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Review: Kidnapping Game (十日遊戲) (2020)
This was a good thriller drama. It wasn't perfect, but it had a lot of things going for it.
What impressed me right off the bad for this show was its incredibly fast pacing, but at the end, the story slowed down considerably and there wasn't really much to keep me hooked. In addition, there was a lot of extra backstory that didn't really factor into the main story line. The fast pacing would've worked really well with an incredibly focused story, and there was just too much fluff that lowered my impression of the drama.
Otherwise, the acting was really good, and the cast was kept very small, which suited the thriller story.
Overall, I would still recommend this drama for its fast paced story telling and its good acting, but after doing some thinking, I find that the story isn't as good as it could've been.
Spoilers.
Story
The crux of the story was as follows. Shen Yun got into a fight with her sister Lu Jie, and Lu Jie hit her head and died. To save her, Shen Hui suggested that Shen Yun go around town so that they could fabricate a fake premise as to how Lu Jie died.
When Shen Yun went out, she bumped into Yu Hai. Shen Yun consulted her dad, who concocted the plan. Shen Yun would convince Yu Hai to kidnap her and blackmail her dad for money. Then they would frame Yu Hai for Lu Jie's murder.
It technically worked too, but Yu Hai was smart enough to figure out what happened. In addition, Shen Yun fell in love with Yu Hai, so she was a bit wary about pinning the entire thing on him.
This part of the story was good. I could've done without Shen Yun's feelings for Yu Hai because I felt it kind of cheapened the thriller.
The other plot that unfolded alongside our main plot took place in the future, with the cops Wu Yuke and Miao Jia investigating Lu Jie's murder. That part was fine. There were some parts where I felt that Wu Yuke was a bit too smart, but I'll let it go. Also, I felt that Miao Jia idolizing Wu Yuke was really cheesy and also a bit unnecessary. Giving us backstory for them didn't really add much to the story in my opinion. And while Wu Yuke was connected to Tian Peng, that part of the story was pretty much unnecessary.
Which leads me to Shen Hui's backstory with his sworn brothers Tian Peng and Xu Lifeng. That side plot felt pretty unnecessary. What did it add to the kidnapping game? It gave us backstory to Shen Hui as a person, but I couldn't think of how it was significant to the story. Tian Peng had power over Shen Hui and Xu Lifeng, I guess, but why did that matter? Why did the truth of Shen Yun's parentage matter?
I felt that this drama would've worked better if it just focused on the kidnapping game. The police subplot was fine, but I think they could've toned it down. And I think Tian Peng and Xu Lifeng's parts in the drama could pretty much be taken out.
Considering how fast the pacing in the show was, it just didn't make sense to explore any relationships that weren't directly related to the kidnapping game between the three main characters of Yu Hai, Shen Yun, and Shen Hui.
There were even some backstories of the main character that felt unnecessary. Yu Hai's backstory was that he had an abusive dad and his mom suffered for it. But what did we learn from it other than the fact that Yu Hai was not a super moral person? Not to mention Shen Hui's entire backstory was maybe just to explain what happened to him, but it just felt so out of place when I started to realize that it had very little to do with the kidnapping game. Perhaps Shen Yun's backstory with Lu Jie and Shen Hui was the only backstory that I actually felt interested in.
I also felt that this story should've ended a few episodes before it actually did. That, or just remove the story line about the murder weapon used by Tian Peng, Shen Hui, and Xu Lifeng. I think that the ending of this story should've focused on Yu Hai and Shen Yun both turning themselves in, which it did, but the lead up to that focused too much on Shen Hui's background that any tension that had been built up was kind of wasted.
Production
As I mentioned, this show was extremely fast paced. I was so impressed because of how much had happened in the first episode. So kudos to the writers for this. I think it's something that we are really missing in Cdramas, that love to stretch their stories far longer than they need to be. Because the show was very fast paced, I liked that the episodes were shorter, so that I wasn't overwhelmed each episode.
I felt that the costume and setting could've been a little more realistic. What I mean by that was that it felt a little too...Cdrama filtered. For example, Shen Yun had a full face of makeup when she was living with Yu Hai and honestly it made it hard for me to get into the story at times. I would've been more interested in "Lu Jie" if she looked like she had run away from home better. Also, I think the show wanted to present Yu Hai as some sort of bitter incel but so much of him did not suit that. His house, for one, was EXTREMELY nice. Also, this guy was way too savvy to be a shut in who only knew how to code.
Of course, the acting was terrific. I'm kind of glad that Liu Yijun got a big role in this show. I so commonly see him as a villain, which he was in this show, but we got to see him in a bigger capacity. I'll talk more about the actors in the character section.
Characters
Yu Hai
Yu Hai was the head of a video game company who was desperate to get financial backing for his game. That was how he met Shen Hui, and it was because he wanted to go to Shen Hui's house to better convince him that he bumped into who he thought was Lu Jie.
Lu Jie proposed to Yu Hai that he "kidnap" her to get a ransom from Shen Hui, that would pay off his massive debt to a loan shark (and then Shen Hui and Shen Yun would frame him for murdering Lu Jie). During the kidnapping process, we saw that Yu Hai was very savvy in how he covered his tracks. Little did he know that he had done all of that for nothing because Shen Hui had planned all of this.
After Yu Hai and Lu Jie got the money, she wanted them to run away together, but Yu Hai refused, probably because he was so invested in his video game.
After Lu Jie was discovered dead, Yu Hai felt that something was up and he started his own investigation into Shen Hui and Lu Jie, whom he discovered was actually Shen Yun.
As cold as he was, however, he had fallen for Shen Yun, and that was what convinced him to protect Shen Yun and turn himself in for "kidnapping." It was kind of lame, but I'll let this go.
Yu Hai's backstory was that he had an abusive father who had supposedly fallen from his apartment. His mother was abused by his father, but I think it was implied that his mother was also not a very good mother. When we saw his mother, she was at a long term care home. When Yu Hai's dad had fallen down the apartment, Wu Yuke was one of the officers investigating the death. I thought we were going to find out that Yu Hai had actually pushed his father off of the railing, but it was kind of left ambiguous, which is fine as well. I think the point of the backstory (or at least what I took away from it). Was that Yu Hai grew up in a background, and became a cold and cutthroat person because that was what he needed to be able to survive both abusive parents.
After Ming Dynasty, I think more people started to notice Zhu Yawen. He is indeed a very good actor. He was good at acting like the cold tough dude who wanted Lu Jie out of his face as soon as possible, and later the determined kidnapper who needed his money. While Yu Hai tried to act cool, he did have a weak point, which was the small bit of affection that Shen Yun had showed him, and that's what brought him down. Like I said, I think it was a bit weak, but Zhu Yawen still did well with what he was given.
Shen Yun
Shen Yun was originally introduced to us as Lu Jie. She was your typical rich brat who'd run away from home because she felt that her dad favoured her sister. Over time, she fell in love with Yu Hai, and though she wanted to run away with him, he rejected her.
Following her departure from Yu Hai, she was rather melancholy, because she loved Yu Hai but had framed him for murdering her sister. Even though her dad had done so much to cover up her crime, she had planned to turn herself in, only stopped by Yu Hai at the last minute.
At the end of the drama, Shen Yun wanted to committed suicide after writing a confession, which she sent to Miao Jia. However, she was discovered before she died and was saved at the hospital. When questioned by the police, she took the blame for everything, acknowledging that she had pushed Yu Hai to "kidnap" her and that she had framed him. However, this directly went against what Yu Hai said in his confession, so the police could easily tell what was going on.
Shen Yun actually had a good relationship with her stepsister Lu Jie, but Lu Jie had turned to drugs and had also started doubting her father's love for her. Their growing distance was what led to their scuffle and Lu Jie's accidental death.
I liked Jin Chen as an actress after watching her in Wu Xin: The Monster Killer. In the first episode, I was super impressed with her. Basically, I think most young female actresses in Cdramaland have played some sort of brat or immature princess, so I felt like a naive Lu Jie was such an easy role for Jin Chen. She just played her so naturally.
As the drama progressed, the naive Lu Jie turned into the remorseful Shen Yun, and Jin Chen played her well too. I think the fact that Jin Chen can keep up with the other more experienced actors of the show is a testament to her acting ability.
Shen Hui
Shen Hui was Shen Yun and Lu Jie's dad, as well as a very skeptical investor. We first knew of him as the investor who didn't like Yu Hai's game. He was very critical of it, believing that it was too dark, and was just Yu Hai's personal project instead of something that could be marketed to the masses. He was extremely harsh on Yu Hai and hit where it hurt.
Over the course of the show, we found out that Shen Hui was a very protective father, concocting up this entire plan to save his daughter from facing a harsh jail sentence and having a criminal record.
Towards the end of the drama, a part of the of the story focused on Shen Hui's background with his two sworn brothers, but like I said, it felt so irrelevant to the rest of the drama. Maybe it was supposed to show us why Shen Yun was so precious to him but I felt like the writers didn't need to dedicate that much time to showing conflict between the brothers.
Shen Hui was initially presented to us as super harsh, but his relationships with his daughter and his third brother were supposed to show that he was a sympathetic man. I guess. I don't think we really needed to know about Tian Peng and Xu Lifeng other than Tian Peng held power over him and Xu Lifeng was sympathetic to Shen Hui.
I would've been more interested in knowing what Shen Hui thought of Lu Jie. It was implied that he did at least care for her, but to what extent? I remember that at one point Shen Hui said that he had to protect Shen Yun because she was his 唯一 "only one." Of course, because Lu Jie was dead, Shen Yun was his only daughter left, and it made sense that he'd do what he could to protect his surviving daughter. But what if we interpreted it the other way? What if Shen Hui had only ever considered Shen Yun to be his daughter, because she was his daughter alone? I would've been far more interested in exploring that facet of Shen Hui.
I guess the point of this side plot was to give us context as to why he died. And perhaps the crew wanted to fully utilize Ni Dahong since it would be a waste to hire him and only use him for one scene.
Liu Yijun did a good job in his role. We know him for his villanous roles, a notable one being Xie Yu in Nirvana in Fire. So he was really convincing when he was terrorizing Yu Hai and attacking his weak points. But his love for Shen Yun, even fully well knowing that they were committing a crime, was very interesting. I felt that the story was trying too hard to make us like him by showing us how kind he was to Lifeng, but I think I would've liked him even if we didn't see him with his third brother.
Lu Jie
Lu Jie, the real Lu Jie, never actually appeared in the timeline of the drama. She was dead before Shen Yun left the house.
All we knew of Lu Jie was that she had had a good relationship with Shen Yun, but had turned to drugs and was starting to distance herself from Shen Hui and Shen Yun. Based on what Shen Yun told us, her death was an accident, caused after Lu Jie had injected herself with drugs and slipped when trying to wrestle with Shen Yun.
Wu Yuke
Wu Yuke was the main investigator for Lu Jie's death. He was a bit...generic, but not in any way that was interesting. Wu Yuke was smart, but in some instances, his smarts seemed to come out of nowhere. When he told Miao Jia his far-fetched theory of Shen Hui and Shen Yun framing Yu Hai, it sort of came out of nowhere. He just said it, and yet we didn't really see enough of his thought process to really see where it came from.
Like every detective cop in literature, Wu Yuke had a past case that haunted him. His past with Tian Peng and his undercover friend Du Lei constantly came up, but it never amounted to anything, which annoyed me to no end. Wu Yuke would've been a perfectly fine character without hinting to the fact that Tian Peng haunted him, because they literally interacted once, and not even in a way that was significant. That interaction at the very end would've gone the same way even if they didn't know each other.
Wu Yuke was also coincidentally the cop who'd investigated the death of Yu Hai's father. Again, this wasn't necessary. If Wu Yuke was as smart as he was supposed to be, he would've gotten enough information from the police file to piece together a picture of what he thought Yu Hai was like.
IN ADDITION, Wu Yuke was ALSO the cop who'd saved Miao Jia when she was a little girl. The hero worship from Miao Jia was annoying, mostly because it wasn't anything new and nothing came of it.
Wu Yuke's past with Yu Hai and Miao Jia made me feel that Wu Yuke was a bit miscast. His actor definitely looked too young to have known Yu Hai and Miao Jia as children.
I think the show tried to hype up Wu Yuke way too much and also in ways that are hardly new, and so Wu Yuke ended up feeling very bland.
Miao Jia
Miao Jia was Wu Yuke's underling, helping him with the investigation. Miao Jia was most interesting when she was doing her own investigative work. She was very determined and very daring, which was not always the smartest, but it was interesting to see how her judgment and common sense would fail her when it came to getting the job done.
Where Miao Jia got annoying was her hero worship of Wu Yuke, and the fact that Wu Yuke didn't think to set boundaries.
Again, the fact that we've seen this kind of hero worship done a hundred times made it feel very boring and cringey. Hero worship can be shown in many ways and this show decided to show it in the most boring overused way.
Zhou Mei
Zhou Mei was Yu Hai's mother. In the timeline of the show, she was in a long term care home. The first time we saw her, the loan shark was giving her a visit to scare Yu Hai. And later on, we saw Yu Hai visit her, but he never seemed happy when he was doing it.
Most parent-child relationships are complicated. There was always going to be part of Yu Hai that loved his mother, but he also couldn't say that he liked her because of the abuse he suffered at her hands.
Tian Peng
Tian Peng was Shen Hui's sworn older brother, and the one implied to be the evilest among the three of them. I can't remember if Shen Hui borrowed money from him, which would make sense as to why Tian Peng had a bigger role in the show, but even if Shen Hui had, the story could've been very smooth without his presence.
Anyway, Tian Peng was basically always holding power above Shen Hui and Xu Lifeng. He'd forced them to participate in murders a few years back, and he was also responsible for crippling Xu Lifeng.
Xu Lifeng threatened to uncover the knife that would prove that the three of them had committed murder, and Tian Peng couldn't have that. Other than that, it wasn't really explained what exactly Tian Peng held over the two brothers, and just that he was an authority they did not want to deal with.
In the end, he had a scuffle with Shen Hui, and he stabbed him, claiming self defense.
Xu Lifeng
Xu Lifeng was the third brother of Tian Peng and Shen Hui. He was implied to have reformed. He now had a wife who was very ill, and he was just focused on her health.
Shen Hui had asked Xu Lifeng to do some things for him, but it was never really discussed what it was that Lifeng did for him. I'm guessing that it was just supposed to vaguely show that Shen Hui and Lifeng were starting to plan to overthrow Tian Peng.
He said that he'd taken his wife to the hospital but they said that she'd been ill for too long and that it was too late for them to be able to nurse her back. I think that was what gave Lifeng the courage to definitively go against Tian Peng and to retrieve the incriminating knife. In the end, he did give his life to get that knife to Shen Hui.
Themes
The thing about this show was that there were a lot of ideas that were started, but nothing came of many of them. When the show started, I thought a lot of things would be expanded on, but they were not.
Mushrooms
Shen Hui had accused Yu Hai of being a mushroom, something that would never grow except in the darkness. And I thought that that mushroom analogy would persist, but it did not. We did get backstory on how Yu Hai had grown up in the darkness, but nothing really came of it. So what that Yu Hai was not a person of supreme morality? He was changed by the power of love, wasn't he?
Lies and darkness
I guess the topic of lies was a theme that was explored, but it was also a rather generic theme that can easily be fit into a thriller, where the point is to keep giving us new information.
Yu Hai's game was about lies, and how the character would beat the game when they'd told enough lies. Shen Hui thought it was too dark, and he accused Yu Hai of being a morally dark person who would never become good. Ouch.
But perhaps it was because Shen Hui came from a dark background that he was so sensitive about these dark topics.
Lies came up over and over again, but like I said, it was because this was a thriller story and not because it was a conscious decision made by the writer. Shen Yun's entire role as Lu Jie was a lie. Xu Lifeng had kept a lie from Tian Peng, etc.
Overall
I think this story was more style over substance. The way that the story was told was extremely engaging. It was so fast paced that I couldn't binge it because too much was happening and I needed time to process it. So I really did appreciate the shorter episodes.
But there was just a lot of unnecessary other stuff that was added to the show, and it bothered me because nothing came of them in a way that was particularly relevant to the main story of the show, the Kidnapping Game.
I would still recommend it though, because I know that some people would really enjoy this show even if the story wasn't airtight.
What impressed me right off the bad for this show was its incredibly fast pacing, but at the end, the story slowed down considerably and there wasn't really much to keep me hooked. In addition, there was a lot of extra backstory that didn't really factor into the main story line. The fast pacing would've worked really well with an incredibly focused story, and there was just too much fluff that lowered my impression of the drama.
Otherwise, the acting was really good, and the cast was kept very small, which suited the thriller story.
Overall, I would still recommend this drama for its fast paced story telling and its good acting, but after doing some thinking, I find that the story isn't as good as it could've been.
Spoilers.
Story
The crux of the story was as follows. Shen Yun got into a fight with her sister Lu Jie, and Lu Jie hit her head and died. To save her, Shen Hui suggested that Shen Yun go around town so that they could fabricate a fake premise as to how Lu Jie died.
When Shen Yun went out, she bumped into Yu Hai. Shen Yun consulted her dad, who concocted the plan. Shen Yun would convince Yu Hai to kidnap her and blackmail her dad for money. Then they would frame Yu Hai for Lu Jie's murder.
It technically worked too, but Yu Hai was smart enough to figure out what happened. In addition, Shen Yun fell in love with Yu Hai, so she was a bit wary about pinning the entire thing on him.
This part of the story was good. I could've done without Shen Yun's feelings for Yu Hai because I felt it kind of cheapened the thriller.
The other plot that unfolded alongside our main plot took place in the future, with the cops Wu Yuke and Miao Jia investigating Lu Jie's murder. That part was fine. There were some parts where I felt that Wu Yuke was a bit too smart, but I'll let it go. Also, I felt that Miao Jia idolizing Wu Yuke was really cheesy and also a bit unnecessary. Giving us backstory for them didn't really add much to the story in my opinion. And while Wu Yuke was connected to Tian Peng, that part of the story was pretty much unnecessary.
Which leads me to Shen Hui's backstory with his sworn brothers Tian Peng and Xu Lifeng. That side plot felt pretty unnecessary. What did it add to the kidnapping game? It gave us backstory to Shen Hui as a person, but I couldn't think of how it was significant to the story. Tian Peng had power over Shen Hui and Xu Lifeng, I guess, but why did that matter? Why did the truth of Shen Yun's parentage matter?
I felt that this drama would've worked better if it just focused on the kidnapping game. The police subplot was fine, but I think they could've toned it down. And I think Tian Peng and Xu Lifeng's parts in the drama could pretty much be taken out.
Considering how fast the pacing in the show was, it just didn't make sense to explore any relationships that weren't directly related to the kidnapping game between the three main characters of Yu Hai, Shen Yun, and Shen Hui.
There were even some backstories of the main character that felt unnecessary. Yu Hai's backstory was that he had an abusive dad and his mom suffered for it. But what did we learn from it other than the fact that Yu Hai was not a super moral person? Not to mention Shen Hui's entire backstory was maybe just to explain what happened to him, but it just felt so out of place when I started to realize that it had very little to do with the kidnapping game. Perhaps Shen Yun's backstory with Lu Jie and Shen Hui was the only backstory that I actually felt interested in.
I also felt that this story should've ended a few episodes before it actually did. That, or just remove the story line about the murder weapon used by Tian Peng, Shen Hui, and Xu Lifeng. I think that the ending of this story should've focused on Yu Hai and Shen Yun both turning themselves in, which it did, but the lead up to that focused too much on Shen Hui's background that any tension that had been built up was kind of wasted.
Production
As I mentioned, this show was extremely fast paced. I was so impressed because of how much had happened in the first episode. So kudos to the writers for this. I think it's something that we are really missing in Cdramas, that love to stretch their stories far longer than they need to be. Because the show was very fast paced, I liked that the episodes were shorter, so that I wasn't overwhelmed each episode.
I felt that the costume and setting could've been a little more realistic. What I mean by that was that it felt a little too...Cdrama filtered. For example, Shen Yun had a full face of makeup when she was living with Yu Hai and honestly it made it hard for me to get into the story at times. I would've been more interested in "Lu Jie" if she looked like she had run away from home better. Also, I think the show wanted to present Yu Hai as some sort of bitter incel but so much of him did not suit that. His house, for one, was EXTREMELY nice. Also, this guy was way too savvy to be a shut in who only knew how to code.
Of course, the acting was terrific. I'm kind of glad that Liu Yijun got a big role in this show. I so commonly see him as a villain, which he was in this show, but we got to see him in a bigger capacity. I'll talk more about the actors in the character section.
Characters
Yu Hai
Yu Hai was the head of a video game company who was desperate to get financial backing for his game. That was how he met Shen Hui, and it was because he wanted to go to Shen Hui's house to better convince him that he bumped into who he thought was Lu Jie.
Lu Jie proposed to Yu Hai that he "kidnap" her to get a ransom from Shen Hui, that would pay off his massive debt to a loan shark (and then Shen Hui and Shen Yun would frame him for murdering Lu Jie). During the kidnapping process, we saw that Yu Hai was very savvy in how he covered his tracks. Little did he know that he had done all of that for nothing because Shen Hui had planned all of this.
After Yu Hai and Lu Jie got the money, she wanted them to run away together, but Yu Hai refused, probably because he was so invested in his video game.
After Lu Jie was discovered dead, Yu Hai felt that something was up and he started his own investigation into Shen Hui and Lu Jie, whom he discovered was actually Shen Yun.
As cold as he was, however, he had fallen for Shen Yun, and that was what convinced him to protect Shen Yun and turn himself in for "kidnapping." It was kind of lame, but I'll let this go.
Yu Hai's backstory was that he had an abusive father who had supposedly fallen from his apartment. His mother was abused by his father, but I think it was implied that his mother was also not a very good mother. When we saw his mother, she was at a long term care home. When Yu Hai's dad had fallen down the apartment, Wu Yuke was one of the officers investigating the death. I thought we were going to find out that Yu Hai had actually pushed his father off of the railing, but it was kind of left ambiguous, which is fine as well. I think the point of the backstory (or at least what I took away from it). Was that Yu Hai grew up in a background, and became a cold and cutthroat person because that was what he needed to be able to survive both abusive parents.
After Ming Dynasty, I think more people started to notice Zhu Yawen. He is indeed a very good actor. He was good at acting like the cold tough dude who wanted Lu Jie out of his face as soon as possible, and later the determined kidnapper who needed his money. While Yu Hai tried to act cool, he did have a weak point, which was the small bit of affection that Shen Yun had showed him, and that's what brought him down. Like I said, I think it was a bit weak, but Zhu Yawen still did well with what he was given.
Shen Yun
Shen Yun was originally introduced to us as Lu Jie. She was your typical rich brat who'd run away from home because she felt that her dad favoured her sister. Over time, she fell in love with Yu Hai, and though she wanted to run away with him, he rejected her.
Following her departure from Yu Hai, she was rather melancholy, because she loved Yu Hai but had framed him for murdering her sister. Even though her dad had done so much to cover up her crime, she had planned to turn herself in, only stopped by Yu Hai at the last minute.
At the end of the drama, Shen Yun wanted to committed suicide after writing a confession, which she sent to Miao Jia. However, she was discovered before she died and was saved at the hospital. When questioned by the police, she took the blame for everything, acknowledging that she had pushed Yu Hai to "kidnap" her and that she had framed him. However, this directly went against what Yu Hai said in his confession, so the police could easily tell what was going on.
Shen Yun actually had a good relationship with her stepsister Lu Jie, but Lu Jie had turned to drugs and had also started doubting her father's love for her. Their growing distance was what led to their scuffle and Lu Jie's accidental death.
I liked Jin Chen as an actress after watching her in Wu Xin: The Monster Killer. In the first episode, I was super impressed with her. Basically, I think most young female actresses in Cdramaland have played some sort of brat or immature princess, so I felt like a naive Lu Jie was such an easy role for Jin Chen. She just played her so naturally.
As the drama progressed, the naive Lu Jie turned into the remorseful Shen Yun, and Jin Chen played her well too. I think the fact that Jin Chen can keep up with the other more experienced actors of the show is a testament to her acting ability.
Shen Hui
Shen Hui was Shen Yun and Lu Jie's dad, as well as a very skeptical investor. We first knew of him as the investor who didn't like Yu Hai's game. He was very critical of it, believing that it was too dark, and was just Yu Hai's personal project instead of something that could be marketed to the masses. He was extremely harsh on Yu Hai and hit where it hurt.
Over the course of the show, we found out that Shen Hui was a very protective father, concocting up this entire plan to save his daughter from facing a harsh jail sentence and having a criminal record.
Towards the end of the drama, a part of the of the story focused on Shen Hui's background with his two sworn brothers, but like I said, it felt so irrelevant to the rest of the drama. Maybe it was supposed to show us why Shen Yun was so precious to him but I felt like the writers didn't need to dedicate that much time to showing conflict between the brothers.
Shen Hui was initially presented to us as super harsh, but his relationships with his daughter and his third brother were supposed to show that he was a sympathetic man. I guess. I don't think we really needed to know about Tian Peng and Xu Lifeng other than Tian Peng held power over him and Xu Lifeng was sympathetic to Shen Hui.
I would've been more interested in knowing what Shen Hui thought of Lu Jie. It was implied that he did at least care for her, but to what extent? I remember that at one point Shen Hui said that he had to protect Shen Yun because she was his 唯一 "only one." Of course, because Lu Jie was dead, Shen Yun was his only daughter left, and it made sense that he'd do what he could to protect his surviving daughter. But what if we interpreted it the other way? What if Shen Hui had only ever considered Shen Yun to be his daughter, because she was his daughter alone? I would've been far more interested in exploring that facet of Shen Hui.
I guess the point of this side plot was to give us context as to why he died. And perhaps the crew wanted to fully utilize Ni Dahong since it would be a waste to hire him and only use him for one scene.
Liu Yijun did a good job in his role. We know him for his villanous roles, a notable one being Xie Yu in Nirvana in Fire. So he was really convincing when he was terrorizing Yu Hai and attacking his weak points. But his love for Shen Yun, even fully well knowing that they were committing a crime, was very interesting. I felt that the story was trying too hard to make us like him by showing us how kind he was to Lifeng, but I think I would've liked him even if we didn't see him with his third brother.
Lu Jie
Lu Jie, the real Lu Jie, never actually appeared in the timeline of the drama. She was dead before Shen Yun left the house.
All we knew of Lu Jie was that she had had a good relationship with Shen Yun, but had turned to drugs and was starting to distance herself from Shen Hui and Shen Yun. Based on what Shen Yun told us, her death was an accident, caused after Lu Jie had injected herself with drugs and slipped when trying to wrestle with Shen Yun.
Wu Yuke
Wu Yuke was the main investigator for Lu Jie's death. He was a bit...generic, but not in any way that was interesting. Wu Yuke was smart, but in some instances, his smarts seemed to come out of nowhere. When he told Miao Jia his far-fetched theory of Shen Hui and Shen Yun framing Yu Hai, it sort of came out of nowhere. He just said it, and yet we didn't really see enough of his thought process to really see where it came from.
Like every detective cop in literature, Wu Yuke had a past case that haunted him. His past with Tian Peng and his undercover friend Du Lei constantly came up, but it never amounted to anything, which annoyed me to no end. Wu Yuke would've been a perfectly fine character without hinting to the fact that Tian Peng haunted him, because they literally interacted once, and not even in a way that was significant. That interaction at the very end would've gone the same way even if they didn't know each other.
Wu Yuke was also coincidentally the cop who'd investigated the death of Yu Hai's father. Again, this wasn't necessary. If Wu Yuke was as smart as he was supposed to be, he would've gotten enough information from the police file to piece together a picture of what he thought Yu Hai was like.
IN ADDITION, Wu Yuke was ALSO the cop who'd saved Miao Jia when she was a little girl. The hero worship from Miao Jia was annoying, mostly because it wasn't anything new and nothing came of it.
Wu Yuke's past with Yu Hai and Miao Jia made me feel that Wu Yuke was a bit miscast. His actor definitely looked too young to have known Yu Hai and Miao Jia as children.
I think the show tried to hype up Wu Yuke way too much and also in ways that are hardly new, and so Wu Yuke ended up feeling very bland.
Miao Jia
Miao Jia was Wu Yuke's underling, helping him with the investigation. Miao Jia was most interesting when she was doing her own investigative work. She was very determined and very daring, which was not always the smartest, but it was interesting to see how her judgment and common sense would fail her when it came to getting the job done.
Where Miao Jia got annoying was her hero worship of Wu Yuke, and the fact that Wu Yuke didn't think to set boundaries.
Again, the fact that we've seen this kind of hero worship done a hundred times made it feel very boring and cringey. Hero worship can be shown in many ways and this show decided to show it in the most boring overused way.
Zhou Mei
Zhou Mei was Yu Hai's mother. In the timeline of the show, she was in a long term care home. The first time we saw her, the loan shark was giving her a visit to scare Yu Hai. And later on, we saw Yu Hai visit her, but he never seemed happy when he was doing it.
Most parent-child relationships are complicated. There was always going to be part of Yu Hai that loved his mother, but he also couldn't say that he liked her because of the abuse he suffered at her hands.
Tian Peng
Tian Peng was Shen Hui's sworn older brother, and the one implied to be the evilest among the three of them. I can't remember if Shen Hui borrowed money from him, which would make sense as to why Tian Peng had a bigger role in the show, but even if Shen Hui had, the story could've been very smooth without his presence.
Anyway, Tian Peng was basically always holding power above Shen Hui and Xu Lifeng. He'd forced them to participate in murders a few years back, and he was also responsible for crippling Xu Lifeng.
Xu Lifeng threatened to uncover the knife that would prove that the three of them had committed murder, and Tian Peng couldn't have that. Other than that, it wasn't really explained what exactly Tian Peng held over the two brothers, and just that he was an authority they did not want to deal with.
In the end, he had a scuffle with Shen Hui, and he stabbed him, claiming self defense.
Xu Lifeng
Xu Lifeng was the third brother of Tian Peng and Shen Hui. He was implied to have reformed. He now had a wife who was very ill, and he was just focused on her health.
Shen Hui had asked Xu Lifeng to do some things for him, but it was never really discussed what it was that Lifeng did for him. I'm guessing that it was just supposed to vaguely show that Shen Hui and Lifeng were starting to plan to overthrow Tian Peng.
He said that he'd taken his wife to the hospital but they said that she'd been ill for too long and that it was too late for them to be able to nurse her back. I think that was what gave Lifeng the courage to definitively go against Tian Peng and to retrieve the incriminating knife. In the end, he did give his life to get that knife to Shen Hui.
Themes
The thing about this show was that there were a lot of ideas that were started, but nothing came of many of them. When the show started, I thought a lot of things would be expanded on, but they were not.
Mushrooms
Shen Hui had accused Yu Hai of being a mushroom, something that would never grow except in the darkness. And I thought that that mushroom analogy would persist, but it did not. We did get backstory on how Yu Hai had grown up in the darkness, but nothing really came of it. So what that Yu Hai was not a person of supreme morality? He was changed by the power of love, wasn't he?
Lies and darkness
I guess the topic of lies was a theme that was explored, but it was also a rather generic theme that can easily be fit into a thriller, where the point is to keep giving us new information.
Yu Hai's game was about lies, and how the character would beat the game when they'd told enough lies. Shen Hui thought it was too dark, and he accused Yu Hai of being a morally dark person who would never become good. Ouch.
But perhaps it was because Shen Hui came from a dark background that he was so sensitive about these dark topics.
Lies came up over and over again, but like I said, it was because this was a thriller story and not because it was a conscious decision made by the writer. Shen Yun's entire role as Lu Jie was a lie. Xu Lifeng had kept a lie from Tian Peng, etc.
Overall
I think this story was more style over substance. The way that the story was told was extremely engaging. It was so fast paced that I couldn't binge it because too much was happening and I needed time to process it. So I really did appreciate the shorter episodes.
But there was just a lot of unnecessary other stuff that was added to the show, and it bothered me because nothing came of them in a way that was particularly relevant to the main story of the show, the Kidnapping Game.
I would still recommend it though, because I know that some people would really enjoy this show even if the story wasn't airtight.