Episode 12 — Two Suns: Hou Yi & Chang’e

The bow refuses

Erniu stands his trial in heaven before the divine bow — and fails it. The flatbread seller cannot do the archer’s work. Whatever of Hou Yi survives in him, it does not answer to a summons or a ceremony; the baker’s hands are a baker’s hands, and the sky stays doubled.

Taishang Laojun explains the failure, and his explanation moves the whole arc off the battlefield and into the heart. Only Chang’e’s love can awaken Erniu’s divine power. The archer’s strength is not locked in his arms or his bloodline; it is locked in the bond heaven itself severed when it took Chang’e to the Moon. The wife is the key to the husband. To get the suns shot down, heaven must first reunite — at least in spirit — the couple its own order keeps apart.

A charlatan monetises the sky

On earth, the two suns have created a market, and a man has arrived to run it. Master Wu — Wu Tianshi — exploits the doubled sky the way such men always exploit disasters: he spreads rumours, he extorts money from the frightened, and he raises the oldest demand in the repertoire. The suns, he announces, require sacrifice. Specifically, he demands that Erniu and Bajie be sacrificed to the sun.

Note the aim. Wu’s chosen victims are not random: they are the archer heaven needs and the pig-man who found him — the two beings whose existence most threatens any man profiting from the crisis. Dress the elimination as piety, let the crowd demand it, and the charlatan removes his obstacles with the town’s own hands. It is the Miaomiao marriage plot wearing a priest’s robe: a private scheme, advanced through a public ritual.

Suitors at the Moon

At the Moon Palace, Chang’e is lonely — eternally, famously lonely — and she has a suitor in attendance. Wu Gang courts her there, the woodcutter of the Moon Palace pressing his devotion on the goddess who cannot leave. His courtship is going nowhere in the ordinary way; he cannot even enter the palace.

Events intervene. The Jade Emperor, acting on Taishang Laojun’s doctrine that only Chang’e can wake the archer, sends Taibai Jinxing to the Moon to summon her: she is to descend to earth and awaken Erniu. Heaven is coming to collect its key.

The rabbit trick

Wu Gang hears his window closing and does something genuinely despicable. Unable to enter the palace and desperate to stay close to Chang’e, he poisons her little Jade Rabbit — her companion, the one living presence in her exile — with his enchanted wine. Then he transforms himself into the rabbit.

Sit with the ugliness of it, because the episode intends you to. The real rabbit is poisoned. The goddess will carry her beloved pet down to earth in her arms, cherishing it, confiding in it — and the thing in her arms will be the suitor she has been keeping at a distance, wearing her companion’s shape, closer to her than he could ever have got by courtship. Heaven’s summons has barely been issued and the mission is already carrying a spy in the goddess’s own embrace.

Thoughts

The episode’s two plots are the same plot in two registers: men who cannot reach what they want honestly, reaching for it by fraud. Wu Tianshi cannot argue the town into enriching him, so he frightens it with the suns and dresses his hit list as a sacrifice. Wu Gang cannot win Chang’e’s heart, so he removes her pet and occupies its place — possession by impersonation, the darkest version of the device this series usually plays for comedy, since a borrowed body is literally how Bajie began. The difference the show insists on is consent and cost. Bajie’s borrowed body harmed no one by his choice and he spent the story paying for it. Wu Gang’s borrowed shape exists only to deceive a lonely woman, and its first act was to poison the creature it replaced. Heaven, meanwhile, prepares to ask that same woman to save the world with her love — without telling her who is curled up in her arms.

Next

A rain prayer goes wrong at the Dragon Palace, a marriage proposal arrives for Little Dragon Girl, and Taibai gets a secret order from the Queen Mother — Episode 13.