There’s a big mythology arc tied to Zhilan, the mythical sword and Nicky’s desire to avenge her mentor, and I’m sure it will connect in some way to the unconvincing triad storyline in San Francisco. After just the pilot, it’s strangely hard to tell how the show will actually function. The original show’s hook was based on Kwai Chang Caine’s wandering exoticism and this Kung Fu is anchored in stay-at-home normalizing (Evan’s character could almost be named Token White Guy). That’s almost the opposite of the migratory, injustice-of-the-week premise of the original Kung Fu. So in Arrow-esque fashion, you have a prodigal child coming back to her hometown after an unaccounted-for period of training/absence discovering that said hometown isn’t as she left it and sticking around to clean things up and repair relations with her family. Nicky’s ex-boyfriend Evan (Gavin Stenhouse) isn’t really sure what to think, but since Nicky is very quickly introduced to hunky Asian art historian Henry (Eddie Liu), who really cares what Evan thinks? Her brother Ryan (Jon Prasida) feels betrayed and her mother goes through an assortment of “I have no daughter!” guilt trips. Not everybody is immediately willing to embrace Nicky after her unplanned absence. Her older sister Althea (Shannon Dang) is on the eve of her marriage, which is good, while her father (Tzi Ma) is dealing with some debt issues tied to a local triad, which is bad. This unfortunate situation forces Nicky to return to San Francisco, where her timing is rather tremendous, for better and worse. Three years into her study, Nicky’s world is rocked when a rogue assassin (Yvonne Chapman’s Zhilan) breaks into the monastery, kills Nick’s mentor (Vanessa Kai), bests Nicky at slo-mo combat and steals a sacred sword of some kind. Nicky ended up at a Shaolin monastery known for training female warriors. Olivia Liang plays Nicky Shen, a young woman who chafed under her controlling mother’s (Kheng Hua Tan) watch and went AWOL during a “cultural tour” of China that turned out to be a matchmaking mission in disguise. Kim, with Greg Berlanti leading the big names on the production team, this Kung Fu has much more in common with The CW’s Arrow than it does with that original series about a Shaolin-trained monk traveling the Old West seeking to right wrong and whatnot.
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