BLISS RATING: ★★★+
“Two guys in love with each other can break boundaries and scale mountains together.” – WordyBoy
This BL series is all over the map, literally. It centered yet again around soul-swapping which is close to becoming a trope. It is also filled with a bunch of down-right awful people. Some even malicious and bordering on murderous. There is also a saint or two and at least one abuser who then sees the errors of his ways. And a mother is in a whole new category of unlikability that I have never seen before in a series. Let me try and put the pieces together here.
Win (Mix Wongratch) is the partial owner of a dairy farm and is quite involved in the operations of the business. Efficient and becoming effective, he is not a particularly pleasant young man and can be hot-headed, short-tempered, and abusive verbally towards people. He had a falling out with his best friend, Korn (Earth Watthanasetsiri) a while ago after the father left some of the shares to the farm to Korn. Win felt insulted, angered, and betrayed that Korn may have manipulated the father into giving him part of the farm. None of this was the case of course, but it made for a good story. Win is so angry that he bans Korn from the family.
Yet, Lin (Jan Supasap), Win’s sister, maintains a relationship with Korn, as they have all grown up together. Win and Korn, up until the falling out, had a close, symbiotic relationship. While perhaps not romantic, it was obvious they were in love with each other. Win, being irrational and unreasonable, drags Lin into the car to go see Korn to finally sever this relationship after he finds out she has a bakery business with Korn.
However, because of his fury, he gets into a car accident and somehow their souls are transferred into each other’s physical bodies. Lyn literally becomes Win and inherits all his traits. The family doctor, Non (While Phumphothingam), who has a crush on Lin, and of course Korn deduces what happened.
A Monk is called in to see if the souls can be switched back. Indeed, they can through a ritual providing Lin, now Mix, and Korn can get holy water from 4 different temple locations throughout Thailand. In reality, this is their journey of discovery to finding out how they truly feel about each other.
And that is both its blessing and curse. The story is quiet but uneven and becomes a bit tropey. It has some good moments of self-discovery though. Unquestionably, Korn is a saint and to some degree a rather passive individual who conforms to the personality of an abuse victim. Always putting up with Win’s whims. Win is not nice to him and is verbally abusive and hurtful to Korn throughout most of the series.
I found that a bit disconcerting. Yet, it showed the power of love on the part of Korn as he held onto the belief that Win would someday change. And honestly, he does as he visits and meets the monks who all essentially tell him that he is a very angry man, but the anger is counterproductive and toxic and to look inward towards the answers he seeks and see the love that is right in front of him. Interestingly, while the Monks all see ‘Lin’, they all know it is “Win’.
Where this story gets a bit weird (or should I say weirder) is as the story unfolds, the mother of Lin and Win appears to be dumber than a box of rocks. And in reality, she is. Rather than being a ‘mother’, she adheres to outdated traditions and does not see what the other two despicable relatives also named in the will as inheritors of the farm are doing. She knows their behaviors are clandestine, yet she remained ineffective about doing anything about it and oblivious of their motives.
Where the one area that she does take a stand on, as we find out later, is because of her homophobic fears. She manipulated the father into giving shares to Korn, knowing Win, ever the irrational, would explode, and therefore the intense relationship that she sensed between Win and Korn would end. And hopefully, since Lin and Korn were close would foster a romantic relationship, marry, and thus the shares of the farm would remain in the family.
Who really S.T.O.L.E. this series? Overall, this is a very well-acted series with some very strong performances by several of the actors. Admittedly, Mix as Win is very strong and portrays that hostile, angry, hot-headed individual with complete conviction. He frankly is scary to me. Yet, he was able to show a vulnerable side to his character and honestly did sense and feel he loves Korn deeply. And ironically, I understood his confusion with not fully understanding Korn’s feelings for him and ‘her’. This was a complex set-up because Win was Lin but had to act as Win throughout. So, the audience while seeing Win had to still sense it was Lin. While Earth as Korn is quite believable, the part became almost too much like a caricature and really showed very little growth or ability to help Win understand what his negativity was doing to him. His passivity also created confusion both for ‘Win’ and ‘Lin’ as he freely used the word ‘love’ to both. But who really is the focus here is Jan as Lin. She did a remarkable performance as ‘Win’. Taking on his nasty personality traits with ease even though her character was way more passive. And made them believably so. She also did a great job of just giving the audience a hint that maybe just maybe if things were different, she could fall for Korn. But she knew and accepted that the relationship between her brother and Korn was literally written in the stars. And she accepted that and worked towards them also seeing that. That was some fine acting to have to be both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sometimes quite literally at the same time. This series did an outstanding job of handling a rather sensitive subject matter when Lin gets her period as Win. It was handled in such a realistic fashion as only guys who are unfamiliar with all of that would handle it. It was quite funny and so on point that I deeply appreciated the efforts to make that whole situation feel so real and genuine.
Where the series felt a little flat for me was the belaboring of the journey for the water. It got frankly boring and only some of it moved the story along. It then got jumbled when the two other more despicable creature relatives get involved. They became more caricatures and buffoons. I really do wish the series had tightened up the relationship with Win and Korn more and made it more intense. It stopped short of having a real Romeo and Juliet moment which is what I wanted.
Despite the passivity of Korn, there were exceptionally strong overtones of connection between the two and honestly, Earth and Mix have tremendous on-screen chemistry. I could feel their connection and actually see the blossoming relationship. I appreciated the rather tender moments at the end of the series where we could sense their greater connection and love between them. With everyone around them accepting that. Sometimes that is all the story needs and perhaps that should have been more of a major focus for this series. Sometimes, there is nothing wrong with showing us a strong loving relationship early on and letting it grow naturally and letting us watch that love grow.
The one other thing that was exacerbating was the unnecessary need to make communication so obtuse. As an outsider looking in, I do not know or understand Thai culture very well nor its language. And so, I do not know if the use of obtuse, indirect, or mixed interpretative language is done because that is how things are said in Thailand or is it because of dramatic artistic license. It seems to me that a lot of issues especially with the gay relationships are artificially challenged because of the lack of clear communication and focus. Do they mean what they are saying? Or in reality, what are they saying? For example, does the word ‘like’ mean a sort of attraction to you, or does it mean love, or does it mean only in the sense of a platonic love. And sometimes, I cannot ‘read’ that even in the context of the scene.
This series suffers from that as well compounded by the fact who was Korn really directing his attention to – Lyn or Win? Sometimes that was unclear.
Nonetheless, this is still a good series to watch and the screen chemistry between Earth and Mix is worth the price of admission.
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