City Hunter

So, this tv show came up with a 3.9 rating on our Netflix. Usually I enjoy anything with a 3.5 or above, so I thought I would give this one a try.

"City Hunter" starts in 1983 when a secret sweep mission is sent by five South Korean men to take out
several North Korean officials in retaliation for a bombing. After the men are already sent, the five men come under a lot of pressure from the U.S. and other countries not to retaliate. In order to keep their actions a secret, they have the twenty-one men killed on the mission. Only one man escapes. He returns to Seoul, kidnaps his best friend (who was one of the ones killed) and raises him with the sole purpose of using him to get revenge on the five men.

The story picks up in 2011 with the son, Lee Yoon Sung, returning to Seoul, posing as a Korean American, recently graduated from MIT. He gets a job in the government's IT security department and starts hunting down the men who ordered his father's death.

The thing is, he turns out to be a really great guy. He feels the best revenge is to expose the men and their corruption, destroy their reputations and their lives, kidnap them and turn them over the the prosecutor's office. His adopted dad, though, really wants him to be killing all of these people. When the son refuses to do it, he comes to Seoul to take care of it himself. Also, he keeps trying to get Lee Yoon Sung to get angry enough at these men to kill them, which involves some truly sinister activities.

So Lee Yoon Sung is caught in this crazy situation where he is trying to take down these men, yet keep them safe from his father. All the while, he has to maintain his secret identity because a Prosecutor wants to catch him for being a vigilante. The men he is trying to take down start sending people after him. He falls in love with a body guard, Kim NaNa, who just happens to guard several of the people he is trying to kidnap.

The story moves a little bit slowly at times, and there are a lot of emotional moments with closeups on characters' faces or clenched fists. But overall, it's an awesome story. I got totally engrossed in it for several days - to the point where I actually had a dream in "Korean" with subtitles (no lie). There are a lot of twists and turns and it also has great social commentary. I highly recommend it.

Castle: Dial M for Mayor

Josh called it. The first time Michael Terry from "Bones" appeared on the screen, Josh said, "He did it."

In this episode of "Castle" all of the evidence seems to show that Castle's friend, the Mayor, murdered a writer who was about to expose him for embezzling money from his charities. The mayor insists that he is being set up, and Castle believes him, much to Kate Beckett's frustration.

The mystery man who warned Castle to protect Kate reappears and gives Castle just enough information so that Castle can help to prove that the mayor is innocent. He was indeed the target of a conspiracy designed to keep him from running for governor and later president. And it was his assistant who was taking the money.

Everyone in this episode was being manipulated, and the main culprit remains a mystery. The mayor comments that because he was too good, because he would not play along with the bad guys, there were powerful forces working to keep him out of a higher office. My thought was, "I wonder how realistic this is." (Sometimes I think I'm as bad as Hodgins with all of this conspiracy theory stuff.)

At the end of the episode, Castle's mystery "friend" says that he helped because he wanted Castle to be able to stay with the police in order to protect Kate stating, "There are times when a well-placed pawn is more powerful than a king."

Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall

"Steven Moffat isn't afraid to kill off his characters."

That is what my husband kept saying before we watched the season finale of "Sherlock." I insisted that since the show was doing so well, there was no way that it wouldn't be renewed for a third season, and my hubby so kindly pointed out that "it's the BBC." After all of that, I fully expected that Sherlock would die. I never expected that he would do so in such a spectacular fashion.

I've read Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and I've seen the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, but BBC's "Sherlock" takes the prize both for most devious Moriarty and for most intense Sherlock death scene. To be sure, Moriarty is always evil, but in "Sherlock" he utterly destroys Holmes, leaving him no choice but to commit suicide. And he's played everything so perfectly that the world thinks that Sherlock is a fraud who made up all of the cases that he solved. I tell you, it was intense.

Sherlock calls John, tells him that he was indeed a fraud, and jumps from a building as John watches. Good ole' Watson, though, refuses to believe that Sherlock was lying to him and stands at Sherlock's headstone months later, begging him to still be alive ... which he is, of course.

But how? Perhaps we shall find out in season 3, set to air in 2013.