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AudienceofOne
Just so very boring
But you know, at first it actually wasn't. Got to give full credit to those amazing Korean production values and the acting chops of literally everybody on screen because all of that propelled me through to about episode 3 before I realised I had no idea what was happening and the whole thing didn't make much sense.Plot points seemed to repeat endlessly to no purpose and characters did inexplicable things for vague reasons (although rank stupidity did seem to be a factor).
The male lead seems to be able to sign up to a dating app with his own image, lure women in and kill them with nobody noticing or caring - let alone the police. I've seen the whole thing and still have no idea what motivated our female lead, Sum, at any point. The writer seemed to think her being autistic was sufficient motivation and I don't even know where to start on how offensive that is.
Somebody and the titular app, Someone, seem to represent an intense desire for connection between people who leave themselves open and vulnerable in trying to find it and thus end up hurt. But the show's limp, oppressed storytelling left us with nothing but a lot of scrabbling around in the dark and, admittedly, healthy doses of Kim Young-kwang being in equal parts creepy and sexy as fuck.
What should have been menacing ended up being undercut by the serial killer's sheer overwhelming omniscience and everybody's vague motivations. Don't get me started on the drama's annoying detours into mysticism and mentions of 'evil spirits' and 'exorcisms'.
By the end, I was hoping I too could be strangled mid-coitus because that would be a hell of a lot more interesting than this show and I'd still end up stupefied to the same extent.
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Just the most fun you will have watching a kdrama
Maybe at some point I'll come back and write a proper review of this hilarious comic action parody about a vigilante named Skunk who steals back Korea's artefacts from dastardly villains.For now, I'll just say - it's the most fun thing I've watched in years. With a perfect mashup of comedy, action movie parodies, well-directed fight scenes and a boat load of tongue-in-cheek humour (and okay possibly a smidge too much patriotism), Stealer is a ride that you won't regret taking.
The longer review will probably note the second half is maybe not as strong as the first. But who cares, really. It's a hoot.
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This review may contain spoilers
A bemusing set of contrasts, Castaway Diva will stun you with its premiere episodes outlining a beautifully tragic backstory of crushed adolescent dreams and then launching into a headscratching modern day tale of.... I don't even know.What was Castaway Diva ultimately about?
Seo Mok Ha (an always class act, Park Eun Bin), is an aspiring singer who longs to follow in the footsteps of Diva, Yoon Ran Joo (Kim Hyo Jin). Running away from an abusive father with the help of fellow classmate Kiho, she ends up stranded on a deserted island for 15 years. Improbable, maybe. But as a metaphor for having your early dreams slip away from you due to tragic, uncontrollable circumstance, it was pretty good. The show had shades of the delightful Thirty But Seventeen.
Fifteen years later, Mok Ha is rescued and tries to revive the career she aspired to while reconnecting with the loyal and generous Kiho.
Except that isn't what Castaway Diva is really about at all. Instead, the show veers off endlessly into the mid-career travails of the fading Ran Joo who isn't as successful as she'd hoped and is struggling with a disloyal agency and nodes. The idea this could somehow equate to 15 years on a deserted island alone after burying your abusive father is outright bonkers. The parallels between these two concepts - the literal and figurative isolation of obscurity for an idol - seems to be what this writer is trying to make and it's frankly gross. Ran Joo comes off as spoilt and entitled and narcissistic and Mok Ha gets dragged into outright fraud in trying to support her idol.
Kiho meanwhile is stranded on his own figurative island (or something) but the connections between these three 'castaway' plotlines is tenuous at best and, in the case of Ran Joo, borderline offensive.
The show is beautiful at several points and the casting is excellent. But the music, like most idol music dramas, is overproduced and often generic. PEB has several laughable moments with her guitar singing solo where the music is so overproduced that you can barely hear her real voice at all. The child actor in comparison had some real moments where you believed she was a raw talent. The rest of the music, apart from a few exceptions, is typically banal.
With an absolutely brilliant opening two episodes and a slow descent into the tedious, Castaway Diva truly is from the sublime to the ridiculous in one show.
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Heartwarming dramedy that sometimes loses the mix between comedy and horror
A heartwarming and healing show about loss, grief and obsession, Here Comes Trouble is a mix of comedy, horror and drama that sometimes loses the right balance between its various elements. But this early tonal confusion shouldn't stop viewers from persisting with a thoroughly enjoyable drama full of great performances and genuine pathos.Pu Yiyong is a kind but somewhat aimless young man who experiences a terrible tragedy and wakes up to find he can perceive spirits: creations of human emotions that have been poured into objects and have developed their own desires. These spirits - grown by obsessive human emotions such as grief, loneliness and jealousy - come to him for help.
He teams up with cop ,Chen Yuying and former classmate, Cao Guangyan to help resolve the situations that have kept the spirits trapped.
As a Western viewer, the show is seeped in a mythology I don't know and do not entirely understand. But it's no barrier to watching a genuinely heartfelt exploration of the destructive power of obsession and the healing power of kindness.
Here Comes Trouble with make you laugh, make you cry and possibly even scare you depending on your appetite for horror. But as with the best of the genre, the problem is never the dead but the living. Humans are the monsters here. Malevolence is ultimately natural rather than supernatural. And kindness is our greatest weapon.
Tseng Jing Hua brings out all Yiyong's immaturity, uncertainty, grief, guilt and desire to help. He is heroic in his lack of desire for heroism, making him an inherently likeable and appealing character. It is this - the complex, multi-layered and three dimensional aspect to all the characters, even the villains - that makes the show shine.
Here Comes Trouble has something profound to say about the human experience but never preaches nor detours into saccharine fantasy. And while its tonal shifts between comedy and gruesomeness can be a bit much, in the end it ultimately works.
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This review may contain spoilers
Just so unbelievably boring
Like my review of Until We Meet Again, this comes with a great deal of frustration.Between Us takes all the slow, reflective, aimlessness of its parent show's back half and turns it into an entire drama. Without even the interesting premise of Until We Meet Again, Between Us is just a formless mass of disconnected BL tropes with the odd scene where the writer seems to really want to examine things like feelings and relationships but kind of doesn't.
There's nothing in Team and Win's storyline that couldn't have been examined as the second story in Until We Meet Again (and boy would that have been better than the Lay's ads, which have not gone away unfortunately). It's definitely not enough to carry even half a drama. And so the writers pad again with even less interesting plotlines and boring one-note relationships between tertiary characters.
I admit to enjoying the relatively well integrated Pharm/Dean saga that is unfolding as per the first season but this time in the background (although I nearly turned it off in the beginning when Pharm started his damn crying again). But we also get the shallow and pointless B and Prince romance, the headscratching romance between Win's brother and his friend, Tul, AND the short afterthought that is Manow and Pruek. So I guess the promise of a woman getting a romance for once really came to very little.
Ignoring the tendency of BL shows to distract from their shallowness by throwing more and more romances at us, Team and Win's story has serious pacing and motivation issues. While Win is quite consistent and well developed (and Boun is still so so so hot, you guys. So so hot), the writer seems not to know who Team is or what he wants and so I don't either. Apart from supportive friend to Pharm and walking trauma flashback, Team doesn't have a personality or a motivation for half of what he does and when he does have a personality it's that of a five year old. Prem is not a good actor and this certainly doesn't help.
Because we don't know who Team is, we don't know where Win's interest comes from. What does he see in Team? We don't know and can't know until the writer works out who he is at all. The integrated common scenes from UWMA only add to the inconsistent characterisation. Team is an entirely different character in the original series and at various other points throughout Between Us. It becomes more and more jarring as the show goes on.
As with Until We Meet Again, my source of frustration comes from the show's unrealised potential (more so with UWMA than this admittedly). Between Us seems to want to genuinely grapple with issues of exploitation, consent and trauma; all areas where BLs have traditionally struggled. Instead its storytelling is all over the place. While Team's trauma is supposed to underpin the story, everything is told strangely from Boun's perspective with his family troubles and fear of commitment coming front and centre instead of Team's story. Although this is probably not surprising since, as I mentioned above, the writer doesn't know who Team is other than traumatised from his experience as a child.
Unlike UWMA I'm not sure what the successful version of this show would look like. It would probably be just as boring as a slow and reflective piece can be. But at least it wouldn't be pointless. Maybe we can imagine a superior version of UWMA with both storylines told adequately rather than two separate pieces that don't work.
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I'd explain what happened in the first episode I watched but none of it made any sense. And, in possibly a worse criticism (considering the genre), the sex scene was clunky and, well, unsexy. At least KinnPorsche's sex scenes were genuinely erotic (as long as you didn't think too hard at the relationships and circumstances around it) but the one that underpins this episode is just flat out badly written, acted and directed.
I didn't know why these two men were having sex. Nor why one of the main characters decided he needed to remodel his bar afterwards. All I knew was that I was confused and bored and, if the former can be handwaved, the latter cannot.
So unless your commitment to watching awkward men simulate bad sex is high, avoid for now. Its not like there won't be a new version of this story next week.
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This review may contain spoilers
Trashy guilty pleasure with a side of good smut
Kinn is the second son of a mafia boss who meets the barfly, Porsche. With no parents and a younger brother to care for, Porsche is willing to do just about anything for money. Following an excellent first episode, he gets recruited to be a bodyguard for Kinn's gangster family. As the two fall in love, they find themselves mired in generic gangster shootouts and a complex family scandal that involves the mystery of Porsche's dead parents.Which is to say, that on paper KinnPorsche sounds like fun. In reality, it's A-grade, rolled-gold trash full of Makjang twists, inconsistent characterisation and a whole lot of sexy boys doing sexy things - most of it non-consensual or involving incest.
KinnPorsche is essentially a fetish drama, with the various fetishes interspersed with something that resembles a plot only in passing: it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, doesn't make much sense and isn't important anyway, frankly.
The show is also a tonal mess, with different direction and production styles clashing (the first episode is surprisingly good, the next two are confusing and contradictory, and the tones clash regularly from there).
But once you get past the idea that this show should be taken in any way seriously - and if you're in the right mood - it could be your latest guilty pleasure watch as it quickly descends into a morass of hot guys boning; sometimes drugged, sometimes drunk, sometimes underage, and sometimes as a result of chained-up basement torture. And nearly always when they're related in some way.
There's a lot of gratuitous sex and mindless violence and the odd, weird, fluffy date episode, which doesn't fit at all. But, I guess, for some people fluffy dating is their fetish so that's here for you as well.
The acting is actually pretty good, especially for a Thai BL, and the sex scenes are genuinely steamy as long as you handwave the rape, incest, torture, murder and creepy borderline paedophilia.
Kinn rapes Porsche, gaslights him, abuses him, manipulates him and yet the relationship somehow seems the most healthy when compared to the other ones in the show. Especially Vegas/Pete ["Nobody can hurt you but me!"] and the super creepy Kim/Porschay ["You're my underage cousin but I'm going to manipulate you into kissing me anyway"].
Anyway, put your brain on hold and enjoy the abuse trainwreck. Otherwise, steer clear.
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Geun Young is the eponymous Antifan who signs up for a show called 'So I Married An Antifan' - as the Antifan - and then finds herself viciously betrayed by being portrayed as an Antifan.
*cue martyr face*
It's an expression you'll get familiar with as it's one of only two expressions she has. The other is a grimace she reserves for when nobody is looking so we can see just how much hard work she's putting into enduring all of the injustices the world has undeservedly thrown at her.
It hasn't of course, most of her victimhood is entirely a choice. In fact if anybody is married to anything in this show, it's the female lead to her victimhood. How dare the reality show she signed up for portray her as smart, fun and in control of the situation she's in? Don't they know she's a VICTIM?!
She becomes homeless for no clear reason I can see and the male lead, Hoo Joon, lets her stay in his house. Instead of taking a bed, she bunks down in the laundry room so we can see just how hard her life is despite living in a mansion, getting an agent, and starring in what could possibly be a hit TV show with a major celebrity.
As for Hoo Joon himself, he's a dick. A famous and rich one so of course he's just misunderstood or something. He's not a real person anyway, just a cardboard cutout of an Idol. The female lead seems outraged by the idea that most of his life is performative despite that being the literal job he has. Of course his life is performative, HE'S AN IDOL.
Apart from our main couple, we have an excruciatingly-boring second couple constituting Hoo Joon's limp, wet lettuce ex girlfriend and former best friend turned greatest nemesis. Like most second leads, these two desperately need to get a life or at least a personality other than 'future violent stalker and domestic abuser'.
The worst thing about this show - apart from the acting, which is at all times bland - is that the premise is excellent and could have been used to spark a fantastic enemies-to-lovers dynamic from this mismatched pair. Instead, from the minute she gets him to do the show by hunting him down and begging, we know exactly the dynamic the show is going for. She's the perpetual victim of injustice, long-suffering and noble. He's hot and rich and always in control.
Can't wait for the sequel - So I Married A Martyr.
I hear she endures that with fortitude as well.
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Those feelings are deep and overwhelming and maybe one day I'll come back here and fill in this review properly with coherence. For now I'll just say - this is a dark and disturbing but powerful and compelling piece of television that you should absolutely watch. It's extraordinarily well crafted: the script, production and acting working together to create a grim tapestry that examines the hierarchical bullying and endemic violence of Korean society and how it has been given brutal form in its nation's military.
As young men are fed into the machine like grist to an unnecessarily violent mill, they do their best to survive in whatever way they can. Whether perpetrators, victims, or bystanders, no one is innocent and no one comes through unscathed.
D.P. is an unflinching look at the perpetuation and normalisation of violence and about what happens when people think they have no way out.
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Both Kim Shi-ah and Jun Ji-hyun put in mesmerising performances as Ashin, the Jurcheon child whose family is slaughtered in a border clash between their people across the river and Joseon where they have settled. A brutal, bleak and dark study of poverty and disenfranchisement, Ashin of the North continues Kingdom's study of those who fall between the cracks of a system that cares only about sustaining itself.
For those who want zombies, they may be somewhat surprised they only really turn up in the last third of the film. But like the best zombie stories, Kingdom has always known that it's not really about zombies at all. This is an origin story to the Ashin character introduced in the final episode of Kingdom season 2. And after watching this bleakly atmospheric film about the character's journey from sun-kissed childhood to stone-cold killer, I can't wait for season 3.
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It makes it even more astonishing, more powerful and more welcome that Korea has made Mad For Each Other: a story about two traumatised people trying to navigate their way back into the world and into a relationship with each other.
Jung Woo plays Noh Hwi-oh, a cop with an anger management problem on suspension. His neighbour and partner in therapy is Lee Min-kyung (Oh Yeon-seo) who is suffering from paranoia, OCD and other post-traumatic symptoms after coming out of a violent relationship.
Mad For Each Other is written and structured more like a classic American sitcom than a kdrama. It episodes are a short 30 minutes and the scenes are short, snappy and the camera never lingers or settles. And yet, while it's a fast paced situational dramedy, the writing has genuine pathos, heart and depth. It's a tragi-comedy that treats all its characters with respect and empathy and never opts for a cliche. Its treatment of mental illness is never trite and, while exaggerated, never farcical.
The production values are high, the acting is excellent and the show never makes its damaged characters the butt of its jokes.
And while I would love to be awarding it the 10/10 it almost attained, the final episode couldn't help itself in opting for some unnecessary action to resolve what should have been resolved with the more subtle character-driven plotting it had until the end. But for being almost perfect, I highly recommend this show.
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This review may contain spoilers
Hey Korea! That Dark show was good, wasn't it? Really broke our minds and broke our hearts. The timey wimey of it all. The tragedy! The emotion! The incest! Let's try to remake it but in a way that's, you know, Korean.
So what would that look like?
Well, for a start our plot has to make no sense. Like absolutely no sense. Because for the plot to make sense and for time travel to be eliminated then our male lead would have never been born. We can't have that though! He's the male lead! He's supposed to beat the bad guys and win the girl! The girl is his mother but Dark told us incest was okay! (This is the opposite of what Dark told us by the way. All of Dark's incest was unintentional and tragic and doomed and what show did you watch?)
So our male lead's mother invents time travel and then travels through time not knowing she's pregnant. She raises him back in the 90s and he becomes a super special magic snowflake (well, he is a Korean man) and his mother raises him the very bestest she could despite the emotional problems caused by radiation damage (due to the aforementioned in utero time travel).
She's murdered when he's 19 and he becomes a cop to find out who did it and then a decade later he meets a woman who looks exactly like his mother. Because she is his mother. She is his mother from this timelime. But even if she wasn't, she looks exactly like her. As in a carbon copy of her.
There's a brief moment of powerful emotional resonance around this. His mother was the only one he had any semblance of emotion for due to his brain damage and her death affected him more deeply then he's capable of expressing. And suddenly this doppelganger is before him dredging up all that inadequately processed grief, loss and guilt.
But, hey, this is a kdrama. So what does it need? It needs romance! It needs a crazy second female lead! It needs cohabitation and hijinks! So what does the show do with this powerful emotional moment between a man and the doppelganger of his dead mother?
It turns it into an inexplicable, utterly gross cohabitation romcom. Sure, he knows this woman IS his mother from this timeline but the show still devotes episode after episode to the romcom version of incest. She walks in on him topless! She treats his wounds! She gets stuck in a store room with him and accidentally removes his shirt! All of this is of course misunderstand by the obligatory psycho second female lead. She knows this woman looks exactly like his mother but still freaks out over him spending time with her. Not despite her looking like his mother. BECAUSE of her looking like his mother. It's weird, it's creepy, it's gross. I have insufficient synonyms to express its awful.
And to get sidetracked for a moment by the second female lead, she's one of only four female characters in this show - the male lead's mother, her alt-version in this timeline, his best friend who's always liked him and an agent in 2050 who's in love with his father, (who still working for Alice). Written out like that, you can sense a theme here. Every single one of these female characters is defined solely by her relationship to a man. Mother, lover, spurned psycho. The writer can conceive of no other role for a woman: no aspirations, no second dimension, no real depth or character. She's either trying to get a man, in a relationship with a man or taking care of her children in a way that's utterly self-sacrificing. This show could have been written by Moffatt, it is that rife with embedded misogynism.
By the end, his mother's invention of time travel becomes some kind of offensive allegory for pregnancy, as though she gave birth to it when she gave birth to her son (everyone knows this is a woman's only real skill so even her amazing scientific achievements are framed as such). The woman invented fucking time travel but it's still used as a metaphor for life coming out of her womb. Does she kill this life or not? Well, of course she can't! She's a mother! So now the whole thing is merely an anti-abortion screed. It's offensive and sexist and misogynistic and it also makes no sense. She invented time travel, not her son. Killing him is irrelevant to its invention and to the establishment of Alice. So as well as being offensive it also doesn't make any sense.
Anyway this show is supposed to be about Alice. So what about Alice? Obviously our male lead's mother is Alice or maybe time travel is Alice. Or maybe he is Alice. Oh who knows. Alice is the name of an organisation based in 2050 that sends people back in time to help them resolve their emotional traumas - for money of course. The male lead's mother helped invent time travel but who set up Alice? Where did it come from? Who runs it? Where is it? None of these questions are answered. And since this show becomes about destroying Alice as some kind of proxy for destroying time travel then this matters. It matters a lot.
We find out early that there are other players in time travel. Rebels who let people travel outside of the network set up by Alice. A prophecy that predicts the end of time travel. A mysterious figure who seems to be trying to kill our male lead or his mother-girlfriend. (Oh at one point we discover that his mother was planning to adopt her alt-universe version and raise her as her own, which makes her also his adopted older sister - Yay for incest!).
None of this is brought together in any way that makes sense.
For those who haven't seen Dark, I don't want to spoil Dark. I'll just say that the outline of this plot is very obviously inspired by Dark. But those elements have been ripped from it thoughtlessly and without context so the whole thing comes off as glossy, nonsensical and shallow. There are some nice themes hiding in here and even some nice dramatic moments as well. The acting at certain points is absolutely top notch.
For a brief moment, the show's grasp of the multiverse theory of time travel isn't too bad either and you start to wonder if the show might pull this whole thing off (and you've fast forwarded all the bizarre romcom cohabitation tropes between him and his mother so you're just pretending that didn't happen). But as the show heads into its final two hours you soon realise it's not going to make any sense. And then - like almost every other time travel show coming out of Korea - it opts for utter nonsense in its pursuit of a 'happy ending'.
And since, in this case, the 'happy ending' involves a romance between a man and his mother, I wish I could burn the whole thing from my brain.
The shorter version of this review.
Just watch Dark.
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One of the most stunning tour de forces of acting you will ever see
If you tune into Beyond Evil for no other reason, then do it for Shin Ha-kyun's Baeksang winning performance as small town cop, Lee Dong-sik. Beyond Evil is an excellent, finely-written crime thriller. But even if this isn't your genre, you won't regret watching this acting masterclass unfold.Accused of the murder of his sister and her friend while still a teenager, Lee Dong-sik has carved out a life for himself as a beat cop in his regional town. As Beyond Evil begins, this backwater is disrupted by the arrival of elite golden boy, Lieutenant Han Joo-won, who's been sent to the small town to avoid a scandal that could impact on the promotion of his high-profile father. Joo-won is convinced that Dong-sik is guilty: not just of the murder of Yoo-yeon and Joo-seon 20 years ago but of other, more recent, killings of illegal immigrants.
Yeo Jin-goo perfectly embodies an entitled member of a ruling class who’s long been led to believe he’s always the smartest person in the room and struggles to know how to act once he makes his first big mistake. And in any other drama, his performance would be considered exceptional. Unfortunately he's acting next to Shin Ha-kyun whose portrayal of this damaged and sometimes unhinged man is one of the most extraordinary I've ever seen.
There’s an air of Twin Peaks small town gothic to Beyond Evil; a sense of a facade of small town life hiding a darkness the denizens either ignore or deliberately plaster over in the name of community solidarity. And with the body parts piling up, it’s time for all those secrets to be dredged up too.
Beyond Evil is the whole package: the writing, acting, themes, music, production values are all top notch. But while it doesn't quite rival the true masterpieces in this genre - Forest of Secrets/Stranger for example - it is still worth every award it won this year. And Shin Ha-kyun has proven himself to be one of the best actors of his generation. And not just in Korea but anywhere.
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They think they're being logical, original and profound but they are most definitely not.
A mess of bad writing and romcom cliches, this show is nothing but a shallow cohabitation romcom. But instead of embracing its own trashiness, it instead delivers the whole thing with an air of earnest profundity that comes across as pretentious.
SIG and PBY are good, especially considering their characters (all the characters) are nothing but chalk outlines. But as well as the rudimentary characterisation and non-existent plotting, the dialogue is ridiculous and unintentionally hilarious. Nobody has actual conversations, they just intone non-sequiturs at each other.
Doom himself (played by a SIG who is always mesmerising somehow no matter what he's doing) is nothing but a walking one-dimensional metaphor signifying the bad things that happen in the world. Kind of the chaos in chaos theory, the randomness of an ultimately ordered system. He is rebelling against Order, known as the deity: an annoying child, terminally ill as this cycle comes to an end and the new one begins. He makes a deal with the terminally ill Tak Dong-kyung to doom the world in exchange for... something. The terms of this contract change in every second episode and even when you think you understand it, you realise it still doesn't make any sense.
The two fall in love or something, although the basis of this love appears to be "he's hot and all about her" and "she's literally the only human he's ever spoken to". Which is to say, they're not in love at all. In fact, for a show obsessed with romantic love, nobody in it seems to know what love is nor is there any believable love relationship in it. It's as shallow as the connection between our leads, which consists of a bit of hand holding, weird nonsensical conversations consisting entirely of allegory and metaphor, and the odd kiss.
The plot structure is like being stuck on a carousel, you look like you're moving but in the end you're back where you're started and the ride just keeps on going. Each week the two episodes bring our two leads back to where they were before the episodes aired. As an emotional journey, it's glacial. As a plot, it's mind numbing.
With the thin shell of bright glossy surface and hollow innards, this show is a Christmas tree ornament. It's super pretty, stylised and somehow antiseptic, doing nothing but decorate. Lacking any real warmth or heart but having a slick and polished exterior.
With this nonsense, Korean romcoms have finally reached peak derp.
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That's saying something considering the insane parade of elements and genres the show rained down upon us from the beginning. At one point a zombie film, a monster flick. a post-apocalyptic survival tale, a revenge melo, and a crime thriller, in the first episode alone, the show gave us:
A hole
Solar flares
A serial killer
Black crazy CGI mist in a mysterious crystal
Zombies
A tentacle monster
And that was only in episode 1.
Kim Ok Bin is quite good as the calm and rational, emotionally-controlled detective, Lee Hwa -sun, who gets caught in the small town apocalypse while hunting down her husband's murderer (the ever present Korean serial killer). And Lee Joon-hyuk is also good in his now-patented role of restrained no-nonsense badass, Yoo Tae-han. But their characters and performances are not enough to save a show that quickly degenerates into a mindless morass of elements ripped from other shows.
A strange mix of 80s monster flick, Stephen King novel, and Korean drama elements, Dark Hole is pretty much a mess. And while the first week shoots for moody and atmospheric and almost makes it, week two degenerates into a boring succession of post-apocalyptic cliches that mostly involve people running around in the dark. It also makes little sense since the mist that people inhale makes them hallucinate and act in response to a a traumatic memory. But by episode 3 they're just lurching around like classic zombies, hunting down and killing those who are uninfected.
I'm wondering if we have Stranger Things to blame, since many of the elements in this are taken from the same classic 80s scifi, fantasy and horror film sources of that show. But Dark Hole doesn't have its charm, its genuine sense of menace nor its appealing characters. And weirdly it also doesn't have the usual OCN gloss.
So rather than dropping it because it's a bit of a mess, I think I'm mostly dropping it because I don't care.
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