Princess of Darkness
A staff writer for just one series of Xena: Warrior Princess, Emily Skopov has nevertheless made a significant impression on the Xenaverse with such outstanding season six shows as Heart of Darkness and The God You Know. The seasoned scriptwriter reveals to Joe Nazzaro the many challenges she has faced during her short tenure with Renaissance Pictures.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 19
A former angel is seduced into becoming the lord of the netherworld. An amnesiac warrior princess is caught between the Valkyries and a grotesque monster she once helped to create. The mad emperor of Rome becomes an unstoppable god… Looking at Emily Skopov’s sixth season Xena writing credits, it’s not surprising that the prolific writer was once christened ‘The Princess of Darkness.’
“That’s what I was called on another show I used to work on,” recalls Skopov, who joined the Xena writing staff early on in the show’s sixth and final season. “When I told some of my friends that this was what I was doing, they laughed, because I’ve always been intrigued by the dark side of humanity.”
Ironically, Skopov, whose previous credits include Pacific Blue, North Hall and Beyond Belief, wasn’t initially interested in joining the Xena staff. Her agent originally submitted an unsolicited script, which caught the eye of Renaissance Pictures producer Patrick Moran. “Patrick was with the company at the time, and apparently he really liked my work,” Skopov recalls. “That was at the time when they were about to launch Cleopatra 2525 and Jack of all Trades, so I was meeting with them more for those two shows.
“I don’t think there was an opening on Xena,” she explains, “but a lot of things happened with the distance, and Rob [Tapert] being back and forth. So, for whatever reason, I didn’t even end up in the running because a lot of logistical things happened and either they had other people in mind, or Rob already knew somebody. But somehow an opening came up on Xena.”
Skopov’s first episode started out as a freelance script based on a premise given to her by executive producers Rob Tapert and R.J. Stewart, but by the time it was finished, the one-off assignment had turned into a full-time staff position. “They said, ‘We want to do something with Xena and Lucifer, and we want to use the seven deadly sins.’ Then we just sat in the room and talked about it for a while.
“Initially it was going to be a freelance assignment, which is typically how they hire people; they audition them to start with. So when I went in, I wasn’t sure what was going on. I went away for a little while and came back with an outline, and it was pretty much after I handed in the outline that they offered me the position. So I didn’t even finish the script before I was given the job!”
While Skopov has since become a devoted Xena fan, she didn’t have much more than a passing familiarity with the series when she took on that initial assignment. “The funny thing about writing or working in television,” she explains, “is that you don’t have a whole lot of free time. You don’t get to watch a lot of television, or sometimes you’re just sick of it and you need to do something else, but I think Xena is one of the few shows I came late to. There were very few shows I made a point of watching, but one days I happened to be flicking through the channels, and it was on at a time that I didn't usually watch television, but it caught my eye, so I stopped and watched it.
“I hadn't known that much about the show before,” Skopov continues, “and I have to admit I was a little dismissive of it. I’d thought it was more for a younger audience, but within two minutes I was completely captivated. I felt like I’d stumbled on some kind of secret, because I think a lot of people, at least within the industry and of my age or my friends, don’t really understand how adult and how smart this show is.
“I remember speaking to my agent that week and saying, ‘I saw Xena and I could not believe how great that show is!’ At that point, I can't say that I got the chance to watch it every single week, but certainly whenever I had the opportunity, or if I thought there was going to be a rerun on, I caught it.”
Having entered the Xenaverse very late in its history, Skopov had to assimilate almost half a decade's worth of continuity within a very short period of time. “Coming into the sixth season, they’d done so many stories already and had covered the spectrum, so in some ways it was hard to find new things that didn't touch on what they’d already done. I took home a lot of tapes and watched as many as I could, and there were certainly episodes which were referred to over and over again within our meetings that I could go home and watch.”
In Heart of Darkness, Xena tries to avoid inheriting the throne of Mephistopheles by seducing the archangel Lucifer (Alex Mendoza) into taking her place. It was a premise that the ‘Princess of Darkness’ had no trouble responding to. “I guess what intrigued me was the idea that Xena was maybe succumbing to darkness,” she explains. “More than anything, it was the idea that Xena was going to seduce Lucifer, and we had to actually bring about his seduction.
“In some ways it was perfect for me: the idea that when you play with evil, you sort of get caught up in it yourself. And I thought it would be interesting to see Xena starting to go in that direction and actually bringing somebody along with her. How do you drag someone towards darkness and make that darkness appealing to them?
“So we talked about the seven deadly sins, but then I started thinking about the framework: what if you take somebody through all seven sins, and as they get caught up, it becomes more and more powerful? So they’re succumbing more and more with each sin they encounter, because sin and naughty behaviour are very appealing, especially for an angel. It’s very easy to live in that rarefied world up there in heaven, but when you’re down there among the humans and you see what it’s really like, your perspective completely changes, and it definitely calls your strength into question.”
Although Heart of Darkness began life as a much darker story, the finished episode turned out a bit different than intended. “I think everybody was very uneasy with what the tone should be and how dark Xena should behave,” Skopov says. “Was the audience going to be confused, would they understand what was going on when Xena started giving in to the dark side? Are we saying she really is giving in to the dark side, or is this an act she's putting on to be convincing? If it’s an act, are we going to clue the audience in or are we only going to reveal it’s an act at the end? The moral ambiguity of where Xena was in all of this caused a lot of people to be very nervous about how we were going to play it, how she was going to come across, and how the audience would perceive it. Would they get it? Would they like it and accept it?
“So there were a lot of questions during the writing of the script which made it take longer than it should have. I usually like to take bigger risks; I think it makes for better drama if she really starts to give in to darkness, as long as you can redeem it at the end. But because people were very concerned about it, the tone shifted when it went into production - I don’t think it was comedic, but it was a little campier than I originally thought it would be.”
Skopov's next episode was also fairly problematic, this time because an awful lot of story threads had to be tied up. The Return of the Valkyrie was the conclusion of the three-part Norse story arc, in which the Warrior Princess has to recover her lost memory and reverse the curse of the Rheingold ring. In order to iron out the complexities of her script, Skopov worked closely with Stewart as well as fellow staffer Joel Metzger, who had written parts one and two.
“There were certainly a lot of elements to tie together,” Skopov admits, “so more than anything else the challenge was how to do it in a timely fashion and how to give everybody their due. You don’t want to just write off a character that you’ve spent some time with, and you not only want to wrap up the story, but also make sure you have time to play out the emotions. At the end, Xena has to rescue Gabrielle, so some of our questions were: when does she rescue Gabrielle? Do we want to see them together as Valkyries, or does she rescue Gabrielle at the end? Some of that was a question of timing - how do we want to play it out; when does she get her memory back? So more than anything else, the challenge was in dealing with Xena’s character.
“We’d discussed everything as a group, and every now and then Joel and I had to ask each other, ‘What did you put in your episode?’, because we were writing them simultaneously. We’d already discussed the major story points, so you’re writing with them in the back of your mind from the beginning. So really the biggest challenge was how to keep Xena proactive when she doesn’t know who she is. How do you not make her look passive and weak? It was a case of figuring out how and when the transformations should come about in the most emotionally effective and dramatic way. There’s no question that it was a very challenging episode from that point of view.
“I will not lie,” Skopov insists. “It was a very difficult tightrope to tread. There’s no question. We : had a lot of discussions about the episode and how to play it, and we had to keep trying one thing and then another, because it was very hard for all of us to be 100 per cent satisfied with the script for those very reasons. It was very atypical in that sense, so yes, that presented a lot of difficulties.”
In her third episode, The God You Know, Skopov pitted the Warrior Princess against the insane emperor Caligula (played by Alexis Arquette), who had been transformed into a god after stealing Aphrodite's power. “Rob wanted to do an episode with Caligula, and that's pretty much all he gave me,” Skopov recalls. “I did a lot of research, but I knew that I was entering dangerous territory anyway because he was such a crazy figure, and I had to decide how much of the sex and violence that characterised him we could really play out in an effective way. It’s not a 10pm show; you’ve got kids watching. So in that sense I had some input.”
This was clearly yet another show which presented the writer with a number of different challenges. “I got a very mixed bag of stories this year,” she agrees. “They were literally all difficult from the get-go. With the Caligula episode, I thought there was the opportunity to do something interesting, but that was from Rob saying, ‘I want to do something interesting about Caligula,’ which was pretty much all I was given.”
Caligula turned out to be an interesting character to write, but Skopov wasn't able to spend as much time with him as she would have liked because of the supporting cast members in the episode, which included Eve, Aphrodite and Ares. “Because we were nearing the end of the season, you’re seeing the last of some of the people you’ve come to know and love, and you want to pay them service. As interesting as Caligula is, you don’t want to do a disservice to the favourites, so it couldn’t be a big Caligula showcase where you really get to develop him and get to know him. We were also dealing with arcs for Ares and how to deal with his loss of immortality, and it was the same thing for Aphrodite. So it became more of an ensemble piece.”
The God You Know turned out to be Skopov’s final episode of Xena, although she did do some rewrites and additionally dialogue for other season six scripts. “Basically, with the show in its last season, they knew the stories they wanted to do,” Skopov explains. “R.J. was going to be writing some episodes, and there were a few freelance scripts, so they chose to put their money into trying to finish writing the season early and spend more on the production, which is what I expected to be the case. When I found out that this was definitely going to be the last year, I realised there was a good chance I'd only work on the first 13 episodes, and that’s pretty much what happened.”
Reflecting on her work as a Xena staffer, Emily Skopov reveals that she's very glad to have been a part of the series, but disappointed that her tenure was so short. Like many of the show's writers, there were story ideas she would have liked to pursue given the chance, but those ideas will have to remain unexplored. “I was really happy to have the chance to write for Xena and Gabrielle, but did I get everything that I wanted out of it? No. I certainly didn't get the chance to come up with a story that I really wanted to do, that I felt passionate about, something that was mine from the very conception. So that was disappointing, but I understand that happens a lot when you’re in a show’s last season.
“They had been talking about seeing the end of the tunnel approaching, and they had so many things in their heads that they wanted to make sure they got done before it was over. Rob is an idea machine, and these are his characters. I only wish I had got there earlier - that’s my regret, that I wasn’t able to gel onto the show at an earlier time for that reason.”
But ultimately, those regrets pale in comparison to the extraordinary opportunity of working on Xena: Warrior Princess. “It’s a great show,” declares the writer once nicknamed the Princess of Darkness, “so I still consider myself very fortunate that I got to be a part of it. I got to see how they do it, and I was lucky to work with people like Rob and R.J., because they were so good at what they did.
“I don't know if there will ever be anything else like Xena.”