Let's just cut right to it, this show was painfully boring. There, I said it. A story built around partial amnesia has real potential, but between the choppy scene structure and random flashbacks thrown in constantly, the whole plot ends up feeling more tangled than it needed to be. The romance doesn't fare much better either, it's written so poorly that I never really found myself invested in this couple. Both leads come across stiff on screen and deliver their lines in a really awkward way. The show runs 8 episodes, each somewhere around 30 to 35 minutes. Hanuel, a 29 year old language teacher, wakes up after an accident only to realize his memory stops at age 19. It turns out he'd been in another accident back then too, which is why his memories cut off at that point. He has zero recollection of the fact that he's currently living with his childhood friend Saebyeok, who's now a huge celebrity. That makes the whole situation even harder for Hanuel to wrap his ...
Lu Feng comes from serious money and falls hard for his classmate Xiao Chen. Xiao Chen's hesitant about it initially but eventually comes around, and the two start a genuinely happy relationship for a while, until things fall apart because of circumstances outside their control. The show does a nice job covering that early romance. Lu Feng's father sends him off to the US specifically to keep the two apart, and Xiao Chen ends up having to switch schools. Years down the line, fate throws them back together when Xiao Chen realizes his new boss is none other than Lu Feng. All those years apart have hardened Lu Feng into someone bitter, so things are rocky between them at first, but eventually the misunderstandings clear up and the two reconcile. That happiness doesn't last though, because Xiao Chen's mother finds out and reacts so badly she suffers a heart attack. Around that same period, an accident tied to Lu Feng leaves Xiao Chen's younger brother seriously hurt, creating even more distance between them. Before she passes away, Xiao Chen's mother pressures him into marrying a woman who's had feelings for him. When Lu Feng finds out, it destroys him, and he throws himself into work just to avoid thinking about Xiao Chen. Five years later, Xiao Chen's marriage ends in divorce since his wife always knew his heart wasn't in it. He goes looking for Lu Feng, who's now a hugely successful businessman, but all that bitterness from the past has turned him into someone who ends up essentially holding Xiao Chen captive in his home and forcing himself on him repeatedly. Eventually Xiao Chen's brother tracks him down and gets him out of that situation. Lu Feng's buried insecurities start spiraling into something closer to a mental health crisis, and he ends up hospitalized, with Xiao Chen staying by his side the whole time. By the end, after nearly ten years of this cycle of separation and reunion, they finally find their way back to each other for good.
As you can tell, there's a ton happening across these episodes. Alongside the main couple, there's also a secondary gay relationship involving Xiao Chen's brother and his own love interest, and they pop up here and there throughout, though they never really become central to the story. I genuinely loved the earlier episodes, watching how completely smitten Lu Feng is with Xiao Chen and their early days of dating. It plays out as a sweet, easygoing romance in that stretch. The actor behind Lu Feng nails that awkward sweetness and youthful naivety of someone falling hard for the first time in his life. Xiao Chen's innocence in those scenes is just as endearing. But as the show moves forward, that repeated pattern of them splitting up, getting back together, splitting again, and reuniting again, each time with a slightly different flavor, ended up being both engaging and honestly a little exhausting after a while. The real character arc belongs to Lu Feng, who shifts gradually from a loving partner into someone possessive, then fully obsessive. He transforms from a hurt, emotionally wounded lover into someone far more calculating and dark underneath it all. Xiao Chen, on the other hand, ends up falling into more of a damsel in distress role. Sure, he's grieving his parents and dealing with heartbreak, but he rarely pushes back against anyone and spends most of the show getting pushed around, whether it's by Lu Feng, his own brother, or his mother. I wasn't thrilled with how the final two or three episodes pinned Lu Feng's obsessive behavior on bipolar disorder. I think something else could've worked better here, especially given how they portray his eventual treatment, since we all know that road isn't simple. He's a guy shaped by years of abuse from his father and repeated heartbreak, so I get the backstory, I just don't get the diagnosis they landed on.
Overall the storyline does feel a bit dated, and it probably would've hit even harder five years back, but I still ended up enjoying it now. I wouldn't call it a great show by any stretch, but it delivers that old school, intense, toxic BL energy really well. A lot of what makes it work comes down to the actor playing Lu Feng. He captures that difficult transformation from a soft, loving high schooler into a deeply obsessive corporate CEO with real emotional weight behind it. He carries the whole thing even when the plot gets pushed into pretty extreme territory. (7/10)
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