bojojoti

Bizarre

So bizarre that my first thought was that I was watching a J-drama. I double-checked the next spoken sentence and ascertained it was, indeed, a Chinese drama. It's dark, dangerous, and deviated from the average drama.

The leads were adorable together. He's the boy your parents warned you about: the bad boy. But not your typical bad boy who did poorly in school and hung out with the wrong crowd. This boy was smart, menacing tall, feral, and definitely detrimental to the well being of those around him. She, on the other hand, was tiny. The ML often picked her up around the waist with one arm and carried her like his own personal Barbie doll with a curtain of glossy black hair. She was kind, brave, and resourceful and an absolute addiction of the bad boy.

The mood was black, and it seemed it was only night in their world. The visuals were striking: the ML and FL fell from the dark sky into a heart-shaped pile of pink balloons (please don't ask why the balloons were there, as logic has no place in this drama, and I'd have to explain the leads landed, miraculously unharmed, on their feet next to a tank containing a murderous mutant octopus with huge ears which was mind controlled by a zombie, at which point the explanation about the balloons hardly matters, right?). Do I care that the plot is ridiculous? Not a bit, because I'm not bored. And the OST was as wild as the action.

I thought I'd picked a tiny filler to watch between the longer dramas, as Viki only showed six episodes. I realize now it has 40 (but only 18 minutes each), which Viki will mete out on a weekly (?) basis. Bah, humbug. Here's hoping the drama keeps its frantic pace, phenomenal weirdness, and ends well.

Update: the weird, frenetic darkness morphed into a montage of musically-enhanced make-out scenes (although I've got to say that Cui Yu Xin and Fang Jin made kissing an art form; I seriously don't know how they got past the censors). That's when I lost interest and found something else to watch. I like kissing (and they had some excellent hugs), but I require a little plot to hold my attention.

I recently came back to finish the series, hoping it would regain the bizarre dark energy of the initial episodes, but it finished poorly with stilted dialogue, nonsensical reasoning, and so-bad-that-it-almost-got-interesting again plot. It's as though the drama was stitched together by committee: a guy on crack, a romance novelist, and a hapless student who was forced to write an ending for his class grade.

It's hard to rate this one. I'd give nine stars for the first episodes. They were a wild ride. I'd drop to maybe a five for the latter episodes. That would average to seven, but I've got to add a half star for the OST. It suited the drama well, and the intro song became an ear worm.

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