Brash and overtly stylised, these characters were so busy being seen and heard that they never stopped long enough to become fully formed characters.
The Uncanny Counter 2 midseason recap: subplots a distraction
The Uncanny Counter 2 midseason recap: subplots a distraction
The one new addition to the cast actually given a character arc – the courageous firefighter Ma Ju-seok (Jin Seon-kyu) – was clearly the one to look out for. He was given a tragic story – the murder of his pregnant wife – and turned to the dark side when possessed by a nasty spirit.
Yet despite his increasingly evil actions, the good man within Ju-seok never completely lost control. At crucial moments he could fight back and stay the bloodthirsty hand of the evil spirit. Therein lay a kernel of hope, the emotion that has often fuelled the exploits of the counters.
Ju-seok gave them an opportunity to cast devils off to hell while at the same time saving a worthy soul. This duality gave him an emotional angle perfectly suited to the idealism that drives the show’s heroes.
Pil-gwang was the more flamboyant and cruel antagonist but, for anyone paying attention, Ju-seok was always going to be the final obstacle.
Ju-seok clearly stood out from all the other characters this year, but that’s only because the rest of them were wafer thin, including the counters themselves.
Beyond interacting with one another, Do Ha-na (Kim Se-jeong), Ga Mo-tak (Yu Jun-sang) and Chu Mae-ok (Yum Hye-ran) were each aligned with protagonists on the outside.
For Ha-na it was her piano teacher love interest, while Mo-tak had his buddy on the police force and Mae-ok tried to draw the young gangster she once saved away from a life of crime. But none of them advanced the plot in any meaningful way or helped members of the trio grow as characters.
That leaves the “uncanny counter” himself, So Mun (Jo Byeong-gyu), who has been the de facto leader of the group all season. While he has been given the most to do, much of it has been in the form of a redundant moral quandary.
8 of the best new Korean drama series to look out for in September 2023
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Despite Ju-seok’s escalating acts of evil, Mun believes that he is still worth saving. No one really disagrees with him, although the story briefly adds an arbitrary reason explaining why Ju-seok has to be killed.
This happens after Pil-gwang coaxes Ju-seok into killing him. Pil-gwang enters Ju-seok and overpowers the evil spirit inside, essentially just transferring bodies. According to Wi-gen (Moon Sook) at the Spirit Immigration Office, this makes him a “complete evil spirit”, the only kind that has to be eliminated rather than summoned.
Mun proceeds to convince the others that there’s still hope and it doesn’t take long for the decree to be reversed.
In a final confrontation, the counters go up against Ju-seok in a dreary set piece that relies on strangling people with telekinesis, an unimaginative and visually uninteresting trick we’ve seen repeated ad nauseam all season.
This follows an earlier dust-up in a penthouse high in the sky, during which Mun has his memory of becoming a counter erased, which strips him of his powers.
Ha-na goes digging into Mun’s mind, where he’s grappling with guilt about hurting the people around him while his body lies in a coma. Ha-na quickly succeeds during a truncated interlude that feels more like a way of padding out the story than of exploring Mun’s philosophical struggles.
If the philosophy of the show has become wonky, so have the rules undergirding its fantastical premise. From the vertical limitations of their “territory” to the evil-quashing powers of a single tear drop in the black evil spirit lagoon in Ju-seok’s mind, the supernatural superhero premise bends with the needs of the story.
It also lacks clarity. Mun, Pil-gwang and Ju-seok are all super-powered, but it was increasingly difficult to understand who was supposed to be stronger than the other and why.
In the end, the why of it all was replaced by a resounding “who cares?” There was a time when we cared about these colourful counters and their zippy duels with evil spirits on earth, but those days appear to be long gone.
The Uncanny Counter season 2 is streaming on Netflix.