A zany time-loop thriller about the unattainability of control & the want of it nevertheless.
My first c-drama was a Bai Jing Ting starrer time loop drama. That gave me such a high that I have been chasing that magic ever since. So imagine my excitement when this new time looping drama with Bai Jing Ting came up on my Netflix feed.
Mobius is a lot of things- a thrilling race against time, a pump-y whodunnit, an array of characters of all shades, an awkward romance, a corny comedy but at its core Mobius is simply a story about control, more specifically the need of humans to be the one in control. The drama uses time as its primary metaphor to drive home its themes of control, ethics and morality and how subjective each of them really are! The writing is nuanced and full of subtext while playing with the familiar beats of a “race against time” story simultaneously.
The drama distinguishes itself from others in the genre of time loops (not that there are many to begin with) by being structured in a set of five loops. This finiteness adds a sense of urgency along with the staple theme of inevitability that this genre runs on.
Bai Jing Ting is agile and clean in the action scenes, while being in absolute control of his craft. The slight romance works as a breather for me, maybe because it is made to be this “awkward in love” trope that I wasn’t expecting. So its a plus for me. What-else is plus is the pace of the drama. It sucks you right into it from the very beginning, though it does falter around the last quarter of drama but not so much as to lose me completely.
The drama also doesn’t explore most of its characters beyond their generic traits and purpose. The cops suffers from this the most. Plus the team dynamic built in one loop carries over to the next when it should not have, given how the cop colleagues don’t have the memories of previous loops. But I digress.
The drama is as predictable in the second half as it was unpredictable in the first! You could see the villains and their motivations way before but the drama lays its tale of morality, of the passion of discovery and the arrogance of it all and lets it all seep through beautifully.
All in all Mobius is this story of the unattainability of absolute control yet the want of it nevertheless, but chooses to tell the story with this zany feel, creating a contrast to its themes, that it all ends up being a deliciously binge-able drama!
Mobius is a lot of things- a thrilling race against time, a pump-y whodunnit, an array of characters of all shades, an awkward romance, a corny comedy but at its core Mobius is simply a story about control, more specifically the need of humans to be the one in control. The drama uses time as its primary metaphor to drive home its themes of control, ethics and morality and how subjective each of them really are! The writing is nuanced and full of subtext while playing with the familiar beats of a “race against time” story simultaneously.
The drama distinguishes itself from others in the genre of time loops (not that there are many to begin with) by being structured in a set of five loops. This finiteness adds a sense of urgency along with the staple theme of inevitability that this genre runs on.
Bai Jing Ting is agile and clean in the action scenes, while being in absolute control of his craft. The slight romance works as a breather for me, maybe because it is made to be this “awkward in love” trope that I wasn’t expecting. So its a plus for me. What-else is plus is the pace of the drama. It sucks you right into it from the very beginning, though it does falter around the last quarter of drama but not so much as to lose me completely.
The drama also doesn’t explore most of its characters beyond their generic traits and purpose. The cops suffers from this the most. Plus the team dynamic built in one loop carries over to the next when it should not have, given how the cop colleagues don’t have the memories of previous loops. But I digress.
The drama is as predictable in the second half as it was unpredictable in the first! You could see the villains and their motivations way before but the drama lays its tale of morality, of the passion of discovery and the arrogance of it all and lets it all seep through beautifully.
All in all Mobius is this story of the unattainability of absolute control yet the want of it nevertheless, but chooses to tell the story with this zany feel, creating a contrast to its themes, that it all ends up being a deliciously binge-able drama!
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