Episode 26 — Three Teases of Sun Wukong

The rescue

Bajie and Little Dragon Girl trick the Dragon King and rescue Sun Wukong. The prisoner of the East Sea walks free because the pig-man and the princess out-schemed her own father in his own palace — the daughter once again spending her standing at home on the beings she has chosen over it. The three of them return to Flower-Fruit Mountain: the darkened, sealed kingdom, whose survival now depends on a weapon nobody on the mountain can manufacture.

The tears that will not come

The weapon is Little Dragon Girl’s tears. Her weeping is weather — it rained a town out of drought; it might flood a sealed mountain back to life. So Wukong sets about making her cry, and tries trick after trick to do it.

Every trick fails, for the simplest and most devastating reason in the series: she is happy. She is with Bajie. After the knot, the quarrels, the spilled water, the accusation, the palaces and the wars — she is beside the man she loves, on a besieged mountain, in the dark, and she cannot be made to weep because her heart is, at last, exactly where it wants to be. Misery cannot be produced in her by technique. The Monkey King, who can move mountains, cannot move this.

The desperate throw

So Wukong does the arithmetic of the desperate. If her happiness is the obstacle, remove its object. He uses the Golden Cudgel — the Sea-Stabilising Needle that chose his hands — and sends Bajie away: hurled all the way to the Moon Palace.

Bajie arrives at the Moon, the destination of all his ladders, delivered there at last by somebody else’s weapon and somebody else’s plan. And outside Guanghan Palace, Chang’e’s cold palace, he meets a sweeper at work — who is the Jade Emperor. The supreme ruler of heaven, sweeping the steps of the Moon Palace, incognito. Bajie does not know it yet. File the sweeper away; heaven’s emperor has seen the pig-man’s face at close range, in the one place Bajie was never supposed to reach.

The flood

On the mountain, the plan works, at the price plans like this charge. With Bajie gone — vanished, hurled to the Moon, unreachable — Little Dragon Girl finally weeps, and weeps uncontrollably. Her tears flood Flower-Fruit Mountain: the water the sealed kingdom was starved of, delivered in the only currency she has ever paid in, her own heartbreak. The mountain is saved by the wound.

Wukong, who engineered the wound, makes the only payment available to him: a promise. He will take her to Heaven to bring Bajie back. The Monkey King who threw the pig-man to the Moon to make a dragon cry now owes the dragon a journey to heaven to undo it. The guide closes on the bargain — flood delivered, debt acknowledged — with the tears still doing their work.

Thoughts

The episode is the series’ thesis stated as a trap. Her tears are the most powerful force in the story, and they are the one force that cannot be summoned, only suffered. Wukong’s tricks fail because joy is not a mood to be argued with; his one success works because loss is real. Notice, too, the economy the show keeps exposing: every institution in it extracts from this girl — her father’s palace prices her marriage, her sister knots her thread, heaven’s war effort needs her weather — and the extractions all work the same way, by taking Bajie from her or her from Bajie. The sweeper outside Guanghan Palace is the episode’s planted gun. The Jade Emperor has now personally swept the doorstep of the Moon and personally seen the pig who climbed there by accident. When the celestial court next sits in judgment on Bajie, its emperor will be judging a face he has already met with a broom in his hands.

Next

A celestial prison, a Queen Mother adopting a dragon girl, and a duel for Chang’e that ends in a marshal’s sash — Episode 27.