Main cast: Elaine Tan (Yan), Matt Yang King (Liang, Renshu), Gwendoline Yeo (Tsiao-Jung), Maddox Henry (Young Liang), Sumalee Montano (Young Yan), JB Blanc (The Supervisor)
Director: Oliver Thomas
Good Hunting is based off a short story by Ken Liu, but I haven’t read that one, so I can only wonder whether some things had somehow been left out from the transition from print to screen.
Set in a steampunk version of early 20th century China, at first, this one is about the forbidden friendship between Yan and Liang—forbidden because Yan is a Huli-Jing, fox spirit that can assume the shape of a hot babe, and Liang’s father hunts down the Huli-Jing for bedeviling human men with their wicked charms and ways. His father killed her mother, but they still manage to form a friendship that endure as they become adults.
Alas, as technology encroaches into everyone’s lives, Yan begins to lose her ability to transform back into her fox form. Eventually, she is forced into being human, and resorts to prostitution to survive. Liang, meanwhile moves to Hong Kong to work shirtless in a factory, because all robotics expert are buff and walk around showing off their torsos, and the two eventually drift apart.
Then, one day, Yan shows up to ask Liang for a favor…
Now, this episode has so many themes running through it: friendship, transition into a technological age, tyranny, sexual exploitation and abuse of women, industrialization. However, they never feel cohesively integrated into the episode. Instead, the episode lurches from one theme to another in an episodic manner, the themes never have a clear link to one another or to an overarching plot.
In the end, this episode feels like a long, convoluted journey with several detours made just to tell me that men are bad, especially men in 19th century China… except for that special male feminist ally, of course, who is all so sweet and nice and buff and what not.
Considering how so many male feminist allies on social media turn out to be real life abusers and worse, perhaps this episode should have chosen to deliver a different message. That or find a way to deliver all these thematic messages in a more cohesive manner. Perhaps the story is too big for the run time, who knows.
At any rate, Gone Hunting never really catches whatever quarry it intends to nab in the first place. It just runs here, there, everywhere without any apparent goal or intention, and I think it’s actually lost.
