I was watching my cable provider’s 24-hour Xena channel, when something caught my eye. Right after Lyre, Lyre, Hearts on Fire is Punch Lines, a clip show. The opening scene seemed very familiar to me: Gabrielle is hanging out at Aphrodite’s temple, trying to write, but is blocked. Aphrodite shows up, wearing her Sigmund Freud reading glasses, and tries to get to the bottom of her anxiety. The entire episode follows, in which Gab is remembering all sorts of clips from the past.

Then it hit me: This is similar to how the unproduced Sappho disco-musical begins! Both Sappho and Gabrielle are suffering from writer’s block, each for their own reasons, and Aphrodite intervenes to help. They attempted to make Sappho several times, and after the first time, they ended up making it into Lyre, Lyre, Hearts on Fire using a similar jukebox concept. The opening scene about writer’s block was not used in that episode, so I’m guessing they recycled it for Punch Lines. If we look at the scenes below, perhaps we can imagine how Sappho may have looked, including a scene in which Aphrodite summons some disco-ball-looking bubbles!

But there’s more! As Gab tells Aphrodite about the storyline involving Argo getting shrunk, Gab mentions they’re headed to Pylos. That’s odd, since they just came from Pylos before Lyre, Hearts on Fire, in Seeds of Faith. So why would they go back? I don’t think they were. I suspect this episode was originally intended to air right before Seeds of Faith. By that time, they knew they weren’t shooting Sappho, and were preparing Lyre, Hearts on Fire, so why not use the writer’s block scene as the opener? Anyway, here’s a montage to help us imagine what could’ve been!