The Heir to the Throne (2024)

Haha predictable but entertaining, shame the ending sucks!

Man this is another run-of-the-mill rich family with typical rich family problems of siblings fighting over inheritance with the typical plot twists that are involved. This has the same formula except that it is still a very entertaining watch. We have a star studded cast led by Charmaine Sheh as the eldest grand daughter of the Yo family (or Qiu if you’re Mando) and we watch how her younger male cousin played by none other than Him Law trying to get in her way and usurp the title of hier. If you wanted to watch a drama to really hate Him Law then this is the perfect one to watch. He is a huge massive anus of a person and I spend most of my time watching the drama imagining him on fire.

Some of the plot reveals were so predictable and came about so rapidly that I found myself laughing at it all. The 2nd eldest son played by Gallen Lo has a great business sense but got into so much mischief in the past that it affected his wives (yes that’s correct, wives) and kids. Oh man, watch it to see what I mean. Let’s just say the 2nd wife has some loose lips.

In any case, I am enjoying how ridiculous everything in this drama is. As always, Raymond Lam is the coolest guy in the drama and has the best scenes. Can’t wait for the final episodes!

Update: I completed watching this ages ago but I had to watch it again to make sure before I complete this review and yes... it is terrible. It had such a good start, but the story and characters became so ridiculous that I stopped caring.

Let's start with the worst person in the show, and no it is not the character played by Him Law. It is actually the Gallen's 2nd wife played by Betsy Cheung. We spent the start of the drama thinking she was so nice and was a victim of constant bullying from Gallen's 1st wife , but later we discovered she was the biggest piece of human trash in the drama. In the past while Gallen only had one wife played by Candice Yu, he had an affair with Betsy Cheung. Later, Candice gave birth to a daughter and realised that her husband could not become the Yo family successor due to the traditional views of her father-in-law. At the same time, Betsy became pregnant with twins, and coincidentally one of the twins was a boy (Him Law). So, Gallen and Candice made a deal with Betsy to allow her to join the Yo family, but in return Betsy would have to surrender her son to Candice and take Candice's daughter as her own, officially making Betsy twins girls while Candice had a son, all this so Gallen could lay claim as successor to the family business. How convenient they became pregnant can gave birth at the same time.

You would think Betsy, as the third-party, agreeing to giving up her son for money and status would already making her a shitty mother, but it gets worse. She was afraid her daughter from the twin birth would be treated poorly by the 1st wife, so she swapped her daughter with Candice's just in case. This led to Candice treating Betsy's daughter as if it was her own and spoiling her. So in essence, she gave up BOTH her children.

And it gets even worse. Those twins are later found out to not even be Gallen's kids. In the past, while she was having an affair with Gallen, she was also sleeping with Raymond Lam's father played by Hugo Ng, making the twins half-siblings to Raymond. When I discovered all of those things, it just showed how awful Betsy was as a person, so the show trying to show her in sympathetic light just annoyed me so much. Candice is loud and obnoxious for sure, throwing her Princess tantrums when she cannot get what she wanted, but she was at least not a scheming anus like Betsy. I hated Betsy so much and was disappointed her ending did not result in her death.

Him Law here was a textbook psychopath. Everything he ever did was driven by intense selfishness and to serve his own ego. When he later discovered he was not Gallen's son, he got over it really quickly and then did everything in his power to not let this information leak out to Gallen because he did not want to lose everything. He also purposely did not share a fire hazard report to Charmaine so that she would get into trouble and have to spend time in prison. He also kept making stupid mistakes that most rational people would not do, like return to a crime scene. When Gallen found out Him was not his son, they gotinto a struggle , which led to Him murdering his father with a glass ornament in Gallen's office. Later, Him returns to the office at night to find the ornament, but he is caught by the police. Dumbass. His ending was too good for him as he got hit by a van while trying to make a getaway and entered a coma, with the drama ending with him still comatose. Just kill him already!

One of the points that made me feel really sick was Toby Leung declaring her love for Raymond. We later discovered that she was Raymond's half-sister when she did DNA analysis, and we found her throwing up after discovering she was in love with her own brother. That really made my stomach turn when I found out, like the writers were out of their minds when they wrote that into the drama. She later ends up getting killed by Him Law when she threatened to reveal their true parentage and mess up Him's plans, so he smacked her into the water and watched her slowly drown.

I am most disappointed with the character of the eldest brother played Benz Hui. He was divorced from his first wife, Charmaine's mother, and managed to bag himself a younger wife played by Dada Chan. He mentioned many times that he did not want to take over the family business and would not fight for it, but I thought this was a ruse and he was quietly plotting behind the scenes to take over, like Benz is known to do in other dramas, but NO! He is just useless! He later discovered that his daughter was made go to prison by the machinations of Him Law, but it required Charmaine saying, "You know this and you won't sit on the board to help me fight them?", so he reluctantly became Vice-Chairman on the board. And just when I thought maybe he would stand up and protect Charmaine in his new position, his new wife ends up having a miscarriage and nearly gets herself and Candice killed, so he decided to step down as Vice-Chairman to spend time looking after his wife, leaving Charmaine to fend for herself. Father of the f'ing year here. His ending was that his wife ran away because of the guilt she felt for the miscarriage and it ended with Benz still looking for her. WTF?

And don't think Charmaine was any better. Her role in this is almost only as eye candy as she does almost nothing significant and was basically this person that got shoved around and had thing happening around her or to her with not much she could do about it. She doesn't scheme, she doesn't make plan A and plan B or contingencies to deal with stuff, all she does is "I will do this and that's it" and then when the crap hits the fan oh no, she has no plan to get out of it. Raymond had to save her a few times, but she inevitably still had to go to prison for a few weeks thanks to the fire hazard incident. She only did a few things near the end of the drama, but only because Raymond armed her with knowledge she could use to attack with. Her character was just fodder for the plot to progress, and that makes me sad because she is a great actor completely wasted.

The best character is played by Raymond Lam. He played a lawyer and former boyfriend of Charmaine. They broke up because he was caught making out with another woman in his car but lied to Charmaine about it when she caught him in the act. She could not forgive his cheating so broke up with him, but there were many opportunities they could have gotten back together but never would because of this thorn in Charmaine's mind. He still deeply cares about her and would do everything in his power to help her whenever she got into trouble. I felt so bad for him when he discovered from Hugo Ng that Him Law was his half-brother, because Raymond really despised Him especially after finding out Charmaine went to prison because Him withheld information. However, despite being my favourite character in the drama, I still believe he doesn't deserve to be with Charmaine, and this is because of Raymond Wong. Raymond Wong plays a rich guy who had helped Charmaine a lot and also had feelings for her. He did nothing but support her in the drama and was an overall great guy. At the end when the van hit Him Law that left him comatose, it should have also hit Charmaine but Wong pulled her out of the way and took the van hit in her place. He survived it and so more than deserves to be with Charmaine. Plus with all the history between Raymond Lam's family and her, this would be for the best.

As for the other characters, they were just there, just like Jeannie Chan who played Candice's actual daughter. She just existed and left no lasting impression at all. Her performance here was akin to her performance The Beauty of War, except less annoying because she was not a massive push over. Even the legendary Lau Kong never had a chance to shine as he only had a few episodes to act in before he died in the drama. The worst use of a "cameo" was with Wilson Tsui, who played a crazy homeless guy and spoke to Him Law while Him was having his bouts of depression in his Lamborghini. Wilson appeared more than once so it was not really a cameo, but he served NOOO purpose at all. Why bring him in if it served no purpose?

This drama ends with Charmaine and Raymond Wong at a church getting married when suddenly somebody opened the church doors and a silhouette of somebody - I am assuming Raymond Lam - was there to stop it. It ends there but I can tell you now we do not need a direct sequel to this drama. It was overall terrible and just average at best. Raymond Lam's star power really can pull things back from the abyss but it cannot elevate this pile of vomit above average, so much so that this is not worth a rewatch like I did as I was speechless the first time and needed to make sure I didn't hallucinate the entire thing. The first drama with Tavia Yeung and Julian Cheung was vastly superior.

Read More

Too many plot points get built up to be abandoned, while the rest of the series relies on tropes.

*MAJOR SPOILERS - A RANT*
**I will be using the actors' names instead of their roles for sake of simplicity.

Cons:
- Raymond Lam's character is introduced as a competent lawyer for the Yau's, but we never see him do any lawyer work. Oh yeah, cause he's doing all the investigations for the cops.

- The cops don't do anything. When they do, it's telling civilians about *all* of their findings. I get the cop's a friend, but isn't it protocol to not release information outside of the investigative team, especially to family members of the deceased who are usually prime suspects?!

- How in the world did the forensics team not find that giant crystal ball under Gallen's desk the night of the crime? But instead they found it which seemed like weeks later? The police team is bad, but the forensics team is worse.

- Benz Hui had one badass scene where he confronts Gallen, and says he will assume the Vice-Chairman position, just for him to immediately give all his holdings to Charmaine later. He never did anything. The whole series he's pining for his wife and he failed at understanding / protecting her at that too. Dude really wants to travel the world. That's like his main goal.

- What happened to Charmaine's Plaza plan? It was brushed off. I get it's not part of the main plot but its sole existence was to cause a fire (that occurred off-screen btw). All the business stuff was just talk and no show. Charmaine's the protagonist right? Why is her storyline brushed off?

- Similar to the point above, they could've incorporated a little more group corporate scenes instead of just 1v1 conversations. The whole plot revolves around the "Yau's family business." That's what everyone's fighting for. Well, we never get to see much of the business operations besides people sitting at their desks like any office. Could be a budget issue, but it's mostly talking. This is an example of the writers going "believe it's important because we tell you it's important."

- Everyone got away with everything so easily!!! Gallen's first wife was dumb, conniving, and cruel in the way she blamed other people with no evidence. She never had her comeuppance! Once she lost her husband, she decided to turn 360 and do charity work? Lady, you caused a woman to lose her baby and humiliated her in front of everyone, and indirectly caused her whole family to die.

- Gallen's second wife was even worse! You can say her punishment was losing her 2 kids but lady got off waaaay too easily. She was the root cause of everything. She was evil and scheming (telling Niki who caused her miscarriage, switching multiple babies, lying to her husband, being a mistress, spoiling her children). She was not a pure soul, the way the show wanted you to believe at the end. And how did the police let her get away with taking the blame to protect her son? Isn't that obstruction of justice? The police were like "ma'am, you're free to go after giving false testimony!!!"

- Raymond was waaay too harsh on Gallen. Yes, Gallen caused his dad's death but he did not intend to kill. He was just letting out his anger, which is understandable because he raised Hugo's 2 kids for 30 years!!! Hugo even said he would accept any punishment from Gallen. Raymond telling Gallen to be apologetic to his dad in the afterlife at Gallen's grave was so off-putting.

- Everything was too predictable. The moment Tobey died, I was saying to myself "Please don't be Him Law. Please don't be Him Law. It's too predictable. Please let there be a twist villain." Nope, it's Him Law.

- Raymond Lam does not deserve Charmaine. Bro cheated. Raymond Wong was the best character. Ending sucks.

- Charmaine was too passive. Everything happened to her; she didn't do much. Her only fight back was that one confrontation with Him Law that made him almost slap her. She is constantly complimented for being smart and strong by others in the show. But it's mostly talk? She had a great scene in the prison where she held down the prisoner lady for crumbling her pig photo. It was a great scene. I wanted to see more of that! Don't tell me she's strong, show me she's strong!

- So Him Law is in an indefinite coma? That's his ending? Would've been better if Gallen decided to not change the will, and Him realizes that Gallen harbored love for him, and feels remorse. Dude should either live in guilt the rest of life in jail, or go out all evil. Instead, he just gets hit by a car and hooked up to a machine the rest of his life without facing the consequences of anything he's done.

- Him Law had more screen time than Raymond Lam, who I thought was supposed to be the male lead. Feels a bit like false advertisement.

- Raymond's and Charmaine's return as an on-screen couple is wasted here.

- Some acting was too over the top (Gallen's first wife and Tobey at some parts). Poor Tobey though. I would've gone insane too.

- I have a really hard time believing Tobey, Jeannie, and Him are the same age and Tobey and Him are fraternal twins, though I understand casting twins is tricky.

- What happened to Charmaine's mom's boyfriend? He gave me "sus" vibes but he didn't do anything in the end.

Pros:
- This is Him Law's best acting to date. Dude poured his heart into it.

- Him Law and Venus Wong have great chemistry. I enjoyed their side story; it was wrong but it was interesting.

- Veteran actors like Benz Hui, Gallen Lo, Hugo Ng did not disappoint despite their limited screen time.

- I like the pig plushie scene as a callout to My Sister of Eternal Flower.

- I do like the line that Charmaine said about how her grandfather and Gallen were misogynists and favored boys over girls, but in the end it's 2 girls (her and Jeannie) that are holding up the family.

- I like the irony that Him Law spent so much time winning the heart and marrying someone he didn't love (Gigi, the Malaysian tycoon's daughter) to benefit himself and the "family business," and Charmaine did the exact same thing by marrying Raymond Wong at the end. The "heir" is truly a curse.

Read More