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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: 老九门 / The Mystic Nine

The Mystic Nine is a 2016 prequel series that tells something of an origin story to the main things going on in the DMBJ/Lost Tomb franchise, as contained in the adventures of a beautiful man, his tomb-raiding polycule, and all the baddies who want to take them down.

Ahead of The Mystic Nine Against the Coming Storm, I am creating this rec, because that looks like it's going to be ... good? I know, it's hard to believe, but all signs point to this thing being not only watchable, but actually enjoyable? The production team rallied nine years later, got like 40% of the original main cast back, and created something that at least from promotional materials looks like it's got actual money behind it. If you are interested in watching that, you probably shouldn't go into it without the necessary context, and the necessary context is this, the 48-episode original Mystic Nine series.

Unfortunately, the original Mystic Nine series is a bit shit.

However, as someone who is on record as liking things that are a bit shit, I'm rolling up with a rec post intended to convince you to watch it. It will involve both talking up the good things and telling you how to navigate the bad things. I'm holding your hand and walking you gently toward something that's about the production quality of a first-season filler episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and there is not a hint of irony in my voice as I tell you that it's quite possibly both the worst and the best DMBJ series of them all. Sit tight and listen, and I will give you five reasons that you should agree with me.

1. It's just fun

I literally cannot tell you what the plot of this show is. The best thing I can get for you is a summary: Our heroes have various adventures exploring tombs, acquiring objects, meeting new people, and defending their hometown loot during the period of Japanese occupation. It hops and it bops and away it goes! Try to keep up!

There are some of you who will consider this a negative. But it's based on a book! you say. Why doesn't it just adapt the book?

Okay, for starters, kudos to you for doing your research. Yes, it is based on a book. However, as is the case with like 95% of the books that are the sources of this franchise, the book was not finished at the time of filming, nor has it been finished in the decade since. So it does follow the book! It also just ... runs out of book. And then it improvises. Which goes about as well as you'd expect.

I think my comparison to a ST:TNG filler episode is accurate in how you just get told a lot of stuff -- "As you know, Bob, here in [place], the [people/objects] do [weird thing]" -- and you're expected to nod right along with Bob. This helps make it incredibly accessible to people who have no familiarity with DMBJ ... or maybe I should say, exactly as accessible to people who know zero DMBJ as it is to people who know all the DMBJ. How much you will understand what's happening has no relationship to your prior encounters with the series.

I feel the comparison holds also in that you're here to watch a bunch of characters you love (or love to hate) as they interact with things you only care about because they do. Why our heroes are going into a tomb is of distant secondary interest; that they are going into a tomb is the part we're showing up for.

The Mystic Nine was the first DMBJ installment adapted for television (a full two years before the next one, the gloriously unhinged Sand Sea), and you can see that this was all a bit of a learning process. In that sense, it's a great place to start, because the production quality only goes up from here!

It's not all crawling through soundstage tunnels or pushing aside foam boulders, either. There are plenty of storylines that have more political and interpersonal aspects to them. People have to think their way out of situations about as often as they have to punch their way out of them. There's a fair amount of forced-smile diplomacy. With one exception, every one of those five people seated at that table up there mistrusts or outright loathes every other person seated with them. But they are going to play nice, because they have to play nice, and it's very fun watching them try to play nice.

So yeah, this one's for the "don't worry about it!" crowd. Have you overtaxed your brain lately on thinky shows? Come to the Mystic Nine! It's not that it's stupid, so much as no matter how smart you are, you simply are not given enough information to figure it out. Come practice achieving a zen state under adverse conditions! Just like, say, a giant Buddha statue stolen and relocated to some jackass' driveway. Who would do a thing like that, anyway?

2. Fo Ye is Everybody's Husband

The main character of the show is a man named Zhang Qishan, who is also known to just about everybody as "Fo Ye", a title that translates roughly to "Master Buddha". And oh boy, is everybody in the show minorly to debilitatingly in love with him.

Played by the delightfully weird and incredibly bisexual-coded William Chan, Fo Ye runs the Jiumen Association (AKA the Mystic Nine), an association of nine tomb-raiding families. He's its founder and the head of Family #1, so he's in charge of the whole shebang. When he and the other family heads get together, they look a little something like this:

L-R, here's who we got:

Huo Sanniang. Head of Family #7. Mean bitch, though you would be too if you were the only girl allowed in the tomb-raiding clubhouse. Recurring supporting character/antagonist.

Er Yuehong. Head of Family #2. AKA Er Ye. Wife guy and opera gay. Professional cross-dresser. Main character.

Hei Bei the Sixth. Head of Family #6. Barely in the show.

Zhang Qishan. That's our Fo Ye!

Chen Pi. Eventual head of Family #4. Devastatingly bad hair choices. One of the main antagonists.

Wu Laogou. Head of Family #5. Grandfather of the main character of the modern series. Loves puppies. Barely in the show.

Qi Tiezui. Head of Family #8. AKA Ba Ye. High-anxiety fortune-teller. Frequent damsel in distress. Good at magic math. Main character.

Xie Jiu Ye. Head of Family #9. Rich like whoa. Canonical substance abuse problem. Recurring supporting character.

Banjie Li. Head of Family #3. Barely in the show.

Whenever I talk about DMBJ, I always say that the Jiumen Association is a polycule, and it's always true, but it's true in the Mystic Nine most of all. No matter how you read their relationships -- sexual, romantic, platonic, adversarial, one-sided, reciprocated, whatever -- they are intense. That's the only word for it. These are some intense, beautiful people having emotions at other intense, beautiful people, and the resulting mess is delicious.

Look, I did another shipping chart for you, please enjoy:

You'll notice that Fo Ye is at the center of basically everything. That's because he is the beating heart of the whole series. He is an absolute maniac who asks other people to do completely batshit things, and people keep telling him yes because he's just that charismatic -- and because if you are one of his people, and you're the one who needs him, he will drop everything and come running.

As the chart may suggest, Fo Ye is extremely pairable, so I'm going to take a moment to hit the highlights:

We get to see Fo Ye and Yin Xinyue meet, court, and eventually marry, and I think their relationship is great. She's insane. She's a spoiled little rich girl way too smart for her circumstances, who plows through life with the confidence of someone fueled entirely by Daddy's money, and it has made her a menace. I'm not going to spoil her entrance for you, because it is legitimately one of the highlights of the show. I know lots of fans of the series who think she's awful and hate her, and I'm like, no, she's awful and that's why you should love her.

The "good and complicated" part of the chart up there is the dynamic between Fo Ye and Er Yuehong. They're two powerful men who each recognize the other as kind of their only actual equal, which is great until they have vastly different priorities. Also, one of them is actively falling in love, while the other is watching his wife die, and you know that's gonna chafe. If you go feral for a beautiful, tragic, romantic friendship, please join me in the hell of my own making over these two.

You're introduced to the relationship between Fo Ye and Qi Tiezui in episode 2, in a scene where ... yeah, if you can watch that and still don't think it's love, I don't know what to tell you.

But there are so many others! So many people orbiting Fo Ye like he's a sassy little sun! Despite being a full-time military officer, his real job is holding together nine different families of incredibly ill-behaved people, and it's not easy -- but, like, you get it. You look at this man and his dangerously handsome grin, and you have zero questions about why enormous numbers of otherwise sensible people keep catapulting themselves headlong into danger for him. This is a man whose Charisma stat is through the roof, and he's not afraid to use it.

William Chan is so much Fo Ye, and Fo Ye is so important to the Mystic Nine, that if they'd made the Mystic Nine 2 and they'd cast anyone else instead of him, I would have refused to watch it on principle. But lucky for me, everyone involved in the production realized that going forward William-less would have been a mistake! And that's why I'm all excited.

Truly, I have no doubt that Mystic Nine 2 will easily convince you to love this ridiculous man within thirty seconds of meeting him. But wouldn't you rather skip those thirty seconds of uncertainty? Wouldn't you much prefer to love him from the first moment he steps into the frame? Of course you would. And that's why you're going to come back and fall for him from the very start.

3. This Motherfucker Right Here

Okay, remember when I said that the show doesn't really have a plot? I wasn't being entirely truthful. The parts with our heroes don't really have a single overarching plot. But the villains! The villains know what they're doing and are pretty consistent about what they're going for. And the head of the villains is the gold standard of a love-to-hate absolute rat-bastard white boy.

Nobody, not even the franchise, can consistently agree on how to render his name. I'm going to call him Hendry Cox because why not. He is an American chineaboo who has shown up to this part of China for Vague Yet Nefarious Reasons. Making him even more evil, he's hooked up with the local Japanese occupying force, even though he doesn't really seem to like them and they definitely don't like him. He is a sonofabitch who loves nothing and believes in nothing except getting what he wants. And he's never going to tell anyone exactly what he wants, which makes him all the more unpredictable.

I mean, is there anything eviller than a Chamber of Commerce?

If you've seen any other DMBJ installments, odds are you've seen either Hendry Cox or the results of his work. He's still around and still being a bastard in the main timeline, but as he's older in those series and movies, he's usually painted as a much more dignified, sinister, and frankly humdrum moustache-twirling threat. Here he's younger and much rougher around the edges, and oh boy, is he a fucking hoot. You ever see a white boy look a Chinese person in the eye and say, in Mandarin, 'You Chinese have a saying...'? You have to be an unbelievable colonialist asshole to do that, and that is what Hendry Cox is.

Now, he could hold a selling point entirely on his own, because I think his delightful awfulness is worth the price of admission. But he also gets to be my pivot point into how the show has many antagonists that make the show the fun time that it is.

Because of said Japanese occupying force, there are so many different flavors of bad guy going on here, Disguiser-style. First and foremost, of course, are the Japanese. But then you've got all the Chinese collaborators, both the true believers and then ones who are just on board with the occupation because they think it's their best chance at survival. Then you've got the ones who are completely unconnected to geopolitics and are just trouble for their own reasons. And then you've got the people who are possibly your allies, but also possibly your enemies, and it really just depends on what they're feeling that day.

Some of the villains you can just hate and write off, no problem. But more of them are complicated enough that even while you hate them, they inspire a kind of grudging fondness, because whatever fucked-up thing is going on with them, you have to admit that it's fascinating. Why is there a picture of Chen Pi up there? No reason.

4. For what it is, it still looks shockingly good

And by "for what it is", I mean a ten-year-old Chinese television show trying to pull off big-screen glamour on a small-screen budget. I mean, just look at it:

Everything about the design and fashion is incredible. As was the case with My Roommate is a Detective, the aesthetic here is just a beautiful historical snapshot of a real east-meets-west transitional period. Everybody's constantly negotiating the balance between tradition and modernity. You can know a lot about someone's place in the world by how they choose to dress. Xie Jiu Ye, the consummate businessman, never shows up in anything but a perfect three-piece suit. Qi Tiezui, whose livelihood depends on convincing people of his mastery of ancient divining arts, tends toward local dress. There's a funeral at one point where the more rural member of a couple shows up wearing white and their more urban, sophisticated partner is wearing black, and that's just such a great little detail. There were some really talented, thoughtful people working on this, and you can see that talent and thoughtfulness shine through, well ... the rest of it.

Because yeah, quality-wise, the whole thing looks like it could have aired on US television in 1987, except for the special effects, which maybe push it all the way up to 1992. It is a production that absolutely shows its age. It was hugely popular at the time, and then it took a full decade to make a second season. We are not exactly dealing with the best-oiled of machines here.

This is probably the right point to pivot to my earlier accusation that this series is a bit shit. Because it's true. Anyone who's watched it is nodding real hard right now. The CG is bad. The editing is rough. The camera work is melodramatic. The treatment of many female characters and ethnic minorities ranges from okay to fucking yikes. And don't worry if you missed something, because if it was important, you'll see it flashed back to at least five more times, usually in a slow-motion montage.

Also, there's a substantial chunk that censorship forced them to cut in the back half of the show. So if you're watching and wondering why the hell the whole meteorite mirror-world portal thing in particular is never explained satisfactorily, well, I can't promise you it made sense before it got shredded to hide the part where a main character transforms into a magical creature, but that sure didn't help.

Oh, it also has no ending. It just completely walks off a cliff before a big scene they didn't want to film, I guess? I'm less mad about the sudden stop now that it's getting a second season, but for a while there, I was pretty miffed.

'Wow, W2, you just talked me out of it!' Okay, let me talk you back into it: This is a show you watch because you love the characters, and you want to see the characters you love do things and have feelings at one another, and you don't stress when those things and feelings don't exactly make a whole lot of narrative sense.

Oh, and it's funny! Did I mention that the show is funny? And mostly on purpose? Sometimes the wackiness of the comic relief can get a little exhausting, but it's so much better than something that takes itself dead seriously. It's hardly an outright comedy, but it does want you to laugh along with it at several parts. It's charming! You can forgive a whole lot of sins when something is charming (which, again, is how Fo Ye gets away with all his bullshit).

So right here, I am giving you permission to fast-forward through anything that gets boring. Doing so may destroy some of the narrative continuity, but, like, what's it going to do, make less sense? I promise you that diligently watching every moment won't make for a significantly more coherent experience. So whatever! Start skipping Chen Pi's later scenes! Blast on by whatever that slimy army guy is up to! Hop over the billionth flashback to something you saw last episode! Blitz past scenes until someone you care about shows up! If you want a preview of each episode's landscape, I recommend this series of detailed recaps, which I have been using while writing this to remind me of what happened when, because hell if I know.

At the end of the day, you are not here to be told some complex, sophisticated narrative. You are here for...

5. Important Tomb Boys context!

If you are someone who is a fan of other installments of the Lost Tomb franchise, and you have not yet seen the Mystic Nine, this is where you must imagine me gently grabbing you by your lapels and ever so tenderly shaking you until you start watching it. Because you don't know. You don't know. You have no idea.

This is especially true if you watched the Southern Archives, because you remember that whole middle chunk of episodes set in Changsha? (I know it said "Changxiang", but it's fucking Changsha.) The ones where you got introduced real quick to about five different people where it seemed like you should already have known who they were? Yeah, you already should have known who they were, because you met four of them in this series, and one of them is for some reason the Kirkland brand version of an actual Mystic Nine character.

Like, were you sitting there wondering, what is up with this sassy fortune-teller with the little circle glasses? Yeah, back your ass up and get over here. Meet him in his original context. See him fabulous.

Or if you've seen Sand Sea and/or Ultimate Note? You deserve to encounter adorable bunny-toothed arsonist Zhang Rishan back when he was just a baby. And if instead you go to those after the Mystic Nine, it hits so much harder when you're several decades later and Zhang Rishan looks exactly the same, except for that bracelet.

And okay, I get it, I get that there are people who are not coming to DMBJ for the intricate, sprawling, maddening mess. Sometimes you are just there to watch the boys get up to isolated shenanigans! Good for you! But alas for me, I have a disease, and that disease makes me vulnerable to all this bullshit. You tell me there is a line to be drawn between Chen Pi and Chen Wenjin, and I am there. You promise to show me that the Huo Family has always been Like That, and I am lining up at the door.

I also think this adds so much because Zhang Qishan, Er Yuehong, and Wu Laogou in particular cast their long shadows over all of the modern series. Their names are invoked frequently with curiosity and awe, but little sense of the people behind those names. Well, here you are! Meet the people and their friends! They're all fucking disasters. They're not gods or legends. They're neurotic weirdos, and the main thing most of them have in common is that they're all in love with the same guy. They're competent separately and way more competent together, and getting them to work together is like pulling teeth.

By the time you get to the modern shows, everyone from the Mystic Nine is either dead or dying or missing or frozen in time, and you know something must have gone catastrophically wrong in the interim to leave the main-series characters in the situation they're in. If anything, the Mystic Nine makes that (still largely uncharted, thanks NPSS) catastrophe even more tragic by making it clear, it didn't have to go wrong. Once upon a time, it was fine. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't half bad. It's just that even the great Fo Ye wasn't good enough to stop things from falling apart.

BONUS: There's more!

More even than the upcoming second season! There are five movies, four of which were made in at the same time as the main series, with the same cast, and a fifth that was made in 2022 and has none of the same actors. The first four are all side stories:

Flowers Bloom in February: Beautiful drama queen Er Yuehong and his incredibly cunty ex stage an opera to steal some artifacts before the Japanese get to them.

Ganges Killing the Trees: Mean bitch Huo Sanniang soft-butches up and gets involved in an active murder mystery.

Four Belongs to Abelmoschus: Dangerous incel Chen Pi wanders semi-sympathetically around an incoherent, gory movie that I honestly forgot everything about two seconds after it was over.

Tiger Bones Plum Blossom: Effete businessman Xie Jiu Ye deals with his opium habit and hallucinates a giant abacus.

They are, as you may be able to discern from my summaries, not good, but that doesn't mean they're not fun. I think Flowers Bloom in February is worth the watch, Four Belongs to Abelmoschus should be avoided, and the other two are up to you.

The fifth, however, is mildly less of a made-for-TV movie, so it's got that going for it. The Last Begonia is a prequel to the prequel, telling the story of the time Zhang Qishan first came to Changsha, met Er Yuehong, fought off some assassins, and encountered some other things that are completely unsupported elsewhere in canon, but whatever. Zhu Zanjin plays a very different Er Yuehong, but I actually like his interpretation just as much. He's younger, less confident, and more cowed by his homophobic father, and it's great.

True story: I watched this before I knew anything about DMBJ, and it was intriguing yet utterly inscrutable. Coming back to it after watching the Mystic Nine made it marginally easier to scrute. However, when I did not know it was connected to the larger Mystic Nine franchise, I was absolutely convinced that the movie was going to dispel the homoerotic tension between these two young men either by death or by relocation -- and as such I was gobsmacked that it ended up with the two of them still living in the same city. Suck it, censors! You can't break up that band! We know they're together in the main timeline! Ha!

Anyway, if 48 extant episodes and 36 promised future ones aren't enough for you, here's still several hours more of Mystic Nine entertainment waiting for you. Enjoy!

Ready to join the families?

You're in luck! This is an extremely watchable show. You can find it on Viki, iQiyi, and YouTube. And if you want the extras, iQiyi also has Flowers Bloom in February, Ganges Killing the Trees, Four Belongs to Abelmoschus, Tiger Bones Plum Blossom, and The Last Begonia (which is also on YouTube).

If you have an incredible tolerance for janky bullshit, then this is a good place to start your DMBJ journey. If, however, you start the Mystic Nine and find yourself starting to fuzz out because of the quality issues, set it aside! Go to Time Raiders or Reunion for an actual entry point, then circle back to the Mystic Nine once you've started to get deeply invested in all this nonsense. They've been waiting for ten years already; they can wait a little longer.

Oh, and if you have the same fast-forward-past-the-credits habit I do, be sure to break it here, because the credits feature adorable interviews and outtakes, and also the ending theme fucking slaps.

I will never tire of the genre of behind-the-scenes pictures of cast members in period costume with adorable handwarmers.

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