SceneStealer

Xu Lanxiang begins Against the Current with a fairly modest ambition.

Live.

Forty seven episodes later, this has involved two identities, several households, employment problems, marriage problems, family problems, political problems, pirates, and at least one man discovering that an imperial decree is not, in fact, a substitute for courtship.

Living is complicated.

Fortunately, Against the Current is very good at complications.

Its greatest strength is that the world around Lanxiang never feels like scenery waiting for a heroine.

People work here. Money matters. Reputation has practical consequences.

Marriage can change a woman's entire material existence. Family can protect you until protecting you becomes inconvenient. Servitude determines where you can go, what you can refuse and who gets to decide what happens next.

Even survival has administration.

It takes its time. If watching people live sounds less interesting than waiting for the plot to arrive, forty seven episodes may feel considerably longer than forty seven episodes.

Lanxiang fits this world beautifully.

She's intelligent without developing supernatural competence by episode twelve, resilient without treating compromise as moral failure and proud without becoming allergic to help. Sometimes she wins. Sometimes she gets outplayed. Sometimes the smartest available move is simply surviving long enough to have better options later.

Tan Songyun understands the assignment. Anger gets swallowed. Fear becomes calculation. Grief waits because something more urgent needs doing.

The women around her are equally well observed. Madam Lin, Guihua, Xiuwan, Cuique, Xingtang. Different positions, different resources, different ideas about what can and cannot be endured.

Zhao Xingtang could easily have become a thesis with excellent hairpins. Instead Li Meng gives us someone intelligent, wounded, perceptive, selfish and occasionally appalling.

She remains a person.

Much better.

That's Against the Current at its best. It doesn't ask whether these women are strong. It asks what strength is worth under different circumstances. Sometimes quite a lot. Sometimes very little.

Liu Xueyi's Jinqi is another good example, at least initially.

He arrives intelligent, arrogant, observant, politically capable and just amused enough by most of humanity to be entertaining.

He's also a man accustomed to power, which matters more than the drama sometimes seems willing to admit.

Jinqi can convince himself that deciding for someone is the same thing as protecting them. The imperial decree is the obvious culmination of that.

He's wrong. Lanxiang knows it. Eventually, so does he.

I liked the growth. I was less convinced by how thoroughly the later writing domesticated the man having it.

Early Jinqi feels like somebody produced by his world: soldier, eldest grandson, political animal, a man for whom hierarchy is ordinary and power is something you use. Watching him learn restraint is interesting precisely because restraint doesn't come naturally.

He should change. The problem is that somewhere along the way the writing begins confusing growth with sanding.

By the later stretch, some of those rough edges, along with his politics, ambition and alarming competence, have been polished down enough that I could see the romantic ideal arriving.

I preferred the flawed man.

Liu Xueyi, fortunately, plays both.

The romance is less convincing to me than the relationship.

Romance isn't the drama's primary concern, nor did I need it to be. But secondary doesn't mean dramatically irrelevant.

Jinqi's feelings are easy to follow. Lanxiang's take considerably longer, as they should. Trust accumulates, reliance becomes mutual, and I can believe these are two people who know each other well enough to build a life together.

Whether the drama quite convinced me they needed to, given their history and how they came together, is another question.

But the writers chose that direction. Once they did, the relationship deserved more than a convincing foundation. It deserved the emotional payoff that foundation had been building towards.

The graveyard scene finally brings them somewhere new. Lanxiang understands something about Jinqi she hadn't before, and the possibility of a different relationship between them opens up.

And then the drama starts skipping time.

That's precisely the stretch I wanted it not to skip.

Not because I needed more romance, but because I wanted to see understanding become attraction, and attachment become love. Instead, the drama is much better at showing me why Lanxiang trusts Jinqi than when, or quite how, she falls in love with him.

The performances create warmth, intimacy and platonic familiarity, but that final shift into romantic attraction remains implied rather than written. Two or three carefully chosen scenes might have been enough.

Tan Songyun and Liu Xueyi are skilled enough individually to fabricate the rapport the writing leaves between the lines, and I remained invested anyway.

I'm not entirely sure the writing would have been so fortunate with another pair.

This is also roughly where my problems with the second half begin.

Early Against the Current is comfortable with unpleasant choices. People compromise for understandable reasons. Good intentions produce ugly consequences. Women living under the same restrictions respond to them completely differently.

Later, things become tidier.

Not bad. Just tidier.

Lanxiang's empowerment becomes more explicit, and she gradually becomes a character the script seems determined to prove right. Characters occasionally fail to notice things for exactly as long as the next twist requires. Some promising ideas are introduced with more conviction than they're developed.

The script starts showing its hand.

I preferred when it kept the cards closer.

Visually, though, this world is superb.

Rooms feel inhabited rather than arranged. Clothing communicates status without turning everyone into a fashion editorial. Courtyards, doors and seating arrangements establish power before anybody says a word.

And yes, people have pores.

We remain grateful.

All that care makes it more noticeable when the thinking inside this carefully constructed world feels less rooted in it.

My issue isn't that these characters resist the values of their time. People have always resisted the worlds they were born into, and historical dramas have always used the past to speak to the present. The best ones do.

But if you're going to make me take this social world seriously, and Against the Current very much does, then I also want to feel what growing up inside it has done to these people.

The inherited belief you can't quite discard. The compromise you hate but still make. Knowing something is unjust and knowing you still have to live tomorrow.

The drama can be excellent at this.

And then, especially later, someone arrives at an impressively clean conclusion while all that historical conditioning quietly leaves the room.

Possible? Certainly. As interesting? Not even close.

The politics never quite reach the same level either. Give this drama a household and it knows exactly who speaks, who stays silent, who pays, who inherits, who gets protected and who becomes expendable.

Give it the imperial court and things get considerably fuzzier.

Bigger stakes. Less interesting power.

The cast rarely has the same problem.

There isn't really a weak performance worth complaining about. Tan Songyun carries Lanxiang without making restraint monotonous. Liu Xueyi gives Jinqi enough presence that his later narrowing feels like a writing decision rather than a performance problem. Li Meng is a particular standout in an excellent supporting cast, and the ensemble gives the whole thing the feeling that everyone had a life before the camera arrived.

The cinematography and direction are equally assured.

Even the music mostly knows when to shut up.

Which leaves me with a drama I liked enough to be irritated by.

There are worse problems.

Because underneath the uneven politics, compressed stretches and occasional urge to make its ideas cleaner than its people, Against the Current remains unusually interested in something costume dramas often rush past:

the difficult business of building a life.

Lanxiang begins with one instruction.

Live.

At first, that means surviving because there is no other option.

Work gives her something. Money gives her something. Other people give her something. Love eventually does too.

None makes her completely free.

Together, they give her room.

"Live" begins as an instruction given to a young woman with almost nothing left.

The drama ends only after she has done exactly that.

Not merely survived.

Lived.