The Hulu/Disney Plus series Connect has an icon of two men gazing at each other, so I figured it was a Korean BL series. Or at least full of subtexts. I watched the first episode.
Scene 1: An amazingly attractive young man named Dongsoo (Jung Hae-in) looks at the moon through telephone wires and sings a song about loneliness. As he drudges down the street, a van stops, and the man inside says "Pretty eyes." Wow, this got homoerotic very quickly!. "Nice eyes." Then he attacks with a hatchet!
Switch to an operating room with lots of chandeliers. Dongsoo naked -- beautiful body! A mad doctor slices open his chest and squelches out his eyeball. Oh, the guy didn't want to have sex with him -- he wanted an eye!
Switch to an old man in an alley, smoking a cigarette, when a plastic garbage bag starts to move, and sliced-off body parts burst out to attack him! He awakens in his room, hearing the word "Connect!"
Scene 2: An eyeglassed girl, no doubt the Love Interest, searches the internet for an urban legend called "Connect" to use in her web novel. The next morning, she is walking through the city, when she stumbles onto a crowd taking pictures of a statue of a naked lady. Except blood is dripping from her -- it's a corpse!
Scene 3: Detectives and police at the scene of the corpse statue. The body was embalmed and coated with resin to preserve it, then marked with the "artist's" signature: the Latin letters P and L.
Scene 4: Night. Dongsoo, the boy who got his eye gouged out, sits in his very upscale apartment, wearing an eye patch, singing his usual song about loneliness. Suddenly his apartment evaporates, and he sees another room, with someone searching the internet for astrology predictions. He's seeing through the person who got his eyes, a standard fiction motif. The subtitles name him as Jin-seop (Go Kung-pyo, also in the running for Most Gorgeous Guy in Korea)
Scene 5: Flashback to the chandelier-filled operating room: the mad doctor removes two eyes from Dongsoo. Suddenly he gets a phone call: "The liver, too? But there's not enough time!" Behind him, Dongsoo's guts re-insert themselves into his body through weird Cthulhu-like tendrils His skin sutures itself. He jumps off the gurney, in shock. One of his eyes re-inserts itself, but before the second one can, the mad doctor returns, and he runs from the room and jumps out the window, naked (nice butt).
In the present, Dongsoo complains: "I should have taken both my eyes back. Now I'm seeing whatever the jerk who got the other one sees!" Yeah, I figured that out in Scene 4. Fireworks explode over his all-glass-ceiling. Narration tells us that a large crowd has gathered for the Seohan City Fireworks Festival. Not a real city.
Scene 6: Detectives Park, Choi, and Yeom (Han Tae-hee) are watching the fireworks, too, as they go through the case to date. Two victims, the lady and a man, both turned into naked statues, but no other connection (nice physique on the man). Hey, no fair! Dozens of close-up shots of the naked lady and her boobs, but only one shot of the naked man, in a photograph.
Scene 7: In the junkyard. While Dongsoo is repairing some discarded electrical equipment, he overhears three college-age guys bullying an old man, a definite affront to Confucian principles, and rushes to the rescue. The old man runs away, but the bullies beat Dongsong, then slash his face and cut his ear off! It re-attaches itself with Cthulhu-like tentacles, while he flashes back to when he was a kid: he fell from a tree, breaking his arms and legs, but they healed themselves, causing the other kids to call him a "Monster." I remember a Singaporean series where the guy had to hide his instant-healing powers to avoid being screamed at. Must be an Asian cultural motif.
Running away, the three bullies encounter an even bigger bully, who demands to know what they saw. "I thought he left town," he muses.
Scene 8: Apprised that Dongsoo is still around, Evil Crime Lord sends his goons out to find him. Two stay to get really chummy, as if they are lovers, and tell each other things that they already know: a body that can't die would be worth a fortune to us! By the way, Love Interest works for the Crime Lord.
Scene 9: Wandering around the city at night, Dongsoo encounters a man singing his song, but with a different melody. "Where did you get it?" "Youtube." He goes back to his apartment to check, and likes this new melody better. Except it triggers his visions of the guy with his eye! Darn, I thought the musician was going to become a gay-subtext ally.
Scene 10: Dongsoo approaches the Crime Lord's hideout, a karaoke bar. Everyone starts chasing him, but Love Interest intervenes and leads him down a side passage. Why did he go back? I don't understand.
But it leads to a balcony hanging over a 5-story drop! She misdirected him on purpose, to see if he coult really self-repair. She slashes his knee, and watches it heal. Then she throws him off the balcony, and grins as he stumbles away. Personally, I'd choose someone less lethal to fall in love with, but heterosexism is heterosexism.
Scene 11: The killer unloads his van: a naked boy in a wheelchair, unconscious. He tells us that he agrees with Plato that there is no single answer to why women are so beautiful: face, figure, blood.... Um..dude, Plato was gay. He shows us his notebook -- some of those drawings are men! So this guy isn't just into women, in spite of his "women" diatribe. I wonder if the subtitles translated it wrong.
He goes into the operating room to work on his next corpse-statue. To create the greatest beauty, you can't just model the corpse. You have to make artistic changes.
Scene 12: A young woman listens to Dongsoo's song on youtube, then gets off the bus to stumble upon the boy corpse-statue. This one has his arms on backwards, and an eye gouged out. This is the Killer's idea of the boy's greatest beauty?
She then goes to work and flirts with the Killer (without knowing, of course). Dongsoo peers through his eye and a giant statue of a man and a woman's heads behind him. He knows this place!
Scene 13: Dongsoo gets another vision: the Killer has spilled water on his sketchbook. He sees all the corpses! "The person who took my eye...is a murderer?" he concludes.
Meanwhile, Detective Choi sees a boy with an eyepatch in a video of the crowd around a corpse-statue. He gets a nosebleed: an important clue. Dongsoo is now the prime suspect! The end.
Beefcake: Dongsoo's swoonworthy body several times.
Gay Characters: The Killer is obviously bisexual. I would ordinarily be upset over yet another LGBTQ villain, but he is actually responding to male and female beauty rather than just swishing around.
Episode 5 has Dongsoo trying to rescue "Z and the Junkyard Owner" from the Killer. Maybe Z is a gay-subtext friend?
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Heterosexism: I'm sure that the Love Interest and Dongsoo will fall in love. In the original webcomic, they look like a couple. (They also look like high schoolers.)
The Superpower: I don't understand why instant-healing would make you an outcast. It wouldn't come up very often, and unless you were hit by a bus, it would be easy to hide. Cut yourself -- slap on a bandaid. Break your ankle -- hobble around for a few weeks.
My Grade: B+
Connect is a Hulu series. It is not available on Disney+.
ReplyDeleteIt was on Disney Plus in December 2022, when I wrote this review.
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