Xena Reviews: Season 1, Episode 24

Is There a Doctor in the House? – Director: T.J. Scott/Writer: Patricia Manney

On the way to Athens, Xena and Gabi are traveling through a forest and find themselves caught in a war between Thessaly and Mitoa. They find Ephiny (who’s about to give birth) hiding in the trees and she tells them her husband Phantes (who we saw in Hooves and Harlots) was killed by Mitoans. Gabi is disgusted by the toll the war is taking on innocents and Xena decides to do something about it. She finds a Mitoan general (Marmax) and follows him. When Marmax goes after a lone Thessalian soldier, Xena knocks Marmax out and stabs him.

Xena and Gabi take Ephiny and Marmax to a nearby Thessalian healing temple, passing Marmax off as a regular Mitoan foot soldier instead of the general. The temple is run by Galen, who has no medical knowledge and spends all his time praying to Asclepius to heal his patients. Xena takes over, teaching Galen’s apprentices (Hippocrates and Democritus) the ways of healing. She (and Gabi) show the healers how to do triage, a tracheotomy (which Xena’s done before in Prometheus), how to splint a leg, and the proper way to remove an arrow. Hippocrates and Democritus are impressed, though Galen isn’t. Xena gets Gabi to change Marmax’s bandage (although she actually ends up sewing his wound) and Gabi tells him a story about a hunter who learned the secret of life is to find peace within yourself and share it with the world. When two wounded men are brought in, Xena gets Marmax and Gabi to help as she intubates one guy (with a pig’s bladder) to re-inflate his lung, and sews up a neck wound on the other. Galen calls the guards in to stop her, telling them to kill her if they have to.

Xena pounds the guards, but they end up losing one of the patients. That bothers Gabi, but Xena says they can’t save everyone and sometimes you just have to let them go and move on. Marmax gives Xena shit for bringing Gabi to a war zone and Xena points out that it’s his soldiers causing a lot of the carnage. Marmax admits they sometimes go overboard and Xena mentions a Thessalian village that was decimated earlier, which bothers Marmax. Democritus is impressed with Gabi’s bedside manner, which is interesting since she was so impressed with Talus’s back in Death in Chains; Gabi’s come a long way as a healer since then. Xena amputates a soldier’s gangrenous leg (which freaked out the censors so much that this episode had about sixty seconds cut from it and the air date kept getting pushed back until it finally aired in the middle of summer). Some guy tells Gabi his son is hiding in the bushes outside, so Gabi goes to find him. Marmax talks to Ephiny and learns how his troops slaughtered her husband for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gabi is brought in all cut up and near death.

Xena treats Gabi, who took down the Mitoan soldier who attacked her, but didn’t kill him (which Marmax finds strange). Gabi gives Ephiny her Right of Caste. Thessalian artillery starts hitting the temple and they evacuate all the walking wounded. Democritus gets an arrow in the chest while helping people evacuate and Xena removes it. Gabi isn’t doing too well and Xena feels guilty for bringing her into the war zone instead of detouring around like they’d planned. The bombardment of the temple gets worse and they start moving all the patients they can, but Xena offers to stay behind with those who can’t be moved. Naturally, this is when Ephiny goes into labour.

The baby turns out to be a breech and Xena does a C-section with a little help from Marmax (and some sort of mesmerism using a candle in lieu of anesthetic). Ephiny’s baby is a healthy centaur boy. Gabi’s breathing gets worse and Marmax’s men try to take over the temple. He orders them to stand down and calls a retreat so they can start peace talks with the Thessalians. Gabi has a seizure and dies, but Xena refuses to accept that, using CPR and pounding on her chest to bring her back. Hippocrates and Marmax both tell Xena to let Gabi go, but she can’t and her persistence pays off … Gabi revives. Later, Hippocrates thanks Xena for the lessons and says he’s going to write everything down (and maybe devise an oath). Marmax thanks her (and Gabi) for the lessons too and forgives her for stabbing him in the shoulder. As they’re leaving the temple, Gabi thanks Xena for saving her (again) and tells her all the cool stuff she saw when she was dead.

This is a really good episode (it’s 26 on my all-time list) and a definite classic. Xena shows her myriad medical skills, which she apparently honed on the battlefield. I guess that means Xena must’ve used these skills to heal the men in her army, either for practical reasons (she couldn’t afford to lose too many soldiers), or because her essentially good nature made her actually care about their well-being. (I’m leaning toward the latter.) Xena tells Gabi she’s going to stop the Thessaly/Mitoa war and proceeds to do just that (though if she’d known it would almost get Gabi killed, I think she might not have bothered). Xena’s impiety is shown here again when she tells Galen that trusting in the gods to heal is pointless, saying people need to trust themselves instead. That’ll be a running theme throughout the show (especially in Seasons 4 and 5).

Of course, the best part of this episode is Xena’s meltdown when Gabi dies. Lucy plays it great, really over the top; you can definitely believe she’s half out of her mind at the thought of losing Gabi. It’s interesting to compare this to Gabi’s freak-out when Xena died in The Greater Good, but the circumstances were a bit different: Gabi didn’t actually see Xena die (and had no way to bring her back), so her first reaction was stunned silence, giving way to anger later on. Here Xena loses it immediately, trying to bring Gabi back even though everyone around her says it’s too late (and disregarding her own earlier advice to Gabi about knowing when to let someone go). But it shows the depth of Xena’s feelings for Gabi, which maybe surprises even her. For me, this is where the romantic part of their relationship starts; I think Xena realizes that her feelings for Gabi run deeper than just friendship. Maybe those feelings were there subconsciously before, but now Xena’s aware of them and they’ll continue to grow stronger (as we’ll see next season). Yes, this is the last episode of Season 1; next week I’ll be doing a recap of the season (and a short preview of Season 2) and I think I’ll do a separate post about the geography and episode order for Season 1, but that’ll go up next Wednesday as well. So two weeks from now I’ll start reviewing Season 2; I hope you’ll join me.

Noticeable Things:

• As I’ve said before, Xena’s timeline makes no sense. Hippocrates and Democritus were roughly contemporary (5th to 4th Century BCE), but Galen came way later, in the 3rd Century CE.
• It’s strange Gabi doesn’t try to offer her Right of Caste to Xena; as we’ll see, Xena’s had opportunities to join the Amazons and always turned them down, but would Gabi know that at this point? Maybe Gabi had brought it up her Right of Caste earlier in their travels and Xena told her she didn’t want it.
• Something that drives me (and a lot of other fans) nuts: did Gabi actually save the kid she went out to find? We don’t see any kid and there’s no mention of him, so maybe the soldier who attacked Gabi had already killed the kid? Or maybe she saved him when she fought the soldier and that’s why she was wounded so severely? I hope it’s the latter, but there’s no way to know for sure since it isn’t mentioned.

Favourite Quotes:

• “Life is only what you make of it.” Gabi’s advice to Marmax after telling him a story.
• “You don’t heal; you wait for some god to help when he feels like it.” Xena chastising Galen for relying on blind faith to help people in need of healing.
• “Gabriel lives by her own code. That code doesn’t include killing.” Xena telling Marmax why Gabi didn’t kill the soldier who sliced her up, even though she could’ve killed him if she’d hit him an inch lower.
• “You don’t know anything!” Xena, losing it when Hippocrates tells her Gabi is dead.