L13

"But when Sara quarreled with Rikito, she said she wanted to bring Chiho to see him as though Rikito was already a hikikomori at the time."

I don't think Chiho agreed to come over on the premise that Rikito couldn't get out of the house because he was a hikikomori. Rather, he was supposedly recovering from a suicide attempt, so Chiho believed he was bedridden and injured. Obviously she would be the one to visit him in that scenario, instead of meeting him in a public space.

"Sara also mentioned (lie) she was rejected by Idol Agency due to her brother's social problem, but again she already failed before Chiho's accident..which is before Rikito become hikikomori."

Even before he became a "hikikomori," Rikito was unemployed and antisocial. He rarely left the house and preferred the company of cats to that of humans. He briefly opened up while he was with Chiho—which Sara couldn't stand and sought to ruin—but fundamentally he was a quiet, timid guy who stayed at home a lot and was supported (and also abused) by his family.

I do agree the last episode was the weakest one, but I wanted to respond to these complaints in particular.

Yeah, that's a great detail about Magistrate Wei. Re. Turkey, IF he's Lu Zhi, I think he could have blackmailed Mr Wang into pretending to be his relative and giving him a cover story? But if that's the case, Lu Zhi must have spent a good few years away from Du County first because otherwise someone would have recognised him. In any case, I'm not married to this theory because there seem to be too many holes in it for now.

I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that Turtle knew what Lu Zhi knew. Lu Zhi only told Mr Zhong and Captain Leng about the skull in Mr Wang's yard. He asked Turtle about Turtle's friend, but when he pointed out the student must have been killed in a place different from where he was found, Turtle just shrugged his shoulders and said he'd never thought about it, indicating he didn't find the circumstances of his friend's death that suspicious or interesting. So Turtle wouldn't have been able to deduce the truth without Lu Zhi telling him everything.

Then Lu Zhi discussed the matter with Mr Zhong and Mr Zhong told him to not even tell the dead child's parents. Do you think Lu Zhi would then turn around and just tell Turtle? Lu Zhi was both a cautious person (and Turtle was a child living in a brothel, i.e. an unstoppable vector of gossip) and someone concerned with doing things the right way (i.e. he wouldn't tell Turtle something he couldn't tell the boy's parents, IMO at least).

It's possible Lu Zhi told someone else about it, or even that he told Turtle later, but so far in the past timeline I think we're meant to assume Turtle is in the dark.

I agree Magistrate Wei is definitely someone from the past.

I also think the man with the beard (the actual killer) might be Captain Yi. The culprit's beard looked very much like Captain Yi's, to the point where Judge Song and Sangeng suspected Captain Yi based on the man's description but were forced to exclude him from their list when his alibi checked out. I think we might circle back to that in the future.

That said, I don't think he's Lu Zhi/the mastermind but rather an accomplice. The mastermind could be Magistrate Wei... or it could be the scholar Turkey. I wonder if he truly is who he says he is, and he kinda looks like Lu Zhi's younger self.

It was his younger self and his friend who hanged himself. They were the young stars of the literary world and were poised to become powerful scholar-officials, but both fell from grace. Judge Song was reminiscing about the lost potential of their youth.

Lots of women in real life are losers, but I wouldn’t call the typical jdrama heroine who can’t make a single decision on her own, thinks she’s too old to deserve love at 32, gets bullied at work because she never speaks up, etc. relatable. Rather, she’s annoying, needy and uninteresting.

What do you mean, "no bromance"? I hate the word bromance because it's childish and stigmatising, but Sangeng and Shicong's epic friendship certainly qualifies. Shicong got fired for Sangeng and took a beating for him, then Sangeng took a beating for Shicong, etc.

Thanks for reminding us that Mr Wang died with a headless chick in his mouth! This shows the killer also knows that Mr Wang killed a student 25 years ago. However, so far the only people who seemed to know that story in the past were Lu Zhi and the two adults he shared his suspicions with, Captain Leng and Mr Zhong. Captain Leng himself became a victim of the killer (who seems to blame him for not doing his job properly, hence the ironic Confucian quote about living according to a consistent—or 'unified'—moral principle, which the killer left at the crime scene as if to say Captain Leng failed to live according to the principles he should uphold) and I don't remember what happened to Mr Zhong, but he's now dead, right? And in any case, he would be super old at this point.

In other words, unless Lu Zhi told someone else beside those two men about the skull buried in Mr Wang's yard—or unless someone else knew Mr Wang's secret, which seems unlikely given how closely guarded it was—I think the revenge killer just has to be Lu Zhi, no?

Moreover, let's remember Lu Zhi's reaction, in today's episode, to being told by Captain Leng that he could never bring Mr Wang to justice. He exclaimed, "So some people can just commit murder and nothing will happen to them?" or something to that effect, and he grew visibly bitter when he was told that Mr Wang's social status would shield him from consequences, while Lu Zhi's own social status and age meant he would never be taken seriously by the government even if he reported what he knew.

I think the anger he expressed at the unjust way the world works 20 years ago resonates with what we know about the killer's motives in the present day. After all, the killer seems to be going after people who did something wrong decades ago and were never held responsible for it.

And let's remember also Lu Zhi's observation, which he made in conversation with Mr Zhong in episode 7, that books may encourage people to be good, but the real world pushes them to be bad. The killer keeps leaving quotes from Confucius's Analects on his victims' bodies as if to chastise or mock them for not leading virtuous lives despite holding respectable positions in the local community. So the killer himself keeps bringing to our attention the discrepancy between what the classics of Confucian/Chinese philosophical thought say and how some people with power and influence actually conduct themselves.

All this is to say that unless this is all a massive misdirection, I think the killer just has to be Lu Zhi. It makes the most sense IMO.

I'm still not clear on what the monkey thief has to do with anything, but the murderer's plot to lure him to Du County was very clever. What if the cheap objects the murderer bought up as antiques to point the monkey thief toward Du County were not randomly chosen? Twenty years earlier, Dr Cheng stole a bunch of cheap knickknacks from Lu Manor because Lu Zhi would always hide the actual valuables before his visits, so what if the stuff the murderer bought up was in fact the loot Dr Cheng had once nicked from Lu Manor? I realise this is unlikely, but I'm just throwing it out there.

We saw that Lu Zhi kinda bonded with Captain Leng after narrowly convincing him not to kill him. Which is not surprising, since Lu Zhi was quite charming. Today we saw him in a more favourable light, I think; his genuine desire to get justice for the dead student, his by-the-book advice to Mr Lu regarding the embezzlement committed by Mr Lu's business partner, and his attempt to help the guard's injured senior brother all showcased his (sometimes impractical/naive) sense of morality.

But we also saw his anger and disappointment when he kept being confronted with how the world actually works, like when Captain Leng told him nothing would happen even if he reported Mr Wang for murder because a servant boy couldn't touch a respected scholar. Lu Zhi even complained to Mr Zhong that "the books" (i.e. classical philosophy/Confucian thought) may encourage people to be good, but the world actually makes it easier to be bad.

These sentiments resonate with the serial killer's apparent desire to punish people with status and influence in the community who did bad things in the past but were never held responsible for them. What is more, the killer keeps leaving quotes from the Analects on his victims' bodies to point out their hypocrisy and failure to live up to the principles of Confucianism.

Like... unless the drama dedicated almost two full episodes to Lu Zhi's characterisation for no good reason only to turn around and reveal that actually *someone else*—who is embittered by the unjust realities of social hierarchy and the triumph of money and influence over moral principle in the exact same way as Lu Zhi—is the serial killer... then the killer has to be Lu Zhi, no?

Plus, who else apart from Lu Zhi, Captain Leng and Mr Zhong even knew that Mr Wang had once killed a student? The killer left a headless chick in Mr Wang's mouth in reference to that hidden crime. Captain Leng himself became a victim of the killer. Mr Zhong would be a billion years old if he was alive. Lu Zhi's childhood friend, who told him about the dead student in the first place, didn't seem to realise Mr Wang was the culprit. I'm just saying...

All that said, I can't wait to get back to the present timeline and see what Judge Song will do now that he knows Sangeng may have a good lead.

Finally, I think Mr Zhong is my favourite character in the past timeline. He entertains Lu Zhi's moral philosophising and likes to fish and talk about the world, but at the same time he's capable of plotting to ruin people's lives and killing men he's known for years with his bare hands. He's both scary and warm.

Some thoughts on episode 7:

I wonder if Mr Xue isn't somehow connected to Lu Zhi? We heard someone (I forget who) say in an earlier episode that the murderer wouldn't be exposed because everyone involved was now dead, including Lu Zhi. And in today's episode there was a conversation between two men (one of them being Mr Xue's butler, I suppose?) where one of them said what the three victims had in common was that none of them had changed his identity since the fire 20 years ago, but then I think he implied the two people most likely to be killed next were living under new names.

So we have to start thinking about which of the characters we know could be living under an assumed identity. The earlier comment that Lu Zhi is now dead immediately struck me as a potential red herring, so what if he survived but is living under a fake name and no one knows who he is? What if he's Mr Xue? He seemed like a bright kid—too smart for his own good in some ways—in the flashback episode, and Mr Xue sounds rich and resourceful, so I wouldn't be shocked if Lu Zhi was able to escape death and become a powerful and influential adult.

In any case, the murderer must be someone who lived in Lu manor 20 years ago and is now going after everyone involved in the conspiracy to set it on fire... but then again, Mr Lu himself didn't seem like a good guy either in the flashback episode, so maybe the situation is more complex.

OK, it's been 6 episodes now and he's been mentioned in a bunch of different contexts without ever appearing on screen to my knowledge. I just gotta ask. Who the fuck is Mr Xue? Could he be one of the two men we saw conversing about the case at the beginning of today's episode?

Thinking you’re a better judge of who deserves to live and die than the rest of society is the definition of unhinged narcissism. Killing people who’ve served their time because they’re not repentant enough or because you think the law got it wrong is psychopathic. Stalking and attacking people is neither defensible nor “heroic.” The death penalty is barbaric enough when it’s passed down by a court of law, let alone when some random university student decides he’s qualified to give it.

The fact you find this kind of fantasy appealing (it’s not at all realistic like you say in your other comment, because “good” serial killers who only pick deserving victims don’t exist in real life) makes you a fascist sympathiser BTW.

Argh, it's so obvious Gui'er likes Sangeng (and he's so convinced his precious master's daughter is too good for him that he would never notice)! If he doesn't get a clue by the end of the show, she should just beat him up.

Also Judge Song is a great character. In many ways he fits the familiar role of a cynical and disillusioned but fundamentally decent man whose talents are going to waste in the swamp of greed and corruption he's been consigned to—a role we were at first invited to assign to Sangeng's dead master, who seemed to fit the hardened yet principled cop stereotype better, until it became clear we were seeing an idealised version of him through the veil of Sangeng's hero worship and Captain Leng was in fact just a piece of shit like everybody else in the yamen—but as interesting, perceptive and morally upright as Judge Song appears to be, he's also a stone-cold psycho who gets off on torturing suspects and collects criminals' teeth as trophies.

The fact these two sides of his personality coexist in apparent harmony contributes to the show's vivid historicity for me. Judge Song illustrates the limits living in a society as violent and hierarchical as Ming China imposed on smart and sensitive people's capacity to treat others humanely. Even if someone from that era was a genuinely good person, they wouldn't operate within a liberal-humanistic philosophical framework that gave them concepts like human rights, individual agency, due process in the modern sense, non-violence, etc. For Judge Song, torturing people during interrogation is an essential element of criminal justice, so why not do his job and be proud of how good he is at it?

The other characters are also wonderfully realistic in that sense. The yamen runners are always going around in packs like wild dogs and not being affiliated with any cliques, patrons, etc. is unthinkable; personal connections and debts are king; the characters are all very proud and respond to slights and insubordination with explosive violence, including Sangeng; secrets are incredibly valuable because what the community thinks about someone, i.e. what people know about them, a person's official status, determines the value of their life—so knowing someone's secret, seeing them without their mask on, is both a source of immense power and a danger to one's own life. I just love how everyone behaves here; it's a proper historical drama.

I'm so tired of jdramas about loser women having their lives fixed by manic pixie dream younger men, jeez.

He's literally a serial killer.

What? He's an unhinged criminal lmao

Which doesn't make any sense because the presence of a unique chromosome should make DNA testing easier, not harder, but I went along with it for the story.

He's had two minutes of screen time and one line so far.

It absolutely is badly written and overacted and every rabid fangirl who thinks it's a masterpiece proves how easy it is to manipulate audiences with crude vibe markers instead of constructing an actual plot that makes sense and leads somewhere.

I'm still on episode 8 and all I have to say is that the leads are so hot together it's melting my brain. Cdramas NEVER get sexual tension right! What happened? Kudos to Ni Ni and Bai Yu for portraying their characters so well, but also to the scriptwriter for making Liuxi so cool. I can't think of any other contemporary Chinese actress who could have done justice to this character, except maybe Liu Yifei. They both have that queenly presence and smouldering gaze.