I’ll cut right to the chase: you can skip this one. But you might not want to for reasons I have no control over. Say you’ve heard all the scuttlebutt around Zhao Lusi’s health and want to support her, or just want to ambulance-chase Pearl Girl, the last drama she filmed before she was hospitalized, for any signs that she was falling apart (I couldn’t find any). Or say you’re between dramas and will watch pretty much anything at this point. In that case, the least I can do for you, after having soldiered through all 40 episodes, is let you know which ones you can skip.
The set-up is actually pretty good, so watch the first 10 episodes. Zhao Lusi plays Duanwu, an enslaved pearl diver who gets caught up in the blood feud of a jewel-merchant, Yan Zijing (played by Liu Yiuning), against the Cui family, who stole his family’s pearl farm and embezzled its imperial tribute pearls with some help from some shadowy and powerful backers. Zijing ends up taking Duanwu under his dark, prickly wing, teaching her the jewel trade the way he learned it–harshly, with no shortcuts and no handouts. This is the best part of the series: you can tell that Zijing knows something about Duanwu based on the “blood-stained pearl” her mother gave her before she died, but won’t tell her for some reason. And, you can tell that he’s growing fond of her but won’t let his feelings derail his labyrinthine revenge plot. It’s good stuff at this point, backed by some really nice set and costume design around the pearl farm, the merchant ship, etc. The leads’ romantic tension gets triangulated when Zhang Jinran (Tang Xiaotian) shows up to investigate the pearl embezzlement on behalf of the Emperor. He takes an immediate liking to Duanwu and pleads with her to trust the law to bring her and her friends on the pearl farm justice instead of falling into Zijing’s revenge spiral. It’s a genuinely compelling set-up, and you’re not sure at this point whether to root for Zijing or Jinran’s path forward for Duanwu.
However, things start to go off the rails right when they’re getting interesting. To be clear, the problem isn’t the developing romance between Duanwu and Zijing per se. It’s natural for them to be attracted to each other because of their shared trauma and murky connections to the “blood-stained pearl” (and the buried treasure it supposedly points to) that supposedly sparked the massacre of the Yan family. The problem is with *how* the screenwriters and director develop that romance. They go from sparring in the dark, candlelit hold of Yan’s convoy’s merchant ship to skipping through flower markets to a sticky-sweet soundtrack. It’s awful, and the actors seemed as uncomfortable with all the rom-com mooning and slapstick they were being made to do as I felt watching it.
The same problem, to some degree, afflicts the plot. Right when it should get interesting–i.e., when a lethal ambush by the bandits who massacred the Yan family all these years ago tears Zijing and Duanwu apart and tosses her up on the canal banks of Yangzhou, where she finally takes a swing at opening the jewelry shop she always dreamed of, but without any of the friends she planned on sharing it with (see the aforementioned ambush)–a truly inane misunderstanding between the leads sends the story into a 15-episode tailspin. Everyone I’ve read who’s reviewed this series has said the same thing about the implausibility of this miscommunication and the hostility that follows. ****<spoilers>*** I mean, if Zijing realizes he can’t get the antidote for his poisoned condition anymore and therefore is going to die horribly, and he doesn’t want to drag Duanwu down that road with him, there were ways to make that happen. He could be icy and awful to her when they meet up in Yangzhou again, and she would of course be bewildered at first and then harden against him over time–that would track. But for her to somehow conclude that he masterminded the ambush and *shot her with an arrow* without asking a SINGLE question about it? 0% believable. ***</spoilers>*** Anyhoo, the upshot is that the producers likely needed to make the story fit its 40-episode contract, so voilà, 15 extra episodes. I’d tell you to skip them altogether, but there’s a legitimately interesting sideplot that gets going in this loop: the relationship between down-on-her-luck villain Cui Shijiu, who got caught in the crossfire of Yan Zijing’s vendetta against her family, and Zheng Wu, the initially arrogant and bullying illegitimate son of Yangzhou’s most powerful jewelery dynasty. Against all expectations, these two make each other better people, and the gorgeous Chloe Xie is twice the actress Zhao Lusi is IMHO. I ended up caring about their relationship more than I did the leads’. So, I guess I’d say just watch episodes 11-30 at 2x speed (the competition between the songstresses for the Qionghua beauty pageant is pretty good as well in here, and it develops a decently strong thread in the series about women needing to band together to survive a brutally misogynistic world).
The last 10 episodes are worth slowing down for. There’s a legitimately surprising reveal for at least one of the Final Bosses in Zijing’s quest for revenge (maybe a bit too surprising? Some of the logic of this character’s double life doesn’t quite add up). And, setting aside a stupid kidnapping plot that goes nowhere, the ways in which Duanwu (now Su Muzhe) builds her jewelry business and support community are realistic and gratifying. She seems in the end to have taken Zhang Jinran’s lessons to heart more than Yan Zijing’s, and as a result, the ending of the series, though bittersweet, is satisfying. I do wish we knew a little more about Su Muzhe’s and Zhang Jinran’s friendship in future decades, and the fates of the songstresses who form a mutual aid society to help each other when their beauty-queen days come to an end. But overall the series sticks the landing in both tone and plot after a crazy loop-de-loop in the middle.
The Rookery 