Watched the last episode of "Lie Huo Xiong Xin" on Channel U on Monday evening. Well, I must say that the ending is really sad man. Anyone else who has followed the series would agree with me. I think it would have been sadder if a friend of mine have not revealed the spoiler ending to me weeks before.

Definitely, the character that one would least expect to die at the last few minutes of the show would be the fireman Ji Detian (starring Wang Xi). Afterall, this is the type of show in which you would kind of expect a happy ending, and Ji Detian as a character surely deserve a happy ending more so than other characters in the show, not because most of the other characters are unlikeable, most of them in fact are rather cute or funny but that throughout the show, he has been a loving father, a caring brother, an ideal boyfriend and well.... a nice jolly fellow. But I guess that is precisely the meaning of "tragedy", to have something bad happen to people who really deserve better or who if not for the tragedy would have realised their dreams.

I think many people must be disappointed with such an ending. I have a friend who decided not to watch the last episode after he read the tragic ending in the synopsis in "i-weekly" although he has been following most of the series. Two scenes from this episode really stood up in my mind. The first was when Ji Detian was trapped in the room with the adjacent corridor engulfed by flames. He was frantically hammering with a metal rod to try to break through a wall and repeating the words "Dad is knocking off" (if I am not wrong, in an earlier episode he was nearly killed while fighting fire and he was also repeating those same words for his daughter to harden his resolve to survive). There then followed the explosion that killed him and his last cry was the name of his daughter.

The second scene was when Yinyi (starring Zhang Keyi), whom Ji Detian just successfully proposed to before setting off for his ill-fated last duty and Nanfeng (don't know the actor's name) came home and amidst tears and hug told Ji Detian's little girl that her father was busy and wouldn't be home soon. There then followed the scene in which the little girl was sitting by herself in the middle of the night in the room and when Nanfeng found her, she cried and said that they were all lying to her and that her father would not be coming back ever again. For all of us who have followed the series and saw the kind of bond between father and daughter and how adorable the daughter was, seeing her cry was really heart wrenching.

In movies and drama series, we are so used to the main protagonists, if they were to die, die in the arms of loved ones and actually having just enough breath to say their last words that such deaths no longer move us. But when the death is so sudden that the protagonist is deprived of even the standard ritual to say his last words, the death became impactful and more tragic. It is like Heaven is so cruel as to not even give him a chance to say goodbye. I suppose this applies to real life tragedies as well, a sudden death without goodbye is always more devastating to survivors than a death that is impending.

To go back to the TV again, I must say that local drama series on the whole still seem incapable of crafting such life-like characters that make the audience feel for them like they are real people. There is always a X factor lacking in local drama series that make them inferior to TVB series and now that Channel U would come under the same umbrella as Channel 8, I think there are even less prospects for creating quality local series.