CANARY REPORT: SCI MYSTERY

[rageprufrock]

Canary Report: SCI Mystery

Canary Reports are a public service to help protect everyone who makes better choices than the Disgrace to Scholars Collective. We watch these and report back in so you don’t have to. Have a drama you want us to try out? Leave a comment below and let us know!

Where to Watch It: For in-progress English subs, a wild hodgepodge of YouTube, Daily Motion and some Japanese website -- all uploaded by the same subbing team. A real pain. Or, if you can understand or want to try tackling the Chinese, you can watch it here on Youku. Not that it matters because if you heed the below you will spare yourself the indignity of watching this.

Summary: Childhood friends and professional enemies Bai Yutong and Zhan Yao are flung back into one another’s orbits when a series of murders rocks Hong Kong. It’s up to the newly formed specialty task force, SCI Mystery, to try and catch the murderer -- that’s if flashy detective Bai Yutong and cold psychologist Zhan Yao don’t kill each other first.

Review/Comments:

I HATE THIS SHOW SO MUCH.

There are many, many reasons that I HATE THIS SHOW SO MUCH, but chief among the reasons I HATE THIS SHOW SO MUCH is that I had a friend in town around the time I was trying to watch this and I had to try and explain this show to her, and during the explanation, I used the words “rat slanket” no fewer than 14 times. Do you know the kind of looks a person gives you when you use the words “rat slanket” to them? I HATE THIS SHOW SO MUCH.

Reflexive primitive rage aside, SCI Mystery falls into a category of trendy idol (ish) drama that I find particularly obnoxious: nobody knows how to act, the show is built on a termite-infested foundation of style over any other possible influence, and the only thing carrying the entire production is how physically attractive the leads are.

On that point, at least, the show did its work.

The one in all white is Bai Yutong. He’s a rough and tumble too cool for school Hong Kong fancy cop who drives a sports car and has his hands jammed into his pockets 103% of the time.

(By the way, there’s a 90% correlation between bad Asian actors and keeping their hands in their pockets. Don’t believe me? Watch any shitty idol drama with a cast of barely legal twinks attempting to act while nearly fainting from hunger and repressing their homosexuality and they will all have their fucking hands jammed into their pockets because they can’t act and they don’t know what to do with their stupid dumb hands during a scene. And then go watch Zhu Yilong or Hu Ge in a drama and notice how this is not a factor at all. Because they can act their way out of a paper bag. Unlike everyone on this fuckshow of a drama.)

The one in all black is Zhan Yao. The one in all black is nicknamed by the one in all white “Cat.” For reasons unknowable, we learn in episode two that he owns a rat fur style slanket and some kind of rat animal hood that he keeps in his home and that Bai Yutong co-opts when he just decides to -- sleep there? Shower there? I swear to God I watched two fucking episodes of this show un-altered and under no chemical influences my only true takeaway was RAT SLANKET.



The general premise of the series boils down to Bai Yutong and Zhan Yao, ex-friends, are thrown together to solve a crime because there are a series of horrifying murders being undertaken throughout the city. The murderer(s) aren’t the masterminds, but rather puppets of a more evil power behind a literal desk. Will Bai Yutong and Zhan Yao -- abetted by their team of loveable randoms, about whom I absorbed literally nothing -- be able to save the day? Who fucking knows. Apparently Bai Yutong is a good cook and makes nice pasta. That’s something else I absorbed about this show. No more plot though. No siree.

But here’s the real reason people are probably talking about this show at all:

It is, on the surface level, similar to Guardian. A show about crime fighting (check), cute boys (check), and a quippy team (check check check). But for all that SCI Mystery has significantly better (if not more interesting) production quality, it’s utterly hollow at its core. I know it’s perhaps unfair of me to say so having only endured the experience of stuffing two trash episodes of this racoon fodder into my eyeballs, but honestly I couldn’t bear to go on and I was simultaneously using all my hate boner energy for Yan Xi Palace, another Masterwork of What Is Happening.

And oh yeah, about 3 minutes into the first episode, the boys jump off of a boat that explodes:

(Why?)

And Bai Yutong has to give Zhao Yao mouth to mouth on a rock and foam spune shoreline, shouting what a lazy cat he is, saying hadn’t they sworn they’d come back from this together.

(I hate this show.)

I don’t even care. Bai Yutong’s face looks like a Yaoi Hands Seme (the MOST NSFW) stepped off the pages of a bargain basement acid trip nightmare directly into my closed for business vagina. Fuck this show. Fuck rat slankets.

Canary Ratio: 0.1 (2/20 -- AND IT WAS TWO EPISODES TOO MANY)

Canary Flashpoint: I literally started fast forwarding about five minutes into episode one.

Comments

[rageprufrock]

Snail is actually on Netflix if you have access to it!

[tinny]

I don't (not exactly, anyway), but i am okay with youtube with subs from subscene.

And I've been meaning to rave about it to you for days already. It is sooo good!

I am floored, I did not expect it to be nearly this good.

The cinematography is awesome, it is so atmospheric! I was skeptical at first, because the setup is eerily similar to Memory Lost - the coolest of the cool super cops and the psychologist he doesn't respect (but changes his mind by episode 4) - but the execution is so deliciously untropey. There is no overacting that I can see. He is allowed to smoke and play basketball when he's stressed instead of the usual binge drinking. She is respected by everyone, and even the comic relief female colleague is actually not that obnoxious. I love their chief, too. (the Hippo guy?) Just... it's all so much better than I've come to expect from cdrama. (And there is a whiteboard with Chinese characters! Being handwritten... <3 I am so easy when it comes to Chinese. :) )

I thank you for this rec from the bottom of my heart. This is actually a show that I can rec without any caveats! Well, I guess I'll wait until I've seen the ending. But that is not going to be long now, I'm already on ep 9 of 20. (It is sooo good.)