Shelfleigh

Against the Current is an absolutely stunning production with a solid first half. Everything feels very alive and rich across the entire production - costumes, location settings, acting, directing, fight sequences, so on and so forth. This will most likely be one of my comparisons on quality drama making in the future. Additionally, the plot and characters set up in the first half are incredibly interesting. I came to care a great deal about these characters, and the situations they ended up facing felt tense and the resolutions rewarding when the threats were overcome.

That said, the second half of the story did not deliver for me. It felt increasing unsatisfactory, frustrating, and oddly unmoored from its initial premise. It failed in two major ways - the main character being sidelined in her own story and the romance.

ROMANCE

I’m going to start with the romance aspect first because I can already hear the people gearing up to write about how it was “not about the romance.” You see, you can say all day long it was not about it, I can even say it was not about it, but the production itself repeatedly centered the ML’s one-sided love and favored romantic beats over character moments throughout the show.

SPOILERS: This show begins on the premise of a marriage between the two main leads, in a roundabout way they end up in the relationship, and their marriage is in many ways a success. The premise laid out for the second half of the show by the ML is his goal to get the FL to fall in love with him. Great, wonderful, can’t wait to see it. And yet by the end I never felt the FL loved him. Did she care and respect him? Sure, I don’t think she would have had kids with him otherwise. But to spend much of the second half focused on them, so many scenes showing his love for her and her lukewarm response to all of it was not satisfying. I either needed her to verbally mention at least one time at the end of the show she loved him OR the production spend less time on the romantic beats/scenes. If the production doesn’t want it to be about the romance, that’s fine, but then stop spending so much time on it.

This is not a knock on the actors as their performances were great. This is a knock against the writing. It felt like the ML was told this was a romance, while the FL was told this was not a romance. It felt one-side and discordant with the premise of the story and the shows own dedication to building it up between them.

XU LAN XIANG

I can’t talk about any of this without SPOILERS so you have been warned.

I think ultimately the second half of the series failed our FL, Xu Lan Xiang. She is by far the heart of the show and her growth in the first half felt moving and memorable. After the wedding (in the late 20s), she becomes an oddly static, angelic figure rather than an actual person. I would argue her character goes through the most storyline changes in the second half without exploring any of them. She kills a person? Time jump. She becomes the head of the entire Lin household? Time jump. A mother? Time jump. She kills another person gruesomely? Time jump. Loses her husband and friends over the years? Time jump by a million.

What happened to exploring these moments? What about the fact that she ends up running the Lin household and holds down a full time career as a playwriter? What about if the friends she made as a slave want freedom too? What about the struggles she may have endured as the new Lin matriarch, if not internally from the family then externally? Did no other servants ever trouble her? Did she not struggle with being a mom? Why is so much time given to a lackluster romance and an overarching political drama rather than the more intimate moments of Xu Lan Xiang?

Perhaps it wouldn’t have felt so mismatched except we watch as the ML and many of the secondary character get fulfilling emotional arcs that feel earned and real. They feel like real people growing and changing through their personally interactions and external pressures of society the entire drama. Our FL essentially reaches complete transformation halfway through the drama and becomes the lynchpin to making plot happen for the rest of the characters as the show progresses.

By the end, I just felt very conflicted about it all. The more I think about it, the more sad I find it. What could have been one of my favorite shows did so little with the main character and shortchanged the romance to be unrecognizable by the end. So many love this show and I’m glad for them. For me, ultimately, it was a great miss.