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.

Duel
(듀얼 / Dyueol)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

I don’t really remember when or why I put this drama on my list, but it’s been on it for a while. I’m guessing it has to do with the fact that ‘science fiction’ was listed as one of the genres for this drama, and I have liked all the Korean science fiction dramas I’ve seen so far. Before I also watched Circle, another OCN drama and I really liked it. Also I recently finished watching Orphan Black, so when I saw this drama was about cloning as well my interest was peaked.

However, it’s a very serious drama. No romance, no comedy, just crime thriller and angst. The cloning part formed the base of the series but wasn’t the main issue. I like the play on the title though, because Duel suggests something with two parts or two people participating, and I could see this ‘duel between two people’ in more than one sense while watching. But maybe that’s just my interpretation.

I tried writing a compact summary for the story but I ended up going into so much detail (yes, there is a LOT happening) that I decided to do it otherwise. I’m going to try and construct a simple summary based on the four (five?) main characters.
First of all, there is Jang Deuk Cheon (played by Jung Jae Young), a veteran detective. He is a single father of a 12-year old daughter, Soo Yeon, who is very sick and needs the vaccine to a long-awaited stem cell treatment. When she gets chosen for the treatment and is on her way to the hospital, the car gets interrupted and she is kidnapped by a young man. Not long after she is kidnapped, Deuk Cheon stumbles upon a young man in a bus who looks exactly like the culprit, only this guy doesn’t have any memories of who he is and how he got there. They both witness the real culprit, indeed an exact copy, but they aren’t twins, so what are they?
The first main part of the story revolves around Deuk Cheon trying to get his daughter back and finding out what is up with these two guys who look exactly alike. It turns out that his daughter is not a random victim and it all traces back to the origin of the vaccine and what happened to the two identical boys.
Then there is Choi Jo Hye (played by Kim Jung Eun), a prosecutor who used to be a good friend of Deuk Cheon’s but ruined her chances of friendship with him after being partially responsible for his wife’s murder. So there’s a bit of tension between the two of them. However, even though she initially seems like a cold person just hungry for a case, she helps in her own way to solve the situation and find Soo Yeon.
Then we have the two mysterious identical guys, Lee Sung Joon and Lee Sung Hoon (both played by Yang Se Jong). They turn out to be clones, created from the doctor who originally created Soo Yeon’s vaccine 24 years earlier. Lee Sung Joon is the more timid one, he doesn’t remember who he is at first but afterwards agrees to help Deuk Cheon with finding Soo Yeon. Lee Sung Hoon, the one who kidnapped Soo Yeon, is bound on revenge. If I elaborate more on the nature of this revenge I will go into way too much detail, so I’ll try to keep it short. The doctor that they were cloned from once injected himself with the vaccine (he was creating a vaccine to cure his own sick daughter and was experimenting). Some guys that weren’t on his side found out about this, killed him and stole his organs, thinking that those were now vaccinated organs. Lee Sung Hoon is now looking for those organs, because he too is getting sick and he also believes that that will fix him. That’s also why he kidnapped Soo Yeon, the first one who was to be vaccinated.
And then last but not least there’s Ryu Mi Rae (played by Seo Eun Soo), a reporter. Her mother passed away a month earlier and left a lot of secrecy behind which she is keen on finding out. Her mother, as it turns out, used to be a nurse who worked for the above-mentioned doctor and she knew a lot about the experiments.
All these people’s lives turn out to be connected by this situation and they decide to solve it all together.

First I want to say something about the cast. I only knew Yang Se Jong and Seo Eun Soo, because they both also played in Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim. I never saw them before that. In Romantic Doctor Yang Se Jong’s character was just a grumpy second male lead who wasn’t really a second male lead because he didn’t have any interest in the first leads. I found it very nice to see him play such an intense role – or should I say roleS. Because he actually played 3 different people in this series: the doctor and both the clones, who all had distinctively different personalities. I’m always impressed with people who can play double roles, but still no one will ever beat Tatiana Maslany from Orphan Black who played like 7 completely different people (only respect). Anyways, now I have seen more of his acting abilities and I’m a bit more impressed. Temperature of Love is also on my list, but since I expect that’s just another romantic love story I doubt he’ll be acting the same way as he did here (I’ll let you know when I’ve watched it).
I didn’t know the two ‘veteran’ main actors, Jung Jae Young and Kim Jung Eun. I read that Jung Jae Young is also a stage actor. Lately I’ve been seeing more stage actors get into drama series, it’s an interesting turn I think. He did a good job playing the rough, swearing police detective whose only weakness was his little girl. Kim Jung Eun didn’t really make a big impression on me, the only thing that jumped out to me was -again, I guess because of plastic surgery- her face just had the same expression almost the whole series. Sometimes, when she showed emotion, it seemed like she had to make it so obvious that her face just looked kind of over the top, like when she was surprised by something her eyes would go like O__O and it almost just looked a bit comical (I’m sorry, I’m critical on face-acting). And overall her character didn’t really get a lot of background, so of the 4/5 main characters, she made the least of an impression on me.

Even though the story itself was -despite its many, many created plot lines- very well established. What confused me a bit at first though was that the main part of the episodes starting with a flash-forward. So the episode would start with something that the previous one didn’t end with (my first reaction: is this the right episode?) but then later on the episode we actually get to that point. I didn’t really understand the necessity of that in the first half of the episodes. Because eventually, the story itself made a full circle from beginning to end and everything was solved and finished very neatly. The flash-forwards only felt like unnecessary ways to add more time to the episode. Because the exact same scene would play later on in the episode, where we see how it led up to there. So not very relevant in my opinion.
Also there were a few things that weren’t clear to me. Maybe I missed some bits, because there was so much happening and you just tend to focus on the main story line. For example: *spoiler* as Mi Rae turns out to be the doctor’s biological daughter who he -as it turns out- was able to save with the vaccine, I assume that he gave both the vaccine and his daughter to Nurse Ryu, so that she could vaccinate Mi Rae and raise her as her own child, but this wasn’t specified I believe. I just assumed this, because otherwise why would he have given the vaccine to Nurse Ryu for safe-keeping. However, his wife never knew about this. When Mi Rae (which also turns out to be a false name; to keep her hidden and safe she was called after Nurse Ryu’s unborn child) was finally (and unfortunately only temporarily) reunited with her birth mother, the doctor’s wife made the impression that she never knew her daughter had been alive all this time. So I wonder how that crucial bit of communication went wrong. Maybe the doctor died before he could tell, because of course he didn’t know that he was going to be attacked. Also it wasn’t clear to me why he injected himself with the vaccine in the first place. I thought they were doing experiments on people or animals or something, but why himself? This seemed like an important part so I might have missed it (shame on me and my weak concentration), but that wasn’t clear to me from the beginning.
Also, everything that Lee Sung Hoon was avenging turned out to be either incorrect or a lie (or both). He wanted revenge on Deuk Cheon because he blamed him for his ‘mother”s (the boys saw the doctor’s wife as their mother as she took care of them like they were her own children) death, and she turned out to be still alive.
He killed a lot of people to take back his original’s organs, only to find out the organs were useless. He despised Sung Joon because he promised to come and find him as a boy and he didn’t while he needed him the most, and it turns out that Sung Joon tried really hard to find him. All these things in the end just made me feel sorry for Sung Hoon because all these things that drove him crazy all turned out to be fake reasons.
And, as I mentioned before, I was a bit confused about Choi Jo Hye’s role in the end because even though she appeared a lot at first, during the final crucial bits she didn’t appear at all. And now that I think about it, the scenes where she appeared didn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the series, she was just doing her own thing and her own research and every once in a while this collided with what Deuk Cheon and his little gang were also involved with. So that almost kind of de-connected her from the rest of the main cast. Which was a bit weird.

Also, there was this old guy named Park San Young and he was the bad guy, the director of a big pharmaceutical company (even named after himself) that tried to get its hands on the vaccine and the technique of cloning purely for his own greedy desires. He was ready to save what was left of his own already spent life even if that meant taking it away from a 12-year old girl with her whole life still ahead of her. He wanted the vaccine to cure his own disease. He wanted the ability to clone people to himself just to experiment curing his own disease. He basically only cared about himself and was the ultimate scumbag.
He spent the first half of the series in a coma, and his daughter was primarily introduced as a mysterious young lady who also wanted to get her hands on the vaccine for some reason. In the end it turned out that she wanted it to cure her father, but once her father regained consciousness he just continued being an ass and in the end she even went against him in order to keep the vaccine out of his hands.
The whole plot of the San Young family felt a bit weak and forced to me. As if not enough people already had to be given reasons for wanting the vaccine. And they just turned the guy into a selfish lunatic who only cared about himself. That made the character of the daughter a bit pointless, because the firm reasons she had in the beginning only ended up being a mistake which she had to fix for herself.

I do want to say something about the actress who played Park Seo Jin, the daughter mentioned above. She is called Jo Soo Hyang. I know her from 3 other series, but I mostly know her because she’s pretty much always cast as a bitchy character. Maybe she has the face for it, I don’t know (and I don’t really like typecasting people on their face). But I guess she has this natural haughty look about her.
In Who Are You – School 2015 she played the bully part so well I actually got angry as soon as she appeared on screen. In Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo she was the bitchy skinny gymnastics girl who made fun of the sturdy weightlifter girls. The only neutral role I saw her in was in the short drama Romance Full of Life, where she was simply the female lead who was a bit aloof because she focussed too much on studying. But even though she always plays the more arrogant roles, I really like that I can see her acting getting better with each series (because I actually watched these series with her in chronological order, not on purpose). So a little word of praise for her. I would like to see her as a super sweet nice girl for a change, though, just to break the standard.

One last and maybe stupid thing: there was one song in the OST that I really really disliked. I don’t usually pay that much attention to the OST in detail, only when I like a song I might look it up and download it afterwards. But this time, there was one song where I disliked the singer’s voice so much, I needed to share it, I’m sorry.
Quite ironically, the song is called ‘Nightmare’ and the performer is called ‘Mad Soul Child’. Both these names are so accurate I can’t even. From the first verse on I already thought the singer sang in a really weird voice, almost like Stitch, kind of swallowing her words if that makes any sense. And then the refrain starts and I just hear a bunch of throaty noises and it actually sounds really painful. It really sounds as if she sings while her throat is hurting really bad. The way she creaks through her exclamations might sound artistic to some people but to me it kind of hurt my ears. So no, no Mad Soul Child for me, thanks. (Again no offense, just my opinion.)

Coming back to the ‘duel’ part, as I said, I approve of the naming of this drama because they actually did something with it. Some examples of times when I thought ‘duel’ became a good metaphor. First of all, all the duels. There was a duel between Sung Hoon and Deuk Cheon. There was a duel between Sung Hoon and Sung Joon. There was a duel between Jo Hye and her boss. Even a duel between Sung Joon and Soo Yeon, when the dilemma arose that Sung Joon wouldn’t be able to receive the vaccine if Soo Yeon got it first. And finally, a big parallel in the fact that everything started and ended with a father trying to cure his daughter.
I really like that the story was wrapped up so nicely, except for the things that remained unclear to me all the plot lines were ended and all the bad guys were either caught or got what they deserved *cough the San Young bastard cough*. Not everyone who deserved to get through the final confrontation made it through, but in the end the most important people (to me at least) ended up cured and healthy and happy.
Sometimes it’s nice to watch a completely different type of series, to see a series so focused on the acting and the story is nice. The last series I saw that reminded me of the themes from this one was God’s Gift ~14 Days~, which is also about a parent whose child is kidnapped and she goes through hell and back (literally, as she goes 14 days back into time) to get her daughter back. But it was so intense and everyone was so serious and angsty that I really started longing for some comic relief. So in the end maybe this isn’t really my thing and now I can’t wait to get back to my romcoms.
If there was a moral, it wasn’t crystal clear to me, but what I got was that everyone, in the end, cares the most about himself and his/her own family. There were a lot of people in this series who just did everything they did in order to save their own and their families’. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but only some cases are justified as legit and some aren’t. We see one guy as a bad guy because he took the doctor’s kidneys for himself, but in the end we also see that the ‘good guys’ blackmail him with the safety of his daughter, so what does that do to the good versus evil ratios here? I’m not sure.
But overall, a good series.