Link Click – Season 2 Episode 5 Recap & Review

Last Supper

Link Click Season 2 Episode 5 delivers us back to the claw machine in front of the shops. Xiaoshi has dived into young Xixi who’s trying to get a stuffed toy. A next-door neighbor demonstrates and deeply explains the ‘swinging claw’ method – which does work, at least this time, delivering Xixi her stuffy.

Meanwhile, the hooded guy has shown up at the police station in the present. At that moment, Captain Xiao hears that the phone that received Qiao Ling’s image actually belongs to the deceased Liu Lan.

In the past, as the neighbor walks Xixi and her mother home, her slightly-older brother shows up and angrily whips his sister away from the suspicious-looking guy. At the same time, Lu Guang is reporting the address of Xixi’s house to Captain Xiao as he checks it against the hoodie guy’s address.

Xixi’s brother gives her a lesson in looking out for herself and tells a story of the cool older kid who jumped in and helped him get his ball from the water, someone who’s brave and reckless. Lu Guang and her brother teach Xiaoshi sign language so Xixi can communicate. Meanwhile, Xixi’s father comes home from work just as her mother sets the table.

They’ve hardly started when the father notices a new camera and becomes enraged, accusing the mother of cheating. He sends the kids to their room as he proceeds to take his anger out on her. To the sounds of punching and slapping, Xiaoshi mouths the words ‘do something’ to Xixi’s brother. He recalls the kid who helped him, who’d told him to get some guts. As the brother tries to protect his mother, Xiaoshi runs next door.

The neighbor is playing group video games wearing a headset and doesn’t immediately hear banging on the door. But he eventually comes out, hearing a commotion as the father grabs a hammer. He knocks on the door but is threatened away by the father – not before noticing the state of everyone else.

At Lu Guang’s hospital room, Captain Xiao finds out Liu Lan died in a criminal case 7 years ago, as did her husband. In the apartment, the father swings the hammer at everyone. But in the police station, the hooded person removes her cover as she faces Xiaoshi. She says her name is Li Tianxi.

The Episode Review

Episode 5 starts to drop some pennies around the backstory of our hoodie guy but doesn’t give us quite enough information, linking together several ideas but not really moving the plot. It does make the connection for us between Liu Lan and our hoodie guy, who appears to be a grown-up Xixi. But why would her deceased mother’s phone receive photos of Qiao Ling?

And if Xixi is someone else’s tool, why is she breaking rank just to connect with Xiaoshi – when she appears to have the same power? Professional networking perhaps? It seems like she needs help too – likely to do with her brother, per the inscription on the photo and the fact that she’s willing to endanger herself to do it. Will this put the emotional and impulsive Xiaoshi over a barrel again?

As for that moment when a kid gets Xixi’s brother’s ball from the water – recklessly, who thinks it may have been a younger, perhaps teenage Xiaoshi? We’ll have to wait and see how deep the connection between them drills. Maybe Xiaoshi is already more intertwined with them than he realizes.