I said in my recap of the premiere that Disney+’s K-Drama Unmasked is unusually forward about sex and violence, and if nothing else Episodes 3 and 4 prove me right. This seems like one of those shows that one-up themselves pretty consistently. If you thought the cat killing in Episode 2 (and the cat-killer shenanigans continue in Episode 3) was too much, you haven’t seen anything yet. One word: Castration.
I can’t even tell if it’s good. I’m compelled enough, but the odd structure is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The show’s arranged in the manner of a network procedural just with the usual K-Drama-length hour-long episodes, so it feels weirdly too long and not long enough at the same time. The introduction of new cases keeps it feeling lively, but I’m still undecided on whether that’s a smokescreen or not.
There’s something a bit try-hard about it all, I think. Junyeong, the psycho kid, seems really overplayed to me. He’s killing cats and kids and pulling their eyeballs out and burning old men to death after threatening to imply they were child rapists. It’s a lot, possibly too much, not in terms of my delicate sensibilities but in the sense that one of those things alone would have been enough to characterize the kid as unpleasant. This feels like overkill.
Showing how truly kindly the old man was is like rubbing it in when you think about it; him clutching the eyeballs to keep them safe and all that. It’s a nice gesture, but these are really broad extremes to play in. It almost makes sense the team is utterly confounded when Han Do, who is generally unpleasant to everyone, is so torn up about the old guy he barely knew. They’re noticing his performance doing the legwork of the script.
There’s a classism message beneath all this but it’s similarly arch. Junyeong has a superiority complex but he’s also just a straight-up nutcase with ambitions of becoming the youngest ever serial killer. His mum’s just as bad, having covered up his murder of his little brother, too. I’m not buying it, truth be told. But it has a nice payoff.
Of course, Unmasked Episodes 3 & 4 also spare some time for the overarching stories of Dr. Trigger and the Cha Seongwook case, but there isn’t a tremendous amount of movement. Soryong is virally labeled an adulterer, which isn’t ideal. Everyone is interviewed, surveillance is installed, and everyone’s privacy is violated – the usual. Seongwook’s ex, Haewon, who cops a feel of Han Do at one point, claims there was another woman with Seongwook the last time she saw him, and in Dae-yong’s investigation, he turns up that there’s a relevant tape missing from the archives which was stolen before it aired by one of the Trigger team members – now the current CEO. So, lots to chew on and speculate over, but little truly meaningful.
If the Junyeong stuff was largely about psychopathy and classism, Episode 4 of Unmasked shifts more into a focus on the justice system itself, viewed primarily through the lens of Yumi, a girl who stabbed and castrated her hotshot lawyer father and is looking at a life sentence for it despite his survival. The hook is he deserved it, having abused Yumi and his wife, impregnated Yumi, and then killed their child before it was even fully born. Do you see what I mean about this show?
Through this, we learn that Han Do and Soryong have also had difficult, traumatic pasts, but it’s a really heavy way to get there, and I’m just not convinced that this show has the chops to really grapple with plots this heinous. It all builds to a cliffhanger in which Han Do and Soryong look on the cusp of being trapped under a collapsing building, which is at least slightly less sinister than the stuff we’ve been dealing with thus far, but the jury’s still out on this one, folks.
