Excellent. Successful novelist has his identity stolen so completely that he is left homeless, broke and living on the street. Now a thug who has been searching for him for three years catches up with him demanding payment of an old debt. Our boy obviously can't pay so the thug beats the snot out of him. In between punches our boy manages to convince the thug that he will get paid if they can figure out who stole his identity, and they are off, racing around Seoul, chasing down clues all to a bangin' soundtrack.
Stealing identities is both an ongoing business and a problem. Unidentified bodies keep turning up and now it is beginning to look like these people can't be identified because their identity has been stolen and now all the government records of this identity now point to the person who bought the stolen identity.
It gets a little confusing because there are different gangs, or maybe just different factions of the same gang, all trying to collect the loot. Also, it begins to look like the identity thief might be the real guy and the real guy might be the fake.
There are several brutal mass fighting scenes and one spectacular smash up of a bunch of police cars.
Agent Kim Reactivated | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content
Cross James Bond with Rambo, give him Korean martial arts skills and you've got Agent Kim, indestructible, lethal and devious to the max.
A North Korean team is sent south to assassinate South Korean government leaders. Unfortunately for the team, a North Korean commander has leaked their plans to the South Koreans so the entire assassination team, except agent Kim, is wiped out. The general who organized the assassination plot gets blamed for this disaster, so the general gets purged and the commander gets promoted.
Agent Kim survives and is captured by the South Koreans. His presence presents something of a problem, but they eventually decide to just turn him loose, and as long as he doesn't cause any trouble, they will let him be. Just to be sure, they assign a couple of people to keep an eye on him.
Agent Kim keeps his head down and leads a normal life. He gets a job, at a bank, gets married and they have a kid. His wife dies in childbirth, so he raises his daughter by himself.
Everything goes smoothly until his daughter gets cross-wise with an entitled brat who is the daughter of a corrupt businessman. This guy is the villain with a capital V.
Up till now, Agent Kim, has been a complete Clark Kent, unassuming, timid, hides in the background, but when his daughter disappears the glove comes off and Agent Kim runs amuck and it's great.
It's like they're trying to create a Korean James Bond, and I guess it's not too bad for a first attempt. The brutality of the North Korean training camps seems excessive, but maybe that is what it is really like. Probably depends on who's telling the story and how good a story teller they are.
Agent Kim is pretty direct and maybe a little crude, but maybe the script didn't ever place him in civilized company. Bond was always suave, except for those few occasions when he to deal with a ruffian.
The other thing might be the scenery. Bond films always have spectacular shots of fabulous places, scenery, hotels, etc. There were a couple big places, but not the sweeping vistas. Not sure what I am saying here, it's just an impression that I get.
The Art of Sarah | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content
Entertaining Korean murder mystery. Silly girls, lusting after designer goods that cost more than their annual salary.
Google summary:
The Art of Sarah (2026) is a Netflix South Korean mystery thriller starring Shin Hye-sun as a woman who constructs a fraudulent identity to enter high society, only to be found "dead" while detective Park Mu-gyeong (Lee Joon-hyuk) uncovers her web of lies. It explores themes of class, deception, and the construction of identity, highlighting the gap between reality and fabricated, luxury-focused personas.
While I was recovering from hip surgery I have accumulated a backlog of Netflix reviews. I'm trying to clear them out, but inspired writing is in short supply, so I'm asking Google for help.
It's about domestic violence, how it affects all levels of society, how obvious signs are ignored and how victims are sometimes so traumatized that they cannot help themselves and even resort to suicide.
Sluggish and tedious, but we've got a complicated murder story, plus the whole psychological aspect that at least partially compensates. Story about two women dealing with domestic violence. Our girl, Jo Eun-Su, has seen signs of it around her all her life but trained herself to ignore it. That works till the day she encounters a middle-aged woman at her job in a high end department store. The woman's back is covered with bruises, she has obviously been beaten. Our girl helps her with the zipper but doesn't do anything else. Shortly thereafter the woman commits suicide by jumping in front of her husbands car. Now our girl feels guilty for not speaking up.
Her best friend from school, Jo Hui-su, is very pretty and small, and she has married well. Her husband is making bank in finance, but he is a real scumbag who beats the snot out of her on a regular basis. Our girl reconnects with Hui-su and realizes her plight. She mentions this to our hero and he makes an off hand remark that she should kill him. Now we are off to the races.
The two gals concoct a plan to do away with the slime-ball husband, and what a scheme it is. Anything this complicated you just know is going to have problems. The slime ball husband dies twice in the first three episodes, but both times turn out to be fantasies.
Our hero, Jin So-baek, runs a grocery distribution warehouse and has a private mahjong club upstairs. He is established, connected and understands people. He steps in at several critical junctures which are really wonderful.
In a bit that is too incongruous to believe, the slime ball's mother, Ko Jeong-suk, gives talks about the evils of domestic violence, completely oblivious to what is going on with her son and daughter in law.
Her daughter, Noh Jim-young, is a political climber on the police force. When her brother disappears her reaction is not find out what happened, but to conceal it and hope that nothing comes out to derail her pending promotion. Yeah, a whole family of scumbags.
Curious bit about the villain. The same actor plays the husband and the warehouse worker hired to impersonate him. Our girl notices the remarkable resemblance, and so does my wife, but not me. To me, they looked completely different even though both characters were played by the same actor.
Bon Appétit, Your Majesty | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content
Silly Korean historical drama / romance. Modern day woman has just won a prestigious cooking competition and is flying home to Korea. She opens an ancient book she is carrying, some of the characters on the page start magically glowing and presto! She magically gets transported back a thousand years in time to the Joseon Dynasty.
Because this is TV, she escapes being executed (happens in every episode I think) and ends up running the kitchen in the king's palace. Meanwhile, the king is writing the book that she was carrying.
Stand out element of this show is what happens to people when they taste our girl's concoctions. It is like a psychedelic experience and their faces glow with rapture. There have been times when I have tasted foods that were exceptional. I enjoyed them, but seeking out these flavors has never been a high priority with me. I can see that for some people it could become a bit of an obsession. I mean witness all the cook books and all the cooking shows. Some people are really into this fancy food thing. Kind of like some people are into football, cars, or opera. People are just weird, man.
Have you ever tasted something that reminded you of a taste from childhood? That has happened to me on occasion and even now it influences my food selection. For instance, tuna fish. My wife fixes hers with Miracle Whip and celery, I fix mine with mayonnaise and sweet relish. I put a dash of catsup on my scrambled eggs. I can eat tuna or eggs prepared other ways, but it just isn't the same.
Very silly, pretty funny, Korean drama. Slow paced, the simplest things take for frigging ever.
We've got two families. The Bok family has become wealthy thanks to grandma's visions of the future that came to her in her dreams while she was sleeping. Grandpa recognized her talent and did what he could to support her, he basically became her servant. Their daughter could fly like Superman. Their son could travel back in time to visit events in his past. The son's teenage daughter can read people's minds by looking into their eyes. All of their talents have atrophied due to 'lifestyle disease', probably triggered when the son's wife was killed in a car crash roughly five years ago. He has since fallen into depression and has been drinking steadily.
The other family are scam artists. There is a brother and sister. The brother is a tough guy, the sister is the ring leader. She has one natural daughter and one adopted daughter. The adopted daughter's father was a drunk who froze to death one winter. He died deeply in debt and his daughter has been saddled with her father's debt. The mom in this family (the ring leader) has set up a couple of scams where adopted daughter ensnares a man into marriage and then through some shenanigans they make off with all their loot.
Now they have set their sights on the Bok family's son. Things become complicated when the Bok's son and the adopted daughter develop feelings for each other. Things become confused when the Bok matriarch figures out the scammer's plan, but doesn't care because her son has cleaned up his act and returned to life.
At the beginning, the daughter who can fly looks like she weighs 300 pounds. By the end of the show her figure has become svelte. You make a person's body look fat with a fat suit, but how did they make her face so fat? She was really fat. If it was done with makeup, it must have been a real chore to get her ready for the camera.
The Bok's house is fabulous. Besides being big and fancy they have a treasure room and a vault. It's like something a Bond villain would have.
I'm not sure why we watched this show, other than the leading couple are very attractive. I asked my wife why we watched this show and she gave me a couple of reasons. One, it is not our usual fare, and two, it is a romance, and we are kind of suckers for this kind of story.
Asian Wiki has a good list of the cast. There are 66 people listed. The leading man was played by Jang Ki-Yong and the leading lady was played by Chun Woo-Hee.
Delightfully Deceitful | Official Trailer | CJ ENM
CJ ENM Global
This show is very different. It starts out like a pretty standard murder mystery with an execution style murder of a couple. This happened ten years ago. The daughter of the couple is convicted of their murder and spends ten years in prison. The first episode makes it look like the she was wrongfully convicted, especially when another guy shows up and cops to the crime.
Come episode 2 we find that the daughter confessed to this crime. But the gun used to shoot the couple has not been found. Now we take a left turn into scam-town. Daughter pulls some kind of stunt that involves getting a bunch of clothes and accoutrements from end high stores. She does this by posing as a policeman and telling them they are under suspicion of selling counterfeit copies. She then uses these clothes to pose as a high roller at a casino, where she accumulates a pile of money from counting cards at blackjack, so much money that the casino security take her to a back room, and instead of kicking her out, they give her an even bigger pile of money. Did she threaten them with a lawsuit. It's unclear.
The lawyer suffers from "excessive empathy", a made-up mental condition for which he sees a counselor of some degree. The daughter is just a doll, and very smart. She memorized books for Pete's sake, but is apparently perfectly capable of murder.
Daughter's probation officer is a real goof-ball. I think he might just be in here for some comic relief. He's not that funny, but his presence kind of gives you permission to laugh at some of the other stuff that happens.
There a couple of unusual things. In at least one scene, the daughter breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to the audience. Conversations sometimes switch back and forth between Korean to English.
Our Unwritten Seoul | Official Clip | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content
Twin girls take diverging paths after high school and now they are young adults with a whole raft of problems: financial, emotional and romantic. Mi-Ji is a lively character. I think everyone else is just there for her to bounce off of.
This show is great. We recently saw another show about young adults in Tasmania and it was just awful. What's the difference? Well, for one, the white kids in Tasmania were chatterboxes, spouting all kinds of nonsense. Characters in this show are so wrapped up in their problems that they hardly speak to anybody, which makes it a little difficult to figure out just what's going on. Of course, that's why we like these shows - it's a puzzle, and it gives us something to chew on.
Korean historical drama, complete with confused would-be lovers, murdering psychopaths, grisly tortures, treachery, double dealing and beaucoup de swordfights. Near the end, one woman pulls out a gun and shoots a traitor. Only gun in the whole show, and she only fired one shot. It looked like a flintlock. As is typical, the plot is confused by the number of people who may or may not be dead.
The story begins when Hongrang, the young son of a wealthy merchant, disappears. He had a penchant for wandering around in the woods, so everyone assumes he has gotten lost or been kidnapped. His doting mother, 2nd wife of the merchant, slowly sinks into a drug and alcohol fueled psychosis. The merchant's daughter by his first wife is like a non-person in this household and is the target of the 2nd wife's abuse. We're pretty sure that the first wife is dead, but you can never really be sure about this. Supposedly dead people show up all the time in these shows.
Over the years numerous boys have shown up claiming to be the missing Hongrang. They are proven to be imposters and suffer grisly fates for their perfidy. Then one day a man who the merchant employed to search for his missing son returns with a young man he claims to be Hongrang. The young man himself makes no such claim due to having lost his memory of his younger years. He is superficially examined and seems to be the real thing. The 2nd wife accepts him as her son, the daughter, who had a close relationship with the young Hongrang, does not, but since she is persona non grata in this house, no one listens to her.
Since Hongrang disappeared, the merchant has taken another young man into his inner circle and has been training him to take over the mercantile operation. So now we have two handsome young men and they are both falling in love with the daughter. She likes both, but she is eventually going to have to choose.
Since Hongrang has reappeared, he is being trained by the adopted son to take over his role and when that is complete the adopted son will be shunted aside, perhaps even cast out. Naturally he is not too happy about this, so he exerts some effort to unmask this imposter.
The new Hongrang is in fact an imposter and has the backing of another clan that is working from the shadows. This clan is run by his adopted mother, who is seeking vengeance against the merchant for . . . something. Turns out the merchant has been running some kind of scam that has defrauded the prince of considerable wealth over the years.
The prince seems to be a typical royal, bemused by the commoners antics, but we're not really expecting any trouble from him. It is only late in the series that he is unmasked as a really nasty villain. He has been collecting children that he keeps in a dungeon where he paints their backs using tattoos and red hot pokers. Nice guy. Six of these children are now adults and have become talismans for a ceremony that will turn him into a god. The climax of this ceremony is when the talismans dumped, one at a time into a cauldron of boiling bronze. Very nice guy.
There are at least four factions competing here, and they all have their own squads of swordsmen to enforce their claims - the merchant, his wife, Hongrang's real mother, and the prince. The prince has the army at his command, so he has the largest force, but the others are all about equally matched and slaughter each other with abandon.
With the forces of evil closing in, Hongrang and the daughter run away. They find an abandoned house on a mountain and consumate their love. The only evidence we get is he unties the bow of her top. Life is lovely for a short time but eventually they are betrayed and the forces of darkness close in and they are captured.
Turns out Hongrang is one of the prince's talismans. Our girl somehow ends up with Hongrang's mother, which you might think would be good, but mom wants her dead just like the merchant's wife. The adopted son rescues her and confesses his love, but she rejects him, and attempts to free Hongrang.
Soul Reaper's Tattoo Episode 10, Mark 1:40
This tatoo is the most risque scene in the show. Typically, these shows show absolutely no skin and only rarely is any physical affection, like a kiss, shown.
This is a pretty standard 2nd world detective show. I say second world because much like Behzat C (set in Turkey), whenever the murder crew goes out on a call they all go in one car. Detectives on Law & Order work in pairs. I suspect this reflects the relative cost of transportation versus manpower. Countries where fuel taxes are the primary source of revenue are going to very sparing of doling out cars to their minions.
Much like Behzat Ç., in every episode we have an ordinary murder that needs to be solved, but we also have the giant, convoluted, case of corruption that continues through the whole series. Naturally, it involves people in the upper levels of business and the government.
There are several paths that can lead to success. You can be diligent, work hard, and earn a living. With a certain amount of luck, you might become successful. Or, you can be a psychopath and just murder everyone who stands in your way. Shoot, since you are unconcerned about other people, you can murder anyone who annoys you. However, if your killings become too blatant, you may need to spread some money around so your killings don't get the attention they deserve, so now you are dealing with corrupt minions of the government's industrial justice complex.
As I recall, there were 32 episodes divided into two seasons, but now Netflix is only showing one season with 16 episodes. WTF the Netflix? Each episode is just over an hour long, in Korean with English subtitles on Netflix.
Beware, spoilers follow.
The story starts with the government's decision to execute a dozen people from death row. The 'good detective' investigated one of these cases five years ago and now evidence comes to light that maybe this guy isn't guilty after all. Naturally, raised on a steady diet of American fairy tales, we expect that our heroes will fight desperately to clear this wrongfully convicted man and at the last second the governor will issue a reprieve. Not here. In fatalistic Asia, he dies.
While the retrial is going on, the pretty girl reporter comes across a piece of video that pretty conclusively demonstrates the condemned mans innocence, but for reasons, she keeps it to herself. After the man is executed she regrets that she didn't share it with the court. In the standard fairy tale, she would be so overcome with remorse that she becomes so deranged that bad things happen. Not here. Here, the handsome young male detective tells her it would not have made any difference. The powers that be wanted the convict executed, and they were going to execute him regardless of whatever evidence was shown in court. Goll durn it, that sounds just like the law. You misspelled 'this' on your appeal, off with your head.
There were some pieces to the plot that make you wonder whether the writers had backed themselves into a corner and needed to pull a rabbit out their hat in order to tie things together at the end. We have one unsolved murder that has been hanging out forever. Resolving this case involves creating this whole backstory that takes several episodes to reveal. I think this is what the whole second season was about.
The cute reporter's boss's brother is a new minister of justice. The two brothers had a sister who committed suicide after being sexually assaulted by a policeman who subsequently disappeared. That happened a while back, maybe as much as ten years ago. Five years ago, around the same time as the original murder that got the convict convicted, the editor eventually tracks down the cop who assaulted his sister and discovers he is posing as a pastor at a church under an assumed name. He confronts the guy at night, in an open area near the church. He asks for, nay, demands an apology. The guy pushes him away and turns to get back in his car. The editor falls down, but then he picks up a convenient rock and wacks his nemesis on the head. Ah, revenge! How sweet it is.
Meanwhile, a hundred yards away, around the corner, a couple of detectives are arguing about a bribe one of them has received. The bribed one (Nam) gets a phone call. While he is occupied the other detective (Jang) hears the editor and the priest fighting and runs to see what's going on. The editor has loaded the dead priest into the back of his car. He plays it cool when Jang appears, but when Jang looks in the back of the car and sees the dead body, the editor wacks him on the head and he falls down. Now Nam is coming around the corner and the editor jumps in the priests car and drives off.
Now Nam has decided that he wants to keep the money. Jang has been stunned by the editor so Nam decides to take advantage of the situation and kill him. He can blame the death on the editor. This whole episode, the fight and the two murders, was recorded by a dashboard camera in car that just happened to have a perfect view of the scene. Nam, naturally, pulls the recording from the camera. Bits of this recording come to light whenever the script writers want to stir the pot.
Nam, being the slimy SOB that he is, having this video gives him the confidence to worm his way into the presence of the major scumbag who actually killed the girl the convict was blamed for killing.
Once upon a time our girl had a friend who was a ballerina. She gets a phone call from her one night, hasn't heard from her in a long time, so she goes to pay her a visit. When she gets there the apartment is apparently empty, so we take a look around. The apartment is something like you might expect if Barbie were Korean. It's wild. Meanwhile the ballerina has committed suicide and is floating in the tub. She leaves a cryptic note asking her to avenge her. Okay then.
There were a number of entertaining bits.
The movie opens with four thugs going into a convenience store and being thugs. In the middle of this robbery our girl walks up to the counter to buy a snack. The cashier, understandably flustered is unable to make change, so our girl pulls out the change she needs from the thug's bag of loot, and then all hell breaks loose. The thugs are armed with knives and our girl is armed with canned goods. Naturally she lays them all out flat in short order.
Choi, the chief villain, is exceptionally strong. He demonstrates this by performing some full body pushups while doing a handstand. He is also a sexual pervert who is into BDSM.
The bad guys have taken over a small hotel and turned into a private brothel where they keep a harem of young women. The decor in the rooms is beyond gaudy.
At the hotel, when our girl gets into a fight with Choi, the couple from the front desk show up to put a stop to it. The woman shows up with a shotgun and lets loose multiple shots, none of which hit our girl because she is so freaking fast. Also because she is lucky, or the mattress is shotgun proof.
Our girl escapes down the hall, but the guy from the front desk shows up with a chain saw. He's running down the hall when a door to one of the rooms is flung open into the hall. He runs into it, falls and cuts his foot off with the chain saw.
Now our girl needs some guns, but this is Korea and guns are illegal, but she has contacts, which she uses to arrange a meeting. The meet is in a big open field. The gun dealer shows up in a largish, battered van. The dealer is a pleasant elderly couple, they look like somebody's grandparents. The open up the back of the van and reveal that it is carnival game booth. They have drawers crammed full of all kinds of guns. The girls, because our girl has picked up the girl who flung open the door at the hotel, pick out some handguns, a derringer and, wait-for-it, a flamethrower. I mean, why not? Grandma demonstrates its use by shooting a flame out 20 or 30 yards. The field looks to be dried grass which ought to catch fire easily, but the flame goes out horizontally and never touches the ground. Imagine that.
Bloody, violent, grisly film about Koreans fighting against a Japanese invasion during the late 16th Century. If that's not enough, a rebellion blows up in the aftermath.
This movie is kind of confusing, partly because they jump back and forth in time and partly because several of the Koreans appear to be clones. You'd think, after watching as many Korean shows as I have, I would be able to easily distinguish them, but such is not the case.
The story focuses on a rich kid and a slave who are brought together as children and grow up in the same house / compound. The slave's initial job is to be the whipping boy for the rich kid who is learning to fight with a sword. Every time the rich kid makes a mistake with his sword, the slave gets a stroke from a cane. The slave soon tires of this so undertakes to teach the rich kid the techniques he needs so he won't make mistakes in training and so the slave doesn't get whipped anymore. The slave eventually graduates to becoming the rich kid's instructor.
When he comes of age, the rich kid goes to take an exam to enter the military, but he repeatedly fails. Eventually the slave takes the exam for him with the promise that he will be freed if he succeeds. He succeeds and the father reneges on his promise. The same thing happens later on with the king. All the peasants who volunteered to fight against the Japanese are promised freedom, but the king reneges on his promise. Slimy nobles.
There is a Japanese high-ranking soldier known for cutting off Korean noses. He has a bunch of treasure chests hidden in a cave. The rebels find the chests and are making off with them when they are ambushed by a group of soldiers. The group is actually two groups, one Japanese and one Korean, working together. Both the Koreans and the Japanese are armed with matchlock rifles. Through some careful choreography the Koreans manage to arrange themselves so they get the drop on their Japanese comrades. Their commander gives the order to fire and the Koreans do, but their guns blow up because the Japanese were in charge of maintaining the guns and had blocked the barrels. I suppose a double load would do the trick, i.e. load it with powder and ball once, and then load it again. They fall upon each other and everyone dies except the two leaders, so we get a swordfight. But wait! Our guy shows up and he can't wait to kill both of them so he jumps in and now we've got a three way sword fight.
Eventually the treasure chests get delivered to the king where upon they are opened and we find they are full of people's noses packed in salt.
The Japanese invasions of Korea, commonly known as the Imjin War, involved two separate yet linked invasions: an initial invasion in 1592, a brief truce in 1596, and a second invasion in 1597. The conflict ended in 1598 with the withdrawal of Japanese forces from the Korean Peninsula after a military stalemate in Korea's southern provinces.
The Japanese and Korean forces were roughly comparable. The Japanese lost roughly 100,000 troops but the Koreans lost a million people, mostly civilians.
Convenience store clerk gets into altercations with people. Pushed beyond his limit he retaliates and kills them only to find out that the people he killed were reprehensible killers themselves. Now he is stumbling through life with all these murders on his mind. Needless to say, he is a little confused. Local cop tasked with solving the multitude of murders that have suddenly started showing up on his beat kind of / sort of suspects our guy on account of him always being in the area. Cop also has a long term project of looking for the ex-cop who put his father in a coma.
Turns out both our clerk and the ex-cop have connections to a computer nerd who researches suspected dirt-bags. When he confirms his findings, he directs his killers to their targets. Ex-cop goes off the rails and just starts killing random people. Perhaps because they are dirty dirt-bags, perhaps because they annoyed him, perhaps because they looked at him funny. Anyway, he kills the granddaughter of some corporate honcho and then the heat is on and things get very messy in a John Wick kind of way. Will our clerk and the nerd escape the manhunt? We'll find out tonight. Or maybe not, if there are plans for season two.
P. S. Couple of items. One is when a prisoner is being transported to jail. He is inadequately restrained and attacks the guards who are with him in the van and causes the van to crash. And because he is the evil villain, he is in the only one who manages to get out of the wreck on his own. This same thing happened in season 2 of Dark Winds. No wonder cops are often getting in trouble for the way they treat prisoners. Can't say as I blame them.
The other is something that seems to happen fairly often in TV shows. Some guy, full of himself, makes some kind of accusation against the hero, the hero is nonplussed, and then after a second or two, the guy laughs and says I'm just foolin' with you or some such. I find this kind of behavior juvenile and irritating. However, the guy is often right, so it's doubly disconcerting. Our hero was within a hair's breadth of getting found out by some moron. Bah, double bah and humbug.
It looks like a Western, but it's set in Korea, so does that make it an Eastern? The show has a bit of comic-book flavor, but that's okay, we don't really want to look too closely at what's going on here. In reality it's pretty awful, so we'll pull back a bit and let our focus be a bit fuzzy. We're in early 20th century Korea and we've got people wearing Western clothes, riding horses and carrying great big six guns. The landscape looks like the American west - wide open plains with mountains off in the distance. I suppose there could be places like that in Korea, but I haven't found any. Kind of reminds me of Clint Eastwood's old Spaghetti Westerns.
Japan invaded Korea in 1910 and occupied it until the end of WW2. The Joseon Empire that ruled the country collapsed at the end of the 19th century. Now we have Japanese soldiers roaming around the country shooting anyone they choose, and we have gangs of bandits roaming around the country shooting anyone they choose, and we have the resistance army roaming around the country shooting anyone they choose, and then we've got the peasants, who mostly just get shot. Very violent.
The story has more bad situations than any show I have seen since I don't know when. The story revolves around a half dozen Koreans. Two guys, a master and his slave, joined the Japanese army. The story starts with the slave heading north to make amends for previous misdeeds. He feels his just punishment would be his death, and he is fine with that. The man who he has wronged (by killing his family) no longer wants revenge, he is simply trying to preserve the lives of local villagers. The master is fully in thrall with the Japanese, even though he is still second class, his being Korean and all. He is disappointed in his slave, who had become his friend, but now that he has gone north, he is just one more rebel to be destroyed.
Then there is the black market arms dealer. A mature woman, dressing in the latest Western fashions, operating out of a brick, four story hotel in what looks like Topeka, Kansas in 1880. She keeps her inventory well stocked by sending her minions out to scavenge arms from the dead whenever there is a battle.
Another woman is a hitman, killing people for a price. She gets to display her talents in, I think, episode 2 where she goes all John Wick on an entire company of soldiers in a hotel.
Lastly we have a femme fatale, a real Mati Hari, who is in love with the slave, but pretends to be in love with the master to the point of marrying him, in order to get military information that can help the rebels. She has also wormed her way into the railway company's administration, so she is privy to all kinds of top secret info.
Korea Railroad Map From a screenshot taken just after the eleven minute mark of episode one
The Japanese want to extend their rail line farther north. They want to use it to transport troops north to fight the rebels. To this end they ship 200,000 won (worth about $10 million in today's money) north via an armored car. Rumor gets out about this shipment and the colonel in charge wants to cancel the operation, but his subordinate (the master) wants to let it go ahead because it is sure to attract the bandits and when they attack he will be there to crush them.
Our girl assassin gets wind of this shipment and manages to locate the manager of the bank that will be shipping the money. She pays him a visit and tells him that the bandits are going to rob the armored car and since they will undoubtedly be successful, they should fill the strongbox with dirt and keep the money. The bandits will get blamed and the manager and the assassin will get off scott free. Clever, if all goes according to plan, but something tells me that's not going to happen.
Until I saw this show I had no idea what happened in Korea prior to the Korean war. My history education kind of missed that. As far as I knew, prior to the Korean War, Korea didn't exist. That they have managed to come so far since then is flat-out amazing.
One of the things that bugs me about Korean shows are the times someone laughs at something that is not funny. I don't know whether this is a common screen writer's trick to ensure that the audience knows that this character is an idiot, or whether it reflects actual behaviors. Pretty weird in any case.
I don't much care for the narrator's ominous tone, but this video, at least, tells a pretty good story about the beginning of the Korean War. I didn't realize just how much territory the North had overrun before they were stopped. A good story? Make it a pretty amazing story: a ship with a big gun can defeat a horde of maniacs who don't have a big gun. Sounds kind of like the story of the British Empire.
South Korea. Busan is on the SE corner. The long, thin island just offshore is the Japanese island Tsushima. It sits in the middle of the Korean Strait, half way to the main Japanese island.
There are some interesting bits, but they spend too much time on the victims bewailing their fate. Yes, bad things happened and people are rightfully upset, but do need to spend quite so much time on it? After a couple of episodes we have had enough.
The title comes from the leading lady's ability to pick up very faint sounds and make some sense of them, which is pretty cool, it's almost like a super-power.
The second episode was about a child molester who had been in prison once and now that he is out he is back to his wicked ways. I don't think society has a good way to deal with this. The sex drive might be the most powerful force in the human psyche regardless of whether you are straight, gay or some kind of prevert. People are going to find a way to satisfy those urges. I dunno, you see one show on TV and you think we have a problem, but society has lots of problems, how many preverts are there anyway? And maybe it's not a constant, maybe it fluctuates with the phase of the moon or the number of automobile crashes. I mean, that would be weird, but that's how little we know about what makes people tick.
The leading man is a kung-fu asshole, running around, chasing people, getting in fights, arguing with people and breaking things. You know, doing manly stuff.
The leading lady keeps her cool regardless of what kind of mayhem is befalling her, whether it's the criminals or the leading man.
We start off with a bright young man working in the police anti-corruption unit. He's made some progress in the department and has gained the rank of lieutenant (I think), but he's ambitious and a promotion might be possible. He seems fairly smart, but he is lazy and not much of a fighter and when he gets jumped by a mysterious man wearing a motorcycle helmet and leathers he gets the snot beat out of him, not once, but multiple times. And where does this mystery man come from? He never appears on any of the security camera recordings. Let me give you a clue: Fight Club.
Not a bad show, though it's a little hard to have much sympathy for the hero because he is so lazy. However, the people around him are persistent and eventually they not only lead him to water but convince him to take a drink.
There is one fight scene where motorcycle man takes on a gang of toughs in an office. When he dumps a couple of barrels of oil on the floor I was reminded of Jason Statham taking on a group of thugs in a garage. There too the floor was covered with oil but wiley Jason managed to strap some rat-trap bicycle pedals to his feet and so manage to get around while the bad guys were slipping and falling left, right and center. The fight scene in this TV show wasn't as good as Jason's fight scene, but it wasn't bad and the difference can probably be explained by their relative budgets.
Another series about Korean royalty a thousand years ago, but this time with zombies. We started watching this once before, but the zombie business turned us off. Since then we have watched The Last of Us, which acclimated us to the whole zombie edifice, so now we are more accepting of weird tales.
It all starts when the royal physician attempts to bring the recently deceased king back to life using an acupuncture needle dipped in a potion derived from the 'resurrection plant'. It brings him back to life, but as a crazed monster craving human flesh. The monster king attacks the physician's assistant and kills him. The physician puts his assistant in a coffin and carries him back to his clinic. All the people at the clinic are slowly starving to death due to the general famine. One wise guy gets the idea to cut up the dead body and make soup to feed all the people. The female doctor and her assistant are out in the woods gathering herbs, so they don't get any of the soup. They get back to the compound just in time to see all the people turn into monsters. Evidently the wise guy doesn't eat any of the soup because he doesn't turn into a monster.
So now the disease is spreading, a nearby town is destroyed and the monsters are running loose across the countryside. The only saving grace is that they become comatose during the daylight hours.
The show is full of reminders of how bad things used to be. Besides plague and famine we also have slavery, torture and psychopathic idiots in charge. Okay, that last one is still with us. I imagine there could have been an epidemic of rabies a thousand years ago and it might look a whole lot like a plague of zombies.
The show has several scenes with hordes of zombies running amok and it struck me that it looked just like a modern day riot, which says something about rioters.
P. S. The setting is more like 500 years ago, not 1,000. Besides the usual Samurai swords, bows, arrows and spears, some of the soldiers had matchlock rifles.
The whole point of reviving the King was to keep him alive until the Queen gave birth to what she hoped would be a boy. If she could also dispose of the Crown Prince (her step son), she would be the acting ruler of the kingdom until her son came of age. Actually, she would be a puppet for her father.
But the Queen has a miscarriage. She conceals the miscarriage and collects half a dozen pregnant women and sequesters them in some spare room in her personal palace. Her plan is to wait until the women give birth and collect a boy baby (surely with that many women at least one will give birth to a boy) and claim him as her own. Once that happened, all the other women and babies were executed. Seems unbelievable that someone could be so vile, but if history has taught us anything it's that there is no limit to human depravity.
We finished watching Little Women, the insane Korean dramatic series, this evening. A while back the two younger girls, Oh In-hye, youngest of the three sisters, and Park Hyo-rin, daughter of the villain and his wife, have run away to Japan. Later on we get a passing comment from Choi Do-il, the inscrutable boy-friend / psychopath, that the girls are in the Netherlands. Shoot, Choi and Oh In-joo, the eldest sister, board a plane for Europe to try and locate them because they are sure the bad guys are after them. However, a crisis arises and they bail out of the plane. Well, not literally, it's still at the terminal and connected to the jetway. No big deal, just another bit of nutso behavior.
So the girls are on their own and we don't hear any more about them till we get almost to the end of the last episode when we see them wandering around some fancy botanical garden (top). Where is this place? The show doesn't give you any clues, and since the last clue we had was the Netherlands, I go looking there, but I'm not finding much. So I feed the screen capture to Google and up pops this image:
P. S. Tech talk - Katie's image is on Instagram, which doesn't enable saving images, so I printed the page to a PDF file and then fed that file to an on online program to extract the images. Whole lot of monkey motions just to give Katie credit for giving me a clue.
We've been watching Little Women, an insane Korean TV series. I have more to say about the show, but right now I just want to mention the Fullerton Hotel. The leading couple are attempting to collect 70 billion won (roughly 50 million US dollars) that has been siphoned off from a politician's web of illegal finances. When you are operating in this rarified atmosphere, what's a few zillion won for a nice place to stay? So the guy books the girl a room at the Fullerton. While the manager is giving her a tour of the place he mentions that it was built by the Duke of Devonshire. While there is such a Duke, and has been since the 14th Century, I could find no connection to Singapore, much less the hotel. I wonder if this is something that was taken from the original book by Louisa May Alcott.
Singapore is 3,000 miles from Seoul, South Korea, where most of the show is set. So just a short six hour plane ride about the same distance as from coast to coast in the USA.
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