'Cause You're My Boy
I came to 2018 Thai BL series Cause You're My Boy (CYMB), also known as My Tee, after seeing a recommendation on Twitter. This series is exceptionally good, beyond anything I had anticipated after having read a synopsis of its derivative central storyline. It lacks consistency in places, and its production values are bargain-basement, but it still manages to be an instant classic, with some stints of top-notch screenplay.
Big Spoilers Warning: I reveal extensive plot details in this review, especially from episodes 6, 7 and 8. I swore I would never do this in my blog, but I've decided I want to look at some of its narrative choices more closely. I've marked the paragraph that contains spoilers, so that you're able to avoid it if you want to.
Summary: High school student Mork leads an eventful rebellious life at school, surrounded by friends and having lots of fun times, though his grades are suffering. He's rather selfish and has street smarts rather than book smarts, but he has a kind, brave and enterprising spirit. For example, he sells pirated gay porn to supplement his father's income from his barber shop. When serious, solitary fellow student Tee turns up at the barber's, Mork is commandeered into giving him a haircut, which turns out very badly for Tee. Angry Tee looks for ways to take revenge, which sets both boys on a path of ongoing tit-for-tat paybacks. When Mork goes too far and ends up ruining Tee's relationship with his girlfriend Bambi, Tee insists on reparations from Mork. They come up with a silly 'gay couple' charade in an attempt to make Bambi jealous so that she will want to take Tee back. The charade backfires when both boys suddenly realise they have feelings for each other.
Early episodes 1 to 5
Reading the above plot summary, you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled onto a reworking of classic Thai BL series Love Sick. The first couple of episodes don't do much to dispel that initial impression. It's charming, sweet, gentle, unevenly paced, poorly edited, awkwardly directed and almost entirely unremarkable. The only aspect that sets its early episodes apart from Love Sick is its screenplay. It's far more persuasively written than Love Sick, with a strong sense of direction and a keen focus on its magnetic main couple. These episodes are all about the traditional Thai BL, "Love Sick"-style set-up: boy meets boy; idiotic accident starts a war; ludicrous 'gay' idea for a truce brings boys together; boys unexpectedly feel attraction; Boy A makes his feelings clear; Boy B denies his feelings and resists Boy A. So far, so generic. Two scenes, however, really stand out, and show that the screenwriters are making a conscious effort to incorporate some originality. The first involves insomniac Mork walking through the streets of Bangkok in the dead of the night to Tee's apartment, swaddled adorably in his blue duvet. It's a winsome, almost dream-like sequence, and it's easily one of CYMB's very best scenes - and in a series full of memorable scenes, that's really saying something. The second notable scene has Tee's mother, a teacher, conducting a "sexuality & diversity" discussion with Mork's class, apparently as an alternative to a more explicit sex education class. (Side note: does Thailand really have these types of classes in schools, and how do we mandate them internationally? Amazing.) Some of the boys treat it as an excuse to be crude, but Mork is keenly interested in listening to her non-judgemental, simple explanations of sexual attraction, sexuality, gender identity, and - in one of the series' most surprising script decisions - Robert Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love. Mork (and we in the audience) will remember her support, candour and generosity of spirit in this scene, and contrast it against her appalling behaviour when she appears in later episodes in a much more challenging context. Scenes such as these two give a really encouraging feeling that something special is brewing.
Two weak BL subplots don't make much of an impact in themselves, though they do play small parts in the central Tee/Mork story. Mork's charismatic brother Morn doesn't realise his best friend Gord is trying to show indirectly that he's crushing on him. One of Mork's good friends Au is a little too over-protective of Mork to be just a friend, and he's deeply suspicious of Tee's increasing closeness to him. Only the actor playing Morn has a decent screen presence, but it's Au who gets the best 'secondary character' scenes, especially in one where he confronts Mork during a car-drive home after episode seven's high drama (explained later in this review). In any case, none of the secondary characters is all that remarkable, particularly when set against such a strong Tee/Mork dynamic.
The narrative in these early episodes also gives us hints from time to time that something much more interesting is bubbling away under the Mork/Tee 'getting to know each other' surface - something that the boys have deliberately hidden from everyone. When we finally get the clarity we've been waiting for via a flashback, it has a vast and surprising impact - not just on the screenplay, but also across our entire experience of the series from that point on. This flashback is decisively important and a critical turning point in the story. You'll know exactly what I mean when you see it. (I'm going to mention this flashback several times in this review, so I will refer to it as The Flashback [!] from now on, to make things simpler.)
Most BL series at this point start wringing their hands, unsure what to do next after being given such a gem of a story. Thai BL series often aim low for some fairly mundane variations of "the boys repeatedly splitting up then getting back together" and/or "long drawn-out bouts of confusion and indecision". Some get their take on this formula right (Together With Me, SOTUS, Love By Chance), but most only partly succeed, if at all (Waterboyy The Series, Love Sick, Make It Right). CYMB succeeds by taking the untravelled high road, a mountainous, difficult path full of dangers and discoveries. It grabs hold of its narrative and runs head-long into this uncharted BL territory, propped up by one of the strongest BL screenplays around. There are very few other BL dramas that I've seen that attempt to portray what this series courageously aims at, and with great originality - the need to be able to question oneself and to forge one's own character in adversity, which are the very best and bravest types of exploration.
Episodes 6, 7 and 8
As the central character of the series, the portrayal of Mork's journey in particular emerges as something really special. It's a very fine depiction of a desperately confused, immature young man whose sense of self, resilience and conscience all come under severe stress. He is totally unprepared for the trials that his choices in life will throw at him, and we as the audience get the privilege of being able to watch him deal with their dramatic consequences and emerge as a stronger, more mature person. From this perspective, episodes 6 and 7 are unforgettable standouts, especially in the way they show the cause-and-effect chain reactions of his decisions. Their plots are worth describing in detail, so here's a SPOILERS ALERT for the entirety of the next paragraph. Skip to one more paragraph down if you want no spoilers.
BIG SPOILERS FOLLOW. In a finely written romantic scene at the beach, Tee and Mork come to an agreement about the status of their relationship. Tee almost immediately makes a thoughtless mistake, and petrified Mork runs away. Scared by what looks like a sudden disappearance, Mork's brother Morn lodges a frantic post on social media, asking people to look for Mork. By this time, Mork and Tee have reconciled, and end up going on their first official date after school at a place called Snow Town. Their physical closeness gets noticed on social media, and soon people are beginning to make the connection between the missing boy at the beach and the kissing boys on a date. Morn's post goes viral, and is soon linked to some compromising CCTV footage from Snow Town. Back at home, Mork is in for a rude awakening. His life is apparently ruined by Morn's post, his sexuality is now public, and his school is almost certainly going to expel him (the boys were wearing their school uniforms at Snow Town, though fortunately Tee's face wasn't visible in the CCTV footage). Mork's father reprimands his son severely for his behaviour and tells him to reconsider his relationship with Tee. At this horrifying moment, the worst crisis in his life since his mother's death, and one where most boys his age would crumple in fear and self-doubt, Mork gathers his remaining strength together and tells his father the truth: that he loves Tee with every fibre of his being and will never give him up. His father is disgusted by his choice and says it will make him (Mork) unhappy for the rest of his life, but Mork is now so determined and so certain of his love that even his father's lack of support doesn't deter him. It's an awe-inspiring moment, one of the absolute greatest in BL. Nothing had prepared me for seeing Mork so categorically sure of himself and the rightness of his decision, and it immediately elevates everything about his relationship with Tee and its portrayal in this series from this point onwards. It's also from this point that the screenplay throws Mork into hell. Despite his father's doomsday predictions, Mork goes to school anyway and does his best to evade the prurient curiosity of his school friends. Completely unaware of Mork's social media catastrophe, Tee participates in a school event but collapses due to an allergic reaction, ending up in hospital. Distraught, Mork also passes out, and his best friends Au and Ton rescue him and take him home to recover. Tee's mother unexpectedly appears at the barber's, and asks to take Mork out for a meal. It's soon clear that she isn't there to support Mork or to sugar-coat what she wants from him. She won't allow him to see Tee at the hospital without some despicable conditions attached. She wants nothing less than a complete rupture with Tee, and the calm, logical and very persuasive arguments she uses to deliver her ultimatum are abhorrent. Mork is immediately angry and defensive. Again, he unequivocally defends the purity of his love from the moral high ground of a good conscience, hinting through gritted teeth that he won't tolerate her hypocrisy or bullying. But when she threatens to take Tee out of school, Mork's courage suddenly hits a brick wall. He finally recognises a kernel of truth in his father's angry repudiation; that others will forever interfere with his relationship and try to destroy it or humiliate him using any method they can. It's hard to think how the screenplay could possibly go any more 'nuclear' than this. It's admirably risky, unexpected and utterly compelling. And it tosses poor Mork into the reality of what it's like to be subjected to judgemental hatred and homophobia, and I honestly didn't think he'd be able to withstand it. Shot after shot, scene after scene, these two episodes progressively build on each other, compounding the tension, drama and emotion, until we reach this astonishing climax of episode 7 with Tee's mother that bodes nothing but conflict and suffering ahead for Mork and Tee. It's A-grade, brilliant BL screenwriting and enthralling television. Early in episode 8, Tee soon re-enters the frame, with no idea of his mother's ultimatum to Mork. Missing Mork, he has absconded from hospital, still sick and disorientated, and he calls Mork to come and find him, though he has no idea where he is. When Mork at last finds him, forlorn and exhausted in an alleyway, their reunion is heartfelt but also solemn and sad. They are finally able to talk through a lot of the misunderstandings that arose as a result of the incident shown in The Flashback. At last we get a slightly better understanding of who Tee is; in earlier episodes, he'd been relegated to playing enigmatic second fiddle to Mork's irrepressibility. While Mork gets most of the focus of the series' narrative, we're now given enough of intelligent Tee's background and character to get the sense that he's actually, in my view, far more interesting than Mork. That's not to say that Mork's story of maturity and finding his strength of character isn't interesting. Far from it. It's just that his back story is unoriginal and less interesting (immature, selfish bad boy), whereas Tee's journey starts from a very dark place filled with depression, from which Mork's love rescues him. The audience is given glimpses into Tee's past as a lost and unhappy child, who had suddenly ceased going to junior high school altogether and managed to keep it a secret for months. He'd go instead to internet cafes or sleep in the streets for hours until it was time to go home. When Mork hears this shocking story from Tee's mother during their quarrel, he knows to a certain extent why Tee had acted so strangely (it relates to The Flashback) but what she leaves unspoken suggests something far more disturbing. So in this important reunion scene in the alleyway, when horrified Mork sees sick Tee sitting on the ground with his head buried in his arms, it gives him - and the audience - a terrible sense of dread and foreboding. There's something so unknowable and ominous about Tee's dark states of mind. 'Cause You're My Boy absolutely makes the right choice and removes Tee's mental state almost entirely from the story. Treating such an important and difficult subject without the respect and delicacy it requires could have been disastrous, especially in as far as as it deals with teenagers. We hear just enough of his back story to be able to sympathise with him, but without fully understanding him. It's a tough to call make though, as it unfortunately places Tee permanently in Mork's shadow, losing something profound in the process. In any case, the most important point from the perspective of the BL drama is that Tee loves Mork just as steadfastly and devoutly as Mork loves him, if not more, and he recovers his blissful smile whenever he is with him. SPOILERS END.
Final episodes 9 to 12
The final four episodes are where the all the hard work pays off. After such a strong sequence of middle episodes, CYMB could easily have rested on its laurels and coasted to the finish line, and it would still have been a very fine addition to the 'Best Of BL' cannon. To its credit, it doubles down on the drama and the emotion. The dramatic implications of Mork's decisions continue to intensify for the rest of the series, many of them being totally out of his control and which then end badly. From the start, he has been continually put under intense pressure from all directions - his father, social media, Tee's mother, school, Au, and, above all else, his own conscience. The strain it places on Mork is relentless, and by the time we reach a pivotal crisis at the beginning of episode 9, it has become overwhelming, almost sadistic. The story suddenly turns upside down, and Tee and Mork are entirely stripped of their agency, leaving them stranded in a fatalistic nightmare. They have absolutely nowhere to turn to except each other - and when even that is threatened, the series suddenly looks like it will inflict something unimaginable on the audience. It's profoundly moving, emotionally involving and a near-perfect depiction of the power of true love in the face of brutal resistance. Episode 11 in particular will have you snivelling on the floor shamelessly crying multiple times, it's just SO GOOD.
It's true, however, that final episode 12 can't live up to the powerful drama of episode 11, and it flattens as it looks for some quick resolutions. It's not a bad episode by any means, but it's definitely disappointing in some of the vague choices it makes.
As fine as this series is, it's obviously subject to some near-fatal weaknesses. Let's be honest; some of them are so destructively bad, it's a challenge watching the series any further. With its subplots kept to a minimum, its rapidly evolving central storyline requires a firm hand to keep it marching in step with its extended patches of forceful dialogue and proactive screenplay, but unfortunately its direction can be frustratingly aimless and tentative. The young actors do okay work overall, especially Drake as Mork, but there are a few inevitable moments of bad acting, and at times you can almost see them begging for some decent direction. It regularly feels as if they have been told to "do something" with no elaboration about what exactly to do or how to play it. Episode 10 all but collapses under the weight of the important "upside down" turning point in the narrative, which, in an idiotic screenplay decision, it then completely ignores. Instead, it futilely chooses to give almost all its focus to the secondary characters. As a result, it's the weakest episode of the series by some distance, and having been deserted by the suddenly wishy-washy screenplay, nothing can save it. Post production throughout the series doesn't fare much better. The sound recording is at times abysmal. The dramatic riverside bridge scenes in episodes 9 and 11 in particular are just awful. There's so much amplified background noise from traffic, it either sounds as if the microphones were thoughtlessly positioned, or the sound technician didn't understand his/her job well enough to know how to fix it. CYMB's haphazard editing leads to some weird continuity issues too, so the plot often gets messy and confusing. It painfully felt like important parts of the story were mistakenly lopped off and left on the cutting room floor. The worst example of this is when Mork faints in episode 7. It's not even shown on screen, we just hear a concerned reference to it from his friends Au and Ton when they give him a lift home. At first I thought their comment about him fainting was a schoolboy joke. How wrong I was. Choosing to edit out something so important, and then managing the repercussions of the deleted scene in the manner they did, is confusing, stupid and inept, at the very least. Other scenes could have benefitted with trimming at least ten seconds off the final take. Lack of professionalism and polish in the production values of Thai BL dramas isn't a new problem, but when it's as noticeably bad as this, I can only hope that someone was held accountable for it. Perhaps it was more of a low-budget issue than anything else.
In the end, forgiving these weaknesses and the deceleration of pacing in the final episode is easy to do because so much else in the series is so memorable. Mork and Tee's story is a triumph of first love over oppression and homophobia. Despite the ugliness of what they are fighting against, and despite Mork's agony of simultaneously wanting to surrender to the intense pressure and to persevere for the sake of a love that's universally reviled, Tee always stands beside him, supportive and unwavering, and never appearing to be anything less than the love of his life. Tee's unassailability and Mork's drawing courage from it are portrayed so beautifully and so simply, it will bring tears to your eyes. This right here is where CYMB excels. It's the depiction of the boys' astonishing courage and resilience that is the screenplay's finest achievement. It really is THE best portrayal of a fledgling BL romance under constant threat, and something that only a small handful of BL dramas that I've seen have been able to narrate successfully but on very difference scales (The Ambiguous Focus's full-blown melodrama, Words of Devotion's low-key antagonism and paranoia, Book unable to confront his traumatic present in Make It Right's second season). None of CYMB's weaknesses ultimately detracts from the power of the screenplay's rawest emotions, or its ability to drive its point home by using dialogue filled to the brim with drama, humanity and pathos. When its screenplay succeeds, it's better than anything I've witnessed in a Thai BL drama so far. Its presence becomes almost spiritual. The way it possesses Mork and especially Tee during its most powerful moments is blindingly transformative. Mork prays to his mother to help him from heaven whenever he hits rock bottom (which happens regularly), so I like to think of it as her influence, like a guardian angel walking beside them, pointing out the hidden traps and the deadly flames but also the undeniable beauty of their path they've chosen.
Rating: 15 out of 20.
Ending: happy.
Best scene: just for the fun of it, let's split them into a few categories.
1. Most Dramatic Scene: Mork's distressing confrontation with his father in episode 7.
2. Most Romantic Scene: The boys' avowals on the beach in episode 6.
3. Most Horrifying Scene: There are two standouts, and it's way too hard to pick one over the other. Mork walking along a bridge in abject despair in episode 9. / Mork, utterly exhausted and with a blood nose, confronts his fate head-on beside Tee in the episode 11 cliffhanger.
4. Funniest Scene: In bed watching TV, Morn and Gord are mortified to see the sublime 'kiss on the beach' scene from SOTUS S. Whichever scriptwriter came up with this idea is a genius.
5. Most Emotionally Devastating Scene: Mork and Tee by the riverside at the Memorial Bridge in episode 11. Seriously, get your tissues ready. I mean it.
6. The BL Oscar for Best Overall Scene of the series (and of the year!): Mork's lunch with Tee's wretched mother in episode 7. It will leave you gasping and shaking with anger - it's sheer brilliance. Will there ever be a scene in BL again with this much dramatic impact?
UPDATE: I'm really surprised to see the amount of hate this series has generated online. Most reviews I've read have completely caned it. It's true that it's far from perfect, and there are plenty of plot holes, but I'm stumped as to why people think its drama doesn't work. There are so many other aspects of CYMB that don't work, but the drama isn't one of them. Its critics definitely have a point when they say the coherence of the plot deteriorates badly as the series progresses, but when the plot isn't being torn to shreds by poor editing and production decisions, it's not that hard to work out what's going on and why. I feel that a lot of the rest of the criticism is aimed unfairly at the writers trying out a more original, dramatic screenplay, rather than something more overtly romantic and traditional. As the TV equivalent of a gay Harlequin novel, BL won't be winning awards for cinematic artistry any time soon. The best that a creative team can do is to question what constitutes BL, and then push its boundaries a lot further. But it's exactly these boundaries that have served BL so well as a successful business juggernaut, especially Thai BL. So trying to do something original that isn't a rehash of a famous series of the past is immensely risky, but it's always interesting and worth watching to see how it works out. In my view, CYMB gets its more challenging drama right, even amid the wreckage of its far less risky weaker elements.
Big Spoilers Warning: I reveal extensive plot details in this review, especially from episodes 6, 7 and 8. I swore I would never do this in my blog, but I've decided I want to look at some of its narrative choices more closely. I've marked the paragraph that contains spoilers, so that you're able to avoid it if you want to.
Summary: High school student Mork leads an eventful rebellious life at school, surrounded by friends and having lots of fun times, though his grades are suffering. He's rather selfish and has street smarts rather than book smarts, but he has a kind, brave and enterprising spirit. For example, he sells pirated gay porn to supplement his father's income from his barber shop. When serious, solitary fellow student Tee turns up at the barber's, Mork is commandeered into giving him a haircut, which turns out very badly for Tee. Angry Tee looks for ways to take revenge, which sets both boys on a path of ongoing tit-for-tat paybacks. When Mork goes too far and ends up ruining Tee's relationship with his girlfriend Bambi, Tee insists on reparations from Mork. They come up with a silly 'gay couple' charade in an attempt to make Bambi jealous so that she will want to take Tee back. The charade backfires when both boys suddenly realise they have feelings for each other.
Early episodes 1 to 5
Reading the above plot summary, you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled onto a reworking of classic Thai BL series Love Sick. The first couple of episodes don't do much to dispel that initial impression. It's charming, sweet, gentle, unevenly paced, poorly edited, awkwardly directed and almost entirely unremarkable. The only aspect that sets its early episodes apart from Love Sick is its screenplay. It's far more persuasively written than Love Sick, with a strong sense of direction and a keen focus on its magnetic main couple. These episodes are all about the traditional Thai BL, "Love Sick"-style set-up: boy meets boy; idiotic accident starts a war; ludicrous 'gay' idea for a truce brings boys together; boys unexpectedly feel attraction; Boy A makes his feelings clear; Boy B denies his feelings and resists Boy A. So far, so generic. Two scenes, however, really stand out, and show that the screenwriters are making a conscious effort to incorporate some originality. The first involves insomniac Mork walking through the streets of Bangkok in the dead of the night to Tee's apartment, swaddled adorably in his blue duvet. It's a winsome, almost dream-like sequence, and it's easily one of CYMB's very best scenes - and in a series full of memorable scenes, that's really saying something. The second notable scene has Tee's mother, a teacher, conducting a "sexuality & diversity" discussion with Mork's class, apparently as an alternative to a more explicit sex education class. (Side note: does Thailand really have these types of classes in schools, and how do we mandate them internationally? Amazing.) Some of the boys treat it as an excuse to be crude, but Mork is keenly interested in listening to her non-judgemental, simple explanations of sexual attraction, sexuality, gender identity, and - in one of the series' most surprising script decisions - Robert Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love. Mork (and we in the audience) will remember her support, candour and generosity of spirit in this scene, and contrast it against her appalling behaviour when she appears in later episodes in a much more challenging context. Scenes such as these two give a really encouraging feeling that something special is brewing.
Two weak BL subplots don't make much of an impact in themselves, though they do play small parts in the central Tee/Mork story. Mork's charismatic brother Morn doesn't realise his best friend Gord is trying to show indirectly that he's crushing on him. One of Mork's good friends Au is a little too over-protective of Mork to be just a friend, and he's deeply suspicious of Tee's increasing closeness to him. Only the actor playing Morn has a decent screen presence, but it's Au who gets the best 'secondary character' scenes, especially in one where he confronts Mork during a car-drive home after episode seven's high drama (explained later in this review). In any case, none of the secondary characters is all that remarkable, particularly when set against such a strong Tee/Mork dynamic.
The narrative in these early episodes also gives us hints from time to time that something much more interesting is bubbling away under the Mork/Tee 'getting to know each other' surface - something that the boys have deliberately hidden from everyone. When we finally get the clarity we've been waiting for via a flashback, it has a vast and surprising impact - not just on the screenplay, but also across our entire experience of the series from that point on. This flashback is decisively important and a critical turning point in the story. You'll know exactly what I mean when you see it. (I'm going to mention this flashback several times in this review, so I will refer to it as The Flashback [!] from now on, to make things simpler.)
Most BL series at this point start wringing their hands, unsure what to do next after being given such a gem of a story. Thai BL series often aim low for some fairly mundane variations of "the boys repeatedly splitting up then getting back together" and/or "long drawn-out bouts of confusion and indecision". Some get their take on this formula right (Together With Me, SOTUS, Love By Chance), but most only partly succeed, if at all (Waterboyy The Series, Love Sick, Make It Right). CYMB succeeds by taking the untravelled high road, a mountainous, difficult path full of dangers and discoveries. It grabs hold of its narrative and runs head-long into this uncharted BL territory, propped up by one of the strongest BL screenplays around. There are very few other BL dramas that I've seen that attempt to portray what this series courageously aims at, and with great originality - the need to be able to question oneself and to forge one's own character in adversity, which are the very best and bravest types of exploration.
Episodes 6, 7 and 8
As the central character of the series, the portrayal of Mork's journey in particular emerges as something really special. It's a very fine depiction of a desperately confused, immature young man whose sense of self, resilience and conscience all come under severe stress. He is totally unprepared for the trials that his choices in life will throw at him, and we as the audience get the privilege of being able to watch him deal with their dramatic consequences and emerge as a stronger, more mature person. From this perspective, episodes 6 and 7 are unforgettable standouts, especially in the way they show the cause-and-effect chain reactions of his decisions. Their plots are worth describing in detail, so here's a SPOILERS ALERT for the entirety of the next paragraph. Skip to one more paragraph down if you want no spoilers.
BIG SPOILERS FOLLOW. In a finely written romantic scene at the beach, Tee and Mork come to an agreement about the status of their relationship. Tee almost immediately makes a thoughtless mistake, and petrified Mork runs away. Scared by what looks like a sudden disappearance, Mork's brother Morn lodges a frantic post on social media, asking people to look for Mork. By this time, Mork and Tee have reconciled, and end up going on their first official date after school at a place called Snow Town. Their physical closeness gets noticed on social media, and soon people are beginning to make the connection between the missing boy at the beach and the kissing boys on a date. Morn's post goes viral, and is soon linked to some compromising CCTV footage from Snow Town. Back at home, Mork is in for a rude awakening. His life is apparently ruined by Morn's post, his sexuality is now public, and his school is almost certainly going to expel him (the boys were wearing their school uniforms at Snow Town, though fortunately Tee's face wasn't visible in the CCTV footage). Mork's father reprimands his son severely for his behaviour and tells him to reconsider his relationship with Tee. At this horrifying moment, the worst crisis in his life since his mother's death, and one where most boys his age would crumple in fear and self-doubt, Mork gathers his remaining strength together and tells his father the truth: that he loves Tee with every fibre of his being and will never give him up. His father is disgusted by his choice and says it will make him (Mork) unhappy for the rest of his life, but Mork is now so determined and so certain of his love that even his father's lack of support doesn't deter him. It's an awe-inspiring moment, one of the absolute greatest in BL. Nothing had prepared me for seeing Mork so categorically sure of himself and the rightness of his decision, and it immediately elevates everything about his relationship with Tee and its portrayal in this series from this point onwards. It's also from this point that the screenplay throws Mork into hell. Despite his father's doomsday predictions, Mork goes to school anyway and does his best to evade the prurient curiosity of his school friends. Completely unaware of Mork's social media catastrophe, Tee participates in a school event but collapses due to an allergic reaction, ending up in hospital. Distraught, Mork also passes out, and his best friends Au and Ton rescue him and take him home to recover. Tee's mother unexpectedly appears at the barber's, and asks to take Mork out for a meal. It's soon clear that she isn't there to support Mork or to sugar-coat what she wants from him. She won't allow him to see Tee at the hospital without some despicable conditions attached. She wants nothing less than a complete rupture with Tee, and the calm, logical and very persuasive arguments she uses to deliver her ultimatum are abhorrent. Mork is immediately angry and defensive. Again, he unequivocally defends the purity of his love from the moral high ground of a good conscience, hinting through gritted teeth that he won't tolerate her hypocrisy or bullying. But when she threatens to take Tee out of school, Mork's courage suddenly hits a brick wall. He finally recognises a kernel of truth in his father's angry repudiation; that others will forever interfere with his relationship and try to destroy it or humiliate him using any method they can. It's hard to think how the screenplay could possibly go any more 'nuclear' than this. It's admirably risky, unexpected and utterly compelling. And it tosses poor Mork into the reality of what it's like to be subjected to judgemental hatred and homophobia, and I honestly didn't think he'd be able to withstand it. Shot after shot, scene after scene, these two episodes progressively build on each other, compounding the tension, drama and emotion, until we reach this astonishing climax of episode 7 with Tee's mother that bodes nothing but conflict and suffering ahead for Mork and Tee. It's A-grade, brilliant BL screenwriting and enthralling television. Early in episode 8, Tee soon re-enters the frame, with no idea of his mother's ultimatum to Mork. Missing Mork, he has absconded from hospital, still sick and disorientated, and he calls Mork to come and find him, though he has no idea where he is. When Mork at last finds him, forlorn and exhausted in an alleyway, their reunion is heartfelt but also solemn and sad. They are finally able to talk through a lot of the misunderstandings that arose as a result of the incident shown in The Flashback. At last we get a slightly better understanding of who Tee is; in earlier episodes, he'd been relegated to playing enigmatic second fiddle to Mork's irrepressibility. While Mork gets most of the focus of the series' narrative, we're now given enough of intelligent Tee's background and character to get the sense that he's actually, in my view, far more interesting than Mork. That's not to say that Mork's story of maturity and finding his strength of character isn't interesting. Far from it. It's just that his back story is unoriginal and less interesting (immature, selfish bad boy), whereas Tee's journey starts from a very dark place filled with depression, from which Mork's love rescues him. The audience is given glimpses into Tee's past as a lost and unhappy child, who had suddenly ceased going to junior high school altogether and managed to keep it a secret for months. He'd go instead to internet cafes or sleep in the streets for hours until it was time to go home. When Mork hears this shocking story from Tee's mother during their quarrel, he knows to a certain extent why Tee had acted so strangely (it relates to The Flashback) but what she leaves unspoken suggests something far more disturbing. So in this important reunion scene in the alleyway, when horrified Mork sees sick Tee sitting on the ground with his head buried in his arms, it gives him - and the audience - a terrible sense of dread and foreboding. There's something so unknowable and ominous about Tee's dark states of mind. 'Cause You're My Boy absolutely makes the right choice and removes Tee's mental state almost entirely from the story. Treating such an important and difficult subject without the respect and delicacy it requires could have been disastrous, especially in as far as as it deals with teenagers. We hear just enough of his back story to be able to sympathise with him, but without fully understanding him. It's a tough to call make though, as it unfortunately places Tee permanently in Mork's shadow, losing something profound in the process. In any case, the most important point from the perspective of the BL drama is that Tee loves Mork just as steadfastly and devoutly as Mork loves him, if not more, and he recovers his blissful smile whenever he is with him. SPOILERS END.
Final episodes 9 to 12
The final four episodes are where the all the hard work pays off. After such a strong sequence of middle episodes, CYMB could easily have rested on its laurels and coasted to the finish line, and it would still have been a very fine addition to the 'Best Of BL' cannon. To its credit, it doubles down on the drama and the emotion. The dramatic implications of Mork's decisions continue to intensify for the rest of the series, many of them being totally out of his control and which then end badly. From the start, he has been continually put under intense pressure from all directions - his father, social media, Tee's mother, school, Au, and, above all else, his own conscience. The strain it places on Mork is relentless, and by the time we reach a pivotal crisis at the beginning of episode 9, it has become overwhelming, almost sadistic. The story suddenly turns upside down, and Tee and Mork are entirely stripped of their agency, leaving them stranded in a fatalistic nightmare. They have absolutely nowhere to turn to except each other - and when even that is threatened, the series suddenly looks like it will inflict something unimaginable on the audience. It's profoundly moving, emotionally involving and a near-perfect depiction of the power of true love in the face of brutal resistance. Episode 11 in particular will have you snivelling on the floor shamelessly crying multiple times, it's just SO GOOD.
It's true, however, that final episode 12 can't live up to the powerful drama of episode 11, and it flattens as it looks for some quick resolutions. It's not a bad episode by any means, but it's definitely disappointing in some of the vague choices it makes.
As fine as this series is, it's obviously subject to some near-fatal weaknesses. Let's be honest; some of them are so destructively bad, it's a challenge watching the series any further. With its subplots kept to a minimum, its rapidly evolving central storyline requires a firm hand to keep it marching in step with its extended patches of forceful dialogue and proactive screenplay, but unfortunately its direction can be frustratingly aimless and tentative. The young actors do okay work overall, especially Drake as Mork, but there are a few inevitable moments of bad acting, and at times you can almost see them begging for some decent direction. It regularly feels as if they have been told to "do something" with no elaboration about what exactly to do or how to play it. Episode 10 all but collapses under the weight of the important "upside down" turning point in the narrative, which, in an idiotic screenplay decision, it then completely ignores. Instead, it futilely chooses to give almost all its focus to the secondary characters. As a result, it's the weakest episode of the series by some distance, and having been deserted by the suddenly wishy-washy screenplay, nothing can save it. Post production throughout the series doesn't fare much better. The sound recording is at times abysmal. The dramatic riverside bridge scenes in episodes 9 and 11 in particular are just awful. There's so much amplified background noise from traffic, it either sounds as if the microphones were thoughtlessly positioned, or the sound technician didn't understand his/her job well enough to know how to fix it. CYMB's haphazard editing leads to some weird continuity issues too, so the plot often gets messy and confusing. It painfully felt like important parts of the story were mistakenly lopped off and left on the cutting room floor. The worst example of this is when Mork faints in episode 7. It's not even shown on screen, we just hear a concerned reference to it from his friends Au and Ton when they give him a lift home. At first I thought their comment about him fainting was a schoolboy joke. How wrong I was. Choosing to edit out something so important, and then managing the repercussions of the deleted scene in the manner they did, is confusing, stupid and inept, at the very least. Other scenes could have benefitted with trimming at least ten seconds off the final take. Lack of professionalism and polish in the production values of Thai BL dramas isn't a new problem, but when it's as noticeably bad as this, I can only hope that someone was held accountable for it. Perhaps it was more of a low-budget issue than anything else.
In the end, forgiving these weaknesses and the deceleration of pacing in the final episode is easy to do because so much else in the series is so memorable. Mork and Tee's story is a triumph of first love over oppression and homophobia. Despite the ugliness of what they are fighting against, and despite Mork's agony of simultaneously wanting to surrender to the intense pressure and to persevere for the sake of a love that's universally reviled, Tee always stands beside him, supportive and unwavering, and never appearing to be anything less than the love of his life. Tee's unassailability and Mork's drawing courage from it are portrayed so beautifully and so simply, it will bring tears to your eyes. This right here is where CYMB excels. It's the depiction of the boys' astonishing courage and resilience that is the screenplay's finest achievement. It really is THE best portrayal of a fledgling BL romance under constant threat, and something that only a small handful of BL dramas that I've seen have been able to narrate successfully but on very difference scales (The Ambiguous Focus's full-blown melodrama, Words of Devotion's low-key antagonism and paranoia, Book unable to confront his traumatic present in Make It Right's second season). None of CYMB's weaknesses ultimately detracts from the power of the screenplay's rawest emotions, or its ability to drive its point home by using dialogue filled to the brim with drama, humanity and pathos. When its screenplay succeeds, it's better than anything I've witnessed in a Thai BL drama so far. Its presence becomes almost spiritual. The way it possesses Mork and especially Tee during its most powerful moments is blindingly transformative. Mork prays to his mother to help him from heaven whenever he hits rock bottom (which happens regularly), so I like to think of it as her influence, like a guardian angel walking beside them, pointing out the hidden traps and the deadly flames but also the undeniable beauty of their path they've chosen.
Rating: 15 out of 20.
Ending: happy.
Best scene: just for the fun of it, let's split them into a few categories.
1. Most Dramatic Scene: Mork's distressing confrontation with his father in episode 7.
2. Most Romantic Scene: The boys' avowals on the beach in episode 6.
3. Most Horrifying Scene: There are two standouts, and it's way too hard to pick one over the other. Mork walking along a bridge in abject despair in episode 9. / Mork, utterly exhausted and with a blood nose, confronts his fate head-on beside Tee in the episode 11 cliffhanger.
4. Funniest Scene: In bed watching TV, Morn and Gord are mortified to see the sublime 'kiss on the beach' scene from SOTUS S. Whichever scriptwriter came up with this idea is a genius.
5. Most Emotionally Devastating Scene: Mork and Tee by the riverside at the Memorial Bridge in episode 11. Seriously, get your tissues ready. I mean it.
6. The BL Oscar for Best Overall Scene of the series (and of the year!): Mork's lunch with Tee's wretched mother in episode 7. It will leave you gasping and shaking with anger - it's sheer brilliance. Will there ever be a scene in BL again with this much dramatic impact?
UPDATE: I'm really surprised to see the amount of hate this series has generated online. Most reviews I've read have completely caned it. It's true that it's far from perfect, and there are plenty of plot holes, but I'm stumped as to why people think its drama doesn't work. There are so many other aspects of CYMB that don't work, but the drama isn't one of them. Its critics definitely have a point when they say the coherence of the plot deteriorates badly as the series progresses, but when the plot isn't being torn to shreds by poor editing and production decisions, it's not that hard to work out what's going on and why. I feel that a lot of the rest of the criticism is aimed unfairly at the writers trying out a more original, dramatic screenplay, rather than something more overtly romantic and traditional. As the TV equivalent of a gay Harlequin novel, BL won't be winning awards for cinematic artistry any time soon. The best that a creative team can do is to question what constitutes BL, and then push its boundaries a lot further. But it's exactly these boundaries that have served BL so well as a successful business juggernaut, especially Thai BL. So trying to do something original that isn't a rehash of a famous series of the past is immensely risky, but it's always interesting and worth watching to see how it works out. In my view, CYMB gets its more challenging drama right, even amid the wreckage of its far less risky weaker elements.
Comments
It's only thanks to you that I gave this show a chance, because most other reviews I've seen panned it. I, however, have just reached the pivotal episodes 6-8 and am entirely enthralled. So, thanks again, and keep up the good work!
What did you think of the "Our Skyy" special? I wasn't impressed, it was a rather generic story, they could have been pretty much any couple. The numerous kisses on the head were sweet, though.
I watched the Rome/Pick 'Our Skyy' special and I couldn't see the point of it at all. If they're going to bring back famous BL characters, they must at least add something to their original story. Instead we get a useless body swap story?? Snore. Maybe I should give Tee / Mork a try?
I could be wrong here - and I'm not sure what the context is for Morn and Tee - but my understanding is that it's a mark of respect in Thai culture to call your friend's parents Mum and Dad.
Uhhm, I'm kinda lost with episode 12. Tee will be leaving temporarily then all of a sudden they're on a rooftop resto. I don't get it...
And is it true that it's based on a novel? I tried searching but I can't find anything. I may be searching from the wrong sites...
Nice review, btw...
:)
Btw, keep doing good reviews! Love from 🇵🇭
Guess a faith to know about this series starring by Frank & Drake after watching 2gether where they star in a subplot with different character name.
Agreed with your assessment, and surprised to know that there are many bad review for CYMB. Guess maybe it was screened in 2018 & is competing with LBC which I love equally too.
Sad that there is no sequel for CYMB as I to found the ending is hanging with some unsettling question ...
1) what sickness does Mok have
2) are Tee bringing Mom together to overseas as if not mistaken there is a scene Mok's brother like pass Mok's passport to Tee
3) the relationship between Morn and Neo
According to the original author's Facebook account, there were plans to release the book in English (under the title "My Tee"): https://www.facebook.com/AuthorCaffeine/posts/1935443246549271:0
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Mork is being quizzed on schoolwork by Tee and every time he makes an error, Tee puts an additional Post-It on some part of his face. Tee then proceeds to remove each of them using only his mouth. :3
SPOILER FOLLOWS PLEASE ONLY READ IF YOU HAVE WATCHED THE SHOW
I just wish that we would have gotten to know what was written in the card Mork have Tee
In many BL series the main couple don't become boyfriends until the last episode. For example in DBK Kao doesn't agree to be Pete's BF until the end of the last episode. But in CYMB Mork and Tee are BFs from episode 2 until the end; I admit from Ep 2 until Ep 5 they were fake BFs but they acted like real BFs and, at the end of Ep 5, they agree to be a couple.
I love this series and, even with it's flaws, I rate it as one of the best BL series I've watched.