Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Connect’ On Hulu, Where A Man Can Still See Through The Eye That Was Stolen From Him

There are times when a show has two story threads going at once, but strong clues that they're going to come together at some point. The sooner viewers can discern that, the better. A new Korean series on Hulu (and Disney+ outside the US) is one such series; it deftly handles its dual story, giving viewers a lot to look forward to when the stories inevitably, well, connect.

CONNECT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man walks down a dark alley, singing a melancholy song about sings clanking

The Gist: Ha Dong-soo (Jung Hae-in), a songwriter who makes YouTube videos of him playing his songs, is ambushed and loaded into a van by a man who keeps saying he has “pretty eyes”. The next we see him, he's on a table in a warehouse, his chest being cut open. A man is using big tools to extract his organs, including both his eyes. Later than night, the man who did the extraction has a nightmare that the disposed parts come alive and attack him.

In the meantime, a woman named Lee Yi-rang (Kim Hye-jun) has been communicating with people about an urban legend called Connect. As she walks down a street that morning, she sees a crowd around what looks like a statue of a naked woman, which seems to have arrived overnight. But she and everyone else are shocked when the statue starts dripping blood. It turns out there's a body in there, and as Detective Choi (Kim Roi-ha) investigates, it turns out this is the second body that's been found this way.

Inexplicably, Dong-soo revives himself, with tendrils coming out of his wounds to heal and reclaim his organs. As he fumbles around to look for his eyes, the tendrils manage to reclaim one of them, but he's chased out of the building before he can get the other one. Those tendrils are something that he's had to deal with his whole life; no matter how gravely injured he was, he'd some how pop up after painfully dealing with those tendrils. It's one of the reasons he keeps to himself.

Somehow, Dong-soo gets visions from the eye he couldn't retrieve; the eye is in a man named Oh Jin-seob (Go Kyung-Pyo), but the visions painfully come and go with little information. The visions are getting so painful, that he goes back to the warehouse to see if he can find out who got his other eye. Of course, the thugs from the organ harvesting ring chase him, but he's saved by Yi-rang, who cuts him to see if what she knows about humanoids like him is right.

One of the things Dong-soo sees is Jin-Seob studying something called “corpse art.” He also sees Jin-Seob talk to a young woman who is about to become his next victim.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Connect has the bleak feel of Korean sci fi series like Sweet Home.

Our Take: Written by Masaru Nakamura and Ha-dam, and directed by Takashi Miike, is setting up an intriguing two-part story that seems poised to quickly come together. One one side we have Dong-soo, who has suffered his whole life with this mysterious ability to regenerate from even the gravest injuries. Then there's Jin-seob, a serial killer obsessed with corpse art. They're connected by an eye, and Dong-soo's search to get that eye back will be the crux of the series.

The first episode sets this up nicely, despite not telling us anything about Dong-soo before he gets snatched and cut up. He's not just your average reclusive songwriter, as we soon find out, but he's also been haunted by this ability to regenerate his entire life. What the hope is that he'll find some connection (get it?) with Yi-rang, who seems to know a lot about Connect humanoids like him, and will help him get his eye back.

We wonder, though, if Jin-seob's side of the story is more interesting. Sure, he's more of a straightforward psycho, but his fascination with corpse art is something we've rarely if ever seen before in serial killer dramas. He's meticulous; he isn't slashing and cutting. He carefully kills, embalms the corpse, encases it in material that makes it look like a sculpture, then carves in a horoscope symbol. Do we want to see him keep doing this thing while Detective Choi, whose nose bleeds when he gets a key lead, chases him down?

This is a good problem for Connect to have, though, as both sides of this story are interesting enough to sustain episodes where we go back and forth, waiting for the two of them to come together.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Dong-soo is in front of the building where he saw Jin-seob talk to his next victim and thinks to himself, “He is here. Give me back my eye, you murderer!”

Sleeper Star: Kim Roi-ha leans into Detective Choi's quirkiness, which makes his character a bit different than the hard-boiled detective stereotype.

Most Pilot-y Line: Dong-soo sees a busker singing his song and asks him where he got it. The singer says he got it from the internet, but changed the melody. Plus the recording is bad and the singer's voice is trash. Seems like an unnecessary scene that just kicks Dong-soo while he's down.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The first episode of Connect sets up a good story that will get even better if the writers can pull of, well, connecting its two main parts.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn't kid himself: he's a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.