Prologue
Yun Ru is in her blue box, lying on her bed, when she suddenly sits up at a question from Zi Wei. On her memory wall, 1998’s Li Zi Wei asks 2019’s Huang Yu Xuan what it felt like when Wang Quan Sheng left her. They share earphones, sit under their tree, and listen to “Last Dance.”
What does it feel like to know you’ll never be able to see someone again, yet also know that you’ll always be thinking of that person?
Yu Xuan responds that it feels like you’ve become very, very small. No matter how hard you try to stop thinking about him, you’ll find that the world is full of reminders of him. Everything will feel really heavy. The corners of your mouth will feel so heavy and you’ll have to work so hard just to squeeze out a smile. Your tears will feel so heavy that even if you tell yourself not to cry, they’ll slip out.
You’ll tell yourself that maybe this feeling is like the tide. Maybe one day. it’ll flow out of you. But as time passes, you’ll realize that this feeling will never go away.
In her blue box, Yun Ru says the exact same words and looks at the larger-than-life images of Zi Wei’s face around her. She reaches out a hand to touch it.
Yun Ru wakes up in her bed and looks around, confused. She bolts to her journal and flips through the pages, looking for the page that says “He is Wang Quan Sheng,” but it’s still not there. She is still Yu Xuan in Yun Ru’s body.
Present
Zi Wei confesses to Jun Jie that he likes Chen Yun Ru. Jun Jie stares at him for a long moment, not smiling and not saying anything. They’re interrupted when Yu Xuan (as Yun Ru) shows up in the doorway with towels. Jun Jie follows her inside, then pops his head back out at Zi Wei, smiling and telling him to come in like nothing’s wrong.
Uncle Wu returns shortly after. He immediately fixates Jun Jie and Zi Wei with a stern look, asking why they’re always in his shop. Which one of them is chasing Chen Yun Ru? The two boys look at each other awkwardly. Yu Xuan saves them by saying that they’re just dropping her off for her protection. Jun Jie hastily agrees and says they should be on their way, dragging Zi Wei out of the store.
But Uncle Wu doesn’t buy the excuse. He asks Yu Xuan later, saying he’s chased girls before and knows an excuse when he hears one. Yu Xuan accidentally spills to Uncle Wu that Yun Ru is stuck in a love triangle. She explains how Jun Jie likes the old Yun Ru, but the old Yun Ru likes Zi Wei, who rejected her. Yu Xuan would never let herself be caught in such a situation, but because she’s just a guest in Yun Ru’s body, her only action is inaction and thus she remains friends with them both.
Uncle Wu responds with a hypothetical question: what should she do if Li Zi Wei likes the new Chen Yun Ru? She doesn’t have an answer to that.
Jun Jie asks Zi Wei what he plans on doing about Yun Ru. Are they going to date now? Zi Wei responds that he’s not going to do anything. Jun Jie asks if Zi Wei is only saying that because he also likes Yun Ru, but Zi Wei tells the truth: that he’ll be emigrating to Canada soon.
Zi Wei can’t sleep at night, so he gets up and draws instead. (I think we all know what the end product will be…) The next day, he skips class to lie under his tree, reflecting on his conversation with Jun Jie the previous day. Jun Jie had been upset that Zi Wei didn’t tell him about emigrating, and also irritated that Zi Wei had led on Yun Ru while knowing that he would be leaving soon.
Wen Rou, wanting to take revenge on Yu Xuan, sneakily takes some pictures of her when the girls in their class change for gym.
Afterward, Yu Xuan spots Zi Wei finally making his way into school. But Zi Wei gives her the cold shoulder. Yu Xuan’s not about that lack of communication, so she corners him in a stairwell, asking what’s going on. She guesses that he had an argument with Jun Jie. She finds it childish that they don’t just talk it out. Jun Jie shows up at the top of the staircase, agreeing with Yu Xuan, saying they should just talk it out. He tells Yu Xuan that yesterday, Zi Wei told him that he liked her and that he wasn’t going to do anything about it because his family was moving to Canada.
Yu Xuan’s takeaway is that Zi Wei confessed to Jun Jie that he liked her. Jun Jie figures out that Yu Xuan knew about Canada before he did, which makes him angry at Zi Wei all over again, so he leaves. Zi Wei feels awkward being left alone with Yu Xuan, and also leaves.
Jun Jie can’t stop thinking about the old Chen Yun Ru. He even thinks he sees her in the hallway, listening to her music and ignoring the world around her, but then realizes it was just his imagination.
After school, Jun Jie and Yu Xuan ask businesses along her route home whether they’ve noticed a student taking pictures. They haven’t. Jun Jie comes up with the idea of asking photo developers if the stalker photos were developed there.
On their way to one such store, Yu Xuan asks Jun Jie how long he and Zi Wei plan on ignoring each other for. He doesn’t want to talk about it. But then he tells Yu Xuan that if she likes Zi Wei, she should feel free to hang out with him and not avoid him to try and spare his own feelings. He just wants Yu Xuan to be more honest and genuine with him. He thinks Yu Xuan is just Yun Ru pretending to be someone different and changing herself in order to get Zi Wei to like her, and it hurts him to think that she feels the need to pretend to be someone she’s not. He tells her that there’s nothing wrong with who she was before.
It’s a sweet sentiment, but the truth is Yu Xuan isn’t Yun Ru. She tries to convince both Jun Jie and Zi Wei of this at once by bringing them together and repeating to them her dream that she was Yu Xuan from 2019. Except now she’s realized that it wasn’t a dream: it is the truth. She even has proof: not only have her grades changed between her past exams and her current ones, but her handwriting has too. In fact, she even spelled her own name wrong on the most recent exam. She tells them how she time traveled using the Walkman.
Li Zi Wei takes the Walkman, puts the earphones in, and listens. He closes his eyes, then opens them and says that he’s like her, he’s not actually Li Zi Wei… he’s actually a Terminator from 2029. Both Yu Xuan and Jun Jie rolls their eyes. Yu Xuan is pissed that he’s not taking this seriously, and says that she is telling the truth. If they don’t hurry and find Yun Ru’s attacker, then she will die in a few months.
They stare at her like she’s crazy. Realizing that they don’t believe her, she starts to grab her things and leave. Jun Jie stops her, saying that it’s not that he doesn’t believe her, but he just wants to know: is she making this all up in order to get him and Zi Wei to make up?
This is just more proof that they don’t believe her. Yu Xuan rolls her eyes and continues to walk away, exasperated. They follow her all the way to her house, but she ignores them the whole way and shuts the door in their faces.
But at least Yu Xuan’s efforts work in the sense that Jun Jie and Zi Wei finally talk to each other again. They go out to grab a bite and both admit that they kind of believe her story. She’s been so different lately that it seems kind of plausible she could be someone else. Jun Jie even admits that his feelings toward her aren’t the same anymore. That’s why he didn’t get angry when Zi Wei told him that he liked her. Zi Wei asks him if he’s being serious. “You’re not saying this just to make me feel better, are you?” he asks. “Why would I do that?” Jun Jie responds.
Late at night, Cai Wen Rou is on campus with her two friends. They pin the photos they took of Yun Ru changing onto the school bulletin board and giggle at their handiwork. Wen Rou is the one who took the stalker photos and was upset that Yun Ru didn’t even react to them, so she decided to take it to the next level.
After they scurry away, Xie steps out of the shadows, having seen the whole thing. He glares at the bulletin board, then at where the girls went, with a dark look in his eyes.
One of the friends, Jian Ying Hui, suddenly gets severe stomach pains. None of them want to spend any longer on campus, which is dark and creepy, but she really needs to go to the bathroom. The second friend offers to go with her, leaving Wen Rou alone. Xie grabs her and covers her mouth so she her screams are muffled.
When the two friends finally finish with the bathroom, they find that Wen Rou has disappeared. They assume she left without them and hurry to try and catch up. They don’t realize that she was actually just downstairs from them. Xie has her captive, and holds a knife to her neck to keep her silent.
At night, Zi Wei continues to think about Yu Xuan’s story. Is it really possible that she time traveled? The more he thinks about it, the more implausible it seems, but he also thinks about when she first woke up from her coma and called him Wang Quan Sheng. He flips through his art notebook to the drawing he made the previous night. It’s the same drawing that Yu Xuan once saw in Wang Quan Sheng’s studio. (Of course.)
Yu Xuan fumes as she thinks again about how Zi Wei and Jun Jie so easily dismissed her story. She tries think of ways she could prove she’s from 2019. But she realizes that she doesn’t have any useful or relevant information about the near future on hand and again laments coming to 1998 without any preparation. She goes back to her notebook and wondering about when and why she would write, “He is Wang Quan Sheng.” Then she hears rocks at her window again. It’s Zi Wei.
He drags her out to their usual pavilion and the park and asks whether she has dissociative identity disorder or delusional disorder. Those are the only reasonable explanations he can think of for her behavior. Exasperated and not wanting to talk in circles again, Yu Xuan asks Zi Wei what she needs to do to prove to him that she is Huang Yu Xuan from 2019.
He asks her to tell her more about who Yu Xuan is, claiming to want to know more about the person he likes. She fixates on that. “Is this your way of confessing to me?” she asks. He quickly claims that this isn’t a confession, since she already knew from Mo Jun Jie that he likes her. But he does want to know whether the person he likes is someone from 2019, or someone who has a dissociative identity, or someone who is delusional.
That’s about to set her off again when he stops her by saying no matter who she is or what’s wrong with her, he thinks she’s super cool. So should he call her Chen Yun Ru or Huang Yu Xuan? He decides to call her Yu Xuan and asks her to tell him about the future. What is it like? Are there flying cars? She starts telling him that things are mostly the same, but slightly different. For example, cell phones have screens.
The next morning, Jun Jie rides by Yu Xuan on his way to school. He offers her a ride, but she says she can just take the bus. He decides to wait with her instead. She asks him where Li Zi Wei is. He tells her that he overslept. Zi Wei watched all of the Back to the Future movies last night because he wanted to know what the future was like.
Yu Xuan is annoyed that Zi Wei didn’t believe her, again. She asks Jun Jie if he believes her. He responds that he believes her if it’s what will make her happy. He admits that it might make it a little easier for him, too, if he chooses to believe her. Then he can keep liking the real Chen Yun Ru and it won’t feel so much like heartbreak.
Yu Xuan is happy with that answer. She decides that she doesn’t care if they believe her or not. At least she’s told her truth so she doesn’t have to feel bad about keeping secrets anymore.
She tells Jun Jie that he’s pretty mature for a teenager. In 2019, they would call him a “warm” man and he’d be quite attractive. She says that Chen Yun Ru should have picked Jun Jie instead of liking that idiot Li Zi Wei.
One of Yu Xuan’s basketball friends gets to class early and sees Cai Wen Rou in class early, head on the desk. She asks Wen Rou why she’s there so early, but Wen Rou doesn’t respond. When she checks on her, she finds that Wen Rou is dead and it’s a traumatizing scene.
Yu Xuan arrives at school and overhears rumors flying and sees the commotion and police tape outside her classroom. Class gets cancelled for the day. She runs into Cai Wen Rou’s two friends, who immediately have a look of fear when they see her and run in the opposite direction. Detective Yang sees the exchange through the classroom window.
Yu Xuan follows the two friends to the bathroom, where she overhears them whispering that maybe Yun Ru killed Wen Rou after finding out about the photos. Maybe they’re next. Yu Xuan goes in to confront them and ask them exactly what happened.
After confronting the girls, Yu Xuan rushes to go find Jun Jie and Zi Wei, running into Xie along the way. She matches his face to Dr. Xie and stares at him, but when he asks if she recognizes him, she responds that she mistook him for someone else and continues on her way. He stares after her, then smirks slightly before turning away.
Yu Xuan tells Jun Jie and Zi Wei that she has something important to tell them, but she can’t tell them at school. They leave campus, catching Detective Yang’s eye.
Zi Wei ends up taking them to his house and bedroom, where Yu Xuan tells them about Cai Wen Rou and her friends taking stalker photos of her as well as some nude photos that they put on the school bulletin board last night. But this morning, the bulletin board was empty, and Cai Wen Rou was dead. Yu Xuan has the feeling that Wen Rou’s death is somehow related to her.
Yu Xuan doesn’t think Wen Rou’s killer and her attacker would be the same person, because why would her attacker retaliate against someone else attacking her? Jun Jie walks closer to her and leans in intently, saying that maybe the attacker believes that Yun Ru is his and that he is the only one who is allowed to hurt her.
They continue to theorize but don’t really get anywhere. For example, why did the culprit take the photos? Is it because they’re in it? Does that mean the culprit is a girl? But that doesn’t make sense, because Yu Xuan clearly remembers a boy’s uniform.
Jun Jie says that the only thing they can really do is wait for the attacker’s next move, especially if the police don’t find any evidence today. He says he has tutoring and heads out.
Once he’s gone, Zi Wei realizes that Jun Jie’s excuse didn’t make sense. He doesn’t have tutoring today. Yu Xuan casually says that he probably made up an excuse in order to leave the two of them alone. Zi Wei is surprised and the room suddenly gets very awkward. He makes an excuse about grabbing some drinks and leaves Yu Xuan alone for a bit.
Yu Xuan pokes around Zi Wei’s room and notices his drawing desk. She flips through his art notebook and then finds the drawing of the running high school student. She has a flashback of when she saw the drawing in Quan Sheng’s studio. At the time, she had been a little jealous that the drawing was of his first love. When she asked why he drew her back and not her face, he teased her by saying that she was so pretty he didn’t know how to do her beauty justice in a drawing. Yu Xuan tried to act casual and make up some excuses about why Quan Sheng should take the drawing down, but he recognized that she was just jealous and continued to tease her about it.
Yu Xuan stares at the drawing in Zi Wei’s room. Zi Wei enters the room behind her, asking her which drink she wants. She turns to face him, eyes wide, and says, “You are Wang Quan Sheng.” He’s confused, but all of a sudden she starts hear a voice saying her name, Huang Yu Xuan.
Yu Xuan wakes up in her own body in 2019 to see a worried-looking Kun Bu and her landlady. Kun Bu tells her that she had been unresponsive for a whole day and night, not going to work or responding to any calls or texts. But Yu Xuan isn’t really listening. Instead, she’s thinking about her last moments as Yun Ru, and discovering that Li Zi Wei was Wang Quan Sheng. She suddenly takes off running.
Yu Xuan charges into 32 Cafe and asks Uncle Wu if Li Zi Wei is Wang Quan Sheng. She asks him to tell her the truth. She’ll help Chen Yun Ru if he wants, but she needs to know what’s going.
“Let me answer that question for you,” a voice says. She turns, to see Li Zi Wei hobbling out to meet her.
They approach each other with tears in their eyes. Uncle Wu smiles a sad smile and looks away.
“Are you Li Zi Wei or Wang Quan Sheng?” Yu Xuan asks.
Flash to Taipei in 2003. Everyone is masked because the SARS epidemic is at its height (ah, the irony because we are in COVID-19 times right now…) and Li Zi Wei has just arrived in Taipei. He rents a car to drive to Tainan to take care of some business.
He visits a prison, where he waits to meet with a prisoner, only to be told that the prisoner refuses to see him and tells him not to come back. With a sigh, he stops by the commissary to send some candy. The recipient? Prisoner Mo Jun Jie.
On the drive back to Taipei, Zi Wei puts in the headphones for Yun Ru’s Walkman and listens to “Last Dance.” But the roads are winding, the drive is long, and he gets a little sleepy. He doesn’t notice some construction and the car ends up going off-road, crashing down a hill, and flipping over. The music glitches then keeps playing.
A high school student falls into a body of water. He sinks deeper and deeper, eyes closed. The music glitches and “Last Dance” starts playing, faintly. His eyes open and he looks around at the water, alarmed, then starts swimming toward the light.
He wakes up in a hospital bed. His mother rushes to his side, calling him “Quan Sheng.” He asks her to repeat what she called him, confused. He stumbles to a bathroom mirror and then stares at his own face.
“I am… Wang Quan Sheng?” he says with a look of disbelief.
Wow. There’s a lot to unpack here in this episode. Where to start? There’s so much going on in my head right now.
First, the obvious. Wang Quan Sheng and Li Zi Wei had the same identity swap experience that Huang Yu Xuan and Chen Yun Ru experienced. Meaning the Quan Sheng that Yu Xuan fell in love with… is actually Li Zi Wei in Quan Sheng’s body? That would make sense, given what Quan Sheng’s mom told Yu Xuan before about Quan Sheng’s personality completely changing after he met Yu Xuan. It also makes the parallel between Yun Ru and Quan Sheng even more obvious. Yun Ru was also a kid who barely talked in high school, yet suddenly had a personality change. It looks like Quan Sheng had attempted suicide, or something, considering we saw him in water. Both he and Yun Ru got hijacked by their doppelgangers after they had near-death experiences, and both Zi Wei and Yu Xuan did the time travel/body jump after falling unconscious while listening to “Last Dance” on that Walkman.
So who is the person that Yu Xuan just met? My guess is that physically, it’s Li Zi Wei, considering the cane and the scar and the fact that we last saw his body get into a pretty bad car accident. But identity-wise, who is he? Is he Li Zi Wei in his own body, now ten or eleven years Yu Xuan’s senior? If we assume the person Yu Xuan fell in love with was Zi Wei in Quan Sheng’s body, wouldn’t that be a good thing? This is a heartwarming and not heartbreaking reunion, right? Because the right people have finally met in the right timeline? But when did they switch back? And how did Quan Sheng have a drawing of Zi Wei’s that was made years ago? Or did he just remake the same drawing? So many questions.
But the story seems a lot more complicated than that. Mo Jun Jie was in prison and refused to meet with Li Zi Wei in 2003. Why was he in prison? Perhaps because he was implicated in a murder? If that’s the case, then it makes sense why both Uncle Wu and Zi Wei want Yu Xuan to go back to the past and hopefully change the past. It seems like Jun Jie has been wrongfully convicted of Yun Ru’s murder, while the real culprit, Xie, is still free. If they could change that timeline and save both Yun Ru and Jun Jie, wouldn’t that be great? But then what does that mean for the current 2019 timeline?
I was so confused when watching the prologue, but it makes so much sense after the rest of this episode played out. I guess everything makes sense in retrospect, which is how a successful reveal works.
I don’t have much to say about Wen Rou’s sudden death and the role that Xie plays in all of it. It’s pretty clear cut there. I guess the real question is whether he is the same person in 2019 (highly likely) and whether he will be successfully caught!
I love that this is both a murder mystery and a star & time-crossed love story. So beautiful!
The Drama Llama 