Episode 28 — Three Teases of Sun Wukong

The banquet tangle

Victory has a banquet, and the banquet has wine, and the wine has consequences that reach the whole world’s love life. Bajie, celebrating his marshal’s title, gets drunk with Yue Lao — the God of Matchmaking himself, keeper of the red threads that bind every fated couple in creation. Drunk, the two of them tangle all the marriage threads. Every thread. The cosmic registry of who is bound to whom is left in a drunkard’s knot by its own registrar and heaven’s newest marshal.

And in the middle of the wreckage, one thread gets deliberately tied right: Yue Lao joins Little Dragon Girl’s red thread to Bajie’s. The bond that her sister once knotted into impossibility is re-made by the god of marriage himself, at a banquet table, in wine. And it works the way the threads work — Bajie begins falling in love with her. The man who ignored her under her sister’s knot now turns toward her under Yue Lao’s knot, and the turning is the episode’s tender centre: after twenty-seven episodes of her loving him, the thread finally runs in both directions.

The King’s unhappiness

On Flower-Fruit Mountain, Sun Wukong is unhappy. The mountain was saved and its king was not: the war ended in arrangements, his prisoner-and-rescuer status is unresolved, and the monkey troops drill and train in an effort to cheer him up. It is a touching picture — an army performing morale for its own king — and it is about to be misread by the only audience that matters.

The order to attack

The Jade Emperor mistakes the drills for rebellion. Monkeys in formation, on a mountain heaven already sealed once, read from the throne as preparation for war — and heaven responds with the instrument it has just created. The Jade Emperor orders Bajie to attack them. Marshal Tianpeng, formerly the mountain’s sweeper of floors, is ordered to make war on his own sworn brother’s kingdom.

Bajie will not do it. Unwilling to fight his sworn brother, he does what the new Bajie does — he schemes, and he schemes with Taibai Jinxing, heaven’s most experienced fixer. The counter-plan is pure Taibai: do not fight the monkey, hire him. Offer Wukong an official post. Give the rebellion a desk in the establishment it was rebelling against.

A pearl buys an office

The scheme has a price, and the price is paid out of Little Dragon Girl’s substance: Taibai uses one of her pearls to buy the office. Her treasure purchases heaven’s bribe, as her tears purchased the mountain’s water and her thread purchased Bajie’s heart — the dragon girl is the economy this story runs on, and the withdrawals never stop.

It works. Wukong accepts the appointment and becomes a minor official in charge of the heavenly horses. The Great Sage, the king who was preparing to march on heaven two episodes ago, is installed in the stables — in a post so lowly the episode lets the fact sit there unadorned, a stable-keeper’s sash on the most dangerous being in creation. He has not yet worked out what he has been given. Heaven is counting on the delay.

Thoughts

The episode runs on two knots. The first is comic and cosmic: the registrar of love, drunk, tangling every thread in creation — the show’s whole theology of fate in one image, since a system that a drunk god can scramble at a banquet was never the solemn machinery the palaces pretended it was. The second knot is the tender one, and the episode is honest about its mechanism: Bajie’s love for Little Dragon Girl begins when the thread is joined. Twenty-seven episodes of her saving him accomplished what her devotion alone could not command — nothing — and one act of thread-work accomplishes it in a night. The show does not apologise for this. It has been telling us since the Second Princess’s knot that hearts in this world are clay to whoever holds the string. What distinguishes Yue Lao’s knot from the sister’s is only intention: one was tied to wound, one to mend. And underneath the comedy, a pearl leaves a dragon girl’s store to buy a monkey a stable — the story’s quiet insistence that every settlement heaven reaches is invoiced, eventually, to her.

Next

A clinic, a mirror that finally tells the whole truth, and an arrest order no army in heaven can execute — Episode 29.