When In Rome
written by Steven L. Sears - Co-Executive Producer
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 03
SD: This episode had Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Vercinix — and yet it seemed to be Gabrielle’s story.
Steven: Gabrielle carried the emotional weight in the story. She had to make the emotional decision. If you just saw the first 35 minutes of the episode, you would think that Gabrielle was the one who was focused and knew what she was going to do and that Xena was the one conflicted. Because everybody knows how she is around Caesar. Even Crassus made a comment about it. When Pompey offered his knife to Caesar and said he was an easier guy to get along with, it seemed like the perfect situation for Xena. There was her moral dilemma. But Xena was never conflicted. She was focused on Vercinix the whole time. It wasn't until she saw Gabrielle's expression after the execution that she realized her focus on accomplishing her mission had slighted Gabrielle. She didn't ignore Gabrielle's feelings, but she’s like a mother watching her daughter’s heart get broken and realizing, “There's nothing I can do about this. She gotta grow up, but I don’t want her to.”
SD: “How many more times are you gonna follow me into battle?”
Steven: Exactly.
SD: The scene on the boat at the end ...
Steven: Xena was saying, “Is this worth it to you? Because I’m not sure it’s worth it to me.” Gabrielle was saying, “Yes, it is. It’s very much worth it to me.” A number of people have commented that they are saying “I love you” to each other a lot recently. This time, however, Gabrielle wasn’t saying it just as an expression of how she felt. She wasn’t saying it because she had to express her feelings. She was saying it because she knew Xena needed to hear it.
SD: That’s why I do this. That’s why I would have been hurt if you hadn’t included me.
Steven: Right.
SD: That’s why, at least at this point, I’m continuing to follow you.
Steven: It’s very difficult for Xena because she’s got to watch her friend grow up and a lot of us don't want to do that.
SD: This show seemed to be a portent of what might be happening in the next season. We’re going to find out what it means to hang out with Xena.
Steven: Yes. Xena has been the most important catalyst in Gabrielle's life and Gabrielle could not have stayed the way she was when she left Poteidaia. She has to grow. And at the end of the day, what you’ve learned is not always the wonderful things that you want to learn. At one point, Gabrielle did have a very black and white view of the world. She would define things according to her own code. That line is really muddied now. And it became muddied when she became part of the black side — when she killed for the first time.
And Gabrielle’s code varied with the situation. That’s something that’s going to be explored a bit. She would look at a situation and say, “Xena, we can't do this because somebody will die.” Then she'd be in another situation and she’d say, “Look, we have to stop all these people” — as in “One Against An Army.” A lot of the next season is going to heighten her introspection.
She is in more of a search now than she was when she left home. When she left Poteidaia, she didn't have to search because she had someone to follow. Now she has a friend, but she realizes she can't simply follow Xena’s code because that’s not who she is. She's saying to herself, “I want to be with this person and I always will, but I’ve gotta find out why I do the things I do and how things affect me. I can’t just accept them because Xena is leading me.”
SD: “Am I really who I am, or am I what you made me?”
Steven: Exactly.
SD: How did Gabrielle get Crassus' ring?
Steven: It’s an off camera thing. Xena wasn’t going to be carrying it around the entire time.
SD: Did Xena know Gabrielle was going to give Crassus back his ring?
Steven: No. That wasn’t part of the plan.
SD: Caesar could have been totally responsible for Crassus’ death if Xena had given Gabrielle the ring to give to Crassus. That would have eased Gabrielle's conscience.
Steven: Right. But that would have spoiled Xena’s plan. If Crassus did have the ring, the execution would not have taken place right then. Even if the guards weren’t positive that he was really Crassus, the ring would have made them stop long enough to find out. And then, Caesar could have ordered the troops after Xena.
SD: When Gabrielle decided not to put the ring on Crassus, she was deciding that he should die.
Steven: Caesar did that. However, she allowed it. She could have saved a life or she could have been indifferent to a life. She chose to be indifferent.
SD: Why did she not give him the ring?
Steven: She made the decision to let the fates figure it out.
SD: Because Xena and Vercinix said this guy should die?
Steven: Right. In the past, Gabrielle would have said to Xena, “That's not your decision. You changed, why couldn’t this person change.” This time she didn’t do that. She didn't even consider it. If Caesar had recognized Crassus and stopped the execution, Gabrielle wouldn't have had a death on her hands, but still had the torment of the choice she had made not to try and save his life any way she could.
SD: What was the genesis of this story?
Steven: We love playing around with Caesar. I had wanted to do a story on Vercingetorix. It is a true story. He was a great barbarian. Caesar captured him, brought him into Rome for five years, showed him off and then executed him. It enhanced Caesar's prestige. I also wanted to do a story of Xena having to go into the worst empire she could ever go into, with the exception of the Horde, and rescue someone. Seemingly impossible odds. And I wanted her to do it by going in and beating the Romans at their own game which is politics.
Rob Taper! had been talking about doing some things with the Triumvirate of Crassus, Pompey and Caesar. And even though we mixed the timeline for the individuals involved, what I wrote was a theoretical possibility. According to history, Crassus was killed in Parthia (Syria). Pompey and Caesar had their falling out and Vercinix was executed. So, all I was doing when I compressed the timeline is saying, “Okay, what if we make the assumption that history is only what Xena wanted us to believe?” That Crassus was supposed to be killed in Parthia, but Xena rescued him and nobody knew about it. Then she exchanged him for Vercinix. According to history, Crassus was killed at Parthia and Vercinix was killed in Rome. When in fact, Xena had done an old switcheroo. The only people who knew about it were Xena, Gabrielle, Pompey, Caesar and Vercinix.
SD: Will we see more of Caesar and Pompey?
Steven: There will be more of Pompey next season. I’m working on a story right now. The thing about working with a real person who has a definite ending, like Caesar, is that you can’t use the character as the traditional villain where your goal is to kill the villain and live happily ever after. What we’ve been able to do with Caesar, however, is completely expose this blind obsession part of Xena because he's the focus of it.
SD: He stands for a characteristic of Xena?
Steven: Yes. He represents that. He was right when he had her in the dungeon — up to that point, it’s never been about business. It’s about hatred, war, conflict, love.
SD: “I have to go to the bathroom. Are we done here?” (laughing)
Steven: (laughing) That line almost got changed. That was the original line and then it got changed to something else. Apparently at the read-through, Lucy (I’m making the assumption it was Lucy as it was her line) had read the first draft and wanted to put it back in. It worked really well.
But when Caesar told Xena, “You have one obsession, Xena, that’s me,” that's been absolutely true. That's what she was able to use against him. She used his situation politically with Pompey and she used his feelings toward her and his assumptions about her. She put him in the most damaging position he could possibly be in and gave him a no-win situation. Now, the next time they meet, however, Caesar has learned from this confrontation. And throughout history, that’s been his greatest trait. He's had many defeats, but he’s come back because he learns from them.
SD: At one point Pompey says to Xena, “He sent Brutus out to find your friend Gabrielle.” Xena responds, “You mean Crassus.” “No, it’s your friend he wants,” Pompey says. “He seems to think she has some sort of power over you. He wants that power.”
Steven: Caesar said to Crassus, “The girl’s the key.” And that's why Crassus started working on Gabrielle. But the point I wanted to highlight there was exactly how Caesar feels. He thinks he knows how to get to Xena. If he controls Gabrielle, he controls Xena and Xena controls Crassus. So, if he has Gabrielle, he has everything.
SD: Why does Xena hate Caesar so much?
Steven: Up until the point when Xena first met Caesar (in “Destiny”), she was a conqueror, but not a murderer. She had gone from conquering the towns around Amphipolis for protection to conquering for trade. But it was business. She had her own mini-empire. The point was power for power’s sake. When she met Caesar, she was getting tired of it all. It was no longer satisfying. But she still liked the idea of power. Then she meets this arrogant man who is so confident of his destiny and she's attracted to him. She looks at him and mistakenly thinks, “This is my soulmate.” She invested a lot of herself emotionally in him. But she doesn’t realize she's keying in to the wrong signals. When he turned on her, she realized, “I'm just a tool for him. I'm just something else to be conquered.” That was an emotional betrayal. Her response when Caesar's men killed M’Lila was to dedicate herself to death.
Now when Xena looks back on that time, it has become much more than just an emotional betrayal of a woman scorned by a cocky man. She thinks, “If I had never met Caesar, the killer Xena would never have been born. In fact, at that moment, I might have even given up my empire and just gone home. And all the people I've killed since then, might be alive.” All the guilt that she's got built up inside about being a killer warrior — it’s focused on him. Obviously she takes responsibility for what she’s done, but she still looks at him and says, “If you had not come into my life…” It’s also a bit of self-hatred. “If I had never captured you…”
SD: This leads to an interesting point. This is the first show where the hero was a mass murderer!
Steven: Because of that, the depth of what you can explore is very rich. Almost anything is fair game with Xena because she’s done so much. She’s the Destroyer of Nations, she’s killed for the sake of killing. How do you rationalize that as a good person? This is somebody who has to make up so much that they will never get past being at an even score. So, you can look at her and say, “The struggles I’ve seen her go through to try and find herself, those are extremely noble.” But does that nobility justify all the deaths? I’m not answering the question. I just put it out there. There are despots throughout history that we can ask that question of. Pick any of the four popular despots out of this century and you cannot say, if that person became good, then what they had done could be forgiven.
SD: At the end of “Forgiven,” there’s no way Xena could cross over that threshold.
Steven: Xena realizes that being forgiven is not why she’s here. She is truly not motivated by her personal desire of “I want people to know I’m good now. I want to be forgiven.” That’s not what motivates her. She has this internal spark that’s now starting to grow which is a spark she always had and that is that she’s a good person. The problem was, she ended up in a horrible place.
SD: And her life now is dedicated to atonement not for the end result of forgiveness, but because she has to make for what she’s done?
Steven: I want to go deeper than that. What I like to say is that Xena was born with the spark of a good, caring, giving person. But she was put into a position which became one of survival. If you took 100 people, all of them with that same spark, and put them into a situation where “you sacrifice that spark or you die,” 99 of them will die. One of them will live through it. But that spark will be suppressed because in order to survive, you are taken in a different direction. Xena was that one person. And her self-hatred, all of those years, was because this spark was trying to get out. When she confused power for love, that was the spark saying, “You’re not listening to me. You’re looking out there for your happiness and I’m right here.” The problem is, she wasn’t trained to address it. Her background has been one of a warrior. If she had never gone through what she went through, she probably would have been a philosopher. She would have been somebody preaching love.
There’s a line in an upcoming script - it may not even end up in the final version - where Xena’s talking to someone else and the person is saying, “Everyone knows I am a bad person.” And Xena says, “That’s just the surface. And there’s so much depth here it must scare you when it comes out. I know the feeling.”
SD: Isn’t it interesting that we love to watch someone going through such agony?
Steven: This, for me, illustrates the real definition of being heroic. A hero is the person who goes out and beats the bad guys. Somebody who is heroic is willing to fight the greatest demons and those are not always outside. Xena is a heroic figure. Gabrielle is truly a heroic figure. Because she didn’t even come from an area of dark. She chose to walk into the darkness so she could discover. Xena is choosing to walk in the light.
SD: Did Gabrielle know what she was getting into?
Steve: No. She had no idea. Gabrielle was very fortunate to have found Xena. She was not running toward something, she was running from something. And that’s the worst reason to leave anywhere. All she knew is she didn’t want to stay home. And here was something that seemed fun.
SD: Dropping the ring into the sea at the end of the episode reminded me of the scene at the end of “Dreamworker.”
Steven: I do a lot of imagery with water. Water is a very comforting thing for all of us because we’re born of water. When we’re carried by our mother, we’re surrounded by water. When we’re prenatal, we have gills. We have an affinity for water mammals. They have an affinity for us. They have an affinity for us. There is a connection there that goes back to the ocean. Maybe it’s my own personal philosophy, but I find more people respond to the imagery of the water. Water has almost every image that you need to talk about human emotions. The crashing of the waves, the calmness of the sea, there’s so much. And when I wrote “Dreamworker,” I made a very specific point about how deceptive the surface can be.
Originally, Gabrielle didn’t drop the ring into the water. But I kept thinking, what is the symbolism we need to show that Gabrielle had a choice of clinging to a decision she made and forever cursing herself for it or accepting it. If she had kept that ring, it would have become an icon for what she had done. When she was talking with Xena and holding the ring, she realized, “I’ve gotta search inside of myself and this is gonna keep me from doing it.” It’s not like she forgets. She knows what happened. But she can’t be so wrapped up in that she ends up the way Xena ended up with Caesar - totally obsessed.
SD: Focusing on that one death is not the issue. It’s the decision she came to that lead to that death that is important.
Steven: It’s funny you brought up “Dreamworker,” because there’s an analogy there. She was saying, “I am forever changed, but I am still me.”
SD: “There’s a sentence in there just dying to get out.” (laughing)
Steven: There are some lines I’ve kept with me for a while waiting for a place to use them. A friend of mine actually said just that. He was surprised and started to stutter and said, “If I stand here long enough, I know there is a sentence that will come out.” I Xenaized it.
SD: How did Argo get to Rome?
Steven: Argo travels with Xena depending on the size of the ship. We’ll deal with the mystery of Argo one day. When Xena needs Argo, Argo is there for her. When she doesn’t need Argo, she lets her go. There was a scene cut from “The Deliverer” where Xena takes off Argo’s bridle and says, “Go. I’ll be back.” And Argo just turns and takes off.
SD: “Meet me here Wednesday at five o’clock.” (laughing)
Steven: It’s pretty much like that. When Xena needs her, she’s there. When Xena whistles, Argo hears and comes. At least twice we wanted to do that. If we had kept those scenes, then the idea that Argo didn’t want to leave Xena in “Army” would have been much more important. It would have shown that Argo knew she was never going to see Xena again. I don’t want to say that Argo’s more than a horse, but…
SD: Any scenes that didn’t make it to air?
Steven: You saw the scene between Pompey and Brutus when Pompey asks about Xena, “Can she be trusted?” And Brutus replies, “Only in her hatred of Caesar.” But there was an extension of that scene where Pompey says, “I wonder why she hasn’t killed him yet.” And Brutus simply says, “Opportunity.” That showed the motivation for why Pompey gave Xena the dagger. Even though it worked well without it, it would have worked more on the audience’s mind - making them sit back and say, “What if she is given the opportunity? Will she take it?”
Another bit was when Xena took Caesar to the boat to see Crassus. Before they got to the boat, there was actually a scene on the way where Caesar is on Argo, hands tied, blindfolded and Xena’s leading Argo. He’s doing the talking. - By the way, he mentions he was defeated in Brittania, but he rationalizes it by saying, “So after I withdrew from Brittania, I of course had to come back here because I realized Pompey was exerting his power. That was the only reason I left. I’ll go back later.” - Then he stops and sniffs the air and says, “We’re heading toward the ocean. Remember that, Xena? That’s where we met, the ocean. Remember, Xena, remember the first time we met?” Lucy did a great reading of this line. She says, “Yeah, and I remember the first time I stepped in cow dung too.”