Psychological Masterpiece - Hugely Misunderstood
The first season of Under the Skin was the literal first ever Chinese drama I ever watched. This was the beginning of my full departure from terrible, stale, morally bankrupt western entertainment, so Under the Skin was more than a mere breath of fresh air, it was water in the desert, a fireplace in winter, and so on. I know a lot of people watched Season 1 mainly for the bromance between Shen Yi and Du Cheng, and that was definitely a very good and wholesome friendship that served as the story axis of the whole season, but it wasn’t the reason I was watching. In a way season one was like Shen Yi’s origin story. It was also Du Cheng overcoming his own trauma and sense of failure and becoming a genuinely excellent leader for his little team.
Shen Yi is an excellent example of how a character can be deeply complex without being morally ambiguous. In Season 2, Shen Yi, having established himself as a committed, talented resource in the police’s fight against crime, had to undergo his next trial. He always struck me as innocent, even naive, but innately brilliant. His brilliance didn’t come from experience, it was his sharp, attentive mind. He could dissect a person’s character, but because he didn’t have much experience dealing with actual people, these astute observations and accurate, seemingly magical deductions, came from a well of knowledge he himself didn’t fully grasp. This is especially shown in the fact that he is very frequently the guy on the other side of the glass listening and watching, not actually talking to the criminal. Sometimes he does, but usually not. In this season this fact is underscored repeatedly when Shen Yi seems to almost fantastically arrive at crucial facts via his artistic process. The knowledge he put on the canvas came from somewhere but he didn’t understand where. So it seemed like magic to the viewer. A clever, disorienting detail.
Throughout season one, up to the beginning of season two, his efforts had been met with success after success. He himself doesn’t even question his success. As far as he’s concerned, the model works. However, when he encounters his first failure, his first catastrophic oversight and a little girl is murdered, that innate brilliance is suddenly shrouded in darkness. Not darkness in the sense of evil, but in the sense of uncertainty. Like all brilliant minds, he begins to question the futility of the fight against evil. In the briefly excellent British drama Ripper Street the main character, a Victorian investigator who had been demoted after he had failed to catch Jack the Ripper, experiences a similar crisis throughout one of the seasons. In one memorable scene he recalls a conversation he had with a philosopher about entropy. This conversation had troubled him ever since. If, despite all our efforts to maintain order and peace, everything is naturally decaying into chaos, what is the point of fighting it? The detective’s friend urgently reminded him that they keep fighting it because if they don’t, chaos wins. But, the detective argued, on a long enough timeline, chaos always wins.
Later, the detective was sharing this same line of worry with a woman he had met, an orphan-keeper in a poor corner of his district whose work seemed equally futile. Her response was immediate and unqualified: “He who saves one person, saves the world entire.”
Du Cheng’s attitude was identical to the orphan-keeper’s. Their job as police was not to save the whole world and erase crime entirely. Their job was to save the person who needs saving right now, stop the criminal who needs to be stopped right now. And then the next person. And then the next person. That’s the job. And it’s important, but it’s also thankless and exhausting and fills you with despair. When one little girl slips through your fingers, every life you’ve ever saved suddenly seems meaningless. Du Cheng, as a character, didn’t really need to develop in this season. His role, narratively speaking, was to serve as the anchor or lighthouse for Shen Yi who was enduring the stormiest seas he had ever known. Tan Jian Ci’s acting as Shen Yi was incredible, here. Always I got the heartbreaking sense from him that he was barely hanging on, that he was clinging to hope by his fingernails, but that he had entirely lost the sense that what he was doing was making any difference. Even when victories renewed his resolve, still you got the sense that he had no light or map in his fight against entropy and that without it, this job would break him and he would become a hollowed out shell running through the motions with a pessimistic sense of hopelessness. “If,” he would often say at the end of a case, “we could have prevented…” And then Du Cheng would silence him, “That is NOT our job.” Pause, then a forced smile and: “I know.”
The writing in this season was difficult and sophisticated. One of the things I admired about the first season was the soft, delicate touch with which they handled very complex moral issues. And, more importantly, that the writers’ sense of right and wrong and morality in general was very sound and was conveyed very well but without seeming preachy, as Chinese cop dramas can sometimes be.
But if the first season went under the skin, this season got into the viscera and the marrow. Every case dug deeper and deeper into the psychological origins of that something that drives a seemingly ordinary person to actually kill another person. And as each case dug deeper, Shen Yi struggled more and more and Du Cheng watched, keeping his distance. Because he knew that this was a fight Shen Yi had to either win or lose alone.
Every case was fascinating, unexpected, and deeply uncomfortable. In that sense I found this season darker than the first, but in a welcome way. Sometimes I found it hard to reach the end because of that inherently tragic reality that most killers did not start evil. But that a series of bad choices led to that final, horrible one. And that at every turn they could have gone back, they could have stopped. But they didn’t. At the end of the day, after all, the ultimate impetus in criminality is the will of the criminal. And Shen Yi could draw and paint and sculpt until his hands fell off, but he would never be able to control human will. Whether of not he could make his peace with that was the ultimate driving question of the entire season.
I don’t care about music. I don’t care about costumes or set design. I care about story and acting. And both were incredible. I loved the addition of Fang Kai Yi. He served as an ideal way to develop the complexity of Shen Yi’s internal struggle. He was a false lighthouse in Shen Yi’s struggle against entropy and that worried Du Cheng who believed Shen Yi was in danger of shipwreck.
There was never a struggle in Shen Yi between good and evil. The struggle was deeper and more fundamental. The writing came at it obliquely and then, from time to time, forced us to hold prolonged eye contact with it. An absolutely, masterfully well-done character development.
Quite liked the possibilities presented with that ending, too.
My only complaint would be that I didn’t get to see more of Shen Yi’s cat. Loved that little dude.
Shen Yi is an excellent example of how a character can be deeply complex without being morally ambiguous. In Season 2, Shen Yi, having established himself as a committed, talented resource in the police’s fight against crime, had to undergo his next trial. He always struck me as innocent, even naive, but innately brilliant. His brilliance didn’t come from experience, it was his sharp, attentive mind. He could dissect a person’s character, but because he didn’t have much experience dealing with actual people, these astute observations and accurate, seemingly magical deductions, came from a well of knowledge he himself didn’t fully grasp. This is especially shown in the fact that he is very frequently the guy on the other side of the glass listening and watching, not actually talking to the criminal. Sometimes he does, but usually not. In this season this fact is underscored repeatedly when Shen Yi seems to almost fantastically arrive at crucial facts via his artistic process. The knowledge he put on the canvas came from somewhere but he didn’t understand where. So it seemed like magic to the viewer. A clever, disorienting detail.
Throughout season one, up to the beginning of season two, his efforts had been met with success after success. He himself doesn’t even question his success. As far as he’s concerned, the model works. However, when he encounters his first failure, his first catastrophic oversight and a little girl is murdered, that innate brilliance is suddenly shrouded in darkness. Not darkness in the sense of evil, but in the sense of uncertainty. Like all brilliant minds, he begins to question the futility of the fight against evil. In the briefly excellent British drama Ripper Street the main character, a Victorian investigator who had been demoted after he had failed to catch Jack the Ripper, experiences a similar crisis throughout one of the seasons. In one memorable scene he recalls a conversation he had with a philosopher about entropy. This conversation had troubled him ever since. If, despite all our efforts to maintain order and peace, everything is naturally decaying into chaos, what is the point of fighting it? The detective’s friend urgently reminded him that they keep fighting it because if they don’t, chaos wins. But, the detective argued, on a long enough timeline, chaos always wins.
Later, the detective was sharing this same line of worry with a woman he had met, an orphan-keeper in a poor corner of his district whose work seemed equally futile. Her response was immediate and unqualified: “He who saves one person, saves the world entire.”
Du Cheng’s attitude was identical to the orphan-keeper’s. Their job as police was not to save the whole world and erase crime entirely. Their job was to save the person who needs saving right now, stop the criminal who needs to be stopped right now. And then the next person. And then the next person. That’s the job. And it’s important, but it’s also thankless and exhausting and fills you with despair. When one little girl slips through your fingers, every life you’ve ever saved suddenly seems meaningless. Du Cheng, as a character, didn’t really need to develop in this season. His role, narratively speaking, was to serve as the anchor or lighthouse for Shen Yi who was enduring the stormiest seas he had ever known. Tan Jian Ci’s acting as Shen Yi was incredible, here. Always I got the heartbreaking sense from him that he was barely hanging on, that he was clinging to hope by his fingernails, but that he had entirely lost the sense that what he was doing was making any difference. Even when victories renewed his resolve, still you got the sense that he had no light or map in his fight against entropy and that without it, this job would break him and he would become a hollowed out shell running through the motions with a pessimistic sense of hopelessness. “If,” he would often say at the end of a case, “we could have prevented…” And then Du Cheng would silence him, “That is NOT our job.” Pause, then a forced smile and: “I know.”
The writing in this season was difficult and sophisticated. One of the things I admired about the first season was the soft, delicate touch with which they handled very complex moral issues. And, more importantly, that the writers’ sense of right and wrong and morality in general was very sound and was conveyed very well but without seeming preachy, as Chinese cop dramas can sometimes be.
But if the first season went under the skin, this season got into the viscera and the marrow. Every case dug deeper and deeper into the psychological origins of that something that drives a seemingly ordinary person to actually kill another person. And as each case dug deeper, Shen Yi struggled more and more and Du Cheng watched, keeping his distance. Because he knew that this was a fight Shen Yi had to either win or lose alone.
Every case was fascinating, unexpected, and deeply uncomfortable. In that sense I found this season darker than the first, but in a welcome way. Sometimes I found it hard to reach the end because of that inherently tragic reality that most killers did not start evil. But that a series of bad choices led to that final, horrible one. And that at every turn they could have gone back, they could have stopped. But they didn’t. At the end of the day, after all, the ultimate impetus in criminality is the will of the criminal. And Shen Yi could draw and paint and sculpt until his hands fell off, but he would never be able to control human will. Whether of not he could make his peace with that was the ultimate driving question of the entire season.
I don’t care about music. I don’t care about costumes or set design. I care about story and acting. And both were incredible. I loved the addition of Fang Kai Yi. He served as an ideal way to develop the complexity of Shen Yi’s internal struggle. He was a false lighthouse in Shen Yi’s struggle against entropy and that worried Du Cheng who believed Shen Yi was in danger of shipwreck.
There was never a struggle in Shen Yi between good and evil. The struggle was deeper and more fundamental. The writing came at it obliquely and then, from time to time, forced us to hold prolonged eye contact with it. An absolutely, masterfully well-done character development.
Quite liked the possibilities presented with that ending, too.
My only complaint would be that I didn’t get to see more of Shen Yi’s cat. Loved that little dude.
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