These sorts of pieces are never fun to write.  But here we are, and the task at hand is what it is.  Unfortunately it’s hard for me to view Link Click II as anything other than a pretty massive disappointment.  Not that it was awful (though there were a couple awful moments) but that it was coming off such a creative high.  Anime (which Shiguang Dailiren technically isn’t) is certainly peppered with shows whose sequels were shadows of the originals, and Link Click II is surely not the biggest drop of the lot (I don’t consider Blood-C a true sequel but if you do call it that, it surely takes the prize).  But it’s still not even a patch on the first season.

So what went wrong?  Hell if I know.  As I said a few weeks ago trying to psychoanalyze a writer is a fool’s errand.  But the feeling in watching this season was as if a really great indie movie or TV series got a sequel from a big name studio, who pumped lots of extraneous flannel into it but never “got” why it was so great in the first place.  Where that analogy gets weird is that Haoling Li was (apparently) fully in charge of both seasons.  Whether this was his plan all along or he changed gears after S1 became a surprise hit I have no idea (again, fool’s errand).  But the result is the same, either way.

I could pick at the ways S2 fell short all day, but I’ve already done that for much of the past 12 weeks and I’m sick of it.  What stands out for me in watching this rather laboured finale is how all the emotional power of the story was washed away in a flood of melodrama.  This was all so overwrought – the staging, the music, most especially the script.  All the subtlety and elegance is gone – it jreally ust hits you over the head with a hammer, which I guess is a fitting analogy.  Frankly it’s almost hard to believe it’s the same writer.

I have to ask – why the hell did Captain Xiao not just come in guns blazing and take Qian Jin out?  You’re got two people suffering from obvious gunshot wounds, one of them a kid who’s dying, and you start throwing punches?  Sorry, that’s just really dumb – a complete short-circuit of logic to create a dramatic moment.  And the really sad thing is the moment isn’t even really dramatic, which is generally the case when they’re so artificially (and artlessly) manufactured.  Was I worried for Cheng Xiaoshi?  Sure (and given that Lu Guang and now Qiao Ling – thanks to Xixi’s memories – have seen his death, with good reason).  But that’s all residual affection earned by the first season.

As for the siblings, well, sure one feels bad for Xixi but her story was so maudlin that it doesn’t pack much of a punch, like a wounded Lu Guang.  And while it may be that Chen was pushed off the roof in the end rather than jumping, I think the credit for that goes to Xixi rather than Tianchen.  He’s just an arrogant little killer with a troubled past, and I have no sympathy for him whatsoever.  He’s obviously set up to be one of the big bads for S3 (yes, it’s coming), in partnership with Liu Min’s brother (his mysterious soccer ball friend), but frankly I’d have been much happier if he dropped out of the narrative altogether.

It’s all but official that a third season is coming, but obviously that gives me a lot less joy than it would have three months ago.  I’ll try to be hopeful and I’ll certainly give it a shot, whenever it comes.  But the odds of Link Click rebooting to its first season form are very long indeed – there’s just no reason to expect that to happen.  Having a series this good morph into something as mediocre as this season was is a major bummer, no doubt about it.  But at least the third season won’t have the power to disappoint me nearly as much.