Top left to bottom right: Karina (Claudia Black), Samsara (Danielle Cormack), Cyane (Selma Blair), Olan (Monica McSwain), Eve’s Rite of Caste ceremony, in Lifeblood, Xena Warrior Princess.
Rewatching season 5’s Xena episode, Lifeblood, I noticed a few things for the first time that were impossible to realize before, when it first aired. This was an awkward episode, using an unrelated series pilot, Amazon High, in flashbacks for this story about the Northern Amazons, and Eve’s Rite of Caste ceremony. It seemed a story filled with elements that didn’t quite fit together, and seemed to rewrite the literal rules of shamanism that the tribe was associated with. That, and the odd tonal juxtaposition between the tragic backstory of these Amazons, and the pilot, a fish-out-of-water comedy set in the prehistoric age.
That said, this time around I didn’t worry about any of that, and just took in the images, and the themes, and it suddenly made more sense. What brings it all together, in my mind, is Eve’s presence. Her potential baptism by blood, exactly what Xena wishes to avoid for her, is eventually reimagined as a baptism by water blessed by the tribe. This actually makes perfect sense, given what we eventually learn about Eve’s fate: as her parents lie frozen, she will indeed be baptized by blood, and redeemed in a ceremony by the Baptist, made possible by a vision not unlike the vision Xena sees with the aid of the tribe’s Atma dagger, a glimpse into the original purity of one’s origin.
Since we have no idea any of this will happen, the first time we watch Lifeblood, we merely consider Eve the MacGuffin of this story, and the real story is Yakut unable to cross over into the next life because of the Amazons’ embrace of vengeance and bloodlust. The tonal shift of her somber concern with the antics of the flashbacks shake our confidence in the story’s unity and message, but if we can look past that, there’s actually a lot of underlying unity.
One of the big influences on both Hercules The Legendary Journeys and Xena Warrior Princess, according to Rob Tapert, was Michael Crichton’s book, Eaters of the Dead (later made into a movie, The Thirteenth Warrior). Based on the true account of a diplomate from an advanced civilization of the 10th century, the Abbasid Caliph, sent to Viking territory to understand their ways. His written account gives us a glimpse of the Viking world which seemed quite savage to him. Crichton adds a fantasy element to this story: The diplomat arrives just as the Vikings are encountering an even more ancient and savage race. They’re a separate branch of the human species altogether: a matriarchal tribe of cannibalistic Neanderthals, with whom no diplomacy is possible. Their ways and their motives are completely alien to the Vikings and the Caliphate diplomat, and it’s made clear that their violent confrontation with will be memorialized in much more familiar terms: as dragons and goblins in the legend of Beowulf.
Amazon High includes these elements as well. The enemies of the Amazons are much like these Neanderthals, and on the occasion when they speak English, we’re almost taken aback, given their animalistic savagery. They’re cannibals as well, having eaten all the men in the heroes’ tribe. The Amazons’ last surviving man is much like the shamans we’ll see later, and holds the secret for summoning a hero from the future. This hero, Cyane, is befriended by Olan, a gal who has the gift for talking to animals, another key shamanistic trait. In fact, her name, “Olan”, is a Siberian Yakut word for shaman (it means literally “arctic hysteria”), which indicates that the show’s research into Siberian shamanism was well underway at this point. Since shamanism also has a Viking connection, in the form of berserkers who became like bears, we see how Eaters of the Dead has possibly influenced this episode as well.
Olan is played by Monica McSwain, by the way, who is the best dancer the Amazons will ever have in any of these episodes! No surprise, since she is a professional dancer and choreographer. There’s good chemistry between her and Cyane (Selma Blair), and in the final celebration dance, we see Cyane introducing dance moves from Pulp Fiction and other 20th century sources, while Olan translates them into much more florid and expressive Amazonian movements. It’s unfortunate we never get to see more of them in a series.
The leader of these ancient Amazons, Karina (Claudia Black), is a visionary of another type, able to transform the surviving members of her tribe into what I assume would be the leading power of their day. Samsara (Danielle Cormack), embodies the fury of the Amazons that we will recognize in later years in characters such as Varia, whom Eve will have to contend with. These are the two archetypes that help shape the depiction of the Amazons on these shows, and one could argue that without Karina’s visionary leadership, the Amazons remain what they are in Lifeblood: a Paleolithic tribe cut off from the rest of humanity, an isolation that might possibly end in season 6, when Eve makes her last appearance in Path of Vengeance.
We see this Eaters of the Dead pattern throughout HTLJ and XWP, into its final season, in the episode The Abyss (which was also originally supposed to include Eve, interestingly enough), a story about a savage race of cannibals seemingly incapable of any kind of speech. Eve herself plays the diplomat between the advanced civilization of Rome, and the Paleolithic Amazons, in Path of Vengeance, as a way to bring them out of their endangered state of isolation. Her mission is interrupted when her bloody past renders her an ineffective messenger of peace. No doubt this leads to her decision to head to India and Ch’in.
When the Amazon High pilot was shelved, it took new form as the bold opener for season 4 of XWP, Adventures in the Sin Trade. The bleak landscapes and gloomy cave settings for Amazon High return, only this time filmed in the epic tones we’d see in The Debt. There are no adults in this tribe: like the men in Lifeblood, the adults have all been killed. Cyane as reluctant leader now takes the form of Otere, and Olan with the Yakut-inspired name is now literally named Yakut! The tribe is hunted by Alti, a shamaness, who summons a berserker, a figure appearing in Norse religious practices. This new incarnation of Amazon High, amongst the Northern Siberians, pops up here and there over three seasons of Xena, finally appearing in To Helicon and Back, when the confrontation that would’ve likely occurred between Karina and Samsara is now fulfilled by Gabrielle and Varia.
No idea goes wasted in the world of Xena and Hercules, however, so I believe we do eventually see Amazon High go to series in the form of Cleopatra 2525. The world of caves and sparsely populated surfaces of roaming saber-tooth tigers, horses and mammoths in prehistoric times are now a dystopian future, with steel caves and Baileys, floating mammoth robots who are just as alien and incommunicative as the Neanderthals in Eaters of the Dead. This time the adults of Amazon High reappear: Karina is now Hel (a name from Norse myth), and Samsara is Sarge. The Atma dagger is Voice, which only Hel can hear, making her a kind of futuristic shaman. Cyane is Cleopatra, of course, from the past now, not the future, but still full of 20th century anachronisms. The villain wears garish makeup, a bit like some of the men of Amazon High, and it’s even hinted at the end that he may be a time traveler, too, which is a plot point that we may eventually have seen on Amazon High. We can see another connection to Amazon High in the title of its pilot: Quest for Fire Power, is a play off of the film about humanity’s first use of fire in the Paleolithic age, Quest for Fire.
These are things I keep in mind as I work through my own Eve-related project, because I think there’s unfinished business between Eve and the Amazons that doesn’t get fully explored, since they likely held them over to develop for an Eve series, which, like Amazon High, did not get off the ground, unfortunately. But to me, there’s a lot of instances on the show, like Amazon High, that are ideas that manifest themselves here and there, and help inspire stories, but don’t necessarily get fully realized, and it’s those ideas these days that intrigue me the most these days.