Really unfortunate that trawl fishing damaged the wreck — but also incredible that the ship was still in use in the early 1960s.

Do you mean this 2025 Korean movie?

I haven’t seen that one but it sounds interesting. Thanks for the recommendation!

My sense is that North Americans just aren’t aware of the existence of high concept or well resourced productions coming out from Asia. China, Korea and Japan have large television and film production industries and the vfx specialists to make shows and films of similar or superior production quality. We’re just conditioned to think that’s Hollywood’s specialty.

The creative choices will be different and the narratives will reflect a difference in culture — and constraints of national censorship in the case of China — but there’s as wide a range of styles and types of stories.

Unfortunately, most of us only have access to the slice of Asian entertainment that Netflix choses to license. Disney+ partners with Chinese producers but then only offers the shows in SE Asia outside China rather than bringing them to Hulu. Amazon Prime was licensing Asian shows a few years ago but seems to have pulled back. Some shows are available to watch with ads on official sites on YouTube.

Asian streamers are available for subscription in North America but the majority of the content licensed at this point is romances and Idol dramas, with the occasional scifi show or thriller tossed in.

Definitely can appreciate that it’s fairly manic, and not for everyone. That’s why it has the summer movie vibe for me.

Also Dylan Wang He Di is often in roles where he’s a bit of an offbeat heroic character in dramas and films with a lot of action.

You might like Mobius better as scifi thriller or Reset if Netflix still offers it in your region.

But slower paced stuff like Interstellar is almost a different genre. Three Body Problem may be more your thing.

Yah, I was more ready to let go of new Star Trek by the time Enterprise was canceled — but that show finally felt like it was all coming together in season four so it was frustrating that it didn’t get a full run.

The miasma of sadness I feel knowing that the SFA and SNW sets have been ripped down in Toronto and Mississauga is making it hard for me to really get excited and embrace the marketing for SNW season four.

I know I will be watching with my spouse and engaging here, but it’s very really not a great feeling given I was around for TOS’ cancellation, TAS’ cancellation, Enterprise’s cancellation and now the closing of this era.

Would be really interested to hear what you think of it.

I would watch the show Mobius first.

It is however an adaptation from the novel “Ni Shi Zhen Cha Zu” (逆时侦查组) by Zhang Xiao Mao.

Mainland Chinese webnovels are often available in English translation but the quality of translation varies widely. Some of the translations are just fan translations, likely just cleaned up AI versions.

Here’s an English translation that I found referenced on MDL:

https://webnovel.leonparenzo.com/story/inverse-time-investigation-team-mobius/

Here’s the drama Mobius for the drama on My Drama List (MDL), a popular database for Asian dramas and films.

As I noted to someone else, Mobius is a current day timey-wimey scifi action thriller available on Netflix. I thought it was very well done.

It’s about a police detective sergeant who possesses the ability to relive some (unpredictably random) days and uses it in solving crimes.

It takes place in Macau, so there’s some Cantonese and English mixed in with the Mandarin although the lead actor Bai Jingting is ethnically Manchu and from Beijing.

Bai Jingting has done quite a few scifi dramas recently. Another timey-wimey one Reset takes place mainly in the Chinese Republican era — with all the angsty spy-stuff and factional twists of that era — and was also on Netflix. (It’s no longer available in Canada but may still be on in the USA.)

Sometimes there’s very consistent tone — Mobius is a good example of tight and consistent tone.

But many in other cases there can be jarring juxtapositions in tone.

Shows that start out as slapstick or Lucille Ball type comedies may become very dark and serious in the third quarter.

Sometimes a comedy is defined only by the protagonists not dying in the end and a ‘happily ever after outcome.’ More in the vein of an Ancient Greek definition of comedy.

And more like Shakespeare’s theatre, there can be moments of outright comic relief in the midst of 40 episode nonstop tragedy.

Then, there are the comic non sequitur comments — especially about food preferences— in the middle of fight scenes that originated in Hong Kong action movies (Per Aspera Ad Astra references those).

I’d recommend that you also try the current day action timey-wimey sci-fi thriller Mobius also available on Netflix for another one to get you into Chinese dramas.

Bai Jingting who stars in Mobius is another strong and popular male lead who is doing a significant number of high concept sci-fi shows. He’s also got a superhero parody comedy movie Keep Real coming out in theatres in China this summer. No news on whether an international streamer will pick that one up.

Glad to be helpful.

There’s a lot of good stuff coming out of Mainland China in recent years but it’s often marketed in a way that makes it really difficult to know what a show or movie actually is about.

Even opening episodes can be tonally radically different than the rest of a series and the trailers and synopses are often simply deceiving. Tonal whiplash is part of the form.

Not what you fear at all.

This is definitely a caution tale about AI but not a dystopian one.

The Commitments.

Fantastic to hear. Glad you can join in.

We’ll be watching S1 E3&4 this Saturday, June 20th between 3:00 and 5:00 pm EDT.

Paywalled for me in Canada.

I find that I am less and less willing to invest enthusiasm in American productions as they don’t get enough commitment from their streamers to make it worth it.

Apple seems to be make two season commitments for most shows, but generally they are following the self-destructive pattern of Syfy. There’s only so many times one can be burned.

As I said, the images were posted on Reddit by someone who loves both Cdramas and Star Trek.

I’ve checked privately with the creator and they asked to watermark the images. They shared the watermarked versions with me by private messaging and agreed to let me post here.

This person is a professional vfx specialist working in television who did this for their own amusement. They have asked me to avoid sharing more detail on who they are which I believe is fair.

If you aren’t aware that there is a certain amount of directed compositing in many CGI engines for vfx and game design, I don’t know what to say.

Using generated render to rough up an idea can be part of the process.

Pursuit of Jade reportedly cost the equivalent of $100 million for 40 episodes and certainly looks like it.

S-tier cdramas are quite well funded now. I just watched the current day 2025 science fiction thriller Mobius on Netflix. It was at the production level of any American or European show.

The creator is a professional vfx artist who was playing, and has included a watermark for that reason.

Yes, AI is part of their toolkit, but these were not just a case of asking a gen AI tool fabricate something.