Eve/Livia was not worth the 25-year time jump on Xena.

Posted by itsascreambaby96@reddit | xena | View on Reddit | 116 comments

It always felt like the show blew up its own world just to center a character who never really earned it. If you’re going to jump 25 years and reset everything, the payoff has to be huge. Eve just… isn’t that.

She’s supposed to be Callisto reborn, which is a massive deal, and yet it doesn’t feel like it at all. That same intensity, that unpredictability, that presence Callisto had is just gone. Adrienne Wilkinson is fine, but she doesn’t have that kind of weight, so the whole idea falls flat from the start.

And then you look at what the show sacrificed to make this happen. Cyrene is gone. Joxer is killed off by Eve. Callisto is gone for good. Hercules and Iolaus are basically out of the picture. The gods are wiped out except Ares and Aphrodite. Gabrielle’s family gets completely destroyed in some of the darkest ways the show ever went.

It’s not even just a time jump, it’s like the show erased everything people cared about.

And the replacements don’t make it better. Virgil comes in, but he doesn’t fill Joxer’s role in any meaningful way, and then he disappears too. Eve ends up fading out before the finale as well, which makes the whole thing feel even more pointless.

So in the end, the show gave up a huge part of what made it work for a storyline that doesn’t land and characters that don’t stick. It just doesn’t feel like a fair trade.