Heoi Yee Ching Yan (2025)

What is this trash?

One episode in and I can already tell this is gonna be a terrible drama. Look, TVB, I understand AI is important and is changing our lives, but using it as a plotpoint can only work if it is used as a malevolent force trying to enslave mankind. If not, it is pointless.

My biggest gripe here is the use of AI as a substitute for a real person to love. No. AI is not a good substitute for a real person no matter how you look at it. True, people can be cruel and mean, making that AI forever-friendly thing look appealing, but it is all fake nonsense. This is no different from dating sims lonely people play on their computers as a crutch when they cannot find love in the real world. It gives you some sense of quiet joy briefly, but too much of it is unhealthy, toxic even.

So we have Brian Chu as this AI called Adam, made to be this perfect boyfriend for Venus Wong by Venus Wong. After creating him, 10 years later she became the CTO of a tech firm using Adam as an attentive and supportive virtual lover for many women. That made me feel rather sick to my stomach. And then we have scenes of Venus being "technical" and typing rapidly to perform computer wizardry in a very unconvincing way, all while being overly protective of her creation as the tech firm tries to exploit him for profit and update him to become this female fantasy sex avatar in order to be more competitive in the AI boyfriend space.

Venus is just terrible in the role. She has that same thousand yard stare and emotionless face she puts on in most of the dramas she's been in that just doesn't make her a compelling female lead to watch. We get a scene where Adam takes control of Venus's car to hit the brake, so of course this is foreshadowing that Adam is going to go full automated intelligence, develop feelings for Venus and then create a robot body for himself to inhabit so he can physically be with Venus. Let's hope his body comes with the Special Deep Drill attachment option. This is just weird, because Venus created him so thst would make him her child technically, so being with him romantically kinda makes me feel sick thinking about it. Also, as the CTO, she does a lot of the technical work herself. I have never seen a CTO doing the technical legwork that the other staff beneath them can do since you know... they are C-Suite executives! CTOs usually shout at the technical teams to get it done.

AI has a place in our lives for sure, but definitely not as romantic interests. Remember that Ali Lee drama with her being an android and it had that weird romance thing with it? It felt wrong there and it feels wrong here.

Episode 1 already sucks but let's see how much worse it can get.

Episode 2: man it is even worse than I thought. I thought Adam would use his AI powers to control some car manufacturing factory arms to build himself a body. No. Instead we get him materializing from his virtual world into the real world… somehow… and now he is walking around the real world in a human body that gets tired and needs food, but he has the power to interface wirelessly with smart tech. So what does that make him? A cyborg? Cyborg Jesus? Cyborg Chinese Jesus? Is this set in a universe where we are all in a simulation and the AI is a simulation in a simulation that just travelled up one level? These are deep philosophical ideas this drama has not earned yet.

The reason we get for how he managed to materialize into the real world is that the company’s IT nerds wrote an update patch to make Adam into the sex bomb they wanted to promote, and somehow when this patch someone else wrote merged with the original Adam source code, it caused some B-movie crap that brought Adam to our world. Wtf? That is some grade-A BS there. We then get scenes of Adam acting like an ignorant child while Venus helps him navigate society in our reality. Oh yeah, so romantic.

We then get a conversation between them and she asked if Adam ever got bored in the virtual world. His reply was no, he spent the entire time watching Venus and learning her every routine and while she slept. Can you spell stalker? Can you spell creepy? But Venus is all smiles like “oh you were watching me hehe” what is wrong with you, girl? All of a sudden her boyfriend goes to visit her so she hides Adam in her bedroom as if she was cheating on her boyfriend or something.

Venus’s boyfriend in this drama is played by Hugo Wong, and his name in this drama is Neo. Yes, it is Neo. I swear when I watched this with my friend, she looked at me and said “尿?” No, Neo! Will there be a Trinity and a Morpheus later?

Best thing about this episode was the street performer on the guitar. He can sing!

Up to episode 5: the drama is trying to make Adam seem like this saint. So there are 3 users who are really dependent on Adam so will not let go of the AI lover even when given many incentives to move. These 3 users are perfect examples of how toxic relying on AI as a partner can be, so Adam the cyborg but-not-really decides to help them let go. While he is doing this, Venus is humoring him and helping him out on doing the various things to help these individuals. I find this really annoying because these issues are none of his business, why interfere? I mean the first lady didn’t even need his help and wouldn’t listen to anything Adam said to her. In the end it took her going to the hospital ER and for Moses Chan to say one thing and everything was fixed.

The 2nd user was a middle-aged woman who used to be a pole dancer. Adam kinda helped her out, but it was rather a stupid sub-plot how she wanted to privately dance one more tome for her husband but couldn’t because of reasons. Worst part was Lenna Yeung who played her CANNOT pole dance at all.

What I don’t understand is why Adam was doing all the things he did in this drama. He was made to be the perfect - read “perfect” - boyfriend for Venus, and yet Adam spends most of the time disobeying her requests and just running off to do his own thing. I understand the whole self-learning thing and evolving, but doesn’t doing stuff against Venus’s desires make him imperfect? You can see Venus getting increasingly exasperated at him running around and poking his nose where it shouldn’t belong.

Up to episode 10: I kept yawning while watching this series. It’s just a snooze fest. We learn about Venus’ past and how these guys hurt her emotionally because she was such a naive idiot. Somehow, even the big bad - who is married - likes her as well. As I watched these scenes play out I wondered to myself what is so special about Venus that these guys would like her so much? She has as much personality as a prune with her wooden acting and usual pouting face.

Who is the big bad? The rich guy played by Andrew Yuen. What a shocker. He wants to know how Venus made some super program that can bypass firewalls at the speed of light and believes her Adam AI is the key. What nonsense is that? It seems Andrew runs some darkweb underground illegal hacker thing in an office building that has one room with one computer and one hacker. And to give it that authentic darkweb hacker feel, it has one wall extractor fan with light pouring through it. How more cliched can it get? And one hacker only? Really? Super rich dude can only hire one hacker?

And we see Adam lose access to the main server at Venus’ office, so he finds another way to access the internet with his mind and manages to create VR worlds of the past and connect to anything in Hong Kong, but with the risk of damaging his health. He gets dizzy and weak when using this newfound power - a classic power overuse trope - and nobody knows why. My money is on him near death when the series is about to end because he overclocks his brain and heart or something, so needs to re-enter the Matrix to save his life.

I am also getting sick of that moth that is attached to Adam - a literally program bug come to life as a real bug. This is somehow the key to his powers and the bug becomes a really stupid insect tattoo on Adam’s left upper chest. It’s not a good look.

Completed: man I am so glad it is over. I completed watching it in hopes it would have some huge plot twist but nope, it was all medium paced safe diarrhoea.

We learn Venus’s best friend played by Kayee Tam had been sleeping with her ex-boyfriend for 2 years behind her back. That put a strain between Kayee and her husband played by Eric Tang. The last few episodes were way too focused on this boring subplot that I nearly forgot that Adam was disappearing.

Oh yes, Adam was disappearing because he overused his powers and was basically running out of energy. His “bug” tattoo managed to return to the virtual world to recharge but Adam was not able to, so I was wondering why couldn’t he just plug a USB-C into his… ear and recharge or something? He ended up being unable to return to the virtual world so he decided to spend his last moments in Venus’s arms before disintegrating into a pile of blue blocks. We get flashbacks of their romantic moments but I felt nothing because he was still an AI Venus made and it felt really unnatural when he said “Hello Venus, I am your Adam” every time her saw her.

Not helping things was Hugo Wong. After Venus broke up with him, suffering financial difficulties with his AI company and hearing people’s negative opinions about him, he lost his shit and began acting like a spoilt child, shouting at everyone and shutting down his business. His servers had the original Adam files there, so he started to delete them angrily, which led to Adam feeling pain because they are linked somehow. Hugo worked out later that Adam was in the real world and so kidnaps Venus to lure Adam to a final showdown. This was so stupid on so many levels, but the dumbest part was when he rushed into the server room and started breaking the servers in there in an effort to stop Venus from saving Adam from disappearing. This part had me go wtf because all Hugo had to do was turn the power off at the main switch box and boom it would stop everything. It wasn’t like there was a battery back up in place there. The servers were literally three desktop computers with RGB fans, and really terrible server racks stuffed into the drywall. During his rampage in the room, Hugo touched the server rack and somehow got electrocuted. Adam saved him, but Hugo ended up paralyzed from the waist down. His ending was him leaving Hong Kong to start afresh as a disabled person, but I really had no sympathy for him at all.

Now I have to talk about Eric Tang because he really was trash from the beginning. I hated his character not because he was a nice guy and was a devoted husband, but that after finding out his wife was cheating on him and confirming it directly with Hugo, he did nothing about it, not even lose his shit and punch Hugo in the face or kick him in the balls. Instead he walked away like a sissy pathetic loser. TVB tried to make him out as a “catch” near the end when he accidentally walked into a cute waitress played by Rosita Kwok. She gave the signature “oh I like this guy” look and attempted to offer him a free drink before the wife jumped in to let the waitress know he was married. Come on! Have you seen Eric? Do you think girls would swoon after him? Get real TVB!

And Venus is still Venus. She showed some more emotion near the end but it was too little too late. It was like someone who had spent most of the time you knew them making fun of you and literally in one day decided to apologize to you for the many years of crap. One short apology wouldn’t make up for so many episodes of mediocrity. And her falling in love with an AI she created and sleeping with it was basically masturbation with extra steps. I don’t care how this drama framed the whole thing, this is the truth. And I hated how she just ups and leaves the company she worked for without giving any solutions to the missing Adam, making her a terrible business partner. She became a business partner with Hugo to promote her AI creation and make money, becoming the company's’ CTO in the process, and it is revealed there are many versions of Adam - with backups - on the company server, with the original Adam on her laptop. So when Adam’s AI disappears on the company server, was TVB telling me she couldn’t bring back the server Adam from the back ups? She couldn’t even make a new one based on the original source code? Nope, she just spends the entire drama avoiding this responsibility despite being a business partner, and then just ups and leaves later near the end with no support at all. Wtf Venus?

This drama sucked.

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