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Pierce Conran

This article contains spoilers.
3/5 stars
Lead cast: Kwak Sun-young, Lee Min-ki, Heo Sung-tae
Latest Nielsen rating: 6.6 per cent
After setting up its TCI (Traffic Crime Investigation) team and escorting us into a few cases, the action-crime procedural Crash did not stick to its episodic structure for long.
This was because TCI was quickly confronted with the demons from the past of new member Cha Yeon-ho (Lee Min-ki). One of those demons was right in their backyard – a member of the brass they report to.


We learn that the reason Yeon-ho doesn’t drive is because of the trauma he developed following a hit-and-run accident he was involved in a decade earlier. This also explains why he became so interested in vehicular accidents – his guilt pushes him to try to prevent other deaths on the road.
When he was a fresh-faced graduate from KAIST, Korea’s top technical university, his car hit a newlywed couple on a dark night. After he came to behind the wheel he was aghast to learn that both the husband and wife had died.
In the present, he receives an anonymous news clipping of the accident, which sparks memories of the painful moment. Among other things, these memories feature a trio of nefarious-looking youths who were also at the scene, and whose parents all happen to be bigwigs.
Yeon-ho may be a naive young man, but we are jaded K-drama viewers so the moment those young men appear it doesn’t take us long to piece together what happened on that fateful night.

Crash takes several episodes to spill the beans, and as it does our suspicions are quickly confirmed.
The young men were the people actually responsible for the deaths and Yeon-ho unknowingly took the fall. The ringleader of these men is Pyo Jung-wook (Kang Ki-doong), the son of deputy police commissioner Pyo Myung-hak (Heo Jung-do).
Myung-hak gets promoted to the top spot in the police force halfway through the series, which comes in handy when he needs to wield his influence as TCI begins to circle in on Jung-wook.
He also has to contend with the mysterious person who has been sending news clippings to everyone who was involved in the crash and kidnapping them one by one. This turns out to be the husband who was believed to have died. He faked his death and became a forensics specialist in the police before hatching a plan to avenge his wife.

While all of this unfolds, TCI does embark on a few other cases, but each of them conveniently connects back to Jung-wook and his cronies.
This includes a drug-fuelled drive through town which results in another massive coincidence – a serious accident that puts in hospital TCI team leader Min So-hee’s (Kwan Sun-young) taxi driver father, Min Yong-gun (Yoo Seung-mok).
All of this wraps up around the halfway point of episode 11, leaving another episode and a half of running time. Despite their successful efforts, the team is disbanded and its members are transferred to different places.
Yeon-ho winds up on a small island; after a girl disappears, he ropes in his former TCI crew for an island visit to solve the case. What follows is a stand-alone investigation that doesn’t connect at all with the heavily serialised events that have already transpired.

It’s an odd way to conclude the series, especially as there’s little in the way of driving, although the case itself, involving shifty villagers and a looming redevelopment deal, works just fine on its own merits.
Similarly, while narratively Crash left a lot to be desired, a lot of its individual elements worked quite well.
There was decent camaraderie between the leads and some strong car sequences – including a massive chase with enough police cars and flipped-over vehicles to recall The Blues Brothers.
There was also the amusing recurring special appearances of actress Shim So-young – one of the highlights of Taxi Driver as a toothy Chinese crime lord – who pops up playing five different characters in the show.

With TCI reinstated and Captain Jung Chae-man (Heo Sung-tae) back in charge after having been forced into early retirement, the series leaves the door open for a second season, without teasing some new mystery or characters.
The ratings are strong enough that a continuation could happen, but the end is structured in a way that it could also work as a fitting conclusion for the series as a whole, if needs be.
Crash is streaming on Disney+.


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The series about the fallout from a fatal car accident involving a police traffic crime investigator unspools effectively but ends abruptly


Lee Min-ki stars as a police traffic crime investigator whose role in a fatal road accident was not all it seems. We are drip-fed information about it until the truth emerges, at which point the plot takes a turn.


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.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}The series about the fallout from a fatal car accident involving a police traffic crime investigator unspools effectively but ends abruptly

The series about the fallout from a fatal car accident involving a police traffic crime investigator unspools effectively but ends abruptly