superborb

tl;dr I enjoyed the characters and acting; the plot is a complete mess. Some interesting thoughts on unreliable narrators and perception that don't go far enough.

The premise: Zhong Meibao shockingly dies in her apt in Horizon Tower. Several suspects emerge, all of whom were in love (to varying degrees of platonic/romantic) with her. Although the framing device is a police procedural, it really is a set of eight mini stories, each two episodes long, from the point of view of an unreliable narrator on overlapping events.

Spoilers ahead!

I especially enjoyed the earlier episodes where you keep seeing the same events, getting more information each time, learning how seemingly unreliable the narrators are. At the beginning, I thought there was a lot of social commentary on how Meibao was kind of a blank slate that men would try and project their desires on. I also did like the relationships between characters -- the theme of found family especially, and how far people would go to protect their important people. I also found the acting to be top notch; some extremely good and emotional acting in here!

I felt that the main problems were that it tried to tie itself too seriously to the police procedural framing device, and dropped all the unreliable narrator themes that were so good in the beginning. It's severely let down in the second half by massive plot holes. The interesting tidbits and scenes from the earlier episodes are just... retconned as needed. The setup with Lin Dasen was so fascinating and then just went nowhere. I uh, didn't find the Wu Mingyue ~metaphorical novel~ interesting at all, and honestly it could have just been cut for all it did to move the plot forward or tell us new information. Just, in retrospect, a lot of fluff scenes that didn't drive plot or character development.

It also tried (and imo failed) to tackle large societal issues about poverty and abuse. I actually like that we don't really know what Zhong Jie was really thinking, how good of a mother or how calculating a person she really was. But what it didn't address is the massive resource imbalance between how much effort the police spent to solve the mystery of a middle class woman's death vs a poor woman's death. There are so many plot holes, but the most glaring to me was how plot convenient the police's abilities to investigate a crime were. They just kept... not asking important questions? They couldn't get Yan Yongyuan on any other crimes?

I honestly feel like the story would have been considerably better and tighter if it wasn't in this police procedural frame. The side stories about the police characters were significantly less interesting (and less screentime was devoted to making them interesting), and by adding this requirement to driving the plot, it made everyone seem very stupid.

I guess despite all the complaints, I did still enjoy watching and don't regret it. (My bf disagrees and hated it. The plot holes were too much for him.) I just feel like it could have asked more interesting questions and been significantly tighter as a story.