap your neck just by straightening her knees. She sprang fully armed from Sam Raimi's head in March 1995, to flesh out an otherwise routine episode of the television series
Hercules, a high-kicking, horse-riding, chakram-throwing ancient-Greek-warrior princess, who mustered armies the way some women shop for shoes, turning heroes against one another as gleefully as she laid waste to sweet little villages.
Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurks doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules her spin-off was an instant certainty--and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on a journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled by the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard, Gabrielle, her constant friend. Set in a lush New Zealand doubling for the pagan Mediterranean, as misruled by Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the rest of the Mount Olympus gang, Xena: Warrior Princess recounts these exploits, as the duo confronts gods, monsters, warlords, idiots and anachronisms, as well as their own flaws and desires at the hilarious and sometimes unsettling mythological crossroads where touchy-feely Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao.
In the first series (first aired US 1995-96), Xena and Gabrielle encounter Centaurs, Amazons, Titans, Gods, Helen of Troy, Hercules, King of Thieves (and Zappa-lookalike) Autolycus and--most important and exciting--Xena's ex-victim-turned-nemesis Callisto, an evil skinny-blonde avenging angel. --Honey Glass
Synopsis
Features episodes 'The Royal Couple Of Theives' which sees Xena attemping to recover a chest which contains a powerful weapon, 'The Prodigal Son' which sees Gabrielle ambushed and 'Altered States' which sees Xena and Gabrielle saving Icus from a group of zealots.