"96°C Cafe" aired on MediaCorp's Channel 8 every Monday to Friday, at 9 pm. Last night was the last episode. Prior to the drama serial, prequels of 8 webisodes were released on xinfirst's portal progressively from 18 February to 11 March 2013.
The webisodes focused more on Yuchen (played by Julie Tan) and Liqiao (played by Desmond Tan), how Yuchen got the job at 96°C Cafe and how the two of them got along. There were other characters in the webisodes that were not shown on TV, such as Shuting (Yuchen's good friend played by Chantalle Ng), Zi Wei (Shuting's senior played by James Seah) and Yuchen's admirer (played by Zhang Zhenhuan), Liqiao's sister (Ruolin) and grandmother and many others only appeared on the TV episodes.
Liqiao was a guy who had lost his wife in a car accident and unable to face up to reality, chose to go for boxing sessions to torture himself. Yuchen had fallen for him and wanted to help him forget his pain of losing his wife. On the TV drama, Yuchen had a new admirer, named Liu Chuanzhi (played by Ian Fang). Chuanzhi was always helping her and cheering her on when things did not go smoothly.
On the last episode, Ruolin finally decided not to marry Lao Jingfeng (played by Tay Pin Hui) and chose Tang Weida (played by Romeo Tan) who was many years younger than her. No doubt Tang Weida had done a lot of things to make her happy but it seemed that she was not really that happy when she was with him, so I find this ending a bit weird. I thought she got along better with Lao Jingfeng. It seemed to me that the scriptwriters wanted to make people feel that Tang Weida's efforts were not wasted, We were also told on the last episode that Lao Jingfeng had phobia of getting married, so it was a good thing they did not marry each other in the end. Although weird, I am still happy that Tang Weida's love and innocence had touched Roulin's heart.
As for Yuchen, Liqiao and Chuanzhi, at first I thought the ending was another "hang in the air" or "up to your own imagination" kind of ending. Actually, I hate this kind of ending. If it is up to my own imagination, I might as well be the one writing the script, ha! ha!. Fortunately, after the end of the show, we were told that we, viewers had a chance to vote for the ending that we wanted. We can go to Chinatown Point on 26 May 13 to vote for the ending we want. Whether Yuchen will choose Liqiao or Chuanzhi is entirely dependent on the votes.
On rational grounds, I will vote for Chuanzhi. My reasons for choosing Chuanzhi over Liqiao:
1) Chuanzhi was always there for Yuchen.
2) Chuanzhi risk his life to save Yuchen.
3) Liqiao did not know how to treasure Yuchen and did not love her enough:
a) 1st time, he only started to woo her when she left 96°C Cafe for a new job. He then realised he needed her and liked her.
b) 2nd time, he suddenly went overseas when he found out his wife had cheated on him when she was alive. He claimed that he had lost faith in love. He only realised he still liked Yuchen when overseas.
Wah, only when the girl was not around, then he would start to miss her, what's the point. Should treasure her when she was with him. Although Liqiao had done up his cafe to be the dream cafe for Yuchen, Chuanzhi had done up the dream house for Yuchen. So, what will be the more popular ending? We shall see it on 26 May 13, at 10.30 pm, on Channel 8.
