This review may contain spoilers
A good story that fell victim to overstretching once the first arc was over
Playing Go was a masterfully told, well-paced thriller full of veteran actors, a 90's small-town crime intrigue + slice-of-life + witty-dark-humor which is genre Chinese drama and movie land excels at. It was a surreal but also quite believably imagined cat-and-mouse game between two brothers, one an acclaimed cop, another a loser in life, a Weiqi teacher at the local daycare center for kids who was pushed into a bank robbery case.
And that was until ep 8, when the first arc ended, with 99% of the threads wrapped up. The quality of the storytelling began spiraling downwards almost immediately after. It was like the scriptwriters used up all their brain cells to get through the initial worldbuilding and after that they had no clue how to either satisfyingly wrap up the story or continue it. The story began putting forth unserious and frankly, dumb situations just so the characters are "forced" back into the so-called Game of Go from the relative peace they found after the first arc.
For example,
1. When Yangao ran out at night to look for his toy that his dad threw away like... hours away of a car ride. No sane receptionist would allow a tiny preteen with a CAST on his leg, no less, would've give a child a torch upon request and let them leave the hotel without informing their parents first. And Yangao shouldn't have been able to reach the place he lost the toy on foot. All that happened just so Yangao and Cui Ye could have a father-son bonding moment.
2. The scene where Xia Yu is the only one on duty at the textile factory when it was running a crucial batch for the company's future, she takes a call to Xiasheng and forgets to keep an eye on the spools, and the batch gets damaged. Even if Xia Yu gave the room her full attention this still would've happened. That was a LOT of spools for a single person to keep an eye on. And if the company was so careless to leave just one person supervising the production at such a crucial time, then it's no surprise it was already on the verge of bankruption. In other words, the incident happened for no reason other than to just push Xia Yu back into narrative, and the writers couldn't think of a single other plausible way to do it other than making Xia Yu look like a silly girl in love when it wasn't really her fault even to begin with.
And there were many other scenes like this that kept happening. I could've overlooked them in an average romcom but I came into this show with MUCH higher expectations, and because it did show me how much potential it had in the first eight episodes.
Sad, is all I have to say.
And that was until ep 8, when the first arc ended, with 99% of the threads wrapped up. The quality of the storytelling began spiraling downwards almost immediately after. It was like the scriptwriters used up all their brain cells to get through the initial worldbuilding and after that they had no clue how to either satisfyingly wrap up the story or continue it. The story began putting forth unserious and frankly, dumb situations just so the characters are "forced" back into the so-called Game of Go from the relative peace they found after the first arc.
For example,
1. When Yangao ran out at night to look for his toy that his dad threw away like... hours away of a car ride. No sane receptionist would allow a tiny preteen with a CAST on his leg, no less, would've give a child a torch upon request and let them leave the hotel without informing their parents first. And Yangao shouldn't have been able to reach the place he lost the toy on foot. All that happened just so Yangao and Cui Ye could have a father-son bonding moment.
2. The scene where Xia Yu is the only one on duty at the textile factory when it was running a crucial batch for the company's future, she takes a call to Xiasheng and forgets to keep an eye on the spools, and the batch gets damaged. Even if Xia Yu gave the room her full attention this still would've happened. That was a LOT of spools for a single person to keep an eye on. And if the company was so careless to leave just one person supervising the production at such a crucial time, then it's no surprise it was already on the verge of bankruption. In other words, the incident happened for no reason other than to just push Xia Yu back into narrative, and the writers couldn't think of a single other plausible way to do it other than making Xia Yu look like a silly girl in love when it wasn't really her fault even to begin with.
And there were many other scenes like this that kept happening. I could've overlooked them in an average romcom but I came into this show with MUCH higher expectations, and because it did show me how much potential it had in the first eight episodes.
Sad, is all I have to say.
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