My rate of watching K-dramas has fallen exponentially, partially because of my impending university matriculation, the next phase in my life that I've spent the past few weeks preparing for. For many of us, university education is daunting, signifying a huge change in our learning environment and a sharp increase in independence, and I'm sure this becomes a bigger issue for more stringent courses of study like medicine or law. It probably becomes even worse when you're from a premier institution so what do you get when you combine a tough course with a good school? We get Law School, a legal drama set in the fictional Hankuk University Law School, an extremely prestigious institute that gets deeply embroiled in a strange case. Starring Kim Myung-min (Six Flying Dragons, The Miracle We Met) and Kim Bum (Mrs. Cop 2, Tale of the Nine Tailed) as male leads YANG JONG-HOON and HAN JOON-HWI respectively, this Netflix Original is bound to keep viewers on their seats as we join our characters in understanding truth and justice through law. Let's dive in.
INITIAL THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS (SPOILER ALERT)
While we do get a general idea of what this drama should be about, episode 1 doesn't actually explain a whole lot about our respective characters and we don't know much about them if at all. Another interesting thing to note is that there's no linear timeline as we have a good number of flashback sequences with little indication as to when we're back in the present day. It can come off as a little jarring but it's not so confusing that you can't follow the drama itself. Episode 1 opens in October 2020 (present day) with first-year law students engaging in a mock trial, with different students roleplaying different roles like judge, defendant, witness, etc. Overseeing the trial is Seo Byung-ju (Ahn Nae-sang), an ex-prosecutor turned attorney-cum-adjunct professor who made a big donation to the school and helped to set up the mock courtroom shown in this scene. He's also shown to suffer from unexplained headaches and when he sends the class on break, that's when things spiral out of control.
It turns out that Byung-ju has passed away during the break, with his body being found by student Jeon Ye-seul (Go Yoon-jung) and there's an underlying current of chaos throughout the school, although most of the students don't show it. As the police investigate Byung-ju's strange death, we're introduced to male lead Jong-hoon, an ex-prosecutor who's now a professor in the Law School, who deduces that Byung-ju was murdered despite evidence of a suicide note. We then jump 7 months in the past, where we see that Jong-hoon teaching the same class criminal law. Famous for his Socratic method of teaching, he's known as the "Yangcrates of Terror" and regularly grills his students to get the answers he wants. The student we see him grilling the most is female lead KANG SOL [Ryu Hye-young (Reply 1988, Dear My Room)], who we find out through flashbacks is a poor student who was sued for assault in the process of helping someone and applied to the Law School through special admissions to get justice for herself.
Interestingly enough, there're two students in the class named Kang Sol who are differentiated as Sol A and Sol B (Lee Soo-kyung) so they'll be referred to as such henceforth. Sol A comes off as a little confused and a bit of a messy student, seemingly unprepared for the rigours of an elite law school. In stark contrast to her is our other male lead Joon-hwi, a genius who passed the judiciary/bar exam prior to even graduating from law school. Self-assured, confident and evidently knowing his stuff better than everyone else in the class, it's quite clear that he's likely the best student in there. We don't know much about his past but we do see him being very distraught about Byung-ju's death and is visibly angered when rumours spread about the professor being a drug addict, having died from a meth overdose. As the police are on the hunt for the murderer, we get glimpses of Jong-hoon's past, revealing that his last case as a prosecutor was trying to indict Byung-ju for taking bribes. The latter wasn't found guilty and our male lead left the prosecution service, souring the relationship between both men.
The bad blood between them more or less puts Jong-hoon on top of the suspects' list, which also includes Lee Man-ho, a child rapist who was released in prison in March 2020 after serving an 11-year sentence. It turns out that Byung-ju was the prosecutor who initially sentenced the criminal to an unknown jail term but that sentence was later reduced after an appeal, much to the chagrin of the then-appeals court judge, our other female lead KIM EUN-SOOK [Lee Jung-eun (Familiar Wife, The Light in Your Eyes)]. She would later leave the court and become a civil law professor at the Law School, teaching the same class of students. Apart from her, Man-ho also has some connection to Jong-hoon, as the former is the only witness from Jong-hoon's sole prosecution cold case. Fresh out of prison, Man-ho heads off to look for a pregnant Eun-sook during her first civil law class and threatens her, resulting in what I can only assume is stress-induced premature birth.
This where the episode ends and boy are we in for a rollercoaster ride of a drama. First off, I will say that the constant time skips can be a little disorienting if you're not really paying attention so that's one potential issue with the series right off the bat. That said, it's likely a creative choice to keep viewers on their toes and constantly wondering who the actual killer is. Now, I don't know if Byung-ju's murder will be the central plotline or if there'll be new developments but for now, it seems likely that Jong-hoon will play a role similar to Beyond Evil's Lee Dong-sik or even (to some extent) Koro-sensei from popular manga/anime Assassination Classroom. Why do I say that? As we see from the last scene in the episode, Jong-hoon doesn't deny that he's the killer but that would be too easy so I highly doubt it's him. However, I think that he's letting himself get arrested as a kind of insane class assignment of sorts, fully immersing his students in a very real scenario and getting them to prove his innocence while finding the real killer. We know that his teaching method is intense so this is probably the realest lesson ever in his eyes.
Personally, I have some theories about who the culprit is. Like I said earlier, I don't think it's Jong-hoon because that's too easy and for the same reason, it's likely not Joon-hwi or Sol A. Our female lead is also clearly not the kind of person who's capable of doing something like this and while Joon-hwi is very well-versed in the law, his strong reaction to Byung-ju's death exempts him for now. I also don't think it's Ye-seul, since she was the one who found the body and seems to be quite a meek girl, and neither is Joo-man, who seems like too insignificant of a character to matter at this moment. That narrows me down to Ji-ho and Sol B. I'm of the mind that Ji-ho is actually Byung-ju's son since, apart from sharing the same surname, we also see him defending Byung-ju's accused bribery in one of their classes. There's also a very brief shot at the end of the episode where Ji-ho is shown to be shaking Byung-ju's presumably dead body so he's probably not the killer. What probably happened is that Ji-ho saw his father's dead body and was distressed by it but because he didn't want to be implicated, he said nothing. That said, he's still the second most likely culprit in my eyes.
That leaves us with Sol B, who gives off all the wrong vibes. Apart from knowing the law very well (almost to the extent of Joon-hwi), she's very cold and quiet, behaving very distant from the rest of her classmates and generally seeming quite standoffish. Maybe this is a deliberate decision on the screenwriter's parts to mislead the audience but as of now, she's the most likely culprit in my opinion. The first episode alone has really left me on the edge of my seat wondering who's the real killer here and I'm very excited to see where we go from here. I haven't really seen too many legal dramas in my time so this is a relatively new and fun experience for me. This drama has been out for a while, having finished airing more than a month ago but I still hope you'll join me as we find out who the killer is in the Law School.
Comments
Post a Comment