In Bed with a Stranger (2024)

Lol episode 1 and already it is all so predictable

Man, I love Joe Ma but this drama from episode 1 had been predictable, and I mean every typical TVB trope was thrown in here from amnesia, lost in translation in a foreign country, suddenly causing a wedding to be cancelled, the situations that force boy and girl to embrace… everything is used in episode 1. I swear every time I called out a prediction it came true because of how lazy whomever wrote the screenplay for this was.

Man… the worst part? Joe Ma got an award near the start of the 1st episode, and when there was close up of the award it made me laugh out loud. It had the label “23rd Top Ten figthers award”, but they made a typo with the word “fighters” and wrote it “figthers”. Clearly it is wrong but they decided not to change it. That alone tells you how much budget was allocated to this drama, so who knows about the quality of the upcoming episodes. Damn I’m worried.

Episode 4: watching up to this episode and so far everything has been predictable. Even the guy that tried to hurt Mandy Wong I got it mostly right. I knew he had gone to prison and someone would get run over on the road because that’s the TVB way. I thought both his wife and kid would get hit and killed by a car but it was just the wife, so I’ll give that to TVB.

Some scenes were just plain setting a bad example for viewers. Joe Ma drove in this classic red BMW 5 series convertible to pick up Kelly Cheung. He spent the entire drive with one hand on the stick, which was on purpose so that Kelly could put her hand on his during one of their touching chats. This meant for the entire trip Joe was steering one handed, very safe (!). When we see Kelly put her hand on Joe’s, we can clearly see the car had automatic transmission and he had it on drive, so there was no reason to have his hand on it besides from the Director wanting the shot where they held hands. Lol what?

What I found hilarious was the obvious product placement of the red flower oil. Man, they zoom in so you get a good hard look at the bottle just before Kelly Cheung uses it on Joe.

Update: I’ve watched up to episode 14 and man what have I been watching? This drama is just a giant commercial and platform to advertise products. You’ll see how the actors blatantly put cup noodles, medicinal rubbing oils, paper map books and even Seahorse mattress. Jesus!

So far, some things in the drama have been so bad, like when Joe Ma grabs Mandy Wong to jump out of a boarded up window because the place was on fire. I thought it was quite high up, but they just crash through the wooden boards as if they were made of paper, then landed on the ground outside on the same level! That had me laughing out so loud because of how stupid it looked.

Another one that had me go wtf was when somehow Joe Ma worked out how some special code written in an old diary entry by Mandy was deciphered using the map book. The code was something like MB123456, and somehow from that Joe worked out MB was for “map”. How does MB mean map? And the numbers were the page number and co-ordinates on that page. Joe then randomly grabs a map book that he happened to have in a car, and coincidentally this was the right book to use to apply his theory. Joe then travelled to that location with his partner and they started randomly digging to look for whatever may be hidden. This part made me laugh even harder because Joe started digging in one spot 3 times and decides nope, not here. He walked to a second location and dug twice and bang, he hit something! He quickly dug it out and it was a small metal box the size of a tissue box. Like how lucky was that! Second attempt and somehow Joe hits that tiny tissue box! Man, why didn’t he use a metal detector to make it more believable? Joe took the box home, opened it and finds a dictation machine buried there 7 years ago. Joe turned it on and there is power! 7 years in the ground and the machine still had power to it! Joe listened to the last recording and of course it had a conversation that was incrimination to him so he deleted it.

This drama is going to get worse isn’t it?

Episode 18: omg, this episode gave us some proper laughable scenes. Check it out, Joey Law is going through 2015 street camera footage similar to Google Maps Streetview. Now, how can you get 2015 Streetview-like footage in 2023 I have no idea, but it is the same sort of browsing around the roads stuff. Joey virtually checks a road and suddenly he spots a couple in the back and in a complete blurry mess. Joey clicks to zoom in and suddenly we are shown a fully hi-res 4K crystal clear image of Joe and Kelly standing together as if it came from a DSLR. Like what technology was Joey using here? It doesn’t even blur out faces to protect identities or anything.

And the pièce de résistance, Joey Law tries to get access to Joe Ma’s safe and to do so he used a thin piece of plastic and places it over the safes’ keys. He doesn’t dust the keys or anything, just slaps the plastic on and lifts it to find black fingerprints on the keys Joe used to open the safe.

How is this drama rating higher than the drama Happily Ever after?

Episode 22: man this episode gave me some good laughs. Mandy nearly gets abducted, so she scratches the man’s right arm then falls over, hits her head and passes out. Joe Ma happened to be around, so he wrestled the same man. That man scratched Joe’s right arm as well before escaping. Mandy later sees Joe’s arm injured and suspects it was him. You know this is so stupid on so many levels because the suspect redirection was so forced, and also the cops here are not properly doing their jobs. If Mandy scratched the man who tried to kidnap her, they could remove the skin from under her nails, do a DNA test like in past TVB dramas and prove Joe was not the man. Why was it not done here? Because the Director didn’t allow it in the plot.

Final update: man I just finished the drama and I can tell you one thing… I called it! I knew Joe Ma was a good guy, it is rare that he is the bad guy in these dramas so all the red herrings being planted throughout the drama to make Joe look like the bad guy I knew were all BS. But the biggest plothole was in episode one where it ended with Joe visiting the location where his then wife Mandy fell off the cliff. How did he know to go there? That was planted with no explanation since he didn’t know where Mandy went missing.

Of course, we have the misunderstanding fully revealed with Mandy realising Joe was the good guy right at the end, and we get the typical TVB trope of a diary entry left by Joe that explained everything on one page. It’s never a daily one page entry per day, it is always one page that explains everything in the past up to that point in time. Convenient. And I also called out that Mandy would get back with Joe and somehow their situations would be reversed. And guess what? It happened. So Joe saves Mandy from falling off the cliff again, but he himself nearly falls. However, his fiancee Kelly - who happened to be the original person who pushed Mandy off the cliff (which I also called out) - saves Joe and she herself instead fell down the cliff. Joe then gets knocked unconscious by Frederick Cheng and was about to be killed when conveniently the cops arrive with Joey Law, and Joe is left in a coma for one week. At the end of the week, a lady - whose face we are not shown - goes to visit Joe in his hospital bed. This is implied to be Kelly’s spirit as it has been a week and suddenly Joe wakes up. We see Mandy now looking after Joe and his company while Joe now has amnesia.

I found Mandy really annoying because I knew everything she was doing was a misunderstanding against Joe. Later after she allegedly regained all her memories, she claimed in public that it was Joe that pushed her off the cliff. This is so dumb, because near the end when Kelly rescues her from Frederick going nuts, she finally remembers it was Kelly who pushed her off the cliff, not Joe. We get a flashback and can see Kelly dressed in BLACK in the DAYTIME attacking Mandy and chasing her to the cliff without a mask on so Mandy could clearly see her face, and it was Kelly that shoved her off. That really made me angry with Mandy, like you can remember everything but you couldn’t remember that important moment that led to you going missing? Geez!

The weird thing was that Kelly was great in this drama. Frederick Cheng also did a great job as a spoiled rich kid who needed people to help cover up his nonsense. Most of the stuff happening in the drama was a result of him being an idiot and the cover ups not being good enough to prevent others finding out.

The biggest annoying person in the drama is by far Joey Law. He had funny moment for sure so he isn’t the usual wallpaper paste as in his other dramas, but he had this unexplained bias towards Joe that made no sense. Even before they met he was looking into Joe’s past and kept saying Joe was a liar and a pretender and a bastard… anything to make Joe sound like the bad guy when he had no basis to these beliefs. Later when they meet Joey is standoff-ish, and this continued throughout the entire drama even in situations where clearly Joe did nothing wrong.

Overall, a predictable drama and it is below average. It had sparks of something great and some of the actors made their roles look good, but man it suffered from too many issues to be good. Better luck next time TVB, stop reusing so many tired tropes in one drama! There should be a trope limit given to Producers before they start producing anything.

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