Restless Rewatch: The Untamed, Episode 42 part one
(Masterpost) (Pinboard) (whole thing on AO3)
Warning! Spoilers for All 50 Episodes!
Welcome to the Storeroom
We are all so justifiably fond of this episode for its wonderful staircase scene and undershirt scene that it's easy to forget that it mostly consists of an endless scene of dudes standing around talking and making faces while a woman kills herself for the sake of the plot. So, I'm here to go over it in excruciating detail! Let's go!
We pick up where the last episode left off, with Lan Xichen demanding access to Jin Guangyao's bedroom because he wants head. A head. Nie Mingjue's head. Jin Guangyao isn't as compliant as usual, with all these extra people coming to join the party, and Su She runs up and says that Gusu Lan is rude.
Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen react to him like he's a gross bug, and Wei Wuxian roasts him for copying Lan Wangji all the time.
Jin Guangyao tells him to chill and then, having failed to charm his way out of the situation in the previous episode, says that he'll let everyone in as a favor to Lan Xichen.
Lan Xichen is still not charmed.
Everybody walks through the cool magic mirror into a giant storeroom where his wife is standing with her eyes closed, doing absolutely nothing. Lan Xichen asks what's up with that and Jin Guangyao says she likes to come into the treasure room to look at all their stuff. Which might be convincing if she wasn't obviously magically enthralled.
(More after the cut!)
Everyone casts their eyes around awkwardly because they don't want to know about whatever freaky shit JGY and Qin Su get up to in private. Except Wei Wuxian, who always wants to know about everyone's freaky shit. He goes and takes a long look at her and walks around her in a circle wondering (on voiceover) why JGY didn't kill her or move her somewhere else.
He tries to talk to her, since she seems pretty much dead, which makes her his idea of a fun hang. Su She says that he must have come in here to talk to her. Remember, WWX is pretending to be Mo Xuanyu, and the show is pretending that Mo Xuanyu was heterosexual, and JGY is pretending that MXY got kicked out for sexually harassing Qin Su.
Nobody says "hey dude, what the fuck is wrong with your wife, why is she frozen" which is weird considering that even the corpses in this show are active and chatty. Wei Wuxian goes to look for Nie Mingjue's head in the place it was before. It's not there and he doesn't think to look anywhere else, even though there is another warded curtain on the other side. Fucking ADHD.
What he finds instead is a dagger, which Jin Guangyao takes out and flourishes. He tells us the following things about this dagger:
It used to belong to Wen Ruohan, then he gave it to Wen Qing
It has killed countless people
It's resentful energy is very strong, which is why it needs a talisman curtain in front of it, although waving it around in a room full of people is fine
It's very sharp! This is always funny to me, when sword cultivators hype up the sharpness of a blade. Like, surely someone as rich as Jin Guangyao has a dude on his staff whose entire job is sharpening all the things?
5. When you look at it, you don't see your reflection, but the reflection of someone it has killed. The VFX department clearly didn't get that note, because while he says this, his own reflection is showing on the blade of the dagger.
He doesn't mention whether Wen Qing used this dagger to do surgery on Wei Wuxian, but I'd like to think it is, just for funsies.
Jin Guangyao holds it out in front of him within easy reach of his suddenly-awake wife. Qin Su grabs it and plunges it into the right side of her abdomen, and dies INSTANTLY.
So, I know we're going for stylized death here, and I wouldn't object if she had done the traditional cdrama neck-cut where you spin around in a circle with a sword at your throat and then die with a little fake blood on your neck. It's cool and just the type of ridiculous that I like to see. It also is a trope that is deeply ingrained in both western and eastern cinema: a cut to the neck will kill you instantly.
There's another equally-popular trope, however: a gut injury or gunshot will NOT kill you quickly. There is a reason Samurai committing seppuku need a second person to lop off their head; otherwise they die slowly. How slowly? I tried to look that up and google got very insistent about telling me about suicide hotlines instead of answering my question. Anyway, what I'm saying is that it's ridiculous for her to die instantly from a stomach wound, and it's extra annoying because so many women in this show die just so men can have feelings about it. Ugh.
Nobody tries to help her, other than JGY telling her to wake up and Lan Xichen checking her Qi. Nobody thinks of, like, a bandage. How are any of these idiots still alive after years of sparring with blades? Maybe they really don't sharpen anything.
Everyone stands around reacting silently for the next several minutes while Jin Guangyao frantically asks a bunch of questions he already knows the answers to. Jiang Cheng and Nie Huaisang run in and also start reacting.
This scene is like watching an acting class called "reaction faces 101."
Su She transferred in via drop/add from the Eyebrow Work seminar.
Lan Wangji is working on an advanced thesis in minimalism
The prof is getting ready to tell Jin Ling he should consider changing majors.
Jiang Cheng out here ruining the curve for the rest of the class.
Lan Xichen gives a quick recap for them of the previous 41 episodes, finishing up by saying that the sword spirit looks like Baxia. Nie Huaisang asks if the body is Da Ge, and promptly "faints" when Lan Xichen confirms it. Lan Xichen goes back to recapping while Jin Guangyao pretends not to know what's up. Everyone in this scene is speeking as slowly as humanly possible and all of the dialogue is just recapping shit we already know.
Su She talks about how it's puzzling that Lan Wangji, who is righteous and stuck-up, is spending all of his time with a notorious ho like Mo Xuanyu.
Jin Guangyao (FINALLY) draws his sword on Wei Wuxian, only to have it blocked by Lan Wangji. Su She starts to draw his sword but Lan Wangji tells him to stop, and he does.
More reaction faces. *Yawn*
Wei Wuxian tells Lan Wangji to step aside, taking the opportunity to feel his shoulder muscle. Su She promptly lunges and Wei Wuxian dodges. All those years months of fighting with a flute instead of a sword made him very good at ducking.
He spins around and grabs the nearest sword, drawing it and fighting Su She with it. Conveniently, the nearest sword is Suibian, which nobody can open except him. He already opened it once in paperman form, so Jin Guangyao probably put it in an easy-to-grab location for this same purpose.
Jin Guangyao hollers that Yiling Laozu has returned to the world. He took a movement class last semester so he switches which is his forward shoulder to emphasise his shock.
Nie Huaisang wakes up and acts like he doesn't know what's going on. Jin Ling doesn't understand why Zidian didn't work, if he's really posessing Mo Xuanyu. Jin Guangyao drops some exposition to explain how the sacrificing curse works. Now everybody is pointing swords at thim, while exposition continues….endlessly. We get it, the sword is sealed. For fuck's sake, we're 16 minutes into this episode and only two things have happened.
Jin Guangyao takes a swing at Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji blocks it, and then WWX blasts them with an annoying-sparkles talisman, which works against 8 armed cultivators, just like it worked against Wen Chao and his gang way back in the old days when they tried to catch Lan Wangji.
Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian run out of the room together, to find a crowd of around 25 cultivators, which is probably meant to represent an army.
Lan Wangji clamps his hand onto Wei Wuxian's wrist and jumps over the cultivators with him, even though we've seen evidence that Wei Wuxian's lightness skills (the jumping-around part of kung fu stunts) are almost as good as Lan Wangji's, core or no core. Admittedly Wei Wuxian can't just fly into a scene from outer space like Lan Wangji seems to do from time to time.
Back in the storeroom Su She asks JGY if they should chase after them - WHY would you even need to ask that? - and JGY says to chase them. So Su She leaves, by himself, while everyone else just stands around doing nothing. Way to act like you didn't already know about Mo Xuanyu being Wei Wuxian, guys.
Jin Guangyao takes an opportunity to masterfully guilt trip Jin Ling about being fooled by Wei Wuxian, "no wonder you took the murderer of your parents as a friend."
The cultivators near the steps finally decide to chase Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, who are halfway down the big staircase. Lan Wangji keeps ahold of Wei Wuxian's wrist as they run down the stairs together.
Why aren't they just jumping down the stairs? Lan Wangji is capable of hovering in the air while playing a guqin in battle; surely he can jump over a second group of cultivators? This isn't a very logical scene but that's ok, because it's setting things up for one of the best scenes in the show....which I'll cover in the next post. *shakes fist at Tumblr's 30-image limit*
