The Lonely Warrior

After his release Cheng Bing gets no hero's welcome. His marriage and his relationship with his daughter have suffered, and his old squad has scattered. He persuades his former colleagues to regroup, no longer as police, and to follow Wang Dayong's trail from city to city.

It is also a group portrait. The Third Squad is set against a Second Squad whose captain works in a very different style, according to Wenhui Daily.

The story is set in the 1990s, according to China News, and adapts a short non-fiction piece by Shen Lan (深蓝), Please Tell the Chief the Third Squad's Mission Is Complete (《请转告局长，三大队任务完成了》). Shen Lan is a former frontline police officer, and The Paper reported that the central figure, Cheng Bing, is a real person drawn from events the author learned about from colleagues. Beijing News counted just over 7,000 Chinese characters in the original, expanded to 24 episodes. Xing Jianjun (邢键钧) wrote and directed. A feature film adapted from the same text, with Zhang Yi (张译) as Cheng Bing, reached cinemas on December 15, 2023, six days before the series. Among the differences Wenhui Daily noted, the series makes the suspect who is still at large the elder brother, Wang Dayong, and moves the timeline of the squad's first encounter with the brothers earlier.

Reception was mixed. Beijing News reported that the series' heat index on iQIYI reached 9,000 within a week and its Douban score stood at 7.4 in late December 2023. People's Daily, reviewing the film and series together, praised the way the squad members keep their commitment to duty and justice after losing their professional status. Wenhui Daily was sharper about the series, writing that the story was stretched and cut up until its extra length became padding.