TV home from home (II)

Back with more telly. You may have noticed that I haven’t updated the tag about movies for a bit; that’s because everything at the cineplex near us has been bumped in favour of some space battle thing. I will go see it, but it can wait. (If it’d been a new Star Trek film I would have seen it at the 00:05 showing, then again the following night. But it’s not.) That’s a rant for another day; we don’t live in The Big City (A.K.A. London village) so we don’t get more than a few blockbusters at our cinemas. If we’re lucky we get a foreign-language film from time to time, but that has to be a festival winner. And even then it’s shown DURING THE DAY WHEN EVERYONE IS WORKING SO WE CAN’T WATCH IT ANYWAY.

I digress.

So the most recent foreign drama I’ve watched is My Dearly Sinful Mind, A.K.A. 心理追兇Mind Hunter. Featuring the usual TVB regulars Kenneth Ma (馬國明), Vivien Yeo (楊秀惠), Michelle Yim (嚴惠玲), and Willie Wai (韋家雄), it also brings a few new faces to light for me. Grace Wong (王君馨) was a powerhouse the whole way through, and Matt Yeung (揚明)’s portrayal of the young ‘orphan’ with Asperger’s was excellent.

In a nutshell: Dr Icy Leung is a clinical psychologist; a recent case of a bloke with learning difficulties killing 4 high-school girls in a school changing room has just ended in the bloke being sentenced to life in prison. However, Dr Leung is convinced his mental state was affected by something and he’s not actually to blame. Dr Leung’s boyfriend - who happens to be Dr Chung, her fellow clinical psychologist - doesn’t agree with her and one night they have a fight about it. She gets out of his car and storms off - straight into the path of an oncoming car. She dies, he guilt-trips himself about it for 4 years afterwards, the world moves on. Until that is the one survivor from the killing spree, Wong Hoi-Ching, returns to HK from seemingly nowhere. Dr Chung, determined to prove his deceased girlfriend was right in her professional assessment, begins to dig into what happened that day, starting with the prisoner who apparently killed the 4 girls.

This looked like a simple ‘oh my poor dead girlfriend; I must avenger her death’ affair when I started it, but it quickly turned into a philosophical dilemma; if you’re up against a complete sociopath, do the ends justify the means in stopping them? How far do you go, no matter the consequences, to prevent them from killing more people just to get what they want?

The complicated web of friends, acquaintances, characters they pick up on the way and how the consequences stay with them - it’s all grist for the mill. You think you know someone, and then they rock up in episode 15 with a shocking secret. It doesn’t look like it has an impact on the overall plot, but just wait for it. Then we have characters and their two faces - everyone does, this is true. But when it means they stray very far indeed from what people see on the surface, it makes for some good telly in terms of furthering the question posed above: can you pretend to be a sociopath to catch a sociopath? And if someone gets hurt because of it but it helps you catch the killer, does that make it ok?

Long, winding, full of red herrings and moments of OH COME ON YOU HAVE TO SCREW THIS BLOKE OVER OR I’LL SCREAM, it also makes you appreciate a slow, steady crafting of getting everyone to their inevitable conclusion - only to have it turned on its head by a character who decides that Enough Is Enough and the Big Bad has to stopped by any means necessary. I did enjoy the final episodes, and I have to say, enjoyed very much the taking-down of a few characters. However, as with most TVB dramas, it left it on a such a note that I’m worried that, if another season ever happens, then the writers will have to literally fish pretty hard to get themselves out of where it was left. But I’m completely ok with that.

Overall verdict: 9/10. Rewatchability? Hmm. Now I know how it ends and all the secrets, probably not very likely to watch the entire thing again (28 episodes). However, the last 3 or 4? Definitely.

And that’s it for now. Wondering what to watch next, but I think I have an idea.

Soopy twist.