*Episode premise spoilers.*
Ooh, this is a good one. Things are really heating up, and Wai Siu-bo has his feet to the fire. I want to stress again that just stating the premise of the episode will involve a major spoiler. Consider yourself warned.
Wai Siu-bo has just made a devastating discovery: the emperor knows all about his involvement with the Ming loyalists in the Heaven and Earth Society. As the emperor toys with whether to execute him outright, spare him, or use him to take out the rebels, Siu-bo reels from the betrayal his friend feels towards him and wonders how on earth he’s going to get out of this one.
This is very much an All about Wai Siu-bo episode, and it’s pretty compelling. Even the scenes that don’t have Siu-bo in them are still about him, as other characters discuss, “How do you solve a problem like Wai Siu-bo?” (only with less whimsical terms than “flibbertijibbit.”)
We’ll start with the confrontation with the emperor, which comes in hard. Wai Siu-bo has always known that the emperor’s love isn’t unconditional, but the swiftness with which the monarch turns venomous is hard to take, even as it’s understandable—really, all the emperor knows is that Siu-bo has been working with the rebels who are trying to overthrow him. Maybe some of his threats, like, “One lie and I will chop you into pieces,” are because he feels hurt at this apparent betrayal.
We of course know that Wai Siu-bo has basically stumbled into all these various alliances, often concocting initial allegiance to save his own skin and then getting invested in people he meets within these groups. Even though these entanglements have brought him some advantages (and wives!), they also mean he’s had to juggle all of these conflicting alliances. As he tries to explain to the emperor, “Your Majesty, you don’t know the difficult position I am in. I have to persuade you not to kill them. I have to persuade them not to assassinate you. I just want to be a man of loyalty.”
Tony Leung Chiu-wai really brings it with the face acting here. Wai Siu-bo is terrified of what the emperor will do to him, but he’s also heartbroken that his friend now sees him as nothing but a traitor. Even as he flails around for a way to wriggle out of the ruler’s retribution, he also wracks his brain for a way to convince the emperor that he would never hurt him. The scene has the intensity of a complicated breakup, and while Siu-bo has to turn his attention afterwards to his survival, the emperor has too much of a “this is personal” attitude for Siu-bo to now mean nothing to him.
A good chunk of the episode sees Wai Siu-bo placed under house arrest for his own “protection” from assassins in the vicinity, which is similar to what the emperor pulled with the empress dowager in earlier episodes. This means that Siu-bo is trapped and surrounded, and it takes a lot of cunning—and some darker actions than we usually see from him—to try and get out.
It's not all doom and gloom, though. There are some fun scenes with Princess Kin-ning (the emperor’s sister,) who has no sense of proportion when it comes to her wishes vs. Wai Siu-bo’s current predicament. And there’s one scene where Siu-bo stretches his propensity for bullshit so far, it makes my head spin. I laughed out loud when he’s with the Devine Dragon master and tries to spin having sent soldiers to destroy the Devine Dragons as a good thing, confidently proclaiming, “Out with the old, in with the new!” Absolutely no shame—I love it.
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