Thursday, December 15, 2022

A Little TLC(w): The Duke of Mount Deer: Season 1, Episode 17 (1984)

*Episode premise spoilers, which involves a twist from episode 16.*

I’ll be honest: whenever a new big group of people are introduced on The Duke of Mount Deer, it takes me a few episodes to sort through them in my head—not necessarily the individual characters themselves, but where they fit in the grand scheme of sects, orders, and rivalries. We’ve spent the last few episodes meeting the Devine Dragon sect by degrees, and this one takes us deeper into their world.

Last week, we learned that Fong Yee sold out Wai Siu-bo to the Devine Dragon Sect in the hopes of protecting herself and Princess Muk. She already immediately had a crisis of conscience about it and tried to make it right, but now all of them, including Sheung Yee, are being held on the Dragons’ island. As usual, the only way for Siu-bo to stay alive is to lie as furiously as he can. This time around, it’s because an earlier lie he come back to bite him: that he’s the only one who can read an ancient inscription revealing the location of all the coveted sutras.

Okay, so I had to do some mental backtracking here. When they first popped up, I thought the Devine Dragons were warriors sent by the empress dowager to capture and/or kill Wai Siu-bo on his secret mission for the emperor. Last week, when a few Dragons mentioned their fear of angering “Lady,” I assumed they were talking about the empress dowager. But it appears they’re a separate group that also wants the sutras, and that seems to be their main motivation for going after Siu-bo. At first, they were just following the same trail as him, but now, thanks to his no-longer-expedient lie, they’re holding him for information they think he has.

And they’re quite the bunch. Lady isn’t the empress dowager, but she appears to be cut from a similar cloth: the beautiful yet ruthless noblewoman whose machinations run deeper than they appear at the start. Upon seeing her, Wai Siu-bo exclaims, “She’s prettier than my wives!”, but it doesn’t take him long to realize that her beauty can be hypnotic and she knows it. Lady and her husband Master, at the head of the Devine Dragon sect, seem somewhere between crime lords and cult leaders. Their acolytes take a quasi-worshipful stance towards them, even as they greatly fear disappointing them. Oh, and they’re big fans of dosing their acolytes with a slow-acting poison and then using the promise of the antidote to keep them in line.

Once again, Wai Siu-bo needs to call on all his BSing prowess. It’s not the first time a lie has gotten him into more trouble than he had to start with, and he alternates between panicking in private and going into showman mode in public. It’s particularly troublesome that, in this instance, his bluff involves being able to read something that he most definitely can’t read. His only potential saving grace is that it’s an obscure script that no one can decipher, and it’s a ton of fun to watch him make a big production out of translating the inscription with an heir of, “Yes, this is totally how people look when they read things. Hey, everybody, watch me read!”

And as always, there are some physical bits here. There’s a nice fight scene at the start of the episode that involves Wai Siu-bo and all three of his “wives” tied to one another like a chain gang. And I really like this moment where Siu-bo struggles to navigate the Devin Dragons’ reverence to Master and Lady, going in for applause when everyone else kneels and then bobbing his knees as he debates whether he should kneel too. In an odd way, it’s a scene where Wai Siu-bo looks completely awkward and yet still projects confidence.  I’m not sure how he does it, but it’s a neat trick Tony Leung Chiu-wai pulls off.

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