When Cui Ye threw Xia Yu's mobile phone into the toilet, the audience in front of the screen finally realized that this drama dressed as a crime suspense was dissecting the human specimen of the 90s with scalpel-like precision.

The latest three episodes are like depth charges thrown into a calm lake, exploding not only the criminal chain of black eating black, but also the blood-colored waves of the collision between the tide of layoffs in the Northeast and the tide of migrant workers in eastern Guangdong in that special era.

The role of Cui Ye can be called the ceiling of the villain of domestic dramas. He is like a precise algorithmic viper, picking on Brother Yi, who is a loan shark, and his logic of black eating black can be called the "precise delivery" of the criminal world. Compared with Gao Qiqiang's violent aesthetics in "Hurricane", he is better at using the cold-blooded of intellectuals as weapons.

The most chilling thing is the reaction when witnessing Xia Yu's serious injury: not panicking, but calmly destroying the evidence. This kind of ruthlessness in discarding living people as chess pieces makes the audience shout "It is recommended to be engraved directly into the title page of the villain textbook".

Even actor Wang Baoqiang contributed the most divisive performance of his career, and he was an honest and honest Go teacher one second ago, and he could make the audience goosebumps with his cockrot eyes when he turned around.

And Jin Xiasheng and Xia Yu's "bankrupt love" looks like a failure of the screenwriter forcibly stuffing sugar at first glance. The "One Eye Ten Thousand Years" between a female textile factory worker and the second generation of the Northeast Broken Rich in the Internet café proposed so fast that the audience collectively asked questions. But when I saw episode 15, I suddenly realized that this pair of CP is the most deeply buried metaphor of the times by the screenwriter.

當夏雨爭奪贓款箱被親爹打傷，當金夏生抱著80萬現金高喊"給廠里送錢我就是廠長"，那些被罵"狗血"的戀愛戲突然顯露出鋒利棱角。原來霓虹燈下的旋轉木馬，轉動的不僅是年輕人的天真，更是一個時代集體困局的縮影。

When the camera swept over the mottled slogan of the textile factory, "Workers should think for the country, I will not be laid off, who will be laid off", and the pattern of the whole drama opened up instantly. The suicide of the old factory director in Northeast China is not an isolated case, but the tip of the iceberg of the embezzlement of the collective assets of Dongfeng Coal Mine; Behind the 200 yuan severance pay of Yuedong Textile Factory is the collapse of the dignity of the working class in the style of "The Piano of Steel".

最扎心的是金夏生那箱80萬現金——這個自以為能用錢拯救工廠的年輕人，像極了當年那些以為"買斷工齡"就能重獲新生的下崗職工，直到被時代巨浪拍醒才明白，有些潰爛不是鈔票能治癒的傷口。

Jin Xiasheng, played by Chen Yongsheng, unexpectedly became the focus of controversy. , a character who repeatedly jumps between criminal planning and the merry-go-round, was complained by the audience that "the degree of refinement is comparable to Gu Li's singing "Love Trading"".

But it must be admitted that the scene where he burned the ledger in front of his father's spirit, the trembling corners of his mouth and clenched fists made a heavyweight breakthrough in the acting skills of the post-90 actors. Perhaps it is this sense of tearing that reflects the collective confusion of young people in the 0s in the face of the sudden changes of the times.

When Cui Ye said the line "The chess player should abandon the child", the black-and-white game on the chessboard has long overflowed the screen. The codes of the times hidden in the details are fermenting: the strangeness of Wang Hongyu being blackmailed but remaining silent, the foreshadowing of the seemingly useless but dangerous foreshadowing of the electronic pet man, and the gradually tightening investigation network of the police brother...... Each branch is like a well-arranged chess game.

And the biggest doubt is no longer the case itself, but how ordinary people should keep the bottom line of survival in the wave of state-owned enterprise restructuring.

The real genius of "Chess Player" lies in turning the crime drama into a social microscope. When Cui Ye calculates people's hearts with Go thinking, when Jin Xiasheng struggles in vain in the torrent, when Xia Yu looks up at the starry sky is obscured by the clouds of the laid-off tide - this drama has long jumped out of the framework of genre films and has become a painful slice of Chinese society at the end of the 90s.

Those viewers who scolded "dog blood" but couldn't help but chase after it may be in this way to reconcile with the pains of the times experienced by their parents.