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AudienceofOne
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.
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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