Alien Space Sensor (2024)

Wasted potential

I am up to episode 20 right now and I think it is enough to get some thoughts in before this drama wraps up for the New Year. This drama started off pretty well, setting up Carlos Chan as a Criminal Psychologist who had grown up with the extraordinary power of seeing briefly into the future to see when bad things happen. I thought it was going to be a drama where he gets mental flashes of danger like in the series Angel where Doyle/Cordelia gets these head splitting flashes of people who needed help. But nope, it is a very tame TVB affair.

I really like Carlos’ acting here because he really feels genuinely nice and easygoing. I think it is how he naturally is, so he melded into this role very well. I remember watching him act like a crazed terrorist in the film Detective VS. Sleuths and it didn’t suit him. It felt too forced. He definitely suits the handsome nice guy role, and I lapped it up.

The love interest is Hera Chan who plays a cop. I actually quite like her here as she is passionate about her job and getting real justice for victims. She is surrounded by red tape and people who ignore her insights because of how young she is. It is quite annoying watching experience cops pin blame on someone based on nothing but “intuition” or “instinct” when clearly there was not enough evidence and Hera pointing this out often.

And we get the big bad of the drama played by Nicholas Yuen. He works at a mortuary as a coroner and has a really sad back story. He is the most complex character in the series and I feel that Nick really delivered here in the role as someone who does questionable things and yet you sympathise with the guy. That is something really rare to see on TVB.

So the story is that Carlos grew up with this power to see briefly into the future and see bad things happen. He dad wanted him to become a lawyer but he refused and became a Criminal Psychologist. We later see him meet with Hera and Nick, and there is a rocky start and but suddenly they are best buds hanging around with each other. We even get scenes where Carlos’ mom thinks Nick and Carlos were a gay couple, it was quite funny. But these funny scenes are very few and far between the other stuff that happens in the drama.

We slowly find out how unhinged Nick is as he suffers from severe bipolar disorder and has some huge mental issues. This was because his father, who was a married man, slept with a prostitute and that prostitute gave birth to Nick. His father’s wife found out, so the wife paid a gigolo to seduce Nick’s mom so she would leave Nick’s father alone. This led to Nick getting disowned by the mom and ending up at an orphanage, and later a mental hospital because - understandably - this trauma as a kid really messed him up. So, in the modern day whenever he encounters people he deems as terrible mothers or bad husbands, he would end up killing them and then secretly sneering. Holy crap! We also find Nick is a compulsive liar, telling the truth and twisting some facts so that it seemed he was not at fault.

The drama also tried to have things extra spicy by making Nick’s father as the same man as Hera’s, so Nick and Hera are half-siblings. Hera accepted he was her older brother but things get crazy when her mother and father find out who he is.

Meanwhile, Carlos keeps getting future messages, phone calls and video calls from the future on his phone from a woman called Mary, who - coincidentally - looks exactly like Hera. She keeps telling him a crazy serial killer is out there and the cops are after her and also he shouldn’t start a relationship with her because he goes missing. And that’s it. Huh?

Man, Carlos’ future vision powers are so wasted in this drama. They introduce it right at the beginning when he was a small kid, but it only happens like 3 times in the entire drama and Carlos is unable to do anything about the visions. I mean if he recognises the place he would rush there, but so far 100% of the time he has seen something, 100% of the time it will happen and he is unable to stop it. Why even give him these powers when he cannot do anything about it? This is like giving a candy bar to a severely diabetic person, what were the producers thinking?

And the Mary - future Hera - thing has not been explained yet. We get flashes to the future of Hera being hunted by the cops while trying to find out where the missing Carlos is and where the serial murderer was, but it was poorly written into the drama. We only know it is a flash forward future scene when the screen makes it look like you are high off drugs and you see Hera wearing a black hat. All the future scenes go nowhere, we just see Hera getting chased by cops and people shouting at her but we ultimately go nowhere. Why introduce this? You could have left out the stupid unexplained future contact with Carlos and just made those future scenes as the final few episodes of the drama where Hera solves everything. We already know Carlos future vision changes nothing, this would have made it more streamlined and not all convoluted.

John Chan plays Hera and Nick’s father and boy his acting was something else. It was as expected as in other dramas, but the scenes when he is in despair and showing his regret over being a terrible father to Nick were so over-acted. He just hammed it up to 11, crying out like a sad old martial artist in a Jin Yong Chinese martial arts drama. The only thing missing was him screaming 天啊 and teaching Nick 獨孤九劍. What I fund weird was how such a weak-will guy ended up having a child with another woman especially since he is so afraid of his wife. Man, he is so under her thumb that the thumbprint is visible from space.

Mimi Kung plays the mother to Hera and man, her character in this drama I am not sure how to feel about. This is because I understand her feelings as a woman who has a husband who had cheated on her and had a child with another woman, but at the same time the decision to hire a gigolo to seduce the other woman and then dump her was simply disgusting. This led to Nick’s awful experience where he was abandoned by both parents and becoming mentally deranged. And yet despite finding out about all this, she felt no guilt and doubles down. We’ll see if she redeems herself later, but so far I really am not sure what to think.

And then we have Zoie Tam as Hera’s superior. She plays a tough and strict cop who butts head with Hera often at the beginning, but later they come to an understanding and mellow out. I actually quite like her character as it was acted out very well, adding complexity as we see her tough side and her vulnerable side when we find out how bad her relationship with her husband was, and later how she blamed herself for how bad things got after he was murdered. She was very convincing in her role, but there is one problem, though. Have you seen her in other dramas like The Learning Curve of a Warlord or The Exorcist’s Meter 2? She was pretty in those dramas, but here oh my goodness… who was the make up artist because they did her dirty. They made her look like Michael Jackson. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, just make sure it’a not white like Michael Jackson!

For now this drama is just average because so many flaws hold it back. The final few episodes might turn this all around so who knows, but let’s wait and see.

Up to episode 23: okay what just happened? Man, it turned out I was wrong and Nicholas Yuen (Duncan) was not the big bad but an obvious red herring planted by TVB to misdirect us. The big bad was actually the Director of the mental hospital. I really did not see that coming, but it explains a lot. The victims of the deaths were all connected as they were or knew someone who was a patient at the mental hospital. Since Carlos was getting too close to working out who it was, the Director purposely moved all suspicion to Nicholas. Nobody would believe Nick was innocent, it even had me convinced it was him, until Nick concocted a plan to expose the real culprit. It was quite clever and it ended in a final confrontation against them at a BBQ place in the middle of the night. In a smart move, Nick put up a small hidden camera to record the whole thing as the Director busted into his monologue of why and how he killed his victims.

In their struggle, Nick was stabbed multiple times and was heavily bleeding out, leaving the Director to pour gasoline everywhere to burn everything down and pretend that Nick had committed suicide out of guilt. Unfortunately for the Director, he slipped on some gasoline on the floor and fell over, hitting his head and passing out. Nick grabbed the hidden camera and crawled out of the BBQ building, just as Carlos and Hera conveniently arrived to call him an ambulance. The Director “seemingly” died in the fire, with a charred corpse found later in the building.

Sadly, Nicholas doesn’t make it and died in hospital, but was at least able to clear his name and prove his innocence. Damn, the acting here was phenomenal and I felt so bad for Nicholas when this all came to light. Nicholas actually said in his next life he would want to be the son of his father again, but I say no way dude. Your dad was a nice guy but he was also the worst father in the world.

One thing did ruin the aftermath of his death for me. In one scene near the end of episode 22, there was a flashback to when Carlos was giving a lecture on how to control your emotional state by cupping a fist inside the other hand and breathing slowly for a few minutes to get the emotion pass. Nicholas was in this lecture and used it to control his outbursts when he could, but projected onto the wall was a slide with the title “Emotininol Control”. That clearly meant to saying “Emotional” as in “Emotional Damage”. How quick would it have been to edit that and fix the typo? The moment I saw it, it ruined the scene for me, kinda like getting ready to make love but the other person had really smelly feet. It kinda ruins the mood.

After some sad scenes, I realised that there were still 3 episodes left and that the future Hera/Mary storyline was not explained. So what did we just sit through then? And the moment I thought that, a new killer was introduced who liked to pick up girls in a taxi and then kill them with hammers. Suddenly, at the end of episode 23, there is a sudden weather change with rain and lightning so Carlos and Hera take shelter at a bus shelter, and suddenly he receives a video call and he can see future Hera/Mary getting attacked by this new killer. I have a sneaking suspicion the new killer is really the Director who managed to escape and replace his body with someone else's. This is the TVB thing to do. I don’t know how they are going to top the tragic death of “Duncan” but I have a feeling the drama already peaked.

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Rocky start, but will eventually get better

This drama is pretty good. It has Carlos Chan's Fong Yat-Chun (Jason) as the criminal psychologist who helps Hera Chan's Madam Ying to solve high-profile cases, along with their forensic assistant friend Nicholas Yuen's Chong Ding-Kan (Duncan). Something that threw me off at the beginning was the unnecessary sci-fi plot where Jason can have premonitions. It's something that can easily be removed and does not do anything much with the plot. Same goes for him being able to contact Madam Ying's future counterpart Mary, which is just her fake name to avoid getting detected from the cops, can also be removed. It pretty much spoils what will happen at the end so as soon as she said she and Jason are going to become wanted, I can tell Jason would eventually kill Duncan and die somehow (his body covered in blood was shown in a teaser lol) then Mary will be wanted (judging from the promotional teaser).

Speaking about Duncan, his whole character was incredibly well-written. This is by far Nicholas Yuen's best role and his portrayal of a mentally-ill person with bipolar disorder was so well acted. You can feel the anger in his eyes and voice everytime he has a crashout. Which is understandable considering that he is Madam Ying's half brother after her dad got with a prostitute while taking notes for a movie involved in a nightclub, and the woman eventually gave birth to Duncan. His backstory was so sad that you can't help but root for him when he killed his mom, and was eventually about to kill Madam Ying's mother too after it was revealed she paid a guy to hookup with Duncan's mom in hopes to get her husband back. It was a really selfish move and I did hope for her to die, but that just shows how well written she was to be incredibly unlikeable. Mimi Kung did a great job of being a selfish mother who only cares about her own family and not Duncan's, as well as being a mother who supports her daughters. The actor who played the father is also really good, you can tell he was in an inescapable situation and was trying his best to please both sides, but in the end it didn't work, which resulted to Duncan relapsing. But the character I really hate was Madam Ying's sister. She's really annoying, and it wasn't just how her character was written, even the actress who played her makes me so angry whenever she does something, every word that comes out of her mouth makes me want to punch my TV everytime she appears onscreen. I don't know what's with the TV producer in writing these extremely annoying characters, but at least it's only one and not multiple. The other characters are fine. I don't understand the hate against Hera Chan though. She's pretty alright for the most part to me, even though her crying sounds so fake like he just immediately shout cries after someone dies, but luckily she doesn't do that for most of the drama. Even the supposedly annoying To Siu-Bo played by Anthony Ho who has a crush on Madam Ying isn't as annoying. You could tell he just cares about her and the family and means no harm.

I actually skipped some of the episodes of the drama because they got boring, but I started watching again after the case where they had to find out what happened to the missing sister. It still got iffy there, but after Duncan's first breakout where it was revealed he was Madam Ying's half brother, that's where I started to pick it up again. I haven't finished the drama yet, but so far it's been great. Just had a terrible start and unnecessary sci-fi subplot. It could have been just a police investigation, would make the drama much more interesting, but the sci-fi part really ruins it. The lighting is also pretty bad, it's too bright and blue. I would prefer the lighting they used in the teaser but oh well.

Small update ep 21: Just wanted to write this small update that I was wrong about Duncan having DID, but I was right about there being a second killer and Duncan being too mentally ill to kill anyone. I did read a comment saying it might be Duncan from the future, which I definitely call bullshit, so I really hope that'll not be the twist. My guess so far is the doctor who treated Duncan and the other mentally ill patients in the mental hospital, but hopefully it'll be revealed in ep 22. Funny enough I was about to point out that the guy with OCD (that was the confirmed disability he has but he also has really frequent ticks which tries to imply that he has Tourette's but it looks so fake) was the true killer, but in the end it was revealed that he's not since he apologized for hitting Duncan and only lent his car to the real kiler.

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Who is the female lead and why is she so bad?

Carlos Chan is good/decent as always and the rest of the cast seem OK as well. The story is kinda interesting. BUT, and this is a big BUT for me, wow, who decided that the female lead was ready for a starring role in a POLICE drama no less is clearly high on drugs. TVB probably doesn't have the highest quality stable of actors left, but wow, she takes the cake. She completely overacts (it's cringey to see her reaction to someone dying). She literally looks like someone who is in an acting class with the professor telling them how to emote. And also, watch her run. It's....ummmm...unique? I normally wouldn't make such comments, but it stretches credibility that she's this amazing, hardcore police officer when she runs like a chicken flapping its wings....in slow motion. I hope the story takes off soon or it's donezo for me just simply because of the horrific actress.

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