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 “Money Maker” from Warrior’s third and final season.

May 2026 at the Couch Avocados column has been You Get May?! because of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. In each header this month, I spotlighted one of my favorite episodes of Warrior, the Cinemax/HBO Max series that thrilled and moved Asian American fans of both the action genre and Bruce Lee, whose ahead-of-its-time 1971 treatment for a half-hour western he envisioned about a Chinese immigrant in 1870s San Francisco was the source material for the series.

Week 1 focused on “The Blood and the Shit,” Warrior’s first road trip episode. It’s perhaps the best thing that was directed by Kevin Tancharoen, the Thai American choreographer-turned-filmmaker who directed “The Dirty Half Dozen,” the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode where Chloe Bennet broke her elbow while doing a riveting one-take fight scene, in addition to directing a whopping 15 other episodes of Agents, which was co-showrun by Maurissa Tancharoen, his sister. (He also helmed several episodes of another Asian American action show, Netflix’s short-lived The Brothers Sun.)

Week 2 was about “Not for a Drink, a Fuck, or a Goddamn Prayer,” the episode where Dustin Nguyen—who stepped behind the camera to direct “To a Man with a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail,” Warrior’s second road trip episode—duked it out with Joe Taslim. Cinemax viewers who only knew Nguyen as Ioki from the original 21 Jump Street or weren’t aware of his martial arts skills on both Jump Street and V.I.P. and in the 2007 Vietnamese smash hit The Rebel were taken for a surprise.

Week 3 focused on “Enter the Dragon,” Warrior’s brutal dramatization of real-life anti-Chinese riots in San Francisco’s Chinatown. You Get May?! concludes today with a bunch of paragraphs about “A Soft Heart Won’t Do You No Favors,” Warrior’s third and final road trip episode. It was written by Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard, who both replaced Warrior creator Jonathan Tropper in the showrunner position in the final season, and directed by Brett Chan, Warrior’s Filipino and Chinese fight coordinator/choreographer.

During Memorial Day Weekend, I wanted to revisit one of Stargate SG-1’s Louis Gossett Jr. episodes. I totally forgot that the late Oscar winner, a friend and mentor to SG-1 regular Christopher Judge, recurred as Gerak, an impulsive Jaffa politician (not to be confused with Garak, the Cardassian tailor who was more than just a tailor on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).

I got a kick out of seeing Chan doing an uncredited bit part in one of the Gossett episodes as a Jaffa pilot who gets shot down with a Zat gun by Vala, Claudia Black’s comic relief character.

I had no idea that Chan was a stuntman for the Stargate shows. Of course he was: He’s Canadian. A role on a Stargate show was a rite of passage for a lot of Canadian performers, just like how a guest appearance on a Law & Order show is still a rite of passage for New York stage or screen actors.

Chan made his directorial debut in “A Soft Heart.” It’s a hell of an episode to make a directorial debut in, and of course it’s great because it’s a Warrior road trip episode. Warrior’s annual one-episode break from all the power plays in San Francisco was always a highlight of the season.

“A Soft Heart” is actually two road trip episodes for the price of one: A business deal between Ah Sahm and Young Jun’s tong and a group of German traders in a nameless Spanish California town goes sour, while in Savannah, Georgia, Hoon Lee’s Wang Chao—a former slave—must fight against being sold into bondage again. (Both the Spanish California half and the Savannah half of “A Soft Heart” weren’t filmed in California. They were filmed in South Africa. Warrior’s sets for its San Francisco scenes were built in Cape Town.)

Ah Sahm, Young Jun, and Father Jun—Young Jun’s elderly dad—meet with the Germans to exchange counterfeit money (which was printed by both Ah Sahm and Yan Mi, his current girfriend) for silver that was minted by the Germans. But then Ah Sahm wants out of the deal because of both the Germans’ exploitation of their Chinese workers and their shocking murder of a local Chinese boy they wrongly accuse of being a thief.

The Hop Wei hatchet man witnesses how injustice against the Chinese in America isn’t confined to just San Francisco and the Chinese-owned Nevada saloon from “The Blood and the Shit.” His people are also being mistreated in seemingly pleasant communities like the California town.

The sight of Wen, the murdered boy’s mother—played by Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter and a former actress who found greater success as a co-producer of Warrior and other projects tied to her legendary dad—grieving beside her kid’s corpse upsets Ah Sahm. He feels responsible for his death and decides it’s time to stop being the apathetic gangster he was for most of Warrior’s run.

Li Yong, a member of the Long Zii, the Hop Wei’s rivals, may be the biggest voice of reason on Warrior, but he isn’t the only character with a conscience. Ever since Ah Sahm kicked the shit out of a pair of Irish hooligans who threatened Penny Blake, a young white heiress he never met before, and Jacob, her Chinese servant, on the street early on in Warrior’s first season, he has sometimes displayed hints of a conscience and an urge to do the right thing even if it results in his punishment or a shit-ton of injuries for himself.

Ah Sahm’s heroic defense of Penny and Jacob led to Sergeant Bill O’Hara arresting him (O’Hara refused to listen to Penny’s assertion that Ah Sahm saved her life) and Father Jun brutally punishing him with a wooden paddle (right after his release from prison) in front of both the Hop Wei and Ah Toy’s brothel for both helping Penny and Jacob and getting arrested.

Despite Andrew Koji towering over Perry Yung, who played Father Jun, on the set of the brothel, Yung was convincingly terrifying in the punishment scene in “John Chinaman.” An Oakland native (I love how Yung brought so much of the Oakland streets to his line delivery in the punishment scene), Yung made his TV acting debut really late in life in 2013 on The Carrie Diaries (where he was seen playing the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute he actually knows how to play) and then recurred as an opium den owner on Cinemax’s The Knick.

In a moment that brings to mind Father Jun’s disapproval of Ah Sahm protecting a white stranger and a Chinese stranger from their attackers, Father Jun advises Ah Sahm to not retaliate against the Germans for killing the boy.

But this time, Ah Sahm doesn’t have to bow down to Father Jun like he had to when the old man wanted to make an example of him in front of the tong and the brothel because Father Jun no longer runs the Hop Wei and doesn’t have the power to beat his guts in with a paddle.

Instead of heading back to San Francisco, which is what first-season Father Jun would have done, the new, post-Hop Wei Father Jun joins Ah Sahm, Young Jun, and a pickaxe-wielding Wen in avenging the boy’s murder. He heroically shoots down a bunch of Germans, while the director of this episode turned once again to his top-tier fight choreography skills and gave Ah Sahm a cathartic and enjoyable church fight scene that ends like a clip from the final fight in Freddy vs. Jason.

The B-story—the half of “A Soft Heart” where the episode title is uttered—is also worthwhile. Two of my favorite Chao-centric episodes are ones where Chao is out of his element and forced to resort to violence when his usual knack for manipulation and chess-like business moves isn’t enough to save his hide. It turns out that even though he doesn’t know any martial arts, he’s a terrific marksman, and in both “Not for a Drink” and “A Soft Heart,” we see why he was able to escape his slave owners in Cuba.

“A Soft Heart” pairs up Chao and British actor Tom Weston-Jones’s Richard Lee, a white Secret Service agent who wants to arrest Chao for participating in the Hop Wei’s counterfeit money operation, but he develops a kinship with him as they end up fighting the same enemy. Violet, Lee’s evil aunt in Savannah, and her racist sons bought Chao as a slave and want to make Lee suffer for killing two members of their family after they murdered Nora, his first love and a young Black woman from a family of freed slaves who worked at the Lee family farm.

Lee’s vengeance against his own cousins forced him to flee to San Francisco, where he found work as a cop and became O’Hara’s partner. The partnership between Lee and the corrupt sergeant was often contentious: O’Hara was racist against the Chinese, while Lee pushed back against the racism of O’Hara and the rest of the SFPD. The sergeant also had no patience for his younger partner’s preference for painstakingly analyzing the most minute details in crime scenes.

During some of the scenes between Lee and O’Hara, I kind of felt bad for Weston-Jones. While the other white male actors on Warrior played racist villains, corrupt cops, conniving politicians, or untrustworthy businessmen, Weston-Jones had to play the one white guy on the show who was morally upright, and it clearly wasn’t as fun as playing a racist monster or a corrupt Californian.

The only white characters who treated the Chinese as equals and were progressive in their thinking were Lee, Penny, and lesbian vintner Nellie Davenport, Ah Toy’s love interest. Lee was often the least interesting of the three. (A frequent complaint from viewers of color was that Warrior gave too much screen time to white characters.)

But in “A Soft Heart,” Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard’s decision to pair Lee up with Chao, Warrior’s most compelling and witty Chinese character, enlivened Weston-Jones’s character. He got to do more than just scold O’Hara (his new best friend and former partner by this time in the series run, instead of the source of his workplace misery), chase around the Hop Wei, or make out with his Black bartender girlfriend (played by Gaosi Raditholo, who also played Nora in flashbacks).

Brett Chan hasn’t directed another episode of a TV series. “A Soft Heart” proves that he has potential as a Kevin Tancharoen-style director of action-packed TV. One of the best things about Warrior—it’s also one of the things Asian American fans like myself miss the most about the show—was how often it put Asian Americans or Asian Canadians in the director’s chair.

***

Warrior was a three-season wonder like Batman ’66, the original Star Trek, and Deadwood, but unlike what happened to Batman and Trek ’66 towards the end of their runs, Warrior’s final season didn’t suffer from budget cuts and too many underwhelming episodes. A lot of fans over at the Warrior subreddit consider the final season to be the weakest. (Nah, I don’t agree.) Those fans are weirdly hostile towards Yan Mi, who was played by Chelsea Muirhead, a Canadian actress who’s Filipino and white.

Muirhead’s character was a good addition to the show because she was nothing like Olivia Cheng’s Ah Toy, Jenny Umbhau’s Lai (Ah Toy’s mute, sword-wielding assistant), and Dianne Doan’s Mai Ling (Ah Sahm’s sister/nemesis). It was nice to see on Warrior a Chinese woman who was just an ordinary worker from Chinatown, and her frustrations regarding her work as a printer never being taken seriously by her print shop owner father and her sexist brother were an intriguing continuation of Warrior’s recurring theme of businesswomen being underestimated and not given a fair chance.

An even better third-season arc was Mai Ling’s Michael Corleone-like obsession with being viewed as a legitimate businesswoman, which leads to her spending more time in white high society. Li Yong warns her that “the ducks” (Chinatown slang for white folks) can never be trusted.

The impulsive and arrogant Mai Ling doesn’t listen to Li Yong, of course, and a misunderstanding that wasn’t Mai Ling’s fault causes her new white female friend to betray her and send her to prison. The entire experience humbles Mai Ling, who, after her release from prison, gets her revenge against the white socialite who betrayed her.

That moment of revenge is the first moment in the series run where I ever liked Mai Ling. Her third-season arc was a good example of how Warrior brought depth and complexity to a couple of Chinese female characters who would have been Dragon Lady stereotypes in the hands of much less talented white writers. Mai Ling and Ah Toy were instead in the hands of talented white writers and a few Asian American ones, too.

Also in the season, Hong—the Hop Wei hatchet man who’s lethal with a chain whip and is a gay action hero with the coolest Safinia/Salinas character theme ever, a theme that sounds like a Hot Fuss-era Killers track—enjoyed a romance with Marcel, a Chinese entertainer played by Telly Leung. Fans of Heated Rivalry (a show I haven’t watched) might enjoy how tender and steamy Hong and Marcel’s temporary romance is, as well as the fact that it doesn’t end with some “Bury Your Gays” bullshit.

Meanwhile, the casting coup of the final season was the addition of Mark Dacascos as Kong Pak, Li Yong’s old friend and mentor. Dustin Nguyen recommended Dacascos to the Warrior producers after both working with him on the set of 2022’s Blade of the 47 Ronin and finding out from him that he’s a Warrior fan.

The stoic Kong Pak wasn’t exactly as entertaining as Zing, Nguyen’s evil character, was in Warrior’s first two seasons, but the fight scene between Li Yong and Kong Pak—an explosion of tensions between them over Kong Pak’s disdain for Mai Ling’s leadership of the Long Zii—in “You Know When You’re Losing a Fight” ended up being my favorite fight scene from the final season. It’s the star of The Night Comes for Us against the star of Brotherhood of the Wolf, and the part-Pinoy Dacascos, who stole John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum from Keanu Reeves four years before his arc on Warrior, is still a beast in fight scenes.

Li Yong’s confrontation with Kong Pak was so riveting that it made me go watch for the first time Dacascos and Kadeem Hardison in 1997’s Drive, a buddy comedy that, as a pairing of an initially somber Asian martial artist with a wisecracking Black guy, I found to be much funnier and better directed (by Steve Wang) than any of the Rush Hour movies.

All these third-season highlights are proof that Warrior still had a lot of gas in the tank and deserved another season.

Unfortunately, yeah, Ah Sahm.

Bonus tracks: Like what happened when I first heard the late Francis Monkman’s swaggering theme from 1980’s The Long Good Friday in 2015 (which was when I first watched The Long Good Friday via San Francisco’s Lost Weekend Video store), I can’t stop listening to Safinia and Salinas’s equally brash Warrior main title theme. My former co-worker Todd Inoue, who currently writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, once said New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” ought to be the Asian American national anthem. Nah, B. I’d argue for the Warrior main title theme to be the national anthem. Every Warrior season finale awesomely concluded with CHOPS—an Asian American hip-hop legend from Philly, ever since his days as a member of the Mountain Brothers—remixing the Warrior main title theme and adding lyrics with the help of L.A. rapper Jason Chu, who raps in both English and Mandarin. “Warrior MT Rap” was played during the first-season finale’s end credits, “Warrior (A New Legend Begins)” (which added Leo Xia and DJ Bonics to the pairing of CHOPS and Chu) wrapped up the second season, and “City on Fire” (which added Lowhi and Niu Niu to the duo) brought the third season (and the series) to an end.

Next week: Mordecai and Rigby are back to their old lazy selves. You know who else is lazy? My mom!