Episode 27 — Three Teases of Sun Wukong

Prison and reckoning

Heaven does not receive Bajie as a guest. Heavenly soldiers arrest him into the celestial prison — the pig-man who reached the Moon by a cudgel’s throw is processed by heaven’s police like any other intruder. And Wukong, who threw him there and owes him a retrieval, goes to Heaven demanding a reckoning with the Jade Emperor. The Monkey King arrives at the court that sealed his mountain, to demand an accounting from the emperor who ordered it.

The Queen Mother’s settlement

The reckoning is intercepted by the Queen Mother, and she settles it the way her side of the court settles things: with arrangement. She intervenes, offers high rank, and — the episode’s warmest turn — takes to Little Dragon Girl. She likes the dragon girl, adopts her as her goddaughter, and agrees to release Bajie. The girl whose own father keeps trying to confiscate her life is adopted upward, into the family of heaven itself, by the most powerful woman in it.

The same hand writes the annex. The Queen Mother plans to marry Chang’e to Marshal Tianpeng. The goddess of the Moon — whose return to her palace the Queen Mother once privately ordered prevented — is to be given in marriage to heaven’s marshal. The court’s machinery is consistent whatever the instrument: adoption or marriage, the women in this story are arranged by the powers around them, and the Queen Mother’s kindness and her scheming arrive in the same audience.

The sweeper, recognised

Bajie, released into this new order, has a recognition of his own: the Jade Emperor is the sweeper he met outside Guanghan Palace. The supreme ruler was sweeping the Moon Palace steps incognito, and the pig-man saw him there with a broom. Bajie now knows what almost no subject of heaven knows — that he has met the emperor out of uniform, at labour, in the cold palace of the goddess. What that knowledge is worth, in a court that has just imprisoned and pardoned him in the same visit, is a question the episode leaves ticking.

The duel for Chang’e

The marshal’s title — and with it, under the Queen Mother’s plan, Chang’e — has to be won. Bajie duels Sun Wukong for it. Read the pairing plainly: the pig-man, against the Monkey King, in open contest, with the Moon goddess as the stakes. By every law of the mythology this lasts one move.

Bajie wins. Narrowly — the guide insists on the narrowness — and with Little Dragon Girl’s help. The goddaughter of the Queen Mother, the rescuer of the mountain, helps the man she loves defeat her own rescuer’s king in a duel whose prize is another woman. Bajie is appointed Marshal Tianpeng: the pig who was nearly roasted in Episode 1 now holds one of heaven’s great military titles, and with it, by the Queen Mother’s arrangement, a claim on Chang’e herself.

Thoughts

The episode is heaven’s whole system in one audience: arrest, adoption, pardon, promotion and a marriage settlement, dispensed by the Queen Mother like courses of a banquet. Nobody is judged; everybody is placed. Even the duel is a placement mechanism — a title and a bride allocated by combat, with the bride unconsulted, as brides in this story’s courts always are. The moral weight sits, as ever, with the one unpaid labour in the room. Little Dragon Girl’s help wins Bajie the duel. She has now rescued him from a demon, a palace, a prison’s aftermath and the Monkey King — and the prize she hands him, this time, is the formal right to marry the other woman. The show never lets her devotion be simple, and it never lets it be repaid in kind in the moment. It just keeps recording the deposits.

Next

A drunken marshal tangles heaven’s marriage threads, a pearl buys a monkey a job, and the stables of heaven descend into chaos — Episode 28.