We're Nothing at All

I did quite like the first half hour of this drama as, in best "Silent Witness" tradition, it tries to forensically piece together just what happened when a double-decker bus exploded on it's route. Keen to reassure the travelling public, the police commissioner drafts in retired expert "Leung" (Patrick Tam) to help out. After a meticulous inspection of the charred wreckage, he begins to reconstruct just what happened - but with the enormous heat caused by the blast there are no fingerprints or DNA to go on, so he is going to have to rely on some sparing CCTV as well as the many grieving families arriving at his lab concerned for missing relatives if he is to identify the victims and quite possibly any perpetrators too. It's in the course of solving this jigsaw puzzle that we are introduced to "Ike" (Ansonbean) who makes a living by doing some street sketching and lives with his family. When he announces that he is gay, they chuck him out and that's when he has to rely on basketball-playing "Fai" (Anson Kong). This young man is more street smart, having left an abusive home at fourteen, and is soon a vital support for his now homeless lover. As their relationship develops, we learn more about both of their childhoods - but what might this have to do with the bus explosion on Valentine's Day? Well "Leung" is still on that case and as his science starts to give us some answers, we begin to see just how this might all, somewhat tragically, knit together. Sadly those more scientific elements of the plot ebb away too quickly and what we are left with is pointed, but contrived and a little soapy. There are plot holes all over the shop, especially regarding just how "Ike" and "Fai" ever got together in the first place and the character development of "Leung" and the explanation for his "retirement" all seems too convenient, even melodramatic, to be plausible. Ansonbean takes the acting plaudits as he brings a certain vulnerability to his role, but the other characters are a little too superficially developed to deliver what could have been a more substantial critique on being gay in Hong Kong and of the complex behavioural psychology it touches on as the plot progresses. I enjoyed this, but it could have done with a more focussed approach.