Welcome to my weekly blog post where I review dramas I’ve started, finished, or am in the middle of. I review anything I want, because I’m petty that way.
This week I redid my website and also tanked it for a few days. That was fun.
My only recaps were episode 3-4 of 1000 Years Old. I’m sad to see people online mistake the absurd comedy of this show for something serious. For me, this show is a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek vampire love story with quirky sensibilities and bright colored umbrellas.
A few weeks ago I finished:
The Sign – ลางสังหรณ์ – 2023
Recently aired Thai police-supernatural-BL with 12 episodes.
Two young men in training to become police officers discover connections that might go beyond this life.
Here’s a link to my initial review.
This is a hard one to review because it does so many things so right, but the writing was seriously weak. For me, this was a nearly fatal flaw.
The show had good acting, leads with chemistry, a fantasy-plot-mixed-with-police-thriller, interesting locations and excellent production. It was easy to overlook the messy, uneven writing because what was happening on screen was so interesting and well done. Compared to Pit Babe’s so-sloppy-they’re-funny action scenes, The Sign was exciting.
But one of our male lead’s actions never made sense to me. Particularly in relation to the show’s main villain. The show could have created reasons for his behavior and attitudes, but instead focused on the police thriller aspect. The fantasy backstory and supernatural stuff was fascinating but never got fleshed out enough to make sense. All the different, interesting pieces of the story couldn’t quite come together. This is the definition of the parts being better than the sum of the whole.
I know it’s unfair, but I’ll take the consistently-ridiculous Pit Babe over the disapointing-wasted-potential of The Sign.
But on the other hand, this show deserves the same praise I gave Pit Babe for being unique and different. If you’re someone who likes adventure, action, fantasy and BL, this is the rare chance to get them together. And I know there are people who can overlook weak characters if the actors have chemistry, which they do.
Plus the show is just beautiful at times.
Despite my disappointment, I’m glad I watched this show. It’s the kind of show I probably won’t watch again, but will want to talk about and recommend in the right circumstances.
Unfortunately the other show I’m reviewing also suffered from weak writing:
Intern In My Heart – เด็กฝึกหน้าใส เติมหัวใจนายหญิง – 2024
Recently aired Thai modern romance with 10 episodes.
A young man with painful psychic touching abilities meets the only person he can painlessly touch: his attractive, bad tempered boss.
Here’s a link to my initial review.
The first half was fluffy fun with a silly, all-over-the-place plot. The second half descended into a chaos of disconnected conflict, climaxing in a big “meh”.
It’s the classic writing problem where instead of earlier conflicts and character flaws escalating, random conflict kept popping up. Every drama trope that could showed up: jealousy, office drama, plagiarism, secret keeping, hospital visits, parental-mistreatment-as-love, etc.
It was like the trope version of whack-a-mole. A problem would come up and wham, get knocked back into its hole. Only for another one to pop up.
Writing good, silly fluff isn’t easy. All kinds of ridiculous things that don’t make sense can happen and the show still works, but the characters need to be consistent. We need a stable center in the chaos.
So my biggest problem is that while conflicts were popping up and getting whacked away, the original set-up of a young man with a damaging psychic ability and an older woman with a bad temper got totally lost. Which was disappointing, because I liked that set-up and I liked the actors in the part.
If you’re looking for a hot older woman and hot younger man to go through a lot together and don’t particularly care about anything else, this could work for you. Maybe you love all drama tropes and want to see all of them together. Or you just love seeing characters in the hospital. You do you.
Otherwise, I’d skip it.
