Endless potential but no action

This drama had endless potential given the cast, the atmosphere and genres of the story, but sadlly it didn't give what I expected from such a large-scale drama. It started out very promising and good, but since we are talking about an action/thriller/mystery/crime drama here, you'd expect a fair amount of suspense/action towards the end, which was almost completely left out here. The key word is: ACTION. I watched this drama zealously because I thought the espionage/monitoring/distance investigation part was just a lead-up to the great things in the end which is ACTION. And by that I mean physical action, and actually going out to catch the criminals. There was little to no action in this drama despite the extremely promising plot and genres. The whole story was just about the characters sitting in computer rooms trying to solve a case from afar.

The first thing that threw me off was when they didn't show how Bat was caught. He was presented as key character who will play an important role, but they finished him off in no time, without us even seeing how he was caught and not seeing a single scene from the interrogation of such a key character.

The next is Du Meng's death... Seriously, why? Such a great, likabe and important character was killed off in no time after just pointing a gun at one of the criminals. I felt like his death was unnecessary with the sole reason of the writers going by the logic that a sacrifice is needed in order to achive good. Furthermore, I was hoping for a real fight scene between two male characters and for Du Meng to beat Chang Lei in one to one combat, but no... Chang Lei thrusts a needle from his glasses (!) into Du Meng's neck like he's some James Bond or something, then runs away and Meng dies on the scene. That was pretty much the only action scene in the drama, and even that was poorly implemented.

Then let's talk about Jeffrey. He was presented as the one who stands behind everything, the main bad guy throughout the series, but when the story gets to a point where it's time to catch him, they don't show us anything besides how Ma Shang detects him on a MONITOR, but we get to see nothing from how they actually go after him, catch him, and interrogate him.

I was also hoping that they'd bring down Hermes, the source of all evil in the end too, but that didn't happen either. Still this is the most forgivable out of the points I mentioned because they dealt with the branch of the organisation that wanted to steal Dinghua's core technology that was what the plot centered around.

Overall, I'd like to emphasize again that this drama had infinite potential, but the lack of action ruined it. It is not worth watching 30-35 episodes of people sitting in computer rooms, be it on a yacht, a van or an office if there is no action in the last 5-10 or at least the last 3 episodes.

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