Bǎohù jiārén. Protect the family.
Not only is that the title of the Season 1 finale of The Brothers Sun, but it’s also the mantra of Byron Wu and Brad Falchuk’s action-drama series. And after spending 15 years torn apart by patriarch Big Sun (Johnny Kou), who only wanted to protect his crime family, “Mama” Eileen (Michelle Yeoh), Charles (Justin Chien), and Bruce Sun (Sam Song Li) have had enough.
In Episode 8, they decide to finally step out of Big Sun’s shadow to redefine what family means. For once in their lives, they choose their own path — to each other. “This is a fractured family story about picking each other back up and bringing love back together into the family,” executive producer and director Kevin Tancharoen told Netflix.
Season 1 started with an assassin shooting gangster Big Sun in Taiwan, which led his eldest son, Charles, to go to California to look after his mother and younger brother Bruce, who had been completely shielded from the family business his whole life. But in the closing moments of the finale, it’s Bruce who shoots Big Sun and puts him in the hospital, protecting his family from the man that made them suffer. Take it from Yeoh, it’s an “incredible, crazy-ass ride.”
Let’s untangle the very complicated dynamics of the Sun family below.
With Big Sun out of the picture (for now), all of them “have a new respect for each other” at the end of the season, said Falchuk. “Everyone actually achieved something,” says Tancharoen. Mama Sun is free to fly off on a private jet, ready to take her place as the Dragon Head amongst the triad gangs in Taiwan. After Charles opens the bakery of his dreams and perfects his churro recipe, he chooses to fly back with his mother, in an attempt to reconnect with her and support her claim.
Although they’re similar in a lot of ways, Wu said, “there’s a lot of unspoken feelings” they had to work through in Season 1, like guilt and shame on Eileen’s side and resentment on Charles’ side — she’d left him behind with his cruel father. As he’s reminded of early in the season, “The oldest always gets the most respect and the least love.” But now that unconditional love from his mother and brother are in his grasp, he’s taking it.
And Bruce? He stays behind in the San Gabriel Valley, finally standing on his own two feet — and on-stage with his improv troupe. Falchuk and Wu wanted to end the series with the Suns happy and content. “We want to take the audience on a wild and sometimes uncomfortable ride, but our intention is for people to finish the show and be smiling,” they said.
Charles and Bruce needed to get to know each other again in Season 1, as they were estranged for 15 years. Li thinks Bruce was very intimidated by Charles when he remet him, but eventually he “grows to really love his brother.” Similarly, Chien thought Charles was quite annoyed and frustrated with Bruce at the start. “There’s a little bit of a sense of resentment because Bruce represents the life Charles could have had,” he said. Rather than being a “closeted baker,” he could have been able to watch The Great British Baking Show in the open. But as they grow closer, Charles develops a respect for Bruce and sees Bruce and the life he has as something he’s responsible for preserving and protecting.
That’s one of the “big themes” of the season for Wu — and the million-dollar question for Charles and his mom. Were their sacrifices to protect the Jade Dragon crime family worth it if it meant losing what they would’ve chosen for themselves in the process? Blood Boots (may he rest in peace) always said that Mama Sun was the real brains behind the Jade Dragons, and she arranged to take Bruce and her Rolodex of information with her to America to protect her husband’s dominance amongst the triads. But she’s always wanted (and deserved) more. “The advantage of having Michelle is that you could play somebody holding back, holding back, and then as soon as they let go and they show their power, you completely buy it,” said Falchuk.
At the same time, Chien sees Charles as a “rather tortured, broken soul” who may come off as a menacing, ruthless assassin, but only because that’s what his father groomed him to be. After all, the infamous legend of how he became “Chairleg” Sun wasn’t really an assassination attempt but a test to see how far Big Sun could push Charles to protect the family. “Charles’ major struggle in the show is this idea of, ‘How do I be more than this man’s son?’ ” said Falchuk. “Bruce never really understood that, so that’s why he has more room to be more rebellious or disrespectful and free-willed.”
Once the Brothers Sun reunite and start to give each other the parent the other didn’t have, Charles and Bruce realize preserving yourself is part of protecting the family. “Bruce gets really good at helping Charles be more vulnerable, and Charles gets really good at having Bruce be tougher,” said Falchuk. Their brotherhood makes them “more complete men,” even if it puts them in danger. “But it’s worth it.”
Once, maybe, when she helped him rise from a country boy into a leader among gangsters. But Eileen’s mother doesn’t mince words in Episode 6, saying that she never approved of Big Sun. Falchuk thinks that Mama and Big Sun may have thought what they had was love, in their youth. But it might have just been a shared vision for the world and realizing they could give it to each other. Their excitement in that pursuit evaporated in their time apart. On Mama Sun’s side, that love and desire for power for Big Sun shifted after he neglected to fulfill her only request while she was gone: to tell her if her family back in Taiwan needed her. She missed her only sister’s death from pancreatic cancer.
“Mama Sun really learned that she has her own goals and things that she wants,” said Wu. “She doesn’t need someone else to give it to her or need to work with anyone else to get what she wants.” And what she wants is to remake the triads in her image. “Smarter, more organized, and more legitimate,” she tells Bruce in the finale. After Bruce helped annihilate the heads of the triads by tipping off Grace’s (Madison Hu) Boxer faction that they’d all be meeting in Los Angeles, the opportunity is wide open for Mama Sun to step in and consolidate their organizations.
Grace might have seemed like she was just a schoolgirl with a crush, but really she was trying to cozy up to Bruce to get revenge on the gangsters who murdered her father and her friends’ immigrant families. “We needed to find a person who was so unassuming at first, and you really had to buy that she was interested in Bruce and she was just a student,” said Tancharoen. “But when we asked her to make the turn and realize that she is the actual bad guy of the story, she really nailed it.”
Hu is sure that Grace really did have genuine feelings for Bruce and that they have a real connection. “Bruce is navigating something very similar to Grace,” she tells Tudum. “They’re both children of immigrants and both trying to figure out their path in life and where they fit in to everything.”
In developing the character, Tancharoen, Falchuk, and Wu worked with Hu to make sure her tone wasn’t “archvillain,” but that she had a certain “history behind her eyes” that explains her Boxer group’s motive. She wants to eliminate the triads who prey on the Chinese people’s misfortunes, and Bruce wants to take his family away from that life. As the Boxers say before each of their kills in the series, “The riddance of evil must be thorough.”
The Boxers were behind every targeted attack on the triad leadership, from the very first shot fired at Big Sun to the attack on Sleepy Chan and his son Drowsy at Ka Spa. They even killed loyal soldier Blood Boots (Jon Xue Xhang) in cold blood to punish Mama Sun for not revealing the identities of the triad members.
But their own hubris is what finally does them in, at the once-in-a-generation meeting at Golden Soup, where all the triad “Ghosts” convene to elect a new Dragon Head. They might have derailed the vote and destroyed the triads (save for the Suns and Frank Ma), but they die from gunshot wounds inflicted by the gangsters — as well as the cops who show up. The death toll at the meeting also includes Grace. Tattoo artist June (Alice Hewkin), who found a new family with the Suns, fights Grace to the death in the kitchen of the Golden Soup. June wanted to avenge her twin sister, May, who was killed by the Boxers in the first episode. Blood runs deep in her family too. Hewkin found the scene where she goes up against Hu super challenging, but a real opportunity to step out of her comfort zone. “Who gets to do that in real life?” she asks, praising Justin Yu and his team’s fight choreography.
Well, Bruce is in hot water after he “betrays” his family by telling Grace where the big Ghost meeting is going to be. Then Big Sun orders Charles to kill his brother in front of his mother. But he can’t do it. So Big Sun sends his soldier Xing (Jenny Yang) to finish the job, only to have her wind up getting choked to death with a phone cord by Mama Sun in her motel room. (The only people surprised Michelle Yeoh’s got moves are her sons.)
To end this once and for all, Bruce goes to confront his father in Wu’s favorite scene of the season. It was a major moment of growth for the character, but also for Li as an actor — Bruce is his first major screen role. “It felt like our whole season had been building up to this,” Wu said. In Season 1, Bruce proves he’s more inventive, strategic, and ruthless than he’s been given credit for, and his bà notices. “He’s the one that gets them out of trouble all the time,” says Falchuk.
But instead of taking the bait to rule Taiwan with his father, Bruce shoots Big Sun to wound and to give him the option to call the ambulance — and then he’d end up right in the arms of the cops waiting to arrest him at the hospital. But Mama Sun won’t let Big Sun get off that easy. She pretends to be a nurse, and she adjusts his hospital chart so he’ll get daily doses of insulin; that way, he won’t be able to move or talk. So long to the country boy.
Season 1 of The Brothers Sun doesn’t end with Bruce driving away from the tarmac in his lime-green Lamborghini. It ends with Big Sun’s No. 2, Yuan, plotting his next move. Wu and Falchuk wanted to end the season on a positive note, while also making sure that the audience knows that this isn’t the end of the story for the Suns. “The end of the season is a happy moment for the family, but when you’re living as a gangster, you can never truly relax,” Wu and Falchuk tell Tudum. “And Big Sun is not an enemy that accepts defeat easily.”
Tancharoen says no one in the cast quite knew where the story was going to go, due to the multiple twists and turns within the character arcs. Wu kept getting text messages from the actors as they read the finale, detailing their reactions. “Some people said that they cried at the end,” he says. The cast realized that finding out how Season 1 ends is really where the Suns’ story as a family begins. “This is actually just the first step in a longer journey,” says Tancharoen.
In a potential Season 2, Wu and Falchuk would want to go even deeper when it comes to the characters exploring their roles within the family unit; as is the case with a lot of families, these roles can be defined from cradle to grave. “The Sun family will struggle to maintain those clearly defined roles,” they say. “The children want to be adults!” Tancharoen puts it plainly: “What they have right now, this unity, is very fragile. Yeoh tells Tudum that Mama Sun being back in Taipei is “going to be hard-core — and you thought it was fun in LA!”
And for the record, even though June booked the Sun family a reservation at Raw in Taipei, Hewkin has never been there herself. In fact, she’d never heard of the famed restaurant until she read the finale script. “I had to Google it and be like, ‘Oh, this place looks really fancy,’ ” she says.
Chien found it fitting that after Charles had done so much for the family for most of the season, it was Bruce who finally stepped up and became the character he’s been growing into. While Charles was sad to see that his childhood love, Alexis (Highdee Kuan), didn’t show as he boarded the plane for Taipei, Chien hopes that his character starts to date in the future. “I hope he starts to have some semblance of a normal life. I think he deserves it,” he says. And will that include a Xiao Pang Pang bakery in Taipei? “I think a bakery is in store,” says Chien. Falchuk hopes so too, and Tancharoen would even go so far as to say opening a bakery would make Charles even better at his “other job” helping Mama Sun rise among the triads — as well as making him happy. “You could probably launder a lot of money in a bakery,” he says. “That’s cash only, and you can make it work.”
As for Li, he was giddy when he first read the script for the finale. He didn’t expect to see Bruce in a situation with so much potential at his fingertips. “It’s such a cliff-hanger. What else can Bruce do? What else is he capable of?” he asks. Li adds that he’s always been intrigued by how different Charles and Bruce are and wants to see them learn more from each other and grow more alike. “It’d be kind of crazy at one point if the roles were reversed! That’d be interesting…”
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