“Voice” (보이스): Season 1

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
December 19, 2020

Moo Jin-Hyuk (played by Jang Hyuk)
Kang Kwon-Joo (played by Lee Ha-Na)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

“Voice” reminds me of “Tunnel” — not in plot, but in the overacting by some of the actors who’re usually more subtle. That said, the series is filled with suspense, even after you are 99% sure that you’ve figured out who the serial killer is.

Kwon-Joo is a police officer who can hear things that others can not. She is an audio profiler of sorts, able to hear snippets of background sound and use that to help solve cases that seem unsolvable. Jin-Hyuk is a police detective who can’t ever forgive himself for ignoring his wife’s phone call right before she died. After spiraling to the bottom and being demoted, he pairs up with Kwon-Joo to find the serial killer who is responsible for her father’s death and his wife’s grisly murder.

One of the more intriguing cases involved an indigent man who threatened a group home employee. Spewing delusional nonsense about how they have it out for him, the man attempts to throw the helper to his death from a building. But Jin-Hyuk defuses the situation just in time. (I’ll talk more about this in the Spoiler Alert below.)

What was maddening about this series was the inconsistency of Kwon-Joo’s physical ability as a police officer. She is depicted as being more than capable of disarming criminals. But when push comes to shove, we see her sitting on the floor stunned, while a murderer debates whether he will kill her or Jin-Hyuk first.

Yesung (Super Junior) plays a hacker-turned-police officer who gets a nice story arc.

As a big Kim Jae-Wook fan, I loved watching him chew up the scenery as a chaebol’s son who is a suspect early on.

Please note that there is a lot of gory violence depicted in this series. Even when they don’t show everything, there’s enough to be stomach turning.

There’s also a lot of shin kicking by bosses to their subordinates. I have never worked in Korea and experienced anything like that. But to those of you who are based in Korea: Have you witnessed this kind of office impropriety?

Airdates: This 16-part series aired on OCN from January 14 to March 12, 2017. Each episode was approximately an hour long.

Spoiler Alert: The scenario I mentioned earlier was so well done and really made me think about how we are conditioned to believe the experts, even when people are pleading for their lives and explaining how they are the actual victims. The homeless man was one of many indigent people and orphans (i.e. people without families to look for them), who was being used as guinea pigs. They were being forced to take unregulated drugs to make sure the medicine was safe for the general public. The ones who looked likely to die were operated on to remove organs that would be sold to medical facilities in China and the United States.

The case around Oh Hyun-ho (Yesung) was also intriguing. But frustrating. Set up as a drugged out criminal who takes a woman hostage, his face and name was all over the news. But once he was absolved in the next day or so, he just returned to work without any investigation or pushback from citizens. As if netizens wouldn’t have screamed bloody murder, accusing the police of covering up for one of their own!

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