Connect (season 1)

Such is the current reality of the streaming landscape that one day you can find yourself casually, almost absent-mindedly browsing Hulu and stumbling across a new Korean series called Connect you’ve never even heard of - one in which all six episodes were directed by much-lionized Japanese cult auteur Takashi Miike, no less. What a time to be alive, eh? 

There are some who would place Miike amongst our greatest living directors… in truth, his output is far too uneven to be part of that conversation (for every genuine masterwork, such as Audition, or display of edgy audacity, such as Ichi the Killer, he probably cranks out a half-dozen scattergun genre works of wildly varying quality… seriously, at his peak he was sometimes releasing up to five features a year), but there’s no denying his name carries creative weight. Connect follows Ha Dong-soo (Jung Hae-in), a reclusive musician who’s abruptly snatched off the street by a gang of organ thieves. He manages to escape… but not before he loses an eye that winds up in the body of Oh Jin-seop (Go Kyung-pyo), who’s so fastidiously regimented and emotionally repressed, he’d almost have to be a serial killer - which, in fact, he is. He’s been posing his victims in elaborate “corpse art” across Seoul as Ha Dong-soo comes to realize they now share a psychic link through his purloined eyeball that allows him to see what Oh Jin-seop sees… inspiring him (perhaps ill-advisedly) to play amateur detective.

That alone would be more than enough to sustain a series (it’s basically a better, more high-concept version of last year’s lackluster AMC offering Ragdoll), but Ha Dong-soo also happens to be a “Connect”… meaning he’s effectively invulnerable. If you chop off his hand, the blood quickly coagulates into sentient tendrils that reattach the limb (you’d be surprised how often that seems to occur in his day-to-day life). If you throw him off the roof of a building, his splintered bones snap back into place as his bent and broken body gruesomely knits itself back together. There are some cursory similarities to the film Unbreakable - not only in terms of Ha Dong-soo’s imperviousness to blunt force trauma, but also in the way the series ponders the concept of superpower-like abilities grounded in an otherwise real world context. The question of whether said abilities could be used for a greater good (or evil) is teased out subtly - particularly through the character of Irang (Kim Hye-jun), a snarky blogger with a deep-rooted interest in Connects (the stuff of urban legend)… whose own closely-guarded agenda has a plethora of twisty, onion-like layers.   ​

Those craving Miike’s special sauce may be disappointed - contrary to the above plot description - that the show isn’t all that “out there.” It’s relatively unassuming in its stylistic approach, the plot not really giving off fumes of truly gonzo weirdness until the finale. Still, the show has its own unique creeped-out pulp flavor. When Oh Jin-seop, having gotten wind of Ha Dong-soo’s “condition,” reveals his master plan, it’s a reminder of why Asian television - South Korean in particular - has gained such a foothold in the West. Their creatives produce elevated genre fare with a fearless nerve that feels almost second-nature. You might assume Connect was conceived as a self-contained entity, but think again - the finale ends on a rather jarring and unrepentant cliffhanger (the end credits almost mocking in their arrival). Not that that’s a bad thing. There’s an untapped mythology here that goes well beyond cat-and-mouse games, just begging for Miike to cut loose and unleash it next season.