The Price
written by Steven L. Sears
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 20
SD: What story did you set out to tell with this episode?
Steve: There’s a saying I like to repeat - Man is not a rational creature, we’re a rationalizing creature. We try to rationalize our actions. But, when it comes down to it, we react as an animal - whatever we need to ensure our survival.
When I wrote “The Price,” which is based on conflict and reaction, what I tried to do is set up a situation that doesn’t seem to have a way out. I wanted to create a situation where all hope was lost and see how my characters would react. I let it play out in what I thought was a very realistic way. When I was writing it, I didn’t have a theme. I wanted to write a situation and I had enough faith in the strength of my characters’ convictions that there would be a theme. Afterwards, I was able to look at the episode and say more about what it was about.
It's not to say I went into the story without any intentions. Obviously I wanted to give the characters a noble calling. But I was thinking I wanted to put Gabrielle and Xena in a situation that even Xena cannot react to the way we’re used to seeing her react. This time, she runs for home. And home for her is to become the killer that she used to be. The total warrior. That’s where she's been safe before. If I put them in that situation, what will happen? Once I thought that, the sequence of the story was laid out in about five minutes.
I then went back and began layering in the different humanities, the different concerns, the different psychologies of the characters. But the initial conflict and Xena's reaction was right there at the beginning.
Once I had the arena set up. I had to figure out what do I put into it. And the question became what part of humanity can be saved during war? And in total war, is being “human” a blessing or a flaw?
We consider war to be the ultimate barbarity. Anything is sanctioned in war. Everything that we are socialized to believe in is abandoned in true war.
One of the big problems at the end of the Vietnam War was that the soldiers had been taught as children to believe that killing was wrong and that they were supposed to have a moral code. Then we told them to forget what they’d learned growing up because in this case, killing was all right. And we sent them off to the war to kill.
When they came home, we didn't bother to untrain them. We just put them back into society and told them the old rules apply again and forget what the rules were during the war. In war, we're told to abandon our traditional mores and social values because the degree to which you abandon them, is the degree to which war is successful.
It’s true that war can be successful in many ways. A controlled war can achieve a political gain. Total war is the complete destruction of the enemy. The American nation was built on the philosophy of total war. Americans have never lost a war when we were committed to total war. We have only lost wars when they were limited, political wars. Europeans understand political wars, we don’t. We consider a negotiated peace as being a loss. Take a look at Korea, for example. Militarily, what we did was amazing. But we consider it a loss because we didn’t destroy the enemy. We negotiated a cease fire.
Xena understands the different levels of war. She knows how to use strength as a threat to get what she wants. She knows how to use war as a manipulation to get what she wants. In her past, she has waged war on one people merely to get something out of another group of people. But those are all levels of war that are logical and planned. There is another level that Xena recognizes that says, “Okay, now we are in complete survival mode. This is total war because it is the only way to survive.”
That’s my link. Total war and survival are linked in Xena's mind. When Xena’s confronted by a foe she’s never defeated, a foe she views as incomprehensible, the only way she can save her troops is to go to total war. In total war, everything is permissible in order to win.
SD: Throwing an axe in the back of a fleeing enemy?
Steve: Everything. Now, Gabrielle has no comprehension of this, but Xena does and for her it's home, it’s familiar. Once you abandon all the restrictions of society, you become an ultimate weapon and it's difficult to stop you. That is what Xena had to become in this situation. The problem is, where does the gain of war slip from being winning for the sake of survival to winning for the sake of winning?
At one point, Xena points to the captured Horde and says, “If I have to kill him later, I will.” And that also extends to her soldiers. She was doing triage and saying, “The only ones I want saved are the ones who can fight.” She's not only willing to kill every Horde to survive, she is also willing to give up every Athenian soldier in that fort as long as she wins the war.
SD: That doesn't make sense. If you win the war and everyone's dead, what have you won?
Steve: Right. It doesn't make sense. War becomes its own gain. The object of war is just to wage war. It is no longer survival. Survival has its own hierarchy. There is the survival of humanity, the survival of our nation, the survival of our friends, the survival of our loved ones, the survival of ourself. If humanity is attacked, we all unite. If our nation is attacked, all the citizens unite to attack the other nation. We'll give up the nation to protect our friends. We'll give up our friends to protect our loved ones. The circle gets smaller and smaller. Xena's concern, we hope, is for her and Gabrielle to survive. She would sacrifice everyone else in the fort to save herself and Gabrielle. In my mind, there was even a little doubt about Gabrielle!
SD: Really?
Steve: Yeah, if she truly became animalistic, that could happen. But I didn’t play with that idea because it would have been flirting with darkness. And, besides, as we've shown so many times, Xena would give up her life for Gabrielle.
And I didn't want to focus only on Xena and Gabrielle and leave out everyone else. The Athenian soldiers were a very important part of the story. They had lost the battle and were resigned to death. They had almost abandoned all hope and along came Xena. With her, they had hope they might win. Ironically, she was willing to let them all die in order to do it.
As I said, in total war, you are willing to give up everything in order to win. That's the “price.” That's how the title came about. When I was thinking about what to call the script. I kept coming back to what Xena was accommodating to wage this war. I realized every time she accommodated something, she paid a price.
SD: One of the most chilling moments came after Xena lured the Horde into the fort and the soldiers defeated them. She came down off the battlements to the cheers of the soldiers and screamed out, “We're going to kill 'em all!”
Steve: That was the moment when she connected with the soldiers. Xena tells Gabrielle that the Xena Gabrielle has known these past years can't save them. Xena believed that and, to a certain extent, she was correct. The new, nice Xena could not have won those battles. Think about it. Up until the moment Xena found out the Horde had rules and a social structure, everything she did was correct. Every brutal act she committed was logical and made sense.
What didn’t make sense was Xena’s premise that the Horde were animals. That was her flaw. And that was a big discussion when we first started talking about this script in the story meetings. In the beginning, I had Xena much more xenophobic - you'll excuse the expression. Much more racist than she was in the finished version. But it was upsetting people and I softened her attitude. I was actually modeling her on the propaganda used to de-humanize the enemy in the two world wars. A lot of it was very racist.
SD: There were so many images in the beginning of the episode that set up the Horde as inhuman - the dead soldiers floating down the river, the men crucified on the banks, the one who rose out of the river with the water streaming off his headdress. The fact that they didn’t seem to have a language. They seemed totally unfathomable.
Steve: To us. That was the point. To make them exactly what Xena felt they were. For all we know, crucifying the soldiers on the banks could have been a way of honoring their warrior spirit in the Horde philosophy. The point is that Xena could not and would not have any interest in understanding them. Her first interaction with them was a slaughter of her men.
SD: I remember a quote from the episode.
Xena: “They aren’t like us. There is nothing about them that we can or should understand.” Gabrielle: “But have you even tried?”
Steve: In most cultures, to fight a successful war. you need to dehumanize the enemy. Both sides need to feel that way. It’s hard to rationalize killing another human being, so you say your enemy can’t be human. That's why I gave them the name the Horde.
I wanted to find a word Xena could use to describe them. I couldn’t call them a tribe - that's a human word. Pack sounded too animalistic to me and not bloodthirsty enough. But a Horde. It’s a very scary word. The basis of Xena’s fear is that they weren’t human and she couldn't understand them because of that. And. she didn't want to understand them.
SD: She couldn't let herself understand them or she wouldn't survive?
Steve: Right. That was the point. It's also a harkening back to an earlier fear, the first time she interacted with the Horde. Here she was having fun fishing with Gabrielle and suddenly she sees that axe. It's very recognizable and she slipped back to her earlier confrontation with them.
SD: I remember someone pointing out that they didn’t remember ever seeing fear on Xena’s face before.
Steve: That was a big point when we discussed the story. I said it was the first time we ever saw Xena turn and run.
SD: Did the opening scene of Xena and Gabrielle fishing and Renee talking to the fish have any specific purpose or was it just a fun thing?
Steve: I can't say that it had any great purpose although, after the fact, I can see some parallels with the main story. Often I find that once I start concentrating on the overall idea and the conflict of the episode, as I start to think about how to begin the script, I unconsciously start putting in elements that will lead in to the story. It’s a natural process of the writing. Because you are so focused on the overall story, it permeates every level whether you know it or not.
For this episode. I wanted to get them near a river, they should be doing something light which would be in contrast to the discovery of the body and I wanted something to link them to the water aside from just the fish. That was when I wrote Gabrielle's dialogue where she was talking to the fish.
SD: A fan commented that Xena ridicules Gabrielle for talking to her breakfast but eventually comes to realize that communication with the Horde was the key to survival.
Steve (laughing): Oh. yeah, that's what I meant. That's what I was setting up and I didn't even know it. No, seriously, I didn’t think about that, but that's an interesting interpretation.
You know what Gabrielle talking to the fish actually came from? There was a little part of me that was bothered that Gabrielle caught a fish, threw it up on the ground and it was lying there dying, waiting to be eaten. There was something un-Gabrielle-ish about it. I decided that, at least, she would give thanks that the creature was giving up its life for her meal. I wrote the lines in a poetic way. Then had her pause, kind of smile, and burp. But Renee played the whole thing as quite amusing which I thought was very good.
SD: The moment after Xena yelled out “Kill 'em all,” and was reveling in the admiration of the soldiers, she looked at Gabrielle who seemed horrified at what was happening to Xena. And Xena seemed to hesitate.
Steve: In my opinion, Gabrielle was the only reason Xena was still alive after “Sins Of The Past.” Gabrielle had more influence pulling Xena into her world than Xena had pulling Gabrielle into hers. At least for the first three seasons. When Xena looked at Gabrielle, that was the Xena we had come to know trying to break back through. But it didn’t last.
Gabrielle was an alien in this episode. She was put into a world she had never experienced before. Up until that point, Gabrielle had never seen the old Xena. That was another main story point. Gabrielle had only seen the Xena who was struggling to find out what was right. She didn't know where Xena had come from. She had heard the legends. but they weren't real to her. She had never seen the reality of the old Xena. I wanted Gabrielle to be transported into what Xena's world was.
SD: This was a Xena that was unknowable to Gabrielle.
Steve: From that perspective, Xena was an animal to Gabrielle. This was not the Xena she knew. It wasn't even the Xena of legend. We all know she was a killer, but she did great things. Not great in the nice sense, but great in the magnificent sense. Now Gabrielle was in the trenches with her. There was nothing great or magnificent about what Xena was doing.
SD: Seeing Xena throw that axe in the fleeing Horde’s back. I couldn't believe she did that! To have the hero do that.
Steve: It made perfect sense. She couldn’t allow the enemy to take back information about their defenses. In this particular episode, everything Xena was doing was antiheroic. Not only was Gabrielle the alien here, so was the audience. I was deliberately writing a Xena they weren't used to.
In the triage scene, Xena tells Gabrielle, “Food and water only go to the men who can fight. The ones who are severely injured, let them die.” The hero wouldn't do that. The hero always protects the wounded. No. If Xena doesn’t have people who can fight, they all die. You only save those who can be saved. That’s what triage is about.
SD: We’ve seen Xena battle tons of baddies and never be afraid. How did you set about making us believe she would be afraid this time? We didn't see Xena's earlier confrontation with the Horde in this episode.
Steve: In one of my earlier versions of the script, there was a flashback to their first meeting. Xena was helpless. She was up on a cliff edge watching the slaughter and the Horde skinning her troops alive. I wanted to play it on Xena's face as she heard the screaming and pounded on the earth because she couldn't get down there to stop this from happening.
Because we couldn't include this, I had to have confidence the audience would accept how horrific the Horde was by the mere fact that our hero accepts it.
SD: We had to respond to how Xena was reacting without having seen it ourselves?
Steve: Right. One of the comments someone made during the story sessions was exactly that. We'd never seen Xena turn and run, so why would the audience believe these people were threatening enough to make her turn and run? And my response was, “Because she does turn and run.”
SD: That’s what scared me. The fact that Xena was scared.
Steve: I knew that would be the reaction if it was presented correctly and also with Gabrielle standing in for the audience. We would feel her reaction to Xena's fear.
SD: Xena learned in the first season episode “Dreamworker,” - also written by you - that the Dark Xena was an integral part of her. Do you think she would ever have lost that part of her?
Steve: No, once you’re introduced to it, it's always there. I made that point in the “rock under the water” speech at the end of “Dreamworker.” And there is still something seductive about it. It's a drug. It’s survival. Xena was formed by survival. And her security is that she can survive by going to that Dark Xena in her mind. I keep saying it - that's home for her. Xena has much more respect for Gabrielle than Gabrielle had for Xena because Xena can't understand why someone would not have that dark side.
There's a line in “One Against An Army” - an episode I didn't write - where Xena says to Gabrielle, “You always thought I was the brave one. Look at you now.”
SD: Xena became who she is because she had a taste of the power the dark side could bring her. Is everyone susceptible to that? Is Gabrielle?
Steve: I look less at the seduction of power than I do to security. I try to reduce all human emotions, psychology, to our animal nature. There's a thing called the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs. It sets forth our basic needs and they start with survival. Without that, nothing else counts. Survival is a form of security. You are secure that you will be alive. Even love is a form of security.
Power is another level of security. With power what do you have to fear? You fear the losing of power. So, I try not to look at the seduction of power because to me, that's very mustache-twirling, “Aha, I’ve got the money and now I'm happy.” It's much deeper than that. There’s an old adage that villains don’t know they're villains. They have an explanation for everything. They don't think they're bad.
In Xena's mind, it's not that she's addicted to power. She's addicted to the security power gives her. Because she did start from a good point. She started as a village person whose village was threatened. It was survival at first. Later on, in fact, it became about power, but in her mind, she always thought about it as being about survival. In her jaded view of the world, holding on to power was the way to survive.
I think Gabrielle is capable of having a dark side. I think it’s possible for everyone. But it's a result of environment. You have to be exposed to it. Gabrielle certainly has that security need, but her handling and interpretation of it was not based on fear. It never became about her survival.The difference between Xena as she was and Gabrielle as she is, is that as long as the price of security is Gabrielle's alone to pay, Gabrielle will fight for herself. If the price of her security involves one other person, she'll fight for that person at the risk of herself.
The old Xena would not have fought for the other person. But the new Xena as influenced by Gabrielle would. The major difference here, in this episode, is that Gabrielle cannot understand a person who will fight at the expense of everything else. To Xena, every “price” is payable for survival. Gabrielle can't conceive of that. At a certain point, no survival is worth the “price” of others.
SD: Why did Gabrielle try to stop Xena from putting the pinch on the Horde prisoner?
Steve: One, she was concerned with the killing of someone who was defenseless. Two, she couldn't just stand there and watch her friend spiral out of control. To use a drug analogy, Xena killing that man would have been like allowing the drug addict to have a little bit more of the drug. She was watching Xena become someone she couldn't recognize and here was another step in that direction. In one sense, Gabrielle was saying to Xena, “If you take this step, you are gone.”
I had debated letting the prisoner die. This was a huge discussion at the meetings. It would mean Xena had murdered someone. I know that the way it was shot was less than what I was trying to get across, but was probably as much as we could have done. I wanted this guy on the ground, blood gushing from his nose from the pinch. Not just to be standing there shaking. And I wanted Xena to be walking away and Gabrielle try to undo the pinch.
In the final draft, Xena undid the pinch. But I wanted the audience to have to decide whether Xena released the pinch because of Gabrielle or because of necessity. I was pleased with the way it was shot because I have had people ask me if Xena intended to let the guy die or did she intend to release him? That's the question I wanted people to be asking themselves. If Xena had intended to save him all along, that would have been the logical, cold Xena. But if she had wanted him to die, but stopped because of Gabrielle, then who has the real power here? Gabrielle. But I needed it to be ambiguous because that would have been the end to the dark Xena spiral.
There was another scene that was meant to show who Xena used to be and was now. It’s when Xena crawls out among the dead Horde to look for a live one to take prisoner. I had envisioned Xena naked, covered with mud, blood and sand. We would see one of the bodies moving and then the one next to it. And then you realize Xena is crawling under the bodies. The idea and visual of her crawling through dead bodies in such a manner would have further illustrated what that Xena was willing to do. Unfortunately, it wasn’t shown that way.
SD: You had the good guys in the castle, surrounded. How did you decide how to get out of this?
Steve: This was the hardest area. Xena was convinced the Horde were animals. Xena's opinion of what the Horde was, was exactly what Xena had become. In fact, she had become the animal, trapped and dangerous. Xena’s opinion was that Horde had no humanity, did not care for life and would give up anything just to win a war. And that is exactly what Xena had become. If you had been in the Horde camp, they probably would have been scratching their heads trying to figure out what kind of animal they were facing!
But the first thing I had to do was to break the idea in Xena's mind that the Horde were animals. What I wanted to do was have the Horde do something that Xena not only recognized, but recognized in someone she loved - and that would be an act of compassion.
When Gabrielle went out to give the injured Horde water, that was an act of selfless compassion. When the Horde came out to gather up their wounded and not kill the wounded Athenians or Gabrielle, that was an act of compassion. It wasn’t just that the Horde were doing something to bring back their wounded. The Horde were doing something that Gabrielle did. Something “human.” To trigger that in Xena, Gabrielle going out there served a dual function.
One, it showed Gabrielle’s resolve to be who she was. It also slapped Xena in the face. Here was Xena doing everything she could, paying every price under the guise of protecting them, and what happens? As a result of what Xena’s doing, Gabrielle goes outside her protection. Xena’s actually contributed to Gabrielle being at risk.
Xena says to herself, “They think it's a truce. They have a code, they have compassion, they think.” All these things hit her at the same time. Even then she was not completely convinced until she had the interrogation of the Horde prisoner and he refused to fight her. But the retrieving of the wounded, the truce, had opened the door.
When Gabrielle was out giving water, I specified in the script that the Horde did not have any weapons. Another unfortunate filming choice. It wasn’t filmed that way, probably because the director wanted a more dramatic reveal of the Horde (the axe coming into frame with Gabrielle in the background). But here’s my reasoning. I wanted the Horde to come out into the field totally defenseless, the way Gabrielle did. They could have been slaughtered at that point. But they were giving honor to their enemies by abiding by the truce. That showed Xena they had a code of honor.
I knew from the beginning of writing the script that would be my way out of the situation. The moment we understand our enemy is the moment we can solve our problem with them. Rather, until we understand our enemy, we can never solve our problems. Unless one destroys the other.
SD: At the end of Xena’s battle with the leader of the Horde, she defeats him, but does not kill him. Then she turns her back to him and walks away. He rises up to kill her from behind and his own men throw their axes into the leader’s back.
Steve: It wasn't that the leader had lost the battle, it was the fact that he was going to kill Xena. She had defeated him honorably and had turned and walked away. He could not accept that and was going to kill her in a dishonorable way. The code of the Horde did not allow that and so his own people killed him. I wanted to show that not only did the Horde have a code of honor, their dedication to that code rose above the power of their leader.
If the Horde leader had retained his honor, he would have walked away. But winning became more important for him and Xena knew that. Everything that happened in this episode led up to a code of honor. The prisoner would not fight Xena because she was superior to him. When she fought the leader, she was out in no-man's-land and yet the Horde were not that far away. If they were total savages, they could have just killed her. They didn't. They were playing by “rules.”
When Xena turned and walked away, she knew the honor didn’t come from the leader. The rules were ingrained in their culture. It showed that she respected their code.
SD: When did Xena change her mind about caring for the wounded soldiers in the fort?
Steve: After Gabrielle went out to give water to the wounded Horde. At that point, Xena sees two things. One, she sees that her solution is going to get them killed anyway. Secondly, she knew she had found a way out so there was no point in holding back the food.
SD: At the end of the episode Xena and Gabrielle talk about the Horde coming back some day and whether or not they can be stopped. And Xena replies, “Yeah. It won’t be warriors. It’ll be someone like you. I just hope that wherever the Horde is from, they have a Gabrielle.” Even though Xena says this, she still has to do battle to save the day. Do you think the good guys can ever win over the bad guys without turning to the same methods the bad guys use?
Steve: You're asking whether I believe that peace can ever come about without fighting? I believe if this were a Gabrielle world where everyone is selfless and everyone has the best interests of their neighbors in mind, there would be no need for war. As long as you have one person who’s willing to gain at the expense of others, you're going to have conflict. You’re going to have someone sacrificing others for their own gain.
Do I believe that you have to fight these battles? No. I do believe you have to be prepared to fight them. My personal philosophy is that if you show the bad guys you are more than willing and capable of fighting these battles, then you're less likely to have to fight them. But the point is that we always have to have someone who doesn’t accept war as the final option, someone who can be our conscience. She hopes the Horde has someone like that, someone like Gabrielle.
SD: A fan commented: “They are both right and wrong. Xena was right - you have to defend yourself when attacked, you can't simply not fight or your enemy will kill you. Gabrielle also made a very valid point. When she said to stop fighting, I don't think she meant to simply lay down your arms and give up. I think what she meant was you have to stop the war mind set and see your enemy not as simply the enemy. You have to see how he is similar to you so you can find a way out of the situation that will allow you both a way out without destroying each other.”
Steve: Yes. I agree with that. What Gabrielle believed is that every problem can be solved if everyone truly wants to find a solution. But to do that, you have to accept that the other side has a legitimate concern. And, perhaps, try to make that concern as important to you as it is to them.