At this point, we are just holding our breath, watching Xu Yan walk the narrowest of tightropes. She's been so good at keeping her balance for so long, but then along comes a creep like ZZY, scraping a knife against the rope.At this point, it is pretty clear that Hao Ming knows far more about her than he is letting on - and has been doing things to protect her. But the conversation where he prevents her from opening up and confessing the truth to him makes it seem more likely that HE has his own secrets he doesn't want to share.
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Good that Yun Xiang did indeed manage to capture Qi TianFeng without bloodshed, per his promise to Shu YaNan. However, the interrogation of Qi was an exercise in dissembling by the latter. If you paid attention closely, Qi didn't reveal anything about the Luo family massacre that Yun Xiang didn't already know. He repeated already known facts and simply claimed he was a weak young itinerant who had nothing to do with it. He threw Tang out as the main villain, but Yun already knew Tang was involved. So this was clearly just a ploy by Qi to get Yun to take down Tang, since Qi is mad at Tang for paying off the pirate Guan. So none of that provided real new information to Yun. The only 'new' info was implication of a connection between Tang and the Yuntai's rival sect. Elsewhere in the episode, more minutes were wasted on Su Mingyu's pathetic can't-seem-to-ever-grow-up subplot. It's really painful to watch the writers portray a character as stupid and pathetic as they are making MingYu out to be.
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This episode really filled in a lot of background info on Xu Yan and in particular painted a deeper picture of her relationship with her grandmother who is basically the single one person in her life who she fully trusts and loves. This brings on tears in a few scenes and, as usual, when Lusi starts to cry ... you can't help but cry with her.
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This series has been very tightly scripted up to this point so this episode was a big disappointment . The relay station battle had so many plot holes and contrivances that it was just not believable. First, the dragging of the "Su finally grows up to face the brutal realities of the martial world" sub-plot consumed a lot of boring minutes. I'll excuse that since most of this series Su has acted with the maturity of a 12 year old so maybe his behavior was realistic ... for a 12 year old. But other plot holes such as the fact that while they had numerous wounded who should have still bee staying in the building, magically at the key moment, no one was in the building and all stupidly hyper-focused on the front-gate with plot-induced tunnel-vision, and just the idiotic way they were trying to brace the gate and no one going up on the wall to take shots with arrows ... it all just felt stupid. It's fine that the bad guys won if that is what the plot requires, but the implementation of the plot here was just poorly written. A real disappointment after all the well-written episodes up to now.
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Her father is just horrible. To neglect the health of your child with a heart defect? And then later to throw away her chance at college? The cost of healthcare and college isn't the real reason since China has universal healthcare and also various financial aid means for people to pay for college - which can be MUCH cheaper than in the US. He used 'being poor' as an excuse to justify his brutal neglect. As a father, I just wanted to slap him and shake him. So hard to watch bad parenting.And man, what is it about Lu Si's acting? When she cries, I cry. How can anyone watch her cry and not feel like crying? Every single time in every show. She's amazing at projecting her character's emotions into the viewer.Her role in this show starts off very difficult - she has had to build audience empathy for a character who is scheming and deceptive and only now providing the background motivation for why she wants to wipe away her past and build a fake one. Unfortunately, it all feels very fragile, like a house of cards. The agave lifecycle as metaphor is a sad foreshadow.
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I'm really impressed with how tightly scripted and produced this show has been, at least so far through the first 7 episodes. They have avoided any lazy plot contrivances so far and every episode has made real plot progress. No dragging out of things to fill time. The action / fight sequences have been well choreographed and well paced. The cinematography, costumes and sets have been beautiful, resulting in some great visuals. And the acting is first rate - so many well-experienced actors in this cast. The nuances of the plot are being revealed very carefully. We get real information each episode yet the ultimate questions are still carefully buried. Hopefully this level of quality will continue throughout the rest of the series.
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Loved the bedside scene with Zuo Qing Ci and Su Yun Luo. This felt like the first, fully honest conversation from ZQC to SYL since maybe the first couple of episodes. So much lying and deception for so long. 'Could really feel the weight of regret in his words as he was crying in her lap, afraid of the death that is finally looming so close. And SYL's face, repeatedly squashing flashes of empathic despair to only show instead love and support. Great performances in that scene.And then, both Sima Lang and Shen Man Qing, making my eyes water over a damn jug of wine!I hope at least one of our two remaining couples can have some sort of happy ending.
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Ugh. That was painful. So sad and tragic. Kinda saw it coming the moment Chang Ge got captured.but it still was a gut punch. Poor Chang Ge and Jiang'Er. So sweet and both always trying to do the write thing. The writers are pretty brutal in this show and showed them no mercy. They had better truly hold Zhu Yan accountable for his crimes in the end. If they 'resolve' him by simply having him, "turn back to the good side", I'll be pretty pissed. It would be a total cop-out to pretend that his "dark side" is some other person. Both sides are part of the same, broken, psychotic individual and that individual needs to be held accountable for mass murder.
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ZQC finally gets a dose of, "Su Yun Luo has a mind of her own and can make choices that you can't control." Looks visibly upset at the realization. Will he finally learn what it means to love someone instead of control them? His character, as written, has steadily become one of the most un-likable ML characters I've seen in an asian drama for a while. His inability to trust even those who love him, his constant deceit of those that love him, his fatalism and penchant for self-harm do not make him a very sympathetic character. This series is still good because there are multiple interesting characters - indeed, HIS character is interesting even if not likable. But if the intent is to restore him to being a likable, sympathetic character before he dies, there are only a handful of episodes left.The contrast between ZQC's destructive fatalism and the way Jiang'Er approaches HER own impending doom with a determination to be happy with her loved one in whatever time she has left is pretty stark.
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Despite the flaws in ZQC plan that the writers have glossed over, this was still a good episode with a lot of movement on multiple plot threads. Kinda sad just how so many characters are in states of real despair at this point. Shen Man Qing is obviously emotionally crushed and uncertain of her life given both the forced marriage and the realizations about Master Jin Xu being responsible for the murder of her parents. Chang Ge is in a similar state of having his faith in his Master upturned. At least both of them have potential emotional life-rafts to cling to in Sima Lang and Jiang'Er, respectively. Though Jiang'Er herself has lost her father and 'uncle', so also has been hit hard with trauma. And obviously, Su Yun Luo got emotionally run over by a truck in the last episode.
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I know that there will be, "more to the story", and the writers will rebuild sympathy for ZQC, but it's hard to have any at this point because the scheme he has adopted seems so absurdly unnecessary - and in particular, unnecessarily cruel to Su Yun Luo - in order to accomplish his goals. He's exhibiting an arrogance in the way he's USING her instead of collaborating WITH her to accomplish the same goals that basically makes him an unlikeable piece of crap. The fact is, poisoning SYL and forcing Su Xuan to transfer the poison to himself was ultimately meaningless, since Su Xuan sacrificed himself to Jin Xu's blade. All that could have taken place _without_ ZQC acting like a total traitor and manipulating and hurting her so badly. Now, sure, I'm expecting he has some scheme to save Su Xuan, possibly due to some magic aspect of the transferred poison or whatever. But again, that probably _could_ have been done without deceiving and harming the person who loves him most in the world. Just stupid. ZQC acts like he's lost everything with his own impending death and the death of his father and behaves spitefully. But he's still has his sister and he still _could_ have had SYL for the remainder of his life. Meanwhile, because of ZQC's schemes, SYL truly at this point has lost everything. Her master - who she worked relentlessly for 10 years to save, is now dead and of course, she's lost ZQC, the man she wanted to love but has now done, to her perspective, truly despicable things. And oh, the only romantic alternative, the weak-minded pathetic Zhu Yan, has let himself turn all dark-side murderous psychopath. SYL has lost everything at this point of the story.
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At this point, the writers are really yanking us around to make us not like the ML. Because his behavior is pretty bad and not at all likable at this point. He also doesn't really seem all that 'clever' as he is supposed to be, because he's making decisions that seem emotionally immature and stupid. His goals could have been achieved with better decisions that don't put him at odds with the ones he loves. The path the writers have him on seems stupid, full of self-pity and self-destruction.For that matter, so do the paths that both Zhu Yan and WSY are on. The former just giving in to his base desires for revenge and the latter for some strange reason continuing to NOT tell Shen Man Qing the truth about who killed her parents.At this point in the story, the men are pretty much jerks. I feel terrible for both Shen Man Qing and Su Yun Luo. And to a lesser extent, for Jiang 'er. At least Chang Ge still seems like and upright guy, but why on earth did he go BACK to the stupid, obviously corrupt Zhengyang Sect? He should have just stayed with her at Wuer Fortress.
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So, Zuo Qing Ci is overthinking and trying to be too clever or perhaps too fatalistic and spiteful. Why reveal what you know to Jin Xu and force yourself into opposition to Su Xuan (and Su Yun Luo)? That seems like plot-contrived stupidity in order to create unnecessary drama. A better 'scheme' on his part would have been to contrive some sort of straightforward 'rescue' of Chang Ge from the Cold Cave as if he's just a friend rescuing a friend. In fact, that could have been done in coordination with ZQC's existing underworld allies.But with the approach he's taking he will naturally end up at odds with Su Yun Luo, which seems like the sort of contrived dramatic tension that the writers want to create at this point in the story.
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Sigh... The pettiness of Zuo Qing Ci is getting old. Sure, it's "admirable" that he's willing to sacrifice himself to save Su Yun Luo's master. But then he proceeds to continue to act petty about it. The number of times he has passive aggressively thrown "you must be happy that your Master is okay" at her is just childish and spiteful. Is he ever going to actually grow up in this series? Are they going to carry this immature behavior all the way to the end of the series? Maybe I'm grumpy because so many of the c-dramas I've seen lately have leaned heavily into the 'one person is slowly dying of poison and keeps it a secret from the other' trope. Kinda sick of poison as a plot device.Also - why are the 'good guys' keeping both SMQ and Chang Ge in the dark about all the bad things their Master, Jin Xu has done? Why send them back to that corrupt sect? It makes no sense.
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This was almost a perfect episode, except for the obvious plot manipulation of having Shen Man Qing be unconscious during the parts where of the Wuer Fortress confrontation where Jin Xu revealed his truly despicable nature. That was pretty obviously contrived so as to further the dramatic obstacles between her and Wen Si Yuan. Felt kinda cheap. Everything else in this episode was good (even if the outcomes weren't all great for the good guys).
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