Okay. So back in the day, I started out as a book blogger, but it’s been a long time since I’ve written reviews and media analysis with any sort of focus, especially once I discovered how much more fun it is to write fan fiction. But since a lot of my friends are watching the current Lost Tomb series (Reunion: The Sound of the Providence) and talking about The Lost Tomb series in general, I thought I would dust off my old skills.

The original Lost Tomb series aired in 2015. I thought I would do a post talking about the iterations of the series, but there is a lot of information, so I’m just going to link to a few sources. The show is based on a popular Chinese web novel series. You can get English translations of the first six books for Kindle (and possibly paperback). There is apparently going to be an American comic book adaptation from Image Comics out in the winter, and the art in the linked article looks really cool!

Given that this is a lot bigger property than I expected, and given that I don’t have anywhere near the familiarity with how it is viewed in China (although I gather that it is extremely popular), I’ll contain my review/round up to my experiences with watching the shows and reading the novels, if and when I get around to reading them — I did buy the books.

Please feel free to leave comments and ask questions and have a fun discussion, but note that this will clearly be very spoilery, so I’ll put everything under a cut. And I’ll be taking character name info from mydramalist.com.

Be aware — this first post is very long as I’m summarizing the episodes. Okay! So let’s go!
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This is a spoiler-free entry for the reboot (Reunion: The Sound of Providence on mydramalist, and may I say, wtf??) but feel free to dig into it with me in the comments. I did not sign up for the VIP iQIYI service, so I’m watching it at the 4 episode per week pace, although I’m sorely tempted to pay and watch more quickly. But I have a bunch of other shows on my to watch list, so for now, I’m going slowly.

One of the shows I started is the original series for The Lost Tomb, which came out in 2015. So far, it has been a wildly different show, both tonally and visually. I’ve read that people didn’t really like it, but so far, I’m enjoying it. However, I also really enjoyed the two Percy Jackson movies, and even Uncle Rick hated those, so maybe my standards are too low?




So far, what I’ve enjoyed about the original series is the lighter tone — it feels a little like the spiritual cousin to the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, which Are My JAM! Wu Xie is a young man who has made it his mission to find cultural artifacts and hand them over to the Chinese government to preserve his cultural heritage. He reminds me of young Indiana Jones in the beginning of The Last Crusade — “It belongs in a museum!” He’s sweetly idealistic, he has good friends to help him along, and I am just enjoying the ride. I love a good adventure archaeology story. If I were a little less lazy and/or squeamish, my dream job would be adventuring archaeologist.

Another thing I quite like about the original series is that there are more ladies! The bar is very low in this regards. Of the dramas I’ve watched so far, it seems like the maximum number of female leads/prominent secondary characters is two, and this seems pretty universal, not just a feature of Chinese dramas. One of the reasons I loved Detective L so much is that, even though Qin Xiaoman is the only real female lead, many of the secondary characters in the mysteries are women, and they are women with interesting and complex lives. Also, I must declare that Bai Yu is my favorite disaster (sorry, Zhu Yilong, I love you, too, but BY is my bias), so I’ll rewatch DL many times.

But so far, the very best thing about all these Lost Tomb shows is that quite a lot of my awesome friends are watching it at the same time, and it’s been a long time since I’ve watch something mostly at the same time as others, and I am LOVING the discussion. It makes me feel connected in a way I haven’t for a long time.


If you’re watching The Lost Tomb in any of its iterations, come shout in my comments. And while I am going to be diligent about keeping any posts either spoiler free or tagged, I personally don’t mind spoilers, so seriously, come shout at me.