Sinister Beings II (2024)

An explosive start, this is great!

This sequel drama continues directly from the last drama and it kicks off with a lot of action and awesome stunts! If you wondered where all the budget from “In Bed With A Stranger” went, it all went here to this drama, and you can tell because of all the action and special effects used here.

I have watched up to episode 3 and Ruco Chan is still separated from Rosina Lin, and you can see how pathetic he was trying to get her back. I am calling this now, Rosina is going to start dating this Professor played by Alex Fong later, and then eventually Alex Fong is revealed to have some dark background and connection to the dark web and terrorism so she breaks up with Alex Fong and gets back with Ruco. This is the typical TVB formula so I am calling it now. I really hope Rosina doesn’t stay with Alex because they are not a good match as a couple.

For now, all good!

Episode 9: so far so good but this episode brought in something that had me laughing so hard! The police go into a home and take somebody there down to the station. While at the home, they spot a triangular computer on the floor with all these RGB fans and you can see it is air cooled with what I think was a Cooler Master Hyper Evo 212. While interviewing the suspect for some possible cybercrime, Terence Tung said something that made me laugh so hard. He says to the suspect, “We spotted in your home a PC that appeared to be as fast and as powerful as the police supercomputer.” I’m sorry but has anybody on the TVB production team ever seen a supercomputer? They are a huge mammoth cluster of racks that require a huge datacenter to set up and have running with huge power demands. And TVB expects us to believe something like that, which a Police force should have, was replicated in a single tiny PC case with a single CPU and powered by a single PSU? I know they say PCs run faster with more RGB lights but come on! Maybe the Police supercomputer is really just a single consumer machine running a Ryzen 9 CPU with a ton of RGB fans?

And what I found hilarious was how the guy who was arrested was hinted in being one of the best computer scientists around and worked on an encryption algorithm that had not been deciphered in the drama. Do you wanna bet that guy is also a hacker? There is this strange belief that if someone can do computer science and/or program they are automatically knowledgeable in the arts of hacking.

Episode 14: man this episode made me feel really bad for Ruco Chan, I mean that guy cannot catch a break! We see how pathetic he had been living for the 3 months after breaking up with Rosina with the eating alone at home and the avoiding alcohol thing. I know the Ruco curse is still active so there is a chance he won’t get back with Rosina if TVB are feeling like assholes, but this episode just made me feel so bad for him when Rosina said “sorry but we can’t be friends, let’s just be colleagues” after Ruco went all out and said he would wait for her.

Episode 15: lol wtf? This episode made me laugh so hard. So Crystal’s boyfriend is the super smart Computer Science banking nerd that cops wrongly arrested and funnily said his desktop PC was as powerful as the Police supercomputer. Well in this episode he is helping the cops try to find out who this weird Darkweb guy called Perseus was. He even roped in Crystal to help him do some “hacking” to detect when Perseus would send cryptocurrency to some mercenaries and intercept it. What made me laugh was how Crystal’s Computer genius boyfriend’s reply to every problem the cops raised was “oh yeah I can download some software for that” or “yeah I can get a program for that.” Like dude, ain’t you like some hotshot hacker lord, why are your solutions all off-the-shelf stuff you can buy? What were you planning? Installing Microsoft Office 365 and writing an Excel macro on their supercomputer? What’s extra hilarious was how he requested to use the cops supercomputer to do the processing and the cops were like “sure dude, install your shit on there”. That’s not good practice, and doesn’t he have his own desktop PC supercomputer at home? I'm calling this now. Crystal's boyfriend is going to die. I can feel my TVB trope senses tingling.

Episode 21: man what an episode. So Crystal Fung’s old Venezuelan orphanage friend, played by Sheldon Lo, who we get to know in earlier episodes turned out to be a “bad guy”, but I found myself really supporting him. He was smart, calm, and a great strategist, so much so that he found out his boss was going to double cross him so he found a way to turn it around back on his boss. He is also shown to be a great marksman doing incredible firearms action in this episode. Later, as he was about to escape on a yacht, Ruco catches up and was about to arrest him when these assassins turn up and they are forced to work together to survive. It was a great scene and showed that the guy was not that bad and he really was the anti-hero type and it suited him. He had that handsome look with a rebellious nature about it that suited the anti-hero vibe. Later we find out he escaped to Mexico and joined a new crime syndicate for protection so I got excited that we may see him again, but soon we get a one month flash forward and Crystal is at a church lighting a candle for someone, and it turned out our anti-hero died off screen in a fire fight in Mexico. TVB did our guy dirty, such a great character just unceremoniously killed offscreen. I hope he get more roles like this in future because he was great.

Episode 23: ouch Crystal’s boyfriend is in a coma because he had an allergy reaction to bromide gas. Alex orchestrated the entire thing because the boyfriend was, again, aiding the cops in decrypting Alex’s darkweb messages. This would be quite a blow to the cops EXCEPT our expert computer science genius oursourced a lot of the work to his Decryption Association Group he was a part of as he couldn’t decrypt it on his own. This was so stupid because usually Police would not just easily allow such a thing to occur as it was highly classified work, they would have to interview individuals and have them work at the Station to ensure confidentiality, instead here this guy goes “hey can I send this confidential stuff online to my buddies at the Association to help?” And the cops go “sure dude”. If it was that easy, why even ask the boyfriend to help in the first place? As he is in a coma I am going to say he won’t die because if TVB wanted him to die it would have been immediate.

Episode 24: we finally get to see Alex Fong develop romantic feelings for Rosina after they keep running into each other. Alex, after seeing Rosina holding photos of Ruco and hearing from Crystal how they still have feelings for each other, decide to go the petty pathetic route of attempting to shame Ruco out of his career so he wouldn’t have a chance with Rosina anymore. Like who does that? It is such a childish thing to do. If anything I bet this would bring Ruco and Ruco back together again.

Episode 25: okay so it seems Ruco loses his court battle thanks to the machinations of Alex Fong, this results in Ruco going to prison for 28 months. Ruco going to prison and framed for monetary theft was just heart breaking, but we see the beginnings of Rosina starting break out of her shell and show immense concern for Ruco. Oh man, they are gonna get back together for sure. I was wrong about Rosina and Alex getting together, I’ll admit that and with only 5 episodes left there is a very low possibility of it happening now so my guess now is that Alex is going to get rejected by Rosina and Alex won’t understand why because he is such a childish shithead, then most likely would have her kidnapped because that’s what creeps do. Let’s see.

Final update: man the last 5 episodes were a rollercoaster. We saw how Ruco was exonerated so he was let out of prison along with the experience bringing him and Rosina back together again. This was great! But on the other hand you how really stupid scenes like Jonathan Cheung escaping prison without outside assistance purely by chance. They were transporting him to hospital when suddenly a black dog in the road causes the driver to swerve off and crash and Johnny took the opportunity to escape. That was so unearned and cheap that it felt insulting.

We then get Alex planning all these terrorist stuff and right at the last minute he calls off the plan because - and get this - he discovered love. Wtf?

Right near the end we find out that Johnny had set up a dirty nuclear bomb on the roof of a skyscraper, and that getting too close to it would give the people such high levels of radiation poisoning they would die in 5 minutes. Ruco and Ben have everybody evacuate and then decide who would disarm it with a coin toss. I thought TVB were going to kill off Ruco so the curse was in full effect, but suddenly out of the blue, Alex arrives and says he would disarm the bomb as a way of atonement for his previous actions. Of course, they let him because the main characters can’t die, and Alex deactivates the bomb before succumbing to the radiation. I didn’t care about Alex dying though, the guy killed his dad so when he died I just said, “good”.

The ending was quite a happy one and I am glad Ruco got a happy ending, a proper happy ending, in a serious drama. It is a shame they ruined it with some really silly choices in where the story was going. Overall score is a 7.5 as the silly scenes pulled it down slightly, but still a great rewatch drama for sure.

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One of the better dramas of the year.

This year has been pretty dry for TVB. With the terrible, forgettable ones coming out, this drama was the saving grace for the year. It has a good story, interesting cases and best acting shown possible. More emotions from Ruco Chan in this drama rather than the first installment as it was more personal to him especially from breaking up with Rosina Lin in the first. Action has greatly improved, with more realistic depiction of wounds being shown instead of the characters still looking clean after every fist fight, although it still faces with the intense editing issue from the first, with multiple camera cuts making it feel uncomfortable to watch, and the atrocious low frame slow mo they used. Luckily it wasn't a big deal as there were less action related cases in this drama replaced with much more interesting cases showcased, so it didn't make this drama boring to watch at all. The only complain I have is the way Jonathan Cheung was handled in this drama. He suffered brain damage from carbon dioxide from the first drama, and instead of having terrorists hired by his partner, Alex Fung, who posed as a professor to gather information from the police while trying to find a way to cure Jonathan to initiate their plan to take over Hong Kong, to break Jonathan out of prison when he was being escorted to the hospital after getting into a fight with an inmate (who should have been a hitman in disguise that was hired to be part of the operation of breaking him out), the thing that had the ambulance get into a crash and Jonathan breaking out, was a dog standing in the middle of the road. Really, TVB? Could have been a good opportunity to have some action in it and make it much more interesting but nope, a damn dog helped Jonathan escaped. He didn't even do anything at the end too, it was mostly a comedic gag with Moon Lau where in the end, he managed to escape.

They still used the same theme from the first, with a different singer doing the vocals and a more remixed version, which I much preferred as it feels much more action paced and faster than the original (no offence to Hubert Wu as his voice is still good). The new song which was sung by Ruco Chan, was the love theme for this drama and his voice still outshines the most. TVB please let him sing more songs! He has the voice for them.

Overall, it was a good drama, they should cut down on the multiple camera cuts and let us actually see the action in motion with a few tweaks to the script to make it better. If they were to make a third one, hopefully the writing would be a tad bit better with a satisfying conclusion as well.

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