If Newyear grows up right, he’s going to look more and more like Lisa’s rumored new man, Blue Pongtiwat.
After episode 2, the ghost is not hard to clock. Full Northern Thai costume. That’s a Rakkhun family ancestor, and she’s not happy. His taste in men is so bad even the ancestors showed up to veto the roster and pick a son-in-law themselves.
After episode 5 I realized this BL is uncomfortably easy to recognize.
Dean performs ease. Moth performs ice. Ten does not believe he is allowed to want something that is not a favor.
I have been all three.
Pun is the one I cannot sort. He can like a person and let him go. Moth with Dean does not seem to wound him. I watch him and cannot tell if that is grace, or another way of not daring to ask.
Episode 8 flashes back to Leuk To and Fei Foon watching Infernal Affairs at home.
Infernal Affairs is a 2002 Hong Kong film starring Tony Leung and Andy Lau. It follows two men with reversed identities: Chan Wing Yan is a police officer undercover in the triads, while Lau Kin Ming is a triad mole inside the police force. Both are trying to find the other. Both want to return to who they were before the lie took over their lives.
Episode 8 puts Fei Foon and Leuk To at a similar distance.
Leuk To knows Sean took Fei Foon, but he cannot simply go in and bring him home. Fei Foon knows someone outside will be looking for him, but Sean has confined him. All he can do is leave fragments of a signal behind.
The hardest part of Infernal Affairs is that its characters are alive, but cannot live as themselves.
Fei Foon is a police officer trapped with the head of a counterfeit operation. Leuk To finally understands the world Fei Foon has been living in, but he can only wait outside it.
In the first extra episode, Feng Qinglang buys a beauty tea from a vendor at the market, someone who says he comes from Langcheng.
That name feels less random than it first appears. The Lang in Langcheng is the same character as the one in Qinglang's name. The show has done this before. Yunhu Mountain, the place Qinglang speaks into his phone's voice input, hides 云胡 from a line in the Book of Songs, 既見君子，云胡不喜, now that I have seen my beloved, how could I not rejoice. An ordinary place name with something buried in it. Langcheng works the same way. It makes the tea feel as if it had been waiting for him.
The vendor tells Qinglang to set up a tea table beneath an old tree. Qinglang does. He sends Changyang off to pick wild mushrooms. In the end, Qinglang never drinks the tea. Changyang does.
Changyang wakes up in the year Qinglang filmed his first project.
On set, he meets Guoge at twenty-three, still working as Qinglang’s assistant. Qinglang is filming. He has been drinking, can barely stay on his feet, and Changyang is the one who helps him away.
Changyang has landed at the exact time of the behind-the-scenes footage from the main story.
We still do not know what that footage actually showed. We only know that Changyang deliberately let it leak because he thought he was protecting Qinglang. Shi Yuhao, furious, argued with Lan-jie over the phone. Lan-jie later died in a car accident.
Changyang has carried that guilt ever since.
So this trip back is not only about Qinglang.
It is also about Changyang returning to something he helped set in motion.
Then Qinglang, drunk and leaning against him, says:
“Shi Yuhao, I like you. Don’t you know that?”
The tea is supposed to be for beauty. Instead, it sends Changyang into the part of Qinglang’s past he never wanted to touch.
And back to the moment when Changyang thought he was protecting someone, but could not save anyone in the end.
But Qinglang did send him out to pick wild mushrooms.
In Yunnan, seeing little people is a familiar joke about wild mushroom poisoning. Changyang has already hallucinated the red carp once. So the episode sets two explanations beside each other: tea from Langcheng, or mushrooms.
One is magic. The other is a very local kind of disaster.
Maybe that is not even the point.
Maybe Changyang is finally being made to see that part of Qinglang’s old wound was left there by him.
In the first extra episode, Feng Qinglang buys a beauty tea from a vendor at the market, someone who says he comes from Langcheng.
That name feels less random than it first appears. The Lang in Langcheng is the same character as the one in Qinglang's name. The show has done this before. Yunhu Mountain, the place Qinglang speaks into his phone's voice input, hides 云胡 from a line in the Book of Songs, 既見君子，云胡不喜, now that I have seen my beloved, how could I not rejoice. An ordinary place name with something buried in it. Langcheng works the same way. It makes the tea feel as if it had been waiting for him.
The vendor tells Qinglang to set up a tea table beneath an old tree. Qinglang does. He sends Changyang off to pick wild mushrooms. In the end, Qinglang never drinks the tea. Changyang does.
Changyang wakes up in the year Qinglang filmed his first project.
On set, he meets Guoge at twenty-three, still working as Qinglang’s assistant. Qinglang is filming. He has been drinking, can barely stay on his feet, and Changyang is the one who helps him away.
Changyang has landed at the exact time of the behind-the-scenes footage from the main story.
We still do not know what that footage actually showed. We only know that Changyang deliberately let it leak because he thought he was protecting Qinglang. Shi Yuhao, furious, argued with Lan-jie over the phone. Lan-jie later died in a car accident.
Changyang has carried that guilt ever since.
So this trip back is not only about Qinglang.
It is also about Changyang returning to something he helped set in motion.
Then Qinglang, drunk and leaning against him, says:
“Shi Yuhao, I like you. Don’t you know that?”
The tea is supposed to be for beauty. Instead, it sends Changyang into the part of Qinglang’s past he never wanted to touch.
And back to the moment when Changyang thought he was protecting someone, but could not save anyone in the end.
But Qinglang did send him out to pick wild mushrooms.
In Yunnan, seeing little people is a familiar joke about wild mushroom poisoning. Changyang has already hallucinated the red carp once. So the episode sets two explanations beside each other: tea from Langcheng, or mushrooms.
One is magic. The other is a very local kind of disaster.
Maybe that is not even the point.
Maybe Changyang is finally being made to see that part of Qinglang’s old wound was left there by him.
“I’m willing to going back to just being friends with Dunk, Pudduang.”
The scene doesn’t tell us how much Bumm knew before she and Dunk got together. So I read it two ways.
If she knew, she’s offering him the choice she didn’t give him before. If she didn’t, she sees he’s hurt and is trying to make it right. Either way, she’s asking him. Late.
It doesn’t mean she never liked Dunk. Telling him on his birthday was still a bad choice.
The triangle is there to push Pod toward Jin and the fake dating. Familiar. I’m more interested in her guilt, and in when she understood what she’d done to him.
What interests me most about NOUR is not immortality. It is what is left after death stops being the threat. Ken can survive fire. A Nour body heals itself. By Episode 6, the show is finally starting to put rules around that. (Ep. 1–6)
But Ken’s real problem is not whether he can die.
It is what still matters when dying is no longer the thing he has to fear.
We hear a lot now about boundaries. Protect your peace. Learn to be alone. Do not make another person responsible for your happiness.
Most of that is probably good advice.
Push it far enough, though, and you get someone who needs very little and can leave before anything costs too much.
Ken is almost there.
It does not look like freedom.
James is not the first person Ken has cared about. Episode 6 changes that. A man dying of cancer once asked Ken to keep living. To live happily. Ken carried those words for decades. (Ep. 6)
So he did care.
He lost someone.
Then he kept going.
Maybe survival is not restoration.
We use those words as if they are close. Heal. Recover. Move on. Become whole again.
But maybe you do not go back.
Ken is still here.
That does not mean nothing stayed with him.
James does not teach him fear for the first time.
He brings it back.
At Tee’s funeral, Praew asks Ken if he has really gone his whole life without a weakness. (Ep. 4)
That line feels different now.
A weakness is not something Ken has never had. It is something he already knows.
A man who does not fear his own death can walk into fire.
A man who knows what it is to lose someone does not have that same freedom.
Vulnerability is one of those words that has become almost automatically positive. Be vulnerable. Let people in. Say what you feel.
Strip the word back, though, and it means something much less comforting.
The ability to be wounded.
Love does not make Ken safer.
It gives the world somewhere to hurt him.
Death is not only the question of whether I die.
It is whether I can live after you do.
The bodies are getting more interesting too. Ken heals. Praew healed, just more slowly. By Episode 6 the bandage was gone. (Ep. 3–6)
So I kept looking at Chita’s leg.
If Nour bodies repair themselves, why had that one not?
Episode 7 answered it by making him the exception to everything else. He is the Nour who can kill Nour. Whatever rules the others follow, he is not inside them.
Which is a strange kind of answer. The question closes and the character opens.
Episode 7 also finishes the bite.
A bite on the neck does not transform anyone. The bite over the heart does, and only if the person being bitten truly loves the one biting them. (Ep. 7)
So immortality is not something you can give someone.
You can only complete it with them.
Praew may have been looking for this.
She had seen what Chita does. She knew what taking Jirat might bring. She did it anyway.
She lost Tee and could not stay. Ken lost someone and has been trying to leave for two hundred years without managing it. Maybe Praew found in one move what Ken has spent two hundred years trying to reach.
And then the show does something I did not expect. James, having just learned the rule, tells Ken that he would want to be bitten to prove his feelings are real, and then asks him not to.
Ken says he will not.
That exchange is the most interesting thing in the episode. James wants the proof and refuses it. Ken agrees almost immediately.
Neither of them explains why.
Maybe he is protecting James. Maybe he is not sure the rule would hold. The bite only works if the love is real, and if it is not, then it is just a hand on a throat.
So why does a man who cannot die need love?
Maybe he does not.
Ken can keep living. Someone once asked him to.
But staying alive is not the same as choosing to have something to lose again.
James is not teaching Ken what love costs.
Ken already knows.
He paid once.
And now that there is finally a way to keep someone, both of them have said no to it.
Episode 7 finally makes the transformation rule real.
Praew turned Tee into a Nour by biting him over the heart. Ken explains the other condition too: the person being bitten has to truly love the Nour biting them. Tee did.
That changes the whole thing for me.
Love is not just what makes immortality painful afterward. It is part of the mechanism itself. One person can do the biting, but the rule still needs something from the other side.
Then the Valentine’s Day timeline falls into place. Praew brings blood for Tee. Chita kidnaps her and hides her in the rear cargo area, the kind that opens directly into the back seat. Tee gets into Chita’s car, calls Praew, and hears her phone ringing inside. Chita grabs him by the throat. The fire starts. Tee dies. Praew gets out alive.
So the bandage is explained.
And Chita is the Nour Ken has been looking for. The one who can kill another Nour.
Something about that fire was not ordinary. Ken walked out of one in 1821. Tee did not walk out of this one.
Then the episode does it again, in front of James.
Chita with his hand on Praew’s throat, burning her alive. The show cuts between that and the same thing happening to Tee. Same grip. Same fire.
So this is more than James recognizing a color. He is there as the killing plays out in front of us. And the older killing is placed beside it so that we understand this is a method, and that it has been used before.
Which makes me look at his father’s death differently too.
What I still cannot tell is how James is seeing this. His established ability is seeing colors and identifying Nour. Either that has grown into something else, or the show is using his moment of understanding to reconstruct the past for us.
That distinction matters.
The other thing I am watching now is Jirat. He works beside Chita every day in a room built around bodies, wounds and causes of death. If he knows nothing, the show will have to make that believable. If he knows something, a lot of his quiet scenes may read differently later.
Praew took Jirat, and Chita took Tee from her first, and now Chita has taken her as well. Whatever she was planning to do with Jirat, she is not there to do it.
And the episode never shows us where he is.
Episode 7 answered a lot.
It also made the central idea stranger.
A Nour can survive fire. A Nour can kill another Nour. A Nour can turn someone else.
The producer leaks his own footage for traffic. The two agency bosses are one bad meeting away from a boxing match. Every other week, somebody is threatening to sue somebody.
And suddenly I understand why DMD and GMMTV keep casting in-house.
They looked at the alternatives and said, you know what, this is fine.
This is a Domundi show, by the way.
They know.
The leads are still on slow burn.
The bosses skipped straight to the custody battle.
CHANGE2561 announced The Crow Club at their annual lineup event.
Four couples. Multiple stories. All in one series.
I was in.
Then the show started and I did the math.
I think eight episodes for one BL or GL couple is about right. Enough time to tell an actual story. Enough room for the romance to build instead of rushing every beat.
The Crow Club has sixteen episodes.
Four couples.
Four episodes each, on paper.
And Episode 1 belongs to the club itself.
So really, not even four.
I’m not wondering which couple I’ll like most yet.
"What really got me was seeing Bay being accepted and looked after by Sun’s family. I keep thinking about…
Boat is the part I keep going back to. Years of lying to keep his father comfortable, and he's the one who ends up feeling like the failure.
The recipe was stolen. Everyone knows. The sons still carry it.
What gets me is that the show never gives them the option of just walking away. The championship is the only way they're allowed to ask.
I keep wondering what these boys would look like written as Western teenagers. Probably slamming a door and deciding it themselves, with the parents left to catch up.
Here it's the other way around. They have to win permission.
Everyone around Takoi has figured it out. They just handle it differently.
Egawa, the female officer, and Hasegawa are fully invested. But when an outsider like Omaeda starts asking questions, they play dumb immediately.
In Episode 9, Takoi comes back from the hot spring trip and shares onsen manju with everyone. They are all chatting and laughing, clearly aware of what is going on between him and Shiono, and equally committed to not saying it out loud.
The Taishou at Torikyu handles it from behind the counter. When the hostility between Omaeda and Shiono starts spreading through nothing but looks, he covers his mouth with his hand.
Except Yagi, the older detective, who still thinks it’s a bromance.
Episode 9 is my favorite so far, because we finally get to know what happened in the past. I do wish some of it had been revealed little by little in the earlier episodes. The story might have been clearer that way.
I’ve also seen people talking about the second couple. I honestly don’t think the show has enough screen time to build that relationship, and I’m fine with them just being a bromance. In real life, the two actors are good friends anyway.
What really got me was seeing Bay being accepted and looked after by Sun’s family. I keep thinking about how many queer teenagers still don’t get that kind of support at home.
I wonder when that gets to become a basic human right.
EP4 is modern dating with better lighting. You spend the night, you buy the condoms, you say dating you was nice, and then someone asks what happens next and suddenly there is a birthday. The job is over. The excuse is dead. You do not walk away and you do not stay. You go where the room is already loud.
Moth does the other half. He preps the apartment. He moves first. Then he arrives at the club with the worst version already written.
“You made me optional after I let you stay.”
Nobody in this episode is confused. They are afraid of a line with no costume on it.
Dean wants closeness until closeness has a time. Moth wants the night until the night has to be named. Ten retires the mission, and Dean looks like a man who just lost his favorite lie.
Share a bed. Deny it to your friend. Miss the appointment.
Saturday is D Day now. Dobby. Danis. Dollar. Dolly. Dawin. Daeng. Dum. And a ghost grandpa named Danai. They didn’t cast a sitcom. They opened a D Club and gave it a timeslot. EP1 was funny. The naming system is a hate crime.
Lin Zai left. Then he turned around and came back.
A-Lie was through the worst of it by then. Fever down. He would have lived either way.
A-Lie was sold by his own parents. In his world people trade each other. Nobody stays. That's the lesson he learned young and it held up for a long time.
So I don't read episode 12 as possession. It reads like confirmation. He doesn't believe words. He had to check with his body.
In the apocalypse everything is scarce. Food, medicine, bullets. Sex is the one thing that costs no supplies. What it costs is your guard.
The show is called an oath. Institutions are gone, language isn't reliable, and the only place left to put a promise is a body.
That gunshot did not pull them apart. It gave weight to everything they had left unsaid.
Why Episode 7 Works
Episode 7 is not good because of how much it fits in. The undercover truth comes out. Leuk To calls off the marriage. Tong Tong moves on the counterfeit template and miscalculates. The police are closing in. Sean takes Fei Foon away. Any one of these could have carried an episode on its own.
But the episode never lays them out like a list of events. Everything lands on the same question: when you finally find the person you lost, and finally understand why he left, can you still trust him?
The Lighter
The lighter Fei Foon lent Leuk To has a snake swallowing its own tail.
An ouroboros.
It brings Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence to mind. Not fate bringing people back together in some soft, romantic way, but the same question returning again and again until you have to answer it differently.
Leuk To was afraid to come out. He wanted the group. He wanted Fei Foon. He thought he could have both, so he went looking for a marriage that would secure his future.
Fei Foon was never given a place in any of it.
He was given the ashtray. Beautiful, but not something you could take outside.
So when Fei Foon disappeared for the second time, it was not the first time Leuk To had lost him. But this time, he understood. He had not lost Fei Foon because Fei Foon had stopped loving him.
He had never made a place for him to stay.
The Shot
Did Fei Foon know the lighter was on him?
The show does not say. But after everyone clears out, Fei Foon comes back with a bottle of water and nothing else. He comes back expecting someone to still be alive.
If he knew, then he bet that a piece of metal would hold. In the end, all he had to trust was a lighter.
But that feels like them.
Leuk To used to keep Fei Foon behind a closed door. This time, Fei Foon puts Leuk To’s life on a chance no one could guarantee. The bullet stops, but that does not mean the damage is undone.
It only means they both know the other has not let go.
A Reunion, Another Loss
The reconciliation is not a reward.
Fei Foon admits the second undercover assignment, and Leuk To finally learns that he did not vanish without a word because he wanted to. He did not choose to leave him again. They pull the deepest misunderstanding open, just a little, and the world outside is already waiting.
Tong Tong miscalculates. The counterfeiters gain ground. Sean takes Fei Foon away, and Fei Foon becomes a hostage.
This time, Leuk To is not losing someone who could be anywhere. He knows which side Fei Foon is on. He knows why he was taken. He knows who took him too.
K-Drama 
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26 
If Newyear grows up right, he’s going to look more and more like Lisa’s rumored new man, Blue Pongtiwat.
After episode 2, the ghost is not hard to clock. Full Northern Thai costume. That’s a Rakkhun family ancestor, and she’s not happy. His taste in men is so bad even the ancestors showed up to veto the roster and pick a son-in-law themselves.
Dean performs ease. Moth performs ice. Ten does not believe he is allowed to want something that is not a favor.
I have been all three.
Pun is the one I cannot sort. He can like a person and let him go. Moth with Dean does not seem to wound him. I watch him and cannot tell if that is grace, or another way of not daring to ask.
Infernal Affairs is a 2002 Hong Kong film starring Tony Leung and Andy Lau. It follows two men with reversed identities: Chan Wing Yan is a police officer undercover in the triads, while Lau Kin Ming is a triad mole inside the police force. Both are trying to find the other. Both want to return to who they were before the lie took over their lives.
Episode 8 puts Fei Foon and Leuk To at a similar distance.
Leuk To knows Sean took Fei Foon, but he cannot simply go in and bring him home. Fei Foon knows someone outside will be looking for him, but Sean has confined him. All he can do is leave fragments of a signal behind.
The hardest part of Infernal Affairs is that its characters are alive, but cannot live as themselves.
Fei Foon is a police officer trapped with the head of a counterfeit operation. Leuk To finally understands the world Fei Foon has been living in, but he can only wait outside it.
They once watched Infernal Affairs together.
Now they are living inside it.
That name feels less random than it first appears. The Lang in Langcheng is the same character as the one in Qinglang's name. The show has done this before. Yunhu Mountain, the place Qinglang speaks into his phone's voice input, hides 云胡 from a line in the Book of Songs, 既見君子，云胡不喜, now that I have seen my beloved, how could I not rejoice. An ordinary place name with something buried in it. Langcheng works the same way. It makes the tea feel as if it had been waiting for him.
The vendor tells Qinglang to set up a tea table beneath an old tree. Qinglang does. He sends Changyang off to pick wild mushrooms. In the end, Qinglang never drinks the tea. Changyang does.
Changyang wakes up in the year Qinglang filmed his first project.
On set, he meets Guoge at twenty-three, still working as Qinglang’s assistant. Qinglang is filming. He has been drinking, can barely stay on his feet, and Changyang is the one who helps him away.
Changyang has landed at the exact time of the behind-the-scenes footage from the main story.
We still do not know what that footage actually showed. We only know that Changyang deliberately let it leak because he thought he was protecting Qinglang. Shi Yuhao, furious, argued with Lan-jie over the phone. Lan-jie later died in a car accident.
Changyang has carried that guilt ever since.
So this trip back is not only about Qinglang.
It is also about Changyang returning to something he helped set in motion.
Then Qinglang, drunk and leaning against him, says:
“Shi Yuhao, I like you. Don’t you know that?”
The tea is supposed to be for beauty. Instead, it sends Changyang into the part of Qinglang’s past he never wanted to touch.
And back to the moment when Changyang thought he was protecting someone, but could not save anyone in the end.
But Qinglang did send him out to pick wild mushrooms.
In Yunnan, seeing little people is a familiar joke about wild mushroom poisoning. Changyang has already hallucinated the red carp once. So the episode sets two explanations beside each other: tea from Langcheng, or mushrooms.
One is magic. The other is a very local kind of disaster.
Maybe that is not even the point.
Maybe Changyang is finally being made to see that part of Qinglang’s old wound was left there by him.
That name feels less random than it first appears. The Lang in Langcheng is the same character as the one in Qinglang's name. The show has done this before. Yunhu Mountain, the place Qinglang speaks into his phone's voice input, hides 云胡 from a line in the Book of Songs, 既見君子，云胡不喜, now that I have seen my beloved, how could I not rejoice. An ordinary place name with something buried in it. Langcheng works the same way. It makes the tea feel as if it had been waiting for him.
The vendor tells Qinglang to set up a tea table beneath an old tree. Qinglang does. He sends Changyang off to pick wild mushrooms. In the end, Qinglang never drinks the tea. Changyang does.
Changyang wakes up in the year Qinglang filmed his first project.
On set, he meets Guoge at twenty-three, still working as Qinglang’s assistant. Qinglang is filming. He has been drinking, can barely stay on his feet, and Changyang is the one who helps him away.
Changyang has landed at the exact time of the behind-the-scenes footage from the main story.
We still do not know what that footage actually showed. We only know that Changyang deliberately let it leak because he thought he was protecting Qinglang. Shi Yuhao, furious, argued with Lan-jie over the phone. Lan-jie later died in a car accident.
Changyang has carried that guilt ever since.
So this trip back is not only about Qinglang.
It is also about Changyang returning to something he helped set in motion.
Then Qinglang, drunk and leaning against him, says:
“Shi Yuhao, I like you. Don’t you know that?”
The tea is supposed to be for beauty. Instead, it sends Changyang into the part of Qinglang’s past he never wanted to touch.
And back to the moment when Changyang thought he was protecting someone, but could not save anyone in the end.
But Qinglang did send him out to pick wild mushrooms.
In Yunnan, seeing little people is a familiar joke about wild mushroom poisoning. Changyang has already hallucinated the red carp once. So the episode sets two explanations beside each other: tea from Langcheng, or mushrooms.
One is magic. The other is a very local kind of disaster.
Maybe that is not even the point.
Maybe Changyang is finally being made to see that part of Qinglang’s old wound was left there by him.
The scene doesn’t tell us how much Bumm knew before she and Dunk got together. So I read it two ways.
If she knew, she’s offering him the choice she didn’t give him before. If she didn’t, she sees he’s hurt and is trying to make it right. Either way, she’s asking him. Late.
It doesn’t mean she never liked Dunk. Telling him on his birthday was still a bad choice.
The triangle is there to push Pod toward Jin and the fake dating. Familiar. I’m more interested in her guilt, and in when she understood what she’d done to him.
What interests me most about NOUR is not immortality. It is what is left after death stops being the threat. Ken can survive fire. A Nour body heals itself. By Episode 6, the show is finally starting to put rules around that. (Ep. 1–6)
But Ken’s real problem is not whether he can die.
It is what still matters when dying is no longer the thing he has to fear.
We hear a lot now about boundaries. Protect your peace. Learn to be alone. Do not make another person responsible for your happiness.
Most of that is probably good advice.
Push it far enough, though, and you get someone who needs very little and can leave before anything costs too much.
Ken is almost there.
It does not look like freedom.
James is not the first person Ken has cared about. Episode 6 changes that. A man dying of cancer once asked Ken to keep living. To live happily. Ken carried those words for decades. (Ep. 6)
So he did care.
He lost someone.
Then he kept going.
Maybe survival is not restoration.
We use those words as if they are close. Heal. Recover. Move on. Become whole again.
But maybe you do not go back.
Ken is still here.
That does not mean nothing stayed with him.
James does not teach him fear for the first time.
He brings it back.
At Tee’s funeral, Praew asks Ken if he has really gone his whole life without a weakness. (Ep. 4)
That line feels different now.
A weakness is not something Ken has never had. It is something he already knows.
A man who does not fear his own death can walk into fire.
A man who knows what it is to lose someone does not have that same freedom.
Vulnerability is one of those words that has become almost automatically positive. Be vulnerable. Let people in. Say what you feel.
Strip the word back, though, and it means something much less comforting.
The ability to be wounded.
Love does not make Ken safer.
It gives the world somewhere to hurt him.
Death is not only the question of whether I die.
It is whether I can live after you do.
The bodies are getting more interesting too. Ken heals. Praew healed, just more slowly. By Episode 6 the bandage was gone. (Ep. 3–6)
So I kept looking at Chita’s leg.
If Nour bodies repair themselves, why had that one not?
Episode 7 answered it by making him the exception to everything else. He is the Nour who can kill Nour. Whatever rules the others follow, he is not inside them.
Which is a strange kind of answer. The question closes and the character opens.
Episode 7 also finishes the bite.
A bite on the neck does not transform anyone. The bite over the heart does, and only if the person being bitten truly loves the one biting them. (Ep. 7)
So immortality is not something you can give someone.
You can only complete it with them.
Praew may have been looking for this.
She had seen what Chita does. She knew what taking Jirat might bring. She did it anyway.
She lost Tee and could not stay. Ken lost someone and has been trying to leave for two hundred years without managing it. Maybe Praew found in one move what Ken has spent two hundred years trying to reach.
And then the show does something I did not expect. James, having just learned the rule, tells Ken that he would want to be bitten to prove his feelings are real, and then asks him not to.
Ken says he will not.
That exchange is the most interesting thing in the episode. James wants the proof and refuses it. Ken agrees almost immediately.
Neither of them explains why.
Maybe he is protecting James. Maybe he is not sure the rule would hold. The bite only works if the love is real, and if it is not, then it is just a hand on a throat.
So why does a man who cannot die need love?
Maybe he does not.
Ken can keep living. Someone once asked him to.
But staying alive is not the same as choosing to have something to lose again.
James is not teaching Ken what love costs.
Ken already knows.
He paid once.
And now that there is finally a way to keep someone, both of them have said no to it.
Praew turned Tee into a Nour by biting him over the heart. Ken explains the other condition too: the person being bitten has to truly love the Nour biting them. Tee did.
That changes the whole thing for me.
Love is not just what makes immortality painful afterward. It is part of the mechanism itself. One person can do the biting, but the rule still needs something from the other side.
Then the Valentine’s Day timeline falls into place. Praew brings blood for Tee. Chita kidnaps her and hides her in the rear cargo area, the kind that opens directly into the back seat. Tee gets into Chita’s car, calls Praew, and hears her phone ringing inside. Chita grabs him by the throat. The fire starts. Tee dies. Praew gets out alive.
So the bandage is explained.
And Chita is the Nour Ken has been looking for. The one who can kill another Nour.
Something about that fire was not ordinary. Ken walked out of one in 1821. Tee did not walk out of this one.
Then the episode does it again, in front of James.
Chita with his hand on Praew’s throat, burning her alive. The show cuts between that and the same thing happening to Tee. Same grip. Same fire.
So this is more than James recognizing a color. He is there as the killing plays out in front of us. And the older killing is placed beside it so that we understand this is a method, and that it has been used before.
Which makes me look at his father’s death differently too.
What I still cannot tell is how James is seeing this. His established ability is seeing colors and identifying Nour. Either that has grown into something else, or the show is using his moment of understanding to reconstruct the past for us.
That distinction matters.
The other thing I am watching now is Jirat. He works beside Chita every day in a room built around bodies, wounds and causes of death. If he knows nothing, the show will have to make that believable. If he knows something, a lot of his quiet scenes may read differently later.
Praew took Jirat, and Chita took Tee from her first, and now Chita has taken her as well. Whatever she was planning to do with Jirat, she is not there to do it.
And the episode never shows us where he is.
Episode 7 answered a lot.
It also made the central idea stranger.
A Nour can survive fire. A Nour can kill another Nour. A Nour can turn someone else.
But not alone.
For that, the other person has to love them.
He’s in such a hurry to find Suzuki that he doesn’t change into his indoor shoes. He just goes in his socks.
That little detail got me.
He’s just heard Suzuki got pushed out by his classmates.
That’s all it takes.
Popular kid, ordinary nerd. I’ve seen it so many times.
It still works if it’s filmed well.
Episode 7 is.
It stays with Serizawa. The music knows when to come in. His monologue doesn’t try to explain everything.
It doesn’t have to.
The producer leaks his own footage for traffic. The two agency bosses are one bad meeting away from a boxing match. Every other week, somebody is threatening to sue somebody.
And suddenly I understand why DMD and GMMTV keep casting in-house.
They looked at the alternatives and said, you know what, this is fine.
This is a Domundi show, by the way.
They know.
The leads are still on slow burn.
The bosses skipped straight to the custody battle.
Four couples. Multiple stories. All in one series.
I was in.
Then the show started and I did the math.
I think eight episodes for one BL or GL couple is about right. Enough time to tell an actual story. Enough room for the romance to build instead of rushing every beat.
The Crow Club has sixteen episodes.
Four couples.
Four episodes each, on paper.
And Episode 1 belongs to the club itself.
So really, not even four.
I’m not wondering which couple I’ll like most yet.
I just want to see how they pull this off.
The recipe was stolen. Everyone knows. The sons still carry it.
What gets me is that the show never gives them the option of just walking away. The championship is the only way they're allowed to ask.
I keep wondering what these boys would look like written as Western teenagers. Probably slamming a door and deciding it themselves, with the parents left to catch up.
Here it's the other way around. They have to win permission.
Egawa, the female officer, and Hasegawa are fully invested. But when an outsider like Omaeda starts asking questions, they play dumb immediately.
In Episode 9, Takoi comes back from the hot spring trip and shares onsen manju with everyone. They are all chatting and laughing, clearly aware of what is going on between him and Shiono, and equally committed to not saying it out loud.
The Taishou at Torikyu handles it from behind the counter. When the hostility between Omaeda and Shiono starts spreading through nothing but looks, he covers his mouth with his hand.
Except Yagi, the older detective, who still thinks it’s a bromance.
Best wingmen. Best cheerleading squad.
I’ve also seen people talking about the second couple. I honestly don’t think the show has enough screen time to build that relationship, and I’m fine with them just being a bromance. In real life, the two actors are good friends anyway.
What really got me was seeing Bay being accepted and looked after by Sun’s family. I keep thinking about how many queer teenagers still don’t get that kind of support at home.
I wonder when that gets to become a basic human right.
Moth does the other half. He preps the apartment. He moves first. Then he arrives at the club with the worst version already written.
“You made me optional after I let you stay.”
Nobody in this episode is confused. They are afraid of a line with no costume on it.
Dean wants closeness until closeness has a time. Moth wants the night until the night has to be named. Ten retires the mission, and Dean looks like a man who just lost his favorite lie.
Share a bed. Deny it to your friend. Miss the appointment.
The chair stays empty.
Stop performing for everyone else. Look only at me.
Third is Nine’s partner. He is teaching Wan to turn his attention somewhere other than the person he came here for.
Wan has spent years looking up at Nine. Nobody has asked him to look straight at anyone.
The punch is supposed to miss. Wan has just been told to see only Third, so he does. The hit lands. On his mouth.
He closes the distance by accident.
Third decides to keep him there.
Dobby. Danis. Dollar. Dolly. Dawin. Daeng. Dum.
And a ghost grandpa named Danai.
They didn’t cast a sitcom.
They opened a D Club and gave it a timeslot.
EP1 was funny.
The naming system is a hate crime.
A-Lie was through the worst of it by then. Fever down. He would have lived either way.
A-Lie was sold by his own parents. In his world people trade each other. Nobody stays. That's the lesson he learned young and it held up for a long time.
So I don't read episode 12 as possession. It reads like confirmation. He doesn't believe words. He had to check with his body.
In the apocalypse everything is scarce. Food, medicine, bullets. Sex is the one thing that costs no supplies. What it costs is your guard.
The show is called an oath. Institutions are gone, language isn't reliable, and the only place left to put a promise is a body.
Why Episode 7 Works
Episode 7 is not good because of how much it fits in. The undercover truth comes out. Leuk To calls off the marriage. Tong Tong moves on the counterfeit template and miscalculates. The police are closing in. Sean takes Fei Foon away. Any one of these could have carried an episode on its own.
But the episode never lays them out like a list of events. Everything lands on the same question: when you finally find the person you lost, and finally understand why he left, can you still trust him?
The Lighter
The lighter Fei Foon lent Leuk To has a snake swallowing its own tail.
An ouroboros.
It brings Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence to mind. Not fate bringing people back together in some soft, romantic way, but the same question returning again and again until you have to answer it differently.
Leuk To was afraid to come out. He wanted the group. He wanted Fei Foon. He thought he could have both, so he went looking for a marriage that would secure his future.
Fei Foon was never given a place in any of it.
He was given the ashtray. Beautiful, but not something you could take outside.
So when Fei Foon disappeared for the second time, it was not the first time Leuk To had lost him. But this time, he understood. He had not lost Fei Foon because Fei Foon had stopped loving him.
He had never made a place for him to stay.
The Shot
Did Fei Foon know the lighter was on him?
The show does not say. But after everyone clears out, Fei Foon comes back with a bottle of water and nothing else. He comes back expecting someone to still be alive.
If he knew, then he bet that a piece of metal would hold. In the end, all he had to trust was a lighter.
But that feels like them.
Leuk To used to keep Fei Foon behind a closed door. This time, Fei Foon puts Leuk To’s life on a chance no one could guarantee. The bullet stops, but that does not mean the damage is undone.
It only means they both know the other has not let go.
A Reunion, Another Loss
The reconciliation is not a reward.
Fei Foon admits the second undercover assignment, and Leuk To finally learns that he did not vanish without a word because he wanted to. He did not choose to leave him again. They pull the deepest misunderstanding open, just a little, and the world outside is already waiting.
Tong Tong miscalculates. The counterfeiters gain ground. Sean takes Fei Foon away, and Fei Foon becomes a hostage.
This time, Leuk To is not losing someone who could be anywhere. He knows which side Fei Foon is on. He knows why he was taken. He knows who took him too.
Knowing does not make it easier.
They had only just found each other.
Then the story takes him away again.