Summer's Desire Episode 1

You can watch Summer's Desire over at DramaFever.

 

 

Wow. Peter Ho is all over this drama. He's one of the stars of the program, produces it, and sings the title theme.

 

 

We open on a dark night. As Yin Xia Mo (Barbie Hsu) narrates, a sweaty Ou Chen (Peter Ho) drives recklessly down the road. We also see shots of Luo Xi (Huang Xiao Ming) being beaten up somewhere. Ou Chen crashes into a tree. He falls out of the car to the pavement, grasping a green hair ribbon in his hand. Luo Xi also falls to the pavement wherever he's at as a small sketch of a woman floats down beside him. Both men gasp out Xia Mo's name. Looks to me Xia Mo is bad news all around. They should both stay away from her.

 

Time skip.

 

At the Taiwan airport Luo Xi sits and stares at the small sketch of Xia Mo when his assistant comes to tell him it's time. As he walks through the airport, Luo Xi is mobbed by screaming girls. A news report tells us he's an international superstar returning home for the first time in five years.

 

Elsewhere in Taipei, Xia Mo and her extremely annoying friend, Zhen En, are applying for jobs as assistants to celebrities. They discover they've been sent to originally be assistants to Shu Er, who knows them from college. Neither Xia Mo nor Annoying Friend look too pleased by this. They'd rather work for that other celebrity, Wei An. (She looks like she's twelve feet tall! Maybe that's why she's a celebrity.) Turns out Wei An is a major bitch, so Xia Mo changes her mind and agrees to work for Shu Er.

 

Xia Mo returns home to the apartment she shares with her brother, Xiao Cheng. There must be something wrong with him as he takes medication and they talk about his appointment at the hospital. Xia Mo has a flashback to when her adoptive parents brought home another adoptee in the form of Luo Xi.

 

We now cut to... is that Venice? Are we in Venice? Anyway, Ou Chen awakens from a bad dream to find himself wearing a puffy pirate shirt. Is Seinfeld aware of this? Ou Chen is comforted by a young woman. He thinks to himself he was told this girl went to school with him and is his girlfriend, yet he has suspicions. Turns out that car wreck five years ago made him lose his memory. All the way to Venice. I'd be willing to lose my memory if it meant I ended up in a mansion in Venice. But I digress...

 

Ou Chen is some kind of fencing master. And he speaks passable English! He has an old man, Xi Meng, as some kind of assistant. He tells Xi Meng to make arrangements for their return to Taipei. Interestingly, Xi Meng seems hesitant and attempts to talk his boss into staying in France instead and attend to the family business there. Ou Chen is firm in his decision. It's Taipei or bust.

 

Ou Chen then makes Fake Girlfriend play the William Tell game, then he breaks up with her. Ou Chen's kind of an ass.

 

Back in Taipei, Shu Er helps Xia Mo get discovered by her agency. I'm not really sure what this business is. It's like a celebrity factory. Xia Mo is sent to celebrity boot camp where she and some other girls will be trained in singing, dancing, acting, the whole works. However, in the end only two will make it out alive. The ultimate prize is recording a duet with the already famous Luo Xi. (The only reason he agreed to the duet is because he knew Xia Mo's name was on the shortlist of contenders.)

 

This causes Xia Mo to have even more flashbacks. That's basically all she does this episode is flash back. In high school we see that Luo Xi was quite a player and all the girls were screaming after him even before he was famous. Luo Xi, however, seems to care about only one person - Luo Xi. He's what I call "freaky deeky." He and Xia Mo have a rather odd relationship, like they're deadly rivals. I thought there was supposed to be a love triangle here. I'm not feeling the love, at least not between these two.

 

 

There's no real momentum to this episode. It was so slow. Actress Barbie Hsu had no energy. Except for a smile here and there her facial expression never changed. Whether she was praising her younger brother or facing down a bully at school, her voice never changed. So monotonous. Huang Xiao Ming wasn't much better. He just stood around looking pretty. And creepy. Again, no energy. Really, to give him credit, Peter Ho was about the only person in this show who seemed to be awake. Problem is he wasn't much in this episode. Too busy singing and producing, I guess.