Misdirection is something that films and TV series use often to make audiences think that they've figured out the direction a story is going only for the rug to be completely pulled out from under them when the truth is revealed. We see this very often in crime thriller K-dramas and Mouse is no different. In the drama's whopping 20 episodes (plus 2 spin-offs), we get a ton of misdirects which keep us on our toes and you never know how everything's going to turn out. I truly lost count of the number of times I commented on the insanity of this series and the final reveal only adds to the insanity. Unfortunately, it does heavily alter the drama's genre, which ends up becoming very over-the-top and leading to a somewhat unsatisfactory ending. Due to the extensive nature of this series retrospect, I'll be breaking it down into segments as listed below. Let's dive in.
SERIES RETROSPECT AND REVIEW (SPOILER ALERT)
Introduction: I mentioned in my initial thoughts post that I was certain that Mouse would not only focus on crime cases but also on the moral dilemma of aborting potentially psychopathic foetuses. I was wrong in that aspect because rather than focusing on the latter plot point, we instead take a look at psychopathy in general and how it drives murderers to, well, murder. On top of exploring the psyche of these psychopathic killers, the screenwriter has misled the audience on so many occasions, almost abusing misdirection in order to keep us on the edge of our seats and also so that we'll never really know who are the true villains in all this. To better understand the way Mouse makes use of misdirection, let's break down the drama's three distinct arcs.
The Predator: Mouse's 6-episode first arc is quite self-explanatory, focusing on the Moojin serial killer aka the Predator, who committed murders as a huge middle finger to God, literally. The arc primarily establishes our leads' personalities and give us a good understanding of the drama's setting. First off, let's look at the extremely gentle and kind Jeong Ba-reum, whose compassionate and almost naïve nature makes him the perfect hero, working together with Violent Crimes detective Go Moo-chi to solve the Moojin serial killings. In contrast, Moo-chi is rough around the edges and hellbent on bringing the psychopathic killer to justice. His most distinguishing character trait is that he's not afraid to conduct illegal investigations to catch the culprit and eventually kill him. As we know from episode 1, Moo-chi's parents were killed and his older brother Moo-won severely injured by Han Seo-joon, the serial killer known as the Head Hunter, and the detective has made it his life mission to end up in prison and kill Seo-joon himself. Moo-chi's childhood trauma has followed him into adulthood and he hates all psychopaths with a passion, including the Predator, and when Moo-won becomes one of the Predator's victims, his thirst for revenge only becomes greater.
Moving on to our female leads with Oh Bong-yi, a tough high school senior who masks her dark past behind a loud and brash exterior. While it isn't heavily expanded on in this arc, she's a victim of rape, having been sexually assaulted by a man named Kang Deok-soo when she was a child. Don't forget this because it gets important later on. Bong-yi has a huge crush on Ba-reum but spends most of her time bickering with him, just like a typical high school girl crushing on someone. She ends up getting involved with the Predator as her sole remaining family member, her grandmother, is killed by him as a means of covering his tracks and Bong-yi herself also fights the Predator but escapes relatively unscathed. Lastly, our other female lead Choi Hong-ju is a broadcasting network production director with her own programme, "Sherlock Hong-ju", where she discusses crimes that've rocked South Korea in the past. Her instincts are rarely wrong and she gets caught up with the Predator as well, using her platform as a ways of apprehending him. There's more to her than meets the eye though and we'll touch on that later.
Now that we know our leads, we have to look at who they're going up against. It's heavily implied that the psychopathic kid from episode 1, Jae-hoon, grows up to become the Predator. He asked God to prevent him from becoming a monster but after becoming a killer anyway, he now wants his revenge by killing people and in a very twisted way, blaming God in the process. The audience is led to believe that the Predator is Sung Yo-han, a genius ER doctor and there's little to disprove this. Yo-han's introduced as cold, emotionless and uncaring, speaking very bluntly to others and even going so far as to threaten a gangster with a scalpel (although to be fair he did have a knife pulled on him at that moment). It would be so easy for him to be the Predator and this is further supported by the fact that Ji-eun, who we know gave birth to Seo-joon's child and attempted to kill Jae-hoon in episode 1, is shown to be Yo-han's mother. There are tons of scenes that make Yo-han look really suspicious as well, whether it's blood on his clothing or having pictures of the murders in his basement, and he even breaks into Ba-reum's home in search of something.
The arc culminates with Yo-han and Ba-reum getting into a fight, with the latter being dealt serious brain injuries by the former only for Moo-chi to show up and shoot Yo-han in the stomach. After the pair undergo emergency surgery, Yo-han dies of septic shock while Ba-reum survives, albeit in a coma. The Moojin serial killer arc finally ends with Ba-reum waking up to the chirping sounds of the bird he gifted to Bong-yi in the past, only to brutally snap its neck and toss it out the window, commenting that he finally has some quiet.
What have we learnt from Mouse's first arc? Apart from introducing and characterising our four leads as well as properly laying the drama's foundations, the screenwriter has deliberately depicted Yo-han as the Predator and characterised him as such, with little evidence to prove otherwise. He's a psychopathic serial killer whose actions make you feel sick to the stomach, directly contrasting with the leads, who are written to be sympathetic and people that you want to root for. This is especially true for Moo-chi and Bong-yi, both of whom have lost everything they've loved to serial killers. The first arc very much focuses on these two leads, pitting them directly against the Predator by having him kill their loved ones, so we get a lot more of their development here.
As for our remaining two leads in Ba-reum and Hong-ju, while they do have a lot of presence so far, we don't really know much about them yet, although you still support them as viewers. Seeing Ba-reum, who couldn't even hurt a fly, get so badly beaten up in the process of bringing the perpetrator to justice is heart-wrenching and you want to see him pull through. However, there're definitely questions raised by his characterisation. Like I mentioned before, teasers have shown that Jae-hoon grows up to become Ba-reum but they're polar opposites personality-wise. That said, there's evidence in the first arc that tries to distance these two characters as much as possible. Apart from the fact that Yo-han is Ji-eun's son, baby pictures in Ba-reum's house also show that his mother is that other pregnant lady alongside Ji-eun whose child was found to have the psychopathic gene all those years ago. As we know, that lady said her late husband was a good person and so she expected her son to turn out that way as well, so Ba-reum's kind personality adds up. That's why it's all the more shocking to see Ba-reum exhibit a short burst of psychopathy in killing the bird because that kind of cruelty is something he's never shown before.
We don't know much about Hong-ju as well but from what we've seen, she's an upright person who wants to bring criminals to justice. That's why it's pretty weird that she was in a relationship with Yo-han at the time of his death and is even pregnant with his child. Is this a repeat of Ji-eun and Seo-joon's "false" marriage and how that psychopath only wanted to have an offspring? As of this point, we don't know for sure but all these unanswered questions lead us to our next arc, which I'll refer to as "vigilante justice".
Vigilante justice: The 8-episode second arc is where the drama amps up its insanity, introducing new threats and giving the audience some serious revelations. Remember, as of right now, there's nothing to disprove that Yo-han's the Predator and this is actually a really important plot point throughout the second arc. After an amnesiac Ba-reum wakes up from his coma, he's hailed as the heroic "Nation's Son" who unfortunately doesn't remember anything, not even his name. A year after, a recovering Ba-reum returns to work as a neighbourhood patrol officer and on his first day back, he chances upon a dead body. However, while he would've freaked out in the past, Ba-reum now barely reacts and is somehow able to analyse the crime scene, deducing that it was a murder instead of a robbery gone wrong. This is only the first instance of Ba-reum's more subtle behavioural changes, as he continues to exhibit the ability to almost read the minds of killers, correctly figuring out and piecing together multiple crime scenes to hunt down a new psychopathic serial killer.
That sounds good right? Unfortunately things take a turn for the worse when Ba-reum becomes prone to violent outbursts, becoming more standoffish in those instances and nothing like his old self. Not only that, he even has flashbacks to events that didn't happen to him, whether it's seeing himself committing some of the Moojin serial killings or even Jae-hoon's childhood memories. Since it's confirmed that all these memories are the Predator's, how is our hero remembering something that happened to Yo-han? The answer is a strange tale of science fiction as Ba-reum finds out that Seo-joon was the neurosurgeon who operated on his brain and actually transferred Yo-han's frontal lobe into Ba-reum's brain. It's a huge shocker for both our lead and us viewers, who are left wondering how a death row inmate could've operated in a hospital. As it turns out, Seo-joon had been begged by Choi Young-shin, the President's Secretary General, to save Ba-reum and in a bid to save "his son", he carries out the surgery.
Ba-reum's violent tendencies only become greater, to the extent where he finally lets it all out and strangles another psychopathic serial killer to death. After succumbing to his murderous intent, Ba-reum starts seeing visions of Yo-han, who taunts and goads him to kill more. When Ba-reum tries to turn himself in for this murder, the police find the supposed crime scene completely clean and no trace of the body, as if nothing happened there in the first place. Don't forget this because this is a recurring plot point. After this incident, Ba-reum meets Daniel Lee, the scientist who devised the foetal psychopathic gene testing and was thought to have been killed by the Predator, who reveals to him that there're darker forces at work here and also tells him that Yo-han's "killer instincts" are slowly taking over Ba-reum's kinder side. This serves as an explanation as to why our hero sort of slips into psychopathy occasionally and now that he's committed his first murder, the addiction will only snowball from there. Daniel then convinces Ba-reum to redirect his murderous tendencies into killing other psychopathic "predators", which would not only be doing the world a favour but also prevent Ba-reum from wanting to kill his friends.
So begins Ba-reum's vigilante killing spree, with his first target being the recently-released Kang Deok-soo, who if you remember from the previous segment was Bong-yi's childhood rapist. Knowing that Deok-soo is still a danger to Bong-yi and even threatened to attack her again, Moo-chi, who has been moved from Violent Crimes to Evidence Management, goes after Deok-soo only to get knocked out by an unknown person with an "OZ" tattoo (super important later on). Because of this, Deok-soo gets murdered by Ba-reum and has the same injuries that he inflicted on Bong-yi back then inflicted on him. With Deok-soo's killing, South Korea is again thrown into chaos, with another psychopathic killer yet again appearing on Moo-chi's radar. After this first kill, Ba-reum continues his spree under Daniel's guidance, taking down a couple other predators. While the government condemns his actions, the public show support for Ba-reum, coining him as a dark vigilante.
As all this chaos ensues, Ba-reum constantly tries to force down the monster that is Yo-han and desperately suppressing his murderous instincts. It does seem to work as he's able to refrain from killing another predator and instead gets him locked up in prison. At the same time though, Ba-reum is under the constant impression that Yo-han wasn't the Predator and was somehow caught in the crossfire. Part of this thinking stemmed from the fact that Ba-reum didn't want to believe that he was living with a serial killer's mind but also, things started to not add up. Eventually, everything becomes clear when overwhelming evidence starts to confirm the worst for both the drama's leads and the audience, with it finally being revealed that Ba-reum was the Predator all along. Absolute shock and horror.
By the end of this arc, Moo-chi is also playing around with the same idea but has yet to confirm it. He still thinks that Yo-han's the killer and doesn't want to believe that he killed the wrong man. Let's talk about Hong-ju as well. In this arc, we get a better look at her backstory as we find out she isn't who she says she is. While it's not properly shown here, she does have a hand in Seo-joon's killings in the past, having sent a video tape to Secretary Choi showing the killer's successful brain transplant experiments and allowing Ba-reum to undergo the surgery. We also see that Hong-ju's child has been born and we also see her experience some discrimination as people think she had a child with a psychopathic serial killer. More information about her will come in the next segment. As for Bong-yi, we don't really see too much of her this arc other than the fact that she knows Ba-reum is the vigilante but again, everything will come to a head in the final arc, where a nationwide conspiracy is uncovered.
Nationwide conspiracy: If you thought that Mouse has been crazy so far, the drama's last 6 episodes dial it up to eleven by bringing in a crazy plot line out of nowhere. We already know that Ba-reum is the Predator and through a series of flashbacks plus the spin-off episodes, we see that his earlier gentle demeanour prior to his injury was all a façade, with him being a cold-blooded murderer and a true psychopath. Our amnesiac lead forgot everything about his past and with everyone telling him that he was a good person and a hero, he starts to believe it himself too. The flashes of memories that he thought was coming from Yo-han's brain was actually his own and when he confronts Daniel about this, the scientist expresses his cluelessness, merely stating that he truly thought Yo-han was the psychopath of the pair. Instead, what we now know is that Ba-reum's current emotions and rejection of murder are actually from Yo-han, and in fact Yo-han wasn't a psychopath but a genius.
As the plot thickens, Ba-reum's friend Chi-guk, who was the only one of his victims who survived his attempted murder, dies of a heart attack and while ruled as a natural death, Ba-reum knows that this was a murder. Chi-guk's death was part of someone's ploy to cover Ba-reum's tracks and with that idea, our lead and Moo-chi start to investigate. Along the way, they find out that there's some organisation working behind the scenes, with its members marked by an "OZ" tattoo. The people who knocked out Moo-chi when he was on the way to finding Deok-soo in the previous arc as well as the ones who killed Chi-guk are all from OZ. The greatest revelation comes when we find out everything that's happened in this drama has been orchestrated by OZ, literally everything. It turns out that OZ has been observing both Ba-reum and Yo-han since they were children as part of an experiment to determine if psychopathic foetuses should be aborted to prevent potential serial killers from being born.
That's why when the pair were both bleeding out on that rooftop, Yo-han's last words to Ba-reum were "we are lab mice (linking to the drama's title)" because they're just variables in a huge nationwide experiment. OZ's head is none other than Secretary Choi, who's adamantly supporting the view of aborting psychopathic foetuses and has been using Ba-reum as a means of pushing her bill through. When Yo-han was found to not possess the gene, he was removed from the experiment but in Ba-reum's case, he was suppressing his murderous instincts so in order to set her plan in motion, she ordered the killing of his family, which we saw in episode 1. This incident sparks Ba-reum's transformation into the Predator and even after his first killing spree ended, they needed the experiment to continue so they fixed crime scenes to trigger another murderous rampage from our lead.
Choi's main motivation is to create a utopia without crime and to do that, she has to rid the world of psychopaths like Ba-reum. She had to create scenarios to convince the government to pass the abortion bill and while the scale of Ba-reum's killings was unprecedented, it only helped to further her cause. We also find out that in the first arc, Hong-ju had already figured out that Ba-reum was the killer and had actually been working together with Daniel to bring him to justice as well as clear Yo-han's name. I'm skipping out a ton of events here and things are getting a little confusing but basically, Ba-reum turns himself in and confesses to being the Predator as well as the dark vigilante, attempting to incriminate Secretary Choi and the rest of OZ, bringing them down with him. Long story short, the drama wraps up nicely, with OZ being brought down, Ba-reum being sent to jail, and Moo-chi and Bong-yi finding closure to their lives. There's a couple more things that happen before the drama ends but first, let's talk about misdirection.
Misdirection: This drama has been an emotional rollercoaster with twists and turns abound, making use of misdirection at every turn. We started this drama thinking Yo-han was the killer and the story was crafted masterfully, leaving little room for us to think otherwise. Of course, things get turned on their head fast as Ba-reum himself goes down a dangerously psychopathic path and is eventually revealed as the killer. A shocking reveal for sure but to more astute viewers, it might've been expected. The craziest reveal is yet to come though, as we find out that the drama's big bad wasn't Ba-reum but instead some clandestine organisation with ties to other government bodies, conducting a sick experiment that resulted in many lives lost.
The screenwriter has used misdirection extremely well, keeping us on our toes and constantly craving more. Even though the drama is insanely long, your boredom is staved off because you never know what's going to come next. This is something that happens very often with crime thrillers and Mouse has taken that to the next level. Not only does it keep us interested, it also makes us feel for our characters because we want them to bring the true villains to justice.
Cast performances: Right off the bat, the best performances have to go to Lee Seung-gi and Lee Hee-joon, who killed it as Ba-reum and Moo-chi respectively. Ba-reum's a character with two very distinct sides, the kind mask he puts on and the psychopathic killer underneath, and while the former doesn't really have much impact, it's when he gives into his violent tendencies that Lee Seung-gi shines in the role. As far as I know we've never really seen him as a full-on K-drama villain, with our closest being the antihero Son Oh-gong in A Korean Odyssey, so it was definitely a breath of fresh air to see Lee act out such a dangerous character. Lee also expresses Ba-reum's internal conflict well and you really feel for his character as we see him struggle to come to terms with his true self. Regardless of the terrible nature of his actions, Ba-reum was still a bittersweet character and was really interesting to watch.
Moo-chi is a good foil to Ba-reum, being the hotheaded one of the pair in contrast to Ba-reum's more lax nature and Lee Hee-joon performs this role well. Whether he's expressing his rage at others or screaming his lungs out at the sight of his brother's mutilated corpse, you really feel every ounce of emotion pouring off the character and it's no wonder this performance got Lee Hee-joon nominated for best supporting actor in a TV role at the 57th Baeksang Arts Awards. I also want to give special mention to Kim Kang-hoon, the child actor who portrays Jae-hoon aka young Ba-reum. I've said this before and I'll say it again, the acting proficiency of K-drama child actors never cease to amaze me and Kim is proof of that. His chilling performance as the budding psychopath is just insane and I can't believe such a wonderful portrayal can come from a kid. I foresee great things for him in future.
Let's move on to our female leads, talking first about Oh Bong-yi, played by rookie actress Park Ju-hyun. Personally, I didn't find Bong-yi a really compelling character and at times I thought the decisions she made throughout the drama were really stupid and it doesn't help that Park's performance didn't leave a strong impression on me either. It's weird because she's accomplished a fair bit as a relative newcomer, having been nominated for and even won awards for other dramas but she's just not doing much in Mouse. The same goes for Kyung Soo-jin's portrayal as Choi Hong-ju, I don't care for her character. Sure, Hong-ju has more influence in the drama's plot than we think, even being revealed to be the long-lost daughter of Park Du-seok but at the same time, I just didn't feel for her character and Kyung's portrayal wasn't anything to shout about either.
Issues with the drama: As intriguing as this drama was, I do have a couple of gripes with it that go hand-in-hand with each other. It was interesting but I felt the drama's final arc was redundant. We had a good thing going with the first two arcs, give or take some plot points, so the third arc with OZ being the main villains wasn't needed. I think Mouse could've been way tighter and a better told story if they had removed both the brain transplant and OZ plotlines while keeping Ba-reum's amnesia as well as having Yo-han die of natural causes. In that way, we could've seen our lead, who's convinced he's a good person, start to uncover the truth behind his own murders and after recovering his memories, he would probably go back to his murderous ways, and have to be stopped eventually by Moo-chi and gang.
That leads me to my next point, the drama is soooooo long. We get a whopping 20 episodes ranging from an hour to 1 hour and 40 minutes, and while I do agree that the drama was exciting to watch throughout, there're a ton of moments we could've gotten rid of. On top of the final arc, the drama heavily abuses flashbacks, something we really don't need. Exposition is fine and all but this is almost an overdose of it because I really don't need to keep seeing the same scene over and over again. This means that if we removed all these "extra" elements, Mouse could've been shaved down to a normal 16 episodes, which would've meant a far more compact and well-executed story.
Final thoughts: Mouse has been a crazy ride and by the end of it, you're probably exhausted even if you enjoyed it like I did. Everyone's stories get wrapped up nicely, Ba-reum dies as a side-effect of the brain surgery, content that he's no longer a monster, while Moo-chi and Bong-yi move on from their personal tragedies. Hong-ju is also happy to raise her son, knowing that his father wasn't a killer at all. There is however, a post-credits scene in the final episode, which shows us that somehow Han Seo-joon's brain surgery video has been leaked and an unknown surgeon is carrying out the same surgery, operating on a young man (WEi's Kim Yo-han in a guest role). Does this mean that we could be seeing another Head Hunter? Could there be a season 2? I highly doubt so because the story doesn't need to be continued. I think that with the amount of insanity present in the plot, it ended when it needed to.
This has been one of the most unique and crazy K-dramas this year, and while there're things that could've been improved, the story was generally quite well done and the screenwriter has really outdone herself here. Depending on your drama taste, Mouse could've either left you wanting more at the end of every episode or an absolute tiresome watch that you had to force yourself to slog through. For me, it was definitely the former so if you're into truly insane crime thriller dramas, this is for you. Thanks for reading.
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