The First Light (2019)

The goods: The actors are pretty good looking and the chemistry is on point. Eye candy everywhere you look. Yum. Love some of the banters and dialogue, too. The fighting and action scenes are also praise-worthy. Kudos to the music too.

The bads: The plot is extremely predictable, to the point where it borderlines unrealistic or simplistic. The way some events play out, it gives a 'are the characters idiots!?' or 'are you for real!?' feeling.

You can tell it's adapted from a BL novel and they try to force it into a 'brotherly love' thing. Worth watching at least once? Heck yes. Re-watching? Not really, lol.

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Fairly interesting cop drama with some implausible events

As a cop drama, this series has a rather decent story about an undercover mission to infiltrate a drug smuggling network.

The quality is compromised by several rather implausible scenes, such as those of people getting gunshot wounds but still walking around quite easily and healing really fast. (Perhaps this is rather common in the genre, but it seems rather glaring in this one). Things also get somewhat ridiculous at times, such as in the last episode when Guan Jie shoots the drug lord right in front of the drug lord's armed guards who have their guns pointed ready to shoot--the guards do nothing even as she shoots the drug lord.

To its credit, the story is fairly decent overall, with a couple of good twists, and it features at least decently choreographed action sequences and camerawork. However, there are a few narrative threads that aren't given a chance to be developed fully before the story changes course. Zhang Chen and Guo Yang's tactics do not really seem to gain them much mileage for several episodes though it would have been more interesting, say, if they had managed to do more with their infiltration into Shen Yu's circle in their attempt to deal with the drug lord, Zhang Jiu.

There are also baffling elements in the story, such as Zhang Jiu's manipulation of the people around him. Zhang Jiu has supposedly taken over his father's drug business after his father dies two years before when Zhang Jiu was only seventeen. The sidekicks he has around him are logically people he has managed to get after his father's death. While Zhang Jiu may well have been learning the ropes from his father, it seems implausible that he has managed to do the things that he has supposedly done within two years, such as gaining Guan Jie's loyalty to him by rescuing her from the pits of poverty. Apparently there is enough time for Guan Jie to study medicine and become a doctor while also going around being Zhang Jiu's top sidekicks.

The romance elements seem rather weak, and almost seem like an overly zealous attempt to disavow the story's BL origins. Guo Yang's love for his ex-girlfriend doesn't seem convincing, and he certainly seems to have a closer bond with his "buddy" Zhang Chen. On the part of Zhang Chen, there is some unnecessary and ambiguous toying of the idea of his affections for Guan Jie. While the removal of the BL elements may be inevitable due to China's censorship rules, the strong bond between the two men could have been given more attention. Instead, we sense the two becoming closer in the way they address each other, but there isn't enough focus on their emotions.

This could have been an interesting BL that doesn't rely on the campus setting for a story, and I do wish a different adaptation had been made by a Taiwanese or Thai production company. However, at least the series doesn't tease BL fans only to disappoint. It just seems like something is missing that doesn't quite get compensated.

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