Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dream Raider’ On HBO Max, Where Both Criminals And The Cops Can Hack Into People’s Dreamscapes

We have always wanted to be in someone else’s dreams. Not everyone, though; we’re more fascinated with what babies and cats dream about than adults. So maybe the machine at the center of the Taiwanese HBO Max series Dream Raider wouldn’t be for us. But a show about tapping into the dreams of cats wouldn’t have a lot of action, would it?

DREAM RAIDER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a graffiti-filled steel mill, a line of women, all dressed in white tank tops and shorts, blankly walk up the stairs and across the roof. Then they one by one drop into the smelter.

The Gist: “Nan Wan City” in Taipei. Detective Li Xiao (Weber Yang) and his partner are called to the scene of a truck accident, where two sisters were injured. One is dead, but the other one is barely hanging on. They both have the same f-shaped mark on the backs of their necks. As the injured sister is loaded onto an ambulance, she grabs Xiao’s hand and says “Save the girls.”

He wants to question her more, but she’s fallen into a coma. Her doctor mentions that a technology was being studied that would let people enter other people’s dreamscapes. Xiao is determined to question the comatose woman, so he seeks out the machine’s inventor, Cheng Tian-li (Shih-Sian Wang). He’s been in prison for the last decade, since a fire with his invention killed his research partner.

Cheng refuses to help because he thinks the technology isn’t ready. So Xiao seeks out his daughter, Cheng An-ya (Ellen Wu). She’s not a medical doctor, but studies neurology and knows how to use the dream raider machine. He leaves her the crime scene photos in order to convince her to dust off the machine. A student in the university’s neural department, Xie Xiao-Yu (Cheng-Chun Chung) knows how to use the machine, so he assists.

When Xiao can’t enter the comatose woman’s dreamscape, An-ya gets into the machine. She sees the bleak steel mill scene, but somehow gets sucked into that line going into the smelter. Out of desperation, they pull Prof. Cheng out of prison to help his daughter, even though they haven’t seen each other while he’s been behind bars. He manages to pull her out of her trance with “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” but he sees something unusual: A woman that’s part of his fantasies, who shouldn’t be in the woman’s dreamscape.

A power consumption map leads the group to an abandoned factory, where a more powerful version of this machine has dozens of young women connected to it. When Prof. Cheng and his daughter try to turn the machine off, the same woman from the dreamscape appears, and talks to Cheng directly; it seems that whoever made the machine is intimately familiar with Prof. Cheng, as well as the accident that killed two people and sent him to prison.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Dream Raider has the dark, gritty feel of other sci-fi cop series like Life On Mars, with a bit of Quantum Leap mixed in for good measure.

Our Take: We’ll say one thing about Dream Raider: It gets down to business pretty much right away. We don’t get much background on Det. Li Xiao, besides some chatter with his partner about his divorce as they roll up on the scene. His boss has a fatty liver. Prof. Cheng and his daughter weren’t close even before he went to prison. That, in a nutshell, is all the character development we get in the first episode.

The show really concentrates on the story and how the Dream Raiders task force is established. In fact, Det. Li seems to be calling the machine “dream raider” before he even meets anyone who would call it that. Perhaps he did some off-screen research we didn’t know about. But it feels like a scene or two was skipped in the storytelling.

It’s more or less a pure procedural, with the team using the dream raiding machine to investigate cases in each episode that tie into the larger conspiracy that is the series’ “big bad,” as it were. We’re generally not a fan of generic procedurals with tropes like the hard-driving detective that carries a flask, the conflicted inventor of an invasive but effective crime-fighting technology, etc. But in the case of Dream Raider, the dreamscapes are so well-done that we’re OK with finding the characters’ stories in those dreamscapes, rather than in dialogue-heavy expository scenes.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: In Iceland, a woman and a man talk about sending cops on a wild-goose chase around the world. The woman asks if he let the girls go on purpose, which is when we see his half-burned face.

Sleeper Star: Ellen Wu as Cheng An-ya. She has an emotional scene with her father that shows us that her acting skills go beyond the usual wooden police procedural style.

Most Pilot-y Line: There doesn’t seem to be a lot of procedure in this procedural. The steps that led Det. Li to find the abandoned factory are basically given quickly and dismissively. This shows that the series is more interested in the sci-fi elements than the actual police element.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Dream Raider isn’t prestige TV by any means, but the story is entertaining enough, especially when the investigations get into people’s dreamscapes, to be a good escapist watch.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.