Sometimes a show doesn’t have to be all that complicated. Sometimes you just need a killer being chased by a strong-willed cop. That’s the premise of a new Korean series on Netflix, with a little bit of accidental vigilantism mixed in to make things interesting.
Opening Shot: A nicely-appointed house, with a young man sacking out on the couch, watching TV.
The Gist: It’s been six months since Lee Tang (Choi Woo-shik) has been discharged from the military and he’s spent most of it either hanging out at his parents’ house or at his dingy flat. He thinks his life has been one boring slog, and he longs to go on a working holiday in Canada’s Rocky Mountains. He even gets a print of a painting of the Canadian Rockies for the wall of the dingy flat.
Tang works the 4-10 shift at a convenience store; one night, two drunk men come in. One of them harasses Tang, and orders him to bring food to the table outside. The other man tries to explain why his friend is in such a foul mood, gets the items and pays for them. However, they both leave trash behind.
As Tang walks back to his flat, he sees the rude man lying in an alley. He finds the kinder man to tell him about it, but the man tells him to go away and mind his business. Then the man starts slapping Tang. It flashes him back to high school, when he and his best friend were bullied by a the same group repeatedly. He took their beatings back then, but for some reason, he decides to fight back this time. He finds the hammer he borrowed from work — he wanted to use it to hang his picture — and hits the man square in the temple. The man gets up, but soon collapses and dies; rain starts pouring down. Tang is of course freaked out. As he tries to figure out what to do, a blind woman with a seeing-eye dog comes through the alley; she pauses over the man’s body, but doesn’t seem to do much else.
Tang runs back to his flat, where he has nightmares about the man he killed telling him about his ailing mother and his three kids. He also realizes he dropped the hammer before he ran back home.
The next morning, after the bodies of both men are found, police detective Jang Nan-gam (Son Suk-ku) examines the scene. He can’t seem to find a weapon for the man with the dent his temple; it’s determined that the men fought each other and they got smacked with rocks or bricks, but there’s no hard evidence of that, either.
Following the lead of the convenience store, Nan-gam eventually questions a somewhat nervous Tang. But Tang never lets on that he knows anything beyond what happened that night, and Nan-gam has no reason to believe he has anything to do with it.
It doesn’t take long for Nan-gam to find out that the man that Tang killed wasn’t who his ID said he was; DNA analysis reveals that he was a serial killer, living under an assumed name. When Tang finds out, he envisions himself and every victim of the man he killed strangling him.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A Killer Paradox is a bit like Dexter, where the main character is a serial killer who only kills other murderers.
Our Take: Written by Kim Da-min, who adapted the webtoon of the same name, and directed by Lee Chang-hee, A Killer Paradox isn’t trying to get too deep. Tang is a guy that’s been bullied his whole life, and, despite his time in the military, hasn’t seemed to toughen up any. But he definitely feels empowered after finding out that the man he killed in self-defense was a serial killer. It’ll likely send him on a spree of identifying and killing other killers, figuring he’s justified in his actions.
So, more or less the show is Tang inadvertently or purposely killing killers and Nan-gam tenaciously pursuing him. Sure, there will be other complications, like the aforementioned blind woman who came through the alley shortly after Tang killed his first victim, but it more or less feels like a cop-chases-killer series.
We don’t know if the show is going to get too deep, whether it further examines Tang’s life or tells us why Nan-gam is such a bulldog of a cop. Right now, it seems to concentrate on the fact that Tang’s mind is very active and that… Nan-gam chews a lot of gum? Again, it might end up going deeper than that, but it might just be what we said it was, a cop-killer pursuit story.
Sex and Skin: There’s actual nudity in the first episode, as we see Tang imagining having sex with a woman after finding out about his victim’s background.
Parting Shot: A woman plays with her dog in her backyard; the camera pans into a room, where a hammer wrapped in plastic is sitting on a table.
Sleeper Star: No one besides the two leads stands out to us.
Most Pilot-y Line: Tang tries to hammer a nail in his wall with a frozen water bottle. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t work.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While A Killer Paradox seems like a pretty straightforward show, it should have a lot of tense moments. Maybe there will also be some twists along the way.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
