Does the plot of this show make sense? Most of the time, no. Did I understand the characters’ motivations? Only about half of the time. Is this show... good? I honestly wouldn’t recommend it. I think these days we have so many other good crime kdramas that I would recommend first before this one.

Then, you ask, why am I giving this a 7, and not like a lower score? The saving grace of the show is its noir style. Goodness, if this show was just played straight it would be an unbelievable and ridiculous crime show where everyone is terrible at their job and characters keep flip flopping back and forth to the point where you give up trying to understand why anyone is doing what they’re doing and you’d rightfully turn the show off and watch something else. But this show’s soundtrack, lighting, coloring, setting and so on are so entrancing to watch and experience that if you just turn your brain off you’ll have an enjoyable time. It’s great to watch a show where it is apparent how much thought and craft was put into the way it looks and feels. The soundtrack is one of the best I’ve heard in a crime show. The fight scenes are well choreographed and shot well (hey directors, did you know you can shoot a fight scene that is well-lit but still conveys the darkness of the tone?) and are quite memorable. The show is often filmed at night or indoors, so there’s this lack of light and air that adds to the darkness of the tone and the sense of futility.

The main 4 characters (Doctor’s Son, Safari, Soo, and Jin Suk noona) are all such great characters to watch. They’re very unique and I think the noir style of the show is what allows them to have their interesting but complicated relationships. Like everyone else, I love Doctor’s Son and he is an amazing character brought to life by great acting. The costume department gets an A+ for all the great suits they have him wear. Soo Min is great too but less interesting than the other characters. Hyung Min is bad at his job and I hate him. Director Min is the worst and is stupid (he’s portrayed as this puppet master but like... dude he’s terrible at it).

Now that I’ve discussed the strengths of this show, I’ll comment on the problems, which include: everything else about it. The plot gets more and more ridiculous as the show goes along, with constantly shifting allegiances and characters revealing hidden identities to the point that it becomes a bit absurd. I lost track of characters’ agendas because of all these switches. The antagonist keeps changing as people’s hidden identities or allegiances are revealed, so sometimes I was unsure who our “good guys” were going after. The characters continuously make bad decisions that still end up being fine in the long run, like walking into an obvious trap but they escape so it’s fine, or a cop shoots another cop but there ends up being no consequences, etc. The show keeps a lot of characters’ intentions in the dark to the point that it becomes confusing rather than intriguing, so I gave up trying to figure out what people really wanted. Occasionally the editing wasn’t great; for example, I would get confused over how much time had passed between scenes and I think that’s due to the abruptness of some cuts. The end of the show was a bit messy in terms of editing and also just the plot itself. This was actually where the noir style failed a bit to me; noir has a cynical view of the world, but despite the character deaths I thought the show ended on a pretty happy note. It focused more on eliminating a few evil people, rather than the city (you know... the “cruel city”) and its corrupt systems. Also I thought the choice of the characters who died was weighed more heavily on those that would have more emotional impact on the viewer, rather than imparting the sense of loss of innocence and naïveté at the hands of a cruel world.

I’d love it if there were more crime shows that embraced this kind of noir style, so I have a hard time discounting this show because it really does stand out. But I just rewatched it for the first time since 2013 and it unfortunately did not hold up well. I think we’ve been blessed with enough excellent crime shows since then that now I have higher standards (you know... like the plot making sense). I still think very fondly of this show, but I unfortunately think that it’s not as great as I remembered.