Reel Tastes & Travels – a light dose of entertainment to wake you up

So of course as we near the end of the series, all the major plotlines have to be resolved. To that end, Chong finally rejoins the national team with his parents’ blessings. Their u-turn could be seen as a bit sudden, but I actually feel the show has done a fairly good job of showing them noticing Chong’s yearning to compete again. And Shan finally getting her prosthetics would have helped give that psychological push to help them get past the trauma of their earlier accidents. 

Chong being Chong throws himself into his training but after such a long break from professional snowboarding, he struggles a bit to keep apace with his teammates. It was a nice touch of realism rather than showing him immediately shooting to the top. It was also nice to see his coach take a sensible approach to his training and offer sound advice and a customized plan rather than further add to the pressure on him and push him to overtrain, which would likely be worse in the long run.

Meanwhile, Zhan is settling into his new job. But Nanfeng, who has finally realized how much Zhan intersected with her college life, and what a genuinely nice guy he is, is desperately trying to to get close to him again. And Zhan is equally desperately trying to put up some boundaries to protect his heart from being broken again. Ultimately he decides to resign and I feel like Nanfeng deserves the brush-off given how she treated him earlier. I’m fairly confident they’ll still get together by the end but she should work for it so that may relationship they start has them on a more equal footing.

Speaking of restarting relationships, Zhi and Chong continue to silently and wretchedly pine for each other. Even after Zhi seizes an opportunity to visit the national training center and see him nothing happens. I was almost resigned to seeing their reconciliation get dragged out as much as their initial getting together was. Thankfully after several false alarms, they finally have an open conversation about their feelings – something Chong should have done much earlier! The episode ends mid- conversation but they are clearly heading towards getting back together and so I can sign off with a huge sigh of relief.

Stray Musings

• Why doesn’t Chong just message or call her! You don’t actually want to break up with her, just tackle your own self-doubts. Why does that need to happen in complete silence. Utter and complete idiocy!
• Dai Duo and Shan continue to be the cutest, least problematic couple on this show
• It was really interesting seeing the different ways the athletes were training. I was especially fascinated by how they used the trampoline to practice some of the stunts they’d need to perform on the slopes