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2. Three Men and a Baby

Forget for a minute what I said up there about the twink's polycule. Allow me to explain the real romance of the show.

First, we have Wu Sanxing. He is Wu Xie's uncle and surrogate father, the one who basically raised him in the Ways of the Tomb Raiders. He is an incredibly charismatic piece of shit who gets away with literal murder by being charming and smart. This guy fucking sucks. In every other series, whenever he appears, you mildly to viciously hate him.

And then they cast Actual Hong Kong Actor Francis Ng, and I'm like, fuck, you're going to try and make me like Wu Sanxing, aren't you? And to my eternal chagrin, despite all my efforts to the contrary, the show made me like Wu Sanxing. It leaned into the fact that he's a complicated and very traumatized man, and it showed him caring for his friends and Wu Xie, and I just [shreds a napkin with my teeth]

Our next old man is Pan Zi. A veteran of an unspecified jungle war, Pan Zi is our Weapons Guy who will ill-advisedly follow Wu Sanxing anywhere. He has dreams of how they're going to be old and live in the same retirement community together. I am not making that up. He literally says this. He's also incredibly hot. A rangy, scruffy, highly competent combat officer and archer with a manbun? What's not to love?

Finally, we have Da Kui. Da Kui is a Big Boi™. He's the party tank, the shock absorber who is pure of heart and dumb of ass. He's here to do the job so he can pay for his aging mother's medical care, because he is a Good Boy™ as well as being a Big Boi™. He also needed to spend like 90% more of the show in that tank top, because mama.

(Also, how much do I love that Da Kui and Pan Zi are played by men in their forties, and Francis Ng is in his sixties? Good, more of this.)

And then they're all going to take care of their pure and perfect baby dummyface, because let's be real, three is the minimum number of responsible adults you need keeping an eye on Wu Xie at all times.

So yes, the killer set of interpersonal dynamics this time around is the co-parenting relationship of a Good Boy™, a Reformed Bad Boy™, and a man who is literally the worst, except he loves all three of them in the only way he knows how. You spend all of Ultimate Note (one of the other DMBJ installments) hollering at Pan Zi about how he needs better taste in men. And then you get here and it's like, shit, I get it now.

The whole DMBJ series is a fascinating series of unintentionally revealing commentaries on male friendship, and this middle-aged trio is one of my favorites. Pan Zi in particular is just so in love with Wu Sanxing, and it may not be in a gay way, but it's definitely not in a straight way either. Da Kui keeps flinging himself into danger for both of them with absolute trust. And Wu Sanxing himself has never in his life known how to express an emotion and isn't looking to start now. Men will literally fight an evil tree for the Bug Armor of Immortality or whatever that bullshit is called instead of going to therapy.

3. A promising start to an Iron Triangle

So if you're familiar with DMBJ canon, all you need to know is this: This baby version of the Iron Triangle didn't get much screentime, so it's hard to judge, but it has some good bones, and I'm optimistic about seeing this trio tackle upcoming plot points!

If you're not familiar with DMBJ, here's the rundown: As I mentioned earlier, (most) DMBJ books are written in first person like they're from Wu Xie's perspective. He does most of his tomb-raiding with two other men. One, Zhang Qiling, is a mysterious and frankly god-modded hoodie-wearing emo boy who loves to show up, pull Wu Xie's ass out of the fire, say nothing, and disappear again. The other, Wang Pangzi, is a loud, jovial angel who is somehow both incredibly competent and unfairly the butt of all the jokes. Their relationship is the glue that holds together story after tomb-raiding story.

And this is the tale of how they meet! Wu Xie runs into Zhang Qiling in the first episode and is immediately down bad for this strong, silent cat-like man. Then he meets Pangzi several episodes later, and you can just see Pangzi overtaken all at once by a staggering need to care for that little dipshit. (Wu Xie survives entirely by provoking this response in people.) You get to see them all bristle and sniff tentatively around one another, while you know that one day, these three will straight-up be the most important people in each other's lives forever.

I have to say, sweet little Xu Zhenxuan more than holds his own as Wu Xie, to the point where ... he may be my favorite Baby Wu Xie? (He has to duke it out with Joseph Zeng, at least.) It took me several episodes to recognize that he was also Ying Lei from Fangs of Fortune, where he was an absolute scene-stealer. He leads Tomb Raiders with a funny Wu Xie who's precious enough that you want to put him in your pocket and feed him snacks, but twerpy enough that you want to shove him in a locker, which is exactly the energy he needed to bring to the role.

I can't say quite as much about this version of Zhang Qiling, because he's just in so few scenes. His job this round is mostly to be a mysterious and handsome desire object that makes Wu Xie search "how to make a boy notice me" on his phone. He is the hundred-year-old sparkly vampire who has never felt love before and Wu Xie is the teen who's drawing hearts around his name in her notebook. He is the horse and Wu Xie is the horse girl. (Really, he's the horse and NPSS is the horse girl.) Sometimes the plot contrives reasons for him to remove his shirt and show off his huge chest tattoo. Also he is extremely weird and I love him forever for it. Now I'm the horse girl. That's fine.

And of course Pangzi is perfect. All Pangzis Are Perfect.

So yeah, I kind of have to grade this Iron Triangle on potential. Time Raiders is mostly about the relationship between Wu Xie and Wu Sanxing, which means everything else takes a back seat. These three are on their own for barely a third of the show; Wu Xie and Pangzi get to spend more time together as a duo, but two do not a triangle make. I'd be more upset about this, except that I know for certain that we're going to see this Iron Triangle again (see the end of this post), and when we do, we're going to hit some points in the plot where all three of them get to be together for some serious shenanigans.

I mean, look at those nice boys up there, in their nice suits. Don't they look like they're about to take you out to a very nice restaurant? A very nice, very expensive restaurant?

4. A pair of fun, (mostly) followable adventures

This series is divided basically in half, and each half has its own storyline, and each of those storylines makes ... I don't know, 80% sense? Something around there? And the missing 20% is largely things that are clearly being teased as continuing on into future installments of the story, which isn't the same as being forgotten about.

In the first story, Wu Xie and Wu Sanxing go on an expedition to find some other people who went on a previous expedition but never came back. This works for them about as well as it does for most people who go on an expedition to find The Lost Expedition.

In the second story, Wu Sanxing has gone missing, so Wu Xie decides to get an expedition together to find him. This works for him about as well as it does for most people who go on an expedition to find That Guy Who Went Missing Last Expedition.

Now, lots of meaningful things happen on these adventures! In particular, the second story provides you with a huge amount of backstory that will become relevant in later series! It's just that right now, you do not have the necessary information to interpret all the little nuances of it. It makes no difference to you if somebody is a Huo or a Xie, and it doesn't have to. If you keep on with DMBJ, someday it will.

Like I said earlier, it's kind of hard to criticize the completion rate of these stories because they are meant to be just the tip of a much larger mysterious iceberg. This show absolutely styles itself as Part One of More. The main plot ends with Our Boys' completing their adventure, but the show tacks on two little stings at the end to make damn sure you know that all has not been wrapped up for good.

So yeah, Time Raiders is not going to tell you what happened to Chen Wenjin; you've got to check out Ultimate Note for that. It's not going to tell you who A-Ning is working for; just pick pretty much any other main-canon series and start watching until you see a weird white guy. It's not going to tell you what's up with Zhang Qiling's tattoo; nobody knows what's up with Zhang Qiling's tattoo, except that it's there and we love any excuse to make a hoodie boy take his shirt off.

But you don't feel cheated, like someone presented you the first two-thirds of a story and then didn't care enough to bother telling you the rest. You get two separate arcs here, and both of them have beginnings, middles, and ends. Even beyond whatever else it might be teasing, Time Raiders is a complete piece of media that makes about as much sense as anything in the Tombs does.

...I can't quite explain why, but Time Raiders feels like Season 1 of a series that never got a Season 2. You know? It's got that sense of something that's making a lot of promises it'll never get to keep, down to the little stings at the end. Except it didn't get canceled at all! Quite the opposite, in fact! The fulfillments of those promises are (mostly) already out there! Lucky you!

5. Fucking finally

This is not the first time this part of the story has been adapted for the screen, but the previous runs at it have ranged from Meh to Real Bad.

Time Raiders provides a good, solid, coherent starting point in a watchable format. And I know that sounds like I'm damning it by faint praise here, but you would be shocked by how every single other attempt to adapt the material covered here has fumbled that ball hard. Some of them make up things that are directly contradicted by key parts of the larger canon. Some expect you to come in with way more prior knowledge than you necessarily have. Some of them get bogged down in side plots that are completely irrelevant to anything else. And more than one of them just wanders off mid-story with a shrug, until you're left wondering if you missed a couple episodes or something.

So I can't tell you how happy I am to have a recommendable, watchable beginning of the story. I feel comfortable pointing the uninitiated at Time Raiders and going, yes, start there.

It also helps that the production quality is pretty high! The acting ranges from perfectly competent to legitimately good. The editing is logical and curates a coherent story. There are no ten-minute scenes of people aimlessly scuba-diving or special effects that look like they were made on a home computer in 1997. You are not subjected to episode-long flashbacks where one of the main cast members plays a completely different character for no discernible reason. And again, if this all sounds like damning by faint praise, well, now you're really getting a sense of why I'm glad we now have the version we have.

Let me not give the impression that this is Serious Cinema or anything. Good performances do not High Art make. You will be expected to roll with some goofball action-movie bullshit that contradicts everything you know about, for example, the natural properties of bronze. But that's fine! If you are even remotely a fan of the action/adventure genre, you are familiar with how sometimes Indiana Jones tells you that in Latin, "Jehovah" starts with an I, and you're like, well, I guess it does now!

I care about many elements of this franchise, and also the elements I care about also tend to be buried real deep under several layers of prohibitively arcane bullshit. Even I initially bounced off the first DMBJ series I tried! And I'm so glad that I didn't, because DMBJ has brought me hours of entertainment and creativity and time spent with both old and new friends. Because I nearly did, though, I am attentive to how individual shows don't always put their best foot forward.

Your ability to watch any given DMBJ series depends on how that series strikes a very delicate balance, with Things You Will Like on one side of the scale, and Shit You Must Tolerate on the other. The higher your tolerance gets, the less difficult it becomes to enjoy the good parts, until it doesn't even faze you when the clam-powered woman-shaped skin puppet breaks into Wu Xie's bedroom to watch him sleep, or someone uses a saxophone to have a late-night conversation across a desert in English, or a man tells you about how ancient civilizations used to catch fish with snakes in their (the fishes') eyebrows, remove those snakes, and put the snakes in their (the humans') own eyebrows. By the time you get there, you'll just be like, that's Tombs, baby!

So build up your tolerance! Start here and work your way in! There's a whole weird world of wonders waiting for you. See you in Gutongjing.

All right, you've convinced me! How do I watch this -- and then, more importantly, what do I watch next?

Two excellent questions! Let's tackle them in order.

(In this scenario, you are Wu Xie, listening eagerly, and I am Wu Sanxing, handsomely imparting questionable information to you.)

Watching Time Raiders is easy and fun! Here's all the episodes subtitled for free on YouTube!

But oh boy, once you're done, what do you watch next? I don't have a definitive answer, but I have some suggestions:

OPTION 1: Ultimate Note. This wild, wacky series doesn't pick up immediately after Time Raiders leaves off, but you can figure that Some Stuff Happened and just roll with it. Be prepared to be tossed head-first into the whole multiple tomb-raiding families bullshit.

PROS: Features many now-familiar Time Raiders characters; immediately addresses the whole reef expedition thing; some of the best, most equilateral Iron Triangle dynamics ever; heihua (you don't know what this ship name means yet, but trust me)

CONS: Tonally somewhat different from the other series; reef expedition thing may still not be clear without further information; does not have a satisfying ending

WATCH IT NEXT IF: You just want the adventure to keep moving forward

OPTION 2: The Lost Tomb 2: Explore With the Note. Despite the 2 in the title, this series adapts many of the same books as Time Raiders does. At 40 episodes, though, it adapts a lot more of the material in those books. It is up to you to decide whether this is a good or a bad thing.

PROS: Absolute must-see for Pangzi/Wu Xie fans; provides a ton of Lore about what you just saw; sexy mob boss Xiao Hua

CONS: Covers much of Time Raiders' plot, but worse

WATCH IT NEXT IF: You can feel how the Time Raiders story was edited down and crave the unabridged version

OPTION 3: Wu Xie's Private Notes 2: A trailer dropped for it just a few days ago, and it looks like it's picking up right where Time Raiders left off! However, it's not even done filming yet, which means that this series may air as soon as the middle of next year, and as late as never! You have to love Chinese TV surprise scheduling.

PROS: A direct sequel to this one; same actors; trailer looks good

CONS: You'll be waiting a while

WATCH IT NEXT IF: You're incredibly patient

OPTION 4: The Mystic Nine: Oh, you want to start from the beginning beginning.

PROS: A rainbow of colorful new and lovable (and hateable) characters; contains information that is relevant to literally every other DMBJ series; the Jiumen Association is a polycule

CONS: You will recognize exactly one (1) character, and he won't even show up until the last few episodes; absolute jank-ass quality

WATCH IT NEXT IF: You were really into whatever was going on with Wu Xie's grandfather.

Or you could go entirely rogue and fling yourself wildly forward into one of the other DMBJ series I've written an individual rec post for! In which case: Sand Sea and Reunion (and Southern Archives coming just as soon as I finish watching it), have fun.

Seriously, there is no wrong way to watch DMBJ, because there is no right way to watch DMBJ. You just sort of piece it together from whatever. You're going to see some plot points 2-3 times. The same character will be played by multiple actors across different adaptations. The timeline is utterly broken. NPSS will start thirty new stories before he writes a single ending. The rules are made up and the points don't matter. It's snakes all the way down.