Reset
开端
A 15-episode Tencent Video mystery in which a student and a game designer relive the same bus explosion again and again, searching the 45 bus's passengers for the cause.
Save- Premiere
- Jan 11, 2022
- Episodes
- 15
- Where to watch
- Tencent Video
- Also known as
- Grasp Reset · Kai duan · 開端
About the drama
Reset (开端, Kai Duan, "beginning") takes a genre usually built on spectacle, the time loop, and pins it to something ordinary: a city bus, a few dozen passengers, and a phone ringtone that signals the explosion is close. It runs only 15 episodes, so the loop never goes slack.
The first two episodes show how quickly it moves. They contain around ten loops, which teaches the rules without a word of explanation. After that the series slows down and turns to the people on the bus. A Beijing Youth Daily review, carried by Xinhua on January 29, 2022, argued that this is where the show earns its warmth: each passenger turns out to have a private life worth knowing, and the loop becomes a way of understanding strangers.
The puzzles are solved by patience and conversation rather than gadgets, and persistence is the main engine of the plot.
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Li Shiqing (李诗情, played by Zhao Jinmai) is a university student who realizes that the 45 bus she is riding keeps exploding at the same moment, and that each time she dies she wakes up on the bus again. Xiao Heyun (肖鹤云, played by Bai Jingting) is a game designer who is pulled into the same loop. He suspects the explosion is no accident, so the only way out is to find who is behind it.
The two have to work together while the clock keeps resetting. Each loop gives them a little more information about who is sitting where and what they are carrying. Meanwhile the police, including officer Zhang Cheng (张成, played by Liu Yijun), investigate the blast in the outside world. Beijing News described the story as told from three viewpoints: the people in the loop, the officers on the case, and the passengers of the 45 bus.
The series is adapted from the web novel of the same name by Qi Dao Jun (祈祷君), published on the Jinjiang Literature City site. It was produced by Daylight Entertainment (正午阳光), the company of producer Hou Hongliang (侯鸿亮), which Beijing Youth Daily described as known for realism rather than science fiction. Filming took place in Xiamen, the local press in Fuzhou reported.
It premiered on Tencent Video on January 11, 2022, and ended on January 25. China News reported nearly 400 million views in the first seven days and a peak single-day total of 69.72 million, with several days at the top of Maoyan's web-drama heat chart. By the January 29 Xinhua piece, total views had passed 1.2 billion.
The same review noted that the "first Chinese infinite-loop series" label was not new to foreign television, and that the format could have been a gimmick. Its verdict was that the human detail around the passengers is what made it work.
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