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What Do You Carry Across a Desert?
Three hundred thousand taels of missing gold, a massacred family and far too many people who seem to know something about both.
That is more or less where Remnants of Gold begins. Zhang Luyao is looking for the truth about what happened to her family, Pu Ying is following an investigation of his own, and somewhere between them sits a much older story involving soldiers, old loyalties and a fortune nobody seems to have actually enjoyed.
It sounds like a mystery about missing gold. For a while, it is.
But the further the story goes, the less interesting the gold becomes.
Part of that is because of the people gathering around it. Zhang Luyao is intelligent, guarded and formidable, but thankfully not written as someone whose intelligence prevents her from making bad decisions. Xin Zhilei gives her a wonderful stillness; she can look exhausted by the world and still be the most dangerous person in the room.
Yu Hou is much messier. Chen Kun makes him selfish, charming, cowardly, lost and loyal without making any of it feel contradictory. He wants money because money means freedom, or at least he thinks it does. The problem is that he keeps forming attachments that make walking away considerably harder than he planned.
Pu Ying is quieter. Yin Fang gives him an appealing steadiness, although the writing never opens him up quite as much. And then there is Ban Cha, who appears with his wine and salt and the general air of a man who has wandered into everyone else's emergency by accident.
By then, the gold has collected an increasingly strange jianghu around it. Ha Bingzhong, Tie Futu, Xiaofang, Pingping, Seventeen, Tang Zheng, the Qin Demons... almost everyone arrives with an old debt, a private motive or some piece of history nobody thought worth mentioning earlier.
I liked that. A strange habit, an old grievance, a few lines of dialogue, and someone who appeared ten minutes ago can feel as though they have been wandering around this world for years.
Sometimes, though, there really isn't much more than the suggestion.
Thirteen episodes keep the story lean, but they also leave several characters somewhere between memorable minor figure and plot mechanism. Xiaofang and Pingping matter, yet their fates very conveniently push other characters where the story needs them to go. Tang Zheng arrives carrying enough history for another drama, while the Qin Demons are wonderfully strange and also suspiciously useful when needed.
Despite finding these people interesting, I never became deeply attached to most of them. The drama keeps us at a certain distance, letting people reveal themselves through what they do, what they remember and what they refuse to explain. I suspect some of that is intentional. Sometimes it works. At other times, especially when characters start dying, I understood why something mattered before I necessarily felt that it mattered.
Xu Bing's direction can be similarly uneven. He likes taking his time, and often I liked taking it with him. People sit and drink, conversations circle around what nobody wants to say, and silences are allowed to last.
But sometimes a scene continues after it has already made its point, while something much more important is treated so elliptically that I wondered whether I had missed a scene somewhere. This becomes particularly noticeable toward the end, when thirty years of grudges, loyalties and unfinished business suddenly have to come together in very little time. Some deaths feel inevitable. Others feel rather more like somebody needed to die so somebody else could finally make a decision.
The desert location work is one of the drama's strengths. It looks dry, empty and unpleasant to cross. The fights have weight, people get dirty and exhausted, and there is a roughness to the whole thing that suits this world. Some of the sets are much less convincing, especially beside those landscapes.
I liked the sense that these people had lives before we met them. They are selfish, loyal, petty, stubborn, occasionally foolish and not always easy to place neatly on one side of anything. Even when the writing didn't give me quite enough of them, it usually left me wanting to know more.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped wondering who would end up with the 300,000 taels of gold, or whether there was ever any gold to find. After enough time in this desert, even the gold begins to feel like a story someone once told.
I wanted to know what would happen to the people still looking for it.
There is quite a bit here that bothered me, but I can already see myself watching it again someday. So despite all my complaints, I'm giving it an 8.5.
That is more or less where Remnants of Gold begins. Zhang Luyao is looking for the truth about what happened to her family, Pu Ying is following an investigation of his own, and somewhere between them sits a much older story involving soldiers, old loyalties and a fortune nobody seems to have actually enjoyed.
It sounds like a mystery about missing gold. For a while, it is.
But the further the story goes, the less interesting the gold becomes.
Part of that is because of the people gathering around it. Zhang Luyao is intelligent, guarded and formidable, but thankfully not written as someone whose intelligence prevents her from making bad decisions. Xin Zhilei gives her a wonderful stillness; she can look exhausted by the world and still be the most dangerous person in the room.
Yu Hou is much messier. Chen Kun makes him selfish, charming, cowardly, lost and loyal without making any of it feel contradictory. He wants money because money means freedom, or at least he thinks it does. The problem is that he keeps forming attachments that make walking away considerably harder than he planned.
Pu Ying is quieter. Yin Fang gives him an appealing steadiness, although the writing never opens him up quite as much. And then there is Ban Cha, who appears with his wine and salt and the general air of a man who has wandered into everyone else's emergency by accident.
By then, the gold has collected an increasingly strange jianghu around it. Ha Bingzhong, Tie Futu, Xiaofang, Pingping, Seventeen, Tang Zheng, the Qin Demons... almost everyone arrives with an old debt, a private motive or some piece of history nobody thought worth mentioning earlier.
I liked that. A strange habit, an old grievance, a few lines of dialogue, and someone who appeared ten minutes ago can feel as though they have been wandering around this world for years.
Sometimes, though, there really isn't much more than the suggestion.
Thirteen episodes keep the story lean, but they also leave several characters somewhere between memorable minor figure and plot mechanism. Xiaofang and Pingping matter, yet their fates very conveniently push other characters where the story needs them to go. Tang Zheng arrives carrying enough history for another drama, while the Qin Demons are wonderfully strange and also suspiciously useful when needed.
Despite finding these people interesting, I never became deeply attached to most of them. The drama keeps us at a certain distance, letting people reveal themselves through what they do, what they remember and what they refuse to explain. I suspect some of that is intentional. Sometimes it works. At other times, especially when characters start dying, I understood why something mattered before I necessarily felt that it mattered.
Xu Bing's direction can be similarly uneven. He likes taking his time, and often I liked taking it with him. People sit and drink, conversations circle around what nobody wants to say, and silences are allowed to last.
But sometimes a scene continues after it has already made its point, while something much more important is treated so elliptically that I wondered whether I had missed a scene somewhere. This becomes particularly noticeable toward the end, when thirty years of grudges, loyalties and unfinished business suddenly have to come together in very little time. Some deaths feel inevitable. Others feel rather more like somebody needed to die so somebody else could finally make a decision.
The desert location work is one of the drama's strengths. It looks dry, empty and unpleasant to cross. The fights have weight, people get dirty and exhausted, and there is a roughness to the whole thing that suits this world. Some of the sets are much less convincing, especially beside those landscapes.
I liked the sense that these people had lives before we met them. They are selfish, loyal, petty, stubborn, occasionally foolish and not always easy to place neatly on one side of anything. Even when the writing didn't give me quite enough of them, it usually left me wanting to know more.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped wondering who would end up with the 300,000 taels of gold, or whether there was ever any gold to find. After enough time in this desert, even the gold begins to feel like a story someone once told.
I wanted to know what would happen to the people still looking for it.
There is quite a bit here that bothered me, but I can already see myself watching it again someday. So despite all my complaints, I'm giving it an 8.5.
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