I Hear Your Voice

This show finished a couple of months ago, but was one of the stand-out dramas of the year. Who knew noona romances were so darn addictive? Not I. But I have since been educated.

Quick summary: A teenage girl witnesses a man being murdered. The man’s son witnesses his murder and mysteriously develops the ability to hear peoples thought when he looks at their eyes. The murderer goes to jail, but is released eleven years later and seeks revenge against the boy and the girl who helped to put him there.

Thoughts:

So I didn’t write this in the summary because otherwise it would no longer be quick, but the main plot line of the show is the fact that the girl who witnessed the murder becomes a cynical public defence lawyer, while the son is a senior in high school who has been looking for the girl for the last eleven years. If you’re thinking first love etc etc, then you would be thinking right – despite the fact that they are like nine years apart. Now it’s not like I have a problem with largish age gaps, or even necessarily the woman being older, but I do take issue with basically a teenager being a serious romantic interest for a woman in her late twenties. That was stretching my ability to take the love line of the show seriously.

Having said all this, Lee Bo-young and Lee Jong-suk have great chemistry, and by about half way through the series, I couldn’t help but be sucked into this romance. Do I still think it fairly unrealistic that a high schooler and a twenty nine year old could make it together? Yes. Do I think that this has probably happened for someone and ended well? Yes. Therefore, I won’t complain and simply say - I don’t blame her for falling for him. Lee Jong-suk is fiiiine.

The shows format during the middle section became a little formulaic, particularly as there is no way that Lawyer Jang is the only defence counsel in that particular court, with the same judge and same prosecutor, who low and behold was an evil teenage nemesis. Sigh, oh the trappings of a court house procedural. Anyway, generally speaking the cases had some kind of significant learning feature for our heroine so it wasn’t all pointless. 


The other thing about this show that I enjoyed was that it wasn’t afraid to pull big punches when they were necessary to the story line. I won’t give them away because that would ruin the whole thing, but I did appreciate that the script writers were clever enough to know what the audience could handle and the way in which the characters would realistically react. It made for a much more interesting drama because unlike many shows, I Hear Your Voice had flawed characters. In fact, that was the whole point of the show really. It forced its characters to reflect on the idea of what makes us the way we are? If we take revenge for wrongs done to us, does that sink us to the same level as the one who hurt us in the first place? These broad philosophical questions made the show more interesting to me than just a simple procedural drama with a noona romance thrown in.

Jung Woong-in should get major kudos for his performance as the baddie in this show. He honestly terrified me. Not just because he was a murderer (don’t worry that isn’t a spoiler, it’s in the first episode), but more importantly because he was a sympathetic villain. We knew why he ended up the way he did, and even though it didn’t excuse his deeds, it made them so much more reasonable, and therefore more terrifying, because really, he is just a normal person who chose a path with no positive end. He was just another flawed human being.

That’s what this show does well. It creates characters that you end up caring about more than you thought you could, mainly because they are so flawed. The romance is wonderful, I won’t lie. But if that was all this show was, it would be much less interesting. Instead we are left with seeing the impact that our choices have, and particularly the importance of believing in those around us and loving them, even when they make mistakes.