This article contains major spoilers for Connect season 1, episode 6, “Confusion”, including an open discussion of Connect’s ending.
Connect is a Disney+ and Hulu k-drama directed by legendary Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, and it’s a wild, genre-blending ride across its six-episode run. While the finale, “Confusion”, certainly lives up to its title, we’re here to explain things as best we can, not that the ending is especially conclusive.
Anyway, here’s the high-level idea. Around the year 2000, Jeongdo Pharmaceuticals made a revolutionary advancement in biotechnology and gave birth to the idea of neo-humans, almost supernaturally advanced human beings with the ability to heal any and all injuries with the help of creeping red tentacles rendered in unconvincing CGI. The show’s protagonist, Dong-soo, is one such neo-human, and when he loses an eye to an illegal organ-harvesting ring, he begins to discover his abilities when he realizes his missing eye is connected to a serial killer who is murdering young women and staging their corpses as public art exhibitions.
Here’s a quote from our Connect season 1 review:
Needless to say, Connect is weird, and it’s sometimes too weird for its own good. The far-flung concepts don’t always fit together snugly, and as with a lot of Miike’s work, there’s a propensity here to just throw whatever at the wall in the hopes something will stick. Some stuff does, no doubt about that, but there’s also a more coherent story here that gets lost in the weeds of outlandish ideas and some admittedly wonky CGI.
Dong-soo teams up with another neo-human, I-rang, who has been investigating “connect”, which has become a kind of conspiracist urban legend. Together, they become embroiled in both Jin-seop’s killing spree and the wider conspiracy with Jeongdo Pharmaceuticals.
Jin-seop is, in many ways, kind of a garden-variety serial killer. He clearly uses his art to justify his killing, but he’s also terminally ill, which in some way has factored into his sense of abandon. His only actual relevance to the connect plot, though, is the fact that he has been implanted with Dong-soo’s eye, which establishes their connection. Dong-soo can often see what Jin-seop sees. Later, Jin-seop attempts to merge himself with Dong-soo using singer Z as a crash-test dummy, and it seems like the idea might have some promise. We later see the fingers he exchanged between Dong-soo and Z still “alive” despite Z having already expired.
Dong-soo is able to get free, though, and after regaining his eye beats up Jin-seop and leaves him for the police so he can escape with I-rang. I-rang had already hinted previously that there are many more neo-humans like them, and we meet one in the form of Gideun. After defeating Jin-seop, Dong-soo and I-rang run out of the building onto the terrace where they’re confronted by a whole bunch of helicopters – it seems as though Jeongso Pharmaceuticals wants their specimens back.
You can stream Connect season 1, episode 6, “Confusion”, exclusively on Disney+ and Hulu in the US. What did you think of Connect’s ending? Let us know in the comments.
