What a viewApple TV+ horror sci-fi K-drama Dr Brain gets inside your head with Lee Sun-kyun’s mad doctor and his brain syncs

Dr Koh Se-won could hardly be accused of minding his own business in Dr Brain, the first Korean-language production from Apple TV+.

With the complete series one now binge-watch-ready, viewers can appreciate the true horrors of availing yourself of what you wish for – when what you wish for is access to the minds and messy memories of other people.

Having started out as a friendless child unable to empathise with his kindergarten mates, Koh (Lee Sun-kyun) eventually channels his lack of social skills into a similarly lonely adulthood, although puzzlingly he does manage to acquire a wife and son along the way. So perhaps there is someone for everyone.

Anyway, what passes for happiness for this research-obsessed, laboratory-animal-killing scientist – who becomes an authority on the workings of the human brain and “the abyss of human consciousness” – can’t last. Wife and child are lost; and to find out what happened to them, and bring them back, after a fashion, Koh must wire up his head to those of others (living and recently deceased) to extract their thoughts and impressions: an outrageous brain hack, but not one that forces him to consider seriously any sort of ethical dilemma. So much for privacy laws.

Lee plays Koh in fittingly robotic style, the doctor, whatever his anguish, hardly deserving of sympathy when he treats every “brain sync” as mere data recovery from a crashed hard drive. That is until he breaks down when assailed by a soup of visions and recollections, some of them his own.