REVIEW: ‘Warrior’ Season 3 Episode 2 — “Anything Short of a Blow to the Head”

Racist cops were already a problem under Bill O’Hara (Kieran Bew) but under the new Captain Atwood (Neels Clasen), it’s so much worse. Opening up with police violence of two kinds, Warrior Season 3 Episode 2, “Anything Short of a Blow to the Head,” is a tough watch. The first is about catching criminals, and the other is about painting citizens as criminals just because they’re Chinese. This carries over into the factories as Leary’s (Dean Jagger) men continually harm the Chinese men working in the factory alongside them.

After discovering a counterfeit printing press last episode, Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) and Young Jun (Jason Tobin) struggle to get accurate results. With violence in Chinatown growing and being praised by the Mayor’s office as restoring order, this episode has a duality. A rising tension spins around Chinatown but there is enough to contend with in the area itself as tensions rise and new routes of success are attempted by both the Hop Wei and Long Zii. While Chinatown has to worry about the San Francisco police, the Hop Wei have entered another plot, one where the Secret Service is inching closer to them. At the same time, Mai Ling entertains a new crowd in order to take what she sees as hers.

Mai Ling is the star of Warrior Season 3 Episode 2. She is an expert manipulator when it comes to both the Tongs and the rich white socialite women of San Francisco. But as Ah Sahm notes in a separate part of the episode that “being hated” is exhausting, Mai Ling shows another kind of exhaustion, parading her wounds to be oggled by white women who want an exotic view into a culture they view as inferior. While Mai Ling is powerful and unwavering when she speaks to the men of Chinatown, steadfast in her views of success, with these women, she makes herself small. She creates a sideshow of trauma to be gawked at and at the same time that she is manipulating these women to help her reach her end goal of ruling beyond Chinatown, she is beginning to be swept up in it.

Dianne Doan is a fantastic actress as Mai Ling. Like Olivia Cheng as Ah Toy in the previous seasons, Doan plays Mai Ling with a nuance that comes from a character who viscerally understands the role others have cast her in in the world. She knows that the men of Chinatown and the other Tong leaders see her as inferior because she is a woman, trying to hand Long Zii to Li Yong (Joe Taslim), her right hand. And to the Ducks in the Pond, she is inferior because she is Chinese. She is either someone to be ignored or someone to be rescued and the way that Mai Ling oscillates between both identities, pressing the points that she knows will yield effects in her favor is expertly acted by Doan. But at the same time, Doan brings a creeping sadness and longing to the role as well. When given an American dress, there is a moment of yearning for something else, and in that moment it’s clear that it isn’t power.

My only issue with Warrior Season 3 Episode 2 is that, like the middle part of Season 2, is too focused on the plight of the white characters in the story. Bill is likable, but he is still a cop who leads a force that commits racist acts of violence against our lead characters and Chinatown. Leary may have fired the Donahue boys because they beat up Chinese men on the factory line, but he didn’t do it because he isn’t racist; he did it to protect Irish labor. While the police and politics of Warrior have created the traditional farming of a Western and an antagonist force to make you root for both the Hop Wei and Long Zii in unison, their humanization of them is frustrating.

I want to see more of the women of Warrior, the Tongs boiling turf war, and what life is like in Chinatown with increasing oppression, or even more of the Chinese characters venturing outside of Chinatown, given how last season expanded the world of San Francisco. We get moments of it, and the increased multiculturalism of the city, but it can be done without making the audience feel for racists. There is much more to explore, including the multiple budding and established queer romances in the series and the moments of life in Chinatown that show it as more than just the area for a Tong turf war.

Ultimately Warrior Season 3 Episode 2 is good, and there is no denying that. However, the expanded nature of the cast and their stories has pushed the narrative beyond where I believe the most fruitful storytelling is. But even with the episode going against my personal taste, the score, action sequences, and acting are all perfect. I find myself at a crossroads in the series. Its perfectly balanced characters work extremely well, but I want to be in Chinatown with the characters that I have grown attached to, not in the pond listening to endless racist rants and talks of violence against the core of the series. The secondary stories aren’t bad, they’re just where I don’t want to be.

Warrior is available now on MAX (formerly HBO Max) and Netflix.