Interior Chinatown – Season 1 Episode 6 Recap & Review

Translator 

Episode 6 of Interior Chinatown begins with Wong taking Willis near the dock. While this is happening, Willis contacts Lana, telling her about his location. There, he helps some unknown people, which he claims is how it’s always been, for some unknown reason.

The police show up just then, along with Lana, and they arrest Wong. Lana explains how she manipulated the ongoing case to be able to reach Willis faster, and Willis fills her in about Wong being innocent. Willis promises Wong to get him bail using the money stashed in Wong’s room. However, when Willis goes back, Fatty doesn’t let him leave with the money.

In addition to this, Fatty has basically become an influencer. Not only is he a rude Asian waiter who everybody somehow loves, he has also begun his own brand of products. 

In the meantime, Wong stalls the investigation by pretending to only speak in his native tongue. There’s a huge fuss about bringing in a translator, and eventually, Willis assumes the identity of the translator and is brought in. There, Wong tells him how Willis’s brother had been asking for his help, revealing that he was somehow the gang leader and how everything was changing. Wong found the brother’s pager broken near the dock, which makes Willis remember since it was there his brother had shot the police detective.

This is where Lana interjects and tells Willis that she hadn’t been truthful to him, as the episode ends.

The Episode Review

Thankfully, there was some plot for us to follow in this episode. There seems to be some action where we finally find clues about Willis’s brother, and the fact that Lana might have been involved is expected, but we would like to know more.

In the metafictional aspects of the show, which is basically the main point of the series, expanding on the concepts of the original book, there are some classic comedy moments often associated with Asian characters in Western shows—the pretence of not being able to understand English, which is amusingly presented here as satire. Only sometimes, it’s so much satire and meta-comedy without a plot for 40 minutes straight that it gets tedious to watch.