Review | K-drama review: Military Prosecutor Doberman – meandering legal action-comedy finishes strongly

This article contains spoilers. 3/5 stars The journey to get there wasn’t always an even one, but early on Military Prosecutor Doberman set up its end goal – the downfall of the villainous division Commander Noh Hwa-young (Oh Yeon-soo) – and viewers were eager to see it play out. Through 16 episodes, the show’s ratings have steadily risen, capping off this week with a finale that delivered on its promise and cracked the vaunted 10 per cent ratings milestone in South Korea, only the third cable show of the year to do so after Twenty-Five Twenty-One and Show Window: The Queen’s House. The slaloming path to Noh’s reckoning at the hands of the dogged military prosecutors Do Bae-man (Ahn Bo-hyun) and Cha Woo-in (Jo Bo-ah) has included several risky pit stops along the way, with sensitive cases involving date rape and a barracks massacre folded in to spice up the more prosaic main narrative, which merely revolved around corruption and cronyism. The show’s biggest gamble was the surprising character trajectory that threaded through all the show’s socially-minded interludes: the redemption arc of Hwa-young’s wayward son Tae-nam (Kim Woo-seok). Military Prosecutor Doberman midseason recap: joyless K-drama Tae-nam was teased as the big bad at the show’s outset and became the first joint target for Bae-man and Woo-in after date raping a vulnerable young woman in a club’s VIP room. After tumbling out of his ivory tower, Tae-nam wound up as a military recruit at the bottom of the pecking order. There he experienced life on the other side of the tracks as he could no longer rely on the protection of his mother, who was forced to distance herself from him during his trial. As a new recruit, he is subjected to intense hazing. Within the course of only a few scenes, an unrepentant rapist has become a sympathetic character. It’s a jarring change but the show commits to it fully. Tae-nam befriends fellow private Byun Sang-ho (Kim Yo-han), who experiences the worst hazing of all. Private Byun eventually snaps, picks up a rifle and grenade, and goes on a rampage through the barracks, blowing up or mowing down fellow soldiers as he repeatedly asks “where’s my mother?” Gory, tense and unrelenting, it’s a dark sequence that threatens to overwhelm a show that is most comfortable when it’s trying to be hip and jocular. Once again the show wades into a serious contemporary issue, but unlike the superlative treatment army hazing received in last year’s D.P., here it is handled superficially. While the episode doesn’t work as social commentary, where it does succeed is as Tae-nam’s redemption. He is one of the few survivors and finally acts like someone ready to change when he speaks up about Private Byun’s bullying during the trial. Tae-nam’s action signals a clear break from his domineering mother, allowing the show to return to its most interesting relationship. After being discharged from the military he visits Woo-in and Bae-man’s makeshift cafe base, where he is tearfully reunited with his Doberman, and leaves personal letters for the prosecutors and the woman he date raped. Bae-man reads the letter, only to discover it is actually a suicide note. He rushes to the abandoned area where Tae-nam is meeting his mother, a place where he was tormented by her as a child. Grenade in hand, Tae-nam is about to obliterate himself and his mother just as Bae-man arrives. An already thrilling climax to the penultimate episode of the series gets an extra boost when it turns into a double cliffhanger. Woo-in is also in a life-or-death situation, having met Hwa-young’s assistant in the hopes of gaining a key witness, only to be confronted with the barrel of a gun. The finale kicks off in the hospital, where most of the main characters are recuperating from bullet or shrapnel wounds. The show winds down its corruption storyline with the tearing down of the nefarious Patriotic Society, thanks to the so-called ‘X-File’ that was in Tae-nam’s possession. That trial over, we return one last time to the military tribunal as Bae-man and Woo-in don their robes once more for Hwa-young’s final judgment. The trial proceeds without any major incident and the Commander gets her just desserts, as we knew she would. Though lacking in surprise, the downfall of one of the best K-drama villains we’ve seen this year is a thoroughly satisfying moment to close the series on. Military Prosecutor Doberman had plenty of problems throughout its meandering run but a strong ending can go a long way towards rehabilitating a show – and that’s what happened with this week’s closing episodes, turning a tonally scattered legal action-comedy into a good old-fashioned story of heroes and villains. Military Prosecutor Doberman is streaming on Viu.