The Winter Solstice (2004)

To the best of my knowledge, so good...

Even though when I saw The Winter Solstice a long time ago and when it had no eng subs (meaning I didn't 100% get all of what was going on), I'm writing a review because I'm surprised there is none seeing as it was this series that pretty much turned me back onto c-drama after straying into k-drama for many years. I was drawn into the TWS story, its acting, its mystery. I list story and mystery separately, because although you could say that a mystery can be the story, to me, the story encompasses the many individual stories of the ensemble of actors — it was their stories, which you could say all together were the puzzle pieces of the overall mystery that made TWS so compelling.

It was the first time I saw Liu Min Tao, and even though her character seemed not on the up and up (villainous even), she shined in her acting (her acting prowess was further confirmed in her role in Nirvana in Fire) as a woman of power but who was conflicted by certain circumstances in her life. Chen Dao Ming was the starring wreck as the protagonist in a smarmy role, kind of in the way you can't keep your eyes off an impending train wreck, cuz he was the one facing many moral dilemmas, when he himself, was very morally ambiguous. In fact, what made TWS good was that it showed humanity in all its hopes and ugliness in all of its characters.

Not wanting to give away anything, TWS was suspenseful right from the beginning and it's from this beginning that you could see that there were many levels and layers of what was actually happening in those beginning scenes. I don't think it's because there weren't eng subs that maybe I didn't understand completely what was happening; it was because you could see from the acting that people were doing things that obviously had back stories so you know you can't take things at face value. All good mysteries come from a complex network of players and motives, which is all of what TWS is about.

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