South Korean sci-fi and horror TV shows are always wild and they serve as a good watch. Being a big fan of Korean TV shows makes it so much better. So, this is a review of a Korean TV show which I recently watched and you might want to dig into that this weekend.
The show is originally a Japanese Anime which was said to be highly rated. The movie adaptation was released by Japanese folks and that was also a big hit. Koreans decided to do a spin-off of the show but they didn't give a regurgitation of the original storyline. Instead, they approached it from an interesting angle.
For context, the original show is about the invasion of parasites that fell from the sky and landed on Earth. The parasite usually has to enter the human body and take over the body which serves as its host. Then, they go on a wild rampage as they slaughter other humans. It's like an alien invasion but the aliens need to full take over a human's body to function.
Drama: Parasyte: The Grey
Genre: Sci-fi, Horror.
Network: Netflix
Episodes: 6
Release Date: April 5, 2024
What Koreans did with their version of the story is to focus it on the same parasite invasion timeline and tell the story from the angle of what the experience was like in Korea. I sure didn't watch the original anime version of the Japanese real-life adaptation of the story.
So, watching this Korean version was my first experience with the story and they did a good job of making the nature of the parasites understandable within the 6 episodes of the show. Kdramas usually have a history of having 12, 16, 20, or 24 episodes. Some historical dramas even run for 50 episodes or above. So, seeing this with just 6 episodes made me wonder how the writer plans to make us attached to the characters within that short period.
To be fair, after watching the whole show, it genuinely felt like it was too fast-paced compared to what I'm used to. Making this a solid 10-episode would have just been perfect for this story. Besides, it wasn't so hard to see that the second half of the show was rushed. It was as if the plot was completely changed within an episode.
Check out the above trailer to get a feel of what these parasites look like when they takeover their human host.
The lead character in this show is a lady whose body was occupied by a parasite when she was getting murdered. The parasite saved her but couldn't completely takeover her body at that moment. This made her a mutant. So, she ended up sharing her body with the parasite in a symbiotic manner.
This made her a target for both humans and parasites. Subsequently, the young lady's normal life rapidly took a wild turn.
The lead character for this show isn't a familiar face to me in Kdrama. This is her first show I'm seeing and her profile shows that she's fairly new to getting a lead role in a TvShow. Nonetheless, she got this complex duality role to play as a human and a parasite. The lady didn't put a foot wrong in her acting. Her co-star male lead is a more popular face in the industry and he also played his character to a tee.
I most likely won't be checking out the anime (original story) version of this parasite universe. I also won't be digging into the Japanese version. But I'm all-in for an additional season of the Korean edition, if there's any talk about that.
Thanks For Not Missing Any Full-stop or Comma.
Thumbnail Image is taken from the gallery section of the show on MyDramaList
Trailer video is shared from Netflix's YouTube channel.