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meganbmoore) wrote2007-06-06 12:31 am
cdrama: Shades of Truth: through ep 11
Cdramas will eat you alive…alive…allllliiiiivvvveeee.
Ok, not really, but seriously…I finished one and immediately started another. Granted, a much shorter one(24 episodes as compared to Return of the Condor Heroes’s 41) and they’re very different series.
Shades of Truth is a modern comedy/romance series about two cops. One cop, Lam, is high ranking and appears to be little more than a goofy playboy after nothing more than the next promotion but, while that’s not ENTIRELY untrue, he’s actually very committed to his job and much of his outward demeanor is his way of getting things done without anyone catching on. The other, Aweto, is an affable patrolman with a hero complex who gets drafted to infiltrate the Triads. He would have been screwed, but a head injury makes him remember his past life where he was one of the heroes of Mount Leung, and gives him the skills he had in his previous life.
Even though he and Lam hate each other in their current lives, Aweto soon realizes that in their previous lives, Lam was his best friend and commanding officer, and he sets out to make Lam remember it. And uses some VERY unorthodox methods to do so, including trying to give Lam a head injury to duplicate the affect it had on him, and kidnapping Lam and recreating a simulation of their past lives. Lam, of course, pegs him as a psycho stalker and isn’t remotely amused, especially since he thinks Aweto is a mobster. HE may not be amused, but it cracks me up, especially when Lam is fending Aweto off with about 4-6 pairs of scissors and some scalpels.
I also adore the nominally secondary OTP of Lam and Sin-Sui, a “dowdy”(they say she’s dowdy, I just think she dresses very conservatively and professionally) practitioner of chinese medicine(which apparently is very different from a normal doctor, but just as respected) I say “nominally secondary” because, once she shows up in episode 4, there’s only marginally less screen time for her character and the main females, and ditto for pairing scenes. They meet when saves her from a live grenade she ended up holding in a bank robbery(too long to explain) and even though he’s incapable of seeing anything with the right equipment and trying to get it in bed, he’s so busy worrying about whether or not she’ll be ok after that that he completely forget to hit on her. And he does that classic “bad boy trying to scare off the good girl before she gets hurt” thing of setting it up so she’ll see him with a random floozy and think he’s scum(and not even hiding it from the other woman when she realizes what he’s up to) and then not sleeping with her afterwards, even though it was his original plan. And lets not forget that he putthe fear of God into a guy at a restaurant for trying to bully her(and, frankly, since Aweto was also there and he had a crush on her in high school, that guy should just be happy he got out of there alive)
I don’t care as much for the main pairing, though. Now, I adore Aweto…he’s nice, he’s fun and he makes a great hero. But Nichole…I just can’t like her. She’s supposed to be a modern and independent, clever woman with her life on track but who gets persecuted by other women and the press because men are drawn to her, but she’s TOO modern and TOO trendy(she’s a radio talkshow host, a magazine columnist AND runs a successful and trendy nightclub? A little much, I think.) and TOO fashionable, so much so that she almost starts to become a caricature, and the way she’s made up, she A) almost looks plastic and B) always looks like she’s a model in the middle of a photoshoot. She’d be ok as a best friend(would work really well, actually) but the way she’s portrayed, she’s hard to care about or sympathize with, for me(and I usually love the female character with her life and career on track, or at least who knows what she wants) as a main character, and as a result, I find myself not really caring about her.
Still, that’s just one character, and I don’t DISlike her, I just wish there was less focus on her, or at least less heavy handed attempts to make us admire and sympathize with her, and the series as a whole is great so far.
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