What a view | Taiwanese crime drama The Victims’ Game gets off to a grisly start on Netflix
- An unlikely pair of investigators – a forensic scientist with Asperger’s and a manipulative journalist – team up against a killer
- Plus, Amazon Prime Video’s Tales from the Loop explores the possibility of parallel histories and the nature of reality
Viewer advisory: please observe a reasonable break between dining and attempted digestion of the opening episode of Taiwanese crime drama The Victims’ Game (Netflix, arriving April 30). Scenes of a grisly nature may have an adverse effect on lunch.
No such difficulties will be experienced by hard-core fans of the finest forensic-investigation thrillers – Silent Witness, CSI, Dexter, A Touch of Cloth – as they pit their detection wits against a distinctly odd couple who have freshened up the old “unlikely-partners-in-crime-solving” theme.
Swinging microscope and fingerprinting kit on behalf of the boys in blue is maverick forensic scientist-detective Fang Yi-jen (Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan), whose Asperger’s syndrome contributes to his outsider status among colleagues and everyone else he meets. He goes into strictly off-the-record business with investigative journalist Hsu Hai-yin (Tiffany Hsu Wei-ning): arrogant, ambitious and unscrupulous, Hai-yin is resourceful where Yi-jen is overcome by debilitating stress and nervous tics; manipulative and brash where he is marginalised and bullied.
Both, however, are fighting the good fight, even if it’s from opposite directions and for motives that set them on an inevitable collision course. On top of all that, Yi-jen has an additional dose of neurosis in the form of his missing daughter, who has somehow been implicated in illegal goings-on. And his best bet for finding her is – much to his annoyance – Hai-yin.
As for the victim of what looks like a gruesome suicide, she appears to have been a lonely, written-off singer. But as the story unfolds, the investigators find themselves suddenly up against a serial killer. The game is on.