A rising body count ought to make a murder investigation feel more urgent. Here, it mostly makes the detectives look worse. Students are being brutally killed, yet Jade and Kamin keep making room for courtship while failing to protect the people in danger or catch whoever is responsible. Worse still, the victims barely become people before the show disposes of them. Their deaths serve the machinery of the plot without carrying any emotional weight. I found myself watching neither a compelling mystery nor a romance I wanted to follow.
That is frustrating because there is a promising thriller buried in this setup. At a college party, seven friends drink and play truth or dare, then all lose consciousness. When they come around, one of them is dead. The surviving friends become suspects, each holding back a different account of the truth. At least one is plainly prepared to sacrifice the others rather than take the fall for what happened. A circle of secretive friends who begin dying one after another could have sustained a straightforward murder mystery thriller perfectly well.
The case also comes with complications that should give the investigation some bite. Captain Jade leads it, despite the suspects including her own brother, Jay. Assigned to work with Jade is Kamin, a new inspector who has recently moved from the US. Meanwhile, another member of the friend group is the son of a prominent politician, prompting their superiors to demand discretion and a quick resolution. Personal ties and pressure from above are already built into the inquiry before the remaining friends start being killed off.
What follows makes almost nothing worthwhile out of those pressures. The investigation crawls along, its logic full of holes, while a serial killer works through the students as though this were a slasher movie. With every additional death, the same question becomes harder to ignore: why is nobody being protected? Jade and Kamin seem hopelessly out of their depth when actual police work is required. The mystery becomes a farce, and the thinly drawn victims offer little reason to stay emotionally engaged with it.
The detectives’ contrasting personalities are used to fuel their attraction instead. Jade trusts charm and instinct; Kamin values discipline and rules. Each visibly gets on the other’s nerves, and genuine feelings eventually develop between them. Their chemistry is decent, too. None of that excuses how irritating the relationship is to watch in this particular story. They spend so much of their time flirting, kissing and sleeping together that solving the murders appears to come second. Apparently an active killing spree still leaves plenty of space for romantic banter.
Mixing gay romance with a murder mystery is hardly an untested idea, and it usually works well enough. The problem here is not the combination itself but the writing’s inability to make the two parts belong together. Lighthearted exchanges and seemingly random sexual encounters jar against the seriousness of the case. Rather than choosing a coherent tone, the writers keep interrupting the thriller with a relationship that makes its central investigators look even less competent.
The ending did manage to surprise me a little, but it arrived after I had already stopped caring—about the killer’s identity and about whether the leads got together. Across 10 episodes of around 50 minutes each, the show squandered both kinds of interest. For me, this was time wasted on a badly written, badly executed BL drama nobody needed. 3/10.