Recap
Yi Yong raises his ink stick to defend himself and — it’s his mom. She wants to drink beer together and encourage him to think about his future.
Yi Yong doesn’t tell her about his dream to be a comic book artist. He shuts down his unpopular comic and walks away. He doesn’t see a comment appearing asking for him to keep going.
Chu Ying is with the police on a bridge where there was a terrible motorcycle accident. There’s blood on the ground below the bridge, but no body.
Meanwhile, the red-thread zombie is running through town and becoming famous on social media.
Yi Yong tries to pick up his grandpa’s jobs with no success. He fails a test given by one nice old client because he can’t write anything with feeling. At home, he tries again, and this time he writes.
Red-thread zombie sees the smoke and spidermans through the city, finding Yi Yong. It wants his help, but it doesn’t know what help or why it came to Yi Yong. It won’t leave him alone, following him even as he uses the bathroom.
Yi Yong tries to take it back where it died, laying it down to rest in peace and leaving it there.
Chu Ying sees security footage of Yi Yong at the bridge. Calligraphy on the wall jogs her memory back to when she found Yi Yong in the wreckage and revived him.
Yi Yong goes to his grandfather’s bedside to talk about seeing a dead person. He wonders if his dad might also come back to him.
Chu Ying somehow finds him at the hospital. They have a confusing conversation where Yi Yong tries to tell her the truth about what happened with the motorcyclist’s body, and she thinks he’s done something horrible with it. She lets him go and he tries to find the zombie under the bridge, it’s not there but it is waiting for him at home.
Yi Yong calls Chu Ying over, and she recognizes it from social media. The zombie says it isn’t the dead motorcyclist. We get a POV shot of something coming from under the water and into the motorcyclist, who was thinking he didn’t want to be seen. So it’s something that took over the body, but it can’t give it back and still doesn’t know what help it needs.
Chu Ying fantasizes about being a detective and briefing everyone on the case, and we learn the motorcyclist was a pharmacist. She snaps out of it and her co-worker tells her the motorcyclist had high blood pressure and was well insured. They wonder if he faked his death, but Chu Ying knows that can’t be it.
Yi Yong helps the zombie change from rags into some of his clothes and hide. He’s worried about if his own father suffered in death, and asks his mom for pictures of the accident victims. She won’t give him anything and says the only one who can know how his dad felt is his dad.
Chu Ying talks to the motorcyclist’s parents and learns he insured himself for his parent’s sake, but his father felt insurance was a curse. His parents say he got along well with his colleagues at work. His mom wants to believe the lack of body means he’s alive.
Chu Ying reports to Yi Yong, and they see a contradiction in stories. They meet up at the hospital, where the colleagues confirm that despite what the motorcyclist’s parents said, they weren’t close. Yi Yong says this means the motorcyclist was getting bullied. With any luck, there’s a loser among the bullies whose been keeping his head down but will speak up.
As they walk away we see a pharmacist who could be that loser.
Yi Yong and his mom visit his grandpa and his mom brings his grandfather’s stuff, which means she was in the boxes where the zombie was hidden. Yi Yong runs home and the zombie isn’t there, but we see it landing from a great height.
Thoughts
This is how to do characters and mysteries. Yi Yong wants to solve the mystery to get the zombie to leave him alone, but there’s a lot more to it that’s very personal. Not only is this tied into his mysterious connection with his grandfather, it brings painful hope and confusion about maybe seeing his father again.
The mystery also brings him and Chu Ying together, and we get to see a bit of their history we hadn’t seen yet. We also once again see that Chu Ying’s ambitions and her work situation don’t match.
Yi Yong putting things together for Chu Ying about the motorcyclist’s colleagues is also tied to his character, he was a ‘bully’ at school and understands how these group dynamics work.
I compare this with My Roommate is a Detective, where the cases rarely had anything to do with the main characters and got solved because the detective was brilliant. It was an entertaining show, but it wasn’t very deep with feelings.
When Yi Yong asks the zombie if dying hurt and then goes to his mom for pictures of the accident, those moments were filled with relatable sadness and worry. Tseng Jing Hua, who plays Yi Yong, does an amazing dumb-high-school-guy expression that’s easily recognizable and funny, only to reveal the strong feelings underneath in these crucial moments.
The character design and special effects for the red-thread zombie are great. I can only imagine the red thread has to do with the concept of the red thread of fate, which usually ties lovers together. In this case, it’s holding the terribly broken body together.
The only downside to this episode is no Guang Yan!
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Oh No! Here Comes Trouble is currently available in the US on iQIYI.