Sagara West

After finding a stash of bullets at the scene of a suicide, followed by a mass shooting at a hostel, cop Lee Do suspects, given tight gun control laws, that something more is going on than just random violence. Someone is sending guns to people.

Let me describe Lee Do. He is very lovely and kind to people like the bereaved mother protesting outside the company where her son died on the job. He does not take a gun on patrol, for backstory reasons, and refuses the idea of promotion. But! He is super skilled in combat situations. He plays cat-and-mouse with shooters, in the role of the mouse. He can take out a dozen gangsters with knives. Also he rides a motorbike and wears a leather jacket off duty. He is played by Kim Nam-gil so he’s very handsome but in an approachable kind of way. ‘Look how cool our hero is!’ says the show, and I am willing to agree.

(I read a ridiculous film studies essay on the female warrior figure in HK girls with guns films the other day, which implied these characters were an unrealistic fantasy, as if the equivalent male character is any less a fantasy! I thought about this during Lee Do’s fight scenes.)

However, the main reason I decided to watch this was because Kim Young-kwang is in it. They therefore rudely did not have him show up till the very end of the second episode. His character Moon Baek is even more ridiculous.

You get his backstory in episode 5

Which is that he was abandoned as a baby and raised for his organs – he has one eye taken before he is shipped off to America where he is rescued mid-organ-theft surgery – and who after killing the men who wanted to steal his organs (after a time skip) impressed an illegal firearms dealer who adopts him, and gets him a new eye, but one eye is blue, so actually he has different coloured eyes!! Amazing. What an awful lot of choices were made in that backstory.

But it is a fun show. I am judging myself a little for how much I am enjoying it. But even if it’s ridiculous, it’s a well made ridiculous, with a cast I can enjoy, and I feel I shall have no regrets.