Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
Last week, Mege hit us with “I didn’t like Oppenheimer. That’s largely because I didn’t understand the second half of the movie.” In its bluntness, this is one of my favourite Six Degrees posts so far, and Mege is spot on. The funniest thing (to me) is that he went right back to watch it again and still didn’t get it, and now he’s apparently seriously contemplating watching it a third time. Noooooo. Cut your losses, Mege!
And that’s my segue, because I’m here to talk about time loops – that trope where we endlessly repeat a sequence to figure out how to fix it.
If you tell anyone you’re watching a plot about a time loop, chances are, people here in the West say “oh, like Groundhog Day“. And certainly, the Bill Murray movie from 1993 is the most famous example of that genre. (TV Tropes tells me that the earliest example is a short book called The Defence of Duffer’s Drift from 1904!) In the movie, Bill Murray is an arrogant TV weatherman who wakes up on the same day every morning. We watch him as he tries and fails to game the system and win over Andie MacDowell. You probably know the plot.
I remember how that concept bowled me over at the time. Something about the idea of getting a do-over again and again and again, and adjusting your responses until you get the result you want, completely tickled my brain. Something about getting to try out the riskiest options (at one point, he ends up in jail) because you know you’ll wake up safe in bed anyway was tremendously exciting to me.
The Chinese series Reset (2022) takes the same concept further and in a different direction. It actually reminded me more of Speed (1994) – the Sandra Bullock movie, in which she has to drive a bus above 50 mph, because the minute the speed drops, a bomb will go off.
In Reset, college student Li Shi Qing and game designer Xiao He Yun fall asleep on a bus. They wake up. Minutes later, an old cell phone ringtone sounds near them. The bus explodes. Then, they wake up again, on the bus.
It’s up to Shi Qing and He Yun to find a way to first get off the bus (between stops) and then figure out what made the bus explode in the first place – which one of their co-passengers is to blame and, above all, why.
I didn’t count, but I think within the 15 episodes of this mini-series it takes the pair of them about twelve explosions to find out how to work with the police, uncover each of their bus-mates’ life histories and stop the horrible events from unfolding. During that time, they will try out everything they can think of – including trying to explain the time loop to a team of disbelieving police detectives not once but three times, killing and dying.
At some point, a traumatised He Yun whispers, “Don’t you understand – the world will reset. But I won’t.” He Yun will have to live with his choices, including the ones that led to other people’s death, forever.
One of the things I like is that the female lead, Shi Qing, acted by Zhao Jin Mai, drives the action. It’s she who has the strong moral compass and the unfailing optimism to give it one try after another. By contrast, He Yun is timid, smart but too much in his own head, perhaps a little selfish.
One of the best and somewhat unexpected parts, is that the series takes the time to explore and weave into the narrative the other passengers with their complicated stories. So, for instance, Zeng Ke Lang shines as the cat-loving but tragically allergic anime fanboy Lu Di (not pictured).
Special shout-out here to Liu Yi Jun. He plays the wonderfully empathetic and experienced police detective Captain Zhang Cheng. His problem is that while his instincts are spot on, he’s missing a crucial piece of information – the time loop – and must therefore reach the wrong conclusion time and time again. A lot of Shi Qing’s efforts go into sharing the information she has won in the previous 10+ iterations with him without making herself the prime suspect for knowing too much. I gather that Liu Yi Jun is a bit of an award-winning superstar. You may know him as the evil Marquis of Ningguo in Nirvana in Fire. I recently enjoyed seeing him as the Leader of the Guardians of Dafeng in the eponymous fantasy costume drama.
Time loops are no more frequent in Chinese movies than they are in Western ones. But Reset pushed a button somewhere. Wikipedia notes that it set the record of exceeding fastest 30,000 ‘Popularity Heat Index’ points, and surpassed over two billion views on the platform Tencent. Within a week, it had an average of over 130 Million views per episode on Tencent.
It’s therefore not so strange that Bai Jing Ting, who plays the male lead He Yun in Reset, later went on to play the lead in yet another time loop-movie: Mobius (2025). In it, Detective Ding Qi gains the ability to “reset” time five times on the same day. He uses it to gather clues and solve murders by the time the last iteration comes along. However, it turns out that he’s not the only one who can take advantage of the time loop…
In real life, perhaps surprisingly, I take pains not to wish for do-overs or dwell on “things I should have said”. What’s done is done, surely. You try to glean whatever learnings you can from your mistakes and move on. And yet, time loops still blow my mind, and there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing someone try out all the possible options. If you feel the same way, both of the series I mentioned are highly recommended and exhilarating to watch.
Click here for the previous link in the chain
Click here for the next link in the chain (from 6 February 2026)
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 