wonhwa

This show completely didn’t work for me. I love Korean historical dramas and the X-Files is one of the few American TV shows I watched avidly when it was airing. Melding them should have yielded my perfect drama crack, and yet . . . There were intriguing moments, especially in the episodes involving geomancy and other time- and place-specific mystical traditions, but as soon as the cheesy glowing space balls started flying around I began reaching for the remote. At forty-five minutes long, the stand-alone episodes felt too short to allow for much emotional engagement and the monster-of-the week plots weren’t especially original. The overall mythology was potentially intriguing, but the writers, perhaps angling for a second season, seemed hesitant to actually “reveal” anything, settling for atmospheric vagueness instead of genuine narrative payoffs. There was lots of artsy hand-held camera work and an effusive fog machine, but I never felt there was much substance behind all the smoke and shakiness. The truth may be out there, but you’ll have a hard time finding it in the oblique writing and the dimly lit, bouncing frames.