When last we left our Handsome Stranger and the Pig Butcher, they confronted Chancellor Wei about a love letter.
Changyu calls him a traitor and starts to read the letter out loud
Chancellor Wei yells at her to shut up, which feels like a tell. Yan Zheng reveals he found the note in the box his Uncle gifted his Mother. Because of his Uncle’s feelings of guilt, he must have never opened it again.
Also, there’s a way to prove the tiger tally is genuine. Ask the person who forged it! Which is Tao, who comes in and quickly confirms it’s genuine.
First, Chancellor Wei’s soldiers show up to prevent him from being arrested. Then, Qi’s soldiers show up. They march right into the suddenly empty throne room without any trouble.
Qi thinks Qian should be excited about being Empress. She’s not.
Nor does Qi get to enjoy being Emperor for very long, because Chancellor Wei is at the door with his soldiers! It’s a trap!
Grand Tutor Li points out Chancellor Wei’s army is too small, but here’s Yan Zheng with his army! Why are Grand Tutor Li and Qi surprised when this would obviously happen?
Qi thinks Yan Zheng will join his side when he didn’t before
To be fair, Qi probably assumes Yan Zheng is like him. But Yan Zheng won’t join him because Qi joined forces with Shi Yue that one time.
Learning that Qi once worked with barbarians SHOCKS Grand Tutor Li so much that he has a heart attack and falls to the ground.
Qi’s final move is bringing out Chancellor Wei’s son and wife as hostages. But Chancellor Wei doesn’t care, and Yan Zheng has to save their lives.
Still, as their men fight Qi, Yan Zheng and Chancellor Wei start fighting each other. NOW? Really? Sure. Fine. It’s fine.
Meanwhile, Changyu tries to get Qian away from Qi. Qian is sure her only way of escaping Qi is to die. But Qi gets hit by a few arrows while protecting her. Unfortunately, he also goes over a wall. And they’re still shackled together.
Changyu catches her and tells Qi to let her go. Qian tells Changyu that he won’t, he’s never learned to let go.
But no! In this dramatic moment, Qi has a moment of self-reflection and dislocates his thumb so he can fall out of the shackle and to the ground. Qian is finally free. Sorta.
Yan Zheng disarms his Uncle
And his cousin takes an arrow to the back for him. But, as he’s dying, Wei Xuan needs to tell Yan Zheng he only did this because Yan Zheng saved his now traumatized mother.
Chancellor Wei is ready for Yan Zheng to kill him, but Changyu stops him.
Chancellor Wei says he feels this ending has been inevitable since 17 years ago. Yan Zheng has him taken away.
Now that all the dying is done, Yan Zheng and Changyu celebrate and… piggyback?
Some time later, Yan Zheng’s aunt begs him to spare Chancellor Wei’s life. Turns out, Wei Xuan wasn’t his son, but the son of a lover who died. Chancellor Wei helped her by marrying her. But he also did it to stop his family from pressuring him to marry. So. Not exactly selfless?
She knows he may not be able to stop the execution, but maybe he can keep his Uncle’s body whole.
The Grand Princess’s mother then gives us half a story
She tells Changyu and her daughter that the Chancellor’s love, Consort Qi, wanted nothing to do with the Emperor. Then, they discovered she was pregnant, but it couldn’t be the Emperor’s child.
Around when she would have gotten pregnant, Chancellor Wei supposedly attacked a palace maid. I think he was really with Consort Qi, and they did a switcheroo to protect her from the Emperor.
Then, when Consort Qi’s place was on fire, the water they poured on it only made the fire burn brighter. Which is horrifying.
And later, an Imperial Physician died by suicide, leaving behind a note that confessed Consort Qi had never been pregnant. So, this wall all the Emperor trying to get back at Chancellor Wei and Consort Qi.
The second half of the story is given to us by Chancellor Wei
In prison, he tells Tao, even though he was there, about that time he got drunk and suggested the Emperor abdicate in front of a bunch of important people.
The Emperor’s son, Prince Chengde, was more popular than him. Unfortunately, he was also indecisive and wouldn’t seize power. So the Emperor worked with his nephew, Prince Changxin, to kill his own son.
And Grand Tutor Li, who was also at that dinner, told the Emperor that Chancellor Wei suggested he abdicate. So the Emperor had that letter from Consort Qi forged, luring Chancellor Wei back. When Chancellor Wei came back, she died in the fire to free him.
Furious, Chancellor Wei launched the bloody coup that got rid of the emperor and allowed himself to survive.
Yan Zheng and Changyu are secretly listening to the full story
In the end, Changyu’s father being framed was a part of the Emperor’s scheme, something Chancellor Wei couldn’t stop.
When Yan Zheng started looking into what happened back then, Chancellor Wei tried to save their relationship by killing Changyu’s parents to keep the truth silent.
Yan Zheng doesn’t want to face his Uncle, so he and Changyu leave.
Tao quotes Changyu to Chancellor Wei: In this life, be a good pig. In the next life, be a good man.
Then Tao leaves too.
Chancellor Wei feels that for a man as bad as him, there will be no next life.
The current Emperor has lost his mind. So, we’re done with him.
Qian brings Qi food in prison, feeding it to him. Because he truly loves her, he hopes that if there is another life, they never meet again. Then… he finishes drinking the poison that she has brought him, coughs up blood, and collapses in her arms.
Before he finally dies, he wants to know who she truly is. She tells him that she is just herself, and he calls her a liar and dies.
Now Bao is the emperor, and everything is great
Because he’s not actually doing the ruling, he’s too young. Yan Zheng is ruling as the Prince Regent. So Bao can make plans to marry Ning, which he’s also too young to do.
The Li’s are essentially exiled. Grand Tutor Li is still alive, but crying because he became a villain 17 years ago for nothing.
We see a vision, Changyu’s maybe, of her returning to her hometown, only everyone who died is alive. The nice people and the horrible people.
But in reality, she goes back to the Zhaos, calls them her parents, and promises never to part again. Mr Jin and his guys show up too.
Yan Zheng sends his Uncle poison so he can die by suicide instead of being cut to pieces. Instead of his lost love, Chancellor Wei thinks about his nephew before he drinks and dies.
5 years later, Changyu and Yan Zheng have two children, but that doesn’t stop them from riding into battle together.
In a post-credit scene, we see reality as it might have been had the tragedy of 17 years ago never happened. Before Changyu is born, the adults decide she’ll marry Yan Zheng. I know that’s supposed to be cute, but I hate it.
Later, as adults, a kinder, gentler Prince Qi meets Qian and is immediately drawn to her. But getting near her causes him to feel sick. Qi guesses this is because she was an enemy in a past life.
The internet tells me Qian was a time traveler
Which kind of backs up my feelings that Qi and Qian would have made their own interesting, individual story. As it was, only hinted at, it made her kind of interesting but unknowable.
As far as endings go for longer cdramas, I place this firmly in the “good” category. Budget issues are pretty obvious in the small anti-climax that was the final battle between Qi, Yan Zheng, and Chancellor Wei.
Also, I think finding out the true truth from two characters in the last two episodes was less than exciting.
But considering the confusing, censorship-masticated mess that Cdrama endings can become, this one was fine.
Bonus points for Chancellor Wei being a complicated villain. He was an illustration of both the victim of those in power and someone who used power to victimize others. Definitely a major theme of this story.
On the other hand, points deducted for Changyu and Yan Zheng’s romance being a non-issue by the end. They triumphed over evil together, which was nice, but… I would have liked to see some kind of heroic, last-minute rescue or something along those lines.
And in the end, Qi did not kill Grand Tutor Li, and that’s the most annoying thing of all.
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