Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Blink
(블링크 / Beullingkeu)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

I’m really on a roll with these reviews now that I’m checking off to-do items from my deadlines list! It also helped that this episode had a very simple and straightforward story, so I didn’t even feel like I had to watch it again.
In this fourth (or second, still not sure) chapter, rather than being provided with a specific social setting like in the previous episodes, we are simply introduced to a main character who’s trying to live her life in a world that’s not even that different from ours – one that’s increasingly starting to lean on the assistance of AI. Honestly, if I’d have to make a timeline I’d say this episode is the closest to ours when looking at where we are now. In this episode, we see the specific application of AI within a context of public order maintenance – the police force. After all, what if human officers start becoming physically unable to keep up with artificial developments?

SF8: Blink is either the second or fourth episode in the SF8 anthology. It has a duration of about 51 minutes and was directed by Han Ga Ram. It’s based on the short story ‘Baekjung’ by Kim Chang Gyu.

In a world that’s becoming more and more dependent on artificial intelligence and assistance, police detective Kim Ji Woo (played by Lee Shi Young) is single-handedly trying to prove she can do it alone. Ever since she lost her parents in a traffic accident that involved an automated driving system when she was a child, she has sworn not to depend on automated systems and AI again. Which is hard, seeing as the times are a-changing and she’s not even able to escape it during her work at the police force. As part of the police detective initiation, all officers have a chip implanted in them that provides them with multifunctional vision, allowing them to calculate faster routes and see in the dark. Ji Woo frequently gets reprimanded for going against the recommendations of her AI chip. She just refuses to accept that computers will be able to replace humans, even though she’s noticing that technology is catching up fast, no matter how smart she is or how much she trains. After she gets another warning at work for letting a suspect get away (guess the chip wasn’t good enough to spot that stun gun), her superiors tell her that they’ll let her mistake slide if she just agrees to do a test run with a newbie. She happily agrees, only to find out that she’s being paired up with an AI partner. “It’s only for a test run”, and if she’ll “please just bear with it” for as long as necessary. Involuntarily, Ji Woo starts investigating a new case with her new ‘partner’, who, for convenience reasons, takes the form of a young man under the name Seo Nang (Ha Joon). As he’s in Ji Woo’s head only she can see him, and the two start a rocky partnership as Ji Woo is adamant on not depending on his skills, useful as they may be. While they embark on the investigation of a young woman’s murder, Ji Woo ultimately finds out that, as much as she hates to admit it, she has no choice but to depend on Seo Nang’s assistance.

They find out that the murder victim had been part of a secret experiment conducted by the military which used cybernetic technology to enhance the skill and strength of certain test subjects. Besides this woman, one other man, Captain Baek Jung, underwent this experiment and he lost his mind and started going after any human being who had traces of AI in their system. First his co-test subject. And now, because of this ‘temporary test run’, Ji Woo is next on his list. It doesn’t take long for Baek Jung to locate Ji Woo and as she witnesses his powers firsthand, she realizes she has no other choice but to let Seo Nang deal with him. After an action-filled climax in which Seo Nang infiltrates Baek Jung’s head and beats the evil AI in his system, the story ends with the end of the test run – Seo Nang will be returned to the lab as a piece of data. In the very final scene, we see Ji Woo as she starts on a new case, and it’s revealed that she secretly stole Seo Nang back.

Out of the episodes I’ve seen so far, I think it’s safe to say Blink has the most straightforward story. There aren’t any plot twists or hidden truths, it’s simply about a woman who, while initially refusing to accept to work with AI, ultimately comes to accept what positive assistance it is able to bring to the world, especially in terms of providing security. The story has quite an optimistic message, in which the main character ends up changing her mindset regarding AI assistance. Considering the recurring theme of the ‘dark side of technology’, I found myself waiting for the other shoe to drop, but in this story that didn’t happen. It was such a peaceful ending it almost gave me a false sense of security, haha.

Let’s talk a bit about the main characters.
As explained above, Ji Woo lost her parents in a traffic accident when they were driving in an automatic car and only Ji Woo survived. Her parents had set the automatic car’s settings to prioritize protecting Ji Woo in the backseat in case of an accident, and this sadly resulted in their deaths. Even though Ji Woo was protected by the system, naturally she could never see it as a blessing. Recognizing that AI was simple-minded like that, programmed to only ever do exactly as its told without being able to look beyond those settings, Ji Woo has always tried to avoid using the help of AI as much as possible. This can be seen most clearly from the way she insists on driving her own car – she refuses to let Seo Nang take automatic control over it. This also has a more direct link to her trauma, of course, as we see that she’s still plagued by nightmares about her parents’ deaths.
When she heads into the investigation with Seo Nang, she repeatedly ignores his suggestions and invitations to grant him access to speed the process in certain matters, such as conducting an on-the-spot forensic analysis of the victim’s body or physically taking down a group of drugdealing youngsters. As it happens, Ji Woo only resorts to granting Seo Nang access to her system when they’re in serious danger and she realizes she can’t take down the opponent on her own. After seeing what he’s capable of in terms of protecting her, she visibly warms up to Seo Nang and even regrets having to part from him when the test run is done.
From the way Ji Woo behaved, despite the fact that she had a more than valid reason to deny AI assistance in her life, it seemed to me like she’d also just become very stubborn in her convictions. It was like she was mostly denying the usefulness of AI to herself, even when she was very well aware of its convenience. I just couldn’t help but feel like she was desperately trying to hold on to her own worth as a human being in a world where everyone else had already completely succumbed to using AI. While that in itself was admirable, she still ended up surrendering to it in the end, and besides the fact that she got attached to Seo Nang as a partner who could lend his useful skills to her police work, I also can’t help but feel like she just wanted a companion. She’d been on her own for so long, not just in her life without a partner and seemingly no friends, but also in her stance against the integration of AI in everyday life.
It’s funny how the episode still has a bit of a fuzzy ending. Ji Woo seems happier than ever when she gets Seo Nang back as a partner, but we also can’t forget that this means that she’s also finally surrendered to the role that AI will continue to play in the world, which will undoubtedly go far and beyond what we already know.
I found it refreshing to have such a clear and transparent main character whose backstory was so defining for her behavior as an adult. It was more than easy to understand where she was coming from, but the typicality of this story really lay in the fact that everyone, even those who kept clinging onto the use of human skill, inevitably found no other choice than to succumb to the undeniable influence of AI technology.

Seo Nang is the provided name for the first male option of the AI partner Ji Woo is teamed up with. As Ji Woo goes for the first general options we don’t see what other forms it is able to take. In any case, he takes the shape of a cheerful young guy who doesn’t let his stubborn partner’s adamant rejections dissuade him from contributing to the case they’re working on. Since Seo Nang is AI, I find it hard to gauge him as a ‘character’ because it’s hard to say whether he really had any motives. I do find it interesting that they chose to bring humans and AI even closer by actually giving the AI a human form to create an even more familiar feeling between it and its user. I bet that if Seo Nang had remained just a blue circle in the sky, it would’ve probably taken Ji Woo even longer to get used to working together and she’d never even start considering it as a living being. So I definitely feel like it helped that Seo Nang took a human form. Still, I can’t help but feel like there was something unpredictable about Seo Nang. The way he kept asking her for access and how he immediately started suggesting to use his abilities to kill Baek Jung? He might have actually taken advantage of Ji Woo’s trust and done something that was beyond her control. In the end he didn’t actually do anything to harm Ji Woo, he didn’t turn against her or anything but it still seemed to me as if he would’ve been able to. When he infiltrated Baek Jung’s mind and stood eye to eye with his evil AI there was a moment where I genuinely thought they’d suddenly team up together against Ji Woo or something. I was just waiting for something to go sideways. Even when they ended up defeating the guy together and they both kind of reluctantly said goodbye, the way he looked all smug and triumphant when it was revealed Ji Woo got him back at the end also made me feel like this had been his plan. I don’t know, maybe I’ve just become paranoid haha, it just seemed a bit odd to me not to have any kind of sense of impending danger or foreboding of evil in this episode.

While there didn’t seem to be any direct references to the episodes I’ve seen so far, I did pick up on a few things that made me think of events from the previous episodes, although they might just be my interpretations and associations. First of all, and I believe I talked about this in my review of Manxin, I thought it was a very powerful moment when Ji Woo came to the realization that, just because she had a bad experience with the preciseness of AI, it didn’t mean that the technology was a bad thing an sich. It just did exactly what it was told based on its user’s needs. Getting angry at a machine for not doing something it wasn’t programmed to do in the first place won’t get you anywhere. The way Ji Woo described how her parents had set the automatic driving system to protect her first also reminded me of the nursing robots in The Prayer, who were only programmed to protect the people they were assigned to and wouldn’t reach out to anyone else, whether they needed saving or not. Seo Nang only emphasized the importance of the user’s influence by saying that AI has no way of even materializing without humans. It’s so easy to talk about AI as if they’re a separate being that has the ability to control people, but we sometimes forget to remember that we are the ones that enabled AI in the first place. It’s all human-made and user-generated stuff. I think it was an interesting choice to create a story about the pure relationship of codependence that exists between humans and technology. Seo Nang would’ve just remained to be a shapeless piece of data if Ji Woo hadn’t gone back for him. Ji Woo chose to go back for him because she realized she preferred companionship, but she also could’ve just as easily decided to discard him as ‘just another piece of tech’. These themes of interdependence also featured dominantly in both The Prayer and Manxin. As a character, Ji Woo also reminded me a bit of Seon Ho in the sense that they both initially reject the technology that’s taking over the world but are at some point softened in their convictions through the realization it’s humans who give the technology purpose. The only link I could find to Joan’s Galaxy was the automatic cars.

By the way, something that puzzles me a little bit is the title of this episode, Blink. While the titles of the previous episodes were all quite self-explanatory, I’m actually not quite sure what this title refers to. I’m assuming it has something to do with the eyes or vision, so maybe it refers to the special abilities the chip enabled to enhance human sight? It did play a role in solving the story’s murder case, after all. But all in all I feel like it doesn’t necessarily indicate the most important message of the story. I could be wrong of course, because this title must’ve been chosen for a reason, but I just mean to say that it wasn’t as straightforwardly clear as the titles of the previous episodes I watched.
What I also find interesting is that the poster for this episode shows Ji Woo positioned in-between the two figures in front of her, eyeing them cautiously. The two figures featured in the front aren’t shown very clearly, we can make out Baek Jung’s face on the left, but it’s not clear who he’s trying to choke. From the scene, we can assume it’s Seo Nang, as the background of the shot features the setting in which their final fight takes place. However, this particular scene does not appear in the story. We never seen Seo Nang and Baek Jung physically fight in the warehouse in front of Ji Woo – their fight takes place in a Matrix-kind of setting within Baek Jung’s mind. So yeah, I just find it interesting they decided to frame the poster in this way.

This is probably gonna be my shortest review within this anthology so far, but then again, I also found this the most simple story. There wasn’t much to unravel in terms of hidden agendas or plot twists. The only thing that remains debatable is whether or not Seo Nang truly doesn’t have any malicious intentions, whether he put in so much effort to win Ji Woo’s trust because he wanted to be freed. I mean, if that ‘farewell gift’ he gave her wasn’t meant as a bribe I don’t know what it was. The whole AI partner thing was still in development, and we saw what the military’s experiment of combining human and AI strength led to, so it can’t be guaranteed to be completely risk-free. While I did find it pretty refreshing to have a story without too many complications, even one that featured a bit of a comical dynamic between the main leads, I still would’ve liked there to be a little bit of an edge. The absence of a hidden evil actually gave me a false sense of security, haha.

Let’s do some cast comments before wrapping up! By the way, I don’t know why, but I found it hard to find a complete casting list for this episode. I wanted to credit the guy who played Baek Jung since he was quite a character presence – I thought he’d be credited prominently since the original short story this episode is based on refers specifically to him (🤔) but I can’t find him in any of the casting lists from any of my go-to drama source websites, and the same goes for the murder victim and the majority of the drug youth gang.

I was so excited to see something with Lee Shi Young again, she’s one of my favorite actresses and it’s been a while since I saw her in anything. I know her from Boys Before Flowers, Playful Kiss, Wild Romance, Valid Love and Lookout. I still want to see Grid and Risky Romance as well. I think the role of police officer suits her very well since she’s actually in really good shape (those abs?? 😳). I always appreciate when an actors’ real-life skills and attributes are used in a drama, and it was a funny aspect that despite her diligent and regular workouts, Ji Woo still lost out to the agility and speed of an AI. I feel like within the short span of the episode we still got to see many different sides to Ji Woo’s character, the distraughtness caused by her nightmares, her hesitancy and skepticism towards accepting Seo Nang’s help, and eventually the dependency and that accepting smile. The struggle she went through to change her mindset was very realistic as well. For all we know she could’ve been fooled by Seo Nang, but we can’t really blame her for it because she did doubt him in the first place and only ended up trusting her own human (and therefore subjective) instincts. Her character may have been simple to gauge but I do think she brought a nice clarity to Ji Woo’s decisions with her acting.

Apparently I’ve seen Ha Joon before in Radio Romance and Arthdal Chronicles, but I don’t have a clear memory of him from there (I might have mentioned him in my reviews before, though). In any case, I liked his performance in this episode. He remained quite an enigma and it was never revealed what the risks of his technology could be, but my red flags did go up when he started asking Ji Woo to give him control to actually cause physical harm to people, whether it was those youngsters or Baek Jung. The mystery surrounding him made him an interesting character, though. It also strangely became a part of his charm that you couldn’t really gauge him. He made the perfect charming yet unpredictable partner. I was kind of curious to see a darker side to Seo Nang, but in one way the fact that he remained ‘harmless’ for the duration of the test run only to emerge from his constraints also seemed to indicate a certain ominousness. It would make sense if his character was supposed to symbolize the familiarity people are meant to experience when using AI, the sense that it’s there to help them and guide them (similar to the Manxin app). I found myself curious to discover how Seo Nang would start behavior after Ji Woo gave him full access.

All in all, it was another enjoyable episode. I liked that it brought an element of humor to the dynamic of the main leads, and they made an even more peculiar team than the lead characters in Manxin. It also included the highest level of action and fighting I’ve seen so far in this anthology. Like every chapter, it brought a new perspective on the use of technology and the relationship between people and artificial intelligence. I’ve seen a lot of comments saying they’d like a whole series of this, and I’d agree, even if it were just to confirm whether Seo Nang wouldn’t actually turn out to be an evil AI entity, lol. While it was enjoyable enough, I still feel like I would’ve liked a bit more edge. That’s just my personal opinion, and it doesn’t take away the fact that it was still a very interesting episode to watch.

Now that I’m halfway through the anthology I’m wondering whether or not I’ll actually be able to finish the whole anthology before the end of the year, haha. I’m going to do my best, but no promises. Looking forward to the remaining four episodes!

See you soon! x