skygiants | (no subject)

I forced

tenillypo to watch Beyond Evil with me despite the fact that none of us particularly like serial killer shows because I'd heard it was extremely good and extremely homoerotic.

I think ... at least one of those things is definitely true!

This is a Prestige Drama about a small town that is still haunted by the disappearance & probable murder of golden-girl high school student Lee Yoo-yeon twenty years ago plus another different high school girl that everybody cares about less; her twin brother, Lee Dong-sik, was accused of the murder, then acquitted, then became a cop in the big city, then got demoted due to some other form of disgrace and is now back working as the Weirdest Cop in this small-town police department while still obsessively trying to Crack his Sister's Cold Case. When the show begins, hotshot-yet-friendless young detective Han Joo-won has just gotten himself assigned to the police department, ostensibly for reasons I don't remember, but secretly because he's following a serial killer case with similarities to the cold case from twenty years ago and is absolutely convinced that Lee Dong-sik has been the killer all along.

At the end of the first episode I turned to Gen and Tenille and said, "ah. You construct intricate rituals to touch the murder walls of other men" and that's it, that's the show. If what you like is guys being incredibly weird about each other, gratuitously grabbing each other by the collar and shoulder in order to accuse each other of murder, holding guns to each other's heads, finding excuses to handcuff each other in public, promising that only the other will be the one who can one day arrest them, crying at each other in the rain while vowing to get vengeance so the other doesn't have to dirty his hands, and so on, and so forth: yeah! absolutely! you're gonna get all of that, all of the time!

I was going to put some images here and then I found this tumblr gifset that has pretty much everything I would have included so, you know, just go look at that and you really will get a full sense of the vibe.

And it is -- let me say it again -- all this vibe, all the time, generally in ways that directly contravene ... basic Earth logic .... to the point that we spent most of the show convinced that the whole town was afflicted with a gas leak that made everybody decide that they had to take the most convoluted method to solve any possible problem. At one point our favorite character, the local butcher, leaves town and gets herself a job somewhere else for a whole episode and has one (1) completely normal conversation with some nice elderly fisherwomen before getting dragged back into the plot; this only reinforced our conviction.

Also, speaking of absurd convolutions, I have got to take a minute here for anyone who is not planning to watch the show to spoil the reveal of what Actually Happened On That Fateful Night to our hero's poor hackey-sack-plot-ball of a sister. Are you ready?

ON THAT FATEFUL NIGHT:

1. she breaks up with her boyfriend, our hero's troubled best friend
2. while heading home in a huff, she runs into her foster brother, doing a serial killing
3. the serial killer foster brother does his signature cut-off-her-fingers move but realizes she's a Good Girl so doesn't actually kill her and instead wanders away to continue lurking in the general area
4. while escaping from her serial killer foster brother, clutching her fingerless hands and calling for help, she's (alas!) fatally hit by our other hero's evil and corrupt dad as he drunk drives home
5. he calls his local bruiser/hit-man for help and leaves the scene
6. the bruiser/hit-man leaves the body and goes to move the car
7. while he's gone, the troubled best friend, ALSO drunk driving home, ALSO hits her body in the middle of the road
8. he calls his evil and corrupt politician mom
9. who ALSO calls the local bruiser/hit-man for help
10. local bruiser/hit-man thrilled to be paid twice by separate people to cover up the same murder, ONCE AGAIN leaves the body and goes to move this, SECOND, car
11. the serial killer, who has continued to lurk in the general vicinity, wanders back, finds the body, and absconds ????? with it ??????? so that it can later be found entombed in the hero's basement
12. local bruiser/hit-man returns, finds the body gone, is like 'eh' and collects his double paycheck
13. yakety sax!!!

At one point we really were wondering if there were any characters in the show who weren't going to have turned out to have had their moment in the spotlight juggling Yu-Yeon's corpse.

Did I mention btw that all the non-serial-killer murders happened because the Evil and Corrupt Politicians are really determined to build a mall? They are incredibly passionate about building a mall.

I actually think the show would be a lot stronger, both thematically and in terms of actual plot logic, if it did not have the whole serial killer plot ... I realize I have said this before and I will say it again, and it is, perhaps, particularly absurd to say it about a show that specifically bills itself as being about a serial killer plot, but nonetheless I stand by it. But, to be clear, I have no regrets about watching it; the vibes really are off the charts. In the last episode Ju-won sobs while he simultaneously puts Dong-sik in cuffs and tenderly caresses his hands and I laughed harder than I have in weeks!

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From:

sovay

And it is -- let me say it again -- all this vibe, all the time, generally in ways that directly contravene ... basic Earth logic ....

handful_ofdust wrote about this series a couple of years ago in a way that suggested I would enjoy it and then I never actually followed up! Honestly it still sounds bonkers great.

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