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

[naye]

"Rat slanket" I am CACKLING.

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

...it sure did. Almost well enough to tempt me to watch it. Definitely well enough to tempt me to watch it if I hadn't been warned about the lack of good acting which is the ONE THING that makes even trash garbage watchable.

Has anyone actually watched the whole thing? And liked it?

[annebd.livejournal.com]

LOL. All of this is 100% true and yet I still watched all the way through episode 10 and only stopped because I couldn't find any more subbed eps.

If you've only watched the first couple eps, you missed the introduction to Bai Yutong's cousin, Bai Chi. Frankly, that's the world's loss, because I feel like you would have some hilariously terrible things to say about his character. You might even disike him more than Guo Changcheng. Because he's a doofus, but he's also apparently a genius. There's an amazing scene where Zhan Yao suggests, after approximately 30 seconds of conversation, that he has a 170+ IQ because of his ability to recognize a pattern of symbols that he wrote down from the Mensa test. That's... not how that works.

[tinny]

I am so very much laughing my ass off!

I know people who like this show, and I watched the first half of ep one on their recommendation (granted, it was not subtitled at the time).

I noped out of it faster than you could say... rat slanket, probably? Even though I definitely need more stuff to distract me from the pain that is Guardian, so I keep trying more shows and not finding much good.

(Maybe with the exception of Memory Lost, which is quite a good distraction, even though the low video quality is a waste of Bai Yu's beauty.)

[kitsunec4]

A+ rage, RIP your blood pressure but that’s some hilarious rage.

But like, I would argue the leads aren’t even pretty enough to suffer through watching this show for. Not even one episode.

[gixininja]

Tbh though Bai Yutong actually does nothing for me on the attractiveness scale but I agree that it was the lack of acting and coherent storyline that had me all ???? because the first episode kind of sets them up as rivals/enemies but then suddenly they're all cozy together and domestic in the one ep?

Anyway, Bai Yutong's sister gets introduced later and she's one of those 'strong' girls who are actually privileged stalkers with no sense of personal boundaries and her 'romance' (stalking) of one of the secondary characters made me very much nope out.

[jukeboxhound]

The above thread reminds me, I was wondering if anyone would mind shedding some light on the cultural context, if any, of a particular trope? Bai Yutong's older sister (...Qi Jiang, I think? I can't remember 2/3 of these characters) is outright stalking, harassing, and assaulting Gongsun, but no one seems to think it's particularly strange, not even Gongsun, who mostly just acts exasperated and cold over it. One of the show's themes is poor mental health (however incorrect or humanly impossible half its portrayals are), but Qi Jiang's behavior is never really lampshaded as unhealthy. She's also very attractive, intelligent, wealthy, and from a well-connected family.

So I was wondering, is this kind of plot the usual kind of "a 'no' just means 'try harder and be persistent'" that we also see in American media or are there some deeper nuances/contexts I'm missing?

(Srsly I wish I'd taken everyone's advice on this drama here.)

Made an account just for this

[juurensha]

Thanks for the head's up on this show! Btw, is anyone potentially going to be watching and reviewing the drama Advance Bravely?

[carabarks]

Is it bad that after reading this scathing review, I just want to watch it more? Just for the pure trashfire it is. If I can sit through Guardian's CGI for Priest's plot and Zhu Yilong, perhaps I can sit through SCI for the eye candy.

In other news, I hope you guys will do Untamed soon. I don't know if it's at Guardian's level of CGI, and I'm still on the fence about the idol acting, but Xiao Zhan is a treat for the eyes and I'm intrigued by the way the prod team's working with the source material. What's with Chinese wuxia and 13 years of absence, face changes before overcoming political turmoil in order to clear someone's name? The protag here sent me on a tangent where Mei Changsu transmigrates post-Meiling II.