It seems it’s a recipe for poison? Maybe by somehow combining both prescriptions? So Dr Cheng helped one of…
I wonder if Mr Xue isn't somehow connected to Lu Zhi? We heard someone (I forget who) say in an earlier episode that the murderer wouldn't be exposed because everyone involved was now dead, including Lu Zhi. And in today's episode there was a conversation between two men (one of them being Mr Xue's butler, I suppose?) where one of them said what the three victims had in common was that none of them had changed his identity since the fire 20 years ago, but then I think he implied the two people most likely to be killed next were living under new names.
So we have to start thinking about which of the characters we know could be living under an assumed identity. The earlier comment that Lu Zhi is now dead immediately struck me as a potential red herring, so what if he survived but is living under a fake name and no one knows who he is? What if he's Mr Xue? He seemed like a bright kid—too smart for his own good in some ways—in the flashback episode, and Mr Xue sounds rich and resourceful, so I wouldn't be shocked if Lu Zhi was able to escape death and become a powerful and influential adult.
In any case, the murderer must be someone who lived in Lu manor 20 years ago and is now going after everyone involved in the conspiracy to set it on fire... but then again, Mr Lu himself didn't seem like a good guy either in the flashback episode, so maybe the situation is more complex.
OK, it's been 6 episodes now and he's been mentioned in a bunch of different contexts without ever appearing on screen to my knowledge. I just gotta ask. Who the fuck is Mr Xue? Could he be one of the two men we saw conversing about the case at the beginning of today's episode?
Thinking you’re a better judge of who deserves to live and die than the rest of society is the definition of unhinged narcissism. Killing people who’ve served their time because they’re not repentant enough or because you think the law got it wrong is psychopathic. Stalking and attacking people is neither defensible nor “heroic.” The death penalty is barbaric enough when it’s passed down by a court of law, let alone when some random university student decides he’s qualified to give it.
The fact you find this kind of fantasy appealing (it’s not at all realistic like you say in your other comment, because “good” serial killers who only pick deserving victims don’t exist in real life) makes you a fascist sympathiser BTW.
Argh, it's so obvious Gui'er likes Sangeng (and he's so convinced his precious master's daughter is too good for him that he would never notice)! If he doesn't get a clue by the end of the show, she should just beat him up.
Also Judge Song is a great character. In many ways he fits the familiar role of a cynical and disillusioned but fundamentally decent man whose talents are going to waste in the swamp of greed and corruption he's been consigned to—a role we were at first invited to assign to Sangeng's dead master, who seemed to fit the hardened yet principled cop stereotype better, until it became clear we were seeing an idealised version of him through the veil of Sangeng's hero worship and Captain Leng was in fact just a piece of shit like everybody else in the yamen—but as interesting, perceptive and morally upright as Judge Song appears to be, he's also a stone-cold psycho who gets off on torturing suspects and collects criminals' teeth as trophies.
The fact these two sides of his personality coexist in apparent harmony contributes to the show's vivid historicity for me. Judge Song illustrates the limits living in a society as violent and hierarchical as Ming China imposed on smart and sensitive people's capacity to treat others humanely. Even if someone from that era was a genuinely good person, they wouldn't operate within a liberal-humanistic philosophical framework that gave them concepts like human rights, individual agency, due process in the modern sense, non-violence, etc. For Judge Song, torturing people during interrogation is an essential element of criminal justice, so why not do his job and be proud of how good he is at it?
The other characters are also wonderfully realistic in that sense. The yamen runners are always going around in packs like wild dogs and not being affiliated with any cliques, patrons, etc. is unthinkable; personal connections and debts are king; the characters are all very proud and respond to slights and insubordination with explosive violence, including Sangeng; secrets are incredibly valuable because what the community thinks about someone, i.e. what people know about them, a person's official status, determines the value of their life—so knowing someone's secret, seeing them without their mask on, is both a source of immense power and a danger to one's own life. I just love how everyone behaves here; it's a proper historical drama.
it was explained that their DNA was so weird that a DNA test was impossible.
Which doesn't make any sense because the presence of a unique chromosome should make DNA testing easier, not harder, but I went along with it for the story.
ayo you lost all credit when you hit on Beyond Evil lol. It doesn't have to be your taste, that does NOT make…
It absolutely is badly written and overacted and every rabid fangirl who thinks it's a masterpiece proves how easy it is to manipulate audiences with crude vibe markers instead of constructing an actual plot that makes sense and leads somewhere.
I'm still on episode 8 and all I have to say is that the leads are so hot together it's melting my brain. Cdramas NEVER get sexual tension right! What happened? Kudos to Ni Ni and Bai Yu for portraying their characters so well, but also to the scriptwriter for making Liuxi so cool. I can't think of any other contemporary Chinese actress who could have done justice to this character, except maybe Liu Yifei. They both have that queenly presence and smouldering gaze.
Isn't the FL supposed to be a firefighter? Why do the tags list both leads as students?
There seem to be a lot of moving parts in the premise of this drama and I guess I won't really know what it's about until I actually watch the first episode. But learning that the ML will want to take revenge on the FL at first made me intrigued.
OMG, episode 2 was even better than the first one! It kept adding layers of psychological nuance to the foundation of the first episode.
Mahiro and Kaori are both flawed and occasionally frustrating people—Kaori can be really self-absorbed and insensitive in her pursuit of the truth even when she thinks she's being empathetic and Mahiro is self-pitying and bitter yet can't stand up for herself—and this episode heightened the interpersonal tensions that come from that. At the same time, it showed us why they are the way they are and also highlighted their good sides; they're not bad people, or rather, they're trying to be good. And they both have a point re. the ethical disagreement between them.
If the first episode was about setting up the mystery of what happened to Sara, the second was about our main characters and why they see the incident from 15 years ago the way they do. We didn't get a lot of new information and Tateishi Rikito remains a total cipher. I hope we'll finally learn something about his motivations in episode 3.
Mahiro's boss is total trash and I hope her sensationalist script and the production studio pushing it on Kaori won't be a major plot point.
Finally, the little girl who played Mahiro in the flashback scene in episode 2 looks SO MUCH like her it's uncanny. Good job to the casting director!
OK, one last thing: Kaori's nightmare was really well done. It gave me an actual jumpscare.
I don't think it's healthy to feel the blame for something that happened in the past to different people than…
The anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea is much stronger and more racially targeted than the anti-German sentiment anywhere in Europe or even Israel nowadays. So it's not unreasonable to ask how palpable it is in this drama.
I also don't think the person you're responding to indicated they feel personally responsible for Japanese imperialism anywhere in their question.
1 
So we have to start thinking about which of the characters we know could be living under an assumed identity. The earlier comment that Lu Zhi is now dead immediately struck me as a potential red herring, so what if he survived but is living under a fake name and no one knows who he is? What if he's Mr Xue? He seemed like a bright kid—too smart for his own good in some ways—in the flashback episode, and Mr Xue sounds rich and resourceful, so I wouldn't be shocked if Lu Zhi was able to escape death and become a powerful and influential adult.
In any case, the murderer must be someone who lived in Lu manor 20 years ago and is now going after everyone involved in the conspiracy to set it on fire... but then again, Mr Lu himself didn't seem like a good guy either in the flashback episode, so maybe the situation is more complex.
The fact you find this kind of fantasy appealing (it’s not at all realistic like you say in your other comment, because “good” serial killers who only pick deserving victims don’t exist in real life) makes you a fascist sympathiser BTW.
Also Judge Song is a great character. In many ways he fits the familiar role of a cynical and disillusioned but fundamentally decent man whose talents are going to waste in the swamp of greed and corruption he's been consigned to—a role we were at first invited to assign to Sangeng's dead master, who seemed to fit the hardened yet principled cop stereotype better, until it became clear we were seeing an idealised version of him through the veil of Sangeng's hero worship and Captain Leng was in fact just a piece of shit like everybody else in the yamen—but as interesting, perceptive and morally upright as Judge Song appears to be, he's also a stone-cold psycho who gets off on torturing suspects and collects criminals' teeth as trophies.
The fact these two sides of his personality coexist in apparent harmony contributes to the show's vivid historicity for me. Judge Song illustrates the limits living in a society as violent and hierarchical as Ming China imposed on smart and sensitive people's capacity to treat others humanely. Even if someone from that era was a genuinely good person, they wouldn't operate within a liberal-humanistic philosophical framework that gave them concepts like human rights, individual agency, due process in the modern sense, non-violence, etc. For Judge Song, torturing people during interrogation is an essential element of criminal justice, so why not do his job and be proud of how good he is at it?
The other characters are also wonderfully realistic in that sense. The yamen runners are always going around in packs like wild dogs and not being affiliated with any cliques, patrons, etc. is unthinkable; personal connections and debts are king; the characters are all very proud and respond to slights and insubordination with explosive violence, including Sangeng; secrets are incredibly valuable because what the community thinks about someone, i.e. what people know about them, a person's official status, determines the value of their life—so knowing someone's secret, seeing them without their mask on, is both a source of immense power and a danger to one's own life. I just love how everyone behaves here; it's a proper historical drama.
There seem to be a lot of moving parts in the premise of this drama and I guess I won't really know what it's about until I actually watch the first episode. But learning that the ML will want to take revenge on the FL at first made me intrigued.
Mahiro and Kaori are both flawed and occasionally frustrating people—Kaori can be really self-absorbed and insensitive in her pursuit of the truth even when she thinks she's being empathetic and Mahiro is self-pitying and bitter yet can't stand up for herself—and this episode heightened the interpersonal tensions that come from that. At the same time, it showed us why they are the way they are and also highlighted their good sides; they're not bad people, or rather, they're trying to be good. And they both have a point re. the ethical disagreement between them.
If the first episode was about setting up the mystery of what happened to Sara, the second was about our main characters and why they see the incident from 15 years ago the way they do. We didn't get a lot of new information and Tateishi Rikito remains a total cipher. I hope we'll finally learn something about his motivations in episode 3.
Mahiro's boss is total trash and I hope her sensationalist script and the production studio pushing it on Kaori won't be a major plot point.
Finally, the little girl who played Mahiro in the flashback scene in episode 2 looks SO MUCH like her it's uncanny. Good job to the casting director!
OK, one last thing: Kaori's nightmare was really well done. It gave me an actual jumpscare.
I also don't think the person you're responding to indicated they feel personally responsible for Japanese imperialism anywhere in their question.