*Spoilers for episode 19.*
We’ve officially reached the halfway point in the series—in A Little TLC(w) terms, the second half will be longer, since it took so long for Tony Leung Chiu-wai to make his first appearance. This episode continues the ongoing Everyone Against Ming storyline while also providing some significant backstory to a decades-long conflict.
In the last episode, the Five Wanderers were attacked by a Shaolin monk, who stole secretly into their stronghold and dealt all of them an intense blow. As he shares his story with them and reveals the history behind his animosity toward Ming, Zhang Wuji debates how he might help. Later on, he’s reunited with his young friend Buhui and, with the help of her servant Zhao, tries to stop the monk from doing any more damage.
One important point from the last episode is the fact that Ming fell to infighting since the mysterious disappearance of their sect leader years ago. The Five Wanderers all have a claim to leadership but no one could agree on who it should be, and without anyone to guide them, the sect is divided. Here, we learn more about what happened to Sect Leader Yang, and we see how the implications of that ripple into the present day.
Also, side note? I’m not sure if it’s just a subtitle issue or if it’s the actual words in Cantonese, but I keep getting tripped up on when “brother/sister” is used to mean actual siblings versus “sworn brother/sister.” There’s a character in this episode who was talking about his sister, and I was thinking it was a sibling relationship, and then he said he was going to kill himself if they couldn’t be together, and I thought, “Wait, hold on here….”
At the start of the episode, Zhang Wuji is in a tricky position. Last episode, Cloth Bag Monk stuffed him in a sack and tied it shut, and that’s where he is when Cheng Kun, the Shaolin monk, attacks. Here, the Five Wanderers entreat him to intervene after Chen Kun immobilizes them, and although he wants to help, he doesn’t want to hurt a Shaolin either.
It is so fantastically goofy to watch a group of warriors on opposing sides trying to be the first one to convince a guy who’s stuck in a cloth sack to help them. It’s even funnier when Zhang Wuji does involved. He literally spends the first part of a fight still stuck inside a cloth sack, so we get to see the sack glow with his martial arts power as it flies across the room like a big cloth boulder. This cracked me up so much.
Zhang Wuji spends the second half of the episode mostly in the company of Zhao. Even though he knew Buhui when she was a little girl and risked his life pretty severely to help her, it’s no surprise that he stands up for Zhao when he sees how poorly Buhui treats her. The servant spends the rest of the episode with Wuji, and they get in and out of various dire situations together. All the while, Zhao expresses her shock at how nicely Wuji treats her, given her low status. Very earnestly (‘cause my man doesn’t know any other way to be,) he tells her, “We are all human and shouldn’t be classed.”
Okay, so I know that in the last Leung series I watched from the 1980s, he played a character who wound up accumulating seven wives. Zhang Wuji is certainly no Wai Siu-bo, but while we’ve definitely seen him dealing with romantic feelings, I find it interesting that we’ve seen him paired with quite a few different beautiful young women as screen partners in less than ten episodes. I like that we see him treat these women with care and kindness regardless of whether or not it’s apparent that he’s into them (I mean, maybe he is—I’m not the best judge of that sort of thing.) For instance, he was plainly smitten with Zhu Jiuzhen, and I haven’t seen any of those indicators yet for Zhao, but that has no bearing on the respect and regard he shows for her. I appreciate that.
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