HIStory3: Trapped

It opens with gunfire. A police officer and the head of the Hsin Tien Group are dead, and Meng Shao Fei (Jake Hsu), the rookie who watched it happen, spends the next four years refusing to let the case close. He is a detective now, and the man he keeps trailing is Tang Yi (Chris Wu), the shooting's sole survivor, who inherited the syndicate on the back of a death he did not choose. Tang Yi is chasing the same truth by methods a policeman cannot use, and he withholds what he knows. To keep Shao-fei close he sets a deliberate romantic trap. Neither of them expects the pretence to become the difficult part.

Two codes of loyalty drive the series, the oath an officer swears and the obligations that bind a crime family, and the conflict is between two systems of duty. Surveillance, disguise and calculated deception carry most of the narrative, so trust has to be assembled out of incomplete information, and the title keeps pointing at the way affection here is staged as tactics long before anyone will own it. A second pairing, Fang Liang Tien (Andy Bian), known as Jack, and Zhao Li An (Kenny Chen), restates the same questions about protection and the limits of obedience from the other side of the line, with Gu Dao Yi (Sphinx Ting) and Zuo Hong Ye (Diane Lin) in support.

Trapped and Make Our Days Count are the two units of HIStory3, sharing a banner but no characters, cast or director. Producer Yeh Yu-cheng has said that this one was drafted as a TV movie back in season one, reworked to mini-series length for season two, and only realised as a full twenty-episode production in season three. It also pushed the anthology into gunfights, explosions and martial arts, which he called a completely new attempt after the dialogue-driven earlier seasons, and the release plan front-loaded three episodes across the opening fortnight on the reasoning that the first three decide whether an audience stays. Li Ching-jung directed, having already made the opening unit of HIStory2, from a screenplay by Lin Pei-yu and Shao Hui-ting for Choco Media. LINE TV carried all twenty instalments between 16 April and 12 June 2019, running from fourteen minutes to thirty-five, and the theme song, How Can I Leave You, is performed by EZU.