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Black & White Episode 3 Recap — 15 Comments

  1. One of the things that struck me on first viewing, and again each time I rewatch, is how remarkably … unselfconscious (or maybe “completely free of any sense of the ability to be embarrassed”?) PiZi is. I mean, he’s just admitted that he’s solved all his cases by virtue of anonymous fax messages, and he says it without the least bit of shame. Not like he’s proud, but more like he’s utterly clueless as to what this naivete (of believing anon. faxes) says about him. It’s somewhere between endearing and mystifying.

    The same thing kind of applies with the two female leads so far, in terms of PiZi: it’s like he makes the obligatory flirtatious gesture, but is completely unaware of their reactions. He’s just made the motion, there, the requirement’s satisfied, and that’s about all that pings on his radar.

    Mark Chao may’ve had to put himself through the wringer playing Yin Xiong’s highs and lows (considering this was his first major work, wasn’t it?), but Vic Zhou’s character is fundamentally far more complex, because he’s so much more opaque. What little we can see is a complete conundrum, where he’s not an outright bundle of contradictions. That’s one reason I didn’t find, and still don’t find, Yin Xiong’s character arc even half as fascinating as PiZi’s, because Yin Xiong comes from such a simplistic place and then gets tangled up, versus PiZi, who comes from a complex place and spends the entire store being unravelled. Zhou had to humanize a character who could’ve just been a lazy womanizing slimeball, and that’s a lot harder to make sympathetic than a character who’s already primed as a Good Guy like Yin Xiong.

    (For the only snark I’ll give for this show, paragraphs like the above make me think: then again, of course you’ll win awards if your father’s already a big name as an accomplished “serious” actor… and you aren’t hampered by a background of being a light and un-serious pop idol.)

    • wonderful comment! I think that was why I found the PiZi character so fascinating too. If PiZi was played by anyone other than Vic Zhou, I don’t think it would have been carried off half as well as it did.

      and I need to rewatch B&W again. I didn’t see the tension in the beginning between YX and CL until the later episodes. Maybe because I was distracted by how YX doesn’t notice that XY likes him. WHY?!! Glad Mark and Janine eventually got together in real life

    • I do agree with you on the characterizations of Pi Zi and Ying Xiong, I still think that Mark deserved the Best Actor win. He really killed it in the last half of the drama, though I thought Vic was really good, too. But I don’t want to get too much into that because that would give away the story, and we’re only on episode three.

      • I agree Mark deserved it too at least he wasn’t overshadowed by already famous Vic Zhou actingwise. Five episodes in and I am more into Mark and his aura than Vic (sometimes annoying) character.

    • Oh the snark…I agree SO MUCH… I was shocked when the winner was announced like, “Really?”

      Zai Zai is the best. I fell for him via Mars and B&W kept it going

  2. I’ve seen Kingone in many dramas and I think his acting ROCKS in B&W.
    I was so creeped by Gao Yi, it gave me shivers.

    • You’re right. I’ve seen him in Devil Beside You and Why Why Love but this Gao Yi character is so effing scary. I didn’t know Kingone Wang had other characters besides ‘the perfect guy everyone falls in love with at the start but eventually forgets when the next perfect guy comes along’.

      • Hah, that’s why I didn’t actually recognize him at all, until I was done with the series and then realized, wait a minute. Because Kingone seems to always play the “generally nice guy who seems like the one worth loving but then loses the girl after all”. Okay, not always; he did get the girl in Wish to See You Again (well, got her, lost her, got her, lost her, got her), and I think he gets the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in… oh, now I can’t even recall the movie’s name, it was that forgettable (Singaporean film, actually). But for the most part, I’ve only ever seen him play nice guys, or at least decent if a little stuck-up guys, but… certainly not a scene-chewing drug-addicted, hollow-eyed raving lunatic.

        Talk about totally playing against type!

  3. I apologize in advance for nitpicking, but I believe you left out the “g” from the “Ying” in Ying Xiong’s name. 🙂 It’s just a bit jarring for me to be constantly reading “Yin Xiong” rather than “Ying Xiong”, since one of the humorous things about B&W that can be lost in translation is that our 2 cops are literally named/calling each other “Hero”/”Ying Xiong” and “Ruffian”/”Pi Zi”. How much more literal/obvious can one get than that? 😉

    Thank you for these recaps, by the way! B&W is such a ground-breaking Taiwanese drama, just like Material Queen. Too bad the latter isn’t getting nearly the same reception as the former.

    I just realized that B&W strongly reminds me of the manga Tokyo Crazy Paradise, by the same author as Skip Beat. Both feature hard-edged metropolises and cops and gangs, and while I don’t know whether the Dreamer case will run this entire drama, TCP did have as one of its major plot points a drug ring run by a shadowy organization. That’s why as I was reading your lovely recaps, I kept getting this odd feeling of familiarity, even though I’ve never watched B&W.

    • I did! I don’t even know why since I wrote it correctly in the first two recaps. *brain fart* I’ll fix it. Thanks for pointing it out.

  4. oh my god – you’re watching a Vic Chou drama!!! I’m gonna read your entries, thanks a lot!!! I liked this drama a lot, it was my last TW-drama for a long time! And don#t feel alone anymore that there are also other writers writing about past dramas like me writing about Autumn’s Concerto just now. 🙂
    I especially liked Ivy since this drama. I I recommand her movie Hear me. Beautiful movie and funny!

  5. once again thank you for digging up this awesome TW drama to re-cap. i realize i missed so much going through it the first time. there were just too many details to catch in one sitting.

  6. Thanks so much for doing these recaps! I remember watching this about a year ago or so but I stopped after a while because I got to be too busy, but now you’ve totally rekindled my interest in the drama. I see a drama marathon in my near future ;D

  7. oh my what chemistry here!! hot hot hot. damn u Vic the way they were almost kissng in that scene on the roof! I had to fan myself! all this homoerotism! haha & after that scene PZ always found ways to keep touching YX lollllz Damn u Golden Bells I miss seeing V/M together! such chemistry is wasted now!

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