"The Years of the Great River Like a Song" is over.
As the final season of the whole show, this also means that this story that tells three seasons has ushered in a real finale, and when the song ends, it's time for us to say goodbye to Song Yunhui, Lei Dongbao, and Yang Xun. 
Frankly speaking, compared with the first two seasons, the quality of the third season has declined slightly, perhaps because there are deletions, the plot is not so coherent, and many twists and turns seem a little abrupt.
But after all, it is still "Big River", even if there are small problems, it is harmless, and the most important thing is that the characters of the three male protagonists are still plump enough.
Compared with movies, the length of the series is its inherent advantage. The three seasons of "Big River" add up to nearly 100 episodes, allowing the growth and changes of the three male protagonists to be fully and delicately displayed. 
I privately think that the soul of a drama is the characters, and it depends on whether the shaping of a character is successful, and whether the changes are reasonable and whether the process is exciting.
What makes a good person? I'll take two American dramas that I like very much as examples, namely "Breaking Bad" and "Lawyer". These two dramas are, in a sense, the same thing: under what circumstances will a person become bad?
Why did Lao Bai change from an ordinary chemistry teacher to a big drug lord Heisenberg? Why did Jimmy, an unpopular lawyer, become the famous Saul Goodman? In both plays, we see the complete process of change.
Change is where the charm of the characters lies.
The same is true of Big River.
It also captures the process of character change.
What's special is that "Big River" uses small people to write about the big era, in other words, the changes in the characters carry the changes of the times. 
The ambition is big, and the degree of completion is not low.
The original author Anai and the TV series screenwriter team not only wrote the era individually, but also tried to trace the economic development trajectory of that era through the development trajectory of the protagonist.
The three protagonists represent the three economic development models of that era, Song Yunhui represents large state-owned enterprises, Lei Dongbao represents rural collective enterprises, and Yang Xun also represents self-employed people. In addition, the heroine Liang Sishen represents foreign investment.
Song Yunhui, played by Wang Kai, was born at the bottom and is a typical image of a poor intellectual.
It is an idiom to describe him as indomitable. Because of his poor family composition, although his grades passed the line, he almost didn't get a college admission letter.
But once he was admitted to the university, he seized the opportunity to rise with his diligence and wisdom, and finally became the technical backbone of the chemical plant after graduation with his own efforts, and became a leader step by step, becoming the helmsman of a state-owned enterprise. 
He is not a person who is good at engaging in power struggles, but whether it is in the Jinzhou Chemical Plant or the Donghai Chemical Plant, he has continued to grow, learning to live with the light and dust, and learning to move forward in a roundabout way, but he has always been a person who has some principles of his own and is very reasonable.
At the end of the second part, Song Yunhui and his wife Cheng Kaiyan divorced, was reported by his father-in-law, and in order to preserve the cooperation between Donghai Factory and foreign-funded Luoda, he sacrificed his personal interests and went to Pengyang Pesticide Factory to work.
In the third part, Song Yunhui was still the Song Yunhui who couldn't be killed, and as soon as he arrived at the Pengyang factory, he suffered an organophosphate poisoning incident and was almost responsible. Faced with the Pengyang factory, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, he gave up a better job opportunity, and chose to stay and work with the Pengyang factory to study bamboo and tide over the difficulties.
In the end, he returned to the Donghai Chemical Plant, and in the face of disputes with foreign companies, he was neither humble nor arrogant, and handled it properly, and the young boy had become a mature entrepreneur. 
Compared with the original work, Song Yunhui in the play has been "beautified" or "purified" a lot. Song Yunhui in the original book is more political, and he used a lot of scheming when dealing with Director Ma, which is not reflected in the play.
But we can still clearly see the growth of Song Yunhui, he is indeed like a beacon of idealism, but he knows how to defend his ideals, a mature idealist, must be more intelligent than a realist.
Lei Dongbao, played by Yang Shuo, is a typical farmer entrepreneur, uneducated, but daring to fight, and easy to get into trouble and get into trouble. 
In the first part, he retired from the army and went home, and when he saw that Xiaoleijia Village was so poor that he couldn't open the pot, he boldly took over the burden from the old branch secretary.
When I heard the words "contract responsibility system", although I didn't know the meaning of it, after receiving the guidance of my brother-in-law Song Yunhui, who was still a college student at the time, I rolled up my sleeves and did it.
Later, he made a career, but he was also imprisoned for bribery in the second part, and at the end of the second part, Lei Dongbao, who had been released from prison, was obviously a lot more mature, and wanted to develop the wire factory of Xiaolei's family into an industrial cluster, and received the support of **.
At the beginning, he was ambitious, and with a little inferiority complex that had just come out of prison, he wanted to do a good job of Thunder, on the one hand, he wanted to let the people in the village live a good life, on the other hand, he also wanted to prove his ability and prove that his ideas and practices were right. 
With the arrival of great success, Lei Dongbao has become more and more authoritarian, and the rapid accumulation of wealth has made him lose himself, move into a luxurious office, drive a luxury car, cheat to find a mistress, and make a lot of trouble, unconsciously, he has dug a grave for himself and Thunder.
It is true that this is the case, seeing him rise from a tall building, seeing his building collapse, Thunder has already buried hidden dangers in blind expansion, when the foreign trade business is no longer easy to do, the capital chain is quickly broken, Lei Dongbao also quickly betrayed his relatives, in the face of the betrayal of the people of Xiaoleijia Village, he was anxious and angry, and ended up with a stroke. 
In the last episode, Lei Dongbao looked back on the past before his stroke and remembered that he was in his prime, how could he not make people feel embarrassed?
Dong Zijian's role as Yang Xun is also a very exciting and three-dimensional role.
He is the support of several younger siblings in the family. He is not like Song Yunhui, who has the opportunity to study and can be admitted to university. is not as good as Lei Dongbao, when he returns home from the army, he has a platform like Xiao Lei's family to show his strength.
Because his family has nothing to do with it, he can only go outside to do some small business, from selling steamed buns at the beginning, to accumulating capital to open his own market, Yang Xun has worked hard by himself.
This character has both his filial piety and loyalty, as well as his clever and slippery side as a businessman. 
He is the epitome of self-employed people in that era, and he must be courageous, smart enough, and able to be a man in order to have the opportunity to become a trendsetter of the times.
In the third part, Yang Xun was clever but was mistaken by cleverness, first stealing and playing tricks, offending the Liang family, and once fell to the bottom, but he dared to fight and dare to do it, climbed up again, and really had a foothold in the East China Sea business community.
The three male protagonists, facing the big era, except for Song Yunhui, who has been more positively influenced, have always adhered to their ideals, Lei Dongbao and Yang Xun have been alienated by the times.
I didn't use "blackening", I used "alienation" because the world was not black and white.
Lei Dongbao has changed from a hot-blooded villager leader to a careerist who disregards collective interests for personal power.
Yang Xun has the cunning of a philistine in his bones, his love path is not smooth, and his business has had many twists and turns, and later he is even more unscrupulous. 
Is society forcing him to do this? can't say that, but a person has experienced a stage of poverty and embarrassment like Yang Xun, and once he sees the opportunity to turn over, it is difficult to follow the rules and abide by his duty.
People change, and in the process of accumulating wealth, people tend to become more complex, and most people will be lost or even have a tendency to "self-destruct".
This is the deepest feeling that "Big River" gave me.
The good thing about this drama is that it not only filmed the rise of light in the style of Song Yunhui, but also the fall of darkness in the style of Lei Dongbao, and the complexity of Yang Xun's line is also intriguing.
In other words, Lei Dongbao's fall and Song Yunhui's standing are equally moving. They were all part of that era.
The torrent of the times is rolling forward, some people go upstream, such as Song Yunhui, some people go against the current, such as Yang Xun, but some people are swept away by the tide and disappear, such as Song Yunping, who did not go to college because of bad composition.
It is the times that are made up of these people.