Write the Good Fight
Steven L. Sears talks to Ian Rentoul about guiding the Amazon nations through four years of Xena: Warrior Princess.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 03
“When I first began writing Hooves and Harlots,” explains Steven Sears, onetime supervising producer of Xena: Warrior Princess, “there were very few rules set down about the Amazons. They had appeared in Hercules, but even though I had enjoyed that episode, it didn't present them in the way I wanted. The first thing I did was to decide that this tribe was to be different from the one in Hercules. Having done that, I then decided that there must be many tribes of Amazons.
“When I got to that point, I immediately hit upon the [Native American] Iroquois nation as well as other Native American tribes who were destroyed by the influx of Europeans into North America. I decided that the decline of the Amazon nation could parallel this. Once a group of tribes under a common banner, they had been smashed by some event and were now drifting apart, each concerned with their own survival. Then, I started thinking, what was the event that [started this downfall]?
“The obvious one was the Trojan War, but this series was called Xena: Warrior Princess so I decided that Xena was to be the ‘Destroyer of Nations’. Somewhere in Hercules, I believe, there was a mention of Corinth being the site of a mighty battle involving Xena. I decided that this was the pivotal battle, and my comparison was the final battle in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
“In fact, I had a whole plan worked out in my head. The Amazons weren’t the direct enemies to Xena’s forces, but the Centaurs were. Their national backgrounds were similar to the Amazons, and after Corinth, they too were disparate tribes of a once great nation.
“As a result of all this detail, I became the de facto expert on Amazon Affairs.”
Gabrielle’s Amazonian direction is more complicated. Sears says that he enjoyed writing the Amazon episodes. “I liked to give the Amazons a point of view that, even if you didn’t agree with, you had to admit had merit. I felt that a lot of Gabrielle’s growth could best be explored in her interactions with them. With Xena, there was a definite dynamic [with Gabrielle being the student to Xena’s teacher].
“With the Amazons, the slate was clean. Gabrielle could be the teacher. On a further note, many fans have noticed that each one of the Xena staff takes different approaches when writing the characters. Since I wrote a lot of the Gabrielle/Amazon stories, one began to build on the other until it almost seems as if the Amazon stories could be lumped together into their own little ‘mini-series’ within the Xena series. Now it’s true that I had my own ideas of where the Gabrielle/Amazon arc would take us, and I’ve managed to do 80 per cent of it. But it all had to fit in the overall series, and the final word on that was with Rob Tapert.”
At the time of writing, the last Amazon episode to be aired has been season four’s Endgame, into which Sears wrote the shock deaths of two of his popular creations, Ephiny (introduced in Hooves and Harlots) and Solari (introduced in The Quest). “Many people were upset with their deaths, more Ephiny than Solari, but they understood the reasoning for it,” he says.
“I had two different ways I could have gone with the story depending on whether Ephiny was alive or dead. I had been told that Danielle [Cormack], Ephiny, wasn’t interested in continuing the character, so it made the decision easier... But Solari was just a matter of choice. Jodi [Dorday] wasn’t available, so I could decide on whether to make her a part of the stakes or say that she was away visiting her sister’. Obviously the sister thing would have been a cop out. So I decided to add her death to the mix to make it more real for the audience.”