OP: “VORTEX” by Baisha JAWS (白鲨JAWS)
As so often happens, the last major premiere of the season is among the biggest. We’ve waited a long time for the second season of Shiguang Dailiren – it was announced in late 2021 – but there was little question it would be worth it. This series seems very much the personal baby of its creator and director, Haoling Li, who made an appearance at Anime Expo this month to introduce the world premiere. Link Click has made a bigger splash in the anime community than any donghua, I think it’s fair to say. And there’s a good reason for that, as to my tastes it’s the best I’ve seen by a pretty broad margin.
Haoling’s comments at A/X seemed to imply that the second season would be quite different from the first. Less reliant on episodic detective stories, and centered around the recurring plot that was set up in the last couple of episodes. This two-part premiere does nothing to suggest otherwise. It picks up right where the S1 finale left off and is pretty much non-stop banger action for 45 minutes. The writing here is so good that I don’t think we’re going to be looking at a better or worse scenario per se – that’s likely to come down to one’s personal preference as a viewer.
No question that Link Click is a series that has two distinct (if connected) personalities. It does do those episodic stories incredibly well – some of the emotions it generated in the first season were incredibly intense. If we don’t get much of that this time I will miss it, but there’s a lot of pathos surrounding the main trio to be sure. Anime, donghua, whatever you choose to call it Shiguang Dailiren is basically a sci-fi crime thriller. The medium and the language are irrelevant (apart from whether I make it eligible for my year-end lists) – what matters is the execution.
The MacGuffin of this season is clearly the new ability user who showed up at the end of S1, and as that cliffhanger played out was controlling the body of Qiao Ling. She’d already stabbed Lu Guang, who lies bleeding out on the floor. The police are lurking outside, waiting for orders to enter. And the killer Liu Min is being rushed to the hospital after attempting to kill himself. It had already been made pretty clear by the end of S1 that he was a tool in the hands of the mysterious ability user, though.
I would never say the animation in Link Click is lavish, and as such the fight scenes are always a bit of a mixed bag. It’s obvious that Li is trying to do more with less here, but he succeeds to an extent thanks to an interesting use of choreography. Both Qiao Ling and Cheng Xiaoshi have some combat training, and it’s obvious that the host’s muscle (and literal) memory remains important even when they’re being controlled. This is a pretty tense standoff, with Cheng mainly concerned with trying to save Lu but having to try and do so without giving away too much – or allowing the user to seriously damage Qiao’s body.
Apart from Lu’s peril, the main emotional drama is driven by Captain Xiao and his subordinate Bin Chen, whose wife is eight months pregnant with their first child. It’s he who collects Cheng – under suspicion for Lu’s stabbing – from the police station. Through a very clever bit of misdirection we’re led to believe that Lu has died on the operation table – it’s actually Liu Min – and that Cheng is going to have to decide whether to break the prime directive and go back in time and save him. That would have been the conventional way to go, but Shiguang Dailiren takes a rather more original path instead.
Bin Chen’s death is pretty unsparing, but that fits Link Click’s history. This is a comic series at times but it indisputably treads the darker paths of the human psyche. There’s no question that Lu and Cheng are going to have to directly confront the person whose ability seems to almost mirror theirs – and who’s already betrayed a desire to steal it. There are even hints that could happen as soon as next week, though that seems very unlikely to prove in any way definitive.
Given that this isn’t anime, it seems appropriate that it should occupy a pretty unique niche in the anime landscape. What makes Link Click so special is that it doesn’t fit any particular profile, be it anime or otherwise – it’s just a timeless and universal thriller with incredibly smart writing and very charismatic characters that happens to be Chinese. As much of a breakthrough as it’s been (and an A/X appearance says a lot) I still get the sense most anime fans either don’t know about it or are reflexively ignoring it. That’s very much their loss, as this series is some of the best TV drama we’ll see this year in any language.
ED: “THE TIDES” by Fan Ka (饭卡) and Baisha JAWS (白鲨JAWS)
Anchen
July 15, 2023 at 11:33 pmThis was my most anticipated show of the season. I really loved season 1, the way they set up the show with cliffhangers every episode but in a way that I really did want to come back for more as opposed to being annoyed or something. It’s done in a rather adroit fashion. This season I am interested to see where things go if the primarily or only focus will be between our heroes and the new ability user. While I do think this is a very interesting angle, I too will also miss the individual stories that were told throughout season 1. I liked the emotional moments that were there, the ability to feel and maybe make a tiny change either in the past or letting the present know something they may have forgotten. I’m curious to see where it goes in the second season.
I also want to take a small step back to say thank you for reviewing this series. I had not heard of it at all prior to seeing your review post of it where you said it was one of the best of that season. I don’t always have the same tastes as you but I do take your recommendations seriously and will try a lot of them, and this one was a definite hit. I can’t say if I am much of a fan of donghua or not. It’s more of an issue that I barely ever hear about them (I don’t think discussion posts for them are on reddit’s anime community). So I feel pretty blind to any that come out and even more blind if they are any good, or expected to be good since I rarely know their source material either. So thanks again for trying it and thus giving me the opportunity as well.
Anchen
July 15, 2023 at 11:57 pmGonna add one more comment. I am happy that Qiao Ling is getting apparently a lot more attention in this season so far. While she was in season 1, she very much felt like a side character, especially since they featured her prominently in the intro as part of the group. While I love Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang, if they make her feel more like a part of the group I think she could really add something to the group dynamic, especially since she had to go through with being possessed.
Guardian Enzo
July 16, 2023 at 12:13 amI kind of lucked into discovering this one myself to be honest. But if LiA lets me share that good fortune a little, that certainly makes me happy.
Panino Manino
July 16, 2023 at 12:00 amIt was actually just one extended episode instead of two.
Oh may, where I even begin?
Opening and Ending where released last week, but I managed to hold myself and not watch it until the yesterday to keep my hype under control. If I had watched the Ending earlier I would go crazy with the speculations. Did you noticed that it references Wells’s “The Time Machine”? But more specifically the 2002 movie? On that version the protagonists uses the time machine to try to revert the death of his fiancee… called Emma!
This can’t be a coincidence, right?
If the question of using their powers to bring someone back to life is the biggest tabu, big enough that Cheng would resist using his power even to save Lu, than I have to assume that this session will debate with the idea of saving or not Emma. After all, Lu didn’t died, so if someone will be saved by going back in time it’s Emma.
Oh please, save her, do it for me director…
Anyway, I remembered seeing comments that in this new season Qiao would be more a lead than she was in the first season and this episode shows signs of this. Her fight scene with Cheng was so good! The action and fights scenes in this series are refreshing, it’s more “realistic” than what we normally see in anime? It’s like those old Hong Kong movies.
But I can’t imagine how can Qiao survive in this story, with any powers. This episode was set up to show impossible odds against the protagonist. Not only they are being chased by this mysterious villain instead of chasing him, he is not alone, there’s a whole crime organization backing him.
Something very drastic will have to happen next episode.
Panino Manino
July 16, 2023 at 12:05 amJust a random thought.
Recently I had joked about waiting to see the reactions of people when they watched an upcoming anime where the villain is a “Teddy Bear”, but then Link Click premiered and seems like Stuffed Bears are important for the plot, and next week there will be AI no Idenshi with it’s own Stuffed Bear.
lHyDrAl
July 16, 2023 at 6:52 pmI ended up watching season 1 with the Japanese dub so I’ll probably wait for the dub for this season as well. Hopefully the wait isn’t too long.
Guardian Enzo
July 16, 2023 at 7:51 pmHow was it? I was hoping someone would sub the dub but it never happened.
lHyDrAl
July 16, 2023 at 9:45 pmI never watched much of the original Chinese version so it’s hard to compare but Sakurai and Toyonaga did a great job as Guang and Xiaoshi. I don’t have much experience with dubs in general but all of the lips were synced up to the Japanese audio which I wouldn’t think is the norm for a dub.
As far as subs, I ended up using the release from ember which used edited Funimation/CR subs so it was interesting comparing the English translation of the OG Chinese audio to what I was hearing in Japanese. Other than slightly mistimed subs it was a pretty seamless viewing experience and 99% of what I was hearing matched up to the subs.
Raikou
July 18, 2023 at 9:52 amI found this originally from your honorable mentions, and marathoning season 1 last year was a blast. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t watch this series, so thank you for that.
Also season 2 seems we will get one main case rather than episodic case, but I may be spoke too soon.
Anyway, the season opener is amazing, the stakes are raised, and I’m interested in how the plot will go.
Guardian Enzo
July 18, 2023 at 11:14 amYVW. Why I do this, basically.
We’ll see. I’d love to see some episodic stuff because that was really great, but I’m not expecting it.
Joshua
July 21, 2023 at 3:15 amSo, this show huh?
When I hear veterans of the anime industry claim that we’re losing talent to China or that China’s donghua industry threatens to overtake Japan’s anime industry over time, it feels like my mind keeps goes back to this particular show, that got all of this inexplicable acclaim from many places, including you, in particular. If Chinese companies are poaching away people from Japan to work on shows like these, I think anime is pretty much screwed hard. It feels like the kind of show that people have been clambering for from anime, namely shows with a “deep” message and is also of high quality, which judging by people here, is becoming non-existent in Japanese media. We’re also seeing this in games with Arknights, Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail dominating Japan’s mobile game industry through aping their anime aesthetics, as well as Tencent and NetEase poaching game industry veterans to make games for them. I fear that China is very much on track to make “better” Japanese media than the Japanese are currently.
Granted this could all go to bunk if it starts pushing Chinese nationalism, but how would I know if they’ve decided to start pushing Chinese superiority in their series? After all, those audiences in the mainland are eating up Japanese anime without much hesitancy (and I’ve heard very little buzz over there compared to over here, so this is clearly meant to drive soft power). And even still, those same veterans fearing that China could overtake Japan in soft power believe that the only thing keeping them back is the rampant government censorship. https://www.reddit.com/r/Donghua/comments/pzyoda/rant_from_someone_working_in_industry/