The Architect of “Armageddon” Tells All
Or, how I created crossover conundrums for Hercules and Xena.
By Paul Robert Coyle
The Official Magazine: Issue 03
A mystical gem that’s the key to time travel. A portal to a parallel world of dopplegangers. A surreal and nightmarish Netherworld that exists between worlds.
The stuff of ancient myth, of latter-day sci-fi?
Well, Hercules and Xena are cut from the same fantasy/action cloth, right? Harryhausen, not Roddenberry. With a little Hong Kong chopsocky thrown in. Definitely not sci-fi. Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert knew what they wanted from the start, and it wasn’t “Conan and Red Sonja Meet Darth Vader.” Besides, the works of Homer are chock-full of enough mythological grist to supply story springboards for years without resorting to flying saucers and time machines.
So how do you account for episodes like “The End of the Beginning,” “Stranger in a Strange World” and “Armageddon Now?”
Well, for starters you hire a writer like me, with credits on Star Trek: Voyager and Deep Space Nine, and make him co-producer. But I can’t take the rap alone. It was Rob Tapert’s idea to do a “Bizarro World” show; I just ran with the ball. Besides, I provided the mythology links. I dubbed the time-surfing game “The Cronos Stone” (Cronos being a Titan and god of time) and I made Zeus’ lightning bolts the device that opened the gateway to the strange world. (Notice I call it a “gateway”, not a “vortex.” That word would be too “science-fictiony.” Well, okay, maybe I called it a vortex in stage direction. But never in dialogue. Am I dancing fast enough?)
“TEOTB” started out as a Xena pitch that had Xena discovering a village of people frozen in time; Autolycus had swiped the Cronos Stone before stumbling onto its full time-warping abilities.
The powers-that-be determined that this would make a better Herc episode. The big guy would travel to the near-past, to a time before the events of The Golden Hind trilogy (in which Hercules met, married and was framed for the murder of Serena, last of the Golden Hind). In my sequel, Herc faced the time traveler’s classic dilemma: whether to let bad things happen or to interfere and thus irrevocably alter all history.
Of course, Herc being Herc, he couldn’t not save that kid from falling in the well. A hero’s gotta be a hero. In the end, he saved Serena, diverting her from the fatal path she was destined to follow with Ares. In so doing, he made a noble sacrifice; he prevented the great love of his life from ever meeting him. When Herc returned to the present, Serena was alive. But she’d fallen in love with another man.
Imagine Jim Kirk saving Edith Keeler from that truck, only to return to find she’d married McCoy, and you’ve got the picture.
Of course, Herc’s changing of the timeline effectively wiped out the events of those three previous Golden Hind episodes. It’s as if they never happened. Sorry about that.
Strife warned, “Messing with the timeline, it’s nasty business.” And Ares complained, “This time paradox business can even give a god a headache.”
Anyway, that show must’ve pleased somebody because it landed me a staff job, and “Stranger in a Strange World” followed. (My homage to Robert Heinlein. The title, not the story in particular.)
Being on staff at Hercules kept me too busy to write any more Xenas for the time being. But luckily it didn’t keep me from writing Xena into Herc. Lucy Lawless generously shot a two-day crossover in “Stranger,” and then again in “Armageddon Now - Part II.” Renee O’Connor also guest-starred in both. (If you missed Renee’s surprising one-line cameo in “Stranger,” I won’t spoil the rerun by saying anything about it here. It’s funny and pretty damn bizarre, if I say so myself.)
In the parallel world, Hercules is a tyrant, Joxer a ballsy freedom fighter, and Xena’s no Warrior Princess. She’s a brassy gum-chewing “moll” with smarts and guts and cleavage that won’t quit. Oh, and she happens to be a master manipulator; the evil Herc’s absolute equal in Machiavellian conceit.
At the end of “Stranger,” Hercules’ evil twin The Sovereign is trapped in the vortex… er, the gateway. We’d always planned on returning to the parallel world next season. But everyone enjoyed this badass double so much that I was asked to write another Sovereign story, which became the genesis for “Armageddon Now.” This time, Hercules and The Sovereign would be trapped together, slugging it out for eternity, with Herc forced to confront his own “dark twin.”
Ares and Callisto trapped him there. Here’s where things get complicated. Last season I turned Callisto into a goddess and then stuck her in a lava pit in my Xena episode “A Necessary Evil.” Since then she was sprung by Hope, the evil offspring of Gabrielle and Dahak, the Force of Darkness whose coming spells the end of mankind and the gods alike. Still with me? If you’ve been watching both shows this season, you are. The Dahak storyline was designed to thread in and out of both series.
Anyway, it was decided that Callisto’s reason for trapping Herc in the, uh, Netherworld, would be so that she would then be free to carry out Dahak’s plan: to go back in time and rid the world of its greatest hero, Hercules, before he was ever born. In turn, Callisto would get her wish granted: to go back to Cirra, her hometown that was long ago reduced to ashes in a brutal attack by evil Xena’s army, and save her parents.
Pretty neat stuff. I’d get to explore Callisto’s relationship with her folks, have her bump into herself as a preteen, maybe learn a secret or two; like find out how that fire really got started.
There was one problem, Callisto was a Xena character, first and foremost. It really wouldn’t be fair to R.J. Stewart and his staff for me to appropriate one of their most popular characters, stick her in a Hercules, show the events that made her who she is today and get to reveal juicy secrets about her past; secrets that R.J. probably never had in mind when he created her.
In the end, the solution was simple. That old time-travel paradox.
Callisto would go back to Cirra. We’d get to see evil Xena there, a Xena who would never turn good because in this timeline Hercules was never born. I got to write Callisto a killer scene where she tries doing the right thing, but ends up flipping out and killing her own parents right in front of her ten-year old self’s eyes; traumatizing herself to her very soul. Hudson Leick came through with another riveting and chilling performance. And best of all, in the end, it all never really happened because Iolaus gets the Cronos Stone, saves pregnant Young Alcmene and reverts the timeline.
See, Callisto failed in Dahak’s mission, so she never got to go to Cirra. We saw it, but then they get to forget it. It’s not “history” anymore. Later on Xena they can do a flashback episode to Cirra, do it their way and not have to worry about being bound to any of the events of “Armageddon Now.”
Ain’t sci-fi grand? Now, if I can just sell Rob on my “Ancient Astronauts” pitch. It’s like, the Greek gods were really these ETs whose starship crashed eons ago, see…
PAUL ROBERT COYLE is a co-producer of Hercules. His many television writing credits include Streets of San Francisco,Simon & Simon, Jake and the Fatman and The Cape. He also admits to an episode of Space Precinct.