Remember Nothing – Director: Anson Williams/Story: Steven L. Sears, Chris Manheim/Telepay: Chris Manheim
This one starts with Xena and Gabi going to the Temple of the Fates, something Xena does every year to honour her brother Lyceus, who died helping her fight Cortese eleven years ago. The temple is attacked and Xena and Gabi fight the invaders. Heeding a warning from Gabi, Xena kills a swordsman who turns out to be very young, barely a teenager. Xena feels so guilty about killing the kid before he had a chance to live a real life that she runs into the temple and wishes she’d never become a warrior
in the first place. In gratitude for saving their temple, the Fates give Xena her wish, but warn her that if she spills any blood in anger everything will go back to the way it was. Xena’s not sure what they’re talking about, but when she goes outside the attackers (and Gabi) are gone. The temple vanishes too and Xena finds herself in peasant garb in a clearing, where her brother Lyceus hails her. She’s overjoyed to see him and realizes the Fates have given her a second chance, to live her life without violence.
Xena’s so happy to see Lyceus alive, she can’t hide it and he wonders if something’s wrong with her. We learn that Lyceus was almost killed ten 
years ago when Cortese attacked Amphipolis, but his life was saved by his Verillus token, a medallion he wears around his neck. Elsewhere, we find out Mezentius (from The Path Not Taken) and Krykus (from Hooves and Harlots) have formed an alliance and are planning to expand and take over even more territory. Xena heads home and looks around, but gets surprised by someone. After almost breaking his arm, she recognizes him as Maphias, a friend of Lyceus’s. But she’s surprised to find out he’s also her fiancé (although she’s apparently been putting off the wedding for quite a while). Xena finds out her mother is dead in this reality and goes to the family tomb. Xena’s sad that her mother isn’t
alive, but is happy she didn’t shame her by her actions in this life. Xena says she’ll miss her mother (and Gabi) but it’s worth it to give Lyceus a chance to live out his life. At the inn, Lyceus and Maphias talk about Xena’s strange behaviour and Maphias says he’ll try to find out what’s bothering her. In a store, Xena stops a slave boss from beating the storekeeper by pulling a rug from under his feet and pretending it was an accident. One of the Fates appears and congratulates her, but Xena gets a shock when some slaves are brought in to gather supplies and one of them is Gabrielle.
Of course, Gabi doesn’t know Xena, but when the slave boss tries to beat her, Xena stops him, almost breaking his arm. Maphias comes in and 
pretends he and Xena want to buy Gabi, but the slave boss says she’s a favourite of Mezentius and isn’t for sale (which surprises Xena, since she killed Mezentius in the regular timeline). Maphias gives Xena shit for trying to help Gabi, saying slavery is legal and she has to go along to get along and not make waves. (No wonder she keeps putting off the wedding if that’s the kind of guy he is.) Lachesis appears and tells Xena she can fix things by shedding blood, but Xena figures she can rescue Gabi and everything will be fine. Lachesis hints that she might find more changes here than she thought, including in Gabi. In Mezentius’s castle, he and Krykus make plans and we see Gabi getting a small measure of revenge
on Mezentius (who’s constantly grabbing her ass and calling her “sweet thing”) by giving him bread licked by a dog and spitting in his wine. Lyceus and Maphias argue over Xena’s defense of Gabi (which Lyceus agrees with) and Maphias again urges Lyceus not to stir things up. Xena gets info from the shopkeeper about the goods he’s sending to Mezentius the next day. Later, Xena and Lyceus discuss the situation and she learns that Krykus has killed or enslaved most of the centaurs and Amazons after tricking them into fighting each other. The next morning, Xena hides in the wagon heading to the castle and when a guard stabs a pitchfork into the straw in the wagon, we see red fluid gushing all over.
Turns out he stabbed a wineskin (the wagon driver is a drunkard) and Xena’s clinging underneath the wagon. She gets into the castle and finds 
Gabi, but Gabi has trust issues in this reality. She isn’t inclined to try escaping with Xena (and shows her the scars she got last time she tried to run away), but does inform her that Mezentius and Krykus (plus a third warlord named Kaputius) have formed an alliance. Xena convinces Gabi they have to stand against the three warlords and talks her into escaping. At the inn, Maphias is worried that he can’t find Xena, but Lyceus assures him she’s probably fine. Xena and Gabi escape by going up the chimney and back at the inn Xena gives Gabi one of her mother’s dresses to wear. Gabi and Lyceus are quite drawn to each
other, which Xena seems to find amusing. (That’s a little strange if Xena has her own romantic feelings for Gabi, but maybe her feelings have changed since this isn’t the same Gabi she knew.) Maphias shows up with some slavers, having made a deal that he’ll turn over Gabi if they let everyone else go. Slavers not being known for their sense of honour, they grab everyone and drag them off after Xena refuses to fight.
They end up suspended from the ceiling in cages in Mezentius’s dungeon. 
Xena and Lyceus argue about why she didn’t fight and Lyceus tells her some things are worth fighting—and dying—for and he’d rather die fighting evil than sit by and watch. Gabi tells Xena she’s not sure whether to thank her or hate her since Xena gave her a taste of freedom, which was then cruelly snatched away again. Maphias gets in disguised as one of Kaputius’s soldiers and frees them, telling them they can escape since all three warlords are now in the great hall. Lyceus has other ideas and heads to the hall to confront them. The others go to help him, but Xena still won’t condemn her brother to death by using a weapon. Lyceus urges her to fight, saying she can’t ignore destiny.
Xena is torn until she sees Gabi kill Mezentius; not only does Gabi not feel any remorse, she actually enjoys it. Xena realizes she has to set things right for Gabi and Lyceus, so she kills Kaputius. Things go back to the way they were during the fight outside the Fates’ temple, except this time Xena heeds Gabi’s warning by disarming the kid instead of killing him. She tells him he has a second chance and not to waste it by killing. The kid promises he won’t and takes off, leaving behind a Verillus token which Gabi finds. That makes Xena wonder, as she and Gabi head back out on the road.
This is one of my favourite Xena episodes (number 4 on my all-time list) and I like it more every time I see it. It’s got that whole “It’s a Wonderful 
Life” vibe, with Xena getting to redo her life and make different choices, while finding out that her actions have consequences she never imagined. Not only is Cyrene dead in this reality, Mezentius and Krykus are still alive and the centaurs and Amazons are practically wiped out because Xena wasn’t there to stop the warlords. Add to that Gabi being enslaved (since Xena didn’t save her from Draco’s men in Sins of the Past) and this reality is kinda worse than the one Xena’s used to, even if Lyceus is still alive. And Gabi’s not just a slave, her
entire personality is different. She’s bitter and cynical and doesn’t trust anyone, not the warm, open person we’ve come to know. She obviously had some defiance (since she tried to escape before), but it was probably beaten out of her. (Plus, it’s implied that Mezentius is using her as a sex slave, which would certainly drain all the joy out of anyone.) Renee plays Gabi perfectly, always sporting an expression of suspicion and mistrust, and giving all her dialogue a cynical, world-weary vibe.
The timeline seems to be roughly the same as Xena’s reality; Cortese attacked ten years ago, but instead of leading the resistance (which Lyceus 
apparently tried to do), Xena convinced Lyceus and the other townspeople to flee into the hills while Cortese destroyed Amphipolis. It’s said that Cyrene’s death happened almost ten years ago and that losing everything to Cortese broke her heart. Maphias also mentions that Xena’s last promise to Cyrene was that she and Maphias would get married, so I guess that means she’s been putting off the marriage for almost a decade; you’d think Maphias would’ve given up by now. Xena recognizes Maphias right away, but is surprised that they’re
engaged; if Maphias is a friend of Lyceus, it makes sense she knew him even in the regular timeline, but apparently there was no romance there. Maybe it was something that never got off the ground because of Xena’s actions after Cortese’s attack. And if the original timeline holds, that would mean Gabi’s been enslaved for about a year, which I guess is long enough for her to try escaping and then have the resistance beaten out of her.
A lot of fans say this episode is about Xena choosing Gabi over Lyceus, since 
Gabi killing Mezentius is what spurs Xena to change things back. But I see it a bit differently. Near the beginning, when they’re in the Fates’ temple, Xena is feeling guilty about Lyceus’s death and Gabi says Lyceus died fighting for something he believed in. Xena assumes it was her Lyceus believed in and if he hadn’t followed her lead in opposing Cortese, he’d still be alive. But over the course of the episode, Xena (and the audience) learns that Lyceus wasn’t following her blindly out
of some kind of hero worship. Lyceus had a conscience of his own, one that just happened to match Xena’s. As we see here, Lyceus would always choose to stand up against evil and oppression wherever he found it because that’s the kind of person he was. When Maphias complains about Xena stopping the slave boss from beating Gabi because slavery is legal, Lyceus applauds her actions and says it’s right to “stop someone—anyone—from being abused, legal or not.” So Xena’s choice isn’t between Lyceus and Gabi, 
it’s between letting Lyceus be who he was really meant to be—a caring person willing to give his life to stop oppression—or changing his destiny to lessen her own guilt. I think Xena realizes she made a mistake when they’re in the dungeon and Lyceus tells her he’d rather die fighting evil than sit back and do nothing. In changing Lyceus’s destiny, Xena did him a disservice by taking that choice away from him. She knows it’s wrong, but can’t bring herself to put things right (and condemn Lyceus to death again) … until she sees what’s happened to Gabi. Not only has Xena twisted Lyceus’s destiny, trying to make him go against his heroic nature, but she’s changed Gabi’s fate too, not letting her be the loving person she was meant to be. So I don’t think Xena chooses Gabi over Lyceus, I think she chooses to give both of them back the lives they were supposed to have, even though she knows 
Lyceus’s will be cut short. I think Xena sparing the kid at the end is symbolic; she gives the kid a chance to live his life without violence, something she couldn’t give Lyceus … not through any fault of her own, but because Lyceus would always choose to fight if he thought it would help someone else. The Virillus token (which almost seems like one coincidence too many) cements the connection; this kid can go out and live a full life, something Lyceus wasn’t fated to have. And since this episode comes right after Orphan of War, where Xena had to walk away from her son (another young blond boy), her killing the kid at the beginning might’ve multiplied her guilty feelings.
Noticeable Things:
- When Xena’s staring at Lyceus soon after changing history, he asks if he has dirt on his face. that’s a callback to Sins of the Past, where Xena brushes dirt off Lyceus’s tomb and says he always had trouble keeping his face clean.
- In the opening scenes of Xena and Gabi travelling across country to the temple, Gabi is wearing her old farm girl outfit from the first half of Season 1. Obviously, this was old footage left over from the early days of the show.
- The leader of the attack on the Fates’ temple is apparently Kaputius,
who’s also the third warlord that joins Mezentius and Krykus in the alternate reality (another coincidence). Kaputius seems to be some kind of ninja or something, judging by the fancy fighting moves he uses on Xena, and Krykus references Kaputius’s “deadly arts”. It’s Xena’s killing of Kaputius in the big fight that sets reality back to normal. - There’s no mention of Xena and Lyceus’s older brother Toris here. If this reality went anything like the original, Toris could still have been ashamed of his own cowardice (or pissed off about Cyrene’s death) and gone after Cortese like he did in the normal timeline. Lyceus says Xena is the only family he has left, so either Toris was killed, or he’s disappeared.
- In future episodes, Cyrene’s inn and house will be shown to be in the same building, but here they’re separate. It’s hard to tell in Sins of the Past, since we only see the inn, but maybe they were separate (or adjacent) buildings at one time and Cyrene changed things as the inn expanded. (Every time we see it, the inn will be a little bigger than before.)
- When Xena first goes home in the new reality, she looks through a
jewellery box at a bracelet and an old ring that she kisses. The bracelet could be her mother’s wedding bracelet, but I wonder if the ring belonged to Xena’s grandmother. We’ll find out later (in Old Ares Had a Farm) that Xena was very close to her grandparents, so seeing her grandmother’s ring again would’ve made her emotional. Maybe Xena was supposed to get the ring, but after turning into a bloodthirsty warlord she could hardly come back and claim it.
Favourite Quotes:
- “When I look at you, I see the purest, the kindest person I’ve ever known. Someone who’s full of wonder, and stories, and would never give up on anything or anyone.” Xena’s accurate (and very loving) description of Gabi. But the alternate world Gabi claims that’s not her at all.
- “Look, maybe it is a lost cause, but I’d rather die fighting these bastards than live with myself if I don’t!” Lyceus showing Xena his true character and making her realize how wrong she was for changing his destiny.