Alien Space Sensor (2024)

Wasted potential

I am up to episode 20 right now and I think it is enough to get some thoughts in before this drama wraps up for the New Year. This drama started off pretty well, setting up Carlos Chan as a Criminal Psychologist who had grown up with the extraordinary power of seeing briefly into the future to see when bad things happen. I thought it was going to be a drama where he gets mental flashes of danger like in the series Angel where Doyle/Cordelia gets these head splitting flashes of people who needed help. But nope, it is a very tame TVB affair.

I really like Carlos’ acting here because he really feels genuinely nice and easygoing. I think it is how he naturally is, so he melded into this role very well. I remember watching him act like a crazed terrorist in the film Detective VS. Sleuths and it didn’t suit him. It felt too forced. He definitely suits the handsome nice guy role, and I lapped it up.

The love interest is Hera Chan who plays a cop. I actually quite like her here as she is passionate about her job and getting real justice for victims. She is surrounded by red tape and people who ignore her insights because of how young she is. It is quite annoying watching experience cops pin blame on someone based on nothing but “intuition” or “instinct” when clearly there was not enough evidence and Hera pointing this out often.

And we get the big bad of the drama played by Nicholas Yuen. He works at a mortuary as a coroner and has a really sad back story. He is the most complex character in the series and I feel that Nick really delivered here in the role as someone who does questionable things and yet you sympathise with the guy. That is something really rare to see on TVB.

So the story is that Carlos grew up with this power to see briefly into the future and see bad things happen. He dad wanted him to become a lawyer but he refused and became a Criminal Psychologist. We later see him meet with Hera and Nick, and there is a rocky start and but suddenly they are best buds hanging around with each other. We even get scenes where Carlos’ mom thinks Nick and Carlos were a gay couple, it was quite funny. But these funny scenes are very few and far between the other stuff that happens in the drama.

We slowly find out how unhinged Nick is as he suffers from severe bipolar disorder and has some huge mental issues. This was because his father, who was a married man, slept with a prostitute and that prostitute gave birth to Nick. His father’s wife found out, so the wife paid a gigolo to seduce Nick’s mom so she would leave Nick’s father alone. This led to Nick getting disowned by the mom and ending up at an orphanage, and later a mental hospital because - understandably - this trauma as a kid really messed him up. So, in the modern day whenever he encounters people he deems as terrible mothers or bad husbands, he would end up killing them and then secretly sneering. Holy crap! We also find Nick is a compulsive liar, telling the truth and twisting some facts so that it seemed he was not at fault.

The drama also tried to have things extra spicy by making Nick’s father as the same man as Hera’s, so Nick and Hera are half-siblings. Hera accepted he was her older brother but things get crazy when her mother and father find out who he is.

Meanwhile, Carlos keeps getting future messages, phone calls and video calls from the future on his phone from a woman called Mary, who - coincidentally - looks exactly like Hera. She keeps telling him a crazy serial killer is out there and the cops are after her and also he shouldn’t start a relationship with her because he goes missing. And that’s it. Huh?

Man, Carlos’ future vision powers are so wasted in this drama. They introduce it right at the beginning when he was a small kid, but it only happens like 3 times in the entire drama and Carlos is unable to do anything about the visions. I mean if he recognises the place he would rush there, but so far 100% of the time he has seen something, 100% of the time it will happen and he is unable to stop it. Why even give him these powers when he cannot do anything about it? This is like giving a candy bar to a severely diabetic person, what were the producers thinking?

And the Mary - future Hera - thing has not been explained yet. We get flashes to the future of Hera being hunted by the cops while trying to find out where the missing Carlos is and where the serial murderer was, but it was poorly written into the drama. We only know it is a flash forward future scene when the screen makes it look like you are high off drugs and you see Hera wearing a black hat. All the future scenes go nowhere, we just see Hera getting chased by cops and people shouting at her but we ultimately go nowhere. Why introduce this? You could have left out the stupid unexplained future contact with Carlos and just made those future scenes as the final few episodes of the drama where Hera solves everything. We already know Carlos future vision changes nothing, this would have made it more streamlined and not all convoluted.

John Chan plays Hera and Nick’s father and boy his acting was something else. It was as expected as in other dramas, but the scenes when he is in despair and showing his regret over being a terrible father to Nick were so over-acted. He just hammed it up to 11, crying out like a sad old martial artist in a Jin Yong Chinese martial arts drama. The only thing missing was him screaming 天啊 and teaching Nick 獨孤九劍. What I fund weird was how such a weak-will guy ended up having a child with another woman especially since he is so afraid of his wife. Man, he is so under her thumb that the thumbprint is visible from space.

Mimi Kung plays the mother to Hera and man, her character in this drama I am not sure how to feel about. This is because I understand her feelings as a woman who has a husband who had cheated on her and had a child with another woman, but at the same time the decision to hire a gigolo to seduce the other woman and then dump her was simply disgusting. This led to Nick’s awful experience where he was abandoned by both parents and becoming mentally deranged. And yet despite finding out about all this, she felt no guilt and doubles down. We’ll see if she redeems herself later, but so far I really am not sure what to think.

And then we have Zoie Tam as Hera’s superior. She plays a tough and strict cop who butts head with Hera often at the beginning, but later they come to an understanding and mellow out. I actually quite like her character as it was acted out very well, adding complexity as we see her tough side and her vulnerable side when we find out how bad her relationship with her husband was, and later how she blamed herself for how bad things got after he was murdered. She was very convincing in her role, but there is one problem, though. Have you seen her in other dramas like The Learning Curve of a Warlord or The Exorcist’s Meter 2? She was pretty in those dramas, but here oh my goodness… who was the make up artist because they did her dirty. They made her look like Michael Jackson. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, just make sure it’a not white like Michael Jackson!

For now this drama is just average because so many flaws hold it back. The final few episodes might turn this all around so who knows, but let’s wait and see.

Up to episode 23: okay what just happened? Man, it turned out I was wrong and Nicholas Yuen (Duncan) was not the big bad but an obvious red herring planted by TVB to misdirect us. The big bad was actually the Director of the mental hospital. I really did not see that coming, but it explains a lot. The victims of the deaths were all connected as they were or knew someone who was a patient at the mental hospital. Since Carlos was getting too close to working out who it was, the Director purposely moved all suspicion to Nicholas. Nobody would believe Nick was innocent, it even had me convinced it was him, until Nick concocted a plan to expose the real culprit. It was quite clever and it ended in a final confrontation against them at a BBQ place in the middle of the night. In a smart move, Nick put up a small hidden camera to record the whole thing as the Director busted into his monologue of why and how he killed his victims.

In their struggle, Nick was stabbed multiple times and was heavily bleeding out, leaving the Director to pour gasoline everywhere to burn everything down and pretend that Nick had committed suicide out of guilt. Unfortunately for the Director, he slipped on some gasoline on the floor and fell over, hitting his head and passing out. Nick grabbed the hidden camera and crawled out of the BBQ building, just as Carlos and Hera conveniently arrived to call him an ambulance. The Director “seemingly” died in the fire, with a charred corpse found later in the building.

Sadly, Nicholas doesn’t make it and died in hospital, but was at least able to clear his name and prove his innocence. Damn, the acting here was phenomenal and I felt so bad for Nicholas when this all came to light. Nicholas actually said in his next life he would want to be the son of his father again, but I say no way dude. Your dad was a nice guy but he was also the worst father in the world.

One thing did ruin the aftermath of his death for me. In one scene near the end of episode 22, there was a flashback to when Carlos was giving a lecture on how to control your emotional state by cupping a fist inside the other hand and breathing slowly for a few minutes to get the emotion pass. Nicholas was in this lecture and used it to control his outbursts when he could, but projected onto the wall was a slide with the title “Emotininol Control”. That clearly meant to saying “Emotional” as in “Emotional Damage”. How quick would it have been to edit that and fix the typo? The moment I saw it, it ruined the scene for me, kinda like getting ready to make love but the other person had really smelly feet. It kinda ruins the mood.

After some sad scenes, I realised that there were still 3 episodes left and that the future Hera/Mary storyline was not explained. So what did we just sit through then? And the moment I thought that, a new killer was introduced who liked to pick up girls in a taxi and then kill them with hammers. Suddenly, at the end of episode 23, there is a sudden weather change with rain and lightning so Carlos and Hera take shelter at a bus shelter, and suddenly he receives a video call and he can see future Hera/Mary getting attacked by this new killer. I have a sneaking suspicion the new killer is really the Director who managed to escape and replace his body with someone else's. This is the TVB thing to do. I don’t know how they are going to top the tragic death of “Duncan” but I have a feeling the drama already peaked.

Completed watching: what the heck. This drama really peaked with Nicholas. After he died the rest of the drama turned into a huge wtf fest.

So I was right, the Director didn’t die. Instead the body that died was his future self. Pardon? Apparently in the future he was chased by cops and he jumped off a patio where he used to live and fell, but instead of dying he travelled back in time!! What the actual f? How? Why? In any case the Director meets his past self and tells him about the future and how to commit murders while he took on a fake identity. That evening when Nicholas confronted him, the future Director went to visit and they got into an argument. Yes, the Director argued with himself, and so present Director decided to murder future Director and use future Director’s body to pretend he had died. Meanwhile, the Director’s father, who coincidentally was the Midnight Murderer, also fell down the same patio in 2005 and ended up 20 years in the future where our present is. From here it goes crazy and the Director’s father wants to kill Hera, but instead gets killed by his present day son. Carlos gets a sudden flash of the future so knew where to find Hera so tries to save her but gets stabbed to death by the Director. Hera managed to finish off the Director with a broken bottle that Carlos conveniently broke and placed on the floor for her. At the end of the drama, her desperation in seeing Carlos again made her jump off that patio and travel to the past to meet younger Carlos and give him a hug.

The time travel nonsense made no gosh darn sense. Apparently all you had to do was go to this old apartment and then jump off a patio and then as you hit the ground you would somehow be safe and would end up somewhere else in time. Why? Never explained. It was such a lazy and stupid plot device because it made no sense! And Carlos’ future vision powers are also never explained. Not only were they never explained, but they were never useful until right at the end, and even then they could not save Carlos. It was as useful as the power to breathe underwater but being afraid of water.

And man, the Director’s father is only seen in the last episode and he instantly - despite being from 2005 - was able to use Hera’s smartphone to access the internet and find out about the future within a few hours. So you’re telling me he managed to unlock Hera’s smartphone and then know how to browse the internet on the phone when he was only familiar with 2005 tech? Man, back then we barely had 2G on our candybar phones back then! Such nonsense!

And Hera, my goodness she was so stupid like doing all the wrong things. Her stupidity led to all the crap happening at the end of the drama, like absconding after being arrested and getting Carlos killed because she was captured. And her plan at the end to jump off the patio to travel back in time was so premature! She should have gotten the Mark-6 lottery numbers and took them with her as she went back so she can rebuild her relationship with Carlos again AND be rich. What a wasted opportunity! And the time travel into the past was not guaranteed! The Director’s father travelled to the future, so the time travel rules are not explained and were unclear. Why did he travel to the future but the Director travel to the past? Why?

This drama was so dumb. TVB cannot do sci-fi to save its life. Look, TVB, my dude, stop with the sci-fi nonsense until you get a good writer to pen a good script for you. Stick to mystical until then. This is why The Exorcist’s Meter and it’s sequel were awesome.

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Rocky start, but will eventually get better

This drama is pretty good. It has Carlos Chan's Fong Yat-Chun (Jason) as the criminal psychologist who helps Hera Chan's Madam Ying to solve high-profile cases, along with their forensic assistant friend Nicholas Yuen's Chong Ding-Kan (Duncan). Something that threw me off at the beginning was the unnecessary sci-fi plot where Jason can have premonitions. It's something that can easily be removed and does not do anything much with the plot. Same goes for him being able to contact Madam Ying's future counterpart Mary, which is just her fake name to avoid getting detected from the cops, can also be removed. It pretty much spoils what will happen at the end so as soon as she said she and Jason are going to become wanted, I can tell Jason would eventually kill Duncan and die somehow (his body covered in blood was shown in a teaser lol) then Mary will be wanted (judging from the promotional teaser).

Speaking about Duncan, his whole character was incredibly well-written. This is by far Nicholas Yuen's best role and his portrayal of a mentally-ill person with bipolar disorder was so well acted. You can feel the anger in his eyes and voice everytime he has a crashout. Which is understandable considering that he is Madam Ying's half brother after her dad got with a prostitute while taking notes for a movie involved in a nightclub, and the woman eventually gave birth to Duncan. His backstory was so sad that you can't help but root for him when he killed his mom, and was eventually about to kill Madam Ying's mother too after it was revealed she paid a guy to hookup with Duncan's mom in hopes to get her husband back. It was a really selfish move and I did hope for her to die, but that just shows how well written she was to be incredibly unlikeable. Mimi Kung did a great job of being a selfish mother who only cares about her own family and not Duncan's, as well as being a mother who supports her daughters. The actor who played the father is also really good, you can tell he was in an inescapable situation and was trying his best to please both sides, but in the end it didn't work, which resulted to Duncan relapsing. But the character I really hate was Madam Ying's sister. She's really annoying, and it wasn't just how her character was written, even the actress who played her makes me so angry whenever she does something, every word that comes out of her mouth makes me want to punch my TV everytime she appears onscreen. I don't know what's with the TV producer in writing these extremely annoying characters, but at least it's only one and not multiple. The other characters are fine. I don't understand the hate against Hera Chan though. She's pretty alright for the most part to me, even though her crying sounds so fake like he just immediately shout cries after someone dies, but luckily she doesn't do that for most of the drama. Even the supposedly annoying To Siu-Bo played by Anthony Ho who has a crush on Madam Ying isn't as annoying. You could tell he just cares about her and the family and means no harm.

I actually skipped some of the episodes of the drama because they got boring, but I started watching again after the case where they had to find out what happened to the missing sister. It still got iffy there, but after Duncan's first breakout where it was revealed he was Madam Ying's half brother, that's where I started to pick it up again. I haven't finished the drama yet, but so far it's been great. Just had a terrible start and unnecessary sci-fi subplot. It could have been just a police investigation, would make the drama much more interesting, but the sci-fi part really ruins it. The lighting is also pretty bad, it's too bright and blue. I would prefer the lighting they used in the teaser but oh well.

Update episode 24: Man, so the director of the mental hospital really was the killer. Although it wasn't really predictable since I had to rule out so many possibilities and the director was in it, it really was a good twist and thankfully his motive made sense. So after a hustle with him and Duncan, Duncan would eventually die after bleeding out which really sucked because we're in episode 22 and he already dies. The acting was really good here, as you could hear in his voice before he died that he was happy that Jason and Madam Ying no longer thinks he's the killer, but it's still really sad that in order to prove his innocence, he had to sacrifice himself. The thing that did bug me a lot, was to add in another mystery in episode 23 about a 'new' serial killer nicknamed the Midnight Killer. I feel that them pointing out that the director died from slipping on gasoline and getting burnt to death just makes the final case of the series so rushed, because there was a whole lot of build up for the alphabet killer, and now we're getting a last minute addition. The writers also tried really hard to make it connected to Jason so that it won't feel out of place by saying that he used to be Jason's neighbor when he was young and the ruled out suspect was also the son of the director.

Also apparently I would think Madam Ying would go fugitive after killing the Midnight Killer and going on the run, along with Jason dying, which yes I'm still going to think he dies in the final episode, but nope. Apparently the Midnight Killer used her gun to shoot Siu-Bo, and accuse her of killing him by placing the gun under her hands since he wore gloves to prevent fingerprints on the gun. Man I don't know why but everytime Anthony's character dies in a drama, it's always really sad. He really has the likeable charisma to him so I'd always feel heartbroken if he dies in the drama. His character was a genuine good guy and didn't mind that Madam Ying didn't like him back. Her crying did ruin the mood, how is the downgrade from her crying scene in On-lie Game, to this so big??? Anyways, after that she had to run away from Madam Chiu so that she could find Jason i guess? They never really discussed why she decided to run away instead of just being in custody, which would be a much better decision considering she would be safe in a jail cell and not be a victim of the midnight killer, but oh well. Turns out her long hair was a wig, but what kind of wig is that strong since we saw in the future flash that she'd get drowned by an old serial killer that Jason interrogated in the earlier drama, and her wig manages to stick on. Ridiculous.

We also learnt that the explosion of a car was not the same explosion that happened in Episode 4, which yeah made sense since she would eventually find out that someone saved him and he was wearing different clothing. Feel like it was a stupid reason to make him wear a suit in ep4 though during that car explosion, felt out of place since he never had a clothing style similar. And the call from the future still did not make sense. She tried contacting the author of a crime book, but it turned out to be Jason from the past, which helps connect to what happened in the first episode. I still really hate the sci-fi plot. It's absolutely not important to the story, we've made it this far and if it was removed it wouldn't even make a difference.

Update ep25: Wtf was that ending. So we learnt that the new Midnight Killer is actually the director, but guess what. He’s the director from the future which explains how he came back. He manages to kidnap Jason and tie him up telling him about the time traveling stuff. This just proves my point that the whole sci fi aspect of this show is so dumb. He was able to time travel from jumping off a building and falling into a specific patio. Like what’s so special about a patio? Also, when it was revealed that the original Director actually died when he confronted the director from the future, but if they were interacting, how did the camcorder Duncan recorded didn't pick up their voices? It can also be useful to not just close the case and continue the investigation, making the Midnight Killer case not feel out of place and random. So we get this confrontation between them, but Jason gets a premonition that Madam Ying will get kidnapped by guess what, the original Midnight Killer who was the director’s dad. At least that was the only time the premonition was useful, I feel like that’s the only scene they wrote where he had a premonition, but they realized it wouldn’t make sense, so they had to write more unnecessary premonitions for the earlier episodes which is hilarious.

When it flashes back to the original on how she gets kidnapped, the OG (gna call him that to save space) wakes up and tells her that he fell down and then just woke up. Originally I was going to say “How tf did you fall from that height, and just wake up normally 25 years later with no scratches), guess what. When he fell 25 years ago, he only went missing because he ‘time travelled’. So the OG is actually from the past who only travelled to the future. He kidnaps Madam Ying into a school, which used to be a mountain when he buries his victims, and Jason came to fight him before a ghost Duncan comes in to prevent Jason from going into the bad side. He went to untie Madam Ying until guess what, the director came in to kill his father. I really like the director as the killer, but the whole time traveling thing can be removed which bothers me even more. Without it wouldn’t even have an impact in the story.

We also got one of the worst endings ever with Jason dying in the end after getting killed by the director. Him dying is not the problem, not all dramas need to have a happy ending so this was a risk well taken, the problem is that Madam Ying couldn’t accept so guess what, she jumped off the building into the same patio and then time travelled to the past when Jason was still studying criminal psychology. I mean it’s not really a bad thing if you think about it, she gets to be with Jason again, Duncan will still be alive so that’s another great thing, if she encounters him she’d be able to fully believe him that he wasn’t the serial killer. But what if she runs into her original self in that timeline? It’s also an incredibly selfish move for her to time travel just because Jason died, she could’ve stayed in her current timeline to take care of Jason’s mom. But not only did she leave Jason’s mom to grieve on her on, now her family won’t even know where she is because of her time travel, so now they’d have to look for her as well. Her character went from really smart at the earlier episodes to just really dumb with her decisions, all because of ‘time travel’.

I know I’m going hard on this because of it, this is why TVB shouldn’t lean into sci-fi stuff if they can’t learn to write perfect stories with them as there are some great time travel dramas, hell TVB even had a great time travel drama, Over Run Over, but that was 8 years ago, and TVB can’t craft another good story with the concept? I have to drop down the score a bit because the time traveling actually pissed me off. Better than Secret Door though, another drama made by the producer last year, but that isn’t really a high bar for it, that drama was just terrible.

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Who is the female lead and why is she so bad?

Carlos Chan is good/decent as always and the rest of the cast seem OK as well. The story is kinda interesting. BUT, and this is a big BUT for me, wow, who decided that the female lead was ready for a starring role in a POLICE drama no less is clearly high on drugs. TVB probably doesn't have the highest quality stable of actors left, but wow, she takes the cake. She completely overacts (it's cringey to see her reaction to someone dying). She literally looks like someone who is in an acting class with the professor telling them how to emote. And also, watch her run. It's....ummmm...unique? I normally wouldn't make such comments, but it stretches credibility that she's this amazing, hardcore police officer when she runs like a chicken flapping its wings....in slow motion. I hope the story takes off soon or it's donezo for me just simply because of the horrific actress.

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