Everyone
knows that a particularly-compelling antagonist can become a fan favorite on a
show or in a movie, and that definitely holds true for Wu Assassins. While I do enjoy the series as a whole, the character
of Uncle Six tops my list of reasons to watch (Uncle Six-related spoilers.)
I won’t
lie: the setup of all this is both predictable and a little hokey. I mean, Kai,
our would-be mythic hero and thoroughly decent guy, is the surrogate son of the
neighborhood crime lord, who also happens to be one of the five deadly Wu he’s
tasked with killing in order to save the world? We’ve all heard variations on
that song before. We’re also no strangers to frenemy narratives, featuring
charismatic villains who, partway through the story, start aligning themselves
with the heroes to varying degrees. The bones of Uncle Six are nothing we
haven’t seen before.
But as a
character, he’s proof that storytelling doesn’t have to be hindered by the fact
that we hear the same stories over and over again. The recipe is the same, but
it’s all about the technique in bringing it to bear. From his introductory
scene, in which he stands around in an impeccable suit giving a history lesson
on the first kingpin of Chinatown to someone he’s about to kill, I could tell
that Uncle Six was going to be executed superbly. He carries himself with an
effortless cool, like someone with swagger but also like someone who knows he’s
holding all the cards at any given moment. He’s mysterious enough that you can
never quite tell if he’s going to shoot you (or burn you with his Fire Wu
magic, since that’s also an option for him,) grant you a one-time reprieve, or
even risk his life for your sake.
From the
start, Uncle Six is more of an antagonist than a villain. Even though he’s both
a gangster and a Wu, he never intentionally positions himself against Kai. From
a personal standpoint, he repeatedly tries to bankroll Kai’s cooking career,
though Kai keeps turning down his dirty money on principle, and while he has a
cosmic-enemies thing going on with the Wu Assassin, he doesn’t realize at first
that the assassin is Kai. Once he does, that makes all the difference, and you
quickly understand that there are very few lengths Uncle Six won’t go to on Kai’s behalf.
This is a
smart tack for the show to take. Fan-favorite villains can be tricky to
maintain, because the audience wants to keep them around, but you can reach a
point where it stretches credibility that the hero doesn’t just take them out once
and all. Here, the unofficial family ties makes that complicated for Kai – even
when he dislikes and distrusts Uncle Six, he doesn’t want to murder the guy as
part of an ancient ritual – but as in most cases, the best option is to work on
at least quasi-redeeming your baddie. But that can be tough too, because you
risk declawing them and losing what made people love them in the first place. Wu Assassins strikes just the right note
with Uncle Six’s turnaround. More shade is given to aspects of his past to
better inform how he got where he is, and working with the good guys doesn’t
make him any less cool or badass. For evidence, look no further than the
fabulous “diner scene,” where Uncle Six schools a bunch of hostile rubes on the
Chinese Exclusion Act before throwing down hard. We may have seen his basic
story a hundred times before, but we’ve never seen it told in precisely this
way.
