Many thanks to Normal Ruffell For transcribing these interviews THE VANCOUVER SUN SHE IS XENA, HEAR HER ROAR AS SHE EVENS THE SCORE "Sorry, sweetheart, but the king doesn't want any visitors," a brutish guard warns Xena, the Warrior Princess, in a recent episode of the feminist sword-and-sorcery series, Xena: Warrior Princess. "Stick around and I'll show you a good time." Xena is set in the mythological realm of ancient Greece, but we are watching television in the '90s and Xena is, to all intents and purposes, a modern woman. So she grins widely and swats the lout in the face with a heavy broadsword - a two-hander, as they say in hockey parlance. Greek mythology was never like this in school. Xena is played each week with brawny verve by Lucy Lawless, a six-foot-tall Shakespearean stage actress from New Zealand, with a Kiwi accent to match. She has big hair, wears clanky-looking body armour and carries herself with the bearing of a rough-and-tumble battler of injustice and new-age philosopher - part Homer, part Gloria Steinem. Xena is kind of Baywatch BC, but it is smarter than the show that spawned it, Hercules: The Legendary Adventures. In Hercules' 1994 season, Xena appeared as a nasty warrior princess out to kill the mighty Herc. After just three episodes, she recognized the error of her ways, reformed and got her own TV show. Judging by viewers' response, Xena has become more popular than the mighty man who preceded her. According to recent ratings published by Nielsen Media Research in the US, Xena is the most-watched prime-time drama in syndication, a group which includes Hercules, Baywatch and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Xena is sort of a Superwoman for the new millennium; she uses her head more often then her brawn; her most reliable allies are other women; and the stories often revolve around strong matriarchal figures (tonight's episode, 9 pm on KIRO, features mythology's Helen of Troy as the center of a political clash of wills, while another recent episode portrayed Death as a woman, Celestia, "keeper of the eternal flame"). The men, by contrast, are often portrayed as louts of the lowest order; unshaven, ill-mannered and poorly spoken, with names like Toxeus and Cyphilus. The dialogue - by Babs Greyhosky, Mary Kay Foster and Andy Armus - is delivered with loony relish, a curious mix of hifalutin' mythology ("The gods grew jealous of their great love and condemned them to separate destinies,"), weird sentiment ("I'm not leaving you, Gabrielle; I've never met a girl who knows every line of Sophocles by heart,") and '90s trash-talk, ("You love shoving women around so much? Try me.") The "ick factor" is high - in one episode, Xena and a friend were buried under hundreds of squealing rats in a dank tunnel - but not so high that parents will be scrambling for their V-chips. Xena is that rare crossover show for children and adults that manages to resolve its problems without always having to resort to bloodletting. It's silly and strange and, on a deep level, oddly compelling, whisking viewers who are willing to suspend their belief into a world of myths, adventures and zaniness. It's little wonder it's catching on.