Happy Camp Recap: Zhao Liying and William Chan, summer 2016 edition

Here comes the new recap for Happy Camp! Honestly, it was not as exciting as I expected, but there was definitely a few highlight moments. In this episode we had William Chan, Zhao Liying, Jessica Jung, Wang Ziwen and Ren Zhong.

There is a legend that mermaids need the help of men to find their humans body. We are introduced to the five beautiful mermaids of this story.

• Jessica Jung is a cold, but beautiful eel-mermaid.
• Wang Ziwen is a strong headed octopus-mermaid.
• Xie Na is a the big boss shark-mermaid.
• Zhao Liying is the fortune red fish-mermaid.
• Wu Xin is the squid-mermaid.

At the same time, a boat of fishers arrived: He Jiong, William Chan, Ren Zhong, Weijia and Du Haitao.

The maidens will have to seduce men with their beautiful voices so they can go back to their human form. The bad news is that only four of the five beautiful ladies can be saved (He Jiong will not chose). This means, it is singing competition time! Because of Xie Na’s loud attitude, the men are discussing that they should probably eliminate her from the choices. When asking William Chan who he would rather chose, he choses number 2. I was like OMG, is that Zhao Liying you are chosing? ❤ But then, the MCs reminded him that he didn’t precise if it is from the left or the right… Which means it could also be Jessica Jung! v_v fine fine…

Through the singing competition, Jessica definitely stood out the most as she is an ex-kpop singer while as everyone else are actors/MC. Jessica’s voice is beautiful.

Xie Na’s performance was the funniest and, in He Jiong’s opinion, an insult to the original song.

Finally, it is time to make a choice. Du Haitao choses Wuxin and Weijia choses Wang Ziwen. Then Ren Zhong choses… Zhao Liying. Next, William Chan choses Jessica Jung and.. Xie Na, after much pleading, is left alone. But it is all good because she has a strong-will and made her legs appear herself. @_@ I kind of wished a showdown between Zhao Liying and Jessica Jung, but I guess it was not meant to be. At the same time, It is also a good thing because I didn’t want to put William Chan in front of an ultimatum.

Now, the team are separated as follow. First team has Wang Ziwen, He Jiong, Xie Na, Weijia and Ren Zhong. Team two has Zhao Liying, William Chan, Jessica Jung, Du Haitao and Wuxin. The first games are survival games.

One goal was to bandage a hurt person. Team one did very well with Wang Ziwen, but team two was a mess with William Chan. Cute, but a mess. ZLY and Jessica had fun banding his whole face instead of only where it hurted and the whole team had difficulties to pull William up.

The second survival game was to pass through a construction made of sticks and ropes, where the player must follow the path of the rope to get out of the “maze”. Du Haitao had the most difficulties, while as William Chan looked like he was flying! While William was doing his acrobaties, one fan was yelling “Da Fu Ye”, which made my Mystic Nine fan heart really happy ^^ [Edit: OMG I am so happy, apparently that fan was Zhao Liying herself!! You go girl, promote our drama like your life depends on it! 8D She was so loud *moved*]

The next game was an art testing game. In both cases, two art pieces are shown with one from a famous artist and the other being fake. In this game, Zhao Liying failed the first test because her “intuition” told her it would be the other, and in the second comparison, everyone gets it right.

Next, we are moving to the pool!! Yeah, very fit considering the theme is mermaids. The game is to run across the dangerous path prepared for them in the water and go through many obstacles as a team. I actually didn’t understand the rules and I am pretty sure they didn’t respect them either… I thought that if you fall in the water, you have to restart, but it looks like even if you fall, you can just climb back on the platform. @_@ The first team to start off the games is the HJ+XN+WZW+RZ+WJ team aka team blue. They are doing as well as they can, but they have Ren Zhong, who has a higher mass density… When this team was done, it was too late for Zhao Liying to play as she had to catch a flight. Hence, He Jiong took her place and played with the yellow team. The yellow team did a lot better than the blue team, even if they had Du Haitao. But they had a completely different obstacles set to play with so I am not sure if it is fair to compare both team’s performances. All I can say is that William Chan looked good and athletic throughout, as he fell with great balance on the platform on his first try.

ZLY pushing WC in the water here

A bit later, Jessica did a similar thing with Haitao, which made the later really happy xD

Finally, the game ended with everyone trying to fit on the same platform and see if they can survive. This was fun and there were two highlights to it. The first is when Jessica was really scared to jump. William Chan comforted her by speaking in English and calling her Jessi. Awwnnn. The second highlight was when Du Haitao jumped and his legs got trapped onto William, making him fall in the water and himself hanging… Haha, that was funny too.

Thoughts:

Honestly, this episode was a lot more boring than I expected it to be. With all the media attention and the anticipation of the fans, this is a serious let down. They had Zhao Liying and William Chan who are the OTP of the hour! The Mystic Nine is not even airing on HunanTV (it is airing on DragonTV for anyone curious), so the simple fact that Zhao Liying was invited shows that Hunan wanted a piece of that hot pie. So, why not take a good use of this beautiful combination? He Jiong promoted the movie I love That Crazy Little Thing multiple times, but couldn’t even name the broadcast station of the Mystic Nine because Happy Camp is a Hunan show.

I thought it was going to be awkward to see William sandwiched between his two female friends and I was totally right. I am sure he has a good relationship with both girls, but it was definitely not shown on TV. Jessica looked like she was trying really hard, but her lack of understanding of Chinese created an invisible, but strong barrier with the rest of the cast. Furthermore, considering that Liying is friend with both He Jiong and Xie Na, I felt like the production team once again did not take advantage of it. He Jiong asked for Liying’s opinion multiple times and Xie Na was holding her hand happily at the introduction part. I am also sure that there were a lot of un-aired contents which could explain Zhao Liying leaving earlier from the filming set (extra games? problems when filming? I don’t know), and hence missing the fun water games 😦 On the bright side, Wang Ziwen was super cute in this. Love her ^^

Even if the aired contents felt very aimless and didn’t have the scenes I wanted to see, there were still a few OTP moments to take advantage of. Here they are. Enjoy the (small quantity of) eye candy!

Edit: I just wanted to say that I ranted a lot more than expected about this episode in the comment section. Thanks everyone for being understanding and thinking I am not childish. ^^ I do realize that this is all promotional tactics, but I am also happy this all ended. Hopefully, we will see more ZLY+WC scenes in the future. Here are some more BTS found by our commenter, Ezc. Thanks a lot! ❤

Liying and Xie Na during practice.

Ending it with Zhao Liying enjoying her lunch ^^

Edit 2: Hunan released a BTS video!! Yeah! So, hum, I would say to skip up to 7:16 if you don’t want to see Jessica Sa Jiao with William Chan. Afterward, there were actually a lot of cute scenes as Zhao Liying eats and talk about how William is her male god. Also, William talks about his role in The Mystic Nine, his Chinese pronunciation, and some popular ChangSha slangs to descripe his Mystic Nine co-star. ^^