#where we're never able to see xena and gabby's faces

[keyofjetwolf]

Like I said before, I really like these segues between Xena and Gabrielle, not only as a basic framework to keep both stories moving, but for the little insights we have from both of them as they experience (and reexperience) this story.

Gabrielle’s reactions, we have to take with some latitude, as she’s serving a specific function to bridge the pieces together. So she asks questions -- or asks them in a particular way -- as the narrative requires. They’re not without context though, and knowing that Gabrielle is going to claim jealousy as her chief motivating factor for the events to come, I’m putting a bookmark in how she calls on it now.**

Meanwhile, take a whiff of the juicy meat on Xena’s part. I’m SO into how Xena’s fear about Borias becomes precisely what Lao Ma brings out in Xena herself. Not just as a half-prophecy (though also that), but as something Xena Of Then had absolutely no fear of happening to HERSELF. She’s so lost, indeed like an animal, with no concern beyond the immediacy of Now. The very idea that she’ll become anything else, that it’s even POSSIBLE, is so remote as to not even occur to her. Which we can then spin further, into the heart of how everything Xena does after Lao Ma is a very deliberate and exacting CHOICE.

And Xena Of Now knows it. This is the core of the guilt she carries. She isn’t that animal, acting and reacting as the seconds tick by. To even try to claim it would be to dishonour and dismiss everything Lao Ma was and the good she brought to the world. Lao Ma gave Xena so much, but what she asked in payment was Xena’s ability to hide in her pain. Lao Ma took Xena’s excuses, every last one. Which is a huge part of what makes Xena so complicated and fascinating a character, but is also another undeniable marker to the audience that the things Xena will come to do in “The Bitter Suite” are her, all her, and nothing but her.

(**) Right here right now, I INTENSELY disagree with jealousy as Gabby’s prime motivator in “The Debt”, at least in the ways I’m currently interpreting it. I’m real fuzzy on a lot of details though, and so I’m particularly interested to see if I still feel that way once I’ve rewatched all this.