Mixed bag

I've read so many raves about Signal and am aware that the drama garnered best drama at the 52nd Baeksang Arts Awards, so I was really looking forward to it. I like gritty detective stories, particularly Scandinavian noir and this sounded right up my alley.

Ultimately, I found myself disappointed in the drama. There was a lot of good, but some lazy storytelling marred the series.

First, the good:
Interesting premise: the idea of a walkie talkie that could connect detectives in modern-day (2015) Seoul with a detective in the past was intriguing and generally well used. I liked seeing detectives work on a case in both timelines--and the effect that solving a crime in the past had on the present. I was particularly intrigued in one episode where using the walkie talkie led to tragic consequences. It wasn't used as a device that magically solved all problems.

Tie in to actual past crimes in Korea. It was interesting to learn about some of these past crimes; I found myself googling the particular crimes to learn more about them.

Character development: I especially loved Detective Lee Jae-han and his commitment to doing the right thing. Park Hae-ye's storyline was also interesting, as we learned about his past family tragedies.

The not-so-good:
The romance between Lee Jae-han and Kim Hye-soo. She seemed mostly a bumbling, enthusiastic rookie with a rather immature one-sided crush on her superior officer. Her behavior seemed inappropriate to me; she kept chasing him even when he expressed his disinterest.

The crime solving relied on coincidence and the hunches of the profilers far too often. In one episode, the detectives in 2015 Seoul are trying to track down the victim of a crime who had lied about her attacker. Park Hae-ye uses his profiling skills to deduce where she might work, and then just happens to see someone walking past him and figures out that it is her--based solely on what? He's never seen her before, but yet she walks past him in the street? Similarly, in the final episode, Lee Jae-han determines that a perpetrator has thrown away a crucial piece of evidence at a rest stop near a particular pharmacy. But by the time he arrives, the trash has been collected. We next see him at the landfill tearing through bags, only for a homeless woman to walk by him with the very item that he needs.

I was willing to suspend my disbelief for the main plot device, but the crime solving aspect was just too far-fetched.

I still give this drama a fairly high score because it was well-directed and well-acted. If only the crime solving had been a bit more thoughtful, this drama would be an "A", instead it's a B, maybe a B-

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