The world between us

The 10-episode series brings the aftermath of a mass shooting as the shooter's younger sister meets one victim's parents two years after the incident.

The series follows the stories of five families of a shooter with depression disorder, a teenager-aged victim, a filmmaker with schizophrenia, a lawyer seeking the causes and treatments for mental health related crimes, and a young couple who are both psychiatrists.

It's not an easy series to watch as it puts all characters in their struggles and the plot develops as to how they encounter, get tangled and deal with the crisis. Despite the plot, the series has a happy ending which I think to be somehow impractical. Also, everyone is forced to their extreme emotions but me, as an audience, don't find it exaggerated. I believe that's what the producers wanna imply: everything's gonna be fine in the end.

I love the Chinese title of the series 我們與惡的距離 (The distance between us and the cruelty). It tells me that actually there exists just a thin line between good and bad that anyone could violate without even awareness.

It's been such a long time that I couldn't find a good series about social problems, after 13 reasons why. It's real and relatable without having to emphasize the dark side of this world. So here are several meaningful and interesting insights that I've learned from this series:

The cause of crime

The leading character in the series, Wang She, is the defender for Li Xiaoming, the shooter. Despite the society's disputation, family's pressure and even the shooter's avoidance, he still keeps finding the real reason for why this incident happens. He does not work to stop the execution but to understand the root causes and how to deal with this aftermath.

The lawyer is the idealistic model of a lawyer that's hard to be found in the real life but his efforts reflect a contrary to people's behaviors. The whole society accuse the shooter and generalize his family for his crime. Few people ask why, and how to stop the crime. We need to ask, not to try to find an excuse for the crime, but to understand the motivation behind it. It is as important as the punishment, which usually is the only thing that people care.

Mental disorders

The series illustrate a lot of mental disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and alcohol abuse. Before that I did have a bias on people with those disorders, that they are so weak to deal with their problems. However, I started to believe that a mental disorder will not avoid anyone, it comes without any reason. It's not something that the 'mental immunity system' can deal with. I then paid some more attention into this problem and learn more about. However I'm still trying to distinguish between the mental disorders and the delusion or excuse about them. While I agree that they are health problems that should be carefully treated, I'm also doubting whether we are relying on them as an excuse. I mean, when we are mentally healthy but easily damaged?

The series also demonstrate social issues such as privacy, work family balance, uninvolved parenting, pressure to have children, and cyberbullying. We can find ourselves in these issues and we gotta ask ourselves, what did we do when we encountered the same things. Sometimes it's painful to find out that what we did was actually what we find shameful in the series. Therefore, it can be said that the series demonstrate issues from a big picture that people are not misled by their own perspective.

There is a piece of news and a caption of people's reaction in every episode's intro that I especially love. Many of the comments are hate speeches which can be easily found anywhere on the Internet. People attack others by words. Did we ever realize that whilst we are judging the crimes, we are also spreading the hate?

-Phuong 🐯