Grid – First Impressions

I do feel a bit apprehensive to be writing a first impression post after just one episode as the whole thing can go to pot later on *cough*The Veil*cough*. But… Grid is written by Lee Soo Yeon, who penned Stranger/Forest of Secrets, so one can be somewhat assured that Drama will stay on course.

I liked the story right off the bat. It starts rather slowly, as we are sort of eased in, which already promises good things to me. Not everything has to start with a bang, in fact it’s sometimes quite beneficial to go slow at the beginning. We get a sort of cold open with (pretty) images of the solar winds starting to form and approach earth. Then there’s a tad spoilery montage of things to come, after which we land in 2005 with the younger versions of our leads Kim Sae Ha (Seo Kang Joon) and Jung Sae Byeok (Kim A Jong). Who btw do not know each other at this point. This is also the year when the Grid to protect earth from the solar winds is activated.

A woman enters a command centre where several people working on the grid project are anxiously waiting for the grid to connect around the globe. Which it eventually does, to everyone’s great relief. The woman then goes out of the room, sits down in front of a work station and quietly states to herself “the girl was right”. Which immediately begs to question: “what girl?” Or it would, if I hadn’t read the synopsis and some articles about Drama. 😀 So I already know who she is talking about and thanks to the spoilery bits at the beginning, I also knew the “how does she know enough to be right” as well. Next we find ourselves in October of 2021 and start following adult Sae Ha on his way to work. He stops by a convenience store to buy some garbage bags and thus accidentally stumbles upon a serious crime. As a good citizen he reports it, which connects him to adult Sae Byeok, who is a police detective. Bit of drama serendipity right there. 😉 This incident is what starts the ball rolling and also gives us the first glimpse of a lady who without doubt is “the girl” referred at the beginning and probably certain someone Sae Ha’s swanky, hush hush government department has been searching for. And now we are going into spoiler territory, so skip the next bit if you’d rather not know.

!SPOILERT!

The Girl… or rather The Mysterious Woman helps our convenience store killer avoid capture. First she drops a rope for him to climb up to top of the building. So, she already knew he would escape through that window. The cops loose sight of him. Except Sae Byeok isn’t fooled so easily and she is waiting when he emerges from under a truck. She gets ready to arrest him but The Mysterious Woman stops her and so a killer goes free. Why is she dong this? She gave the world the Grid so she can’t be a baddie, right? Well, we know she is from the future so the killer, Kim Ma Nok has to be somehow connected to something (bad?) that will happen in the future and for some reason he must not be caught. At least not right now, it is alway possible that there is a timeframe after which his capture does not matter anymore. The baffling thing for Sae Byeok is that after they tussle a bit The Woman just wanishes into the thin air. Only thing left to prove she was actually real, is a cap SB knocked off her head. Guess she can teleport then.

END OF !SPOILERT!

I was surprised how quickly the episode went by. I haven’t checked the epi length but it must be shorter than what we get far too often these days. Not that I’m complaning but with just one ep per week I was left craving for more. The first epi was mostly just setup and we didn’t really get to know any of the characters properly yet. I’m intrigued though and looking forward to how the story will progress. Hopefull the characters will also be fleshed out more in the coming episodes. Based on Stranger, this writer will probably not delve too much into the backgrounds of the characters but I’m sure she’ll give us enough to allow us form our own opinions about them.