General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Black Box (黑盒子)

The Black Box (黑盒子) is a 2025 Taiwanese anthology television series directed by Charles Lee (李昭樺), adapted from the LINE WEBTOON manhua of the same name by the Taiwanese cartoonist Pony (廖軒毅).¹ Its twelve episodes are divided into four three-episode units, each a dark fable in which a character trades future time through a mysterious black box to obtain what they desire, and each pays the price.¹ The series premiered on October 31, 2025 on LINE TV and Netflix and ran through November 21, 2025.²

Key fact	Detail
Format	12 episodes in four three-episode units: Creation Hell (造物獄), Space Journey (星際救援), Pig Family (豬人), and The White Box (黑白盒子)¹
Broadcast	October 31 to November 21, 2025, Fridays at 9:00 pm on LINE TV and Netflix²^•³
Source material	Manhua Hei Ho Tzu (黑盒子) by Pony, serialized on LINE WEBTOON since June 2017; 364 chapters and over 55 million views by November 2025⁴
Director / writers	Charles Lee (李昭樺); screenwriters Lyra Fu (傅凱羚), winner of the Golden Horse Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Detention, Cari Chang (陳群), Wu Chia-wei, Huang Yen-chi, and Chang Wan-er⁵
Production	Presented by the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA), Taiwan Line, TWR Entertainment (兔將創意影業), and Singapore's Wawa Pictures; producer Winnie Su (蘇莞築)⁵^•⁶
Lead cast	Christina Mok (莫允雯) as the masked woman Qiqi, with Lee Lee Zen (李李仁), Fu Meng Bo (傅孟柏), Cheng Jen Shuo (鄭人碩), Lucia (陸夏), Derek Chang (張軒睿), and Jian Man Shu (簡嫚書) across the four units²
Reception	First place on Netflix Taiwan's weekly chart (November 3–9, 2025); Douban score 6.1/10 from 1,259 users as of November 24, 2025⁴^•⁶
Recognition	Nominated for four awards at the 61st Golden Bell Awards⁷

Spoilers

Premise

The series is framed by Qiqi (琪琪), a masked woman who has lived for ten thousand years. Ten millennia ago, wounded and near death, she received a black box from a mysterious figure of light and gained the ability to trade time with others, extending her own life into the present.⁶ The stories she witnessed became tales she tells her terminally ill daughter, and in the final unit she considers using the box's power to keep her daughter's life fixed forever on its happiest day.⁸ The recurring line of the series states its rule plainly: everyone has desires, and every desire has a price.⁹

Episode runtimes

Sources disagree on episode length. LINE TV's episode list gives runtimes from 27:18 (episode 8) to 39:01 (episode 3).¹⁷ TheTVDB lists an average runtime of 45 minutes,³ while TAICCA's sales catalog lists the program as 30 minutes by 12 episodes.⁸

The four units

Creation Hell (造物獄). The sculptor Hsiao Wen (陸夏) cannot accept the departure of her ex-boyfriend Chih Wei (張軒睿). When he and his new partner Yu Fan (邱偲琹) move in next door, she drills through the wall to watch them, studies witchcraft in a remote village, and creates a living wooden copy of Chih Wei, which she imprisons in her basement.¹⁰ The unit examines possessive love, the point at which "I love you" becomes "you belong to me."⁶

Space Journey (星際救援). The astronaut Meng Bai (傅孟柏) is stranded alone in space after a storm on a mission to Titan. A white alien creature appears, and the two communicate through comic books as he seeks a way home.⁸ The unit was the one fans most wanted adapted, and it was shot in Taiwan's first broadcast-grade LED virtual production studio built at a television station, in a production the makers described as Taiwan's first space science-fiction drama.¹¹

Pig Family (豬人). Hsiao Wei (洪君昊) resents the smell of the family pig farm and his father's (鄭人碩) favoritism toward his younger brother. An accident swaps his soul with a pig, and through the swap he comes to understand the love his family had never expressed.¹⁰

The White Box (黑白盒子). The homeless man Chi Han (李李仁) trades his future for an endless "today" in which his wealth grows each day, but he is trapped in a repeating day and loses his one chance to reunite with his son. The unit also reveals the masked woman's origin and merges the comic's two core chapters, "Black Box" and "White Box," extending the 2023 short film of the same name, which also starred Lee Lee Zen.¹²^•²

From comic to screen

The source manhua is a black-and-white anthology of horror, thriller, grotesque, and heartwarming unit stories, drawn with cinematic framing; it has run since 2017 and passed 200 chapters and 70 units.¹³ LINE Taiwan acquired the adaptation rights through the Taiwan Creative Content Agency's "potential adaptation texts" matching program, and a 30-minute 2023 short film, entered in the Kaohsiung Film Festival's fantasy section, won Outstanding International Short at the Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival.⁴^•¹ Principal photography on the series began in May 2024, with four stories selected from more than 300 chapters of the comic.¹

Director Charles Lee developed a visual style he called "colorful black and white," preserving the comic's monochrome imagination while using lighting, set design, and color grading to highlight specific colors in each scene, with light adjusted to each story's tone.¹⁴ In each unit he kept the element he judged indispensable from the original: deformed love in Creation Hell, misunderstood family affection in Pig Family, friendship across species in Space Journey, and a synthesis of the three in The White Box. In the original comic, the black box is a tool aliens dropped on Earth to experiment on humans, and exploring human emotion was the core spirit he carried into the adaptation.¹⁵

The cast prepared for unusual demands. Christina Mok, cast as a masked figure who travels across ten thousand years and many countries, memorized Japanese lines by romanization for the scenes set in 1950s Japan.¹⁴^•¹⁶ Derek Chang played his first darkened, twisted character, taking both the real Chih Wei and the wooden copy in Creation Hell.¹⁴

Reception

The series reached first place on Netflix Taiwan's weekly chart for November 3–9, 2025, and held first place in LINE TV's ratings for three weeks through November 24, 2025. The adaptation also drove readers back to the comic, whose views rose roughly tenfold compared with the month before the series premiered.⁴^•⁶ On Douban it scored 6.1 out of 10 from 1,259 users as of November 24, 2025.⁶ It was later nominated for four Golden Bell Awards at the 61st ceremony.⁷

Reviewers noted the anthology's unevenness as inherent to the form. A Walkup review, which gave the series five stars, observed that viewers labeled it a Taiwanese Black Mirror but that its engine differs: where Black Mirror fears technology, The Black Box's fear comes from the price a person is willing to pay for desire, making it closer to a set of moral fables. The same review ranked Space Journey and The White Box as the strongest units, noted that the shared formula, selling the future for a desire and then returning to the happiest day of the past, makes the ending structure predictable by the third story, and criticized The White Box for crowding two merged chapters into one unit.⁹ A Tatler review cited by Baidu Baike praised the four units' distinct styles and the series' turn of fear away from external gore and monsters toward the darker sides of love, family, and life choices.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › Hong Kong and Taiwanese serial drama

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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