My Week in Dramas 31 December 2025

The Manipulated, Tempest, Vigilante

It’s hard to think of any K police procedural that I’ve come across in the past decade that hasn’t featured a conspiracy of sorts. Such stories inevitably become staple when corruption is rife and those in power despise the people they are supposed to represent. Democracy is weaponized against the people and there’s no actual rule of law except where it suits. Needless to say conspiracies aren’t solely in the realm of fiction and the pull it has on the public imagination is scarcely surprising. It carries broader explanatory power for victims of crime especially. Or those who feel helplessness in the face of power more generally. When evil has its sway with no saviour in the horizon, conspiracy theories flourish. Plausibility becomes a matter of degree. The motive then becomes the mystery that needs to be uncovered. Therefore it is within that uneasy space that The Manipulated operates.

When Park Tae-jeong (Ji Chang-wook), a cafe operator and delivery man falls prey to the machinations of a wealthy hacker on the prowl for a scapegoat, he barely knows what hit him. What struggling small business aspirant doesn’t want to make an extra buck here and there? He is meticulously lured into a trap and before he can make sense of any of it, he’s thrown into the slammer for rape and murder… committed by someone else. Overnight he loses everything unaware that he’s been the victim of well-resourced operation. If the bodies can’t be buried, there’s no need. With the technology and resources available, an unsuspecting pleb can take the fall for the degenerate offspring of a politician who is willing to pay for the service.

The Manipulated is very good television when it is The Count of Monte Cristo — the bit that sees him in prison trying to survive the injustice, the beatings and regaining the will to live. His friendship with the altar server is key to his recovery. All the best stuff happens in those first six episodes. But once the show switches gear to The Fugitive, it loses its earlier confidence and even meanders in wasteful fashion squandering a good two or three episodes in a repetitive wash cycle. The previously strategic Tae-jong flounders unconvincingly undoubtedly because the script needs him to. Not because there’s nothing interesting that could be done to maintain momentum but partly it seems to me because it doesn’t really know what to do with the villain-protagonist dynamic. Having built him up as a cackling James Bond adversary with Big Brother type reach, the show can’t let Tae-joong triumph too easily against such a leviathan. As a result the show sacrifices character development and the final episode speeds its way in flimsy fashion to the resolution.

There’s no faulting Ji Chang-wook’s performance from start to finish. He delivers on every front and cements his reputation as one of the best of his generation in what could have been the role of a lifetime if consistency was the modus operandi of the writing. He is let down by the script once the show loses momentum.

The villain as played by Doh Kyung-ho is a curious figure. He is suitably psychopathic and the actor does well enough. But apparently he’s not really an adult but a child who is still pandered to by the family nanny now that there are no restraints on his appetites. The blind nanny is equally ruthless and eggs on her man-child ward to indulge his whims where they take him. What’s always been needed before he was allowed to throw tantrums with no consequence was a triple dose of Mary Poppins medicine to pull him into line.

It also becomes a competition among the hierarchy of villains as to who does the most blood-letting which oddly has a desensitizing boredom inducing effect. All the action and horrifying violence in the world should not be a substitute for rudimentary things like character development. When the ending isn’t nearly as good as the start it’s a downer.

Showing more finesse and consistency is Tempest, a political thriller that also features a conspiracy but on a far larger scale. Jun Ji-hyun plays a former diplomat Seo Munju, married to a popular presidential candidate. When her husband is about to make some world-shattering announcement at church, he immediately succumbs to an assassin’s bullet. Security is surprising lax for a man with ambitions and secrets — a recurring problem I have with the show. Munju is immediately captured on camera reacting to the bloody scenario. Coming to her rescue is a mysterious mercenary Baek San-ho appearing from nowhere. They lock eyes in the chaos signalling an unspoken connection over tragedy.

To find out who called the hit on Jang Jun-lk, Mun-ju is persuaded to join the presidential race. There are far too many unanswered questions that plague her. Was her late husband a North Korean spy trying to do more than advocate for reunification? And what’s this new super submarine with all the bells and whistles purportedly made by the North Korea? Is World War III on the cards? From the set-up the show promises to be a Hunt for Red October style thriller.

There’s a lot about Tempest that gets the adrenaline pumping. The subject matter and its accompanying themes addresses various political issues that are fairly universal. Despite the geopolitical jargon and window dressing, it turns out not really to be a show about politics except peripherally which is something of double-edged sword. It starts off giving the impression of being something and ends up being something else. The key strength of the drama is its storytelling and plotting which is good enough to distract the viewer from some of its weaknesses.

Where the show really falls down for me is the motivation of the show’s primary adversary for which there are several contenders. With multiple agendas at work in the narrative, known facts are not necessarily red-herrings but pieces of a larger puzzle whose positions aren’t evident at the start. Multiple agendas are always fine but after all the build up, the villain’s motivation for making waves is something of an anticlimax.

Judging from online comments, the most controversial element by far is the romance. Which is odd seeing that this is to a large extent a Bodyguard story and that it is his attraction to Mun-ju that sees the bodyguard sign up as a human shield when nobody asked. To say that the romance is unnecessary shows a failure to recognize what the show is really about. With background chatter about reunification in the Korean peninsular as a metaphor and a high profile political marriage rife with secrets, it’s not hard to see what beats at the heart of this show.

For the most part the storytelling is cinematic. The use of wide and high angle shots are aplenty. It can be an immersive experience as long as one doesn’t get too fixated with details. The performances are good as one might expect of the large array of veterans from Kim Hae-sook as the president to Lee Mi-sook as the domineering mother-in-law. But this is a show about fundamentally about ideas so characters represent voices in an geopolitical fracas that’s being going on for as long as there has been nations. I’m not a fan of Jun Ji-hyun’s brand of stoicism but it’s also obvious that Seo Mun-ju is written as an alternative — neither left nor right but a third way… whatever that means.

Two years later, I’m finally done with Vigilante. The title speaks for itself and it’s another show about ideas rather than people. Those expecting any depth or breadth of thought in this will be disappointed. At times it devolves into a mindless action drama. The actors do what they can with what they’ve been handed but in the end, they’re playing caricatures in the battle of ideas. Which is hardly surprising since this is based off a webtoon. It’s not V for Vendetta by a long stretch but the message is similar: vigilantism arises when injustices run rife and those in authority look the other way.

While it holds some entertainment value, it does nothing new and despite the cast, will soon be forgotten.

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