I'm astonished at how many 10-star reviews there are. Did anyone even watch the full series? Are you just staring at the actor's pretty faces? Are they just rating the costumes?
If you're looking for a story with continuity and plot, you should leave your expectations at the door. The whole story reeks with aggravating decisions made by every single character at every single turn. I don't know where to begin. It's like describing the logic of a dream and the person listening to it just has to nod their head and say "uh-huh" because they don't want to be rude. I only finished the series because I was hoping it would get better. It didn't.
Tropes of Mad scientists, power-hungry lieutenants with a personal vengeance, and a test-tube monster which slaughters everything in the blink of an eye -- with the exception of the main cast somehow. Every single soldier repeats the mistake of shooting this monster, and even with a full firing squad, the monster is able to kill each and every one of them at once. And yet, whenever the main characters holds a bolt-action rifle at ten meters away, it's staggering to stand straight and runs half as fast.
Character wounds are insignificant. Midway through the series Tae-sang, the main character, is slashed with a katana by some thugs. He absolutely needs stiches for this injury, but instead continues throughout the entire series without any attention to how paintfully dehabilitating this wound should be. It's never closed, and he never complains about it. In fact as soon as he first wraps it up, he jauntly swings his jacket over himself. Alright, - so let's pretend his pain tolerance is somehow infinite, but this wound should have opened up over again and over again. He's literally sprinting, climbing, bending, and crawling. He gets shot, stabbed, and beaten, and yet none of this ever impacts his energy or mobility.
Characters have no minds. There is a moment when Jang Tae-sang, Comrade Kwon Jun-taek, Yoon Chae-ok, and her father are crawling through a vent and land in a janitor's closet of some sort. Just then a guard catches them and for some reason and they each their own turns fighting this single guard. Why? It's a 4v1, and they're all incredibly skilled fighters in a small space. Why not just take him out at once? What's the issue here? Nearly everyone has a gun or a knife -- and this happened a lot. Whenever a character is off-screen, it's like they just don't exist. You could count the seconds on a stopwatch if you realized how long it took for anything to happen. There comes a moment in this fight when Tae-sang is battling for his life to redirect a pistol away from his head, and then suddenly the shot goes off. Of course, you know what should have happened, but miraculously Tae-sang had overpowered the guard and shot him instead. But why didn't Chae-ok or her father take any time to shoot their gun during the full dramatic 20 seconds of struggling? Or even throw a knife? Did I mention Tae-Jang has an open stab wound wich should be pouring blood - even still? All this does is painfully break the fourth wall and remind you that it's all wound makeup for the rest of the series, because they act like these dramatic bruises just aren't there. Also, why did his comrade friend leave immediately at that exact moment? "Every man for himself?" Aren't they best friends, or at least he should feel some ironic comradery? Couldn't he at least help deal with the immenant threat of a sigle soldier while you have the numbers? There was no logic here at all. Of course, this friend gets captured in no time, and is "tortured" for information. By "tortured", I mean they tie his hands through some prison bars in the exact same room that a ton of children just managed to escape, and then ask him to write everything he knows, after which he just does without a moment's hesitation. He even writes a follow-up chapter on top of what he already wrote just as a thank-you card. (What a useless and spineless character without any redeeming ark.)
The military is incompetent beyond belief. The security of the hospital is non-existent. What level of security indicates an actual "Nobody in, Nobody out." policy? Because every time they instate another "Increase the security!", they repeatedly allow random individuals to just leave the compound, like the little child carrying a rickshaw with more children in it than his famished body should be able to carry. They just let him slide on through. It's 1945, why were there no intercom systems in this entire hospital to direct the army?
CGI was painfully apparent in so many scenes. I have sympathy for this criticism because it's not easy to get right. But it was like they just never blended the lighting into some of the scenes. Monster CGI is terribly difficult to begin with, but they made the decision of showing the entire monster quite early, which meant they couldn't go back the mysterious "psychological horror" stage. Once you show the face of the monster, you can't take it back.
Infinite time for dialogues. This nearly killed me. There is a scene near the end where the main characters are defending a hallway through a barracade. Small soldier boy alerts everyone about where they are (somehow a single gunshot gave that exact location away?) The soldiers sprint towards the wing of the hospital, which must be 30 miles away because it takes them a solid 15 minutes to arrive up the stairs and down a hall. By that time, the characters have built a wonderfully makeshift barracade strong enough to hold back perhaps a a curious child. Meanwhile, we're worried about whether our innocent civilians are going to make it out of the window in time. Yes -- there was time. There was time for them all to escape and climb back in and escape again four times over.
At first you see the brave characters prepared to defend with rifles through the barricade, and then suddenly they're sitting with their backs to the barricade when the soliders actually arrive. They choose to just let the squadron of soldiers fire at them through a single mattress and bedframe; finally they defend themselves and in three shots have scared the entire brigade back into the hallway. Then begins this 5 minute dialogue between Jang Tae-sang and Yoon Chae-ok about their emotions. I was waiting for a shout or a bullet to interrupt them. This is the moment you would expect the soldiers to be marching down the hallway, to be hearing soldiers yelling, or to hear this livid lieutenant who wants his personal revenge on this woman.
On another note, how does every prisoner get antrhax during the outbreak except for one special woman? It was obvious she was going to survive given her significance in the plot, but she didn't even attempt to cover herself in any way. As far as I could tell, there was no reason she would have been safe beyond astronomical chance.
Chae-ok drinks the serum, and never even hints at experiencing symptoms. What? She doesn't even vomit, she doesn't even feel sick. Literally nothing happens. And if everything were to happen according to the same time-frame, then the worm should have travelled to her brain much sooner than it travelled into Myeong-ja in the last moments of the last episode. Did she literally not drink it at all? And why did that one woman prisonner bash her head into the wall after drinking the water? Didn't she get a control serum?
Why were the vents used so much in this series? Why did they have to wait until an entire floor of the hospital and a platoon of soliders were slaughtered before just pumping nitrogen into the vents? And why did the air vents have a random trash chute for skeletons? Do they prefer that their air-filtration system intake smells like bones and carcasses? And of course, after falling 50 meters down this chute, Tae-sang is immediately found by the angry vengeful lieutenant. (No, he didn't bring backup - he's just there alone.) The lieutenant points a gun at Tae-sang's head and fires, yet somehow, he miraculously isn't the one shot. This is the third time this trope has been used in the series. > Person points gun at main character > Person fires gun > Main character is not shot, in fact, person with gun is shot. They don't show how this scene happens at all beacuse - you couldn't. There is no type of plot-kinematics that could connect a wounded man, still bleeding from his ever-stabbed gut, and falling 50 meters onto concrete and bones, to somehow overpowering a soldier standing above him, and shooting him.
Furthermore, why do the occupant Japanese police care if they rescued other men and women from the prison? It doesn't concern them. This really confused me during the moment the truck escape turned into a chase. They hold up their end of the bargain, and now they want to do WHAT with the prisoners - detain them for... being prisoners? Do you really need to extend your resources on chasing a truck of prisoners after you've already found the woman you were searching for? Couldn't you have also just given the prisoners some police outfits like they gave the truck driver? Until the end, nearly every character insisted on wearing their street clothes and not disguising themselves, even within the hospital. At one point Tae-Sang even hides among a rack of coats but doesn't even consider putting one on. They kill soldiers at the start and don't even bother to take their uniforms either.
Above all, what did Tae-sang have to prove by staying in the hospital. It's not even heroic martyrdom. He just thinks he needs someone to keep the Japanese soldiers occupied. Why would that have been necessary when literally everyone has already escaped? If you wanted to distract the soldiers, why not just open the vent and trick them into chasing you through the vents like they clearly were willing to do, because they did.
By the end of the series, the series wants to leave one question lingering on your mind - "Who is the monster." I had many others.
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