The thread is open.
Later I’ll open threads for the previous episodes but I’m opening this one right now because I think @ibisfeather and @monmour will like discussing the angsty moments of Episode 31.
I’m sure if @agdr03 was watching this show, she’ll love it too.
Let’s enjoy the show.
Spoilers.
For Episode 31
1. When Mo Xiu Yao (MXY) burned the paper wrappings of the sweet treats (honeycakes?) Ye Li (YL) gave him, I thought it was fitting way to sever all their ugly past connections. Just burn it all!! It parallels the time when YL burned the hate letters and hate plaques nailed to the family mansion that MXY kept from his brother’s wrongful trial.
But…
I like the symmetry of MXY visiting YL’s bedchamber to gift her with her favorite bonbons and putting them in her candy jar one by one because she wasn’t to be found. Oooh. I love how his action circled back to the theme of food cravings as a language of romance.
2. I thought YL’s senior brother’s rage when he learned that MXY had driven YL away was restrained. He just grabbed MXY’s shirt; I would have punched him.
3. His hair turned grey from extreme distress. Correct me if I’m wrong but I’ve never seen that done before in cdramas. I thought it was epic. Ha! I’m sure future screenwriters will copycat that.
I’ll continue this later. I’ve a city to explore now. Toodles!
Remember now: Before spoiling, note the episode you’re about to discuss.
The first time I saw the hair turning grey was in k-drama Scarlet Heart where the queen’s hair turns white after the death of her husband. Will come back and check out the other stuff later.
30-31
I am about to start 31 (was that about 30 combined, pcml?)
Just a general comment of mine as an offering to the thread gods, brought over from the mdl comment thread.
I am incredibly impressed by Cheng Lei’s acting. He had to carry the emotional ball in so many scenes so many times in the earlier episodes and he did a lot of it with his eyes. I was able to supply imaginary internal monologues when I watched him without effort.
BaiLu’s character in the early episodes was generally frozen and mysterious. in between sudden bouts of reversion to an unexplained vulnerability. Now we find out she is severely traumatized. The husband didnt notice at first because she was also so monumentally and strangely competent at her ‘missions’.
And he was such an emotional mess to begin with. Let’s not forget he was being terrorized and flogged in some grotesque exaggeration of ‘taking responsibility’ by a tick-like embedded minion of the Marquis accompanied by private bullyboys; that his sister-in-law, who should have been protecting her son and brother-in-law as the household madam, had spiraled into near suicidal depression three years earlier and never emerged.
This comment was, in a slightly shorter form, sparked by the usual lively wailing and moaning about the leads by the mdl hordes. and the corresponding brave voices of sense who stand up for literary and dramatic truth. I have a sneaking fondness for them all, since between adhd and slow mental digestion processes, a spark to get me going is always welcome.
About the bonbon scene — I thought CL’s take on being dead-drunk and rolling about was absolute masterclass.
Oh, I am at 32. The breakup in 31 was so painful I have lost my mind. That link between 30 and 31 was seamless.
I wish @WE was interested in the plotting of the 45-minute cdrama episode!
I need him to demystify the hocus pocus!
ep32
opening scenes — so haunting ands dreary even before we open the Academy doors.
The opening of which, by the way, has been thoroughly spoiled by the teasers.
But not the towering forests of bamboo (finally recalling the open ing scenes of episode 1!) the greens and greys. The music. That endless staircase infested with crows — who have been hanging around in thecapital following every step of Ye Li. Now we will find out why.
The desperate haste of Mo Xiu Yao and his head guy, A Jin (Liu Xing Chen, one of those youngsters cdrama puts on display). We do not know if the senior brother Li Fei Bai (Shawn Zhang) told Yao everything — he must have?
The obliviousness of the royal eunuch. I have been asking all along — who knows in the capital about what happened here? Does the head eunuch know? I think the Dowager regent knows. But how does she?
ep32
That white jade hairpin as they embrace. Is that the half of the token remounted? The one she split (or threw away?) with Han Ming Xi (Lin Mu Ran) the wayward younger brother of the head of Tianyi Pavilion, an ally of the hidden Rebel Prince.
ep 32
Mad as a hatter. Mad as the March Hare.
Our heroine has lost her mind, oh no, lost her mind six/seven years ago.
Her husband looks at her in that dusty ruin where she spent those last three or four years at Li Mountain completely alone, hallucinating like crazy — he looks at her and he just weeps.
Does anyone know their Chinese opera? there must be several precedents. Somehow something from Japanese Noh is tickling the back of my mind.
ep32
the scene on the high mountain viewing platform, where she has set table for the dozen deceased members of the Academy. He participates in her formal introduction of him to empty plates and stilled spoons.
It works by extension. She would normally have introduced him to their ancestral tablets, and He would have a few words to say to them as well. Which he does properly, thanking them for their help to him in training her and for taking care of her so well. He also repeats his promises to take care of her just as he would have during a marriage ceremony (which, remember they did not have!).
And it is so eerie. Both lovely in its formality and sad, her illness is sad. What are the traditions here which so perfectly support this. The Liao Zhai tales seem too bloody.
Thanks, @angelwingssf.
According to google,
“Stress physically damages the stem cells that give your hair its pigment. When you are stressed, your body’s “fight-or-flight” response releases the chemical norepinephrine into hair follicles. This forces pigment-producing stem cells to rapidly mature and migrate away, depleting the follicle so that new hair grows out grey.”
Although biologically, it’s impossible for hair to turn grey overnight, I like the message of this trope. For every minute that Ye Li is gone, Mo Xiu Yao ages years. Although his grievances were understandable, it’s undeniable that he did a terrible thing to her.
To me, his grey hair is reminiscent of that old Christian tradition of monks and saints to wear a hairshirt. Although the abrasive hairshirt is worn as an undergarment and thus, not visible to others, it constantly reminds the wearer of his guilt, repentance and desire for atonement.
Same outcome with the MXY’s white hair. Unlike the hairshirt, it’s an outward and very much visible reminder of his sorrow for hurting Ye Li. Everybody who sees the bizarre transformation in his appearance is bewildered and wonders what’s wrong with him. But like the hairshirt, it’s his body that bears his penitence.
Ep33
Monmor is still back in the teens and resolutely not reading this, so I will be short.
If ChengLei and BaiLu both receive awards it will probably be for this episode. ChengLei’s acting has been stupendous. BaiLu portrayed a woman truncated by her repressed trauma up until now, so this was her first real outing and it was sweet.
Lots-of-tears warning: episodes 29-33
Ep33
I see I didnt say what my favorite part was.
Our couple are lying in their hard and rickety bed amidst the ruin of LiMountain Academy.
Prince Yao has just returned from exploring on his own across the strange bridge with the see-no-evil monkey statue. He has found the ghoulish cemetary where YeLi all by her teenage self, buried everyone she knew, everyone whom she loved and who loved her, after they all died (of the plague but that is his deduction).
So he knows what she went through, what he had suspected.
He lies down next to her curls up so that his face is inches away from hers, and begins to talk about fear of death.
It is really lovely.
Woo-Hoo! MM has caught up. The debate is on over the divorce letter. It has been going on for days in the online world but now we bring it to BOD.
My take is, Yao’s brain is scrambled eggs. He is so in love that he divorced her, went to work and didnt want to come home to face her. What did he think, she would stay put? He wasnt thinking at all.
Then when he finally shows up dead drunk he brings the woman he has divorced some take out food. Well then.
MM says all korean actors must take a special drunk acting lesson when they start out. Give ChengLei, oops real names now, Yang Hui Xiang, top of the class.
I did catch up! Episode 33 was so lyrical.
@IF. I also particularly noted that scene when they are so close and the camera is so close to the two of their faces.
ep34
This sequence, visuals talking.
At the burial ground in the past.
Her face.
The array of grave markers which she has erected.
Then a perfect echo of those markers (spacing) in the peaks of the mountains nearby from a moderate distance, rising out of the mist.
Then the grass and bamboo at ground level with ants busy at transporting large dry pieces of stuff. some seconds there.
Her face again.
@MM, This is when words fail me and I am happy to feel assured that friends here will use full sentences to parse what to me is only seen, more than thought. involved.
The repeated moments of his doing something for her. Nothing Grand. Just cooking or chopping wood or nailing something. A recurring rhythmic motif during the episode. The spider webs everywhere
His dawning realization that she had been planning his treatment and even constructing a wheelchair for him
Oh I was thinking you were talking about episode 33. Sounds like 34 continues similarly.
This episode is also elegiac in it’s mourning of the dead and of a vanished way of life. There is consolation in the scene we talked about where the two of them are encircled in bed.
I am not sure if this is appropriate for this forum but it turned into a comment way too long and abstract for the comment page of FJ.
Ep38
beginning
The discussion between the dowager and YeLi late at night after the D had been frightened by ?was it a crow? surely not a bat?
I havent heard such an overtly political discussion of the morality of governance in a long time.
It is a very wide-ranging discussion and started off to be the usual political speech required by the censors, that a governments benevolent actions are the best merit: reforming taxation, reigning in a corrupt bureaucracy, establishing an organized response to natural disasters which provides relief from a centralized govt agency. These are always slipping away due to human frailty and greed and must constantly be reformed so govt also has the task of policing itself.
But then the discussion goes in the direction of the wisdom of YeLi’s Grandfather, Head of the Academy and Teacher of the Dowager.
We have been waiting to blame the Dowager thoroughly. Dd the Dowager know that she starved the Mountain of food and medicine, thereby contributing partly to the tragedy?
And YeLi centers the discussion not around public action per se, but on the personal actions in the present based on a blend of public and personal reflection on the merits and blame accorded to each person, but as topics divorced from each other.
So the discussion veers away from official self-justifications of the CCP into a discussion which is decidedly not about justice. Not about balancing out merits against blame for bad actions. It is more about how the story is told — in full context all actions are about our precious human lives and how to live them.
Another comment or two…
I think the later episodes look to be very well-plotted. I am enjoying them. the leap into politics alienates the never-die romantics among the viewers. But the script is great.
ep37
excellent exposition… starting with life on the street and the rumors, YeLi’s intuitions about them, [[the return of the Dowager and YeLi being taken hostage. Then only then do we go to the army camp and learn of Yao’s feint and disposition of the troops. VERY well-done.
I dislike the opposite choice and glad the scriptwriter avoided it — if we had known of Yao’s cleverness to begin with, annoyance and fear at the situation at home would have been annoying because we already knew the truth. As it is of course we were stalwart and loyal but the uncertainty holds our interest now instead of being annoying.
YeLi being taken into the palace in the most genteel way as a hostage is a brilliant stroke of the writer. Wait until you hear the letter she wrote to Yao.
YeLi is a genius. Not only is the letter masterfully poetic, it also conveyed the political situation completely. Love it.