“Wait! I can’t catch my breath.”- quote from My Dear Ganster Oppa

No more appropriate words were spoken to better describe this series than those above. While they were not meant to summarize this series, this is nonetheless the most fitting phrase to capture the spirit of this awful series. Something that started out entertaining ended up so disappointing.

The series begins interestingly enough. Even with a worn-out theme of a withdrawn boy who has an unrequired love for his best friend, it was charming for a while. Their friendship seemed sincere and intense. Guy (Ping Krittanun) is a lonely, reserved, socially isolated young man. He is the classic ‘wallflower’ that no one pays much attention to. However, who suddenly pops into his life is Wahl (Winner Nichakoon), a rather outgoing, socially adept, yet surprisingly caring young man his same age. But strangely is possessive of Guy. Over the years Wahl becomes his only friend outside of some gaming acquaintances he meets online. While Wahl has had a steady girlfriend, Guy still pines over Wahl wishing for something to happen between them but knowing that nothing will. Yet always feeling as if there is a deep connection between them.

One of his gaming friends with whom Guy does have a bond with is named Yuri whom he thinks is female. When Guy gets the chance to finally met Yuri, he finds out that Yuri is Tew (Meen Nichakoon), an astonishingly handsome man dressed in black that seems to elevate a mysteriousness about him. And certainly, exudes an even greater attraction. At first, Tew is a pensive, distant, somewhat brooding man of few words. Unbeknownst to Guy, he has a darker side to him and is in the Thai mafia which of course he does not wish to share with Guy initially. Yet, almost from the beginning Tew seems drawn to Guy and for good reasons. Guy’s innocence and pure wonderment of the world is so refreshing and charming that he naturally draws you into his world.

However, this series very quickly falls apart when it tries to get into the nitty-gritty of an actual story. The supposed Thai mafia underworld is filled with laughable caricatures of epic comic proportions. They look silly, act silly, and frankly are silly. Sometimes over-the-top trying to look bad (while always coiffed impeccably) but never really able to shake the sanitized version of a what has to be seen as nothing more than an after school special.

So, they take what started out to be a good love story and seemingly do not know where to go with it and therefore, then begin to throw one cliché or trope after another to see if anything works. The whole concept of Kenji (Tommy Charupob), (the nemesis of Tew), was laughable and came across as nothing more than a caricature. The head boss was the ultimate of caricatures with the fake hairdo and starchy personality. That was awful. The cliché ‘romance’ which never was between Tew’s driver/bodyguard, Tul (Tin Boonpongthong) and Kenji’s stooge/ informant/turned good guy Boss (Cosmo Mills) (who is admittedly adorably cute) was trite, so overblown and corny. With Guy’s gaming friends being right from a comic book; they were all so over-the-top mimics. They at least provided some comic relief and humor into this series. However, I did like the bizarreness of Muffin (Yoghurt Yoshita). She was at least entertaining and quirky. Way too much time was spent on the sudden realization by Wahl of his love for Guy, rather late in the game, after he knew that Guy and Tew were inevitably meant to be with each other. That went nowhere and if you wanted to introduce that into the story so late in the series, why was it not more poignant or have a point to it? You missed a golden opportunity to show his profound regret and its effect. That would have deepened this series impact significantly. Instead, the series throws in a lame, trite scene where some cute guy sits down next to Wahl and asks him for his class notes. Can you be anymore obvious in your banality?

Because this is a BL and these guys are, well, handsome and hot, the awfulness of the plot gets overlooked as well as the mediocre acting. But looks cannot save this series. And it sure did not. Sure, there is screen chemistry between Meen and Ping in their romance scenes and some were even steamy, but this story is so much more than that. It was alluring drama. However, their emotional scenes were frankly awful. I continue to state, there must be at least a minimal standard for acceptable acting and for me that is the ability to cry when necessary. So, if you cannot cry you cannot act and, in this case, both Ping as Guy and Meen as Tew were merely performing, not acting. I honestly can say I did not see Ping shed one tear in any of the emotional scenes where he was supposed to be crying or weeping. So, I lost complete interest in his performance which overall is somewhat shallow and lacked a dramatic range. To me it screamed poor direction when they could not even use fake tears to give the illusion that he at least is capable of crying. It was funny to see Tew wipe away non-existent tears off the face of Guy. How pathetic is that. Tew could hardly get emotional himself but at least he had an excuse for being so jaded as he was a member of the mafia. However, his overall acting is so wooden and stiff, it looked like he wanted to be anywhere else other than in this series. Regrettably, the acting became rather perfunctory to me.

If you do a mafia-type series, then you must have some grit to it, some angst, some genuine rawness to the story. This had none of that. The fight scenes were so choreographed that you could anticipate their next moves and the gun fighting scenes were downright hysterical. They were such bad shots! I detest violence but if you are going to make that your theme, then give us that! Do not sanitize something that is not! You cheapen your whole product. I should not be laughing at killing scenes!

This is such an underwhelming series that I am astonished at how bad it really is. But it presents well. Its theatrics are perhaps intoxicating but this time, I am not buying into it. The screenplay is so second-rate. The acting is at best mediocre. The story itself is so lame that it looked like it picked ideas from other BLs, stuck them in and hoped it all worked. I will never understand the continuing story of Wahl and why he was so late in his realization. That of course does not excuse Guy’s total inability to be himself and share his feelings earlier with Wahl. The contrived ending is something out of Pollyana’s playbook. The only thing missing was the phrase, ‘and they all lived happily ever after.”

Rating- 2 out of 5

Streaming on- IQIYI