Reviews

Wasted potential

I am up to episode 20 right now and I think it is enough to get some thoughts in before this drama wraps up for the New Year. This drama started off pretty well, setting up Carlos Chan as a Criminal Psychologist who had grown up with the extraordinary power of seeing briefly into the future to see when bad things happen. I thought it was going to be a drama where he gets mental flashes of danger like in the series Angel where Doyle/Cordelia gets these head splitting flashes of people who needed help. But nope, it is a very tame TVB affair.

I really like Carlos’ acting here because he really feels genuinely nice and easygoing. I think it is how he naturally is, so he melded into this role very well. I remember watching him act like a crazed terrorist in the film Detective VS. Sleuths and it didn’t suit him. It felt too forced. He definitely suits the handsome nice guy role, and I lapped it up.

The love interest is Hera Chan who plays a cop. I actually quite like her here as she is passionate about her job and getting real justice for victims. She is surrounded by red tape and people who ignore her insights because of how young she is. It is quite annoying watching experience cops pin blame on someone based on nothing but “intuition” or “instinct” when clearly there was not enough evidence and Hera pointing this out often.

And we get the big bad of the drama played by Nicholas Yuen. He works at a mortuary as a coroner and has a really sad back story. He is the most complex character in the series and I feel that Nick really delivered here in the role as someone who does questionable things and yet you sympathise with the guy. That is something really rare to see on TVB.

So the story is that Carlos grew up with this power to see briefly into the future and see bad things happen. He dad wanted him to become a lawyer but he refused and became a Criminal Psychologist. We later see him meet with Hera and Nick, and there is a rocky start and but suddenly they are best buds hanging around with each other. We even get scenes where Carlos’ mom thinks Nick and Carlos were a gay couple, it was quite funny. But these funny scenes are very few and far between the other stuff that happens in the drama.

We slowly find out how unhinged Nick is as he suffers from severe bipolar disorder and has some huge mental issues. This was because his father, who was a married man, slept with a prostitute and that prostitute gave birth to Nick. His father’s wife found out, so the wife paid a gigolo to seduce Nick’s mom so she would leave Nick’s father alone. This led to Nick getting disowned by the mom and ending up at an orphanage, and later a mental hospital because - understandably - this trauma as a kid really messed him up. So, in the modern day whenever he encounters people he deems as terrible mothers or bad husbands, he would end up killing them and then secretly sneering. Holy crap! We also find Nick is a compulsive liar, telling the truth and twisting some facts so that it seemed he was not at fault.

The drama also tried to have things extra spicy by making Nick’s father as the same man as Hera’s, so Nick and Hera are half-siblings. Hera accepted he was her older brother but things get crazy when her mother and father find out who he is.

Meanwhile, Carlos keeps getting future messages, phone calls and video calls from the future on his phone from a woman called Mary, who - coincidentally - looks exactly like Hera. She keeps telling him a crazy serial killer is out there and the cops are after her and also he shouldn’t start a relationship with her because he goes missing. And that’s it. Huh?

Man, Carlos’ future vision powers are so wasted in this drama. They introduce it right at the beginning when he was a small kid, but it only happens like 3 times in the entire drama and Carlos is unable to do anything about the visions. I mean if he recognises the place he would rush there, but so far 100% of the time he has seen something, 100% of the time it will happen and he is unable to stop it. Why even give him these powers when he cannot do anything about it? This is like giving a candy bar to a severely diabetic person, what were the producers thinking?

And the Mary - future Hera - thing has not been explained yet. We get flashes to the future of Hera being hunted by the cops while trying to find out where the missing Carlos is and where the serial murderer was, but it was poorly written into the drama. We only know it is a flash forward future scene when the screen makes it look like you are high off drugs and you see Hera wearing a black hat. All the future scenes go nowhere, we just see Hera getting chased by cops and people shouting at her but we ultimately go nowhere. Why introduce this? You could have left out the stupid unexplained future contact with Carlos and just made those future scenes as the final few episodes of the drama where Hera solves everything. We already know Carlos future vision changes nothing, this would have made it more streamlined and not all convoluted.

John Chan plays Hera and Nick’s father and boy his acting was something else. It was as expected as in other dramas, but the scenes when he is in despair and showing his regret over being a terrible father to Nick were so over-acted. He just hammed it up to 11, crying out like a sad old martial artist in a Jin Yong Chinese martial arts drama. The only thing missing was him screaming 天啊 and teaching Nick 獨孤九劍. What I fund weird was how such a weak-will guy ended up having a child with another woman especially since he is so afraid of his wife. Man, he is so under her thumb that the thumbprint is visible from space.

Mimi Kung plays the mother to Hera and man, her character in this drama I am not sure how to feel about. This is because I understand her feelings as a woman who has a husband who had cheated on her and had a child with another woman, but at the same time the decision to hire a gigolo to seduce the other woman and then dump her was simply disgusting. This led to Nick’s awful experience where he was abandoned by both parents and becoming mentally deranged. And yet despite finding out about all this, she felt no guilt and doubles down. We’ll see if she redeems herself later, but so far I really am not sure what to think.

And then we have Zoie Tam as Hera’s superior. She plays a tough and strict cop who butts head with Hera often at the beginning, but later they come to an understanding and mellow out. I actually quite like her character as it was acted out very well, adding complexity as we see her tough side and her vulnerable side when we find out how bad her relationship with her husband was, and later how she blamed herself for how bad things got after he was murdered. She was very convincing in her role, but there is one problem, though. Have you seen her in other dramas like The Learning Curve of a Warlord or The Exorcist’s Meter 2? She was pretty in those dramas, but here oh my goodness… who was the make up artist because they did her dirty. They made her look like Michael Jackson. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, just make sure it’a not white like Michael Jackson!

For now this drama is just average because so many flaws hold it back. The final few episodes might turn this all around so who knows, but let’s wait and see.

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