Voice

Maybe I'm being a little unfair, but I started watching this coming off the back of Stranger (Bimilui Soop) which is really very good and fancied watching another Korean series.

I like the cast and some of the stories within the main arc are pretty cool. But as others have said, the decisions made by the Golden Time Team can be really dumb. They seem to spend a crazy amount of time listening, watching, before actually doing! They display the time onscreen since the calls came in, which seems redundant when they are so slow to respond.

Also, unlike Stranger, the cops seem to carry guns more often (in Stranger they always seemed to have tasers) yet seem like they really don't want to use them at all, as they would rather wave them around than actually shoot them.

And yet......I must admit I'm enjoying it and its cheesiness. The cast are good enough to keep me watching, as are some of the contained stories.

I thought the series got off to a sluggish start-the wife of a police officer is stalked and killed by a smooth-talking, elegant killer armed with a sort of ball peen hammer and the story drags while the officer grieves. Then, the authorities think they have the culprit, but another (female) officer-a call centre operative-claims the voice of the suspect does NOT match her recollection. Thus, we encounter the unique 'hitch' of this show: this girl has amazing hearing, a skill she has developed diligently. As work begins on other cases, this 'gift' plays a big part, and we suspect one day, she will identify the voice of our mysterious serial killer with the 'slugging device'.

The series contains forensic errors, and some unexplained plot elements, which savvy viewers in the Western Hemisphere will detect easily, but the gifted call Center Officer & the cop with the murdered wife, and their new team, combine for suspenseful episodes, if you stick with it. This 'gifted faculty' thing is catching on: we have Monk with his obsessive-compulsive attention to details; Sniffer, a Russian crime series with a human bloodhound; and the defunct LIE To ME about a human lie detector. It all makes for fun if you suspend your belief a bit. It all started with Sherlock Holmes, you know, in Victorian England, and his gift of observation & deduction.

So, despite its faults, and some grisly moments when the mysterious killer strikes, we are going to wait this one out TIL our gifted girl nails the bad guy.

It's clear from this drama that the CSI and forensic evidence programs so common in the US and UK etc. haven't yet made it to Korea. There is constant snap diagnoses at a crime scene, often by detectives and without, for instance, a medical examination of a cause of feath, that for some reason is thought to be irrefutable. A prisoner is strangled leaving ligature marks amd dosed with gas and set on fire with a lighter afyer which the perp escapes out an open window and when the cops finally bust the door open theg immediately call it suicide. So... in a locked bathroom the now dead guy somehow manages to dose himself with gasoline and, without lighter or mstch burn himself up and it erases all signs of ligature marks... Just stupid. Other than pre-SCI bumbling and a woman who hears everything but only sectively (the basis of the show), this is entertaining.

Just goes to show how important a script is. You can have good actors, and a good story with appropriate twists and cliffhangers. But the captions have got to go. I understand that it's incredibly complicated to try and convey the depth of what is happening in bite-size captions, especially with cultural and linguistical differences. But...really ? Almost every interaction between characters goes something like this: Character 1-"The suspect is in the alley"...Character 2-"So...what you're saying is that the suspect is in the alley?" I'm 5 episodes in and it just continues and continues. Quite maddening. Decently entertaining otherwise.

Ignore the other review. Even among Korean dramas, which are generally very good, this one stands out.