No doubt about it. With all these season premieres happenin, the addiction comes back with full force. To believe otherwise would be self-delusion.

In that vein, tonight's Xena premiere brought with it many laughs, some good drama, a heap of good ole Xena-style fun, and.... for the first time since the show began five years ago, a new title sequence! THAT certainly came as a surprise.

And don't think I didn't notice the writing credit. Yes, from the ranks of the mighty net bards, one of the greatest has risen to actually write not only a televised episode, but a Season Premiere. Three cheers for Merwolf! Hip hip, hooray!

So, how did she do? I loved the dialoge. I loved the plot. I loved the story. For once, it was like the perfect blend of comedy and drama. But then, about midway through the forth act, things just... fell apart. It was like any semblence of all the great story-telling that had preceeded just evaporated away in a lame attempt to throw together a quick ending and make room for the end credits. A very disappointing way to conclude an episode after building it up so well for around 50 minutes. (Well, probably more like 35 minutes if commercials are subtracted.)

This smells to me like a case of some key scenes ending up on the cutting room floor due to time constraints. What happened to the Amazons? Okay, so they chased Ares's army off. It would have been nice to bring some closure to that, and at least let the audience know something of what their final plight was, instead of "Okay, that battle is over. Now they can disappear and everybody will forgot about that." Even more glaring was Eve. She had been a prisoner in the amazon camp. Ahem. Anybody behind the wheel at RenPics remember that? Apparently not, because during Xena's "outage", there came Eve, trotting next to Gabrielle into the icy glacier to resuscitate the Warrior Princess. (Such a quick, massive change in terrain also poses a major continuity problem, but we can ignore that in stride, given that it's the least of the problems with this ending.)

It sucks to have to write that too, because right during the last commercial, I was still thinking "Damn, this episode is gonna go down as one of the great ones." And it was good in just about every regard. But then that slopped together ending. Oh well. This review has probably been more negative than it really should be, just because the last impression is the one you leave with. There was a lot of good stuff in there.

I think I'll get some sleep now. Zzzzzzz.