Stream It Or Skip It: ‘White Dragon’ On Amazon Prime, Where A Man Learns About His Wife’s Not-So-Secret Other Life

Why does it seem like half the people on TV either live double lives or end up finding out about their loved ones’ double lives? In White Dragon, a British thriller shot almost completely in Hong Kong, a professor finds out a lot about his wife after she dies in a car accident; in fact, he starts to learn a little bit too much about her. Read on for more on this series…

WHITE DRAGON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes of Hong Kong. A car drives up a mountain road, while a woman leaves a teary message asking for forgiveness. The woman gets blocked and told to back up. Just then, a truck barrels in and t-bones her car, sending it down an embankment.

The Gist: Back in London, professor Jonah Mulray (John Simm) gets word that his wife of three years, Megan Harris (Dervla Kirwan), died in her adopted home city of Hong Kong. Shaken to his core, he flies there to identify her body; he’s told to go to the consulate first and see a woman named Sally Porter (Emilia Fox). He does that immediately, but not before seeing a protest against the businessman running for high office in HK.

After he identifies Megan, tearing up over all the memories they had, and then gets the gruesome details of her death at the police station, he sees a man being questioned while holding her picture. Jonah follows the man out and when they confront each other, he finds out the horrible truth: The man is David Cheng (Anthony Wong), and he’s been married to Megan for twenty years. Jonah is flabbergasted, not able to comprehend that this woman he loves so much has been lying to him this whole time. Sure, she spent most of her time in HK, and wanted him to visit. But he has no idea why she’d keep her life there such a secret.

Then Jonah is attacked by a man who steals his passport, and he starts to wonder just what else was going on with Megan. He asks Sally to see if the consulate can extend his stay so he can figure it out. In the meantime, Megan and David’s daughter Lau (Katie Leung) gets arrested protesting the XO corporation, which David bemoans because it brings attention. Also, a reporter named Michael Cohen (Anthony Hayes) calls Lau with information about Megan, prompting David to threaten him at his office.

Our Take: White Dragon (which aired last year on ITV under the title Strangers) takes the usual trope of a spouse learning about the other spouse’s secret life and turns it around: It’s usually the woman learning about the man’s secret life, not the other way around. What’s great about the show is Simm’s slow-burning realization that everything he knew about the woman he’s been in love with for the past five years is at best a lie and at worst… who knows what?

We also like Wong’s performance — in his first English-speaking role — as David, who’s distraught over Meagan’s death, but knew about Jonah via his inscription in a first edition of Jane Eyre. He seems to be less upset about Megan’s infidelity, because there is likely other things going on. “She’s dead. What good would that do?” he says when Jonah asks why he isn’t angrier.

We aren’t as keen on the mystery that’s developing around Megan and her doings in Hong Kong. When we noticed that the guy who stole Jonah’s passport was the same one who told Megan to reverse past a roadblock, we knew that the accident she got in wasn’t an accident. And we know that there’s a cover-up at the highest levels, with a couple of scenes that show HK detectives tossing out CCTV pictures of Jonah’s attacker, among other things. But we already know that Megan was into some bad shit, so any twists from here on out may not take us by surprise.

Sex and Skin: Besides seeing a dead Megan’s upper torso with a closed up autopsy Y-cut, nothing.

Parting Shot: Jonah listens to the message that Megan leaves him as she’s driving up that mountain. And he realizes that Megan’s death didn’t happen quite the way the police told him it did.

Sleeper Star: Leung is going to play a big role as Lau, who speaks with a “fancy” British accent due to her mother Megan, and it feels like Jonah is going to reach out to her so they both can find out the truth about Megan and David.

Most Pilot-y Line: It’s amazingly convenient that Jonah’s phone battery dies, and in all of the massive city of Hong Kong he couldn’t find a charger or a cable. It’s a dumb plot device that threw in an artificial delay to Jonah learning the truth about his wife’s death. Though it gave us a chance to see scenes filmed in the nutty market at Kowloon’s infamous Chungking Mansions.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The mystery of White Dragon isn’t interesting enough to propel us to watch more episodes, despite fine performances.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream White Dragon on Amazon Prime Video