This was one of those full-on melee episodes of Kingdom, the kind where chaos is happening on all fronts and a dizzying area of intermittently appearing characters are crucial.  They say sometimes you can’t tell the players without a scorecard but honestly, the scorecard for Kingdom would have to be the size of a Kanji dictionary.  And it would have almost as many Kanji, come to think of it.

Xiang Yi, the young Chu commander who sort of looks (and acts) like the “Chu Xin”, gets a 5000 man complement from Wa Lin and orders to take Teng’s head.  He’s brilliant but young and brash, many too young to command that many.  But he’s largely running interference for Wa Lin, who intends to make a frontal assault and crush the defensive formation.  Meanwhile Wang Jian is toying with the Yan general Wu Lu Duo, pretending to retreat and drawing him into a trap which costs him his entire 8000 man elite mountain unit.  He does walk away with the forts Wang Jian abandoned to sell his act, though.

With Hangu Pass ablaze and panic rising like its smoke in the capital, (as if all this weren’t confusing enough, the other totally unrelated Xiang – Zheng’s pregnant favorite concubine – makes an appearance too) fires are breaking out all over the field.  What Wu Lu Duo is trying to do represents Qin’s worst nightmare, flanking the pass altogether and staging an invasion through the mountains.  That makes Wang Jian one of the lynchpin’s of Qin’s entire defense, which given his personality is understandably making a lot of people in the palace very nervous.

We really have’t seen Xin for two episodes, though there’s so much going down all over the field that it’s easy to forget that.  Teng seems to be the overall centerpiece of the defense, with the young thousand-man commanders playing vital roles in disrupting the invaders’ relentless attacks.  But the odds still seem inexorably stacked against Qin here, and none of these defensive moves seems to have the potential to truly change the dynamic – only delay the inevitable.  What – and who – is destined to be the means to change that?