Warning, this review contains massive spoilers related to character identity and ending, so beware.

So I’m continuing my unplanned series of time travelling dramas, this time with Tunnel. After Signal and Kairos, there’s time (heheh, get it? TIME) to get into a bit more literal time travelling, since till now the dramas revolved more around time communication, not direct travel. This time, we’ve got it, there’s movement here, movement in time (cue Doctor Who intro).
So we have late eighties, when leather jackets were in and humanly treatment of suspects was unheard of. Park Gwang Ho, young team leader of violent crime unit, is on his way to catch serial killer who strangles women with their own stockings. Unfortunately something goes a bit wrong and Gwang Ho wakes up around thirty years in the future (cue Mr. Queen intro). Luckily this time Choi Jin Hyuk’s genitals are intact (don’t hit me, watch Mr. Queen for reference) but the status of his life, not much so. He get’s the job of junior officer in the same department that he worked in the eighties, but there’s a lot of questions he wants to know the answer to. One of them is who is the guy with the same name, that Gwang Ho replaced and why are people so obsessed with phones. The new problem arises when he finds another woman strangled with her stockings. Thirty years later.
First feeling that I get after watching first episode was flashbacks to Life on Mars (original BBC version). There we had similar situation but in reverse (travelling to past, not future). There also we had similar problems with fitting in to new environment that is using different investigation methods. And the same as in Life on Mars, I’ve instantly fell in love with dynamic between two main characters. Park Gwang Ho and Kim Seon Jae are both unlikable but with different reasons. Gwang Ho is loud and obnoxious, dive kicking the suspects whereas Seon Jae is silently judging everyone, not bothering with answering questions. Which later on, makes Seon Jae’s relationship with Shin Jae Yi perfectly believable. They’re both pretty weird.
Some things are unfortunately painfully obvious to the viewer. Like true identity of Shin Jae Yi being daughter of Gwang Ho. The viewer can clearly see where this motive is going couple of episodes before it’s finally revealed. But unfortunately, the amount of coincidences, like that is just too much and it makes some things obvious later on. Viewer just learns to look for patterns like that. Like every time someone’s identity is to be revealed, we can tell in advance what’s going on. And you know, in mystery drama, it shouldn’t really happen.
And since I’ve lost hope, that this review will be spoiler free, let’s talk about relation between Gwang Ho and Jae Yi, because how it develops is absolutely crazy to witness. Right away after knowing his true identity she’s staring to treat him as her father, even being urged to call him Appa. And you know, for any other character I wouldn’t be so surprised, but Jae Yi from the beginning was shown as this weird, socially distanced character who’s relation will people is absolutely antisocial. The idea of her being all of a sudden touchy feely to an almost stranger was for me very unnatural. Plus Gwang Ho from the bat starts to call her by her old name (that he learned from someone on the way, since till then he didn’t really know at this point that his wife was even pregnant) and is treating her as his daughter (with standard “you cannot date this man”) which is an absolutely cringe, since technically he’s younger than her.
We have very narrow number of characters here. There’re no new suspects, they all emerge from characters we already know. And this is not that bad of an issue, but just working with the same spectrum od characters all the times felt a bit stuffy at some moments. But that might’ve been just my feeling. Aside of that we have a very nice array of characters, to the point that we quickly get familiar with them.
I’ve wanted to ignore the ending, but I have to say something, because you know what, it absolutely spoiled my impression of this drama. After all this back and forth time travelling, I was sure that the reason for Gwang Ho to travel to the future, was to know the identity of the murderer and to finally catch him in the past. You know, so he wouldn’t commit all those crimes. But no, or at least it wasn’t shown, because it seems, that after catching him in the future, Gwang Ho came back to just live his life, and with all the information that he had (including his diary where murderer one by one describes his crimes) catching him would be fairly easy, right? So it seems that catching him in the future was partially pointless, without saving all his victims that he killed on the way.
But, cutting back to the chase. Overall, I find Tunnel a good drama. With some exceptions of course, but I have to admit, the characters and their chemistry was what finally bought me. And you know, you can never have enough time travelling plots!