Affinity: Episode Recap 17-18
**SPOILER ALERT**
Table of Contents
TL;DR (Quick Overview)
A tender morning-after with Xie Xinxu’s family gets shattered when his parents turn up dead, and the whole scene spirals into a mind-bending time-loop through both their childhoods of hospital beds, a father with a syringe, and an escape that somehow ends with a giant dragon. Episode 18 keeps the chaos going, real backstory about Wu Nongyu’s sick mother and a cliffhanger involving Max, a cliff, and said dragon.
Affinity Episode Recap: 17
Wu Nongyu brings food in and finds Xie Xinxu curled up asleep, scarred, and it hits her that this was probably the first time he’s ever had someone there while he processed this kind of pain. Normally he’d have suffered through it completely alone, unable to express real emotion since being infected, day after day, alone. Figuring the food shouldn’t go to waste while he’s out, she starts eating.
He’s suddenly awake, staring right at her, and it startles her. She tries to leave, but he grabs her and tells her flatly not to move, since her scent helps him sleep. Outside, his father wants to go in, but his mother stops him, hoping their son can follow his own heart for once, scolding can wait until tomorrow.
The next morning, Bureau people show up outside, reporting a shooting and waiting on orders, too far away for either of them to hear clearly. He holds her close so she isn’t spotted. They check the living room and find his parents dead in a pool of blood, a dagger left at the scene. He picks it up to examine it, but she snatches it and wipes it clean, worried his fingerprints will make him the suspect.
Since he can’t physically cry and doesn’t look like someone grieving, she drags him to chop onions to force the tears to make it convincing for the Bureau. He feels awful about he can’t show real emotion and has to rely on fake tears over real dead parents. But she tells him true emotion isn’t only tears, that touch and words count too.
Something clicks loose in him and memories of daily life with his parents surfacing. Genuinely good acting in this scene, real grief he can’t physically show. Xie Xinxu parents death scene was rough.
The Bureau alarm sounds. He locks her in a room to protect her and gets taken outside. As he’s led away, he looks back at her through the window and suddenly breaks free, rushing back inside. The moment he opens the door though, everything’s changed, different clothes, a different room, not his house anymore.
A little girl demands to know who he is, then compliments him on being handsome. It’s Wu Nongyu, as a child. Even his gunshot wound stops hurting and he starts wondering if any of this is real.
Little Wu Nongyu offers him a drink, then her own arm. Her father has told her that her blood is powerful so if Xie Xinxu needed it, he was welcome to have it. He notices needle marks all over her arms and asks who hurt her, right as her father walks in. Genuinely scared me, zombie movie energy out of nowhere.
She runs and he dodges her father’s gaze. Trying to leave, he ends up walking an endless loop of the same staircase over and over, and realizes this isn’t real. He goes back to find her and hears her crying under a blanket. She begs him to take her away.
Her father, frantically researching something, stabs her with a syringe again. Xie Xinxu grabs her and runs, her father’s shouts closing in behind them as she begs him to hurry. This entire sequence, the looping stairs, the terrifying father, is crazy. The effects aren’t amazing, but it lands anyway.
Affinity Episode Recap:18
He pulls red woollen yarn from a bag and uses it like a net to stop her father’s chase, then hands her the other end. She follows it to her mother’s hospital bed and touches her forehead. With the fever improving, she’s happy that her blood is helping.
It turns out her mother is critically ill and her father discovered long ago that her blood is the best treatment. Although she’s terrified of needles she fully accepts it a she wants her mother to get better. She hugs Xie Xinxu, thanking him for bringing her to her mother.
She still has to go back though, worried her father will be lonely otherwise, since she knows he cries after every blood draw once she’s asleep. Her father chases them again, convinced Xie Xinxu means to kidnap her and she urges him to leave. Wu Nongyu’s mother’s backstory is so sad.
He jumps out a window and wakes up, finding her leaning on his shoulder, murmuring “Big Brother” in her sleep. She wakes too, still half convinced it’s a dream and happy he hasn’t left. They compare dreams and it seems like they’ve been living in each other’s memories, though neither has time to dwell on it, they need to move.
The car’s out of gas, so they walk. She spots a wooden box with a glass shard inside that looks completely ordinary. Right, so the fragment’s just sitting out in the open for anyone to grab. Surely, they could’ve come up with a better discovery method than that.
She marvels at the storage method, and he casually mentions dragons are still alive. She doesn’t believe him. He collapses from exhaustion and only then does she notice his wound is worse than scrapes.
He needs her help again, same as in the dream, since her touch regulates his viral load either way. Thinking she’s hesitant, she just kisses him instead and he tells her the kiss makes his legs weak.
Unfortunately, it barely helps. He collapses again before they get far and they tumble down a hillside, where Max, tracking bloodstains, catches up. They fall asleep and she wakes to find him unconscious. Grief stricken she tries to wake him but nothing works.
She forces herself up, drags him forward, and tries a bird diversion to throw Max off the trail. However, it doesn’t work as her Yin scent gives her away. Max interrogates her and when she tries to run, he knocks her out.
Gun to her head, he tries to force Xie Xinxu out of hiding, but he’s still unconscious and unresponsive. Max kicks her off the cliff and just as he’s about to leave, a giant dragon comes swooping in. The dragon is ridden by Xie Xinxu and of course he had come to the rescue as he’s holding Wu Nongyu.
What in God’s name is a dragon doing in this show?? I did not think it could get more insane. And they’re still driving a Xiaomi in the same universe. I can’t stop laughing and yet I’m so far gone down the rabbit hole, I can’t turn back.
Affinity Episode Recap 17-18: My Thoughts
This batch is the show at its most emotionally sincere and its most gloriously deranged, sometimes in the same scene. The grief sequence with Xie Xinxu’s parents is genuinely one of the most moving things the show’s done, and watching Wu Nongyu teach him that emotion doesn’t require tears is a real, tender moment that makes the sudden swerve into a childhood time loop even more disorienting in the best way.
Learning her backstory, the sick mother, the needle marks, her father’s desperation, adds real weight to who she is outside of just reacting to Xie Xinxu’s chaos, and the mutual dream sharing is such a clever, strange way to build empathy between them without just having them talk it out.
And then there’s the dragon. I don’t have a defence for the dragon. I don’t need one. This show has fully earned the right to throw anything at me at this point, and I will keep watching every unhinged second of it.
Thanks for reading! Would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Comment below.
Affinity: All Episode Recaps and Full Reviews
Where To Watch Affinity: YOUKU English