tungyin1

This movie shares a title and underlying source material with the TV series (from the same year): a young woman gets a heart transplant and becomes unwittingly entangled with mysteries involving the donor. Movie and TV show quickly diverge, though. The movie is more of an amateur detective story, with Xia Zao An trying to find out if her donor was set up to be killed so that she could receive the needed transplant. The math part of the movie has to do with LaPlace's Theorem -- essentially, the belief that if you knew with perfect certainty where every particle was and its velocity, you can predict the future.

The movie is decent, but I found the TV show more compelling. The TV show is more of a techno-thriller, and the heart transplant plays a much bigger role in the story.

The imdb plot summary pretty well captures what this show is about: a c-pop star and her best friend (a genius at solving crimes), both junior college students, get drawn into a series of murders that turn out to be connected to a shadowy organization. Meanwhile, the pop star turns out to have a split personality, that of a former government agent. (This is revealed very early on).

The c-drama that this most reminded me of is "Love Me If You Dare" with Wallace Hou and Ma Sichun. This one doesn't have the rom-com aspect of "Love Me If You Dare" (well, maybe a tiny little bit), but both shows involve slowly unwrapping the layers of the conspiracy.

I was watching this show while running on the treadmill, and it definitely kept me coming back to work out because I wanted to see what happened next. Be warned that, while it does have an ending, it's most like the end of one book, but not a series. There definitely could be at least another season of the show, but seeing as it's been five years, I doubt it will happen.

Main character Liu Ziguang washes ashore on a beach with no memory of his last eight years (though we the viewers know much of it, with a few key pieces of information hidden from us as well). He discovers that he's really good at fighting, almost superpowered in terms of athletic abilities, and he can shoot guns. What happened in those eight years?

Back in his hometown (Jiangbei), he saves a boy from kidnappers but draws the suspicion of a feisty female police officer (Hu Rong). He also reunites with some childhood friends and does a lot of local heroic deeds.

The main driver of the plot is the mystery of those eight years, combined with the drug trafficking going on in Jiangbei, which it turns out he has some connection to. Meanwhile, he and Officer Hu gradually fall for each other, though not without complications.

There's actually a lot of comedy in the series, though not so much in the last eight or nine episodes. Other parts are heartbreaking -- credit really goes to actress Ma Sichun, who shows incredible range, going from tough and determined, to lovey dovey to utterly devastated.