Affinity: Episode Recap 21-22

**SPOILER ALERT**

TL;DR (Quick Overview)

A fake investigation into a “cheating” wife spirals into full soap opera absurdity. Wu Nongyu and Xie Xinxu keep clashing over what’s real versus drug-induced. Episode 22 finally, properly, confirms his feelings are genuine. No more medicine excuses.

Affinity Episode Recap: 21

Yin Che wants help finding his friend’s affair partner, promising to meet again once the person is found. Later, he also finds Wu Siyuan and Li Xiang waiting for him as they are also hunting for the fragment he possesses. He brings up the friend’s wife story again, but Li Xiang suspects “the friend” he keeps mentioning is actually Yin Che himself.

This is so dumb. If you’re insuring a fragment worth three million dollars, would you really hand it to strangers just to investigate your own wife? Completely unnecessary detour.

Li Xiang tracks Qi to a restaurant and runs into Wu Nongyu and Xie Xinxu there having a meal. They’re about to leave, but she calls out to them anyway, and once everyone realizes they’re chasing the same lead, she volunteers Lin Juan to help investigate together. Lin Juan is very enthusiastic toward Wu Nongyu.

Xie Xinxu stabs a dagger into the table, furious. Lin Juan isn’t fazed, glancing at the food and noting that none of it is her favourite, satirizing him as an unqualified husband. She warmly thanks Lin Juan for helping guide their work anyway, and fearing they might shake hands, Xie Xinxu drags her home before it happens.

Back home, he asks what’s wrong, why she was so deliberately warm toward Lin Juan when she’d been so intimate with him just yesterday. She’s upset because yesterday’s feelings weren’t even real to begin with, which he misreads as her disliking the kiss, promising not to kiss her again unless she wants it. What actually angers her is that his feelings have all been drug induced reactions.

Lying on the bed bored, she spots Qi’s account asking for flower shop recommendations and worries it’s for an affair partner. The next day, she, Lin Juan, and Xie Xinxu tail the delivery driver, whose bag falls mid ride. As he goes to retrieve it, a car hits him, and Xie Xinxu jumps out and stops the vehicle with one hand, hurting himself in the process.

She notices him wincing as he gets back in the car and tells Lin Juan to keep following solo while she rides with Xie Xinxu instead. She reaches for the inhibitor, but he tries to kiss her first, and she reminds him of his promise. He stops immediately, pulls out an inhibitor of his own and asks her to inject it.

Lin Juan returns mid scene and finds it strange that as a bonded couple, why did Xie Xinxu use medication first before she tried to comfort him? He shares his theory with Wu Siyuan over the phone and for the first time in the drama, other people are now aware that they haven’t formed the pact. Lin Juan separately texts her that the flowers were meant for a friend, not a lover.

The inhibitor isn’t working, so she hugs Xie Xinxu, telling him comforting him is literally in the contract and that he can speak up if he’s genuinely uncomfortable. This sets him off completely, and honestly, fair, I’d rather suffer too than hear that. He asks if anyone could comfort him as long as it’s contractual, and she shoves him off, calling him sick.

Qi shows up, fully aware she’s being investigated and explains she never actually cheated. The photos were meant to prove to Yin Che that she’s thriving without him. It turns out he was once her tutor whom she fell hard for.

His family got sick and her father offered money for treatment if they got married. After the wedding, total incompatibility surfaced such as her love for cats of which he is allergic and not enjoying the same type of foods.

Later, he asked her to move out for a “solitary project.” She left angry but secretly never left at all, faking travel posts instead and now plotting revenge for being so unloved by her husband. Then they come up with a plan.Wu Nongyu texts Yin Che, telling him his wife really did cheat, and he drops everything to find her, only to get knocked out.

He wakes up in a room where three people in black robes tell him he’s already dead, and his level of remorse will decide whether he gets processed as waste. I laughed out loud at that line. Whoever wrote this must have had the time of their life inventing nonsense. This Affinity black robe cult is nuts.

Affinity Episode Recap: 22

Qi presses Yin Che on why he never cherished her after marriage and he admits he was scared of ending up like their cat, loved at first, abandoned later, bed and all. He was terrified of being discarded once he was “obtained“.

So he kept things distant on purpose, thinking it would preserve the marriage’s freshness, barely eating meals with her, and still feeling like he could never satisfy her. Then he overheard her complaining that married life was duller than being single.

It turns outs that every act on both parts was all based on misunderstandings and in fact were borne out of love.

Wu Nongyu speaks to Wu Siyuan and as he’s also investigating this, he sends video proof that she has always been around and not cheating. Yin Che walks up to her, apologizes with real emotion and promises to be honest with his own heart going forward. She hugs him tight, Wu Nongyu smiles, and Li Xiang, watching, tears up too.

Wu Siyuan invites Li Xiang back to his place to wash up and she points out that a late-night invite could easily read as something more. Flustered, he insists he’s just being a concerned colleague.

Xie Xinxu holding a spear and sickle combo weapon during all this is genuinely hilarious.

Once Qi and Yin Che leave, Wu Nongyu puts Xie Xinxu on the same trial scenario, calling out the medication’s effect on everything he’s felt. He stays quiet at first, sighs, until he sees her nearly in tears, and finally opens up. He tells her that watching her in the bathtub ached.

Watching her with Lin Juan made his chest tighten with jealousy. Sharing dreams gave him sensations he’d never had, and every kiss, every embrace, sent his heart racing. He explained that these are not emotions he had before and he’s learning to understand what they are.

She’s upset that all these feelings never required sincerity, just medicine. He tells her again that they are just vitamins and he wants to stop taking them. He tells her that his feelings are real and he knows that she has been healing him slowly over time.

She’s the one who made him unable to resist, assimilated him completely. And then she hugs him tight, accepting what he had said. This was a wonderful scene despite sketchy surrounds. Cui Yuxin was totally convincing and I felt every bit of his emotions.

Yin Che sends the fragment over, no payment required. Two fragments down, one left. She buries herself in fragment research on the computer, while he clings to her anyway, insisting they go to bed together.

Affinity Episode Recap 21-22: My Thoughts

This batch delivers the show’s most soap opera detour yet, and it’s somehow completely earned by the end of it. Episode 21 leans hard into jealousy and misunderstanding, and honestly the “did they even form a pact” mystery that Lin Juan stumbles onto is a clever bit of plotting layered under all the chaos.

That black robe cult reveal had me cackling though, this show never misses an opportunity to go somewhere completely unhinged.

Episode 22 is where their relationship changes. Xie Xinxu articulating his emotions out loud, watching him list every physical, involuntary reaction he’s had to her, the racing heart, the ache behind his eyes, and then getting told none of it required sincerity, just medicine, is a gutting moment before it flips into relief.

Finding out it was vitamins the whole time recontextualizes basically every scene since episode 20 and it’s a satisfying reward for anyone who’s been side eyeing the “is this real” question along with Wu Nongyu. Half way through the drama and finally we are starting to see a real romance, not one built on a Ren/Yin need or insecurity.

Two fragments down, one to go, and I’m fully here for whatever detour the last stretch throws at me next.

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Where To Watch Affinity: YOUKU English