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Jinna: “Anda, get some proper rest if you’re sleepy. Don’t sleep in the car.”

In mystery shows, “found dead in the car” is almost never the whole story. The car is just where it happens.

Carbon monoxide in a closed car is the classic cover. It looks like Anda dozed off and never woke up. That’s the version everyone would accept. Writers plant a line like Jinna’s when that is the story they want you to believe.

So when he says it, it sounds like ordinary worry. I’m not sure that’s all it is.

Lin Zai isn't naive. He knows He Yao's brother was bitten. A scientist with a reason that personal is worth betting on, and he bet right.

He just doesn't know how right. The brother isn't taken. He's being kept.

The part I can't defend is that Lin Zai did it without telling A-Lie.

Big Jane: Don't be too emotional.

Lil Jane: Ditto

Ha. I know which 7 you mean.🤣

Thanks, I've got both on my list.

Maybe it is my own attachment to Hong Kong, but this BL carries a kind of nostalgia for me. It is set in the present, yet it often feels like it comes from somewhere earlier.

Maybe it is the Hong Kong way of speaking, with English folded into it. Not just Cantonese, but something slightly different in rhythm and texture. In Episode 9, I could clearly hear “care.” Dropped into the middle of a Cantonese line, the way people actually talk.

This is the first BL I have watched in Hong Kong Cantonese. That alone gives it a certain meaning for me.

Ash will stay with me for a long time.

Watching the first special episode, I kept thinking about a much older Chinese way of entering another world.

In Chapter 5 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Jia Baoyu grows sleepy during a family gathering and lies down in Qin Keqing’s room. He falls asleep, and the ordinary world gives way to 太虛幻境, Taixu Huanjing.

There, he sees the registers of the women around him and hears songs that reveal their fates long before he can understand what any of it means.

And then there is that word.

境.

太虛幻境. 春山境.

A realm. A state. A world with its own boundary, something you cross into.

So when 寒陽風起春山境 has Changyang enter another reality through that cup of tea, only to find himself inside a moment from Qinglang’s past that he was never meant to witness, the association feels hard to ignore.

Not the same device. Not necessarily a direct reference.

By the time I got to the end of the finale, it finally hit me why a few of the actors in Season 2 looked so familiar. Like, really familiar. I looked them up and found out they were all star cameos!

The guy playing Fou4Mod 30 years later is singer Timethai. His biggest hit lately is “HIT ME UP.” The music video is so beefy and sexy!!! What a waste that they didn’t make him take his shirt off in the show.

The blonde fangirl who’s a huge Fou4Mod fan is Hannah, a member of 4EVE, one of Thailand’s hottest girl groups right now. The die-hard fan who marries her is Apo from DICE.

Tomo, who plays Baa 30 years later, and Chin, who plays Chian, were both boy band members and singers when they were younger. This cast is packed with stars.

The ending is…such a dream. Especially the part where Fou4Mod announces that he and Chian are actually together.

It’s not that I think fans can’t accept Fou4Mod having a boyfriend. I think what they can’t accept is Fou4Mod lying to them over and over.

When Chian confessed that he was a sasaeng fan, Fou4Mod let it slide. Then he started doing fanservice with Bua to sell tickets. As soon as the fan meeting was over, he announced that Chian really was his boyfriend and that Chian loved him.

There’s a 90% chance people would call him out for using the fan meeting to sell tickets by deceiving his fans. Before the fanservice, Fou4Mod couldn’t even sell half the tickets. The rest sold out because he played up the ship. Most of the people who showed up were fans of Fou4Mod and Bua as a couple, or people who started supporting Fou4Mod again because of the pairing.

And the Fou4Mod-Bua shippers would be devastated. You sell out the fan meeting by playing up the ship, then turn around and slap your fans in the face as soon as it’s over? You’d get dragged hard. BL fans aren’t here for you to use, okay? Your company would sue you into the ground, lol.

But anyway, it’s just a show. I don’t mind the romantic, dreamlike ending. Maybe it’s the director and writers’ hope that fans can accept an idol being honest about who he loves.

The finale is an hour and 23 minutes long. Both main couples and the younger couple get their endings, so it wraps things up pretty neatly. It may not have the first season’s brilliant plot, but at least it gets across what the show wanted to say this season.

Your last point is the one I keep turning over. If James were dying, Ken would bite him. Ken probably knows that about himself, and he has just watched what it did to Chita.

So wanting to die might not only be exhaustion. It might be the one way to make sure he never has to break that promise.

And you are right about James. Even with Ken about to go, he was still looking at Chita. He loves Ken. He came here for his father.

Me too. Not the ending where he finally gets to die. The one where he gets to be tired at night and hungry in the morning.

After two hundred years, that would be the kindest thing the show could give him.

Honestly, I am not sure. I may have missed it.

But if you are right and Chita was the only one who got out, that might explain more than anything else. The boyfriend broke the promise and did not survive it. Chita woke up as the thing he asked not to become, and the one person he could have blamed was already gone.

So the hatred had nowhere specific to land. It went to every Nour instead.

If it's a past-life lover, the veto is even pettier. She's not picking for him. She's clearing the field.🤣

The heart bite does not only turn the living. Praew kills Ji, and Chita brings him back with it. So the bite reaches past death, as long as the love is there.

Which raises a question the show does not answer. If the person is already dead, whose feeling is being tested, and when. Chita bet on something he could not check.

A new Nour is also weak. Ji cannot stand on his own until he has had human blood. Tangme walks in, Ji panics, she fires, and Chita kills her and feeds her to him mouth to mouth. Turning someone is not one action. It has an aftermath, and someone pays for it.

Then Ken explains the thing I had been reading as restraint.

He has bitten people before, but never over the heart. Not because he could not. Because he did not want to make anyone into this.

So the man with cancer got years and stayed human. That was the limit Ken chose, not the limit of what he could do.

And when James corners Chita, Ken shoots James to stop him.

Chita is the only Nour who can kill a Nour. James was about to destroy the one exit Ken has found in two hundred years.

He wanted it more than he wanted James safe. That is the coldest thing this show has done.
He goes further. He offers Chita a deal. Get Ji out of Thailand, live somewhere far from here, and in return Chita ends him.

Ken does not ask for anything in that trade. He arranges other people's survival and prices his own death into it.

James stops him anyway. Then the police open fire on Chita, round after round, faster than he can heal, and Ji steps in front of the bullets.

So healing has a ceiling. Enough damage, fast enough, and a Nour dies like anything else. Tee burned for the same reason.

The flashback is the part I keep going back to.
Chita was human. He loved a Nour. He asked him never to turn him, and the man agreed.

Then another Nour attacked him, bit his neck, and the place caught fire. Chita was burned, pinned under something heavy, his leg broken. His boyfriend chose to break the promise rather than watch him die.

That is where the limp comes from. The injuries happened before he was turned. A Nour body holds. It does not undo.

He has been walking around inside that night ever since.

And James asked Ken not to bite him, and Ken said he would not, and this is the story sitting underneath that agreement. Someone made that promise before. It held until the moment it cost too much.

Chita says his ability comes from hatred. He hates Nour, so he can kill them.

Including whoever did this to him. Including himself.

Then in Episode 8 he turned Ji, which is the exact thing that was done to him.

Which leaves one question for the last episode. Where is the boyfriend now.

The hatred came from somewhere.

I've just finished watching episodes 8 and 9.

I keep thinking about what death means to someone who cannot reach it.

For most people death is the limit that makes everything else legible. You have a certain amount of time, so some things matter more than others. Take the limit away and the arithmetic stops working. Nothing costs anything. Nothing is urgent. That is not freedom. It is just being unpriced.

Ken has been trying to end it since the nineteenth century. He kept count. Two hundred years of a man doing the same thing and writing down the number.

But here is what I did not understand until now. He is not trying to escape pain. He thinks mortality is the correct condition, and he has been removed from it.

That is why he has never made another one of these. He has bitten people. He has given them time. He has never taken the ending away from anyone, because he does not think it is his to take, and because he knows what is left when it is gone.

So when he tells James he will not bite him, he is not refusing closeness. He is refusing to do to James what was done to him.

There is a harder version underneath. If death is what gives a life its shape, then loving someone who can die is the only kind of love that means anything. Ken cannot offer that. Whatever he gives James, he cannot give him a shared ending.

He can only outlast him.

Someone once asked Ken to live happily. He has spent every year since doing the opposite. I do not think that is ingratitude. I think he heard the wish, understood it was written for a person with an ending, and knew it was not addressed to him.

[spoiler]

That place in Episode 5 where Third and Wan cycle past all those wind turbines?

That’s Khao Yai Thiang Wind Farm, beside Lam Takhong Reservoir. You can rent bicycles there too.

So if you’re ever around Khao Yai, you can stop by and try the Wan and Third bicycle date for yourself.

Finale spoilers. GagaOOLala hasn’t released the last episode yet, so I haven’t seen the official English subtitles for this scene.

By the finale, Omaeda has been rejected by Takoi and turned his jealousy toward Shiono. He kidnaps Takoi and beats him badly. Shiono is the one who finds and saves him.

Later, on the rooftop, Shiono looks at Takoi and says:

ボロボロじゃないですか。
Boroboro janai desu ka.

Boroboro can mean worn out, battered, falling apart. Here, Takoi is literally standing there bruised and beaten.

But if you know Kamen Rider, boroboro may ring another bell.

In Kamen Rider Blade, Tachibana has the famous line:

俺の体はボロボロだ。
Ore no karada wa boroboro da.
“My body is falling apart.”

The line became a meme among Kamen Rider fans.

And now look at who is standing on this rooftop.

Takoi is played by Shu Watanabe, Hino Eiji from Kamen Rider OOO. Shiono is played by Riu Saito, Jo Akuse / Bun Black from Bakuage Sentai Boonboomger.

Saito has even said he watched OOO because Watanabe was an older actor from Akita, their shared home prefecture.

So here we have a Super Sentai actor looking at an actual Kamen Rider, completely boroboro, and saying:

ボロボロじゃないですか。

I have no idea if it was intentional.

The tokusatsu part of my brain noticed anyway.

Match Point Finale

Sun and Bay, sitting down to figure out when they’ll video call.

That’s the part of the finale I keep thinking about. The show could have made the distance the tragedy. It doesn’t.

Sun tells Bay that the right relationship should help you move forward, not make you hold yourself back.

Then they get practical.

They set rules. They pick times to call. They agree that if something feels off, they say it. They don’t let it sit.

And they’re still in high school.

The song Khobfa and Rin listen to together is Khu Chiwit, or “Life Partner,” the hit by COCKTAIL. Its official video is nearing 300 million views. GMMTV artists sing it at concerts all the time, and I already love this song, so I was happy the moment it started.

The first half is a strange music competition. Khobfa and Rin name their band Horizon because Khobfa’s name, ขอบฟ้า, literally means “edge of the sky.”

Somehow, they make it into the top five. The organizers say that writing an original song will earn them extra points, and Khobfa’s band is the only one that decides to try.

Khobfa asks his bandmates about their romantic experience. Jinnie’s love interest is AI. Ohm’s is a phone scammer. Danthai’s is… the auntie at the bento shop who calls him handsome.

Netflix’s subtitles leave out the setup. Danthai starts with, “Don’t discriminate against age-gap love, okay!”

Thanks. Worth watching on its own, though it's less action than two men stuck in rooms not able to say who they are.

Right. Nine has been doing the nice-guy voice so long he can't hear how it sounds next to someone who isn't doing one.

Behind the door, Nine is talking. Not the voice from the interviews. Wan has had a camera on this man for years and has never heard him sound like this.

Third gets close and Wan doesn’t step back. Nine never looks. Third does.

Wan stays at the door longer than he needs to.