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.

Love’s Lies
(真爱的谎言之破冰者 / Zhen Ai De Huang Yan / The Icebreaker of True Love’s Lie)
MyDramaList rating (so far) : 5.0/10

Hello everyone! Sorry for the long silence, a lot has been happening. I hope everyone is safe and healthy during this bizarre Corona situation. For some reason I’ve been switching back to Netflix and also downloaded Disney+ so I had some difficulty getting back into an Asian drama, certainly such a lengthy one as Love’s Lies.

Since it is taking me a lot of time to watch this, let alone finish it, so I have decided to split it into two halves. I will finish part 1 first, then watch something else in between, and then get back to the second half when I’m in the mood again. It’s just too lengthy for me to watch in one go without getting impatient to watch the rest of my to-watch list at this moment.

If I remember correctly, I put this drama on my list after seeing a trailer of it which looked really cool and intense. I’ve seen a couple of really good Chinese series in the past and it looked like this might be worth my while, even though I’m normally not one for the ‘drug case police crime’ genre.
But I watched some genre that wasn’t really in my alley before and it still turned out to be very thrilling, so I think I decided to put it on my list to give it a try, remembering in the back of my mind When a Snail Falls in Love. I really liked that one.
Next thing I know, my list becomes longer and longer and as this one approaches I start wondering, why did I put this on my list? What is this? I watched the trailer again and I was like Oof… not sure if I’m going to like it, but I guess I’ll give it a try. So here I am. Halfway through it. After almost a month.

For the practical information: Love’s Lies has 44 episodes. Now most Chinese dramas are quite lengthy, so that in itself doesn’t have to a problem as long as it remains interesting. Secondly, each episode is about 45 minutes long. And there’s so much drama and so much happening in every episode that I can almost never get myself to watch more than 1 episode a day.
It’s like when I was watching Valid Love, but maybe not exactly as emotionally draining. It’s just not really grabbing my full serious attention as of yet, that’s why I can’t focus that well and it feels like ages to finish it.

Anyways, as I said I will write this review in two parts. I will first write up until episode 22 where I’m at right now, and add part 2 after some time when I feel like I can continue. I stopped at quite a cliffhanger point, but it’s an alright point to take a break.

Love’s Lies starts off in Beijing. Tan Dou Dou (played by Pan Zhi Lin) and Jin Yuan (played by Luo Jin) used to be a great couple until Jin Yuan disappeared on their wedding day and stood Dou Dou up at the altar. She then hears nothing from him for seven years.
We then switch to the present, where Dou Dou arrives at work and a strange package is delivered to her at her office – a package with Jin Yuan as the sender. As she’s opening it, the police storm in and compromise the package. It contains a teddybear and, after some more thorough searching, it turns out that the teddybear contains a whole pack of crystal meth.
Dou Dou, unaware of anything that’s happening, is taken in by the police for questioning about Jin Yuan, even though she doesn’t know anything about what happened to him since he disappeared on her without saying a word.
She escapes the police and makes her way to Haibin, followed by one police officer called Qiao Liang (played by Cao Zheng). She follows the address on the package to trace Jin Yuan in Haibin and then finds out he is involved in some major drug trafficking case. In an attempt to single-handedly catch him in the act, she gets herself involved with both the Haibin police and Jin Yuan’s secretive mission, which remains unclear. When they reunite, however, there seems to still be a spark between them and it’s clear that something serious made Jin Yuan disappear all those years ago, because he still loves Dou Dou and does everything to not keep her involved.
After working together with the police to clear Jin Yuan’s name (since he wasn’t the one who sent the package to Dou Dou), Dou Dou gets into even more trouble when she finds out Jin Yuan is also under the command of Cai Bing Kun (played by Zhang Chen Guang), a major drug maffia boss. It turns out that ‘Uncle Kun’ had the package delivered to Dou Dou to get her involved so she and Jin Yuan could be together again – or so that he can keep her hostage to make sure Jin Yuan keeps following his orders.
Useful leverage, as Jin Yuan ALSO happens to be a spy for the Haibin police who are working on a plan to capture Cai Bing Kun’s gang for seven years now. The last part of the first half of the series consists mainly of Jin Yuan not trying to get caught in his work as a double spy and Dou Dou trying to think of ways they can both escape.

So far, they have managed to drag the whole story on for a long, long time. Not even that much has actually happened. What makes it feel so long is partly because of very long scenes with long dialogues. I swear, every scene has a long dialogue which goes on and on and on. I really feel like this is one thing that makes every episode feel so lenghty.
My prior experience with Chinese dramas is that they always try to incorporate as many stories/storylines/characters backgrounds into one series, even side characters’ that the viewer doesn’t find as interesting as the more important characters. I had this problem before with Meteor Garden 2018, they went way too deep into some past romance story of one of the F4 members that really didn’t peak my interest at all.
Now in Love’s Lies, there are a lot of stories besides Jin Yuan and Dou Dou’s.
To explain them all will take a lot of time, so I will go step-by-step.

On the one hand, we now have the story that happens within Cai Bing Kun’s gang. Dou Dou is kept hostage on the island where they reside, far away from the city and only reachable with one boat. Jin Yuan occasionally has to go back to the mainland to help with drug trafficking cases (and unknown to Uncle Kun, to meet up with the police lieutenant he’s spying for).
On the other hand, there is the story of Qiao Liang and the Haibin police force. They are still trying to figure out where Uncle Kun is hiding, and where Dou Dou went (they suspect Jin Yuan of kidnapping her). Besides the police lieutenant and the captain (I think?) no one in the police force knows that Jin Yuan is actually a double spy helping them to bring Uncle Kun down from the inside.
Qiao Liang has unknowingly almost ruined several cases in which he might have found out about Jin Yuan’s involvement with the police, all because he is a bit reckless and jumps at every opportunity to catch Uncle Kun. In the meantime, Qiao Liang is also getting sort of romantically involved with this captain’s daughter and has asked the captain if he could become his apprentice. The police captain, Captain Huang (played by Wang Yan Hui) has only his daughter Xin Yue (played by Lu Xing Chen) and doesn’t want her to marry a police officer because he lost his own wife because of his occupation and finds it too dangerous if she were to get involved in anything.
Anyways, so Jin Yuan is basically the chain that binds the two sides of the story together. He’s the only link between the police and Uncle Kun. However, he is being pressured a lot from both sides. The police is basically forcing him to stay there to finish the mission they have been working on for seven years. Uncle Kun is getting more suspicious about him by the minute (since he’s caught a rumor of there being a mole in their midst) and is forcing him to prove his loyalty to him more intensely than ever. Jin Yuan has by now already been forced to murder one of Uncle Kun’s closest associates because he couldn’t let himself be suspected and this particular guy was getting too close to the truth. He is fooling the maffia, putting his life at risk every single day. It’s a lot of pressure. And then there’s Dou Dou, who’s also not making things easier for him. She keeps getting in the way of his plans, thinking she needs to stand up for him and help him but all she does is get ing herself even more unnecessarily involved. She has already tried reaching the police and escape from the island, openly threatening to report everything to the police, getting Uncle Kun more agitated and angry as time goes by. And of course it all comes down to Jin Yuan to keep his woman in tow.
Because – Oh I forgot to mention this – Dou Dou was forced into marrying Jin Yuan on the island. If she didn’t become ‘one of them’, Uncle Kun would’ve been forced to kill her because she was a liability. So, they are actually married now. And while Dou Dou is all too happy acting like a lovey-dovey couple, Jin Yuan is scared as hell for her. He refuses to pretend he loves her when they’re alone, only in front of Uncle Kun does he openly speak of how much he loves her.

So, part 1 ends after Jin Yuan and Dou Dou decide to go back to the island (after actually successfully escaping it) and need to prove more than ever to Uncle Kun what they have been up to. At this time, Uncle Kun is more suspicious of Jin Yuan than ever.
At the same time it has been revealed that Uncle Kun also has a spy within the police force, one who has already reported at least one case of Dou Dou’s plan to report something to the police. His face hasn’t been revealed yet, but it looks a lot like it’s Captain Huang. Which, if true, would pose a new reason for him to reject Qiao Liang’s relationship with his daughter – he doesn’t want anyone to get involved in any way.

I think Luo Jin, who plays Jin Yuan, is the best actor in the whole series. His character is so incredibly layered and conflicted. He has so much backstory and everything makes it so hard for him to choose for his own happiness.
He grew up with a drug dealer as a father, saw him get in trouble with gangsters all the time. He lost his entire family to the drug dealing business that Cai Bing Kun took over, and for seven years he has been working secretly with the police to avenge his mother and brother. The reason why he disappeared from Dou Dou’s side also has to do with that he was summoned by the police when his father died or something. Anyways, he chose not to tell her anything because she didn’t know about his family history to begin with and decided to keep her safe by disappearing.
And now, at this stage, we start to see how hard it has been on him. We see how much he cares for Dou Dou and how he is literally not letting himself admit to it. The way he looks at Dou Dou is just so heartwrenching, he is so conflicted. He is in way too deep to stop now, his head is telling him to finish the mission, even though the lieutenant gave him a chance to walk away.
He’s the kind of guy who would sacrifice himself for anyone he holds dear, he just wants to do things his own way as long as he can keep Dou Dou safe.

And then there’s Dou Dou. Honestly I find her very annoying. She is very impulsive and naive at the same time. She is gutsy at the wrong moments, causing her to make the tensions even worse. It honestly seems as if she’s still not completely aware of how much danger she is in. And she does things… that are just plain stupid. For example, when she is locked inside the house at the island, the first thing she does is run to the phone to call the police. As if she can seriously just call the police from a maffia prison.
Also, her regular attempts to run away. She is like a little child sometimes. Whenever she thinks no-one’s looking, she thinks she can just sneak away. Girl, there’s armed guards spread over the entire island. I was actually really surprised when she actually managed to get off so easily that one time. But it also happened in a stupid way. She was literally on the boat, the guy was just peddling her around because she needed to clear her mind after Jin Yuan had to shoot that one guy. And then she came back and she saw those guys looking for her and then suddenly she was like ‘Oh welp, I can actually use this boat to leave!’ Like, girl. You were on the boat for an hour and the thought to sneak away didn’t occur to you earlier?!
I don’t know, she’s just a little too hysterical for me. And she cries a lot. Of course, in the situation she’s in, she can’t be happy. But it just feels like she’s trying to bluff her way out of something she doesn’t even fully understand yet. After they get forcefully married, she puts on this whole ‘I’m going to be a good wife!’ attitude and starts bringing Jin Yuan lunch at his office and stuff like that, and Jin Yuan is just like ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing, we got married so I can protect you and it wasn’t so that you could flaunt it and shout it out to the world because it’s freaking suspicious we got married overnight’. It’s like she keeps getting herself more and more involved while she should trust in Jin Yuan. Because of her radical behavior, she now passed three streaks with Uncle Kun and she is risking her life for nothing.

I’m confused as to why, even in this situation where they’ve each seen what the other has become in seven years and are in the same boat, Jin Yuan is still pretending and not telling Dou Dou the truth about what happened. I mean, he did tell her by now but it took a long time. He just kept her guessing and that’s why she has so many conflicting and mixed ideas about him. She doesn’t know for sure he is working with the police, she’s suspecting it but he won’t confirm it. She had the chance to run away and let Jin Yuan return to the island by himself, but she didn’t. It was an emotionally logical choice, because of course she loves him too much to be able to let him go back by himself and he will probably get himself killed. On the other side, I think it would’ve been better for her to disappear. She shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in this from the beginning. She quite fairly has nothing to do with any of it, except being Jin Yuan’s ex. But even when they were together she didn’t know about his secrets, so she really has nothing to do with any of the things she has now gotten herself involved with. And she keeps doing it. She keeps calling their bluff and she keeps getting herself into more danger. That’s what I find really dumb.

Dou Dou also had some contact with Qiao Liang, even though she didn’t know it was him. When he was chasing her on the train from Beijing to Haibin in the first episode, he secretly added himself to her WeChat under the alias of ‘Black Cat Detective’ and has gained her trust insofar that she sometimes sends him messages. Which is also weird, because she doesn’t even know who Black Cat Detective is and she still sends messages about her being in danger. And when she does, she sends some really poetic ambiguous stuff like ‘There is plane that will go down and I can’t stop it’. Like, how the heck is someone who doesn’t know what situation she is in understand what she means by that? If she wants help from someone outside of this whole thing, it doesn’t help to speak in code.
So Qiao Liang usually can’t make a lot out of her messages and always ends up asking his fellow officers for advice. And then he’ll be like ‘OH. The plane is a metaphor for Jin Yuan! Jin Yuan is about to do something and she can’t stop him!’ And then what. He still can’t do anything about it because he doesn’t have any proof of what Jin Yuan is doing.

I honestly don’t think Qiao Liang is a great police detective. He is super reckless and instinctive, but he lets himself get carried away and doesn’t think about the consequences to his actions. He’s the kind of guy who will just go after the culprit when he happens to see him without calling for backup. The ‘I got this!’ kind of a guy who really doesn’t ‘got it’.
Also, he’s not really smart. As in, as a detective I always reckon they see things others don’t see and they can see through coded messages and have some kind of nose for trouble. But seriously, he has had several on-point clues that he’s just let go because some people from Uncle Kun’s side tried to put him on the wrong trail. And then he’s just like, ‘Oh, guess I was wrong, bummer’. I mean, DUDE. He located the freaking island. He SAW Uncle Kun with his own eyes. There was a wedding on the island, the next morning when he sees Dou Dou she’s ‘suddenly’ married after disappearing for an entire day. He keeps waiting for messages from people after they disappear, too. Dou Dou has gone missing like 5 times and all he does is wait until he hears from her, wait until she finally picks up the phone. And then all she tells him is some lie about how she’s fine and there’s nothing wrong and he just lets it slide.
Honestly, all these really serious situations are happening and the police are just having promotion parties. They sit around the table to talk about ‘hm, we still don’t know where Uncle Kun is hiding’, and they’re literally not doing anything. The lieutenant is of course keeping some things under wraps, but it seems like Jin Yuan is the only one doing all the work for the police. He slips some hints to them every once in a while, like: keep an eye on this drug trafficking event. That’s it.
I also don’t understand where Qiao Liang is going with Xin Yue. He was all about making an impression on her at first, and they’ve worked together and she even helped in some cases, and now that she’s finally responding to his advances, he suddenly starts acting all casual like ‘Xin Yue? What about her?’ and acting like he’s too cool for school. I don’t really get him.

A point of criticism on the acting part: the guy that Jin Yuan had to shoot to gain Uncle Kun’s trust – Du Da Hai? – he really got on my nerves. His acting was really bad. He had this super bad guy face, bald and scarred and crooked teeth and everything, he was supposed to be Uncle Kun’s most loyal and most dangerous ally – but he was basically the Captain Obvious of the whole scene. He overacted everything, he named everything that was already obvious without mentioning. I guess it was his role definition to be a total badass except when in front of Uncle Kun. But he was literally the guy who verbally mentioned everything that was already clear.
He was the guy who, during the countless dinner scenes at the island house, would whisper to his neighbor ‘I wonder what is going on?’
In one scene, Uncle Kun called him and a few other guys to come out for a moment, as if there was something happening, but it was just to leave Dou Dou and Jin Yuan’s other trusted friend alone to listen in on their conversation, hoping they would reveal some information about Jin Yuan’s true motives. The next day, the bald guy literally says, ‘Hm, I wonder what yesterday was about. Uncle Kun asked all of us except Dou Dou and Shao Yang to come outside but nothing really happened. Why did he leave Dou Dou and Shao Yang here by themselves, do you think?’
I really can’t stand it when things are filled up with dialogue when it’s already so obvious what’s happening. Sometimes silent acting is so much powerful than spoken text.

Another thing that I noticed a couple of times is that sometimes there are some really sloppy continuity errors in between the scenes. At one point, Dou Dou delivers lunch at Jin Yuan’s office and you see her exit the room, leaving her bag on his desk. The next shot, she walks out of the building – holding that same bag. I mean, come on, did they honestly not notice this when editing? Besides that, there was this shot where Uncle Kun’s right hand man (I believe they call him Third Uncle) was pointing a rifle at Dou Dou. The next shot he was suddenly standing next to her with his hands folded. Things like that are just sloppy.

On the other hand, the scenery shots are really beautiful. In Chinese dramas they are really good at mapping the environment, bird’s eye view city shots but also panning over rice fields, bringing color into buildings to make things look appealing. So that’s something I like about it. However, story-wise, I’m not enjoying it as much as I’d hoped. Every character has an aspect I don’t agree with and sometimes some directing choices are just weird.
A few other examples being Qiao Liang holding his phone in front of his colleague WHILE HE’S DRIVING. He be like ‘look at this message I got’, making his colleague look WHILE HE’S DRIVING. Doesn’t this even get you minus ranking points in China? And for god’s sake, you’re supposed to be a police officer? Do you even know about safe driving?
And then, another part that I really couldn’t understand. Qiao Liang and another Haibin officer are after this drug trafficking truck. They’ve received news from their superior that they ought to go to another location because they received a tip that the exchange is taking place elsewhere. This is to get them off Jin Yuan’s trail. However, Qiao Liang pushes on and discovers that they are tailing the right truck after all. His superiors urge him to come back (because it’s Jin Yuan driving the truck and they can’t have them find out), but Qiao Liang pushes on, keeps driving, and when he catches up with him he cuts the truck off, leading to an accident. The truck plunges into one side of the car and they’re both knocked unconscious for a moment. Jin Yuan flees, Qiao Liang sees him from behind as he comes to. He then doesn’t even check whether his colleague is okay, he’s just like ‘He’s running away, come on, we gotta go after him!!’ He doesn’t even look twice at his colleague who still has his eyes closed. I’m sorry, but isn’t the safety of your fellow men more important? It’s things like this that make me wonder whether the writers really now how police officers are supposed to be.
Luckily, they are both okay, and the next day they’re all merrily throwing a party because they at least got the truck with the drugs in it and they’re all just laughing and no one is like ‘Dude, you almost got yourself and your colleague killed in this accident’.
Both in the maffia house and in the police force, people are acting so casual and it’s really making me uncomfortable. If it’s their intention to make this a serious story, they should make the people in it act more realistically.
If I were kept hostage in a maffia house, I wouldn’t open my mouth to make snarky comments to my capturers. Especially when they’re wearing arms. Just saying, there’s a difference between bravery and plain stupidity.

So, that was my review for the second half of Love’s Lies. However negative my criticism may sound, I do have to admit that it’s getting slightly more interesting now and I’m just very curious with what they’re going to fill up the remaining 22 episodes.

For now I’m going to retreat into another romantic comedy, just for some distraction. I’ll update this review when I finish the second half!
Wait for it, bye-bye!