never a dull moment at the Yiling Teahouse

2. The Only Good Het in the Tombs

DMBJ is not known for its high-quality heterosexual romance, to put it mildly. Most of the time, it makes the smart decision to not even try. When it does, you mostly wish it hadn't.

Therefore, you cannot imagine how shocked I was to find myself falling head-over-heels for the incredibly weird canonical love story between horny hot mess Dr. Liang Wan and emotionally constipated 80-year-old virgin and arsonist Zhang Rishan.

Their relationship goes a little something like this: He needs something from her, so he contrives a plan to ask her out. She declares him her boyfriend. He continues the relationship in order to continue getting things from her. She thinks he's hot, so she's fine with that. He warns her that continuing their relationship will involve messing with some very bad members of the Tomb-Raiding Industrial Complex. She's like, again, you're incredibly hot, so that's not a problem. He makes her memorize maps and sends her to a desert. She dresses up like him and pepper-sprays him. And somewhere in the midst of all that, he falls for her and she gets sick of his shit, and they wind up for-real dating as equals.

Part of what's so delightful about their relationship is how awful they are to one another. It'd be bad if that awfulness were one-sided, but man, they each give as good as they get. He's heartless and exploitative, and she's neurotic and insecure. She makes constant demands of him that he's almost too confused by to refuse, and he keeps putting her in situations no sane person should want to be part of. He comes from a cutthroat world of complete bastards, while she wears her heart on her sleeve whether she wants to or not. They're extremely good for one another, because he trusts her competencies and is going to make her demonstrate every one of them, while one of her chief skills is calling him on his bullshit.

It is at this point I need to sing the praises of Liang Wan, hottest of the hot messes. She's one of the principal POV characters for the novel, where she's just as boy-crazy (though for a different boy, because Zhang Rishan's not in this book) and just as far in over her head. The adaptation has absolutely done her character justice. What makes Liang Wan so charming to me is how much she absolutely refuses to let herself be stopped by being completely out of her depth. She doesn't know what the hell is going on most of the time, but fuck it, she's rolling with it. She's just also going to be applying moisturizer and anti-aging serum the entire time, because you know what, sometimes when your whole world is falling apart around you, the one thing you can count on is your skincare routine.

Zhang Rishan is surrounded by people so cool, butter doesn't melt in their mouths. He can be balls-out naked in front of them without batting an eyelash. It is her thirsty disaster charms alone that have set fire to his frozen heart. I love them to bits.

3. Enemies to ... ???

This is Sand Sea's Wu Xie. You're not going to like him at first, because he spends the first several episodes tormenting a teen who only mildly seems to deserve it. What you find out as the show goes on is that Wu Xie is having a bad time -- more than that, he's having a straight-up bad decade. He has taken a lot of psychic damage and decided to cope with it by being absolutely insane. He's a bitch with no sense of self-preservation living in constant gremlin mode. He is no longer under the active supervision of his husbands, and he's going to make that everyone else's problem.

The show chooses to start out by inflicting Wu Xie on a bunch of strangers through an arc that's bizarre, lengthy, and mostly completely unrelated to the larger plot. It does introduce a few elements that will matter, though, and one of them is Su Nan.

When Su Nan appeared as the badass head of a mercenary outfit, I was braced for one (or both) of two things to happen. Thing one, I figured she'd die or otherwise leave the narrative after the first arc, which made me not want to get attached to her, if she wasn't going to stick around. Thing two, I was all but certain the show was going to try and make her Wu Xie's love interest, which made me make such a face, because [see last point].

Neither happens. Su Nan is still around in the final episode, and what she becomes to Wu Xie is much, much more interesting.

They're not friends. They're never friends. They can't be friends, because they absolutely can't trust one another. Except sometimes they have to trust one another, and in return they have to allow themselves to be trustworthy.

In the last relevant chapter or so of the novel, Wu Xie gets his throat cut and shoved off a cliff ... and because the novel isn't finished, we have no idea why that happened or who did it. The drama decides that when he goes over that cliff this time, throat unslit, Su Nan needs to go with him. This means they spend much of the later part of the series depending on one another for survival, getting real vulnerable, sharing trauma, and occasionally fucking one another over anyway, because they are both bad and untrustworthy people.

And they're ... kinda into one another? But because it's not textual, it winds up being great. If the show had tried to write their romance, I would have hated it. Instead, it chooses to leave things fraught and unspecified, with the two of them obviously having a lot of feelings but not even knowing themselves what all those feelings are, much less how to react appropriately to them. That is delicious. Pour that right into my mouth.

I also choose to interpret Su Nan as being transfemme (complimentary), if only because that's the most charitable explanation for her dedication to keeping her tits out and her lipstick game sharp even in wilderness conditions.

4. This Man Should Not Be Trusted With Children

As I mentioned before, all members of the Teen Boy Squad wind up paired with adult men who act as their mentors. Li Cu and Wu Xie are the main duo, since they're the main character of this show and the main character of the entire franchise, respectively. Yang Hao winds up in an even more abusive dynamic with a bitch of a man who takes advantage of Yang Hao's capacity for rage. But precious baby Su Wan is lucky enough to be adopted by, well...

If you read my rec for Reunion, you will recognize him as the guy I called "this giant fucking loser" with all the affection in the world. Hei Xiazi is both the worst and the best, which makes him the perfect man to take care of the tender soul that is Su Wan.

Su Wan's a poor little rich boy who is happy to be bullied by his friends, because it means he has friends! He's a dipshit because he's sheltered by his family wealth, and he's also a dipshit because he'd be a dipshit no matter how much money he had. He needs someone to kick his ass in a way that builds him back up again and helps him make the transition from doormat to functional adult.

The circumstances that bring these two together are so batshit, they're not worth recounting here. Suffice it to say that as one adventure arc ends, Hei Xiazi is tasked with taking Su Wan home. Su Wan expresses interest in whatever Hei Xiazi's whole deal is, and Hei Xiazi responds by offering (in a roundabout way) lessons in what exactly his whole deal is.

Hei Xiazi is a terrible teacher, but he's a perfect teacher for Su Wan, who is the kind of boy who would go find the nearest dictionary if you told him the word "gullible" wasn't there. They're preciously weird at one another. The work so well together because Su Wan believes the best of everything, which leads him to see right past the parts of Hei Xiazi that other people (correctly) find inscrutable and offputting. With Hei Xiazi's questionable guidance, Su Wan finds for the first time in his naive, privileged life a goal for himself that is both achievable and worth the effort.

Later books give evidence that all three of the boys eventually go to work for Hei Xiazi, which I think is great, especially since he is somehow the least toxic and terrible of all the mentor characters. ...Man, though, that bar is low. It's a miracle anyone in DMBJ survives into adulthood.

It's also cute to think about how the boys are no doubt context-appropriately homophobic, because it's so easy to picture their respective reactions to finding out that their strong, terrible male role models are queer. Cue Li Ci and Yang Hao's respective no-homo freakouts, while Su Wan just has a million slightly offensive but ultimately well-meaning questions about how bisexuality works.

And I'm just going to say, if you watched the Untamed and loved Xue Yang? You owe it to yourself to see that actor suddenly become the sweetest little butterscotch muffin ever. ...Yes, if you didn't recognize him earlier, that's Wang Haoxuan, and he turns in an incredible comic performance here. Su Wan is consistently one of the funniest characters onscreen. The bit with the saxaphone kills me dead.

Anyway, unlike the first three relationships I've talked about here, this is one you have to wait a good long while for. Su Wan shows up in the first episode, Hei Xiazi appears about a dozen or so episodes later, but it takes their storylines much longer to cross. It's worth the wait, though, knowing that eventually you'll get to see these two weirdos bounce merrily off one another.

5. Everybody Loves Pangzi

This is the Iron Triangle I mentioned earlier. Obviously there's Wu Xie in the middle. The perfect boy in the hoodie is Xiao Ge, who is at the time of this series slightly stuck in what's basically a giant time-lock safe, so you're only ever going to see him in flashbacks. (Xiao Ge is trapped, so you can't have Xiao Ge.) And then, over there on the left is the man whose nickname translates to "fatty," Wang Pangzi.

Hold on to your butts, because I am now going to wax poetic about how much I love this fictional man.

Pangzi is the best. The best. He's funny. He's kind. He's got terrible taste in men and only slightly less terrible taste in women. He's a gentleman. He's the party shock absorber. He's prone to making things explode. He's impeccably dressed. He's charmingly superstitious. He's not subtle. He's got an excitable little stammer and an atrocious Beijing accent. He's a flexible fat man. He's the most fuckable person onscreen no matter who's onscreen with him.

He's also usually the DMBJ everyman character, except Sand Sea has a ton of everyman characters for a change, so he winds up filling the role of a badass insider instead. His job is basically to hold down the fort while Xiao Ge's indisposed and Wu Xie's off being insane. In the absence of both his beloveds, Pangzi's going to do what needs to be done, and he's going to be incredibly hot while he's doing it.

Usually, DMBJ shows serve up a huge amount of Pangzi and Wu Xie interaction. Sand Sea only puts them in the same room near the very end -- but they're collaborating throughout. In fact, the only way the whole story works is if they're basically so much in each other's back pockets that they can function as a single unit even across great distances. The record will show that I read them as husbands -- but more importantly, they're good friends who understand and trust one another completely. As much as it pains me that they're apart for basically the entire thing, they're never really apart, you know?

However, because Wu Xie is physically elsewhere for so much of the show, Sand Sea provides a unique chance to see Pangzi interacting on his own with other characters. Wu Xie is the special little boy who always takes up all the oxygen in the room -- and of course Pangzi doesn't begrudge him this, because Pangzi loves him. Without Wu Xie around, though, we get to watch all the other relationships Pangzi has cultivated over the years.

One of the best is with Xie Yuchen, a.k.a. Xiao Hua. In other series, we see the two interact, but only in the context of having Wu Xie around. Sand Sea presents us with a little window into what is clearly a longstanding friendship. From the tiny bit we get of their interactions, it's obvious they hang out on a pretty regular basis. They're chilling and having spa dates while their husbands are out there getting sandy and fighting snakes, proving that these two urbanites are absolutely the brains of their respective marriages.

...Hold up a second,

I hear you say,

IS this show actually gay? Because you keep using words like "husbands" and talking like it's intentionally, onscreen, boys-kissing-boys gay.

On the one hand, no.

On the other hand: Is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid gay? Textually, taking it at face value, and especially considering the context in which it was made, no, it is absolutely not gay, nor was it meant to be gay. But when you step back and realize everything it's doing, you kind of can't avoid the really romantic implications. Maybe Butch and Sundance never smooch, maybe they don't even want to, but they're each other's other halves. We would instantly recognize what they are if one of them were a lady. In a narrative setting where gayness is unthinkable, nothing they can do can be gay, which loops around to making everything kinda gay, and ... look, I'm just saying, if Pangzi were a woman, we'd know immediately what she is to Wu Xie (and holy fuck she would be so hot). If Xiao Hua were as female as the opera characters he plays, we'd have no questions about her relationship to Hei Xiazi. Keep everything beat for beat, line for line the same, and there'd be no missing it.

This is something you get a lot with stories about men written by men, this unintentional homoeroticism from male authors who don't realize their misogyny has actually poisoned them against heterosexuality. Remember what I said earlier about DMBJ's regrettable het? So much of it stems from the assumption that getting a girl and a boy together will inevitably to romantic feelings from at least one of them, so there's no reason to bother spending time giving either of the participants any actual reasons to like one another. (Sand Sea does this too! Just with a character I haven't mentioned here, because I'm trying to talk about the good dynamics.) This kind of thinking treats women not as people, but as as basically interchangeable desirable objects. But men are people, which means the male characters' feelings are worth discussing in the narrative! So what you get is these well-developed, intimate relationships between men described in loving detail, sat right next to perfunctory heterosexual couplings -- and we're supposed to believe that one is romantic and one is not based solely on the genders of the participants? Yeah, no, I call bullshit.

And -- if you'll permit me to loop back to the boys for a minute -- we now have a model for how a straight Iron Triangle would behave, and it is not the way the actual Iron Triangle members are about one another. Those teens love one another in a way that is fierce and strong and not what Wu Xie, Pangzi, and Xiao Ge have going. Maybe it could become that, but it's not now. It's not better or worse now for being what it is, but it is different, and it makes by contrast some things very clear (and very queer).

So that is why I feel justified in referring to them as husbands and will continue to do so despite the lack of explicit textual support.

Anyway, back to Pangzi!

Where were we? Right, Xiuxiu!

Pangzi's always at his best when he gets to be a knight for someone he cares about. This time around, that's Huo Xiuxiu, who who only shows up after you've met several of her matriarchal family's other members, all of whom would be at home in a Tank Full Of Dangerous Ladies. Xiuxiu is not a fighter like they are, but she does have an object that means everyone's out to get her, and as such she relies on her Pangzi to keep her safe while she's trying to survive the fucked-up games her family is playing.

And Pangzi clearly loves it. He absolutely thrives on being the big brother/bruiser figure for her. He loves how cool it makes him look to her. He doesn't have Wu Xie around to be a tank for, so he's going to tank for her. In fact, he's even going to bring in reinforcements to help him do it. (What's the deal with the cute Tibetan boy? Look, shh, just appreciate that you've got a cute Tibetan boy.)

Then there's his dealings with the rest of the Tomb-Raiding Industrial Complex, who are a bunch of shady dudes with impressive family pedigrees and expensive suits, all of whom are trying to play twelve-dimensional chess with one another. There's going to be lots of names dropped, of families and of individuals, and the show is going to act like you're supposed to be impressed. And if you're familiar with DMBJ canon, yeah, you could be impressed! Or you could be like Pangzhi, who rolls up in his amazing Holstein shirt, not giving a single fuck what any of these rich bastards think about him.

This is actually some character development for Pangzi, who has in the past been cowed (pun unintended) by the wealthy, mostly due to his own financial situation. That stage of his life is over now. Honey badger has ceased to care. The cool, pretty people are going to try and give him shit, and he is impervious to it. You better believe the Iron Triangle trashed this fancy restaurant the last time they were in here, and if you give Pangzi half the chance, he'll fucking do it again.

No wonder Zhang Rishan likes him. A pair of little firestarters.

Don't let me oversell you on how much Pangzi is in Sand Sea, because he's not. There's maybe a dozen of the 52 episodes that have any Pangzi content, and he's only in small parts of those episodes. Pangzi is a rare and precious event, like an eclipse. Cherish the Pangzi moments and all the wonderful interactions contained within.

caveat: You call that an ending?

Buddy, if you'd seen how most other DMBJ series end, you wouldn't be asking me that. But because I'm assuming you haven't: Yes, I call that an ending, because it actually attempts to do a winddown and conclusion, instead of just wandering off on a cliffhanger. The ending isn't wholly satisfying, but it is an ending. There is a narrative, and that narrative concludes. Does the conclusion make sense and tie up all the loose ends? Absolutely not! But it does follow basic story structure and resolve the action semi-competently.

As I said about the sweet disaster that is Psych Hunter (which was also directed by the guy who did Sand Sea!), I think knowing in advance that an ending sucks makes the ending suck less. It removes the disappointment factor and lets you enjoy what is there, instead of making you grumpy about what isn't. No, you're never going to understand a lot of things. That means whatever you want to be true can be true. The book is unfinished. The series is nonsense. Canon has no hold on you. You are free.

As compensation, here's a picture of Xiao Ge without his shirt on.

Are you feeling like it's Tomb Time?

There are a couple places you can get this one! Try Viki, WeTV, this YouTube playlist (which is missing the first episode for some reason), or this YouTube playlist (which has the whole thing). Note that subtitles vary in quality from place to place. The YouTube versions also have the bizarre, amazing in-character commercials, and it's up to you if that's a plus or a minus for your viewing experience.

I love this bonkers show. It is balls-to-the-wall weird, to a point that will make you question the translation. I got to the part where Zhang Rishan explains that ancient people worshipped fish with snakes in their eyebrows, caught the fish, took out the snakes, and implanted the snakes in their own human eyebrows -- and I thought, surely that's not what he's actually saying. Nope! The subtitles are accurate. It's the show that's off its rocker.

Anyway, once you've watched Sand Sea, scroll down to the bottom of my rec post for Reunion and find out how you can get even deeper into said tombs! Trust me, there's a lot down here.

As those other posts would indicate, this would not be my first choice for how to get into DMBJ. It is, however, how a fair number of people have gotten into DMBJ, so what the hell do I know! Or maybe this post has convinced you that Sand Sea is worth watching, but you'd rather build up to it than go into it raw. That works too! Whenever you get to it, it'll be here: under a bunch of sand, tattooed and inexplicable, and extremely gay whether it knows it or not.

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.