Having a week to get back into the swing of Kingdom certainly helps. But I also think this is a series that often benefits from scaling it down a little, which is ironic given how sweep and grand scale is an essential part of its appeal. Considering that this sequence is covering a battle with hundreds of thousands of soldiers (I haven’t counted but that sounds right) lack of sweep isn’t going to be a problem. But here we really focused in on just a few of them, and lingered long enough for their stories to play out. That helps.
It was interesting to see the Mo Ye sword written into the plot. Much of the story of these husband and wife swords is surely apocryphal, but it’s the sort of gory and tragic tale military legend can’t get enough of. Xian Yi is the one wielding it, but he loses sight of Meng Tian, whose focus is the archer Li Bai. He cleverly secretes himself beneath Li Bai’s platform, and manages to disable him before the archer can impact the battle between Xian Yi and Wang Ben (or the even bigger one just starting up).
Linwu stands at the head of the mighty armies of Chu, but the bandit king has a secret weapon in Wang Qi’s old sidekick General Teng. He cuts through the battle like a weed whacker with his sights squarely on Linwu, and their standoff is the feature event of the week. Linwu may be a bad man, but he’s no match for Wang Qi’s right hand. This is the first lynchpin in the Qin defense plan, and Teng is more than capable of pulling it off.
As for Xin, he finally gets a little screen time here. Unfortunately for him the Feixin Force is up against the army of Wan Ji, consisting entirely of relatives of the victims of the Changping massacre. 400,000 Zhao prisoners being buried alive is likewise probably apocryphal but no doubt Bai Qi killed a lot of them – he was known as “The Butcher” for a reason. Zhao has a special hatred for Qin as a result of that, and Xin and his men are facing the brunt of it.
Interestingly, we see something very rare indeed here – Diao riding into battle. Strategists directly entering the fray was extremely uncommon at the time anyway, but Diao sees how desperate things are looking for the Feixin Force on the dust-shrouded battlefield and decides she has no choice. I’m trying to remember the last time we saw Diao involved in a battle directly and frankly I can’t – suffice to say it’s been a very long time indeed. I admire her courage but that’s not what she gets the big bucks for, so her goal should be to help restore a semblance of order to the Qin troops and get the hell out of Dodge as quickly as possible.
