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DoT, I see what you mean, of course. I suppose it's not a big problem for me because Xena is not a realistic show: In real life, people don't come back from the dead (more than once!), or swap bodies, or gobble some ambrosia and become gods ... etc. Even taking something far less extreme, they don't recover easily and without permanent damage from the sort of blows our heroines routinely take. (In real life, Xena would have been covered with scars and missing quite a few good chewing teeth -- and her nose would probably have been misshapen from being broken a few times.) As I said before, I think it combines a very high level of psychological realism with a fantasy/magical setting, and that's a big part of what makes it appealing. But even so -- realism is not, for me, a standard by which it should be judged.

If anything, I would suggest that The Bitter Suite and the magical resolution of the Rift was a more problematic "cop-out," because the 25-sleep changed only Xena and Gabrielle's external circumstances while Illusia was used to help resolve their emotional and personal issues. In Season 5, to me, the big cop-out was actually not the time jump but the miracle pregnancy -- the writers couldn't figure out how to get Xena pregnant the "regular" way while still doing their delicate dance around the subtext issue, and so came up with the supernatural conception.

Btw, not trying to persuade you to see it my way -- I think that for each of us, our reaction to what we like/don't like on the show is very personal, including which plot device finally turns out to be our last straw (or our shark-jumping moment). I'm just explaining why it works for me.

Could the writers have come up with a more realistic solution? Well, we've come up with a few so far, and I think that each of them might have worked. (Now that you've explained more about your "settling with the Amazons" idea in the other thread, I'm half-sold on it, or even two-thirds sold on it. ) But do we know for sure that the writers/producers didn't consider these ideas and conclude that they wouldn't work, for one reason or another? Maybe you couldn't get rid of X & G's unencumbered, unanchored existence without cutting out the heart of the show. Some of the domestic or semi-domestic scenarios, despite interesting possibilities, lack for me in the larger-than-life quality that X:WP had at its best. To me, the drama between Xena and Livia/Eve is more engaging than the more down-to-earth scenario of Xena and Gabrielle pursuing their careers as part-time warriors and then coming back to Amphipolis for quality time with little Eve. (Though of course the drama could have come from somewhere else.)

I do have to say, if it was possible to have several versions of the show, I'd definitely have liked to see the Amazon one and the "part-time warrior" one.