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Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 伪装者/The Disguiser.

The Disguiser is a 2015 spy drama set in Shanghai, 1940. It follows the adventures of four wealthy siblings, all of whom are to some degree engaging in coordinated espionage, subterfuge, and other general acts of sabotage against the brutal occupying Japanese force.

I need to mention the Nirvana in Fire connection up front, because yeah, if you've seen that, you've probably noticed some familiar faces already. And the comparison isn't unwarranted! The stories are completely different, but they're both character-driven, complex, subtly cheeky adventures that manage to keep that tense intrigue going throughout the narrative. Like Nirvana in Fire, the Disguiser's on the heftier side -- 48 episodes -- but they go by at an incredible clip, so that it never feels long.

I have done a rec post for this before, and I stand by everything I said there. However, I figured it deserved its own for-real rec post, so here we go with five specific reasons I think you should give it a try.

1. We're all comrades in horny jail

This is an intensely horny show, starting from -- but absolutely not stopping with -- the main quartet.

These are the four Ming siblings. Only the elder pair of them, Ming Jing and Ming Lou (both on the passenger side of the car), are blood-related to one another. Ming Tai (also in the back seat) got adopted into the family when he was young enough that Ming Jing's relationship to him is very maternal.

Meanwhile, Ah Cheng (driving) was somewhat less thoroughly adopted when he was around ten, meaning that he's always weirdly marginal when it comes to who actually counts as part of the Ming family. He's a brother, but also he's a servant. Sometimes he's in the family photos, and sometimes he's left out of them. His name is legally "Ming Cheng," but basically no one ever calls him that.

What this means is that you've got four incredibly attractive people who are all legally but mostly not genetically related to one another, keeping secrets both with and from one another, yelling at one another, running headlong into danger for one another, sleeping in one another's beds, and occasionally demanding some members of the family spank the others. Is it hot in here, or is it just them?

And it's not just that these are pretty people up in each other's business. Nearly every interpersonal interaction among all the main characters is at least background levels of horny, because of how high the stakes are. The tension running throughout the show is intense -- and of course it is, because these are spies in life-or-death situations, trying to keep their cool so they don't get killed. So many of the relationships are built on lies meant to charm and seduce their targets, which is of course going to be sexy. But when they're built on honesty, they're all the more intimate for that disclosure, because being open with someone about your real identity and allegiances is putting your entire life into their hands.

To be clear: When I say the show is horny, I don't mean that it's erotic or salacious, or that you're going to get a peep of anyone's naughty little comrade, or anything like that. This is the horniness of lingering glances and shouting matches and power imbalances and guns pointed at chests. It's a combo platter of smouldering Victorian yearning mixed with action-movie adrenaline. It's the delicious, redirected horniness you get when sex isn't on the (canonical) table, so all that fraught energy has to go somewhere.

Get to the part in Episode 6 where Ming Jing gets out the short whip. You'll be glad you did.

2. Bad, bad bitches

Some of the baddest bad guys in the show are ladies. In fact, I can't even tell you about all of them here because of spoiler reasons. There are two, however, who deserve special mention.

The first and most prominent is Wang Manchun, member of the Japanese-controlled government's intelligence service, who is one of the best antagonists I've seen in anything. Perfectly coiffed and devastatingly intelligent, she's a member of a powerful Chinese family who has chosen to work for the Japanese-controlled intelligence bureau. She can be genuinely warm and sweet, almost girlish even, when she's around someone she likes. She can also torture a dude to death without smudging her eyeliner.

Her fatal flaw is that she's so in love with Ming Lou -- and so mistakenly convinced that Ming Lou is in love with her -- that it makes her make some extremely bad decisions. When was the last time you saw the handsome gentleman be a honeypot?

I feel okay spoiling you about the fact that these two do not end up together. Ming Lou does not see the error of his ways and start returning her feelings -- which is what I was damn near certain was going to happen for almost two-thirds of the show. I was braced for the show to come in singing the praises of the redeeming power of heteronormativity! NOPE. She's crazy and she needs to go down.

(I do have some issues with how she goes down, but ... well, you'll understand when you get there.)

The other baddie, Nantian/Minamida, is a stark contrast to Wang Manchun. There is nothing delicate or femme about her. She gets given the worst hairstyle and the most unflattering outfits. The actor's features are already strong, and the way the show makes her up doesn't allow a single inch of softness to slip out. There is one point where she gets to dance with Ah Cheng, and she's painfully wooden. It'd be funny if she weren't so dangerous.

As the section chief of the Japanese forces in Shanghai, Minamida is a formidable foe. She's smart. She's mean. She's incredibly suspicious of all these smiling Chinese people who surround her, because she doesn't know which ones are legitimately sucking up to her and which are just waiting to drive a knife into her back. Just plain killing her would be easy. Killing her and getting away with it? That's what's going to need a plan.

The actor is also Japanese! In fact, they've gotten a fair number of Japanese actors to play the Japanese characters, but she's the only one who also speaks Mandarin competently and doesn't need to be overdubbed by a native speaker. She's scary and intense and kinda makes your skin crawl. It's great. She's great.

And while we're talking about bad girls, I'm also going to shout out Yu Manli in here, because while she's not a villain, she's absolutely a morally grey character -- and I love her to itty bitty bits. She's about three inches high and weighs about five pounds soaking wet, and she will murder the heck out of you. Baby girl.

3. It's queer in here

The original novel is not danmei. No boy-kissing has been censored, because there wasn't any in the first place. The author/screenwriter is a lady, but not one who dabbles in BL. This does not merit the "Censored Adaptation of a Same-Sex Work" tag on MyDramaList. Censorship didn't do anything to this one. It was never gay.

That said, the show is massively queer, in that it lauds textually the normative experience of getting married relatively young and having lots of children -- and then gives you so many characters, both heroes and villains, who don't do that.

I mean, we've got:

Adult unmarried siblings living together

A grown woman who has intentionally remained unmarried in order to manage her business and family interests

Two adult brothers, both bachelors, who basically live in one another's back pockets

In fact, plenty of people who seem to have forsaken marriage and children in favor of their various active patriotisms

"Life and death partners" who have to fake-date their way through a couple spy missions

A teenage girl sold into sex work who offers to marry the man who saves her and is politely turned down for her own good

The same teenage girl pulling a black-widow routine and using multiple other marriages as a pretense to murder dudes

A couple whose marriage is forbidden by their families, except they do not end up together

A guy who has to break up with his real girlfriend so he can pretend to be with the spy colleague he lives with

A single woman who adopts a child

Two orphaned young adult siblings who adopt two children not that much younger than they are

A heterosexual relationship between people who are functionally equals in their various underground organizations (which don't want their members having romantic relationships with anyone)

A note on that last one: There is a cishet normie love story that runs the length of the show. A lot of people dislike it; I think it's cute and fine! But no matter what you think of it, you have to note the sharp contrast between this prescriptive tale of young love and everything else that's going on around them. There's a lot of lip service paid to how their marriage and the children they will presumably have someday are the ideal, but it's certainly not the only way people live, or even live well. In fact, everybody else treats their romance a little bit like oh, thank goodness he's doing this so we don't have to.

Other aspects of heterosexuality are similarly praised in concept, but not really shown in the best light. There is a lot of filial devotion involved here, but overwhelmingly toward parents who are dead. Living parents, by and large, either are absentee or just plain fucking suck. The show even has very few married characters anywhere in its principal cast, and most marriages that even get so much as mentioned either are portrayed as scummy (because the husband sucks ass) or ended because one of the partners died. Even the very idea of marriage, while praised in theory, doesn't thrill most of the characters. At one point, when Ming Jing brings up the idea of Ah Cheng's getting married, Ah Cheng cannot extract himself from that conversation fast enough.

What this really does mean is, when it comes to heteronormative ideals, the show frequently says one thing and does another.

Do I think the show is queering things on purpose? Absolutely not. This is instead one of those situations where there's such an underlying assumption that heterosexual desire and family unit construction are universal constants ... that the show barely actually gets around to portraying those things as good.

What you get instead, then, are a lot of powerful interpersonal ties that cannot be satisfied by marriage. The most intense loyalties in the show are between people for whom heterosexual pair bonding is not a social or narrative option. Therefore, those intimacies form along different pathways, many of which fall way outside the socially acceptable parameters of marital respectability and reproductive obligation. People love one another fiercely in sometimes unconventional ways. It doesn't get much queerer than that.

I'm also going to put the phrase "the inherent eroticism of letting someone who loves you shoot you with a sniper rifle" right here and walk away. Perhaps it will intrigue you. Perhaps it will intrigue you extra to know this happens more than once.

4. Jin Dong in menswear

That's it, that's the selling point.

Okay, wait, I do have something to add: In a sea of strong performances, his is arguably the best. He absolutely nails this tone of quiet, competent exhaustion the whole way through, making his Ming Lou this perfect gentleman on the verge of collapse.

You learn (somewhat confusingly) in the very first episode that Ming Lou is an important minister for the economy under the new (Japanese-controlled) government in Shanghai -- except, no! He's actually secretly the captain (codename Viper) of the local KMT division, working to undermine the occupying Japanese forces -- except, no again! He's actually -- and this is the real one this time -- head of intel (codename Cobra) for the Shanghai CCP underground.

(I bring up the codenames because my first time through, I didn't fully realize that they were attached to his different identities, and I just thought the occasionally spotty translation couldn't agree on which English word to use for the same snake.)

Living this three-identities-deep life is taking its toll on Ming Lou, but you know what? He's also a damn professional. He comports himself in exactly the manner he's supposed to behave at all times. And Jin Dong sells it beautifully, this carefully restrained exterior that houses a passionate heart.

This to me is the reason his relationship with Ah Cheng is so precious: Ah Cheng is the only one who understands, because Ah Cheng is living the same life of nesting-doll secrets. It's easier on Ah Cheng, though, because he doesn't have to be the face of it all; he just gets to smile and do whatever his da ge tells him to. They are each tasked with taking care of the other in ways great and small. I'm not going to spoil its context, but one of the most powerful moments in the show is when Ah Cheng says matter-of-factly that he knows his life is worth less to Ming Lou than other people's are, and Ming Lou, to put it mildly, pointedly disagrees.

So yeah, this is The Ship.

If you consider their relationship entirely fraternal, theirs is an incredible dynamic of trust, dependence, vulnerability, and sacrifice. If you consider it fraternal and spicy, well, it's still all that, but also enjoy picturing them tenderly removing each other's really nice suits piece by expensive piece.

5. You gotta spy hard!

Imagine the spy media spectrum where at one end you've got James Bond and Mission: Impossible movies (sexy, glamorous, high-tech), and at the other end you've got the Rebel and John LeCarre novels (grueling, well-reserched, realistic). The Disguiser is well toward the latter end of that continuum. It's got a bit of a Hollywood gloss on the whole mechanics of spywork, but man, not much of one.

Despite what the title suggests, most of the spies in this show are exactly who they say they are. Ming Tai is the only one of the siblings who assumes temporary false identities as part of his spycraft, and even he really can't do that anymore once he's back in his native Shanghai, where he's the recognizable youngest son of a prominent family. They all have to be spies in plain sight, which is equal parts a hindrance and an asset. You've got to see Ming Jing do-you-know-who-I-am her way out of some shit. It's great.

There are some legitimately tense scenes and escapes, and I like that most of the threats are overcome by quick thinking and very good acting. The schemes that our heroes pull off work because our heroes understand what makes certain people tick, and other people can't pull that shit on our heroes because our heroes have one another. It's smart spywork that stops short of being grandiose. Even the big plans that involve several steps rely less on supernatural feats of timing, and more on just trusting human nature.

The show is definitely spinning a propaganda yarn about how the noble Communists saved the day during the '40s, and in doing so it takes some pretty entertaining liberties with history. Even so, the particulars of the political philosophies are absolutely secondary to the conflict. You're never going to get a scene where two guys excitedly detail just how much Mao rules. At best there's some blah-blah about freedom and love of country that could be transposed onto any nationalist ideology without a lot of work. If you asked me, based only on information provided by this show, to explain the difference between the KMT and the CCP, my main answer would be, one group uses a code name that's one kind of snake, while the other uses a code name that's a different kind of snake.

And honestly, it's kind of nice. All you really need to know is that the Communists are cool, the KMT are okay but definitely less cool, and the Japanese and anyone who works with them fucking suck. I can do that! I grew up in a sports-watching family. I'm used to being sat down in front of the television and told, we want the guys in the blue uniforms to beat the guys in the white uniforms. No sweat.

The plot does fall down more than a little bit in the final act, due to a combination of intentional obfuscation on the drama's part, a couple things that probably should have happened onscreen instead of off, and a sudden rash of stupid-ass decisions made by one character in particular. But by that point, you're invested enough that you might as well see it through to the end, right? The dismount's a bit shaky but ultimately satisfying, as the genre goes.

I'm going to say the same thing here I said in the Nirvana in Fire rec post: This show is not for everybody, but if this is the kind of thing you like, it is a fantastic example of that thing.

bonus: And speaking of Nirvana in Fire...

Here's the full set.

Basically, if you watched Nirvana in Fire, you owe it to yourself to see the Disguiser. It’s another smart, character-driven drama, and you get to see a lot of your favorite actors in radically different roles, costumes, and relationships. (And speaking of costumes, both shows apparently have the same costume designer? That's range.)

Going to give this one a shot?

It's unfortunately a little hard to find. In my region (i.e., the US), KissAsian and YouTube are as good as it gets, both of which have their drawbacks. Some others among you may be lucky enough to be in a region where Viki will show it to you (which is where the KissAsian subs come from in the first place). There's a horrible set of machine translations running around out there, so beware of those; you'll know immediately you've tripped over those when they don't translate any of the onscreen text crawl at the start.

And speaking of the subtitles: Both extant sets, to put it politely, leave something to be desired. You can generally tell what's going on, but there are times you'll have to work for it. This is definitely more annoying when you're trying to follow a smart spy drama than it is when you're breezing through a low-intensity fuzzy xianxia mess. You actually have to pay attention to this one.

As a bonus, pretty much the whole thing was filmed in Shanghai Film Park, so if you're missing Dragon City, well, here it is! This was in fact the first Republican-era show I saw after watching Guardian, and I spent a lot of time going, hey, I know that street! ...like a nerd.

You can feel the brotherly love.

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