“Stranger” (비밀의 숲): Season 1

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
September 21, 2020

☆☆☆☆
Hwang Si-Mok (played by Cho Seung-Woo)
Han Yeo-Jin (played by Bae Doona)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

You’d think that spending 16 episodes on one case would grow old fast. But “Stranger” is so well executed that each episode unravels a new mystery that is tied to that first original case. Just when you are positive that you have a handle on the villain(s), you’re proven wrong repeatedly. A clever cat and mouse game where the players are chaebols, prosecutors and the police, “Stranger” benefits from skilled writers, who do a great job showing the human side of criminals who would ordinarily be dispensed with as monsters. And by doing so, the viewer is left conflicted: Why are we sympathizing with people who don’t deserve our grace?

Cho Seung-Woo and Bae Doona are superb portraying a taciturn prosecutor and an intuitive police detective, respectively. He is aloof and shows no emotions. She is thorough and unafraid to go against her superiors’ orders to ferret out the truth.

At the core of the plot is the murder of a sleazy middleman, who procures prostitutes for powerful men. This leads to the abduction and attempted murder of an underage prostitute, who appears to be the link between all the bigwigs at the police station and the prosecutor’s office. There’s also a subplot involving a young attorney (played by Shin Hye-Sun), who is determined to clear her father’s name.

There is so much backstabbing (literal and figurative) that your head will ache, trying to keep track of everyone’s wrongdoings. Lee Joon-Hyuk plays Seo Dong-Jae — a character I put in the Amanda Woodward category. Those of a certain age will remember the “Melrose Place” character played by Heather Locklear. Amanda was a conniving survivor, who at one moment would be your very best friend. But at the drop of a hat, she would turn on you if the outcome benefitted her. Dong-Jae is ambitious, but is repeatedly reminded that he should be grateful to have a job because…he didn’t graduate from a top-tier law school. He is willing to do anything to hang onto what he feels is rightfully his. If he has a moral compass, it’s often off kilter and needing adjustment.

The ending was surprisingly bittersweet, but satisfying. It showed that in order for there to be true, meaningful change, sacrifices need to be made.

This is one of the few K-Dramas where there is no romance. The plot didn’t suffer because of it at all. If anything, it flourished without it.

Season 2 of this series is down to its last handful of episodes. I’m curious to see if the showrunners are able to keep up the same level of intrigue as the superb first season.

Airdates:

tvN aired 16 hourish-long episodes from June 10 to July 30, 2017.

Spoiler Alert: 

There were so many potential killers in this series. Yoo Jae-Myung (who played an immoral chaebol in “Itaewon Class” and a kindly attorney in “Prison Playbook“) plays Si-Mok’s direct boss with understated emotion. In the final episode, it is revealed that he enlisted help from an underling for their deadly crime spree. (Lee Kyu-Hyung — who also was in “Prison Playbook” — plays the partner in crime, who suffers from irrevocable anguish after his kindergartener is killed during a school field trip.) Before he jumps off a building to his death, he tells Si-Mok that there has been so much corruption orchestrated by the rich and powerful that this is the only way he could think of to help right all the wrongdoings he was a part of. He spent years gathering documents, recordings and other forms of evidence to take down the corrupt — including his power hungry father in law. Yoo is such a powerful actor that viewers sympathize with him, even though we know his hands are filthy, too.

Dong-Jae morphs from a sleazy potential killer to a sleazy kinda-sorta double agent to Si-Mok. By the end of the series, we have almost forgotten that while he is not a murderer, he came awfully close to killing a colleague by strangulation. The fact that she survived and that he felt remorse for what he did doesn’t take away from the fact that he went there.

Similarly, the police chief goes to prison for his part in all of this. His policemen say that he’s getting a severe punishment, when he didn’t even kill anyone–he just had an affair. The affair was with an underaged girl. And when he feared that she would wake up from a coma and point him out as one of her clients, he tried to smother her. And again, no, he didn’t kill her. But he shouldn’t be congratulation for that.

© 2020 JAE-HA KIM | All Rights Reserved