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Excellent return to SVS for Denise Byrd and Trish Kocialski (the two had started just in tandem providing the subject of "Been A Wonderful Life", S7), with this two-part episode, that it's going to be a mainstay of the season.
Everyone knows that Xena was born as a character in a trilogy of episodes from Hercules: The legendary Journeys, S1, but perhaps not everyone knows that the son of Zeus stories have entwined several times with facts and figures from the Warrior Princess saga, and I am not referring only to those where their paths have actually encountered ("Prometheus", S1, and "God fearing Child", S5, in Xena, or "Judgment Day", S3 in Hercules), but also and especially to those in which only the aftermath of them affected the parallel series.
I'm talking in particular of a two-part episode of Hercules, S4, "Armageddon Now I and II". In that story, Iolaus, almost inseparable companion of the demigod (but their friendship has never hinted at any subtext), was forced to travel back in time to find the Cronos Stone that, affecting time flow, would take Hercules back from that sort of limbo between two different dimensions in which he was imprisoned. The story is very complicated and includes also other characters from Xena series, as Hope and Callisto, and this is not the place for telling it in detail (but if you have not already seen that, do not miss it), suffice to say that at some point, Iolaus finds himself in an alternate world where Xena had never met Hercules, and had never repented, becoming instead the pitiless Conqueror of Greece; and where Gabrielle was a rebellious opponent of the tyrant, and not her faithful partner. And in the only scene in which they appear together, the Conqueror "calls for her legs to be broken". (The same scene attended by a dismayed Xena in this first part of "X Marks the Spot")
In that episode, this development occupied only a few seconds and was almost irrelevant in the plot. Nothing more than what usually in the jargon of the showbiz is called a cameo, an appearance of honor for Gabrielle, but an appearance that could not pass unnoticed to xenites who have always fantasized about it, trying to imagine (since the TV authors have never returned on it) what story it could conceal behind.
Their various visions gave rise to a series of novels and even entire cycles in several volumes, that are one of the richest vein in the vast territory of fanfiction.
The same Missy Good, after some initial resistance (by her own admission, she never liked too much the Conqueror stories), ended up giving in to the insistence of fans, and produced until now a couple of novels which are among her best things of these last years.
The reason for the success of these particular versions of Xena and Gabrielle is probably not free from a certain morbidity. In fact the relationship between the two women, that in the classic series is based on equality and mutual respect, becomes here something different, and definitely intriguing. The authors unravel plots, often similar to each other, where the mighty Conqueror, Xena, can exert her domain on her young slave, that the poor little Gabrielle suffers heroically, hoping to find eventually in the heart of her master that sparkle of love that she already feels in hers, in a sort of sado-masochistic relation.