Connect – K-Drama Episode 1 Recap & Review

Connection

Episode 1 of Connect starts with Ha Dong-soo looking skyward as he sings a song. The song he was singing continues to play as Dong-soo walks in through various lanes, late at night. A car approaches him slowly in the empty street and halts right in front of Dong-soo. The car door opens; a man asks him if he has good vision.

The man threatens Dong-soo with a knife and compliments his eyes. Another one of the two gangsters takes charge of him and kidnaps him. Dong-soo is now in a clinic-like facility where he is being operated on by a doctor. He is unconscious and the doctor begins cutting his body.

Dong-soo begins to wake up mid-incision. The doctor begins chopping his body up into several pieces before extracting Dong-soo’s right eye. After that, the doctor goes outside to dump Dong-soo’s cut-up body in a trash bag but is scared when he sees how parts of his body were crawling towards him. Turns out, it was only a nightmare and the doctor then wakes up inside the clinic.

He mentions the word – Connect – which is an urban legend. Meanwhile, Lee Yi-rang who is working on a web novel is also looking up information about connect on an online forum.  She then leaves her house to go out for a walk and notices a crowd taking photos of a partially nude sculpture of a woman in the middle of the street.

The sculpture seems too realistic and Yi-rang is shocked to see blood dripping down it. Cops arrive and inspect the human-like sculpture with blood dripping down it’s face and body. There is commotion around the scene of investigation and Dong-soo can be spotted there with an eye patch.

The forensics investigate the female sculpture and Detective Park claims that the sculpture has the alphabet P carved on it. Detective Choi wonders if it was something like the signature of an artist. Dang-soo is in his apartment where he is playing the guitar as an ambulance siren off in a distance. He wonders who was being transported this time as he continues to play the guitar.

Dong-soo starts feeling an itch in his empty eye socket and begins seeing out of it. He is confused at first but once he shuts his left eye, he can see what the new owner of his right eye is seeing. Dong-soo sees the person look at the computer with the horoscope on it as well as the same ‘P’ mark that was seen on the sculpture.

He is confused as he looks at the point of view of the new owner of his eye. The person seems like an artist. He is moving around his apartment and Dong-soo takes it in. The man puts some eyedrops in his right eye and shuts it which stops its connection with Dong-soo. He is left confused.

A flashback shows the doctor extracting both of Dong-soo’s eyes when he notices that the eyes are moving involuntarily despite being extracted from Dong-soo’s eye sockets. The left eye begins to water and the doctor is confused. He gets startled by a phone call and as he goes out to answer it, an unknown creature from inside Dong-soo’s body heals the incision made by the doctor.

Dong-soo wakes up and gets off the table looking for his eyes leaving the doctor shocked and confused. He is able to see through his eyes and he spots himself. He manages to put his left eye back into its socket and the doctor calls the guards. Dong-soo runs out of the clinic leaving his right eye behind.

Present-day Dong-soo guesses that his eye was probably transplanted into someone else and that was what he was seeing from. There are fireworks outside his window while Detective Park is still at the station looking into the sculpture case as he watches the fireworks on the news.

Detectives Park and Choi both are the victims in the two sculpture cases, one male and another female. Detective Choi claims that there was no connection between the two victims. The cops are trying to make something out of the two cases but they are unable to figure out why they were killed.

Detective Choi claims that the killer had killed, embalmed and resin-coated the victims into making them look like a sculpture. He is curious about the blood dripping down the victims and wonders if the killer had done so intentionally.

Detective Park jokes saying that Detective Choi had special powers and wonders why he was not able to come up with anything regarding this case like he did with other cases. Detective Choi asks Park and the rest of the team to look at the forensic report of the resin and find out where it was purchased.

The next day, Dong-soo is working and his boss’ wife is looking for him. Dong-soo goes out to look for the old man and sees him being bullied by some high school students. Dong-soo takes the old man away but the students continue to threaten him.

He rushes the old man away but the kids start beating Dong-soo up. He tries fleeing but they continue to strike him. One of the kids threatens to use a knife on Dong-soo and strikes off his ear. Dong-soo’s eye mask falls off and the kid is scared to see Dong-soo without an eye.

Dong-soo holds up his ear from the ground and asks the kids to stop. He recalls being called a monster as a child when his body healed on its own. The kids run away and his ear begins to get attached to his body despite his trying not to let it.

The kids run away and talk about Dong-soo and his missing eye when one of the two men that kidnapped Dong-soo in order to extract his eye overhears them. The gang leader – Mr Kim learns that Dong-soo hadn’t left town and puts his men out to look for him.

The gangsters leave to look for Dong-soo and Min-sook tells his boss, Mr Kim that finding the ‘Connect’ would be a jackpot for them if the doctor was to be trusted. Yi-rang can overhear the conversation between the two gangsters and is shocked to learn about Connect. 

Dong-soo tries to keep it lowkey after the incident with the kids. He finds a singer singing by the street and talks to him. The singer tells Dong-soo that he was singing a song he found on the internet and badmouths the original not knowing it was Dong-soo who wrote and sang it. 

He goes back home to replay the track and tries to make it better. Meanwhile, the new owner of Dong-soo’s eye is an artist who is playing some music as he sketches. Dong-soo’s song suddenly plays and the artist experiences pain in his eye.

The connection seems to have been made as Dong-soo also feels the sensation. The man inspects his eye using a mirror and Dong-soo can now see the artist’s eye. The artist stops playing the song and the connection is lost again. 

Dong-soo is confused and wonders how he can get his eye back. He recalls being called a monster as a child after his body healed despite falling from a huge tree. Dong-soo is angry and determined to get his eye back. 

He goes back to the same street where he was kidnapped and the gangster spots him. He puts his men to chase after Dong-soo but the humanoid runs away. Yo-rang is at the scene too and follows along the chase.

The gangsters are running behind Dong-soo and somehow catch up to him. After a quick fight, Dong-soo manages to run away but Yo-rang takes him someplace safe. He is confused about her identity and thinks she is with the gangsters and is leading him to them. 

She claims that she wanted to see it in person and gets up close to him. Yo-rang opens a pocket knife and slashes Dong-soo’s leg. His cut starts bleeding initially before the matter erupts and heals the cut completely leaving no scar behind. 

Just then, they overhear gangsters and Dong-soo begins to run. Yo-rang pushes him off the dead-end and the humanoid falls on a car and breaks his bones before eventually healing and running away. 

Oh Jin-seop, the artist and the new owner of Dong-soo’s eye is the killer. He gets a new body into his workstation that he wishes to turn into a sculpture. The next morning, a woman is on her way to work as she listens to the same song from Dong-soo. 

She notices a mob of people in front of another sculpture – this time a child. Detective Choi notices how the killer’s signature was on the new victim as well. The woman works with Jin-seop. The two are on a walk when she starts humming Dong-soo’s song and the connection is made again. 

Dong-soo can see the woman as well as the location of Jin-seop before the connection breaks again. Jin-seop asks her about the song while Dong-soo now knows where to find Jin-seop. The cops find that a lot of artists from around the world are appreciating the artwork despite calling the killer out for the murders. 

Meanwhile, another connection is made and Dong-soo notices the book in front of Jin-seop with the sculpture artist’s initials. Dong-soo looks up the corpse art and concludes that the new owner of his eye was the killer who was making sculptures after killing humans based on what he saw in the book. 

Detective Choi looks at an image from the crime scene and spots Dong-soo in one of the photos. Dong-soo’s eye patch makes him look suspicious and the detective has his infamous nosebleed. He asks Park to look up Dong-soo. Meanwhile, Dong-soo is standing across Jin-seop’s adamant to get his eye back from the murderer. 

The Episode Review

The show is pretty interesting and intense so far. The chase is going to be amazing but I am more interested in why Jin-seop is doing what he is doing rather than Dong-soo’s identity as an urban legend.

I wish the makers would have kept Jin-seop being a murderer a secret because not being able to put a face to the criminal was interesting in the first half of this episode. The characters are just unfolding and the plot is very intriguing. We will only have to watch the rest of the episodes to see how this one ends.