'The Glass Mask' (this time I go with the english title, as it sounds way nicer) introduced me to a new lead couple, I haven't seen another lakorn with either of them, yet. The girl looks like a typical nang'rai, not nang'ek. I looked her up and she's a beauty contestant, a big one. It isn't as bad as with Pooklook Fonthip, she is able to show a cute side (they needed to equip her with a fake nose for that, though:) As for Film Thanapat, he looks cozy on his sharerice profile picture. But on MDL profile picture, or in this lakorn, with all the hairproduct, not so much.

The plot is weird, too. Girl not only looks like nang'rai, also acts like nang'rai, a bit. She has a guy on the side (another gel-styled head). Pra'ek is bitterly dissapointed to find out he's got a cheating girlfriend, so the only logical thing the writers could do is switch her with a nice one with the same face. Got it? Me neither.

I felt bad for the girl waking up at hospital in panic. She couldn't remember what her name was. She couldn't remember who her family was. They changed her face to confuse her even more (but did they do eye surgery simultaneously? she needed to wear glasses), and also all the other people (apart from the face, she also happened to have exactly the same body? I kept waiting on someone to notice she's got at least slightly different hands or something). As for her, she is supposed to have "full amnesia", meaning she can't even remember her childhood. WHICH would mean that mentally, she is still a child. It's then a bit pedophile for her to have ANY romance line in this. What were the scriptwriters thinking? If someone can remember how to use spoon and fork, they can remember their mother, too (and the mother is still searching for the disappeared girl). Yet this nang'ek can't, while she can remember how to apply fake eye lashes. Is she supposed to be some kind of supernatural phenomenon?

Then it's revealed that the cheating girlfriend played the piano, had a deceased father she talked a lot about, also actually knew the pra'ek since childhood (played together in sandbox and everything). She hardly was a "sexy party girl" to him, then. Theirs should be morelike brotherly-sisterly bond. If they dated and slept together it was a bit incesty, actually.

I sometimes wonder what the scriptwriters that do write ROMANCE do have in their heads.

How to tune in such story? Looking from ANY angle, it didn't make sense. Including that it was not actually romantic. What was the audience supposed to feel watching it? I won't stretch over the illogical amnesia thing as it's pointless, clearly it's just another stupid lakorn but when there's trouble understanding the characters, then the audience simply can't enjoy their whatever story. I sincerely wished the show had abandoned the main plot and concentrated on something else. Not likely to happen, huh? Then, I tried just to concentrate MYSELF on something else. There's definitely something attractive about Film Thanapat, I decided. But why couldn't they just cut the guy's short hair actually short, so there wouldn't be the need for that overly complicated thing on the top of his head? They even dyed his hair some ridiculous auburn shade. Geez, leave the MEN'S hair alone! So gay.

Okay... I'll stop:) I hoped watching the 2nd couple could save me, here. I found them both likeable and sharing good dynamics so I went from there.

Meanwhile... The main guy sleeps with his fake girlfriend. First, he makes a huge jealous scene to her and she reacts such way if all nang'eks reacted, there would be no more need for all that slap/kiss dragging for loong time, LOL. Then they sleep together and I thought as the girl with the wide nose and glasses hardly had any boyfriend, she had to be a virgin. So, prae'k finds out he's got some other girl, there. He says NOTHING to the girl or to her "mother" that presented her to him, but confides to his dad. It's a funny scene where he doesn't directly tell him why he "knows" it's not her. As I previously watched 'Sud Sai Pan (2013)' where the pra'ek did NOT notice he slept with a virgin (seriously), I was prepared to expect the same here. But no, in this lakorn we live in the world where they never cease to surprise us which basic rules of logic do apply, and which don't...

Pra'ek then finds more proof confirming her switched identity. Even when dealing with considerably grave misconduct he doesn't go through proper channels, just confides to his dad again. The two have another even more stupid debate about how could her "mother" do that, that he's really unsure she's the same person as his girlfriend (huh? I thought he GOT that sorted already) when she looks exactly the same: talking with same breath about the mother owning PLASTIC SURGERY clinic. It's like a comedy, the only thing missing is the bacground laughter like in sitcoms. Concurrently to that we have scenes with the girl clearly reacting on seeing her old home and her own photo and her own mother but no one chooses to pay much attention to THAT, lol. Shall the old gf wake up and save everyone from their misery? Probably not soon... Next episode pra'ek finally confirms the girl's identity through a fingerprint and pieces all things together. Still, this is 1/3 of the "story", only. But what is there left to connect to any of the character's emotion? Pra'ek doesn't seem to feel the need to tell what he has discovered to ANYONE (just his dad doesn't count). He shall just marry this girl?

For a good lakorn, there is actually no need for such complex plot. Just very simple emotions can be powerful for the audience if they're true, meaning if the audience is able to UNDERSTAND them. Here, I could understand the girl, she was just being herself under the strange shell, but I could NOT understand the guy. I suppose the authors of this weird script thought it "romantic" that the pra'ek liked the girl with his unfaithful exlover's body & kind stranger's soul so much he didn't care about the crime done, about her grieving family, about her (amnesiac, then brainwashed) herself? The only person whom he deemed worthy of treating as equal enough to talk straight was his dad, who was neither the causing nor the affected party. As the result, the dad was the only character this pra'ek had real relationship with. Therefore, the romance did not properly work and we were just forced to watch the endless double dealings of all the deceit involved characters. I'm sure it all was intended to be extremely smart. But unless they intended the pra'ek to be in fact worse villain than the "evil mother", it's only a proof of incompetent scriptwriting. Why do most lakorns exhaust so much effort on overtangled fables that are just silly instead of concentrating on the relationships and some real feelings?

While I tried to concentrate on the side-story (I actually found the second couple more attractive), of course majority of the screentime was devoted to the silly main plot. Here I can mention that watching scenes with Pock Piyathida was also quite a strain. She was cute 20 years ago, playing "nang'ek" alonsgide Andy Gregson, but her current "mature villain lady" roles are painful to watch. Mirroring eerily the class of acting of Oliver Pupart (as I say, there's good acting, there's mediocre acting, there's bad acting and then there's Oliver Pupart) who "stars" (or stares) in front of a camera with her, here.

When the old gf wakes, she acts psycho (I don't think she was this psycho before... suddenly she's like from a bad horror movie) but I kind of thought the pra'ek deserved his old gf back. He consulted his "brilliant" dad again, but that was the only thing he could do, again. The nice girl disappeared and was in danger and I couldn't help thinking it was praek's fault. He finally turned to police but it was too little too late. Mostly they kept "playing detectives" themselves and it continued being as dumb as ever. It reminded some kind of parody element.

When it all felt so long like my review here, still many episodes remained. It seemed like never-ending story, while "story" not quite being the right word. I didn't cheer for the nice girl to end up with the pra'ek this lakorn had... She had a nice boyfriend already. I thought she was better off returning to him, and pra'ek with his old gf actually suited each other. Maybe it was just me. But I found it all more stupid the more "smart" it tried to be and even if I accepted the game, I cared for the second leads and side characters - family members - way more. I pitied the second lead girl when she found out about her father. What a cruel discovery, and only because the scriptwriter got carried away on a crazy story. As everything in this series, this didn't make slightest sense (an intelligent doctor reckoned he owed being loyal to his evil lover, but it didn't occur to him what he owed as a parent?). Somehow, the devastating consequences on human relations always played the second fiddle to "amazing love" of the main leads.

When the main evil "mother" capable of murdering both her fake/real daughter stated that after all no real harm was done to the nice girl as she DID get to meet a rich guy she would else never had a chance to marry, I couldn't help but thinking the same about this lakorn's creators. All is well in the end, just as long as the nice girl keeps the rich lover boy and keeps being pretty after her surgery, right? I so wished her to turn massively ugly (without hope for any surgery) just because I had to listen so many times to the annoying pra'ek repeating how he loves her for her soul ONLY, lol. The scene where she regained ALL her memories back I would SO appreciated it (even if her "amnesia" never had much sense) had she told the pra'ek to get lost, but of course, no. Both her mom and her real boyfriend had to tiptoe out of the room when they were having their "reunion". Seeing it was like that, I really had enough and wished that at least was ending already (and couldn't fathom what should MORE episodes be about). This was very, VERY long even at nineteen or twenty - hour long - epis, but no.

I periodically thought there was just 1 last episode left and there was not, LOL. It felt so WAY over. STILL the characters needed to amateurishly investigate more and more stuff. I felt like I would take it even if the evil/fake mother was revealed as an alien, if it happened RIGHT NOW and not after suffering 3 MORE HOUR EPISODES, lol. If there was ever a show I wanted to drop mere few episodes before its ending, then it was this one. And I think THAT is even less flattering than dropping it after FIRST few. Just every time I was about to turn this "drama" off forever, there was a scene of the second couple. So cute, these two. But everyone and everything else was actually unwatchable from the beginning to the end, so I think I should mirror that in my rating.

I guess even the final episode of this "drama" is kind of symbolical, because after the police finally resolves things in the usual stupid "crime action" sequence, audience is still to watch long flashback of the secondary characters and their years old past. Says a lot about dramaturgy skills of the writer. The only good point were the few present time scenes that added closure to second lead girl and her father.

Next time, I would love to see good romance lakorn with no silly criminal stuff in it, which seems like 5 year old kid has written it, and which in my opinion has nothing to do with romance. Thank you.