Forest of Secrets

June 10, 2017

Hwang Shi-mok (Cho Seung-woo), a prosecutor who feels no emotions due to childhood brain surgery, finds a body near his office. Detective Han Yeo-jin (Bae Doona), assigned to assist, is his temperamental opposite — warm, intuitive, driven by feeling. The Seocho prosecutors' office establishes the institutional world.

June 10, 2017

The murdered man's connection to the prosecutor's office — internal corruption the investigation is not meant to find.

June 17, 2017

Yeo-jin's instinctive read of the case — right for reasons she cannot yet articulate — contrasted with Shi-mok's analytical process that arrives at the same place by a different route.

June 17, 2017

The prosecutors' office's resistance to an investigation that might implicate its own members.

June 24, 2017

Investigation sequences at Gwanghwamun Square — the symbolic centre of Korean institutional power used for the drama's most direct examination of what the institutions are supposed to protect.

June 24, 2017

The network of corrupt relationships within the prosecution — who protects whom and at what cost.

July 1, 2017

What Yeo-jin's involvement in the investigation is costing her within the police hierarchy.

July 1, 2017

Shi-mok and Yeo-jin at the drama's midpoint — their partnership the most unusual and most effective in 2017 Korean drama.

July 8, 2017

Evidence connecting the murder to the prosecutors' office reaching Shi-mok.

July 8, 2017

Their partnership tested by institutional pressure on both sides.

July 15, 2017

The full map of the corruption — how many people, how many institutions, how long it has been operating.

July 15, 2017

Who is being protected and who is doing the protecting — the corruption's apex.

July 22, 2017

The specific limit of Shi-mok's emotional absence — the moment where his inability to feel becomes his most effective professional quality.

July 22, 2017

The mechanism for accountability within a system that has been designed to prevent it.

July 29, 2017

What accountability costs — the people who are not corrupt and who are destroyed alongside those who are.

July 29, 2017

The finale. Named one of the Best International Series of 2017 by The New York Times. Cho Seung-woo and Bae Doona's partnership — and the drama's uncompromising institutional critique — made it one of the finest Korean dramas ever made.