Nolan Peale

Episode 5
Liked it, except I wish they would have just let Joyce be Ho Woo’s noona and not the resurrected presumed dead lover of Seung Jo. I really didn’t like that the only way the writers could think of to get her to talk to SJ was to have him drag her by the wrist out of the meeting. And if I’m Joyce, I’m firing whatever staff from HK I brought with me who stood by and let me be manhandled like that without a peep. That may looked dramatic, but it was dumb.

I figured that Haebit was killed for its IP. Sales Leaseback for the win.

So the next battle is going to be Audit vs Advisory. VP A looked stunning in white, but she was never going to win that particular battle. Heck, I’m surprised Jiseng Bank would have agreed.

I’m the real world, Ho Woo wouldn’t have been giving that presentation. Joyce’s criticism of that were correct. Man, they drunk some kool ad about Scam Tech’s prospects. Yeah, if only a mere 10% of houses were constructed using 3-d printing, they’d be in good shape. Lol. Is that all. Easy peasy. Im sure they’ll go from 0% of the market to 10% next week. Because if there’s one thing people like when building their house,es, it’s unproven construction materials.

Just started watching. I've worked at a large accounting firm for 25 years and I can see why its confusing to people who haven't worked for one. The premise isn't really accurate in that there is no way a major firm would hire a high school graduate for service delivery, and at least in the US, you can't sit for the CPA exam without a BA. But I won't quibble about that. I found the treatment that Ho Woo received very accurate. Its exactly what would happen to a first year without a degree. I thought they did a good job spelling out the various role of accountancy teams and the conflict between the profession's public mission and the profit motive.

I also had to laugh when he was corrected on how to refer to his colleague. Although over the course of the past 25 years, US firms have become less formal, that is not the case globally. When I started, every partner was a Mr. or Ms., and if you were close enough to one to get permission to use their first names, you did not refer to them by their first names when others were around. The Catty office chatter is realistic. So is laying out your photo id in order to make copies since those copies are charged to the client. Or were (again, in the US we don't do that so much any longer, but when I started one needed two different codes to make a copy. What I did find inaccurate was the fact that the managers and senior managers left their IDs out for him to use. He's so lucky. When I was a junior, they always just handed me a stack of papers and told me to copy it without providing me the numbers).

The catty office chatter trying to knock down someone who might be promoted is fairly constant. Referring to your audit accounts by code name isn't really a practice in the US. That's deal advisory and a transaction specific practice. However, a team member should only discuss client work with another team member. And never should it be mentioned whose tax work you are doing and what deal you are working on.

In the US at least, the kind of cross-sell that the vice president engaged in with the media company is forbidden and has been for the past 20 years. Unless he was talking about additional work from due diligence to prepare for the transaction, actual deal work like they described would be against the rules to perform for a public audit client. I'm giving that a pass as rules and regulations vary by country, and of course, the reason they showed that is to demonstrate that the Vice President is not an ethical accountant. He's the bad guy, so having him do something shady is fine.

I did like season 1, although it was mainly for Shin and Asuka. I like my romantic leads daring, forward, optimistic and resilient and they have those qualities in sufficient quantities. Their love interests, though? Might as well have gotten jobs as beige office wallpaper. I'm fine with the first episode starting where we left off, but if episode 2 doesn't leave that status quo, I'm going to be disappointed. The issue for Minato and Shin should be revolving around making their relationship public. But I fear the powers that be have decided it should be an drawn out "will they or won't they have sex?" As for Asuka and Sakuma, I'm just hoping that Asuka gets to open a pet store specializing in tropical fish or gets into college and gets a good civil servant job in the Japanese Department of Fisheries. That and he soon realizes that he's far too buoyant of a personality to date an emotional dead weight like Sakuma and finds someone who'll be chatty with him. If that doesn't happen, I'll feel rather sorry for him being 18 and already in a rut without any way up and out of it. I know its foolish, though, since for some reason, Japanese fujoshi either like sexual beasts or neutered gay men and this has all the hallmarks of the latter.

Giving it a chance, though. Its only episode 1. I just hope the characters hate their status quo as much as I do and they get knocked out of it quickly.

So apparently inmates in prison in some unnamed foreign country and inmates in mental hospitals in Thailand wear the same uniform. Hmmm. Anyway, my latest theory is that Sin and Sun are a couple, Host had something to do with Sun's imprisonment, and Sin has been faking his condition. He actually can walk and say more than "Zo needs help with his homework." He's just been biding his time and now that Sun is out of prison, he's breaking out of the home, killing Sun's mom, and sneaking back in as an alibi. Gun never ran down Sin...Suzy had host do that to get Gun that role. Sun knew the truth, so Suzy had him tossed in jail.

Something like that. Because honestly, no one really has any clear motive for killing her. The disputes they had with her don't rise to the level of murder.

Yeah. It would probably help if we knew a little more about Gun and why he wants to have a little brother. That's really how I see their relationship. Like just make Gun an orphan or something so that the idea of having a simp like Pitch in his life makes sense. I liked it better when I thought he might want to fuck Pitch just to screw over Suzy and her rules and didn't have any other feelings for him. But sadly, he's just a softie.

Now all that said, you can kind of tell that this company is in Thailand, because the CEO of a company conspired with his brother to release an video to discredit his son as successor which had a huge financial impact in the market place. He's taking actions knowingly that would depress the company's shares for strictly personal reasons and give him a reason to fire his son's lover. And no one seems to bat an eye about that!

Jian group is a public company, though. Now, this particular account is probably immaterial to its P&L, but Digital Marketing is reporting stellar results that aren't true. If the financials are released with a statement about how record profits are coming out of the Digital Marketing group, well, that's going to be a problem. This new technique they have to boost sales by creating such compelling stories that influencers jump on board and forgo their compensation isn't actually viable if it depends on having a wealthy manager shoveling them money on the side and not reporting those expenses. The internal controller as well as internal audit at the Jian group would like to have a word with Mr. Jeng about some unusual expenses that group is incurring and not reporting. General counsel is also a bit concerned that someone seems to be signing contracts with influencers to work on Jian accounts without submitting records of those contracts for review.

Episode 11

The Good: Well, as far as episode 11 breakups go, this one made sense. It sucks to be the Digital Marketing department, who are soon hitting the unemployment office, but the boss was actually making decisions based on personal desires, and the pressure of working for the company while having a romantic relationship with the boss became too much for Pat.

I do think it accurately portrays how Junior/Senior relationships can unfold in a modern workplace. It's understandable that Jeng would try to have everything go his way, even though it's clear that it won't and can't unless we stray into la la land. The breakup is a result of a character flaw that had been established earlier. Since most Thai BLs tend to introduce new flaws late in the story when they need them, I'll give this a pass. On a scale of 0 to 10, I'd give the breakup a 7.5.

The Meh: All of this should have happened in episode 8. Time and time again, Thai BLs suffer from pacing problems that could easily be avoided. It's evident that this was written by a youngish millennial. It's videogame storytelling at its worst. The "Big Boss" appears early on and then disappears for 11 episodes until the final level. There has been no indication that all these meaningless side quests were preparing the characters to face the main antagonist, so naturally, he defeats them easily. The end. Back to level one. Next time, get better loot.

The Bad: Usually, when I write recaps, I tend to stop at "the Meh" as I'm an optimist. But for crying out loud, who wrote this thing? The first few episodes were fine, but then the story meandered with dinner dates, beach walks, pregnancies, shopping trips, and whatnot, to the point where none of the characters involved in the final showdown were well defined. Jaab is suddenly revealing Jeng's backstory with his father in episode 11... backstory! There's little emotional weight to "saving the Digital Marketing Department" because the main characters seem miserable working there. Pat would be better off in a less stressful job that doesn't make him cry. Moreover, since we've been out of the office for 6 weeks, we no longer care if any of the side characters get to keep their jobs. Do Jeng and Pat actually want to achieve their career goals? Does Pat want to be manager? Does Jeng want to succeed his father as the chairman of the company? Does his father want him to? Did Jeng come back to Digital Marketing to restore his family relationship and that's now at stake? Who knows? All of this is thrown at us in half an hour when it should have been established gradually throughout the series.

IDK. Its an issue because the project turned out to be overbudget once the secret payments were factored in, and if it weren't the son of the president involved, it would be considered fraud. And because Jeng went about it in such a way that was easily discovered by his father, the project was actually a disaster. They would have been better off failing honestly than succeeding dishonestly. I'd be very pissed if I were Pat.

I have to agree though, stating the "Let's break up" 3 times was a little weird. Like maybe Pat had converted to Islam at some point was trying to get out a triple talaq.

Yeah. I get the sense that eps 8-9 were written by a different person. Someone with an ideological point to make. Religious Soul Mate Zealot got ahold of the script and decided to put her thumb on the scale for Patts as much as possible because the idea that Tai might decide not to choose his soulmate is a heresy and that we might actually want him to choose rather than be forced into things by unnamed forces of destiny is a thought put in our minds by the evil Satan himself. We could have a legitimate love triangle, you know. Like where Tai needs to choose between Patts and Lomfon, but that would involve making Patts less than perfect in every way for Tai. For believers in the Cult of the Soul Mate, triangles are blasphemy and we need to go into act IV of this thing with as many options closed off as possible.

Honestly, given how crappy Thai series can be sometimes, it'll probably turn out that she did just die from accidentally eating a raspberry and this whole thing will have been a waste. Everyone will be ruined in the police report laying out what their motives were, though.

Honestly I think what he got was a "so do you like making money, or being broke. You know where to insert that penis if you don't wish to be broke" talk from Miss Suzie and that was enough to change his mind. Same with the little chat with Gun. "Oh, its good to be sorry. You wouldn't be famous if I hadn't covered this up. So which do you prefer?"

Probably my least favorite episode. They just really want to drag out this trip to the mountains as long as possible, don't they? I guess they were worried that we might get excited to see the consequences of that big reveal at the end of episode 8 and lest we get too excited to see what Lomfon's reaction is going to be, we end up with 20 minutes of Nara pathetically apologizing twice! Because if there's one character who we really really needed to see more of, it was Nara. Oh, and any hope that there would be a meaningful conflict after it was revealed that soul mates aren't exclusive, where characters might have to re-evaluate what they believe and understand about themselves, is kind of dashed when they then spent another 20 minutes giving us more soulmate cliches. Like maybe they were worried that we had forgotten that Patts and Tai were soulmates for 5 minutes so they needed to underscore, bold, italicize and put it in all caps that by giving us (in a late episode!) more proof in the form of a "missed connection from years ago." Plus, we didn't even get to see Duer. LOL.

Looks like things will get on track again next week, but I wish they would have just skipped this episode and jumped right into the conflict that's coming.

Either that or Lomfom has been hiding his illness and learned to read lips to get by. Hopefully they'll have some explanation for it. Although its a Thai story, so I'm not going to be surprised if they are just extremely sloppy with continuity and world-building consistency.

I'm not even certain they were 17. Ren was giving off jailbait vibes in that encounter.

The chicken looked tasty.

I liked it, although it probably would have been helpful earlier on to have Pat say something indicating that he didn't have an inkling that Jeng might be gay. I had to pause and reflect on why I found his reaction so weird. If this weren't a BL and we didn't know it was a BL, would we think that Jeng might be interested in men? Probably. Back when Pat was crushing hard on Jeng before he knew he was his boss, he probably should have mentioned to Ae in one of his rants that "its too bad, he's probably straight" or something like that. My guess is that the novel is written in the first person from Pat's perspective and readers would understand better why he was shocked.

My other "Meh" moment is ruining the confession in the bar by immediately following it with that long, drawn out vomit session in the bathroom. Thai BL does that kind of thing all the time, and its annoying. Yeah, it made sense I guess because Pat had eaten 2-3 full meals + boba tea + a lot of wine then mixed up with mixed drinks. I would be on the floor myself at that point. But still, I wish Thai BL would from time to time let us savor the good feels without swinging us immediately into something repulsive.

Anyway, I loved the first "date" in the restaurant. Jeng going into micromanaging mode to demand changes to the restaurant to better set the mood was very much something he would do. I like how the restaurant just happened to have extra flowers laying around when he demanded them. I'd try to pull this off the next time I was on a date with my partner, but it probably wouldn't work for me since the chairs at McDonald's are usually bolted to the floor.

I also had a chuckle when Jaab asked the bartender to make it strong as possible. Like dude, then don't order it on the rocks. And what exactly are you expecting the bartender to do to make straight alcohol stronger than it is? Send it back to the distillery?

Yeah. I the BL that So and Pitch are in looks very dramatic. I'm glad that Pitch didn't write it, since the BL in his dream was pretty cheesy - I mean, Gun doesn't seem like the type of romantic lead who in real life will kiss in the rain. It would mess up his hair. Or ask too much about your feelings. Or call you p. LOL.

He is apparently the type of romantic lead who'll bring you a caramel macchiato for some reason. I'm with So, though. There's enough sugar in macciato to begin with, so no need to add extra.

Anyway, I'm going to just give this another week. There's a lot of tension building, but something needs to give. We know that Mz. Suz. is allergic to nuts, so when is she going to do something that will make someone really need to poison her? What's up with Host? If some roles require Wayu to "grab genitalia just for excitement, but not too stress," does he also have roles that require him to tug them like there's no tomorrow? The questions, the questions....

Given their rowing skills, it would probably take them 12 episodes just to get back to shore to sign their contract.