Although the aforementioned cliffhanger may have taken viewers by surprise, the show'd producers knew from the very beginning how they planned to end season four. "Two years ago," explains executive producer RJ Stewart, who wrote that episode, Ides of March, "we were sitting in a bar in New York, and Rob Tapert said to me, 'I want to end the fourth season with crucifying Xena dn Gabrielle,' so we knew for a long time that that's where we were headed. Because we knew what the season-ender was going to be, we thought we'd might as well make it a theme for the whole season, because you don't always know what's going to happen at the end of the season. Sometimes it's a last-minute idea, or something that evolves, but since this season was geared around it, we decided to make it a strength."

Signs and Portents

The crucifixion scene was actually shown a number of times throughout the season starting with the fourth-season opener, Adventures in the Sin Trade, but viewers simply didn't believe it could happen. According to co-executive producer Steven Sears, "We showed it to everybody, and basically said, 'Here's how it's going to end,' and everybody said, 'oh no, they're trying to trick us! I'll bet I can come up with what's really going to happen!' but no, that's exactly what happened.

"What we were saying was, here's a possible ending to the season, it depends on what choices our characters make, but we were then saying, if they stay true to who they really are, they'll die. If they choose not to be true to who they really are, they mighthave lived, but they chose to be true to who they were."

A Comedy of Errors

Having spent most of the previous season creating a convoluted storyline that was often inaccessible to some of Xena's more casual viewers, the show's producers were determined not to repeat their mistake. The next season would be a thought-provoking philosophical journey for Xena and Gabrielle, as they both sought answers to some very difficult moral questions. "In the third season," claims Sears, "it was the authors searching for what the characters were going to do, and in the fourth season, the authors figured out that it's the characters who should be doing the searching. In the fourth season, there was a definite focus of where this was going to go, but in the third season, we didn't have that."

The serious moral questions being raised in the new season meant it became more difficult to include the comedic episodes such as The Play's the Thing or A Tale of Two Muses in the overall story mix. "It was very difficult," notes Sears, "and I can't say we succeeded all the time. We almost ended up with two different series going on at the same time, and the reason for that is back in our first and second seasons, we were able to hit a nice balance between humour and drama within each episode. The more we got into serialising our characters; building on their past pain and their past joys, we realised that whenever we did an episode that might possibly touch on that, jokes were just tasteless, but we still wanted to have humour, otherwise we're going to be this deadly show; people were going to say, 'Oh God, I've got to watch Xena, it's so difficult!'

"What ended up happening was, we couldn't do the balanced comedy, so we had to do more broad comedy, consequently, it would change temperatures so quickly, the enamel on your teeth would crack. One week you'd have death of this or the death of that, and end with a tear, and the next week on Xena, we'd be in a bubble factory or something like that."

Faith and Hope

One of the most ambitious storylines in season four was Xena and Gabrielle's trip to India, which would result in a number of physical and emotional changes for both characters. It also meant a good deal of research for the show's writers, who knew their subject matter had to be handled in a careful and responsible fashion. "When we first decided to go to India," explains Sears, "we sat down at the big table and talked about how wonderful it would be, spiritually and philosophically for the characters, the look, the colours; a wonderful choice, however, these are people who have a living religion, so how are we going to handle that, because we can't go there and ignore it. Do we embrace it or do we put it in the background, in which case quite honestly we thought it would be an insult, so we figured, look, it's a spiritual journey, and this is a spiritual belief, so let's embrace it, and over and over again, RJ was the one who kept saying, 'Be careful, because this is a living religion, and we don't want to offend anybody; it deserves our respect.' The amazing thing was, the person who did the most research and had the most knowledge was RJ, and it was his episode that got nailed!"

The episode that Sears is alluding to is The Way, in which Xena seeks help from the Hindu deity Krishna in order to defeat the king of the demons. It provoked a great deal of controversy from Hindu groups, many of whom hadn't actually seen it at the time, and eventually, a pro-Xena backlash from the viewers who felt the episode had been handled with sensitivity to their religion. When The Way was recently repeated in America, it included an opening disclaimer and an additional message shown with the closing credits.

"When I first sat down to write it," notes Stewart, "I knew if we were going to have Krishna in it, we had to absolutely accept him as the ultimate godhead, or else it would be offensive, and I talked to some Hindus about it and they thought that was okay, and Rob had an advisor down in New Zealand who thought it was okay, and then this one group in America drummed up a lot of support in the Hindu community against us before anybody had seen it, so what we've done now is enlist our own support in the Hindu community, and are coming back with it. We have a PSA in front where we have a member of the Hindu community talking about it, and Lucy and Renee saying, 'Go to your local library to learn more about this,' so we're trying to be as responsible with it as we can."

Bathtime Fun

Ironically, Stewart is certainly no stranger to controversy, having scripted the infamous bathtub scene in Season Two's A Day in the Life, which further ignited the 'Are they or aren't they?' debate which had already been raging for some time. "What I wanted to do," claims Stewart, "was, this was like a western town, it was like High Noon, and they're waiting for the giant, and I was thinking, in the male western movies, what do they do when they come into town after being on the road a while? I just thought of those shots of Lee Marvin or Henry Fonda sitting in a bathtub with a bottle of whiskey and a cigar, so I wanted to put them in a bath, and then of course, the next thought, the wicked thought was, 'We'll put them in the same bathtub!' but it came from a place of a lot of fun. I'm not saying I was completely insensitive to the subtext, I knew that existed, it was just a question of how much we committed to it."

"Every time I've done a series where the leads are the same gender, this happens, there's a fan-based subtext to it," claims Sears, "this one more than others, and when we started playing with it, we were doing a wink and a nod, because we were never really saying anything about these particular characters and their sexuality. We were just playing them the way we'd always played them, but if you want to see that, that's fine, wink nod, that's kind of cool, and we'll put in a couple of things that are overt so you can kind of play with them, and back at that time, it was a reciprocal thing."

The Pregnancy

Looking ahead to the fifth season, now well into production in New Zealand, the show's producers promise a number of revelations in store for the warrior princess. "I think there's probably no secret that Xena's pregnant," says Stewart. "There's a trip back to China, we're going to meet some new historical characters, and there is evolution of existing characters, not just Xena and Gabrielle but other characters in very dramatic ways that I can't say too much about because they're very key things."

How easy was it to incorporate Lucy Lawless' real-life pregnancy into the show? "More difficult that we ever imagined!" declares Stewart. "It's so challenging to figure out how to have an action hero be pregnant. We're a bunch of cock-eyed optimists, so when we first started, we were saying things like, 'It will be a break-through show, there's never been an action hero pregnant before!' That's the kind of nonsense we were saying, but there's a pretty good reason for that: it's very difficult to watch a pregnant woman kicking butt."

"We had all these plans-" adds Sears. "We were kidding around, give Xena a shield, so she's always walking behind the shield, but that was not something we were going to be doing."

"It presented its own set of challenges, because it's hard to be a superhero when you're pregnant," says Doug Lefler, who's directed several episodes of Xena, including the fifth season's Chakram. "When I was shooting the episode, she wasn't supposed to be pregnant in the story, so it presented its own set of challenges of how you could shoot her. It's also a lot harder on Lucy, and she couldn't work as many hours a day because of her pregnancy but we managed to work around it."

Side-Kickin' Ass

As for Gabrielle, "She's the most loving but also tougher-than-ever sidekick you can have," promises Stewart. "She continues to grow as a character too, because now that she's left the path of the searcher that she was last year, she's somewhat more of a woman of action this year."

Renee O'Connor has also been practicing with a sai, which will be Gabrielle's new weapon of choice. "I had asked the guys to work out a fight with her," recalls Lefler, "and to make it fairly simple. When we got to the point where I was going to shoot it, I didn't think I had much time to do much of anything with it, but she showed me the routine she had practiced, which was fairly involved, but she had learned it so well, I said 'We've got to shoot this!'"

With the fifth season of Xena ready to debut stateside, its creators hope that viewers will find themselves looking forward to the latest adventures of their favourite warrior princess. Says Stewart, "I think the adventure of watching Xena go through pregnancy, birth, and blossom as a mother is going to be very exciting in the context of an action series."

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