Falling for Snow

Snowfall is a bit of a strange Chinese fantasy romance drama about an abused blind girl and a philanthropic immortal vampire (sort of) set during the later Republican Era (1912 to 1949) who find a very chaste love while constantly saving each other from repetitive conflicts and bizarre clashes with not very well defined antagonists over three meteorites that bestow magic powers, all this while behaving without a lick of common sense whatsoever. I liked it despite all the script problems -- and there are many -- because it is strange and weirdly romantic at times, but not in any satisfying sense. Also, the primary antagonist (I think he was, anyway) ended up endearing himself to me and I'm still not sure why.

Mi Lan (played very well by Ouyang Nana) is a blind girl who is constantly beaten and starved by her wealthy mother, who blames her for all her problems. I will put this upfront: the scenes with the mother abusing her blind daughter were very hard for me to watch, and may be triggering for anyone who has been abused as a child. Anyway, Mi Lan finally gives up all hope, escapes the mansion and goes out into the night to pick a spot where she can freeze to death.

While preparing for suicide, Mi Lan stumbles over a 100-year-old vampire who looks about forty, Shen Zhiheng (Gao Wei Guang), who is shot, broken and bleeding after an assassination attempt by some local thugs on behalf of the superintendent of a regional army, maybe? (this is what I mean about characters being not very well defined.) She rediscovers her desire to live as she contacts Situ Wei Lian (played very artfully and enthusiastically by WinWin of NCT and WayV fame), a doctor Shen knows, to come and save him. This seems to take about a week, but Shen's fine after he rests up. Meanwhile, Mi Lan pays for ducking out at the hands of her mother, who decides to starve her.

That's pretty much the rest of the 24 episode series. Everyone tries to kill Shen, Mi Lan saves him but in the process is beaten, shot, dies etc. Ocassionally they flip roles and Mi Lan has to be saved while Shen suffers injury and comes close to death. Meanwhile, there are three meteorites that fell to earth and bestowed fabulous but eerie powers on three different families. One of these rocks is the reason Shen became a sort of kind of vampire, although that explanation is rather fuzzy. One of the antagonists has another that fogs the minds of others set in a ring; it apparently kills everyone in her family when they hit 30. I never quite got who had the third one, what it looked like and what power it bestowed; it seemed to be tied up with a cast iron bird and tree sculpture. I got the feeling that the producers wanted the stones to play a bigger part in this drama but they got backburnered due to the repetitive conflict action.

Problems: well, not with the cast, that's for sure. They all did a tremendous job with the crap script they were handed. Otherwise, the writing, the constant violence, the arcs of pretty much everything, the lack of definition, the repetitiveness of the conflicts, the sheer stupidity and lack of common sense displayed by everyone at every turn, the romance (if it was that; the blind girl and the vampire had more of a father/daughter vibe to them for me) really made the series plod. The ending sucked, of course, in the Japanese way of endings. That said, the best performance in the series has to go to Ryan Ren, who plays thug boss Li Ying Liang. He owned his role as a poor boy turned gangster who ends up becoming Shen's worst enemy, then his victim, and then weirdly his savior. Despite all the mutations of his character -- some of which are idiotic -- I really did end up falling more for Ryan Ren than the protagonists. If you don't mind all of the above, then Snowfall may be for you. Available on Viki.com.