Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Reza Safinia and H. Scott Salinas’s “Fung Hai Suite” from Warrior’s second season.

Both You Get May?! and Asian Pacific American Heritage Month continue with a look at “Not for a Drink, a Fuck, or a Goddamn Prayer,” the fifth episode of Warrior’s second season. Written by Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard, the duo that later showran Warrior’s third and final season, and directed by Loni Peristere, the co-founder of the visual effects studio Zoic (of Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones fame), “Not for a Drink” is one of my favorite Warrior episodes.

I wouldn’t recommend “Not for a Drink” as a gateway episode like I did last week with “The Blood and the Shit,” Warrior’s bottle episode, but it has something for everybody—from fans of same-sex romance to fans of Hoon Lee, a muse for Warrior creator Jonathan Tropper—and it contains my favorite fight scene in the entire series. So many elements in “Not for a Drink” demonstrate why the underrated Warrior is badly missed by its fanbase.

Also, Sophie Mercer is absent from “Not for a Drink.” She’s the fucking worst.

Celine Buckens played Sophie, the younger sister of Penny Blake (the politically progressive white socialite who was Ah Sahm’s first-season love interest) and the temporary boyfriend of Dylan Leary (the racist Irish mobster who fights to exclude Chinese immigrants from California). She previously played the little French girl who befriends the titular horse in the Steven Spielberg version of War Horse. Buckens, an addition to the cast in Warrior’s second season, isn’t a terrible actress. Her character wasn’t poorly written. But if I knew Sophie in real life, I’d hate her guts.

The only other Warrior characters I hate more than Sophie are Leary and Samuel Blake, the smug and vapid mayor of San Francisco, as well as Penny’s estranged husband and Sophie’s brother-in-law. Sophie’s reckless actions contributed to the eruption of the Irish’s anti-Chinese riots later in the season, and in the episode that preceded “Not for a Drink,” her recklessness led to Leary’s destruction of her sister’s steel mill for choosing to hire Chinese laborers instead of Irish ones.

Penny’s loss of the steel mill—a business Joanna Vanderham’s character inherited from her late father and fought to protect from the threats of both her sexist husband, who resents her business acumen, and Leary—kicked off a recurring theme on Warrior: the struggles of independent businesswomen to survive in an age when suffragists fought for women’s right to vote. Warrior’s first episode took place in 1878, several years after Wyoming and Utah became the first two states to grant women the right to vote. California didn’t allow women to vote until 1911.

Ah Toy, a trained swordswoman and a Chinatown madam Tropper based on a real-life California madam of the same name, is my favorite female Warrior character, thanks to Olivia Cheng’s charisma, as well as her confidence while wearing the campiest outfits this side of the Met Gala. She and Nellie Davenport, the owner of a Sonoma County winery, are two other independent businesswomen on the show who learn the hard way that capitalism is rigged against female business owners.

Played by Miranda Raison, another second-season addition to the cast, Nellie employs mostly Chinese women at her winery and provides them with an alternative to both sex work and the harshness of the San Francisco streets. Despite Ah Toy’s skepticism about Nellie’s view that sex work shouldn’t be the only option for Chinese women, the two businesswomen bond over their experiences and finally kiss in “Not for a Drink.”

Ah Toy and Nellie’s romance was the longest-lasting romance on Warrior. It outlasted Ah Sahm’s romances with Penny, Rosalita Vega (a fight club owner in the second season), and Yan Mi (a counterfeit money maker in the third season), as well as Wang Chao’s nearly Sledge Hammer-esque romance with firearms (but he doesn’t talk to his guns like Hammer did). Terrifically played by the aforementioned Hoon Lee from Banshee, Chao is a black market salesman who provides contraband to the Chinatown tongs and the SFPD but annoys members of the tongs because he doesn’t side with any of their crews.

Chao is less like a character you’d find on a martial arts drama and more like a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine schemer character. The DS9 character Chao resembles the most is Garak, who changes sides more often than a ball at Wimbledon.

A slave for 11 years in Cuba (which resulted in him being fluent in both English and Spanish) before he escaped from bondage, Chao doesn’t know any martial arts and is a thinker instead of a fighter. But in “Not for a Drink,” where Chao and Li Yong, a member of the Long Zii tong, team up to frame Zing, the sadistic leader of the Fung Hai tong, for a series of killings that were actually committed by Ah Toy with her sword, Chao holds his own against the Fung Hai when they catch on to his plot against Zing, and he unleashes his warrior side for the first time when he takes down several of Zing’s thugs with a pistol.

“Not for a Drink” and 2023’s “A Soft Heart Won’t Do You No Favors,” which was directed by Warrior fight choreographer Brett Chan, are episodes where Chao is out of his element. Both episodes are my favorite Chao episodes, as well as two of my favorite Warrior episodes. (“A Soft Heart” will receive the spotlight from me two weeks from now.) “Not for a Drink” also provides closure to an arc about Chao’s battle with Claire, a drug-addicted white prostitute he had a secret daughter with, over custody of that daughter, whose name is Hannah.

Chao’s brush with death while fighting the Fung Hai spurs him to make a heartbreaking choice to protect Hannah from Claire’s unstable way of life. Warrior was lauded by many Asian American viewers during its run on Cinemax for making its Chinese characters complex and flawed—Ah Sahm, a character Bruce Lee (no relation to Hoon Lee) intended to play when he wrote the treatment that evolved into Warrior, is more flawed than any of the heroes Lee starred as in his movies—and Chao is the best example of the complexity of Warrior’s Chinese characters.

Li Yong isn’t as complex as Chao—he’s often the voice of reason on Warrior even though he’s both the lover and the right-hand man of the power-hungry Mai Ling, Ah Sahm’s sister/nemesis—but he’s equally compelling to watch, thanks to the incredible physicality of Indonesian judo champion Joe Taslim, the star of 2018’s brutal and gory The Night Comes for Us, as well as Sub-Zero from the 2021 version of Mortal Kombat. Taslim’s calm Warrior character doesn’t talk much. He lets his fighting do most of the talking. His fast and efficient fighting moves are a bit subdued compared to those of the killing machine Taslim starred as in The Night Comes for Us.

But as Taslim pointed out in the above featurette, whenever Zing or someone else threatens Mai Ling’s life, Li Yong loses control of his emotions. That’s when the angry Taslim we’re more familiar with from The Night Comes for Us and Furious 6 resurfaces. Frequently surrounded by leggy and tattooed women and clad in a vest straight out of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’s Ricardo Montalban scenes, Li Yong’s opponent in the action centerpiece of “Not for a Drink”—who first appeared in the first season’s fourth episode—was delightfully played by Dustin Nguyen as a cross between a hair metal band frontman, a live-action Batman villain, and Khan Noonien Singh.

Like Lee after his run as Kato on The Green Hornet, the Vietnamese American 21 Jump Street alum returned to his parents’ homeland and became one of its biggest movie stars. But Nguyen’s filmography in Vietnam is more varied than Lee’s post-Kato filmography: In addition to being an action star, Nguyen headlines rom-coms and supernatural thrillers. His directorial efforts—which include his 2013 directorial debut, Once Upon a Time in Vietnam, in which he starred as a hard-drinking warrior monk (it’s on Tubi!)—led to him also directing three Warrior episodes.

“Not for a Drink” was a strong episode because of the material for Olivia Cheng and Hoon Lee. Then it became a keeper when it decided to pit one of Indonesia’s biggest action stars against one of Vietnam’s biggest movie stars in a thrilling fight scene I’ve rewatched more times than any other Warrior fight scene—including even Andrew Koji’s dazzling demonstration of his nunchaku skills in Ah Sahm’s first nunchaku scene a few episodes later in “Enter the Dragon,” the season’s pivotal Chinatown riots episode. (CW: Li Yong shoves his sword up a Fung Hai thug’s neck and squishes another thug’s eyes with his fingers.)

When Nguyen tauntingly says, “I’m kinda mad at you,” to Taslim, it makes me wish that Nguyen got to play a Batman villain, which is funny because one of DC’s best Batman artists—since 2004—happens to be also named Dustin Nguyen. The Li Yong/Zing fight scene makes me proud to be Southeast Asian: Taslim attacks Nguyen with silat moves from his fight scenes in The Raid and The Night Comes for Us, Nguyen retaliates with similar silat moves and everything he knows from his martial arts projects, and it was all remarkably choreographed by a Filipino fight choreographer.

Like Blair Underwood, Lucy Liu, and Bianca Lawson, Nguyen does not age, and he was so fun to watch in the Li Yong/Zing fight scene that it made me buy (on DVD) and watch for the first time director Charlie Nguyen’s The Rebel last week. That was the 2007 Vietnamese martial arts flick where Nguyen (no relation to the director and his brother, The Rebel star Johnny Tri Nguyen) played another sadistic villain: a 1920s Vietnamese secret agent who works for French colonizers and quashes peasant rebellions.

The Rebel rules—just like Warrior does.

Next week: Warrior dramatizes (and changes a few details about) how anti-Asian violence once escalated to a massive scale in San Francisco. It’s the most harrowing and emotionally draining episode in Warrior’s run.