I think the secret of enjoying this season of Shiguang Dailiren is diminished expectations.  I guess there’s no way to take that except as a criticism, but to me it’s just acknowledgement of reality.  The last couple of episodes have worked pretty well as a far-fetched conventional thriller, but in  S1 that would more or less have been the baseline, not the apex.  For a while in the middle Link Click II wasn’t even working on that level, so this is certainly better.  But ultimately it’s still a pretty stark dropoff from the first season.

In effect then, this all comes down to Qian Jin being a psychopath whose misplaced jealousy turned him into a murderer (and Tianchen too).  There’s a nice irony to this, given the way things played out with Tianchen, Tianxi and their father.  The cycle repeated itself, and their salvation was even worse than their original downfall.  But it still lacks any of the emotional resonance that any of the mini-arcs of the first season packed, even the single episode ones.  Those told complex human tragedies, this is just kind of plot for plot’s sake.  Not much grey, just black and white.

Tianchen, indeed, has the most interesting and pathos-driven arc in the story.  He was certainly a victim when this all started out, but his actions since then have dragged him far enough into the darkness that he’s probably beyond redemption.  As I said last week, “At some point Qian and Tianchen’s interests will diverge and that will be big trouble for the latter”.  That point has arrived pretty quickly, and even if Tianchen believes he knew all along he and Qian Jin were using each other, he was arrogant to think that as a child he could go toe to toe with a professional psychopath and manipulator like Qian Jin.

Was Tianchen a willing accomplice to the crimes Qian Jin had him commit?  I suppose that’s debatable, and he’s underage to boot.  But he, like the man pulling his strings, had something he wanted to gain and was willing to throw innocent lives away to gain it.  Obviously he wasn’t planning for Tianxi to be among them, as indeed she may now be – certainly Qian Jin has shot her, though perhaps not fatally.  But that’s the cost of doing business the way he was.  For both killers Cheng Xiaoshi is the key, the man who can go back into the past and fix their futures.  Except he can’t, and all this has really been for nothing.

That, as much as anything, sums up the waste that this season has turned out to be.  One arc covering an entire season, and it doesn’t pack the same punch as any of the single-episode storylines of the first.  It’s more or less a tale – not told by an idiot, perhaps – but still full of sound and fury signifying nothing.  Maybe that first season was just lightning in a bottle.  An alchemy that could never be recaptured.  Trying too hard to be clever is almost never a good idea, and after a season full of little gems, this one has been a handful of sand slipping through Link Click’s fingers.