Monday, August 15, 2016

TV Review: I Hear Your Voice

                                                   I Hear Your Voice Review
I Hear Your Voice is a k-drama that is a lot of different things, the best way I can think to describe the series is a legal drama, noona romance(older woman, younger guy) and it deals with the theme of vengeance. This drama is one that is a bit hard to summarize but it is a very good drama that has an engaging plot and characters that you can't help but get invested in.

The series starts off with Jang Hye-sung deciding to become a public defender solely because of the fact that they make more money then the kind of lawyer that she is now. Hye-sung starts the series off as someone who is pretty selfish, immature and doesn't really care about her clients(this trait is especially apparent in how they showed a series of closing statements she made when she basically said the same thing in the same bored tone as to why her client shouldn't go to jail)but despite this I still loved watching her and I was still very entertain by her and that's before we even get to her backstory.

It is really Hye-sung's backstory that gets you invested in the character in a meaningful way and it shows you that she's more than the person that she represents herself as in the beginning. It is made clear in the backstory that Hye-sung is someone who has a very clear sense of what justice is and that to her has a lot to do with the truth coming out and this sense of justice is something she regains as she starts working as a public defender.Ten years before the story starts Hye-sung witness a man named Min Joon-gook murder a man with a pipe and attempt to kill the man's son as well. Later on after Min Joon-gook had threaten to kill her if she came forward as a witness after much debate Hye-sung does come forward as a witness against Min Joon-gook and this is something that lead to two things first that Min Joon-gook has now vowed to kill her so she lives in fear of what will happen once he's released and two that the man's eight year old son Park Soo-ha has vowed to protect Hye-sung once Min Joon-gook is released and he has developed a crush on her.

Soo-ha is now a senior in high school and he has been looking for Hye-sung for the past ten years both because of his crush on her and because of the desire to protect her. Soo-ha has the ability to read minds and this is something that keeps him distant from the people around him which is one of the reasons that Hye-sung is someone who's so important to him. When Soo-ha first really re-meets Hye-Sung is disappointed that she has become cynical and doesn't seem to care about the truth of what happens and this is one of the reasons why Soo-ha tells Hye-sung that he can read minds and makes sure that she believes it and how he starts letting her use his ability to help her win her cases.

Through the first part of the series Hye-sung starts to regain her sense of justice by working as a public defender and becomes someone who once again both cares about the truth and even her clients. There are many people that help inspire this change in Hye-sung's character but one that really sticks out is Cha Gwan-woo an idealistic public defender who started at the same time as Hye-sung but takes a very different approach to being a public defender with him caring about his clients to the point of stupidity and Hye-sung not really care much at all. Throughout the series the two of them make each other better by picking up some of each other's skills.

Another plot thread that made the series so great was the rivalry and complicated past that Hye-sung and Seo Do-yeon share with how Hye-sung was kicked out of high school because of a lie that Do-yeon told and how the two of them never really got past what happened between them. I liked seeing how Hye-sung and Do-yeon went up against each other in their court cases and I liked that their past conflict made the court room conflict more personal for both the characters and the audience. I liked that there was a lot more to Do-yeon's character than I originally thought there was and I liked how their relationship improved throughout the series.
Soo-ha spends the first half of the series doing his best to insure that Min Joon-gook doesn't get the chance to make good on his threat to Hye-sung. The task of protecting Hye-sung is one that requires the two of them to live together for most of the series and through living together they get to know each other in ways they never would have been able to if they haven't which leads to them developing a very strong bond and only increases Soo-ha's desire to protect Hye-sung even if the ways he plans to go about aren't something that she would like. Through the first part of the series Soo-ha soon learns that Min Joon-gook has the cops fooled so he can't relay on them for help so he believes that he'll have to take matters into his own hands. Let's just say that Soo-ha told a ton of people during the first half of the series that he was going to kill Min Joon-gook and this is something that he had every intention of doing at the time because he thought of his own life as already lost and was perfectly fine with throwing his future a way so that Hye-sung may live.

This series is one that has great characters that develop over the course of the series in ways that I felt were believable and it was a series that gave characters more depth than you would have expected from those type of characters and can make you feel for and understand people you'd rather you didn't. This series does a great job with the relationship between the characters as well rather it be the romantic couple or the mother-daughter relationship between Hye-sung and her mom each relationship is given importance and it adds something to the series as a whole. Both the acting and the writing in this series is fantastic and I think that if your only going to watch one K-drama in your life this should be the one because it's just really great. Please tell me your thoughts about the series in the comment section below because I think I could say a lot more about this series.

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