There are times when a show has two storylines at once, but strong indications that they will eventually come together. The sooner viewers can see that, the better. A new Korean series on Hi (and Disney+ outside the US) is one such series; It handles its dual story cleverly, giving viewers plenty to look forward to as the stories inevitably, well, connect.
ASSOCIATE: Stream or skip?
opening shot: A man walks down a dark alley and sings a melancholy song over the clang of singing
The essentials: Ha Dong-soo (Jung Hae-in), a songwriter who makes YouTube videos of him performing his songs, is ambushed and loaded into a van by a man who keeps saying he has “beautiful eyes”. . When we next see him, he’s lying on a table in a warehouse with his chest cut open. A man uses large tools to remove his organs, including both of his eyes. Later that night, the man who performed the extraction has a nightmare that the disposed parts come alive and attack him.
Meanwhile, a woman named Lee Yi-rang (Kim Hye-jun) has been communicating with people through an urban legend called Connect. As she walks down a street that morning, she sees a crowd of people around what appears to be a statue of a naked woman who appears to have arrived overnight. But she and everyone else are shocked when the statue starts dripping blood. It turns out there is a body there, and when Detective Choi (Kim Roi-ha) investigates, it turns out that this is the second body found this way.
Inexplicably, Dong-soo revives himself, with tendrils coming out of his wounds to heal and regain his organs. As he fumbles around to look for his eyes, the vines manage to recapture one of them, but he is chased out of the building before he can get the other. Those tendrils are something he’s had to deal with his entire life; No matter how badly injured he was, he somehow surfaced after painfully grappling with those tendrils. That’s one of the reasons he keeps to himself.
Somehow, Dong-soo gets visions of the eye he couldn’t retrieve; the eye is in a man named Oh Jin-seob (Go Kyung-Pyo), but the visions painfully come and go with little information. The visions become so painful that he heads back to camp to see if he can figure out who has his other eye. Of course, the organ harvesting ring thugs are after him, but he is saved by Yi-rang, who cuts him to see if what she knows about humanoids like him is correct.
One of the things Dong-soo sees is that Jin-seob is studying something called “corpse art”. He also sees Jin-Seob talking to a young woman who is about to become his next victim.
What shows will it remind you of? Connect has the gritty feel of Korean sci-fi series sweet home.
Our opinion: Written by Masaru Nakamura and Ha-dam and directed by Takashi Miike, it’s an intriguing two-part story that seems poised to come together quickly. On the one hand we have Dong-soo, who has suffered his entire life from this mysterious ability to regenerate even the most severe injuries. Then there’s Jin-seob, a serial killer obsessed with corpse art. They are linked by an eye, and Dong-soo’s quest to find that eye will be at the core of the series.
The first episode builds this up well, although it doesn’t tell us anything about Dong-soo before he’s caught and cut up. As it soon turns out, not only is he your average reclusive songwriter, but he’s also been plagued by this ability to regenerate his whole life. What the hope is is that he finds a connection (get it?) with Yi-rang, who seems to know a lot about connect humanoids like him, and will help him get his eye back.
However, we wonder if Jin-seob’s side of the story is more interesting. Sure, he’s more of a straight-ahead psycho, but his fascination with cadaver art is something we’ve rarely, if ever, seen in serial killer dramas. He’s meticulous; he cuts and does not cut. He carefully kills, embalms the corpse, encases it in material that makes it look like a sculpture, and then carves a horoscope symbol into it. Shall we see how he keeps this thing going while Detective Choi, whose nose bleeds whenever he gets a lead, tails him?
This is a good problem for Connect to have as both sides of this story are interesting enough to entertain episodes where we go back and forth waiting for the two to get together.
gender and skin: None in the first episode.
farewell shot: Standing in front of the building where he saw Jin-seob talking to his next victim, Dong-soo thinks, “He’s here. Give me back my eye, you killer!”
sleeping star: Kim Roi-ha borrows from Detective Choi’s whimsical nature, making his character a little different from the hard-nosed detective stereotype.
Most pilot line: Dong-soo sees a street musician singing his song and asks him where he got it from. The singer says he got it from the internet but changed the tune. Also, the recording is bad and the singer’s voice is crap. Seems like an unnecessary scene that Dong-soo just kicks while he’s on the ground.
Our appeal: Stream it. The first episode of Connect builds a good story that gets even better when the writers manage to tie its two main parts together.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but he doesn’t fool himself: He’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and elsewhere.