The Greater Good – Director: Gary Jones/Writer: Steven L. Sears
This one starts with Gabi practicing her fighting moves (using Argo as an opponent) until Xena whistles and Argo kicks the staff out of Gabi’s hand. Xena wishes Gabi and Argo could get along, but Gabi thinks Argo hates her. Xena goes to a well for a drink and meets a girl who asks her to help Lord Seltzer, who’s being attacked by the warlord Talmadeus in a nearby village. Xena calls Argo (who tosses Gabi out of the saddle onto her ass) and rides to help Lord Seltzer, who turns out to be Salmoneus. Xena runs off Talmadeus’s men, but ends up getting shot with a dart by a woman in a tree outside the village.
Xena quickly realizes the dart is poisoned, but has to ignore it to help Salmoneus. Apparently Salmoneus sold fake weapons and armour to
Talmadeus, which explains why the warlord wants him dead. Salmoneus’s new business venture is selling carbonated water to the villagers (hence the name Lord Seltzer), which actually does seem to have improved their general health. The villagers are certainly enamored of Salmoneus, but he’s ready to abandon them to save his own ass until Xena convinces him they have to stay and protect the villagers. In Talmadeus’s camp, he’s disturbed to learn Xena is involved, but his hatred of Salmoneus compels him to go ahead with his plan to attack the village. Xena slips into Talmadeus’s army while it’s marching and ends up pounding most of the soldiers. But when 
she and Talmadeus fight, the poison starts affecting her and Talmadeus almost kills her. Gabi saves Xena by throwing her staff with perfect accuracy and they ride off on Argo. Talmadeus knows something’s wrong with Xena. Xena admits to Gabi she’s suffering from tolmic poisoning and says things will get worse before they get better. Xena knows they still have to deal with Talmadeus and suggests Gabi take her place. (We get a reprise of the opening credits scene where Xena dons her armour, except this time it’s Gabi.)
The armour doesn’t fit Gabi too well and she’s not confident about fooling Talmadeus, but Xena insists it’ll work. Gabi’s really not happy about having
to ride Argo and we learn she used to have a pony named Tympani who died (which could explain why Gabi’s reluctant to get too close to Argo). Gabi rides into Talmadeus’s camp and convinces them she’s Xena, leading them back to the town where the villagers are waiting to ambush them, using pressurized seltzer jugs with darts in the corks to drive the invaders away. Xena (who’s barely able to stand) helps with her chalram, making it look like Gabi did it (although Gabi’s “chakram” is made of wood and not even hollow). After Talmadeus’s 
men take off, Xena tells Gabi they have to follow up to get rid of them for good. Gabi is worried about whether Xena’s going to die, but Xena tells her it’s about the greater good, not about any one person. Xena does ask Gabi to take her body home to Amphipolis if she dies and Gabi agrees. Gabi goes to Talmadeus’s camp and tosses fire bombs all over, but she gets thrown off Argo into a water trough where the dye washes out of her hair and Talmadeus realizes she isn’t Xena.
In town, Xena (who’s lost the use of her legs and can hardly see) fights off two of Talmadeus’s men who try to jump her. She crawls away from their
unconscious bodies and keels over. Before Talmadeus can kill Gabi, Argo comes in to rescue her and they ride off together. In town, Salmoneus finds Xena dead and knows they’re in trouble. When Gabi returns and finds out Xena is dead, she can hardly believe it. Salmoneus is ready to take off, but Gabi says they can’t leave the villagers to Talmadeus’s mercy … they have to stay and help, for the greater 
good. Gabi heads for a nearby town to get help from Iolaus, but on the way she stops and freaks out, venting her anger at Xena’s death by pounding a tree with her staff. Salmoneus takes Gabi’s message to heart and offers himself (and Xena) to Talmadeus if he’ll let the villagers go. Talmadeus agrees, but naturally plans to double-cross Salmoneus and sell the villagers into slavery. Back in the village, we see Xena’s fingers move.
Talmadeus betrays Salmoneus, taking all the villagers captive. As Talmadeus prepares to rip Xena’s body apart between two horses, Gabi shows up and pounds the shit out of everyone, ending with a kick-ass move where
she disarms a guy, vaults over him into a forward roll, and finishes with a sword at Talmadeus’s throat. Gabi tells him she’s taking Xena’s body home, but Talmadeus manages to distract her and knock the sword from her hand. Argo is one of the horses tasked with pulling Xena’s body apart and convinces the other horse not to move, no matter how much they’re whipped. Talmadeus realizes Argo is Xena’s horse 
and orders her killed, but Xena revives in time to save her. Xena frees Gabi and they start kicking ass, while Salmoneus frees the villagers. The villagers help fight Talmadeus’s men and Talmadeus is ready to waste Salmoneus, but Xena kicks his ass and he ends up in the water trough surrounded by armed villagers. Xena admits to Gabi that fighting off the poison (by actually dying temporarily) took longer than she’d anticipated, but thanks Gabi for trying to take her body home. They leave the village, still wondering who shot Xena with the dart.
This is a really good episode (#44 on my all-time list) and introduces the “greater good” concept, which would become an integral part of Xena and
Gabi’s characters throughout the rest of the series. Both Gabi and Salmoneus learn about the greater good, about fighting for something more important than your own life, and both of them put it into practice. Gabi also learns the acting for the greater good means setting aside your personal feelings, which is why she chooses to stay and fight after Xena dies, even though she’s devastated. It’s interesting that Gabi goes off by herself before having her angry freak-out; 
she knows she can’t let the villagers see her break down or they might lose faith in her leadership. So she’s already showing signs of being a good leader and we’ll see that develop more in future episodes. As for Salmoneus, he still talks like a snake oil salesman, but we see he actually does care about the villagers, not just as customers but as people, which is why this is probably my favourite of his appearances on Xena.
The real relationship explored in this episode is Gabi and Argo; Gabi thinks Argo hates her, but maybe she’s just avoiding getting too close because of
losing her pony Tympani when she was a kid. There was supposed to be a scene after Gabi’s freak-out when Argo came over to nuzzle her and offer support and Gabi accidentally called Argo “Tympani”. But apparently they couldn’t get the horse to cooperate, so the scene ended up getting cut. By the end, Argo and Gabi seem to be on better terms (and Argo did save Gabi the first time Talmadeus caught her, so she obviously never really hated 
Gabi). Gabi gets to kick some ass in this episode, especially during the fight in Talmadeus’s camp. She was totally in the zone for that fight, 100% focused, which is obviously why she went through Talmadeus’s men so easily, even pulling off a Xena move like knocking the sword in the air and catching it. Unfortunately, Talmadeus tricked her into losing focus for a split-second and disarmed her.
There were more scenes that got cut from this episode because it ran long: the stuff about Gabi going to get help from Iolaus is confusing because she pops up at Talmadeus’s camp. There was a scene of two of Talmadeus’s men on the road talking about how they had captured Salmoneus (and Xena’s body);
Gabi was hiding in the bushes listening, so she realized she didn’t have time to go get Iolaus and just went straight to Talmadeus’s camp instead. And there was a scene right before Xena is attacked by the two guys of one guy disturbing a chicken that runs across Xena’s foot. We only see the chicken brushing past Xena’s foot, which alerts her to the fact that someone’s in the room, but the part with the chicken running away from the two men was cut, so the scene doesn’t totally make sense. There were also supposed to be scenes interspersed through the episode of villagers burping because of Salmoneus’s fizzy water, and even a scene of Argo being a bit gassy. (You can see Argo drinking out of a seltzer barrel in the background while Xena examines the poison dart, but nothing really comes of it.)
Noticeable Things:
- An obvious question is why didn’t Xena just tell Gabi she was going to have to “die” to fight the effects of the poison? As Xena said later, she didn’t think it would take so long to fight off the poison, so she probably figured she’d be revived by the time Gabi got back. Plus, Xena probably knew there was a chance the poison could kill her and didn’t want to give Gabi false hope by assuring her she’d be fine.
- Gabi mentions Salmoneus having a “guardian Moirae”, which is what the Romans called the Fates. So, I guess Gabi’s saying Salmoneus has his own personal Fate that keeps him from getting in too much trouble with his schemes.
- Gabi has trouble controlling Argo with her whistles, but we see
Salmoneus can do it … and so can a lorikeet in a tree! - We see Gabi using a collapsible staff that folds up so she can store it in Xena’s saddlebags. I don’t think that was ever used again.
- When Xena’s fighting the two guys who jumped her, it looks like she breaks the second guy’s neck, but according to Steve Sears, she doesn’t. He had originally written that she did break the guy’s neck, but the producers thought it was too “unheroic” to kill a guy who was already unconscious, so they had Salmoneus confirm the guy is alive when he comes in later.
Favourite Quotations:
- “Sometimes you have to have patience with things that annoy you.” Xena talking to Argo about Gabi, although Gabi assumes Xena was talking to her about Argo.
- “That’s just what happens with things that you love … sometimes they just leave you.” Gabi talking about losing her pony Tympani and by extension, Xena.
- “It’s not about me. It’s about these people. That’s why we’re here. People like this used to be my victims. I keep that in mind every time we come up against a warlord like Talmadeus. It’s the greater good, remember that.” Xena explaining that her life isn’t important in the big picture, a theme we’ll see again in future episodes (including the finale).