*Spoilers from episode 29.*
We’ve hit the three-quarter mark of the series, and there’s a lot going on here. I won’t get into the big spoilers from today’s episode, but big things have been happening!
When we got Granny Golden Flower’s backstory in the last episode, we learned that she’s originally from the Persian wing of Ming Sect. She was meant to be their “Holy Girl,” their leader, but she’s been on the run from them for years. They’ve just caught up with her, and they don’t take her giving up her vows lightly. Xie Xun urges Zhang Wuji and the others to help her. It leads to a major revelation, a huge betrayal, and a serious shakeup in the love polygon race.
The recontextualization of Granny Golden Flower is kind of wild. She’s been one of the most insidious players in the game, and it’s interesting to see our heroes rally around her. As she becomes more sympathetic, I don’t have much to say about the new antagonists yet. I’m waiting to see what more we may learn about them. When our heroes are backed into a corner, shoutout to Zhao Min for saying, “But it’s nice that we can die together.”
I won’t get into the details of it, but the competition for Zhang Wuji’s heart becomes a whole different ballgame. Players have been taken off the board in different ways. At the moment, it may seem like there’s only one clear choice (Xie Xun certainly thinks so,) but I don’t know if I’m ready to count all the others out yet.
We get more of Zhang Wuji acquiring new martial arts skills in seconds, complete with supremely ‘80s special effects, so that’s fun. There’s a scene where he learns a lost fragment of a legendary movie by studying the imprint on the face of a man who got smacked with the Sacred Fire Tablet—love it, no notes!
And of course, Zhang Wuji is trying to hold everything together, which is easier said than done when he’s surrounded by four different women who have feelings for him, helping someone who’s caused a lot of pain and death, and still reckoning with seeing his godfather again for the first time in over a decade. In short, he’s being pulled in a lot of different directions, and although he does all he can to keep everyone safe, Team Wuji takes a hard hit in this episode.
I want to point out a couple line readings from Tony Leung Chiu-wai that I really liked today. I love Zhang Wuji’s reaction to one of the women irrevocably changing her life for his sake, somehow both gentle and urgent as he tells her, “You shouldn’t have done that. We can fight to the bitter end.” And when Xie Xun tries to suss out his feelings about the current last woman in the running for the love polygon, I like how he states this as a complete matter of objective fact: “Of course she is beautiful. If she is not considered beautiful, there will be no beautiful women in the world.”
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