Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend
(我女朋友的男朋友 – Wǒ nǚ péngyǒu de nán péngyǒu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

I started watching this drama because I saw a trailer of it and thought it looked kind of funny. Also the story seemed like it wouldn’t be too standard -like, not a Chinese version of Absolute Boyfriend or something like that- so I decided to give it a go.
I have to say foremost that I don’t watch a lot of Taiwanese/Chinese dramas, there’s only one that I’ve recently seen which I really thought was good (When a Snail Falls in Love), but the way of acting just isn’t really my thing most of the time. The way in which the voices are dubbed over the actors makes all the sound effects (like crying, sighing, just little sounds people make in-between the talking) sound really fake and they tend to over-act a lot. Also I have a problem with the Chinese language, since I can never hear where a sentence starts and where it ends, it’s all just waves of gibberish in the same tone to me.

However, I started watching this as a comedy relief break after Duel and I have different things to say about it. I will start with the positive parts. First of all, the camera shots and the way all the sets were laid out was beautiful. They made all the backgrounds, from the street where the main character lives to his izakaya restaurant home to the anime club in his school really colorful and cute and it just made me want to actually be there to check it out. They did a great job in decorating all the sets and backgrounds. I love colors a lot, so just looking at all the shots made me cheerful. And I wouldn’t mind living in that guy’s house, and hang around that pub restaurant although I can’t cook for the life of me. It just looked really nice, overall. It was nice to look at just for the settings and backdrops they used for filming. Of course I don’t know if they used an actual house or they build the whole thing, but everything looked very nice and bright. I really liked how they played with colors, the series was a canvas in itself.
One major thing that I liked is that they made everything look really anime-ish, considering the main character is a huge anime and manga fan, and so his whole surroundings and even the people he’s surrounded by all look like they came straight from an anime. It was nice to see how they played with these things.

I don’t really know any Chinese actors so I wasn’t familiar with any of the actors playing in the series. The first shot was hilarious, it was of the main character waking up with seemingly a hangover and he just looked straight into the camera with a face that suggested he’d had lived 100 years in hell, after which his narrated self-introduction started. What a way to introduce the main character. That set the tone for me from the start. In the beginning I was a bit confused because they started off just like each episode from Duel started with a flashforward of something that would happen later on, so I didn’t really get it at first and afterwards it also seemed like not that necessary to put that particular scene as the flashforward. However, it all started to make sense from there on.

Short summary of the story: Ah Zhai (played by Bai Shu) is an otaku* (very fanatic and almost obsessive fan of Japanese anime and manga culture) and university engineering student, who has an immense crush on his so-proclaimed goddess and the most popular girl in school, Xiao Pei Ni (played by Cai Wen Jing/Elvira Cai). When she travels to Japan to study overseas, he follows her without hesitation but finds out she is seeing someone. Heartbroken, he takes to the sake and being completely drunk, he stumbles across a suspicious looking store, which turns out to sell love robots. There he blanks out until the next morning, when he wakes up in his Japanese hotel and finds a mysterious box in the garden, addressed to him. The box says ‘Adam’. When he opens the box, inside he finds a really handsome male robot (played by Li Chuan) who connects with him the moment their eyes meet and acknowledges Ah Zhai as his master and lover. Ah Zhai, completely not okay with this, tries many things to get rid of him and even eventually goes back to the store to ask if he can return Adam, because he spend all of his money on it while he was drunk. The store manager, hiding in a pink bunny suit, tells him it’s impossible to return the product. He also tells him that he is from the future, where a 100 otakus have helped build these love robots so that they would still have someone to love. In the end, Ah Zhai manages to persuade the manager to buy another robot from him, a female one this time, and that she has to look exactly the same as his love Pei Ni.
But things of course don’t go as planned, when he goes back to China to receive his package, due to unfortunate circumstances (created by himself), the first person his female robot sees is Adam, and not him. She connects with Adam and therefore acknowledges Adam as her master and lover.
So: in short, Ah Zhai is in love with Eve, the female robot. Eve is in love with Adam. Adam is in love with Ah Zhai. The most awkward love triangle ever. What follows is a long series of happenings in which Ah Zhai gets annoyed at Adam and tries to make Eve fall in love with him. At a certain point, he tries to reset Eve’s settings in his desperation to be the first one she looks at. But in this, he creates an error in her system and she starts transforming to four different personalities that she had while she was owned by previous owners.

Honestly, while the story unfolded itself I was thinking that the perfect ending would be for Ah Zhai to fall in love with Adam. I wanted that so badly to happen. I’ve never shipped a male couple like this before, haha. No, but I really did think that Ah Zhai was treating Adam very unfairly. Adam was honestly the sweetest boyfriend ever, he did everything for Ah Zhai and Ah Zhai never appreciated it once.
I don’t have to sugarcoat that Ah Zhai annoyed me a lot. Not only his character -he was an orphan who’d lived with his grandfather his whole life and after his rich gramps died he inherited this huge house and never was short on money so he has always been very selfish and only thinks about himself. Even the few friends that he has, he doesn’t seem to fully appreciate them and is always the first to blame them even though he himself makes most of the trouble.
For example, Ah Zhai’s best friend, Wang Fu Gui (played by Liang Hao). Wang Fu Gui was the best friend Ah Zhai could’ve ever wished for. He shared his interests, they were a great team, and even though he didn’t want to, he always ended up helping him out, whether he was risking his own skin or not. He was the one who resetted Eve’s settings (naturally he didn’t know that she would react to it like that), but did he ever get one compliment or acknowledgement or an ‘thanks for helping me’ or a ‘you did your best’ or a ‘it wasn’t your fault, it was mine’? Nope. So in that respect Ah Zhai really annoyed me for not valuing his friends in the beginning and literally only caring about himself. Another part had to do with the acting. As mentioned before, one of the things I dislike about Chinese dramas is how the actors tend to over-act a lot. In Ah Zhai’s case this was definitely so. And the thing that bothered me most was that he actually ruined several scenes which were really good and touching if they’d been acted out normally. There were scenes where Ah Zhai was sincerely sad or felt really bad otherwise and his face would just cloud over and I would be like ‘Uh-oh, now it’s coming. The true acting skills of this actor who’s shown us only comedy up until now.’ But no. He would just start crying in such an exaggerated way, even pulling really weird faces that I just couldn’t take the scene seriously anymore. And I mean it, they could’ve been really touching scenes if he’d toned it down.

On the other hand, I was a bit more impressed by Adam and Eve’s acting. Because Pei Ni was initially introduced as the super pretty cute girl, I was afraid that Eve would be just that: just the cutesy innocent pretty girl. So I really liked it when they added the part when her system glitched and she went full domination mode. It also really explored the versatility of the actress and I could see that she was so much more than just a pretty face. It’s always nice when actors get a chance to show more of their acting abilities than just one emotionless character for example. She went from a yankee to a bitch to an angel to a femme fatale within a couple of episodes.
The guy playing Adam had it a bit more difficult since he had to remain in his calm and almost blank-expression state for most of the series. The way he acted was more robot-like than Eve, I thought. But the way he would then suddenly show a worried expression or you actually see that he was processing an emotion was really good.
I think that it’s really difficult to play a robot, since you can’t allow your face -which is naturally full of emotion- to show all those emotions. So I think that he did a really good job there. You could even see that sometimes he was teasing Ah Zhai by trying to be intimate with him and that he was actually enjoying that. In the end, the relationship between Ah Zhai and Adam was what grew the most in the series and even though Eve was the prospective ideal partner, in the end Eve was the one who became the extra.
When Ah Zhai was about to lose Adam for real and he said ‘I don’t want to bind with Eve anymore. I want Adam back.’, you could hear me cheering in the background.

Besides that, there were a couple of interesting side characters as well that sometimes even interested me more than the main ones (as regularly happens). For example, the before mentioned Wang Fu Gui and the president of the anime club, Meng Shan. They shared this weird but really sweet bond and I really liked the parts where their relationship was explored further. They could’ve treated the side characters as just that, but they didn’t completely abandon them, fortunately. Apart from that, there were some other typical people, the handsome but cold and jerky student council president, the girl with the princess syndrome who just assumed every boy on the planet was in love with her, the sheepish muscly sports guy, the girl and the guy who were cross-dressing all the time… a wide variety of characters, again reminding of an anime, in my opinion.

The series had 32 episodes, but they were all about half an hour (minus the opening and ending themes which for some reason are always extremely long in Chinese dramas and always show most of the show’s content so I always skip them in fear of spoilers), so it was a light series and easy to watch. The director of the series even made a guest appearance as the LUV Robot store manager (the pink rabbit, yep) and later the man in black who came to teleport Adam and Eve back to the future (which was the same character in the series, sorry if that wasn’t clear).
At the end of episode 29, Ah Zhai, whose memories have been wiped by the ‘creator’, gets into a car accident and the episode ends with the anime club members taking a group photo with him while he’s in the hospital and still unconscious. Then the screen froze and it said something like ‘Well now, the hero’s dead so I guess the story’s over… or who knows, maybe there will be a major plottwist in the last three episodes, I wouldn’t know… You can decide for yourself whether to watch more’. I really liked that, it just seemed like they pulled a lot of things to interact with the viewers. Ah Zhai also regularly spoke into the camera, as if he was literally narrating his own life to the viewers. I like these kind of signals, it makes it more fun to watch.

Just one more thing, I was really curious as to how it would end, but I found the ending a bit random. He was just suddenly okay with sharing his life with both Adam and Eve, the three of them as friends forever, even though he would still feel like a third wheel to them sometimes. And then it ended with the real Pei Ni returning from Japan and paying him a visit and the three of them just stood there like …’Hi~’… and that was the end.
Which I found a bit odd and I wanted to know more concretely what everyone was thinking. And of course I was a bit sad that he didn’t choose Adam over Eve in the end, haha.

Overall, a comedy relief watch, there’s some hilarious stuff in there, some really awkward stuff as well, but it was a sweet story. And if I were to think of a moral, I think they needed to make Ah Zhai more aware of his surroundings, that he wasn’t alone and that he had friends and that there was so much to experience if he would leave his house and go out and see more of the outside. Adam and Eve were responsible for getting him out, out of the house, out of his shell, out of his comfort zone (special thanks to Adam for that). In the end, of course, I wouldn’t say that living with two robot friends for the rest of your life is the healthiest thing to do, so that was a bit weird. But at least they all got to be together in the end and that was ultimately what they all wanted and needed.
The story wasn’t the best or deepest ever, but it was definitely original in its own weird way and like I said, the amazingly colored sets and backgrounds and just the fact that the whole series looked really cute contributed greatly to the pleasure of watching it.
And of course, if you like anime, you’ll enjoy the references and the cosplay and especially how they decorated the anime club. Man, if I’d had a clubroom like that in my university, I would become a member just to be able to hang out in that room, lol.
It was funny because I saw a little part of a behind the scenes clip and it seemed like Bai Shu didn’t know anything about anime and manga and cosplay and all that. I can only imagine how they made him prepare for this character and this show, haha.
Next on my list is another Chinese series, so I’m really curious as to if I’ll get used to them more. Until then!

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Duel
(듀얼 / Dyueol)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

I don’t really remember when or why I put this drama on my list, but it’s been on it for a while. I’m guessing it has to do with the fact that ‘science fiction’ was listed as one of the genres for this drama, and I have liked all the Korean science fiction dramas I’ve seen so far. Before I also watched Circle, another OCN drama and I really liked it. Also I recently finished watching Orphan Black, so when I saw this drama was about cloning as well my interest was peaked.

However, it’s a very serious drama. No romance, no comedy, just crime thriller and angst. The cloning part formed the base of the series but wasn’t the main issue. I like the play on the title though, because Duel suggests something with two parts or two people participating, and I could see this ‘duel between two people’ in more than one sense while watching. But maybe that’s just my interpretation.

I tried writing a compact summary for the story but I ended up going into so much detail (yes, there is a LOT happening) that I decided to do it otherwise. I’m going to try and construct a simple summary based on the four (five?) main characters.
First of all, there is Jang Deuk Cheon (played by Jung Jae Young), a veteran detective. He is a single father of a 12-year old daughter, Soo Yeon, who is very sick and needs the vaccine to a long-awaited stem cell treatment. When she gets chosen for the treatment and is on her way to the hospital, the car gets interrupted and she is kidnapped by a young man. Not long after she is kidnapped, Deuk Cheon stumbles upon a young man in a bus who looks exactly like the culprit, only this guy doesn’t have any memories of who he is and how he got there. They both witness the real culprit, indeed an exact copy, but they aren’t twins, so what are they?
The first main part of the story revolves around Deuk Cheon trying to get his daughter back and finding out what is up with these two guys who look exactly alike. It turns out that his daughter is not a random victim and it all traces back to the origin of the vaccine and what happened to the two identical boys.
Then there is Choi Jo Hye (played by Kim Jung Eun), a prosecutor who used to be a good friend of Deuk Cheon’s but ruined her chances of friendship with him after being partially responsible for his wife’s murder. So there’s a bit of tension between the two of them. However, even though she initially seems like a cold person just hungry for a case, she helps in her own way to solve the situation and find Soo Yeon.
Then we have the two mysterious identical guys, Lee Sung Joon and Lee Sung Hoon (both played by Yang Se Jong). They turn out to be clones, created from the doctor who originally created Soo Yeon’s vaccine 24 years earlier. Lee Sung Joon is the more timid one, he doesn’t remember who he is at first but afterwards agrees to help Deuk Cheon with finding Soo Yeon. Lee Sung Hoon, the one who kidnapped Soo Yeon, is bound on revenge. If I elaborate more on the nature of this revenge I will go into way too much detail, so I’ll try to keep it short. The doctor that they were cloned from once injected himself with the vaccine (he was creating a vaccine to cure his own sick daughter and was experimenting). Some guys that weren’t on his side found out about this, killed him and stole his organs, thinking that those were now vaccinated organs. Lee Sung Hoon is now looking for those organs, because he too is getting sick and he also believes that that will fix him. That’s also why he kidnapped Soo Yeon, the first one who was to be vaccinated.
And then last but not least there’s Ryu Mi Rae (played by Seo Eun Soo), a reporter. Her mother passed away a month earlier and left a lot of secrecy behind which she is keen on finding out. Her mother, as it turns out, used to be a nurse who worked for the above-mentioned doctor and she knew a lot about the experiments.
All these people’s lives turn out to be connected by this situation and they decide to solve it all together.

First I want to say something about the cast. I only knew Yang Se Jong and Seo Eun Soo, because they both also played in Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim. I never saw them before that. In Romantic Doctor Yang Se Jong’s character was just a grumpy second male lead who wasn’t really a second male lead because he didn’t have any interest in the first leads. I found it very nice to see him play such an intense role – or should I say roleS. Because he actually played 3 different people in this series: the doctor and both the clones, who all had distinctively different personalities. I’m always impressed with people who can play double roles, but still no one will ever beat Tatiana Maslany from Orphan Black who played like 7 completely different people (only respect). Anyways, now I have seen more of his acting abilities and I’m a bit more impressed. Temperature of Love is also on my list, but since I expect that’s just another romantic love story I doubt he’ll be acting the same way as he did here (I’ll let you know when I’ve watched it).
I didn’t know the two ‘veteran’ main actors, Jung Jae Young and Kim Jung Eun. I read that Jung Jae Young is also a stage actor. Lately I’ve been seeing more stage actors get into drama series, it’s an interesting turn I think. He did a good job playing the rough, swearing police detective whose only weakness was his little girl. Kim Jung Eun didn’t really make a big impression on me, the only thing that jumped out to me was -again, I guess because of plastic surgery- her face just had the same expression almost the whole series. Sometimes, when she showed emotion, it seemed like she had to make it so obvious that her face just looked kind of over the top, like when she was surprised by something her eyes would go like O__O and it almost just looked a bit comical (I’m sorry, I’m critical on face-acting). And overall her character didn’t really get a lot of background, so of the 4/5 main characters, she made the least of an impression on me.

Even though the story itself was -despite its many, many created plot lines- very well established. What confused me a bit at first though was that the main part of the episodes starting with a flash-forward. So the episode would start with something that the previous one didn’t end with (my first reaction: is this the right episode?) but then later on the episode we actually get to that point. I didn’t really understand the necessity of that in the first half of the episodes. Because eventually, the story itself made a full circle from beginning to end and everything was solved and finished very neatly. The flash-forwards only felt like unnecessary ways to add more time to the episode. Because the exact same scene would play later on in the episode, where we see how it led up to there. So not very relevant in my opinion.
Also there were a few things that weren’t clear to me. Maybe I missed some bits, because there was so much happening and you just tend to focus on the main story line. For example: *spoiler* as Mi Rae turns out to be the doctor’s biological daughter who he -as it turns out- was able to save with the vaccine, I assume that he gave both the vaccine and his daughter to Nurse Ryu, so that she could vaccinate Mi Rae and raise her as her own child, but this wasn’t specified I believe. I just assumed this, because otherwise why would he have given the vaccine to Nurse Ryu for safe-keeping. However, his wife never knew about this. When Mi Rae (which also turns out to be a false name; to keep her hidden and safe she was called after Nurse Ryu’s unborn child) was finally (and unfortunately only temporarily) reunited with her birth mother, the doctor’s wife made the impression that she never knew her daughter had been alive all this time. So I wonder how that crucial bit of communication went wrong. Maybe the doctor died before he could tell, because of course he didn’t know that he was going to be attacked. Also it wasn’t clear to me why he injected himself with the vaccine in the first place. I thought they were doing experiments on people or animals or something, but why himself? This seemed like an important part so I might have missed it (shame on me and my weak concentration), but that wasn’t clear to me from the beginning.
Also, everything that Lee Sung Hoon was avenging turned out to be either incorrect or a lie (or both). He wanted revenge on Deuk Cheon because he blamed him for his ‘mother”s (the boys saw the doctor’s wife as their mother as she took care of them like they were her own children) death, and she turned out to be still alive.
He killed a lot of people to take back his original’s organs, only to find out the organs were useless. He despised Sung Joon because he promised to come and find him as a boy and he didn’t while he needed him the most, and it turns out that Sung Joon tried really hard to find him. All these things in the end just made me feel sorry for Sung Hoon because all these things that drove him crazy all turned out to be fake reasons.
And, as I mentioned before, I was a bit confused about Choi Jo Hye’s role in the end because even though she appeared a lot at first, during the final crucial bits she didn’t appear at all. And now that I think about it, the scenes where she appeared didn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the series, she was just doing her own thing and her own research and every once in a while this collided with what Deuk Cheon and his little gang were also involved with. So that almost kind of de-connected her from the rest of the main cast. Which was a bit weird.

Also, there was this old guy named Park San Young and he was the bad guy, the director of a big pharmaceutical company (even named after himself) that tried to get its hands on the vaccine and the technique of cloning purely for his own greedy desires. He was ready to save what was left of his own already spent life even if that meant taking it away from a 12-year old girl with her whole life still ahead of her. He wanted the vaccine to cure his own disease. He wanted the ability to clone people to himself just to experiment curing his own disease. He basically only cared about himself and was the ultimate scumbag.
He spent the first half of the series in a coma, and his daughter was primarily introduced as a mysterious young lady who also wanted to get her hands on the vaccine for some reason. In the end it turned out that she wanted it to cure her father, but once her father regained consciousness he just continued being an ass and in the end she even went against him in order to keep the vaccine out of his hands.
The whole plot of the San Young family felt a bit weak and forced to me. As if not enough people already had to be given reasons for wanting the vaccine. And they just turned the guy into a selfish lunatic who only cared about himself. That made the character of the daughter a bit pointless, because the firm reasons she had in the beginning only ended up being a mistake which she had to fix for herself.

I do want to say something about the actress who played Park Seo Jin, the daughter mentioned above. She is called Jo Soo Hyang. I know her from 3 other series, but I mostly know her because she’s pretty much always cast as a bitchy character. Maybe she has the face for it, I don’t know (and I don’t really like typecasting people on their face). But I guess she has this natural haughty look about her.
In Who Are You – School 2015 she played the bully part so well I actually got angry as soon as she appeared on screen. In Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo she was the bitchy skinny gymnastics girl who made fun of the sturdy weightlifter girls. The only neutral role I saw her in was in the short drama Romance Full of Life, where she was simply the female lead who was a bit aloof because she focussed too much on studying. But even though she always plays the more arrogant roles, I really like that I can see her acting getting better with each series (because I actually watched these series with her in chronological order, not on purpose). So a little word of praise for her. I would like to see her as a super sweet nice girl for a change, though, just to break the standard.

One last and maybe stupid thing: there was one song in the OST that I really really disliked. I don’t usually pay that much attention to the OST in detail, only when I like a song I might look it up and download it afterwards. But this time, there was one song where I disliked the singer’s voice so much, I needed to share it, I’m sorry.
Quite ironically, the song is called ‘Nightmare’ and the performer is called ‘Mad Soul Child’. Both these names are so accurate I can’t even. From the first verse on I already thought the singer sang in a really weird voice, almost like Stitch, kind of swallowing her words if that makes any sense. And then the refrain starts and I just hear a bunch of throaty noises and it actually sounds really painful. It really sounds as if she sings while her throat is hurting really bad. The way she creaks through her exclamations might sound artistic to some people but to me it kind of hurt my ears. So no, no Mad Soul Child for me, thanks. (Again no offense, just my opinion.)

Coming back to the ‘duel’ part, as I said, I approve of the naming of this drama because they actually did something with it. Some examples of times when I thought ‘duel’ became a good metaphor. First of all, all the duels. There was a duel between Sung Hoon and Deuk Cheon. There was a duel between Sung Hoon and Sung Joon. There was a duel between Jo Hye and her boss. Even a duel between Sung Joon and Soo Yeon, when the dilemma arose that Sung Joon wouldn’t be able to receive the vaccine if Soo Yeon got it first. And finally, a big parallel in the fact that everything started and ended with a father trying to cure his daughter.
I really like that the story was wrapped up so nicely, except for the things that remained unclear to me all the plot lines were ended and all the bad guys were either caught or got what they deserved *cough the San Young bastard cough*. Not everyone who deserved to get through the final confrontation made it through, but in the end the most important people (to me at least) ended up cured and healthy and happy.
Sometimes it’s nice to watch a completely different type of series, to see a series so focused on the acting and the story is nice. The last series I saw that reminded me of the themes from this one was God’s Gift ~14 Days~, which is also about a parent whose child is kidnapped and she goes through hell and back (literally, as she goes 14 days back into time) to get her daughter back. But it was so intense and everyone was so serious and angsty that I really started longing for some comic relief. So in the end maybe this isn’t really my thing and now I can’t wait to get back to my romcoms.
If there was a moral, it wasn’t crystal clear to me, but what I got was that everyone, in the end, cares the most about himself and his/her own family. There were a lot of people in this series who just did everything they did in order to save their own and their families’. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but only some cases are justified as legit and some aren’t. We see one guy as a bad guy because he took the doctor’s kidneys for himself, but in the end we also see that the ‘good guys’ blackmail him with the safety of his daughter, so what does that do to the good versus evil ratios here? I’m not sure.
But overall, a good series.