233. When a Snail Falls in Love 如果蜗牛有爱情 (2016) Chinese

Wang Kai, Wang Olivia

Drama Rating: 9/10     Neck Score: A+

In general, this drama was amazing.  It had a great cast of characters, and a lovely, dark crime plot.  I absolutely loved Xu Xu, our mail lead, who is a stoic, logical, and lovable psychologist, who is also the tiniest girl ever.  I loved the interactions between our heroine and all the characters, as she was both logical and kind.  I especially loved the slow but steady romance between the head detective of violent crimes and our intern criminal profiler psychologist.  The title gets its name from the animal imagery that our lead girl, Xu Xu, uses when profiling people.  Everyone in the violent crimes department gets profiled with animals, from a monkey to hippo.  Xu Xu even draws these profiles into comics of everyone, which leads to a series of comics about a snail and her lion boss, who then start to fall in love.  I also really liked the other couples and characters.  I was especially rooting for the pig and hippo.  The plot, with all the connected crimes that got more and more complex was amazing.  I loved how it became more serious and bigger at every turn.  I also loved the detail we got to see in how our heroes faced it and figured things out.  I loved the character development, as everyone grew, especially our snail and lion.  We got to see them form themselves into a great team and a great OTP.  My only complaint in this whole show is that the ending got a little sloppy.  Not so much in the actual plot.  I feel like the crime plot got wrapped up much more nicely than the romance did.  It felt super rushed and kind of nonsensical.  There was a ridiculous time jump where suddenly everything happened.  Whole romances were skipped over.  We left everyone at the start of the real relationship, and suddenly jumped to weddings and proposals.  It was weird and we felt a little cheated.  It didn't flow well, and we felt less satisfied.  They also tried to leave the ending super open ended, which would be find, but it was instead confusing.  I wouldn't mind a season 2, but I don't like how they wrapped up this series in an attempt to let that happen.