Border - JDrama

Where do we go when we die? It’s an interesting question, one with many varying answers that I find quite intriguing and tend to research from time to time just to kill time. But whatever the answer may be, I’m sure the recent drama I watched would make it one very dark and gloomy place.

Border is a Japanese drama that was released in 2014. One of the many JDrama’s that was on my backlog, I find I’m glad I finally got around to watching it. The series has a somewhat dark tone to it and despite my expectations, which weren’t much aside from the general good acting I always know to expect from the lead actor, I found this drama quite surprising.

The series follows a detective that gets shot while on duty but survives the fatal wound with one strange twist; the bullet that gets lodged in his head allows him to see dead people. Though a fairly predictable plot twist, this drama takes the scenario and paints it with a dark and gloomy brush as it follows our detective as he goes back to work, using his newfound ability to solve crimes and confront the evil that exists in the world around us.

The episodes were interesting and each one seemed to take the detective deeper down a dark path as he strayed further and further from using ‘normal’ methods of solving crimes and instead turned to much sinister ones that aided both his ability and efforts to catch the bad guy. That is until it led our poor strung out detective to the ultimate cross roads.

It’s an interesting observation as you watch the detective’s character change so drastically due to his newfound ability that he seems to attach a somewhat curious responsibility to, very interesting indeed and very engrossing to watch. It reflects a rather sad reality that sometimes the bad guys might just beat the good guys, despite the supernatural advantage on the good guy’s part and that maybe, just~ maybe knowing that little detail might just drive you over the edge more often than we’d like to admit.

Yeah, this was a very thought provoking drama. It might have been dark and gloomy, but I guess that helped as it brought its solemn message across. I reckon it’s worth watching, I mean it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves the bad guys have their good days too, right?

Sense8 - TV Show [Netflix]

WTF!?

Those are the thoughts I constantly had while watching the first episode of Sense8 and let me tell you, it wasn’t the hopeful kind. It was more the frustrated why-the-hell-am-I-watching-this kind of frustration that almost had me switching over to another series to watch.

In all fairness I probably should have watched the trailer first before jumping head first into this show because then things would have probably made a hell of a lot more sense than it did going in blind. Instead of waddling through a dark room with no flashlight and pies being thrown at me constantly while I try to make my way through. I would have at least had a candle and fork to get me by. You know - the basics.

But anyway, how do I go about describing the confusion that is Sense8?

This show comes at you like a seemingly normal science fiction that has you thinking about telepaths on a whole other level as it drops you smack into the middle of eight random individual’s lives. Now how we come to be dropped into these unsuspecting people’s lives is rather strange as the story starts off pretty suddenly with the suicide of what would seem like a crazy drug addict in an abandoned building. This event proves to be the ‘birth’ of our eight individual’s special connection.

But neither of these poor souls knows what’s happening as this ‘awakening’ doesn’t seem to come with a handbook and they each find themselves seeing things and speaking languages they never knew before, as well as knowing skills they’d never learned. Needless to say most of them turn to the idea that they have become crazy.

While surprisingly others in the ‘cluster’ seem to take the change in their stride and ease into their situation quite smoothly.

Still the change doesn’t go unnoticed by the eight as they begin to notice the other people that seem to be sharing their thoughts and lives with them. However, there are others outside their little intimate cluster that also takes note of our unique individuals and their strange ability and it turns out our protagonists might be a little less safer in the world because of their strange connection.

The show, for me, was very confusing at first but I won’t lie and say I didn’t get hooked after things began to fall into place and sense was born from the senseless. The concept was different and intriguing and I think that was what hooked me. However, something tells me that this show probably won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s life I guess. I liked it. It was new and truthfully, the strangeness was refreshing. A series that took a sci-fi concept and used character development as a form of progress, now that’s something I can binge watch any day.