snufkin

It’s actually the one thing Han Kihwan got right about him—that his cold rationality is just a front.

The mask is necessary to cover up how deeply his emotions actually run—arguably deeper than any character in the show, barring Dongsik.

The evidence of this is revealed in the extremes he’s willing to go for justice for complete strangers (Lee Geumhwa) and people he just met for whom he’s grown an alarmingly deep attachment to so swiftly (Lee Dongsik and the rest of their Manyang family).

The mask is necessary precisely because he feels too much.

And yet it’s in the little things he does like this that his mask slips a little, because he can’t help but protect the people he has come to care for, no matter how much he denies it.

Ironically, Han Kihwan gets it right.

Lee Dongsik, the so-called lunatic of the RIU, of Manyang Substation, is the rational one.

The way Minjeong acted with Jin-muk is framed like she's a spoilt brat who is discriminatory towards her father's disability. But turns out no, that's not it. She sensed something was off about him. She didn't trust him for whatever reason. She was actually pleasant and had a great relationship with practically every other person around her. While she distrusted Jin-muk and kept her distance(rightfully so, in the end), she fully trusted Dongsik, who was 'her mother and half a father'. The other parental figure. She 100% saved her own name as 'Dongsik's Eternal love Minjeong', she smiled when she saw Jeong-je and even trusted him enough to tell him that her dad creeped her out, and she had Ji-hun saved as 'Minion Ji-hun'. Like pretty much every other man and parental figure in her life, she trusted and respected. She folded her blanket and put all the things they gave her after she got drunk in place.

The media, and even we as the audience initially perceive her as someone who's disrespectful and entitled with no regard for others purely because of how she reacts to Jin-muk.

Initial impressions coloring judgment. She is such a prime example of what happens when you aren't a 'perfect victim'. She didn't even do anything wrong, she was a regular college student who was partying and living life but she got labelled horrible, misogynistic things because of it.

She was right to have trusted the people that she did; because Jae-yi and Dongsik defended her to the end, because they knew her.

it is also, impressively, a show that pierces the real ugly rot of 1) police corruption and its overlap with capitalism 2) atrocious real-life lawmaking 3) the poor handling of femicide in stories. i cannot express how abruptly shocked i was to discover that i did not hate the way this show was carrying itself, despite its crime drama genre, narrative about two homoerotic cops, and its murder mystery premise featuring a plot about a serial killer with solely female victims. here is a story that understands its purpose and is so clear-eyed about it that i did in fact tentatively suspend all my wariness about Cop Shows to watch it—and what i got was a scathing response to every serial killer and true crime documentary out there. a narrative that said: enough. enough. look at the way grief rots people from the inside out. look at the way loss ruins lives. do not forget the sufferings of the innocent.

far too many crime dramas possess an incredibly dehumanizing analytical tone to them that goes, “what if these poor women died in brutal gruesome tragic ways? anyway, look at these men and their heroic journey for justice!” it’s why i can’t fucking stand to watch them for the sake of my blood pressure. while beyond evil is not exempt from using such gruesomeness as a part of its horror aspect, the women in this show, particularly the women who were murdered, occupy such a heavy weight over the narrative that it is impossible to reduce them to what they’re usually reduced to: numbers in files, or cold cases. and because the purpose of beyond evil is to examine the ways grief and loss bring about destruction to people’s lives and communities, these women cannot be seen as numbers. they need to be vivid and real; the audience needs to feel their loss as deeply and gnawingly as the townspeople do. as we would in real life.

personally i’m still surprised at myself for liking a Cop Show this much—because the law enforcement sympathy is unavoidable in a cop show—but then i’m also shocked at how immediately this show establishes its awareness of police power. i don’t mean it gives a passing nod, like a brief disclaimer. i mean that you watch until the end and you’re like: oh! the entire fucking show is about police power and its consequences! this entire goddamn show is about cops’ potential for harm and how it destroys lives! the main character only ever became a cop out of desperation because he realized it would protect him from suffering further at the hands of the police. because he realized it was the only way for him to get access to both the information and the legal power needed to take his own steps to solve his sister’s murder. it’s not radical—it’s a cop show. but it is novel. a cop whose relationship with his own occupation is bitterly resigned at best and traumatic at worst.

this is far from an original thought, but truly i think what makes beyond evil worth watching is that it is so incredibly careful with itself. its meta awareness of its own genre heightens it to a tier above other crime dramas—it knows and rejects voyeuristic perspectives into the lives of people who’ve suffered real loss and tragedy, and so it makes the loss inescapable. every direction you look, someone’s life has been irrevocably altered by the murders you learn about in the story. it gives you no space to push away the murder—no, you need to sit directly in its field of impact. all the fucking time. you are not watching the town suffer, you’re suffering with the town. the story sucks you in and makes you live alongside the rest of them; it's why the first watch hurts so raw. because the story refuses to let you take a true-crime approach. because it refuses to prioritize the narratives of perpetrators over human lives. you are there, and you are hurting.

What are you doing here alone? To catch me? Then why don't you cuff me right here and now? I confessed everything to you.

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