Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
This week I recapped episodes 3 and 4 of Our Dining Table and watched them make bento and curry.
This week I started:
Parallel World – 西出玉门 – 2023
A currently airing Chinese Supernatural Adventure Mystery drama, I’ve watched 14 of 38 episodes.
A woman who can’t remember her past teams up with a man with a tragic past to explore the desert for answers about both their pasts.
This show is pretty awesome so far. We start slow, meeting our FL as she hangs from a tree in the desert (and China helpfully warns us against such actions). Liu Xi, played by Ni Ni, is one scrappy, tough lady. She can fight anyone and do any odd job and has an amusing, unstable moral compass. Despite the fact that she seems like she’d need no one’s help, she wants our ML to guide her into the desert.
He’s Chang Dong, played by Bai Yu, and he’s very, very, very sad about being the sole survivor of a desert storm that took out his fiance and a bunch of friends. Since he was the guide on that trip there’s a whole extra layer of guilt and public condemnation. He’s also into shadow puppets.
So far their relationship has been teammates (reluctantly on his part) to a growing understanding and respect. Despite the fact that he won’t lighten up and she’s annoying in the way only a hot lady in a crop top can get away with, they have each other’s backs. This makes their relationship feel more real and solid than one based on random skinship.
Their dynamic reminds me somewhat of Gang Tae and Moon Young in It’s Okay to Not Be Okay.
But the show has more than characters going for it. The first quarter of the show takes place on the Silk Road and specifically with Yumen Pass. As I watch I’ve been looking up names and places that get mentioned and learning more about Chinese history. Even if you aren’t that interested in Chinese history, the location is visually interesting and different.
But as the title of this show promises, there’s a lot more to this show than exploring China’s past and deserts. The section I’m in has a real Alice in Wonderland feeling, and I’m loving it.
