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 “Chinatown Riot” from Warrior’s “Enter the Dragon” episode.

Via Criterion’s 2020 Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits box set, I recently watched for the first time 1971’s The Big Boss and 1972’s Fist of Fury—the first movie where Lee busted out his nunchakus, a weapon that was taught to him by Dan Inosanto, the Filipino American martial arts legend I named the lead character after in a treatment I wrote nearly 10 years ago for a Blue Thunder-inspired graphic novel idea I abandoned.

The Criterion box set’s excellent liner notes by Jeff Chang—the author of 2025’s Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America and 2005’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation—are why I would rather listen to an audio commentary for a martial arts flick by Chang, who has never done a commentrak, than a commentary for one by Bey Logan. He’s the British white dude whose history of sexual misconduct caused the 27 Dragon Dynasty DVD commentraks he recorded for the Weinstein Company to be unlistenable nowadays. Ugh, the copy of Dragon Dynasty’s two-disc release of The Rebel I received in the mail earlier this month has that piece of shit as the moderator on its commentrak. Instant skip, man.

Even before the sex pest stuff, I had a problem with Logan doing so many Dragon Dynasty commentraks. Why the fuck weren’t there any Asian American voices during those commentraks? I bet one of the writers from Asia Pacific Arts—the magazine Saturday School podcast hosts Ada Tseng and Brian Hu were writers for, as well as a mag that interviewed Johnnie To in 2004—would have been eager to do the Dragon Dynasty commentrak for To’s PTU, which, of course, was given to fucking Logan.

“I’m getting a bit tired of hearing Logan on (seemingly) every Dragon Dynasty release,” wrote the reviewer at Hong Kong Film Net in a 2008 review of Dragon Dynasty’s release of PTU. You weren’t alone, Hong Kong Film Net.

Anyway, The Big Boss and Fist of Fury were the first two movies that marked Lee’s return to acting in Chinese movies (he was a child actor in Hong Kong before his move to Seattle) after he introduced himself to American audiences by stealing fight scenes in things like The Green Hornet and the 1969 James Garner vehicle Marlowe. The reason why Black folks like stand-up comic/documentary filmmaker W. Kamau Bell embraced Fist of Fury—and why I enjoyed it so much recently—is simply because it’s a movie where Lee beats the shit out of racists.

“It’s funny to think that, like, Enter the Dragon is the glossy one. But [Fist of Fury is] the one that I feel like was totally about claiming space for your people, which, as a Black comedian who talks about race a lot and talks about intersectionality, like, [that moment where Lee’s character says, ‘We are not the sick men of Asia,’ to the Japanese school is] the moment that, like, has only grown bigger over time. As a 13- or 14-year-old watching it, who lived in a house where we talked about the civil rights movement, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, like, I totally get that, even though I’m not Chinese,’ ” said Bell, a Bruce Lee nerd, to Bruce Lee Podcast hosts Shannon Lee (Lee’s daughter) and Sharon Ann Lee (no relation to the Lees) in 2016.

Warrior, which Shannon Lee co-produced, was another project where martial artists got to beat the shit out of racists. But while the Chinese wushu students in Fist of Fury faced off against Japanese colonialists, the Chinese immigrants on Warrior dealt with racist Irish thugs—whenever they weren’t embroiled in tong wars or, in the case of Chinatown madam Ah Toy (a real-life figure) and arms dealer Wang Chao, were preferring to stay out of those wars because entrepreneurship appealed to them more than taking a side.

If you just tuned in, I’m celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month by focusing each Couch Avocados header on a standout episode of Warrior, the entertaining Cinemax/HBO Max drama based on an unproduced TV series idea Lee envisioned in 1971 as “a slam-bang, half-hour western ACTION series” about Ah Sahm, a martial arts prodigy from China, and his journey across Old West-era America “with the help of a guide named Big Bill Walker.” This week’s installment of You Get May?! (my explanation for that name is here) is about “Enter the Dragon.”

The 2020 episode was written by Warrior creator Jonathan Tropper and the duo of Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard. It was nicely directed by Dennie Gordon, a female director whose name I recognize from Burn Notice (she helmed eight episodes of that blue-sky USA Network show, as well as six episodes of The Practice).

“Enter the Dragon,” the second season’s penultimate episode, places the mostly fictional Warrior characters in the anti-Chinese riots that swept San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1877 and were started by Irish laborers. There are a lot of differences between the actual riots and the fictionalized riots: They include the fact that “The Itchy Onion,” Warrior’s first episode, established the show’s setting as 1878, not 1877, and the fact that the body count in the fictionalized riots is bigger than the one in the actual riots (only two Chinese men were killed in the 1877 riots, a three-day thing instead of the one-day nightmare “Enter the Dragon” depicts).

Oh, yeah, and in the actual riots, a hatchet man from a local tong didn’t grab a pair of nunchakus like Bruce Lee and wipe a bunch of Irish scumbags off the street with it.

Because I watched Gordon’s episode before I watched Fist of Fury, the film that “Enter the Dragon” reminded me the most of was 1997’s Rosewood, the late John Singleton’s best film (sorry, Boyz n the Hood) and a harrowing depiction of the 1923 Rosewood massacre in Florida. Like Rosewood, most of “Enter the Dragon” is hard to watch: One of the show’s secondary Chinese characters is lynched in the second season’s most disturbing scene. But when the Hop Wei, led by Young Jun and Ah Sahm, and the Long Zii, led by Li Yong, put aside their differences for just one day and team up to protect Chinatown from the Irish, it’s so damn satisfying—especially if you’re an Asian American viewer who gets pretty fucking angry about anti-Asian violence.

My favorite addition to Warrior’s cast in the second season is Hong, a naive and openly gay hatchet man for the Hop Wei, played by Chen Tang. All the major Chinese characters on Warrior—except Chao, Father Jun, and Yan Mi—got to channel Bruce Lee in some way. Ah Sahm sometimes did Lee’s mannerisms from his first three kung fu movies. Li Yong was based on Lee’s more mature side. (In “Not for a Drink, a Fuck, or a Goddamn Prayer,” Li Yong even donned a disguise that was a callback to Lee’s telephone repairman disguise from Fist of Fury.) As for Hong, he’s basically Lee in the comedy scenes from The Way of the Dragon: a country bumpkin who’s always stuffing his face with food and is more willing to smile than the other characters Lee portrayed after his appearance in Marlowe.

But in a fight, Hong is far from a turnip that just fell off the turnip truck, especially when he removes the chain he always wears as a necklace and takes down rival tongs with it.

In “Enter the Dragon,” Li Yong meets Hong for the first time and gives him a badass nod.

In other circumstances, Li Yong and Hong would have been scrapping, and Li Yong would have been ducking from Hong’s chain a bunch of times. But because of white savagery against the Chinese, they’re temporarily on the same team.

The sight of Hong, Young Jun, Ah Sahm, and Li Yong kicking the shit out of the Irish together makes me wish their tongs stopped fighting each other.

At one point, Joe Taslim looks like he’s floating for a couple of seconds when Li Yong takes down two Irish thugs at the same time. But that wasn’t done with wire work. That’s simply Taslim being a god-tier martial artist. Unlike Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China flicks or Xena: Warrior Princess, Warrior never used wires in its fight scenes.

“Yeah, [the absence of wire work in the fight scenes] was intentional. We didn’t want that because we wanted to be gritty and realistic,” said Warrior stunt coordinator Brett Chan to The Ringer in 2019.

That move where Taslim looks like he’s defying gravity is one of many examples of how Chan’s fight choreography on Warrior often brings to mind dancing at its most soulful and funky.

“Bruce talked about [martial arts] as a dance, right? If you’re working out with somebody, if you’re watching boxing matches, as bloody as they can be,” said the aforementioned Jeff Chang at AloudLA’s “Bruce Lee and the Afro-Asian Culture Connection” panel discussion at the Los Angeles Public Library in 2018, “the best ones are a dance, right?”

But the most thrilling moment of action in “Enter the Dragon” has to be Ah Sahm’s first moment with nunchakus in the series run. Even though he’s a trained martial artist, Andrew Koji had no experience with nunchakus. For Warrior, Koji underwent six months of nunchakus training. “Enter the Dragon” presents the results of Koji’s diligence.

The characters who experience the most changes due to the chaotic events of “Enter the Dragon” are Kieran Bew’s Bill O’Hara—a racist Irish cop and a revamp of Big Bill Walker from Bruce Lee’s eight-page treatment—and Ah Sahm. Before “Enter the Dragon,” O’Hara viewed the Chinese as subhuman even though he did business with Chao and Ah Toy. But in “Enter the Dragon,” the lynching that leads to the riots disgusts O’Hara, who is nearly killed by the lynch mob while trying to stop the lynching, a tragedy that forever changes him.

In the following season, O’Hara stops referring to the Chinese as “ch___s” and quits the force (temporarily) because in “Whiskey and Sticky and All the Rest Can Wait,” he objects to the cruelty of Chinese parents being forcibly separated from their children by his new chief at the SFPD during the racist chief’s raid on a Chinatown apartment building. As for Ah Sahm, the act of protecting innocent Chinatown denizens during the riots causes him to begin to question his loyalty to the Hop Wei and consider a life away from the tongs.

“Enter the Dragon” is a remarkable hour of TV, but I wish the episode was called “Fist of Fury” instead of “Enter the Dragon” because it’s closer in spirit to Fist of Fury. Enter the Dragon, Lee’s final completed movie, was a Bond movie that took place on a Bond villain’s fancy island. It wasn’t a movie about the daily struggles against oppression. I guess the Warrior writers preferred a title that could function as a declaration of Ah Sahm’s transformation from an apathetic gangster to a Chinatown folk hero. In that case, there’s nothing better than “Enter the Dragon.” But if I wrote the episode, “Fist of Fury” would have been the title.

Like all other Warrior episodes, “Enter the Dragon” concluded with a hip-hop track that was mostly or entirely performed in Mandarin, my sister-in-law’s native dialect. I love all of Warrior’s end credits tracks—even though I don’t understand a single word of Mandarin.

Bonus track: From the end credits of “Enter the Dragon,” here’s Taiwanese American rapper ØZI with “Jiāsuǒ.” The track title is the Mandarin word for a cangue, a wooden torture device that restricts a prisoner’s movements and is worn around the neck.

One more bonus track: “Jiāsuǒ” is great, but a small part of me wishes that “Enter the Dragon” concluded with audio of tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s live version of his 2018 cover of Joseph Koo’s Fist of Fury theme (“I use hands to hold my fellow man”) from Later… with Jools Holland. That version of the Fist of Fury theme is one of my favorite moments from Holland’s show, along with KT Tunstall’s career-changing 2004 performance of “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” and Franz Ferdinand’s epic 2006 performance of “Outsiders.” 

Like what happened with the aforementioned W. Kamau Bell, Fist of Fury’s depiction of the marginalized fighting against oppression by changing their hands to fists of fury resonated with Washington. He and the Next Step, his band, took the Fist of Fury theme and turned it into an anthem for Black activism.

Every Saturday on either YouTube or Internet Archive, I watch an old episode of Soul Train (because it used to air on Saturdays in first-run syndication). However, my least favorite part of Soul Train is the musical guest segment half because the late Don Cornelius demanded that his musical guests lip-sync their newest singles to keep his show’s costs down (prepping the stage for a live performance was apparently too expensive for him), and it always looks awful. Earth, Wind & Fire never appeared on Soul Train because the band, one of the greatest live acts ever, opposed lip-syncing.

I either fast-forward through Soul Train’s musical guest segments or hide the screen (while keeping the audio going). I wish Soul Train was more like the still-on-the-air Later… with Jools Holland, where nobody ever lip-syncs. If Washington, the Next Step, and vocalist Patrice Quinn had to lip-sync on Soul Train, I wouldn’t be surprised if Washington says to Cornelius, “If you don’t let us do our number live, I will use these hands to slap my fellow man.”

Next week: You Get May?! wraps up with a look at Warrior’s third and final road trip episode, an outing where the show’s least interesting male character gets a bit of a personality boost from teaming up with the show’s most interesting male character.