With every streaming TV series receiving a surplus of episodes to tell their tales, it’s become commonplace—if not a cliché—for shows to take their sweet time developing their narratives. Not so with Dream Raider, HBO Max’s new Mandarin-language sci-fi drama about a team of law enforcement agents and scientists using cutting-edge technology to enter into the “dreamscapes” of comatose patients in an attempt to find out who’s manipulating them like them puppets. There’s more action packed into the first few minutes of this eight-part HBO Asia production’s premiere than can be found in most likeminded small-screen efforts, to the point that it almost appears as if the endeavor is playing a game to see just how much plot it can race through in each of its 45-minute chapters.
On the basis of the show’s initial two episodes (which were all that was provided to press), the answer to that query is: a lot. Debuting on Feb. 17, Dream Raider begins with one of many memorably haunting images: that of similar-looking young girls dressed in white tank tops and black shorts marching up the stairs of a dystopian city’s steel mill to its roof, where they systematically step off a ledge and plummet into a fiery incinerator like brainwashed lemmings. There’s something inherently unreal about this suicidal sight, and that impression is amplified by Detective Li Xiao (Weber Yang) and his partner Che Na’s (Aggie Hsieh) ensuing discovery of two sisters dressed in that same uniform at a roadside accident. While one of those girls perishes, the other winds up in a coma, and in the first of what will be numerous fortuitous (read: laughably contrived) turns, her doctor informs Li that, years ago, he attended a Northern District University lecture by a professor who invented a machine that allowed people to communicate via the subconscious—a device that “might be helpful to you.”
Before that bit of magical good luck can even be processed, Dream Raider cuts to a prison cell whose walls are scribbled with mathematical equations and diagrams. That chamber’s sole inhabitant is Dr. Tian-Li Cheng (Wang Shih-hsien), the creator of “dream raiding technology” that he no longer wants anything to do with, since its last use led to the deaths of two people close to him. Even seeing pictures of the mysterious scars on the napes of the two girls’ necks isn’t enough to persuade Cheng to help. It does, however, pique the curiosity of Cheng’s estranged daughter An-Ya (Ellen Wu), a brilliant scientist with a PhD in neural engineering and a current research focus on noetic science that aims to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness through meditative (vs. mechanical) means. Approximately one second after she turns down Li’s offer, An-Ya is joining his new crew, which also includes Cheng’s former assistant Xie Xiao-Yu (Chung Cheng-Chun), a nerd who has immediate eyes for Che Na and who knows how to operate the dream-raiding machine.
The contraption in question is a crystal-powered The Matrix-style doohickey that uses futuristic headdresses and brain-implant plugs to read electrical impulses and link people’s minds together. This isn’t very dissimilar to the apparatus featured in Apple TV+’s recent South Korean import Dr. Brain, and once Cheng arrives to round out Li’s motley crew, it pays instant dividends, allowing An-Ya and Cheng to simultaneously travel inside the reveries of the comatose girl, where they’re confronted by the steel mill scenario that opened the series. An-Ya promptly falls under whatever spell has the rest of these women strolling to their doom, and she’s only saved by Cheng’s last-second quick thinking—a brush with death that’s made additionally puzzling by Cheng’s encounter with a mysterious woman in red who both seems to be in control of this hive-mind dreamscape, and knows him personally, stating, “I’m your hidden desire.”
In the vast majority of cases, recounting so much key information would necessitate a massive spoiler warning, but Dream Raider handles this and more in its first half hour alone, speeding through twists and turns as if it were hopped up on amphetamines. To a greater degree than its derivativeness—which also extends to its A Nightmare on Elm Street-esque notion that any pain felt in the dreamscape has real-world repercussions, meaning a subconscious fatality could result in an actual one as well—the show is defined by its breakneck storytelling. Almost none of what happens to Li and company makes a lick of logical sense, and yet by persistently keeping the pedal to the metal, the series simply and amusingly zips past one preposterous development after another, all while occasionally engaging in deliberate humor, most of it having to do with Li’s cycling-loving police department boss.
Typical of Dream Raider’s absurdism is a second-episode bit in which Li and company must contend with a group of five students who have jointly leaped off the roof of their school. With only 24 hours to get to the bottom of this mystery, Cheng deduces that they need a portable dream-raider device (because their patient can’t be moved out of the hospital ICU), sketches up a diagram of said compact machine, and then builds it—all with time to spare! Such nonsense is the order of the day, and it remains prevalent as the newly-minted Dream Raider Special Task Force stumbles upon subsequent victims whose slumbering brains need invading—all courtesy of a shadowy madman with horrible facial burns who’s seen, in brief snippets, orchestrating his mind crimes from an all-white Icelandic lair alongside Cheng’s enigmatic woman in red.
Fitting for such craziness, Dream Raider’s cast overacts to the hilt, although in a manner that suggests they’re barely hanging on for dear life to the zigzagging storyline. Directed by Daniel Fu and Simon Hung and executive-produced by Soi Cheang (The Monkey King 2 and 3), the show handles its wilder elements with aplomb; a later trip into a soldiers-battling-aliens dreamscape is suitably immersive and hectic. More importantly, though, it does so with a frenzied energy that suggests its well aware of its own silliness. By the conclusion of its second installment, Dream Raider has piled on such a wealth of head-spinning bombshells that it’s difficult to keep up—suggesting that, somehow, the remainder of its first season will continue delivering a bounty of ridiculous riches.