ShortCircuit

He TOLD QingLang in no ambiguous words that - I quote - If Chen Zhu dies, I won't live either. QL knows he wasn't joking. Obviously he told WenShu too...

https://orchidlantern.com/deep-in-the-act-chapter-61/

From here to the second extra, I can't do it justice by summarising it. And it's a good TL (2 chapters and 2 extras).

He gave up therapy before getting on for keeps with Gao Zhun and became a professor of psychology. That's where the tie-tying scene comes from, he was going to his first day at his new job and wanted good luck from his partner.

LOL, good for me I read the novel's ending, or it would've been confusing.

The best part is that they actually managed to stay very close to the novel's plot. Gao Zhun and Zhang Zhun also were pretty easy to separate :)

One of the good ones.

PS YunTing's explosion at the end, LOL, "what's going on with this world?" was hilarious :D Everything she touches turns out gay, the girl has a superpower :D

Since last week, it's two eps per week.

So basically, it would have COST too much to actually film the sequence so they made a deep-fake AI one instead. No excuses about making art and all that jazz that ALWAYS comes up when the award season rolls in.

AI is not art. It's regurgitated mash (sometimes hilariously so - see the US "African" map they just presented at the UN) that replaces humans and the NEED for expert humans. It takes jobs - not just in the IT industry, other than the prompt-generating human, but also from the FILM industry. If one can just cut costs and not use stunt doubles, cinematographers, prop makers and on and on - these people will be either be paid less and less (because they're replaceable) or cease to exist at all, in time.

I cannot accept any such excuse. If I had known it would involve AI before starting, I would not have started it. It's not that I am a purist when it comes to drama or cinema. But his excuse is lame, and it just all comes down to cost - even when regarding the stupid Kopiko commercial. (THOSE weren't AI, were they? I guess the actors still have some value to sell things.) If the drama cannot do without the scene, get the budget for it properly. If it's not really needed, then don't include it at all instead of making it AI. It's not that hard.

Sure looks like unspoken rules, and also Sis Jialin now has to fend off the freaking "sponsor". I think Han Lu thought it would be a one-off, but the guy seems persistent.

QingLang being the cutest love-brain puppy: 100/10. Need more, send more please!

WenShu CANNOT be unaware QingTian already knows. Why is he being stupid?! WENSHU STOP BEING STUPID and DO SOMETHING!!! I know he called QingLang over, but it won't be enough. QingTian is already acting off, like he doesn't even care, he's not being subtle about it at all. Dammit, if they drop the ball on this boy I'll go over there and spank everyone.

Also, Han Lu, ah, Han Lu... That was awesome and extremely stupid at the same time. I don't want that for him, at all. He'd be better without the hanger-on.

PS Mysterious Hunter school or something, let's have a deal - you have 10 days for whatever you do there, the students have a three-month vacation. Repeat throughout the year. Deal?

I DID notice!! Told my sister, in surprise "OMG Honda could TALK!"... and she didn't remember who Honda was. We're going low contact over this. /s

I guess he later must have had some kind of wound that left him unable to speak. Maybe they'll tell us (just hoping they didn't actually forget he was a mute in S1 LOL).

Is that the guy who gets to ~translate, LOL?

Very little Pasin so far, too.

This kind of series is my cup of tea, and the first season delivered splendidly on it. But this one is overdoing it, making it impossible to suspend disbelief for, replacing what did make it good (the bond between JinMan and JiAn and their resilience) and turned him into basically the Terminator and her into an almost-prepared Sarah Connor.

I am all for nice action sequences, but the knife fights this season, many though they be, don't hold a candle to that one knife fight between JinMan and Bale in S1. The pyros are all over the place, the drones are way too OP and accurate until shot down, the mercs - all part of the BIGGER Babylon - have the shot count of Imperial Troopers while JiAn and everybody on her side are either Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. The way they go down like clay targets is really amazingly underwhelming - so these guys are who JinMan the superman was afraid of?!

If there'll be a S3, what's left for him to do, take over the world or go to other planet to overkill anything there, too?!

The season underrates itself. The simple fact most of us are fans of S1 doesn't mean we're suddenly blind to the faults of S2.

Though anyway, TBH, I was afraid this would happen. It happened to basically ALL Asian dramas that got a S2 or even S3 infused with Western money. I'm looking at Sweet Home, Alice in Borderlands, even Squid Game. I am pretty certain they'll destroy the magic of Moving 2, too. Oh well.

TL:DR: Season 1 of ASfK is one of the best thrillers out there. S2 so far doesn't quite get there. I am happy you're happy with it, but I am not. I'll wait til the end before rating it, as usual, but so far, at the half-point... something's still lacking.

The first season remained within the bounds of human effort and didn't go over the top. They can do reasonable action thrillers if they want to. This time though...

Unless they manage to airlift WooJin to some hospital and he's not already dead.

Anyway - what's this season, an actual shopping mall for killers?! I get it, drones are crazy (they're waging war in the real world anyway), can you please run out of them? Okay, thanks.

AT LEAST Bale is now dead, good riddance. Also good riddance to Jun the cute madman.

Darlings, cutting off someone's head with a knife might look interesting in a SFX (or AI) scene, but seriously LOL, it does NOT work like that. At all. Not with a knife, even combat, not without the smallest recoil LOL. Let's get serious here, shall we?

There's a little way too much force - and way too easy to get rid of them, too, if they're also Babylon - thrown around just to get JiAn. What's it going to be next, a tank? A rocket launcher? A B52? A nuclear bomb?!

PS the scary ghost disappeared, boo! And then she got all better and had time to fall in love in a second with the guy she suspected so much that she put cameras all over the island to guard against him. And then she shut them all down before the mercs got there. Uh-uh.

These two eps are way better though I seriously hope Q is smarter than Kusanagi (I wouldn't bet on it).

So. I was debating with myself if JiAn gets a love line this season, I'm not debating anymore.

TBH it kind of gets very very veeeeery slow. Almost nothing happens. And when it does, it copies what Legend of the Kitchen Soldier did, with the overblown reactions to food.

So he's more of a first-aid worker-level than a doctor (his supposed profession that he actually trained for and all) but an expert at cooking (that he just browsed through that desert recipes book for)? Yeah. *sigh*

I kind of don't like virgin characters that are obviously quite adult - and by virgins I don't necessarily mean physically. I don't like how grown adults react like they never ever even considered being attracted to anyone, of the same or the opposite sex, like ever. Why is Dech so shoked? Is he a monk in his everyday life?!

Anyway - it's been so slow moving that I already had time to get over the initial liking. If the next ep is just as slow, I'll maybe stall or even drop it. I like naked people as much as everyone else, but that's not enough to fill 10 eps. Especially as the MC acts like a nincompoop.

PS I always heard durian is an acquired taste and it smells like you'd want to die and be saved from it. Does frying it into crisps really save it for nose-breathers?

10 minutes in, I really don't like the AI OP. I guess I'll be waiting for opinions after it airs a few more eps before deciding.

PS The little girl actor's acting is really fierce. I like HER.

PPS For a Mango drama, this has one of the best subs I've seen. Old-time style expressions and all. It FEELS like they're not living in modern times and speaking a bit dated language. It's a nice touch TBH and I never expected that from Mango. (Good subs for Hunter WHEN???)

If the FL "merged" with the original SXH's soul and then made a son with a CP that would turn out to be also revived (but in his own body), that would make the son the Son of Frankenstein and Frankenstein's Bride LOL. At least they managed not to do that again. Though I did wonder myself if that's what they implied - he died and gone to the underworld then Dr Xie managed to go get him back, 2ha-style. Because of plot reasons.

Yeah, I can see a lot of people like this like a lot of people (generic term) would love junk food. But it's still stupid, IN MY OWN OPINION.

Anyway, I've happily had it with this drama and I don't care to visit the page again.

I wish everyone many more happy drama watches!

The Grandma Empress poisoned her own grandson by direct bloodline of descent. Because she didn't know and she wanted to destroy her adopted son's family instead. To hell with the Empire and stuff.

The Emperor could've saved his precious brother that we spent way too many scenes with since he was already long dead, but he chose to "respect" his brother's military command (despite being completely able to send SOME help at least. He chose not to).

THEN, because he's ambitious, he decides to steal his brother's son - who would have become Crown Prince anyway - for himself, and "love" him more than his own sons. As one does, you know. That made zero sense. Not to mention that he chose to tell his adoptive mom he will make the prince CP right after telling her her own son died. Nice. Low EQ around the house.

Then his own blood-sons ALL fall for the same woman (and his stolen son, too). Because females were scarce in that two-days travel Empire, so it was needed. Nobody was like her. She's unparalleled. Nobody does incense like her. And stuff. And nobody does cold ice queen like her, EVER. In any drama, either. She's an iceblock.

Moving on. His tragic older son decides to do a fake complot to fool everyone and "lose" his right to the Empire. Yeaaaah, right. She still doesn't love him. What a pathetic fool. He even decides to stab his own full brother because of reasons. The full brother marries his army, since he can't have the ice queen. LOL.

Then another of his sons decides to drink the poison his wife fed him - because WHY?! Anyway, he conveniently leaves her some confession that is absolutely useless. Pathetic.

Then (actually, the first of them) another son chooses to go watch his mom's tomb FOREVER and EVER (nobody mentions him again. He vanished into the dark mysteries of tomb raiding, maybe).

And one other (I had already forgotten about him) decides to rebel because his daddy didn't love him. He obviously fails - because this is a family of failures - and dies. His daddy doesn't even acknowledge he ever existed, afterwards. LOL.

And then the fake-son, the CHOSEN ONE, goes away for like 4-5 years because of reasons, turns up to get fed vinegar by his own son, and is in limbo, legally speaking (since his father made his own gradson Emperor in the meanwhile LOL). Like... What the hell?! Not to mention that it took 20-some years of nobody managing to heal his poison, but then! Miraculously!! A SECRET SECRET EXTRAORDINARY CURE (that nobody mentions and explains how it works) APPEARS!! And he is HEALED!!!! And the only thing remaining is some white hair esthethically pleasing and making him even more handsome.

This whole story was dumb, dumb, dumb!!!! I liked the premise, but as it dragged past the halfway point and all the males in the Imperial family were STILL acting like married-with-children VIRGINS around the ONE and ONLY MOST-DESIRABLE WOMAN of the whole wide WORLD, it got so tiresome. And once you break that suspense of disbelief screen, everything becomes so clearly dumb and despite the nice cinematography and (overused) love songs, you just get... tired.

Highlights: the ML is really handsome. Some of the support cast is great (at emoting, at least, something the FL lacked).

Down points: the whole overreaching stupidity of it all. The completely non-important assassinations and kidnappings and attacks that nobody ever mentioned after they were done (and then they put themselves in danger again.) The complete lack of ANY kind of emotions on the face of the FL (I know Meng ZhiYi CAN act, I've seen her do it. Here she's just a extra-whitened huge-eyed non-expressive cold puppet that looks nice but doesn't inspire anything. Not admiration, not hatred, not love, not care, nothing. What is it?! At one point I imagined it's botox or something. What the hell happened?!) The stupid way ALL the males around her LOVE her. and are 100% devoted to her (I mean, what the heck?! They're supposedly master strategists, but they ALL fall for her?! Did she give them some Gu worms or some incense making them mad?!) The unexplainable disparition and re-apparition of the ML in the last eps. Like, he ded?! Then stay ded. Noooo, he's alive! Surprise, mofos, I'm back and nobody will ever tell you how this magic trick works! (I don't even care anymore at this point).

So yeah. Rated for cinematography and the support cast, but these 30-some hours of my life were completely wasted.