No question, for me Shiguang Dailiren II is a more prickly series than its predecessor.  It’s more difficult in every way.  More difficult to grasp, more difficult to feel, more difficult to love.  The last couple of episodes had me feeling as if that gap was closing a bit, but whatever progress was made in clarifying the plot was quite deliberately undone this week.  It’s a bold move to intentionally confuse things this much halfway through the series, but fortunately the story is interesting enough to carry that off.

I think it’s fair to say Xixi is the ability user based on what happened this week.  Or at the very least an ability user – her brother could be one too, though I’d bet against it at this point.  We know she’s sitting in the interrogation room saying she’ll only speak to Cheng, but before that we flash back to the final part of his trip into the past.  It remains brutal and unsparing to watch.  Tianchen tries to intervene to save his mother, and gets knocked unconscious by a hammer blow for his trouble.  The neighbor can’t bring himself to intervene directly but he does at least call the police.  And the father barely pauses at the prospect of what he’s done to his son.

This is the essence of why Cheng’s existence can be so brutal.  He wants to act, he can’t bear the pain of what he’s watching unfold, and Lu is lecturing him to stay his hand.  But then something very weird happens.  Cheng seems to shift to the mother’s point of view, and then gets bounced out of the photo altogether despite having no recollection of ending his stay voluntarily.  What happens in the past isn’t entirely clear either.  Both parents wind up dead; it seems likely that the mother killed the father with a hammer blow to the head.  But how did she get stabbed?  Did they struggle, and he did it to her?  Did she stab herself after killing him?  Neither of those possibilities quite ring true to me.

Another odd thing is that both children seem to disappear from the police record at this point.  Xixi at least seems to have wound up in the police station, at some point having gained the ability to speak.  She demands no listening devices – the captain smuggles one in on Cheng anyway, but the girl isn’t fooled.  She’s toying with him, obviously, but what’s her game here?  Eventually she demands coke (the drink, not the drug) and then to go to the bathroom with Cheng.  Officer Wang accompanies them – in the process confirming that the conversation was being listened  to – and then the three of them disappear on the way to the bathroom.

Also – what is Qian Jin’s connection with this case?  How is it that Lu disappears from his hospital room under police noses yet again?  And of course, what’s happened to Tianchen?  I don’t mind waiting a while longer for answers, though to have the rug yanked this far backwards this late in the series is a tiny bit frustrating.  It certainly takes balls to mess with a highly successful formula as much as Link Click has –  I think it’s unclear just how successful it’s been doing so, but it still has enough credibility banked to justify continued patience.