Season 1 |
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Episode Guide
Episode 1 -| Review Score – 3/5
Episode 2 -| Review Score – 3.5/5
Episode 3 -| Review Score – 4/5
Episode 4 -| Review Score – 4/5
Episode 5 -| Review Score – 3.5/5
Episode 6 -| Review Score – 3/5
Episode 7 -| Review Score – 3.5/5
Episode 8 -| Review Score – 3.5/5
Episode 9 -| Review Score – 3/5
Episode 10 -| Review Score – 3/5
When I started watching Your Honor, I believed it could be the next Beyond Evil. It had a lot of the same marking as the 2021 K-drama — a fatal incident that has more to it than meets the eye, an array of complex characters surrounding said incident and a web of events that keeps getting more and more convoluted.
Circling it all is the cat-and-mouse dynamic of the two leading men — respected judge Son Pan-ho and crime boss/conglomerate CEO Kim Gang-heon in Your Honor; eccentric policeman Lee Dong-sik and shrewd detective Han Joo-won in Beyond Evil. But as the last few episodes of the 2024 series came around, I realised that where Beyond Evil succeeds, Your Honor Season 1 fails.
It took a lot of thinking to figure out why. After all, both are incredibly grim shows that deal with dark subject matter and sports characters that fall into grey areas. Both feature conversations about morality and ethics and whether the system (the law) allows for those things. And this is where they diverge because Beyond Evil simply did it better.
Your Honor sets itself up as a show that is going dive deep into the themes of ethics, justice, law, and even capitalism. Season 1 after all pits a highly respected judge against a crime boss who practically owns the city. But in the end, the conversations that occur are not quite as deep as they are made out to be. The dialogues don’t probe the layers of meaning and significance and the characters aren’t given as much meat as they should have been.
That’s not to say it’s all bad. The K-drama executes the slow-burn thriller side of the show quite well. It slowly draws more people and more deaths into the story, building the situation up to a devastating degree. Things kick off when Pan-ho’s son, Ho-young, accidentally kills Gang-heon’s son in a hit-and-run.
Pan-ho tells his son to turn himself in but does a 180-degree turn when he realises the boy is Gang-heon’s son. He now knows his own son won’t receive a fair trial and proceeds to hide the crime.
But in the same way, a lie breeds more lies, this crime also breeds more misdeeds and Pan-ho finds himself becoming somebody he wasn’t before. All to protect his son, of course. This transformation is nicely undercut by an audiobook version of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis playing each morning from Pan-ho’s iPad. What follows then is a tussle of power between Gang-heon and Pan-ho, as one seeks to avenge a son while the other wants to protect his own.
It’s an intriguing concept and Your Honor Season 1 plays with evidence and drops twists and turns that make it even more so. The acting is superb as well. Son Hyun-joo is excellent in his role as Pan-ho. He portrays the character’s change in a subtle but powerful way, depicting all Pan-ho’s shame, doubt, fear and desperate desire to keep Ho-young alive.
Similarly, Kim Myung-min is fantastic as the terrifying Gang-heon and makes his presence felt. Kim Do-hoon, too, does a heartrending performance as Ho-young, bringing the character’s tumultuous feelings to the surface.
However, the writing lets these stars down. While Pan-ho receives the most material to work with, Gang-heon’s character feels woefully unexplored. We are constantly told that he is ruthless and violent but we don’t see anything to back it up. In fact, we don’t know anything about his past, about who he was before his son’s death.
Even at present, Kim Myung-min plays out Gang-heon’s contradictory emotions but there are no dialogues or scenes to back it up. Ho-young, too, misses out on this complexity and depth, particularly when he is nearly absent for a few episodes in the middle stretch of the show.
There are quite a few moments when Season 1’s logic doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as well. For example, and this is a minor spoiler, Ho-young’s hit-and-run is linked to a case that falls under Pan-ho. It stays that way even when the hit-and-run car is found and identified as belonging to Pan-ho’s family. The police and the prosecutors know this. How, then, is he allowed to still oversee it?
This happens a few other times as well when legal proceedings are glossed over and important plot-changing information is just “documents” that we never learn more about. But the biggest letdown is the conversations. As in Beyond Evil, I was hoping Pan-ho and Gang-heon would debate right and wrong and offer the viewers a healthy dose of philosophy. Unfortunately, this requires a much higher quality of writing and Your Honor’s scripts are strictly in the average range.
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Verdict - 7/10
7/10