Conjuring up memories of individual Crossbow episodes...
- The one where Gessler invents a "lie detector" (he calls it a "truth revealer"), which is actually just a torture device used to wring confessions out of people. Tell ends up strapped to the thing, but his willpower wins out and he eventually escapes it and still kicks Gessler's butt.
- One with a race of "trolls," actually an offshoot of humanity adapted to living underground.
- An episode with a sort of giant robot automaton, basically an oversized clockwork knight.
- A cool murder mystery in a monastery; Tell uses some quick thinking and a flute to save his life from a poison gas attack.
- Tell eventually meets up with his long-lost son, who becomes a co-star of the show (I never liked the character; he was kind of a whiner. I much preferred the earlier episodes where Tell was solo).
- There was one cool fight scene between Tell and Gessler around some sort of clockwork fighting mechanism (used to train warriors? - I forget) that spouts blades all over the place.
That was the thing I liked best about the series: it had excellent fight scenes. I got a little tired of Gessler almost always being the "bad guy of the week" (and naturally he escaped every week so he could menace Tell the following episode). It was also pretty "gritty," in that the living conditions were more realistic than you'd expect to see in the average period piece. The guy who played Willaim Tell was good in the role, but I can't remember his name. I do recall he had very angular facial features, though.
Johnathan