*Spoilers for episode 38.*
It’s the penultimate episode of the series, and all the trouble Wai Siu-bo has made is coming home to roost! I’m sure he’ll find a way to resolve it somehow, but for now, he’s really going through it. Although some of the situations Siu-bo gets himself into can be ridiculous, the emotions are always honest when it really counts—that’s something I appreciate about the series.
Wai Siu-bo is back in Beijing, where he’s more torn than ever. The emperor has captured his friend Fatso, Green Wood Lodge member and the guy who started Siu-bo on this wild journey all those episodes ago, and the emperor wants to use his execution to make Siu-bo prove his loyalty once and for all. On the other side, the Heaven and Earth Society want him to prove his loyalty to them by taking their vengeance on Cheng Hak-song, who committed a heinous crime against them—except the emperor has made Siu-bo swear not to hurt Cheng. What’s a clever fool to do?
We get scenes with lots of characters here—the emperor, Heaven and Earth Society, the wives, Cheng and his family—but pretty much everything is revolving around Wai Siu-bo. As such, I don’t have a lot to say about the other characters today. Cheng remains despicable and generally The Worst, and Or is used in a plot against him. Both the emperor and the Heaven and Earth Society are demanding Siu-bo’s allegiance even as they mistrust him. The emperor threatens him with castration, suggesting that he “be a real eunuch” in exchange for Siu-bo’s pleas to grant clemency to Fatso. Yep, once again, the emperor’s showing himself to be a true friend (eyeroll.) I swear, his entitlement and pettiness in his friendship with a peasant is one of the realest things about this show.
Tony Leung Chiu-wai is great here. Wai Siu-bo is boxed in on all sides and running out of options, and while he’s certainly scared and angry in reaction to his circumstances, it goes deeper than that. He’s hurt. He may be duplicitous, and he’s been playing every side since the beginning, but for all his dishonesty, he’s not actually disloyal. If anything, he often cares too deeply for his friends, which gets him into trouble when those friends are mortal enemies with one another.
He spends a lot of this episode freaking out: pleading with former friends who believe the worst of him, snapping at his wives when he feels like they aren’t helping him enough with his predicament, and wracking his brain as he tries to figure out how on earth to get out of this one. Within all that tumult, he has his resolute moments, such as his declaration, “Death is better than failing a friend,” but for most of the episode, he’s roiling with his various dilemmas.
One episode to go! How’s he going to pull it off?
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