Marco Polo: Rendering
December 22, 2014 9:26 PM - Season 1, Episode 8 - Subscribe

An engagement. A revengeful murder. AhLin develops further. Sword dancing. Bone dice are played with. Grisly pots get stirred. Kokachion comes under Marco's protection. Marco gets sucked in.

A slow episode for me. I’d liked to have seen more of the battle. When did the rendered Chinese get used? Wouldn’t you have to have a height advantage to pour them down on your opponent? I can’t imagine they had some sort of pump and fire hose.
posted by unliteral (2 comments total)
 
Whoops Marco. Whoops.

Also, gross.
posted by natteringnabob at 9:44 AM on December 31, 2014


Yeah looks like no budget for the battle scene (real or cgi), so it was very anti-climactic. That the "hole in the wall" would be a trap was terribly predictable. Marco's sudden friendship with the Song prisoner was really forced, and didn't make the "rendering" scene any more emotional; still just gross.

But the question of the human soup has been bugging me too, given that they are the attacking force. Can't really catapult a big bowl of stew right? But then I did find this:
The Mongol siege against the walled town of Kusong exemplified Koryo's [Korea's] heroic resistance. General Sartai brought the full array of his medieval assault weapons to bear against the city's defenses. While Mongol troops attempted to undermine the defensive walls by tunneling under them, formidable lines of catapults hurled large boulders and molten metal at the town. Special assault teams used siege towers and scaling ladders against the earthen walls and pushed flaming carts against the city's wooden gates. Perhaps the most grisly tactical weapon used at the siege of Kusong was the catapult-launched fire-bomb. The Mongols boiled down their captives and used liquified human fat to fuel a weapon which produced fires that were practically inextinguishable. Kusong's defenders refused to surrender and stubbornly held on for thirty terrifying days and nights. An old Mongol general, inspecting the ramparts during the siege, commented that, "...I have never seen [a city] undergo an attack like this which did not, in the end, submit." In the end Kusong remained in Koryo's hands.
posted by Kabanos at 9:53 AM on January 15, 2015


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