Disney+ K-drama review: Flex X Cop – Ahn Bo-hyun, Park Ji-hyun lead fun series that concludes on a disappointing note

This article contains spoilers.

3/5 stars

Lead cast: Ahn Bo-hyun, Park Ji-hyun

Latest Nielsen rating: 9.3 per cent

The first, concerning a cult, has a personal meaning to Gang-hyun, as it is related to the reason her father, Lee Hyung-jun (Kwon Hae-hyo), was disgracefully kicked off the police force.

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While investigating the Oryun Community years earlier, Hyung-jun was suddenly accused of taking bribes, just as he was getting close to the truth.

In the present, several bodies turn up, some bearing Oryun Community tattoos. Gang-hyun tries to dig into the cult but is blocked by her superiors.

When she talks back to the department superintendent he puts her on suspension, but this only strengthens her determination.

She secretly goes undercover as a new congregant to try to get some information on the inside, while I-soo also infiltrates the community, although in a showier manner as is his habit.

Together they discover that the cult has been drugging congregants before killing them for their money, but in the show’s most James Bond moment yet, the cult leader presses a button in his office and the pair fall through a trapdoor into a small chamber that begins to fill with water.

Thankfully their colleagues manage to stop the water in the nick of time.

With Gang-hyun back on the force, and her father reinstated and promoted to superintendent – as the previous one has now been imprisoned for taking bribes from Oryun – a new case appears to occupy the team, this time quite literally in their backyard.

A man climbs over the gate of I-soo’s family compound and dies on the grass from a stab wound. No one at the house seems to know who he is, but then again, the members of the Hansu Group, especially I-soo’s odious mother-in-law, Cho Hee-ja (Jeon Hye-jin), are hardly the most cooperative witnesses.

Finding a mysterious dead body on one’s property would be a bad problem on any day of the week, but it is particularly concerning for Hansu Group chairman Jin Myeong-chul (Jang Hyun-sung), who is in the midst of a presidential election.

I-soo and Gang-hyun’s investigation proves that no one in the family had a hand in the man’s death, but it uncovers some dark truths all the same.

The man who had been attempting to blackmail the family to pay back the creditors who were responsible for this death is revealed to have been both Hee-ja’s former lover and the father of I-soo’s dependable older brother Jin Seong-ju (Kwak Si-yang).

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Although the case is resolved, it leads I-soo to discover a far more terrible truth about his mother, Myeong-chul’s lover, who was believed to have killed herself when he was a child.

I-soo finally remembers that he hid her sleeping pills on the day she died, so she couldn’t have used them to kill herself. He searches for the murderer, first looking at Hee-ja, until he learns that his mother’s killer was his own brother.

During this investigation, Seong-ju also kills Myeong-chul, who by then had given up on his political aspirations.

It was a fine twist to end the show on, even if none of us ever believed that I-soo’s mother had died by her own hand, but for a show that frequently saw fit to poke fun at wealth and privilege, it was a surprisingly classist conclusion.

I-soo was unfairly looked down upon for being an illegitimate heir, but in the end, he is the only blood descendant of the Hansu Group, in addition to being the hero of the story. The villain is Seong-ju, who is outed as a psychotic usurper.

Any sympathy the show tried to drum up for I-soo is thus rendered hollow, as Flex X Cop sends the same message to us that I-soo’s family had sent to him: do not covet what you were not born into.

This disappointing end point aside, Flex X Cop was often an engaging watch, particularly whenever I-soo and Gang-hyun teamed up to take down the bad guys and left the emotional baggage at home.

Hopefully, the recently announced season two will offer us more of that.

Flex X Cop is streaming on Disney+.