Perfect 10 Liners 1×09 Review: Episode 9

After a bit of a break (sick, out of town, take your pick), I’m back, seated and here for Perfect 10 Liners. With episode 9, we’re starting the second arc, saying goodbye of a sorts to Arc, Arm, and their friends. Instead we get almost an entirely new cast of characters as we focus on our second pairing.

You know what I love? They went all in on the change. I was expecting slightly different credits, with this arc’s supporting cast being different. But they changed things up completely – altered the color scheme a bit, reordered the main cast so that Perth and Santa are first, and they even have different clips of the mains. It sort of does feel like an almost entirely different show.

We met some of our new characters earlier, as this series is being told largely via flashback but we still get some scenes in present day. Yotha is Arm’s peer mentee, and the newest edition to the Perfect 10 Liners. Faifa is Yotha’s younger brother (which is hilarious because Junior is like five years older than Perth), but they are Irish twins, so they’re starting university at the same time. (Apparently, they were supposed to be identical twins, which makes more sense why Gun would mistake Yotha for Faifa with the faucet incident.) Unsurprisingly, Yotha and Faifa are roommates, but Yotha seems to rarely sleep at home.

On the other side, we have Gun and his best friend, Kong (Aun Napat), who move into the same dorm as Yotha and Faifa. We learn right away that due to some childhood trauma, Gun has to sleep with the lights on. This is such a dark secret of his that even Kong didn’t know the full story until now. He and Kong seem like they will be chaos gremlins – Gun has to promise his mother that he won’t prank anyone, and the two get extremely dramatic when they accidentally go to the wrong dorm room. The next day, they become fast friends with Faifa as they’re going through their introductory activities.

One thing I will say, after watching this and We Are, is that everyone involved in this production must have amazing friendships. I have genuinely loved how all of the friendships are portrayed. I’m going to miss the single brain cell trio that is Arm, Po, and Sand (Po and Sand were only in one scene!), but it looks like Gun, Kong, and Faifa will have an entirely different yet equally fantastic dynamic. (I especially love how excited Kong and Gun got when they realized that Faifa had money and would be able to buy them food. I mean, I’m not going to prioritize that, but I would also be very excited. For the food.)

In the last two episodes of Arc and Arm’s story, we got to see how Arc noticed Arm right away, but we the audience didn’t become aware of it until later. However, with Yotha and Gun, they’re showing us from the beginning. Yotha and Gun have multiple run-ins before being officially introduced, and everything that happens says a lot about both of them as individuals. But it means that Gun is aware of Yotha basically from the get-go, and he seems to already be interested.

What Gun is learning about Yotha: he’s kind (he helps him in the bathroom without thinking and doesn’t even stay to get the credit), and he’s mysterious. On the surface these two seem like polar opposites, but when you think about it, I think they have a lot of similarities. Yotha comes across as cold and aloof, but according to Faifa he doesn’t like crowds (hello, fellow introvert), and he doesn’t seem to be all that caught up with traditions. And Gun is a literal puppy, but I get the sense that he doesn’t have many friends, aside from Kong. He hides in public, behind a smile; Yotha just full on hides.

Also, we heard about Gun’s trauma, but Yotha clearly has something in his past, as well. It’s in the way he and Faifa talk about their mother and the way he acts with their older brother, Newton (Pepper Phanuroj). And I’m dying to know his history with Warit (Boom Tharatorn). Are they exes? Were they friends who had a falling out? Is it at all related to their mother?

Now, if you caught on to the fact that Yotha hardly ever sleeping at home and Gun needing the lights on would be important, congratulations! That will be the major impetus for getting these two crazy kids together. (Oh my god, they were roommates.) When the power goes out on their floor, Gun goes to Faifa and asks to sleep in his room; Faifa offers him Yotha’s empty bed, insisting that he won’t be home.

But Yotha does come home, finds Gun in his bed in the middle of a nightmare, and instead of being like, “WTF?”, his immediate reaction is to comfort Gun, a person he has only known for less than 24 hours at this point. (Well, it was actually to wake him up, but still. He could have been a lot more forceful than he was, is all I’m saying.)

This whole situation tells us a lot about Gun and Yotha, but also about Faifa. Yotha says earlier in the episode that Faifa is very self-sacrificial; he’s always doing things for other people and rarely makes choices based on his own wants. And it looks like Gun is similar to that. Faifa asks if he needs all the lights on or just the lamps – and I fully believe he would have slept with the overhead lights on if Gun asked. But Gun downplays his own issues because he no doubt thinks he’s already being enough of a burden and doesn’t want to push it, especially with someone he’s just met. (After all, his best friend only learned the truth like the day before.)

I’ll be honest, this is the arc I’ve been waiting for since the pilot trailer dropped back in March. I was really excited for PerthChimon, and then once Chimon had to drop out, I was eager to see how PerthSanta would be as a pair. I appreciate that we got to see a glimpse of an established couple before delving into how they got together. Because having seen Yotha be so sweet and affectionate with Gun, and then seeing how he was before they started dating, makes me think it will be a very interesting journey from one to the other.

Yotha and Gun haven’t interacted enough yet to get a sense of how Perth and Santa will be as a pairing. But even just this one scene tells you a lot about Yotha and Gun’s dynamic. Still, we won’t really see how they are until next week.

I like the structure of this show. We’ll get to see all of the couples get together, and then we’ll get to see them be adorable boyfriends in the background. Arc and Arm flirting in front of everyone’s salad was great; the cute sound that Arm made when Arc was being especially romantic was a nice touch. (By the way, I really appreciate how they acknowledged that Arc totally knew Arm was behind the Facebook page. That was a loose thread that doesn’t need to hang around.)

That said, there was a lot of Arc and Arm in this episode, considering how little of the other characters we saw during their episodes. As much as I enjoyed their story, it started to drag near the end. (There was a reason I chose not to review the past two episodes, outside of being sick and out of town.) I feel like in addition to not giving the supporting cast enough scenes, their story in particular started to get repetitive. And I would have happily traded one of the ArcArm scenes in this episode for a PondSand glimpse.

It makes sense, though. Arm is the bridge between the two stories, and as Yotha’s peer mentor, he’s going to be around at least as much as Pun was. It looks like he’s going to develop a bond with Gun as well, as they’re basically the same person.

But I’m really excited for the side couple in this arc, Warit and Klao (Aou Thanaboon), because I love AouBoom. (They need their own series like now.) I don’t want their story to suffer so we can get more Arc and Arm, and I get the sense that Arc and Arm are going to do more than just be cute in the background. From the look on Arm’s face when Pun talked about Jet graduating, I suspect that Arc’s upcoming graduation is going to be A Thing.

We also got a bit of our third couple already – Faifa and Wine. As we’ve seen in the “present day” scenes, Wine will be Yotha’s peer mentee, who gets co-opted by Faifa. There was a scene in episode 3, where Faifa and Wine were talking and it sounded like they had met before. Well, now we know that they have. I don’t think that brief meeting is enough to explain the conversation they had over dinner, but honestly, who knows at this point. Maybe it was.

Still, I suspect that Wine may make another appearance at some point, even if he and Faifa don’t interact again.

I mentioned that I thought Arc and Arm’s story was dragging near the end. You would think, with only 8 episodes to get a couple together instead of the usual 12, that it wouldn’t be an issue. But it still felt like it took forever for them to get together, because they kept having the same problem. I hope that won’t be an ongoing thing with this series, because as we go on, we’re going to cram more and more couples, so there’s going to be less and less time for each of them. I can only hope that Yotha and Gun don’t suffer from the same repetitive nature of Arc and Arm’s relationship.

Author: Jamie Sugah

Jamie has a BA in English with a focus in creative writing from The Ohio State University. She self-published her first novel, The Perils of Long Hair on a Windy Day, which is available through Amazon. She is currently an archivist and lives in New York City with her demon ninja vampire cat. She covers television, books, movies, anime, and conventions in the NYC area.

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