[Fish Sandwich]

Yeah, I loved this episode. Much like the show as a whole so far, it's basically assembled exclusively from concepts that have tons of appeal to me. I mean, we've got some light martial arts spiritualism that leads to introspective character development where the main hero realizes he wants to fight to make people smile after some flashbacks which build a past that further fleshes out his motivation with clear and relatable grounding. Like, wow, what a killer little story this is. I can't get enough of how rock solid the writing in this series is.

My two favorite little things were definitely finding out Liu Bei has been incompetent since childhood (he even has like a little kid version of his outfit in the present; it's adorable!), and him not hesitating to give away Guan Yu and Zhang Fei to save their lives, which is super heroic and selfless, but in a very specific way that also demonstrates the sort of lack of spine that's often a weak point for him. Liu Bei can only make that offer because he's writing off the possibility he could save them in that moment, which, of course, turns out to be wrong by the end.