Xena: Warrior Princess (TV Series) Is There a Doctor in the House? (1996) User Reviews

Salute to Xena - A 25th Anniversary Review

[skullface2020 · 7/10 · 4 April 2020]

Xena and Gabrielle find themselves in the midst of a civil war. As Ares' favorite type of conflict, civil wars are the most bloody and ruthless. Who will they encounter, and will Xena and Gabrielle be able to help establish peace or even escape with their lives?

SYNOPSIS

Xena and Gabrielle find themselves in a war-torn forrest during their travels. The civil war around them is raging, and they're trying to get through the area safely. They stumble upon a poor pregnant woman hiding on the forest floor. It's the Amazon warrior Ephiny (season 1 episode 10), and she's close to giving birth to her baby that's fathered by Tyldus the centaur. Ephiny and Tyldus fell in love after Xena fostered peace between their peoples. They were traveling through the area when they found themselves in the middle of this civil war, and unfortunately Tyldus was killed. They find a nearby temple where they can get shelter and Ephiny can give birth. However, Xena captures a general named Marmax fighting in the civil war, and she wounds him and brings him along to perhaps serve as either a guide or a bargaining chip.

Upon entering the temple they realize that it's a mess with tons of injured people. The old priest running the show is basically useless. It's under the protection of soldiers opposed to Marmax, and they send him to an area that houses wounded prisoners from his army. Xena is not too interested in the main priest's desires, and she immediately begins providing expert medical aid to the injured. She has a lot of knowledge, and the young priests start to learn from her even as their boss protests. She enlists Marmax to help, and he's impressed. It starts to get really crazy as catapult fire begins to hit the temple, and the injured start to overwhelm the scene. Gabrielle runs out to find someone's young boy who is lost, and Xena forces Marmax to help her give aid to a soldier from the opposing army.

Suddenly things go from bad to worse. Gabrielle returns severely injured, and Ephiny's life seems to be in danger due to trouble giving birth. Xena must prioritize the aid that she is rendering to all those in need. With the help of her knife, and General Marmax, Ephiny's baby centaur is successfully delivered. Men loyal to Marmax storm the temple, and they're ready to continue their fight. However, Marmax tells them that it's all gotten insane. They're in the midst of a temple full of dying people, and this civil war has already been a lose-lose situation. He orders them to pull back. Gabrielle for a moment seems to have succumbed to her injuries, but of course she pulls through. Marmax tells Xena that she taught him a lot about life and helping others, and that he'll begin negotiations with the other army to stop hostilities so that peace can be restored to the land. The young temple priests also learned a lot from Xena. They plan to improve their temple and turn it into a place that offers sound medicine to those in need. It's a good thing that Xena and Gabrielle found themselves in this war zone after all.

NOTES

Compassion can not only heal others, it can bring people together. Xena's experience offers a lot of insight to others, and Gabrielle is meant to be right by her side helping her fight for peace and justice.

Enter: General Marmax

More drama than action. Some great performances. The "M*A*S*H" episode.

[reb-warrior · 10/10 · 27 April 2021]

Xena and Gabs are traveling a war-torn area being fought over by Thessaly and Mitoa. They come across a wounded and pregnant Ephiny from 'Hooves and Harlots,' and bring her to a healing temple along with a wounded Mitoan General. There Xena uses her medical skills to treat people. Gabrielle helps her and shines as she takes the all-important kind & caring bedside manner approach to patients.

Xena shows her "many skills" as she performs all kinds of medical procedures that she learned on the battlefield treating wounded soldiers. Later when Gabrielle almost dies, Xena gets emotional trying to bring her back. Lawless really delivers one of her best performances in season one in this episode, going from warrior, to keeping her cool when things keep happening around her, to happiness when she delivers Ephiny's baby.

Gabrielle helps Xena, not knowing much about healing but follows her instructions. But she shows how important it is to be kind and caring towards patients. We've all been there, and know that it helps to have and caring person looking after you. Gabs is a bard so she's able to apply that gift of storytelling to the patients as she tends to them.

I thought the actor that played Marmax did a great job as the seasoned and weathered Mitoan General as he experiences growth and realizes that the war must end, inspired by both Xena and Gabrielle.

Gabs sure did recover fast as she is up-and-at-them out of bed in one day after suffering a serious injury that killed her. Lol. Notice Gabrielle says she saw Talus from 'Death in Chains,' on the "other side." Good to remaining consistent.

Ephiny gives birth to her centaur child. They both will appear in future episodes. Her child will be named Xenan, whom I assume is named after Xena who delivered him.

Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, learns a few things from Xena and is very inspired by her. Xena and Gabs' place in history throughout the show when it comes to inventing stuff, or "being the first to," has been kind of a fun topic in the Xenaverse over the years.

This isn't a big action yarn with all kinds of elaborate action and CGI. Instead, it's more of a drama with some action in it. Directed by TJ Scott, who directed 'Callisto,' which was the very epitome of action in season one, instead, he opts to pull out some great dramatic scenarios and performances by both Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor and indeed some of the other actors in it. I've always said this show is more than just an action show, that it's also a drama among other things, and this is a great episode that validates that. It's also commonly referred to as the "M*A*S*H" episode as a nod to that amazing series.10/10.

Bottle episode. And not even mediocre one.

[ttapola · 3/10 · 2 July 2009]

Oh my. Where to begin. It seems that Xena's production company ran out of money just before the end of the season and had to churn out this lazy bottle episode. The plot summary pretty much tells how dire this is, but let's give it a fair trial and present all the evidence against it: 1) Poor Ephine's husband is killed even before the episode starts because they save money by neither having to hire the actor nor do the poor Centaur CGI. 2) The General is wandering *alone* in the woods. WTF? Where are his guards? 3) Cliché #1: The priests think prayers will be useful but Xena shows them some actual medical aid. Well, never seen that scenario in fantasy series or movies before! 4) And what do you know, she inspires the conveniently present Hippocrates to start working on his famous principles! 5) Cliché #2: One of the wounded dies to show Gabrielle (and us) that not everyone can be saved. 6) Cliché #3: There's an amputation scene during war. 7) Cliché #4: There's a birth scene during what is basically a siege. 8) Cliché #5: Having witnessed the suffering of the wounded and the dying, the General has a radical change of heart and decides that there has been enough war. He orders his troops to retreat in order to start peace negotiations. 9) Cliché #6: A major character (Gabrielle) dies, except that she can be brought back to life by trying to resuscitate her for an abnormally long time while shouting "Fight!" "Don't leave me!" "Wake up!" etc. 10) The next day, Gabrielle is well enough to walk away. Sure. And to cap it all, the whole thing is just plain flat. As if everyone was thinking, "This is the last episode of the season, then it's vacation time!" Maybe they were.

Is There a Doctor in the House?

[Prismark10 · 4/10 · 15 October 2019]

Xena and Gabrielle comes across some wounded people caught up in a civil war. Xena needs to give them urgent medical attention by setting up a proper mobile army surgical hospital in a healing temple.

They also come across a pregnant woman about to give birth to a centaur. Worse Gabrielle gets mortally injured.

It really is case of war is hell and Cena and Gabrielle deal with the casualties of war.

A limp end to the first series which is mainly studio bound. I think the budget ran out. It is Dr Xena as she displays her medical skills right in front of a young Hippocrates who is impressed with Xena's healing skills. He is less enamoured with the old man Galen's power of prayer to the healing gods. Galen is also offended by Xena's modern medicine methods. This is Ancient Greece after all.