Remember Me (2022)

A life drama full of great messages, but a romance it is not

The first and foremost thing viewers need to know when coming into this drama is that this is not a romance drama. It is a life drama with a few romance plots. It's slow. It's meandering. It's chock full of time skips. There's not a lot of focus on developing romance or chemistry.

As a life drama, it's about our many main characters finding their way through life. From elementary to high school to university to working life. On their relationships between each other, their romantic partners, and their family. And how their respective character flaws need to be overtaken before they can get what they want. As viewer, we are taken on a ride to see how they come to terms with a change in future plans, grief, insecurities, trauma, distance from loved ones, and more.

We get to feel the nostalgia of watching how people communicate/d through the passage of time. How certain technologies made it easier, but were still subject to the same difficulties because of the people using them. But through it all, we were able to see a friendship that lasted through multiple decades, even as the people within it changed. And we got to take a look at several different family dynamics, and how they are still family regardless.

I loved this drama. It had a nostalgic and comfortable atmosphere that I enjoyed sitting in with each episode. I also enjoyed seeing how our mains grew as individuals and all possessed some trouble or another that I could relate to. There wasn't much focus on relationships, but I think that's okay. Because it wasn't the direction this drama was trying to take.

If you're coming in expecting your typical BL, you'll be sorely disappointed. The Life/Slice-of-life genre is not for everyone. So if that genre is not for you, I highly recommend skipping. Because it is actually a good story. But it's a good life story, not a romance.

However, I do wonder if the drama might have been too ambitious with the amount of main characters it was tackling. All of their stories were told completely, but I didn't get to emotionally connect with them as I usually would have liked, despite their performances being pretty solid. In my experience, most life dramas with such a big array of characters will choose an episodic format, which helps establish to viewers that they aren't meant to emotionally connect with the character too much. But by putting all of their storylines together into the same episodes, it made me feel like I was expected to connect deeper than what I actually did. Nonetheless though, it is a quality that is common with life dramas, so I can't really hold it against this production in particular too much.

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It’s really not a BL series.

I placed spoiler alerts at the end of this review.

This series is mostly about a group of friends that struggle with their problems throughout life. This is really not a BL series because the BL storylines are mostly treated as a secondary thought. However, that’s not the main problem for me. The overall story concept was actually a good one. See the spoiler alert at the end of this review if you want more information. However, the script was a complete mess. It suffers from the two main problems that is often seen in Thai series: too many storylines and too many supporting characters. The script started off really good in episode 1, but then the cracks begin to show by episode 3. By episode 7, the script starts to make no sense and the logic behind the characters’ actions don’t add up. Overall, the acting was ok. Some of the actors were better than the others. I expected better from this cast considering they are not newbies. There were also some poor editing choices. One major editing choice caused a major timeline continuity problem in episode 11. There was a lot of wasted screen time starting from the middle of the series and onward. This did not need to be a 14-episode series. They easily could have trimmed all of the useless filler screen time to make this a 10- to 12-episode series. I also don’t understand why the Special Moment Director’s Cut at the end of the series was done and not incorporated into the other episodes. The songs they used were good, but the background music throughout the series was bland and very annoying. As for the ending, see the spoiler alert at the end of this review if you want more information.

Random notes:

I know everyone else was complaining about the bad wigs, but I thought it couldn’t be that bad. I was very wrong. It’s almost like someone showed up with a box of wigs and dared the production team to place them in as many scenes as they can. This could basically be turned into a drinking game.

The opening and closing credits are way too long.

******Spoiler Alerts******

I give the screenwriter credit for writing a series about the different means of communication with characters that don’t know how to use basic communication with each other. This was the only successful thing that came across in the script. I had an idea this was the general concept and was happy it was confirmed in the last episode. I actually gave an extra point for this.

Am I supposed to believe that none of Name’s friends went back home for any of their breaks during the first 2 years in college? None of them, not once? This is just a small example on some of the lazy scriptwriting.

It does show happy outcomes for all of the characters in the last part of episode 14.

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