I have to spend a moment in celebration of the news that Damages has been not only renewed, but renewed for two more seasons.

Despite my appreciation for strong female characters, it took me a little bit of time to get into Damages. I think because in the beginning, Glenn Close’s Patty Hewes was too much of a dark enigma to specifically be likeable, and Rose Byrne’s Ellen Parsons was too young and naïve to truly capture my imagination.

The beauty of the series in large part was it’s structure, designed with a built in hook that seemed to acknowledge the nebulous characterizations and sought to capture people’s imaginations with the promise of what was going to happen between these two women even more than who and what they were at the beginning. There was always the tease that the story we were being told existed in flashback. In the present, cataclysmic events had helped shape the two women and the world around them, and the story existed to unfold those events, sometimes with teasing misdirection, playing on the viewers expectations to take us where they wanted us to go.

In that way, I suppose it existed almost as a lawyer’s summation. Giving us as the jury some idea of where it was going, but waiting until the end to hit us with the full emotional impact of how it was going to get there.

Like some other notable stories with two female leads, Damages is in no small part about the effect that each of them has on the other. There is in the beginning something of a stark, Yin/Yang dynamic between them. Passive and aggressive, wily experience versus untested potential. This element was played up in the famous promotional image, showing Rose as a dark reflection of Patty.

Darkness, or Yin, isn’t understood as something evil but instead as passive to counterbalance Yang’s aggression. But always, the real sense of balance achieved by Yin/Yang exists in the one tiny, purest piece of the other which exists in the heart of each of them.

It took most of the season before we got a real hint of Rose’s sense of aggression. And when it surfaced, it was pure and unyielding. Likewise, it was almost surprising to get glimpses of passivity from Patty, a time when she would allow Ellen to call the shots and dictate her movements.

And like any good circle, the end of the season took us back to where it had begun. To a long pier, hinting at all the secrets buried underneath the churning surface of the water.

At the end of the pilot, we saw Patty infamously throw a dog collar into that water. A tangible reminder of her guilt, and her guile and the sense that in this story there were not going to be simple understandings of good and evil, right and wrong. Everything was a means to an end, and there were few lines that Patty wouldn’t cross if she had to. Perhaps this was even the biggest hint at what was to come with the labyrinthine plot about Arthur Frobisher and Patty’s bid to milk him of everything that could be taken from him only serving as a backdrop for the relationship which would develop between the two women and what a dark, deceptive place it was born in.

Another television show to revolve around two female leads, with a story focusing on the relationship between them and the impact they would have on each other lives was Xena:Warrior Princess. Yes, yes, go ahead and laugh. What could the two shows have in common? Xena was over the top, cheesy and dancing on the edge of exploitation even as it showed a woman as the ultimate warrior. And yet, at it’s heart, the show Xena was as much about the character Gabrielle, a young, idealistic girl who follows after Xena, saying “Take me with you, teach me everything you know. I want so much to be like you.”

And through the course of the series, we see the young, happy, fumbling child Gabrielle was slowly fall away, as she followed the darker path Xena lead her down, losing her innocence slowly, often painfully, until she had indeed become something very much like what Xena had been when they met. It was both affirming and heartbreaking, because the skills and abilities she had learned at Xena’s side had come with the darkness, the pain and guilt off all the battles she had fought. And the lives she had taken, or failed to save.

Very early on in the series, there was an episode called Dreamworker which in many ways established the thematic arc of the entire series. In it, Gabrielle was taken by a priest and put through a series of tests designed to make her shed blood for the first time. With her ‘blood innocence’ paving the way for her to be sacrificed in the name of the dream god worshiped by the priest. In order to save her friend, Xena had to make her way through a passage of her own dreams, where she was assaulted with the memories of the first man she’d killed and the last, along with many others taunting her that she was leading Gabrielle down a similar path. And that she would leave Gabrielle with similar demons to face in her own dreams. In the end, Xena’s ultimate test was to face off against a dark eyed reflection of herself, taunting her with the truth that no matter how much she hated the darkness inside of her, it was that same darkness which had which had given her strength and ability.

Gabrielle’s journey in this episode had begun with her picking up a sword, in an attempt to help Xena out when they were attacked by a group of thugs and a warning from Xena that she shouldn’t pick up such a weapon if she wasn’t prepared to use it. And through the course of her trials, Gabrielle had to come close enough to the idea of taking another life to be able to see how frightening and horrible the concept seemed to her.

Now, what does all this have to do with Damages, you ask? There is this scene at the end of Dreamworker.

Likewise, the dog collar Patty tosses into the water at the end of the pilot still sits under the surface. The actions which brought it there having changed her, even if she was the only one who understood it. And when the two of them are standing out on the pier together in the end, the water around them is symbolically filled with all things which had passed between them since they met. It looked the same on the surface, but the reality was that everything had changed.

And now with the news that we’ll be getting not just one but two more seasons, I look forward very much to seeing what the consequences of those changes will be.