Brief Story Line
David Jung (Daniel Dae-kim - Avatar: The Last Airbender live action series, Hellboy 2019 version etc) used to be a spy working for Caddis organization that he created together with his partner Juno Lund (Piper Perabo - Spontaneous, Coyote Ugly etc). After an incident, he decided to quit his work and led a normal life in Seoul while getting remarried with Eunju (Kim Tae-hee - Iris: The Movie, Hi Bye Mama TV series etc). His peaceful life was disrupted when he found the mysterious assassin named Rebecca (Reina Hardesty - Startup TV series etc) whom he had been searching for years.
However, his effort proved to be dangerous as he became the target of Juno and her son Oliver (Louis Landau - Rivals TV series etc) who assigned their team and employed professional killer nicknamed Gun (Kim Ji-hoon - Death's Game web series, The Haunted Palace TV series etc) to kill David.
So what would happen to David? You could find out in the first season of this series.
End of Brief Story Line
OK, one of the reason I was intrigued to watch this series was the spy action genre, and the fact that it only had 6 episodes. Although to be frank, I thought it was a limited series so I was a bit disappointed with the cliffhanger ending. As at the the time I posted this, there was no indication yet if it will be renewed. So I have to wait anxiously if there will be closure to the story or it will be just another one of those unfinished series. Let's just hope it's the former.
Now the first episode started off quite nicely with some exciting action scenes. After a while the main plot became clearer and I could foresee what it's all about. My favorite part about the series was actually more on the action. I knew Daniel Dae-kim was OK but he was surprisingly better than expected and convincing in those action sequence. His co-star Reina Hardesty was unfamiliar to me but she was pretty good too during those scenes. However I did not really like her character as she was shown to be insecure, indecisive and annoyingly superficial. Yes she was written that way, but maybe it could have been done differently for the series. Piper Perabo's character was completely different from her role in Covert Affairs TV series despite it's of similar genre, while Louis Landau was also unknown to me but he performed his role adequately.
Since the series was set in South Korea, there were plenty of well known stars from the country. I had seen Kim Ji-hoon before and I liked his character here as the ruthless, cool with amazing fighting capability killer. There was also appearance of Park Hae-soo (Karma mini series, Yakhsa: Ruthless Operations etc) as David's old contact Shik-choi. It's kind of reunion for him and Ji-hoon since they starred in Money Heist: Korea - Joint Economic Area TV series. In addition to them, there were also recurring cast like Charles Parnell (The Killer, The Last Ship TV series etc) as Senator George Dawson, Sean Dulake (Dramaworld TV series etc) as Juno's right hand man Hollis and the very familiar Sung Dong-il (Forbidden Fairytale, Project Wolf Hunting etc) with Lee Il-hwa (My Name is Loh Kiwan, Reply 1988 TV series etc) as parents of Eunju.
The series itself was based on graphic novel of the same title by Arash Amel (writer of Hidden Strike, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare etc). Creators of the series were novelist Steph Cha & Ken Woodruff who had experience as producer and writer for Gotham and The Mentalist TV series. Since I have not read the comic, I could not say whether the series was loyal to its source. However critics seemed to enjoy it as it got a positive rating. Out of the 6 episodes, my favorite would have to be the 5th which has strong intelligence ops feel and the finale came close in second (though it was a bit upsetting to see its ending).
Overall this was a series that was pretty entertaining for me. It has quite a lot of action sequence that was excellent for small screen. Having only 6 episodes with duration between 44-51 minutes also made it almost effortless to complete. Story was not complicated at all and quite easy to understand. Oh before I forgot, each episode (except the first one) had South Korean reference for title (you can see it for yourself when you watch this). Only thing that I would have liked better was the way Rebecca's character written as it made me having lack of sympathy towards her. So if you are looking for a new spy thriller drama series that have attributes like above, then you can give it a try. But if you are worried if it's not going to be resolved, then you can wait for confirmation about its renewal before watching. The choice is yours.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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