Entertainment

K-drama review: Voice 4 – disappointing procedural drama loses sight of its characters


This article contains spoilers.

1.5/5 stars

Few things are as satisfying as a well-crafted investigative thriller, whether in the pages of a book, within the dark surroundings of a theatre, or broadcasting to your TV screen every week. A few things hold true for the ones that capture the imagination.

Chief among those elements are the investigators through whose eyes we experience the story and the investigations themselves. Ideally, they are interesting stories that are cleverly revealed to viewers as the investigators uncover plot layers, bit by bit. However, these two elements are mutually dependent – without one, the other will not work.

Season four of the procedural series Voice has been plagued by a variety of issues, but its most glaring flaw has been its inability to make us connect with its protagonists. It didn’t start that way, as the first few episodes of the season showed us Kang Kwon-joo (Lee Ha-na) and her Golden Time Team enjoying a brief respite to bask in their achievements and also introduced us to the gruff LAPD detective Derek Joo (Song Seung-heon).

Their joint investigation began as Derek was faced with his greatest tribulation, the abduction of his mute sister. Kwon-joo used her auditory skills to help him over the phone, but in the end, they ran out of time and his sister was found dead. Almost as soon as that happened, the chase for the killer, who appeared to have some connection to Kwon-joo, shifted the entire show over to the fictional Vimo Island.

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It was a compelling start for this new investigative team, but beyond the opening salvo Voice season 4 focused almost exclusively on breathless investigations. A few different cases with varying connections to the main villain kept them busy for a few episodes. This was until the “Circus Man” killer and the Stone Family Village cult behind him became the sole focus of the investigation.

While this is a typical and often effective way of mapping out a procedural series, the problem was that although the investigations were moving at a full clip, the character development came to a standstill. There were no quiet moments to allow us to connect with Kwon-joo and Derek.

It’s true that we know Kwon-joo, since she has been around since the start, but she didn’t grow as a character during this season. The season ended with a revelation about the origin of her special skill, but after being a focal point in the early episodes, her sensitive hearing was seldom used throughout the subsequent investigations in the season.

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Derek was given a lot more to do during the investigations, as he demonstrated his expert knowledge of a spectacular range of obscure subjects, but we’re never clued into who he is, beyond his role as a grieving and angry brother.

It’s a stretch to accept that he’s been allowed to investigate his sister’s murder, in a foreign country no less. Derek is able to confront Dong Bang-min (Lee Kyu-hyung) in interrogation rooms several times, and invariably attacks him before being yanked away by his surprised colleagues.

Beyond being a repetitive trope that highlights Derek’s one-dimensional persona, it’s also one of several instances of baffling police work in the show.

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Whether they are Golden Time members, LAPD or local officers, all the law enforcement officers in Voice exercise questionable judgment time and again, but not of the kind that can be mistaken as social commentary.

Late in the season, Bang-min is incarcerated in a mental institution, and Shim Dae-sik (Baek Sung-hyun), posing as a spy for the Stone Family Village cult, immediately sets him free in a plan coordinated with fellow police officers, to follow him. However, he almost kills a pair of officers in the process.

After 14 hours of breathless investigations and lots of dubious split personality psychology, the main investigation of season 4 of Voice came to an end. Yet it did so without any big revelations. It was already clear early on that Bang-min was both the culprit and suffering from a split personality disorder.

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We also discover the extent of the evil within the Stone Family Village, with choice throwaway pieces of information including the revelation that village leader Dong Bang Heon Yup (Jang Hang-seon) raped the women in his cult and abused children.

The show seems to want to shine a light on child abuse – Derek, Kwon-joo and Bang-min all experienced some form of it. But like many other things in the shows, it’s an element that’s shoehorned into the narrative, rather than properly explored.

The coda strongly hints at a fifth season of the show, which would explore the F Children’s Hospital that experimented on Kwon-joo and Bang-min as children. If a continuation does materialise, let’s hope that it devotes more time to its characters.

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.



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