The best part is from start to finish its only 120 minutes of your time.
The best thing going for this series is that it is short, so grab that bag of popcorn if there is nothing else on and you don't feel like reading a book.I truly have nothing against short series, in essence they are just movies cut in short length. Which is why I hold them to the same standards. They should still have the capacity to tell brilliantly cohesive stories with movement, depth, feeling and character, since there are plenty of cinematic and TV movie examples out there as proof positive it can be done.
Unfortunately, this series suffers from alot of forced and rushed moments. The tragic scenes, deductive reasoning moments and fight scenes were rushed through; it left the story feeling somewhat fragmented. It certainly has several spots that may cause you to scratch your head in puzzlement (not in a good way) and a few more spots requiring your hand at the ready to rewind because you blinked.
It was the romance portion, however, that was the biggest disappointment, as nearly all the scenes felt like after thoughts and were salt and peppered throughout the series for effect. It seems as though they were going off a bad cliche checklist. Pretty sure you can check them off as you watch it, who knows that could be a fun way to watch it -- see if you can spot all 10. The romance just seemed completely out of sync with the rest of the plot line. I'm not even sure I would qualify it as a romance as this usually needs its own story arc within a series which sorely fails to do. So maybe a new category or tag is needed -- Multiple Cliche Moments (MCM for short)
The music has a nice elegant piano intro, however it fails to match the true nature of the series. The rest of the music: while again well played, sweet and tender, still did not match the scenes they were in, with the exception of the ending, for obvious reasons (which I obviously can't tell you without revealing spoilers). I feel the music was concentrated on the romantic aspect of this drama rather than the main storyline which was the corruption/drugs/murder. This is far from a sweet and elegant story as the score would lead you to feel.
On a positive note, I do find the time period they chose interesting as not many are set in this era.
There was good potential chemistry between the ML and FL, if given more time and opportunities to develop their characters interactions it would be worth seeing what they could do with more.
Side note: English subtitle issues on IQIYI did cause some minor hiccups, but didn't effect the story as a whole.
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