BLLoversLink

This is an ambitious GMM series.

I’m all in for it to be successful, as anything to do with politics and military history is my bag, but I’m stumped they gave this significant project to someone with so few accolades as a Director in general and specifically to a production team with no BL success record whatsoever. Let’s see what they can pull off.

Will this be another GMM BL where the actors are expected to compensate for an otherwise weak creative effort and then take the blame when they inevitable fail to do the impossible? I hope not. This strategy is what GMM has largely been trading on for the last two or three years with very little success - yet they persist.

I don’t think we can discount that they’re trying to make another hit as big as To Sir With Love but I think they’re going need much more than aesthetics and expensive color techniques. TSWL has an accomplished Director and a technically strong, culturally confident, very senior writing team that really immersed themselves in every second of the translation of this story to our screens as their critical and commercial success attests. However, not even that entire creative team along with the two superstar actors who helmed the TSWL production have been able to replicate that level of success in a BL with a greatly reduced-in-quality script. This matters.

The Episode
Thailand has a very interesting and complicated history with the Imperial nations and though it was not directly colonised by Europeans it still had a tense relationship with them for hundreds of years. Thailand also had relations of domination with some of its neighbours and had its own imperial ambitions in the region so I’m keen to see how this plays out in the story. This should provide much of the foundational dramatic tension for the story, but somehow so far, it has not put in an appearance.

It’s good that they try to depict some of the cultural norms and past-times from that period which is pretty cool even if they’re mostly limited to extensive scenes of fighting arts. I hope they will expand on this area in due course besides the few seconds of a music theatre show.

It was very nice to see some familiar props, sceneries and even sets from TSWL and I think that’s a useful welcoming nod to a community that already has positive associations with these symbols.

When Rati describes himself as a Frenchman and Thee describes a few of Rati’s actions and instincts as Thai, I’m not sure where the politics of the narrative will take this but it suggests a core struggle for Rati’s character will be his own political consciousness as an indigenous person and this development is surely going to make huge impact on the choices he will undoubtedly have to make. Looking forward to this if so.

I’m hoping that they don’t do the usual rushed relationship that has become a hallmark of GMM TV flops because in the very first section of the first episode they seem to already be into each other which is not a promising start given a context that precludes it, but perhaps they have too few episodes to accommodate the depth and breadth of the original story? Let’s find out.

A few things that gave me pause:

Someone who looks like a stranger to the locals and is even associated with a European embassy at a time when France has violently colonised pretty much all of the immediate surrounding countries, is going to be beset by spies monitoring his every move and you can triple that during wartime. So Rati’s immediate bonding with a Thai stranger without a sense of his own security is very odd but again, maybe they have to rush it because they haven’t got enough episodes; I don’t quite understand, and the flashbacks don’t make this more compelling. A French-speaking operative would be regarded as a hostile, not a friendly, force in occupied Indochina and certainly with good reason during WW1.

These contextual oversights might help explain the forced intimacy which logically seems much too much too soon in the way it is introduced before the end of the 1/4 parts. This is usually the sign of a writing team that is not confident in its ability to maintain dramatic tension so they substitute for it with sexual tension instead - once more not great. The dramatic tension heightens all the other sources of tension, even some of the jokes might’ve landed if a modicum of dramatic tension could’ve been generated. Urgent sounding music scores do not make up for this lack.

As a brand new member of a diplomatic corps in a new assignment he/sh would be drilled to be on maximum guard. Even if attracted to someone sexually you have to regard them as almost an enemy, and losing a necklace doesn’t constitute such an extenuating circumstance that would make one abandon precautions that could literally save one’s life. If Thee’s trying to seduce Rati sexually, we haven’t been given even subtext that he is aware of Rati’s sexuality as a factor that could help him and not endanger him and his mission, so I feel Thee needed to have put in a bit more work in order to persuade Rati to let down his guard so prematurely, but maybe there’s more that we don’t know yet.

Let’s see what unfolds with episode 2.