The whole two parter is racist, honestly Joxer’s jokes are just the tip of the iceberg on that. There’s a lot of cultural insensitivity on this show, but nothing as mean spirited or unappreciative as this. Xena has spent four seasons establishing that it is not okay for one person to play judge jury and executioner and then murders 100,000 people because “they know too much”. It’s horrific. Yes she had some even worse reasons when she was evil but the entire point of the show is that she’s trying to be better, when she does something morally complicated like this there needs to be some kind of reckoning and of all the things they thought needed to be in this episode, I cannot believe they chose to cut Xena’s moral dilemma, just to make her say “I have no choice”. Lao Ma is not a morally simplistic character, she absolutely is a political manipulator, that’s part of what makes her interesting to me. She also is someone who holds the belief that people are capable of change, that’s kind of the whole point of her story with Xena, and yet these episodes have her basically having decided that two of her children were going to be evil and making shitty plans according to that, instead of doing anything to help them with their dark sides (one of which she apparently created). They also change the nature of her teachings to something dangerous and not worth using, which is one of the instances where the cultural insensitivity comes in. Then in part two of course Xena is allowed to use it this one last time to do one giant murder because she’s the queen of the universe. And the studio mandated attempt at a subtextual boyfriend of the week is honestly just funny to me. Lin Qi follows Gabrielle around and she has to shut him down several times before he (maybe?) gets the point. Renee is a hero for real for insisting they let her stay true to her character.