Sarcasm on the Rocks

The Widow isn’t supposed to be a villain. She’s not the heroine either. If you identify with her because she’s awesome, the narrative wants you to identify with her. If you’re a little scared of her because you realize her particular brand of post-apocalyptic feminism has a deeply self-serving strain and she wouldn’t hesitate a second to kill any woman who challenged her, the narrative wants you to be scared of her too.

To draw a wuxia parallel, if you haven’t seen the movie Hero, I have to spoil it for you now. Jet Li’s character spends much of Hero trying to kill the emperor. The emperor is a ruthless tyrant who’s devastated entire cultures, but Jet Li decides not to kill him at the end in order to accomplish the greater purpose of unifying China, fully conscious that his refusal to kill a bad person means his own death. Many wuxia narratives have no villains at all. This isn’t moral relativism, this isn’t a “Game of Thrones” ripoff (hahahaha) it’s just the different way conflicts are set up.  

Ultimately, Quinn isn’t the villain either. He’s a deeply evil and disgusting person, but he also represents stability and order. I do think we’re going to see him get his just deserts, either this season or the next—but he’s not the “Big Bad” in the sense of a typical US season action show arc. The overarching conflict of Into the Badlands isn’t Baron versus Baron, it’s involvement versus detachment. Sunny and Veil long passionately for escape, for detachment in a Buddhist sense, but they’re constantly becoming involved in earthly power struggles, much against their will.