Episode 36 — The Earth-Shaking Bride Snatching

Groom’s clothes

Bajie’s answer to the South Sea marriage is the most Bajie plan imaginable, and the most touching: he buys groom’s clothes. He will go and find Little Dragon Girl and marry her himself — present himself at the wedding as the bridegroom, in the proper dress, as if the whole crisis of seas and springs could be outfaced by a pig-man in new clothes arriving with his heart in his hands.

He discovers she has changed her mind. The woman who escaped this marriage, who was freed from it by her own chancellor, has resolved to go through with it. The groom’s clothes are bought for a bride who no longer wants rescuing — who has counted the East Sea’s lives against her own happiness and chosen the sea. Bajie is standing in wedding dress at the wrong wedding: his own, which is not happening.

The soul-swap

What he does next is the series’ founding device, played one final time at full scale. Bajie and the South Sea Crown Prince exchange identities by soul-transfer. Bajie takes the prince’s form; the prince takes Bajie’s. The pig who began his human life inside another man’s body now borrows a second one deliberately — the bridegroom’s. In the crown prince’s shape, Bajie reunites with Little Dragon Girl: he reaches the bride, inside the palace that shut him out, wearing the face of the man she is supposed to marry.

Her explanation

She tells him the truth that governs everything now, and she tells it to the face she thinks is the prince’s — or perhaps, in the way of this story’s recognitions, to the man she knows is inside it. Only a South Sea marriage alliance can bring water to save the East Sea. The spring merger is the treaty; the treaty requires the marriage; the marriage requires her. There is no version of her people’s survival that leaves her free, and she has finished looking for one. The explanation is not a rejection speech. It is a hydrological fact, delivered by the woman who has become its prisoner with her eyes open.

The prince in the cell

The swap’s other half pays the swap’s price. The real crown prince — in Bajie’s form, wearing the pig-man’s face — is mistaken for Bajie, and imprisoned. The disabled heir of the South Sea sits in a cell under a stranger’s identity, arrested as the intruder his own bride’s lover actually is. Bajie has his reunion; the bill, as this story’s bills so often arrange themselves, is presented to the person least able to understand it: an innocent prince, in a borrowed face, in a cell, in his own palace.

Thoughts

The soul-swap is the series examining its own premise at the end. Bajie’s first borrowed body was an accident that killed a man; this one is a choice that jails one. The device has not changed — what has changed is that he now knows exactly what borrowing a life costs the person whose life is borrowed, and he does it anyway, for love, once. The episode does not let the reunion’s warmth cover the cell. It also gives Little Dragon Girl the arc’s defining speech, and gives it to her in disguise’s hearing: she does not say she does not love him. She says the East Sea needs the water. Thirty-six episodes after a pig tried to make himself indispensable so he would not be eaten, the woman he loves is making herself indispensable to a dying sea — and the indispensability, in both cases, is the trap.

Next

An escape, a pursuit, a hunt for a fourth spring that could free her from the marriage — Episode 37.