"X-Files" creator Chris Carter brings Lawless onto the scene as a former associate of Agent Doggett (Robert Patrick), one who predictably comes with more than her share of trouble for Doggett and his partner Scully (Gillian Anderson).

"What can I tell you about the two episodes?" Lawless asks in her thick Kiwi accent, speaking by telephone from her home in Auckland, New Zealand. "I feel like Chris Carter will come after me and I'll end up with bloody cement boots on my feet, at the bottom of the ocean, if I tell you too much.

"Let's see," she says thoughtfully. "My character, Shannon McMahon, reenters Doggett's life. They used to be in the military together - in my back story they fought in Beirut - and now she's causing a great deal of trouble. You don't know if she's good and you don't know if she's bad. She seems to be both things at once.

"Am I being typecast?" she asks. "What is it about me? But anyway, McMahon also is bearing tidings, not entirely of gladness and joy, for Scully's baby.

"And I spent half my time naked."

Naked? As in nude? In the buff? Au natural?

"Why not, if it looks good on screen?" Lawless says, laughing. "Of course, you don't see anything except my well-endowed body double. Let's just say the character's a bit of a water baby, a water babe. She's a nymph."

Though she waxes enthusiastic about the "very welcoming" cast and crew, Lawless declines to reveal anything more about her "X-Files" gig. So it's time to revisit "Xena," which ended last June with "A Friend in Need," a two-parter in which Xena was crucified and then viciously beheaded. The controversial denouement, though true to the risk-taking nature of the series, infuriated many of the "Xena" faithful to a degree which Lawless seems only now to be fully grasping.

"Talking with a friend of mine, I finally understood what that might be about," Lawless says. "For her, it was that so many people in this world have never been in love, or they were in love and lost the other person. They want to believe in the soul-mate concept.

"Our show kept talking about 'the soul mate, the soul mate' for all those seasons," the actress says. "And I personally don't really believe in the soul-mate idea, but it never really occurred to me that other people could so need to hold onto that, that that's what they loved about the show.

"At the end," she says, "what we did was take Gabrielle's soul mate away from her. Gabrielle (Renee O'Connor) and Xena were split up. And I think that had a dreadful resonance for very many of our fans.

"For that I'm really sorry."

That said, Lawless adds, some viewers mistakenly believed that the show's makers - chief among them her husband, producer/writer Robert Tapert, who co-wrote and directed "A Friend in Need" - plotted each episode with an eye toward the effect it would have on viewers.

"We really just tried to get a story on film every week," Lawless says. "That's an immense task. But we broke their hearts (with the finale), I think."

Up next for Lawless is a New Zealand production of the stage show "The Vagina Monologues," which will begin a limited run in February. That, of course, leaves time for other acting jobs and perhaps even another visit to "The X-Files."

"My being back, it remains to be seen," she says. "All I can say is that I had a stupendously good time working with those people, and it was immensely challenging. I came home mopping my brow and saying to the New Zealanders, 'Whoa, do they work hard in America!'

"I spent three nights underwater, breathing from an aqualung," Lawless says. "So it was very challenging stuff. But I'm open to coming back if they invite me to do so."

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