The only Dark Hole here is the black hole of boredom this drama opened up as it sucked me into a soporific coma.

That's saying something considering the insane parade of elements and genres the show rained down upon us from the beginning. At one point a zombie film, a monster flick. a post-apocalyptic survival tale, a revenge melo, and a crime thriller, in the first episode alone, the show gave us:
A hole
Solar flares
A serial killer
Black crazy CGI mist in a mysterious crystal
Zombies
A tentacle monster

And that was only in episode 1.

Kim Ok Bin is quite good as the calm and rational, emotionally-controlled detective, Lee Hwa -sun, who gets caught in the small town apocalypse while hunting down her husband's murderer (the ever present Korean serial killer). And Lee Joon-hyuk is also good in his now-patented role of restrained no-nonsense badass, Yoo Tae-han. But their characters and performances are not enough to save a show that quickly degenerates into a mindless morass of elements ripped from other shows.

A strange mix of 80s monster flick, Stephen King novel, and Korean drama elements, Dark Hole is pretty much a mess. And while the first week shoots for moody and atmospheric and almost makes it, week two degenerates into a boring succession of post-apocalyptic cliches that mostly involve people running around in the dark. It also makes little sense since the mist that people inhale makes them hallucinate and act in response to a a traumatic memory. But by episode 3 they're just lurching around like classic zombies, hunting down and killing those who are uninfected.

I'm wondering if we have Stranger Things to blame, since many of the elements in this are taken from the same classic 80s scifi, fantasy and horror film sources of that show. But Dark Hole doesn't have its charm, its genuine sense of menace nor its appealing characters. And weirdly it also doesn't have the usual OCN gloss.

So rather than dropping it because it's a bit of a mess, I think I'm mostly dropping it because I don't care.