PROMO TRANSCRIPTION
ON THE NEXT XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS
(Sirens singing)
Poseidon: Have a nice voyage.
XENA SETS SAIL WITH THE LEGENDARY ULYSSES
Ulysses: King of Ithica.
Gabrielle: What a man.
Ulysses: I think I'm falling in love with you.
(Xena kisses Ulysses)
TOGETHER THEY BATTLE THE FORCES OF POSEIDON
Poseidon: Xena, stay out of this!
Xena: I want in on the fun, too.
AND THE FORCES OF NATURE
Ulysses: What are you doing?
(Xena tying up Ulysses)
Xena: Saving your life!
BATTLE ON, XENA
TV GUIDE PROMO
Xena and Gabrielle have a Poseidon adventure when they help
the good king Ulysses regain his island kingdom from the nasty god of the sea's pirate henchmen.
Xena and Gabrielle try to help Ulysses return to his home after many
years away.
Xena and Gabrielle encounter pirates, the sea god Poseidon and the
alluring Sirens when they help Ulysses sail home to Ithaca to re-claim
his kingdom.
AIRING AND RATING INFORMATION
1st RELEASE: 04-21-97
An AA average of 6.7
Competition from Syndicated Action Dramas:
(1) XENA 6th with 6.7
(2) HERCULES 9th with 6.0
(3) STAR TREK DS9 13th with 4.8
2nd RELEASE:09-15-97
An AA average of 5.2
Competition from Syndicated Action Dramas:
(1) STAR TREK DS9 8th with 5.2
(2) XENA 9th with 4.9
(3) HERCULES 11th with 4.7
(4) WALKER TEXAS RANGER 17th with 4.1
(5) PENASCOLA 21st with 3.7
SYNOPSIS:
This synopsis is by Bluesong.
The story opens with our two heroines
walking along the seashore. Gabrielle asks Xena to listen to the
sea and not be so tense -- and intense. Xena stops to listen and
draws her sword -- there is a battle ahead of them. Xena goes
toward a man fighting three others; she does not approach until
an entire gang of pirates head for the man. She and Gabrielle
then go and help the man fend the pirates off.
The man is Ulysses, bound for Ithaca.
He has been living in a cave, trying to get his ship back from
pirates sent by Poseidon, the God of the Sea. Ulysses and Xena
approach the god when he rises from the water, and Xena is told
to mind her own business since Ares has a thing for her, but Xena
declines Poseidon's offer. Poseidon tells Ulysses that his wife,
Penelope, is dead.
Gabrielle dresses up as a dancer,
complete with a wig and purple bra, and sets off in a canoe for
the pirate ship. She then performs the "Dance of the Three
Veils" (a la a ROYAL COUPLE OF THIEVES. #17) while Xena and
Ulysses board the ship and get into place so they can attack the
pirates and get the ship back. Xena calls to the pirates -- I
want to play too! and then the fight is on. Gabrielle uses a mop
as a staff. Ulysses is injured during the fight, and after Xena
patches him up he says he'll drop Xena and Gabrielle off at the
next port -- 3 people can run the ship. Xena says she and
Gabrielle will help him get to Ithaca. You can sail a ship?
Ulysses asks. "I have many skills," Xena replies.
Gabrielle is not a sailor. She remains
seasick for most of the voyage. There is much chemistry between
Xena and Ulysses; they share a kiss while Gabrielle is supposedly
sleeping, but she sees and hears. She asks Xena if she loves
Ulysses; Xena hesitates and Gabrielle says: "Promise me one
thing. You'll follow your heart and not worry about me?" Xena
says, "You're part of my heart." Xena then says that Gabrielle
has taught her to love. "Did YOU say love?" Gabrielle asks. I
guess we'll be staying in Ithaca a little while, she adds.
Poseidon turns out to be little threat.
Xena and Ulysses decide to stick close to the islands. The
sirens are the main danger here. Xena lashes Ulysses to a mast
while she guides the ship past the island. Ulysses kicks
Gabrielle and manages to free himself. He wants to go to the
Island. Then Xena starts to sing and her song is more compelling
than that of the sirens.
They reach Ithaca, and save a man who
is being attacked. He is a friend of Ulysses. He says the
people want Penelope to marry. Now Xena and Ulysses both know
Penelope isn't dead. They go to the castle through a tunnel.
Xena sends Gabrielle in to get some cloaks and she tells Ulysses
that she has no feelings for him and that he's just like all men,
thinking a woman kisses him and then she's in love with him.
Ulysses dresses like a peasant and Xena and Gabrielle act as
servants. There are lots of men in the castle throne room.
Penelope says if any man can thread
Ulysses' bow she will marry him. None can. Then Ulysses steps
up and says he wants to try. They let him. He has trouble with
the bow; Xena crawls beneath the table and bend the bow at the
bottom so Ulysses can thread it. Ulysses does not know this. He
throws back his cloakhood and announces himself. Xena and
Gabrielle help clear out the room and then they quickly leave.
Xena and Gabrielle go back to the ship, and as they begin to
leave Ulysses shows up. He says he knows Xena did not mean what
she said in the tunnel. Xena tells Ulysses to go run his
kingdom, and Xena and Gabrielle sail off.
COMMENTARY 1:
Commentary Beth Gaynor.
We definitely did have our parallels between Ulysses and
Perdicus, didn't we? Guy shows up out of the blue to sweep
one of our heroines off her feet - so to speak. Will our
happy twosome get broken up by a pretty face?
Ulysses does have the spark of some common ground with Xena.
Here's a real warrior - "what a man" - and an adventurer who
knows the road, with a strong moral compass pointing him
toward his people and his land. Sure, that's a good basis
for making Xena sit back and appreciate the view.
Sadly, the relationship had problems from there. The actor
was generally OK, but didn't make Ulysses stand out as
anything out of the ordinary, in spite of some *fabulous*
lines. ("What are you doing?" "Tying you up." "All right,
I'm game, what did you have in mind?") There was a wealth of
potential that could have been mined - as I recall my Homer,
Ulysses was quite a trickster. That could have provided some
fun, but it never made it to the screen.
And - peeve alert, here - the ending betrayed it all.
Ulysses was a man on a quest, and a noble one it was; return
to his kingdom, his people, and his wife. At the beginning
of the episode, it was Ulysses' driving force - all that
mattered was what stood between him and Ithaca. Then he hits
land, finds out Penelope is alive, and he pitches everything
he had been fighting for out the window. It should have been
one of those classic romantic dilemmas - the man that Xena
could love, the man that's worthy of love, is the one who
will stay with his kingdom and his wife, regardless of his
feelings for another. If he's willing to pitch all that out
the window, betray the woman who's stood by his memory for
years and abandon his kingdom of people who are sorely in
need of his help, just for the sake of what he's hoping is
love, he's also betraying himself and that love. Well,
that's the dilemma we SHOULD have seen more of. Ulysses
flunks the test, not once but twice trying to ditch and run
off with our Warrior Princess, and Ulysses went from Hero to
Putz in the blink of an eye, with barely a comment from Xena
except to firmly send the man back home.
We got treated to Lucy's singing voice again briefly, and is
anyone surprised that Xena can sing to rival the sirens?
Granted, those sirens with the bodacious sound system looked
like they were stoned out of their minds (they were even
forgetting to open their mouths half the time), but it's
still an impressive accomplishment for Xena's resume. I was
trying to figure out why the sirens' singing performance
looked so strange; do you think that the music for the
sirens hadn't been composed yet when they filmed? The sirens
weren't singing in synch with the actual music; maybe they
were trying to keep the acting-singing as neutral as
possible to fit whatever the final tune ended up being.
One quick question: Is Gab's hair back to serious blonde
again, or does the color on my set need adjusting?
Gabrielle does the dance of the three veils, even to the
same music as Xena danced to in Royal Couple of Thieves
(Wow, who brought the boom box on board?), AND takes out
three guys while she does it. Not bad! I hope subtext fans
had a great time with Xena's appreciation for Gab's
performance, not to mention the line "I want in on the fun,
too."
Gabrielle also gets to stretch her legs in Xena's footsteps:
she's learned how to kick now as well as staff-bonk! And she
got disarmed and managed to pick the darned staff back up
again. Way to go, woman! You're getting the hang of it!
Xena really needs to rethink her timing when the guys come
calling. Can she find a guy to get snuggly with MORE than
five feet away from a sleeping Gabrielle? First Marcus
(Mortal Beloved), now Ulysses - it's no wonder Gab usually
sleeps soundly; she doesn't have much choice in the matter.
COMMENTARY 2:
Commentary Carmen Carter.
After two years of sly winks and teasy subtext that implied much but stated nothing, R.J. Stewart's ULYSSES trumpets an overt statment about
the Xena/Gabrielle dynamic. Despite any innuendo to the contrary, the
deep emotional and psychological bonds that Xena has forged with
Gabrielle are divorced from any desire for sexual expression.
In fact, this particular clarification of the relationship
between Xena and Gabrielle appears to be the central point of ULYSSES, if not the
*only* point, since the episode itself was short on substance. All the
rest -- the fights, the pirates, the fights, Poseidon, the fights, the
Sirens, the fights -- was window dressing. Where RETURN OF CALLISTO was
flawed by an attempt to cover waaay too much material in one episode, ULYSSES
suffered from not having nearly enough to say. It might have made a solid
thirty-minute story, but at forty-plus minutes the "Xena falls in
love"
plot was stretched rather thin.
As was made quite clear during the opening scenes, Xena
experiences an
immediate sexual attraction to Ulysses, and within short order
falls in
love with the sea-faring king of Ithaca. Unfortunately the actor
playing
Ulysses wasn't appealing enough to make this romantic scenario
persuasive,
especially for those of us who roll our eyes at the
Love-Interest-of-the-Week approach to television romance. To
everyone's
relief, Xena turns Ulysses away out of a respect for his marriage
to
Penelope. The warrior princess may have led armies into lethal
assaults
against hapless villagers, but she's no homewrecker.
Any remaining ambiguity in the relationship between Xena and
Gabrielle appears to be played out on the bard's side. When she overhears
Ulysses declaring his love for Xena, her reaction is one of heartbreaking
distress. Then the next morning she pulls herself together and directly
questions Xena about the romance. "I need to know." Xena is somewhat rueful
to learn that Gabrielle was awake that night, and she answers the question
with a certain gentleness that implies concern for Gabrielle's feelings.
It is a very touching moment between the two of them, yet one that only
makes sense if it signals an end to Gabrielle's hopes for a more intimate
relationship with her traveling companion. In an exchange between platonic
friends, these emotional undercurrents would be puzzling and out of place.
So what are we as an audience to make of certain past events,
such as Xena kissing Gabrielle in THE QUEST? Nothing, evidently. That one
action is the closest XWP ever came to a smoking subtext gun, so the
retroactive interpretation appears to be that it was a simple, comforting
gesture on Xena's part.
Whatever.
WHIMPERS, MURMURS, AND A LOVE GONE TOO
FAR
11-15-00. In the October 2000 issue of Femme Fatales magazine, actress Rachel "Penelope" Blakely was featured in an article. The article included this part:
New Zealand, geographically less than a stone's throw away from
Australia, prompted Blakely to cross over for assignments in YOUNG
HERCULES and the 'Ulysses' episode of XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS; in the
latter, she played the long-suffering Penelope, whose spouse, Ulysses,
has been saddled with a 10-year tenure in the Trojan Wars. Teaming up
with the Greek hunk, Xena conspires his extrication to Ithica and
Penelope's waiting arms. "I had a lot of fun doing XENA," recalls
Blakely. "It was great watching Lucy Lawless on set to see how she works
and does the action. Penelope was basically a queen whose husband had
disappeared a decade before. They were childhood sweethearts. He
eventually came back and reclaimed the kingdom, and his queen, just in
time. But, I think he may have been secretly in love with Xena. I also
played young Herc's mother on the telemovie."
03-08-00. R.J. Stewart was at the First Annual Special Effects Film Festival in Phoenix, AZ on 10/30/99. From Marilyn Cristiano's On the Road report:
R.J. noted that the Poseidon effect in the opening credits was such a
popular effect that they built an episode, ULYSSES (43/219), around it. R.J.
made the point that Renaissance Pictures could never afford to produce XENA
in the United States given it's production values, but that New Zealand's
favorable exchange rate of fifty-one cents on the dollar and less expensive
labor costs makes XENA affordable to produce.
12-20-98. At Dragon Con in Atlanta (09/98), Steven Sears stated that although he thought there was some chemistry between Lucy and the actor who played Ulysses, the problem was that actor was not a fighter. Sears said that Lucy is amazing - she can subdivide her personal space up into eight quadrants, and do arm and leg movements independent of each other, and it's all real. He says she's very good - but the dude wasn't, so they had to film long shots of him, and head shots, because he
coudn't do the moves Lucy was doing and make it look good.
12-20-98. At the Valley Forge Con (10/05/97), while discussing ULYSSES, she confessed that she actually loves boats and that she was eating marinated octopus, not squid. In fact, she recounted how once she was resigned to having to eat the stuff, she decided to just gross out everyone on the set. So started munching with relish and did indeed succeed in grossing out the production crew.
Xena gets another
boyfriend! Will it be Xena's revenge on Gabrielle's marriage in
RETURN OF CALLISTO (#29)??? And FINALLY Poseidon from the opening
titles appears!!! Too much, eh?
HIGHLIGHTS:
Highlights by Beth
Gaynor.
I did like the final scene on the ship just for Lucy's
performance, telling this man she was so attracted to that
he should go home and be happy there. It's the kind of
situation Xena has had to face more than once: she tried it
on some little starry-eyed farm kids (Chariots of War), with
much less success on a kid from Poteidaia (about a
half-dozen times during Sins of the Past before she gave
up), and continuously with a certain mighty-warrior
wanna-be. Xena's a natural leader and damned magnetic. When
you're leading an army of brigands that's not such a bad
thing, but when you're a loner on the road and want to
prevent uprooting the people around you, that gets a little
tougher sometimes. And it's especially tough when you don't
really want the person to leave. But Xena passes the test
that Ulysses fell flat on and sends him packing.
Gabrielle, dear Gabrielle, wins the scene-stealing award for
the week (again!). Renee continues to show off just how
great a comedienne she is. The moment she appeared at the
cabin stairway, even though her lines were on a completely
different topic, she had the sway of a person who's going to
be miserable as long as she's on top of waves. I couldn't
stop laughing every time she was stumbling (or hanging)
across the screen; sure, Xena was cruel, cruel, cruel to the
poor bard, but it WAS awfully hard to resist.
TRANSCRIPT
Click here to read a transcript of ULYSSES.
DISCLAIMER:
Despite Gabrielle's incessant hurling,
Ulysses' ship was not harmed during the production of this motion
picture.
