Is Yvonne Chapman leaving Kung Fu? Is Zhilan Zhang gone for good?
For weeks now, we knew that this was coming; unfortunately for Nicky, it happened right when Tan thought he was more powerful than ever and basically unkillable. This is what you can call the most perfect of all supervillain final-form showdowns, the underdog compared to a would-be god. For a time, it looked like the plan was going to be trapping him as opposed to killing him, given that this didn’t feel altogether possible.]
Yet, the hero tonight came from a rather unexpected place: Zhilan Zhang. Consider this a reminder that chapters can be redeemed no matter of what they’ve gone through. She is the person who stayed behind in order to make sure that Russell could not leave. Does that mean that Yvonne Chapman is leaving the show? It felt like that was potentially the case as we got closer to the very end of the episode.
The thing that we would cling to if you’re a fan of the Zhilan character is that technically, there’s always a chance she could resurface. This wasn’t some traditional “death” and so long as that is the case, we do think that the door is always open. Still, we understand the narrative pull beyond what we saw tonight — taking down Russell Tan was no easy feat and in order to pay that off and have it be believable, the writers clearly decided that there needed to be something big to justify it.
While Olivia Liang can’t guarantee that Zhilan will return, she did tell TVLine the following in a finale postmortem:
“It can’t end there. I would love to see more of [Nicky and Zhilan’s] dynamic in the upcoming season … We’ve introduced magic to the world, so it wouldn’t be the craziest thing if she managed to survive. But I don’t know what [the writers] have planned.”
What did you think about the events of the Kung Fu season 2 finale?
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Photo: The CW