Why Lucy Lawless Still Hates Xena: Warrior Princess' Bleak Finale

Look, I love a bleak television ending as much as the next jaded critic, but the ending of "Xena: Warrior Princess" is exceptionally dismal. The series, which starred Lucy Lawless as the titular warrior princess, followed Xena as she tried to find redemption for her past as a ruthless killer. The character had originally started as a villain on the series "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys," but she ended up being an interesting enough character to carry a spin-off all of her own. Xena, as an anti-hero before we were even really calling them that, was a deeply conflicted character who had some awfulness to answer for, but that doesn't mean she deserved an ending as brutal as those we later got for serious real-world dramas like "Breaking Bad" and "The Sopranos." 

"Xena: Warrior Princess" was a wild series that could be all over the place tonally, feeling like one part soap opera, one part epic fantasy adventure, and one part Roger Corman monster flick. With executive producer Sam Raimi helping to run the show things were guaranteed to get gross and as gory as network TV would allow, but apparently the writing team had no problem cutting out fans' hearts as readily as Xena might disembowel a mythological baddie. 

In the series finale, Xena not only dies but then sacrifices herself as a ghost, too. Fans were devastated, and it turns out that it wasn't just fans who were upset — Lawless hated the ending, too. 

In an oral history of the series for Entertainment Weekly, Sam's brother Ted Raimi, who played Joker, said that he loved the ending. However, Lawless said her feelings on it had really soured with time: 

"I always regretted the ending. It seemed kind of amusing to us at the time. You know, in a sort of Tarantino-esque way, like, 'Oh yeah, that's crazy. Cut her head off.' But what it did to the fans was just awful. So I keep going, 'It never happened, never happened...'"

At the end of "Xena," the warrior princess takes on an army led by a powerful supernatural being called Yodoshi, the eater of souls, who has the souls of 40,000 villagers Xena killed in her earlier years within him. She ends up killed in a very "Game of Thrones"-esque way, shot through with arrows and then decapitated, but that's not what really upset fans. What hurt them the most was the fact that Xena then goes to the underworld, kicks Yodoshi's undead butt, and ends up sacrificing herself anyway so the 40,000 souls can be at peace. 

It makes sense thematically because Xena was supposed to be beyond redemption, but also this was goofy wish fulfilment fantasy in the 1990s. Some of us just wanted a happy ending for the woman we had watched try to improve herself and the lives of others for six seasons. 

While Lawless isn't a huge fan of the fantasy genre, she did nonetheless seem to want a proper ending for fans of "Xena" who felt burned by the character's double death. She gets a pretty sweet final goodbye with her traveling companion/friend/not-so-subtextual girlfriend Gabrielle (Renée O'Connor), but ghost Xena just fading into nothing and Gabrielle continuing her journey feels kind of weak. 

Series co-creator R.J. Stewart (who created the series with Lawless's husband, Rob Tapert) told EW that he wouldn't have gone with that ending if he'd known it would completely alienate fans and make them abandon the series completely, but also that fans not liking endings honestly came with the territory. He has no regrets, however, because he's "been to 'Xena' conventions" and has seen the numbers of fans still in attendance.

Like many other shows that ended in a way fans didn't love, theres more to "Xena" than the official ending. There's scores of fanfiction out there, plus the actual "Xena" comic series from Dark Horse Comics, giving people more "Xena" after the series went off the air. They might not have Lawless's killer battle cry or the beautiful New Zealand shooting locations, but at least we get more of everyone's favorite warrior princess.