[Confession] Circle Episode 1
Before anything else, I would like to define my drama reviewing:
First, I won't be posting episode recaps for dramas because i don't trust my character - I tend to get lazy when I have routines to accomplish and
Second, sometimes when I decide to watch a drama, I depend my continuance on the first episode. So if ever I am interested in a drama, I will watch the first episode and I will review it just to see how it goes. If I liked it, I'll have a continuation review after I finished the whole thing.
Kke, let's go! :D
My Gahd I'm so diligent! This is my 4th review of my Kdrama First Episode Hunt, and my 7th review for the week!! I can't believe how epic my no-kdrama vacation affected my blog-pacing! I have a lot of things to catch on! Hahaha but it's not that I don't like it. In fact, I love every bit of it. Makes me fill with wonder at how Asians develop their dramas. They're (We) are so talented! --Okay stop now. Haha! I'll be proceeding to my next review which is on a rather different scale - Circle.
Here is the synopsis of the drama:
The drama is divided into two parts. The first is set in the present, The Beta Project (2017); which is about brothers who think they saw an alien in their childhood. The younger brother, Kim Woo-jin's (Yeo Jin-goo) university suddenly has an array of suicide cases. A student who looks like the alien but claims she's not and Woo-jin thinks that the suicides are actually murders. They work together to stop the organization behind it.
The second setting is in the future, A Brave New World (2037), the story is about an alien invasion in 2017 and the subsequent new Earth in 2037; which is separated into the “Smart Earth” where people’s emotions are controlled and no crimes or illness exist, and the “General Earth” where people still suffer from rampant plague and lawlessness.
When I started this, it lost me. --What I mean is, as you can see from the synopsis, the drama is divided into two settings. I’m still warming to this split-episode storytelling where the two timelines are told as separate parts. It’s jarring at first, and in the premiere I got mad that we weren’t with Yeo Jin-goo anymore and still had half an episode left to go. But now that the connecting threads are starting to show, I’m slowly becoming more invested in the two worlds; there’s also so much here that gets me excited: the mystery connecting the two time periods, the whodunnit case, the false utopia with the sinister government. It has all these compelling mysteries and it's a kind of sci-fi you don't often find in dramaland.
Circle feels like it came out from a sci-fi book --fresh and innovative—it’s not reinventing the wheel, but it’s bringing something new to dramaland, which excites me; what feelings of familiarity it did evoke were all positive ones. The Production is no joke either - especially on Year 2037. The characters are mysterious, the pace is intense, and best of all, it’s completely unpredictable! Though I have no idea where it’s going just yet. And that’s probably the best part.
But for now, it's not something I should be watching. It needs a lot of thinking and processing and being employed won't guarantee that I'll enjoy deducing mysteries here. So I won't be diving my nose into this now - maybe after I'm unemployed (wtf)