I just finished #legendofzanghai yesterday, and my thoughts aren’t very distilled yet, but nvmd 🤪
Overall verdict: I liked it a lot! Tbh, I haven’t liked a single thing I’ve seen xz in since cql, so this was a *very* welcome change. I rate him! It pained me to say that everything he was in was rubbish! But it was!
I really appreciated that the plot was not as convoluted as you often get with 40 episode c-dramas. There was a clear throughline, a diverse but not overcrowded cast of characters, a central conflict that the whole show was about. I was able to follow everything and it actually hung together! Again, a welcome change from other dramas, where I often *feel* very strongly that the plot is absolutely riddled with holes, but because it’s so complicated, it would break my brain to try and pinpoint them. Here, I felt I understood what was going on, while still being surprised and highly entertained by the twists and turns of the story.
I also massively enjoyed the romance element. I’m not sure “romance” is even the right word, as both people basically don’t have a romantic bone in their body, but I thought their relationship was wonderful. Playful, passionate, but with the interesting tension that both parties have their own agenda that they have to balance against any love interest. It was also very equitable and full of mutual respect, none of this “don’t bother your pretty little head about things too important for you to grasp” bs I keep seeing elsewhere. They’re both equally serious, competent, professional people, he a politician and scholar, she a martial artist and businesswoman - which also leads to some fun reversals of old gender tropes (including one scene where he is the damsel in distress, she comes to his aid and beats up the bad guys, while he assists as best he can by e.g. toppling book cases on top of them. I don’t think he actually smashed a vase over anybody’s head, but he might as well have, so close was it to stuff I’ve seen in dozens of films from the fifties and sixties, where a guy rushes in all guns blazing to rescue his girl, and she (after a brief moment to recover) pluckily does her best to help by throwing things and tripping up the baddies with her foot as they rush to the exits.
I also liked that, despite some very foreboding scenes of everyone happily having dinner together, during which I kept wailing “oh no, oh no, you are all going to die horribly!”, the death toll among the good guys was remarkably low. And everybody who died actually stayed dead.*
*Caveat: Actually, one of the few things I *didn’t* like was the extent to which they left their options open to return people from the dead later - it’s heavily hinted that one good guy in fact faked his own death, and the big bad is never actually shown as a corpse, plus in the scene where he dies, nobody follows through and maybe stabs him a few extra times to make sure. So my money is on both these people returning if there is a Season 2.
1/2
