Like my review of Until We Meet Again, this comes with a great deal of frustration.

Between Us takes all the slow, reflective, aimlessness of its parent show's back half and turns it into an entire drama. Without even the interesting premise of Until We Meet Again, Between Us is just a formless mass of disconnected BL tropes with the odd scene where the writer seems to really want to examine things like feelings and relationships but kind of doesn't.

There's nothing in Team and Win's storyline that couldn't have been examined as the second story in Until We Meet Again (and boy would that have been better than the Lay's ads, which have not gone away unfortunately). It's definitely not enough to carry even half a drama. And so the writers pad again with even less interesting plotlines and boring one-note relationships between tertiary characters.

I admit to enjoying the relatively well integrated Pharm/Dean saga that is unfolding as per the first season but this time in the background (although I nearly turned it off in the beginning when Pharm started his damn crying again). But we also get the shallow and pointless B and Prince romance, the headscratching romance between Win's brother and his friend, Tul, AND the short afterthought that is Manow and Pruek. So I guess the promise of a woman getting a romance for once really came to very little.

Ignoring the tendency of BL shows to distract from their shallowness by throwing more and more romances at us, Team and Win's story has serious pacing and motivation issues. While Win is quite consistent and well developed (and Boun is still so so so hot, you guys. So so hot), the writer seems not to know who Team is or what he wants and so I don't either. Apart from supportive friend to Pharm and walking trauma flashback, Team doesn't have a personality or a motivation for half of what he does and when he does have a personality it's that of a five year old. Prem is not a good actor and this certainly doesn't help.

Because we don't know who Team is, we don't know where Win's interest comes from. What does he see in Team? We don't know and can't know until the writer works out who he is at all. The integrated common scenes from UWMA only add to the inconsistent characterisation. Team is an entirely different character in the original series and at various other points throughout Between Us. It becomes more and more jarring as the show goes on.

As with Until We Meet Again, my source of frustration comes from the show's unrealised potential (more so with UWMA than this admittedly). Between Us seems to want to genuinely grapple with issues of exploitation, consent and trauma; all areas where BLs have traditionally struggled. Instead its storytelling is all over the place. While Team's trauma is supposed to underpin the story, everything is told strangely from Boun's perspective with his family troubles and fear of commitment coming front and centre instead of Team's story. Although this is probably not surprising since, as I mentioned above, the writer doesn't know who Team is other than traumatised from his experience as a child.

Unlike UWMA I'm not sure what the successful version of this show would look like. It would probably be just as boring as a slow and reflective piece can be. But at least it wouldn't be pointless. Maybe we can imagine a superior version of UWMA with both storylines told adequately rather than two separate pieces that don't work.