- Title: Kung Fu (2021) – Destiny
- IMDb: link
Kung Fu continues the show’s tradition of a goofy set-up involving Nicky (Olivia Liang) helping someone in trouble while saving its best moments for character-driven scenes outside of the contrived set-up. The person in trouble this week is Chloe (Chelsea Clark) who disappears from Althea‘s (Shannon Dang) bachelorette party when she’s blackmailed by an old friend (Richard Harmon) from her troubled past. Nicky and Henry (Eddie Liu) eventually track down the bling ring crew and stop them from robbing the Soong home as the main storyline ends with the show’s only fight sequence. The bachelorette party, including Althea attempting to appease her mother-to-be, offers it’s share of moments (as does the look-in at the groom’s bachelor party), but it’s what is happening with the Shen family which delivers the episode’s best moments.
The theme of “Destiny” is discovered secrets and learning to understand and forgive. This plays both into Chloe’s trouble and in the fallout from the previous episode where Nicky and her father (Tzi Ma) learn the secret her mother (Kheng Hua Tan) has being keeping from the family causing her father to move out. It’s in the Shen’s children attempting to fix their fractured family where the episode hits all of its best emotional beats including Ryan (Jon Prasida) talking to his father about coming out, Mr. Shen talking to Nicky about discovering her in China and his reasons for not disrupting the new life she had found, and Nicky accepting the reasons for her mother’s secrets and taking an important first step in claiming her destiny.