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. Dr Brain: Apple TV+ sci-fi noir K-drama is thrilling to the end 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. Based on the Dr. Brain webtoon by Seoul artist and writer Hongjacga, the six-part series expertly balances science fiction, horror and mystery, then blends in a thriller element when Koh discovers that the police regard him as a murder suspect. As well as introducing action to proceedings, this also extends Koh’s plug-in-and-play method of intelligence gathering to South Korea’s criminal element. Not that this impresses cynical, suspicious detective Lieutenant Jiun Choi, invested with barely disguised disgust by Seo Ji-hye. Koh’s radical crime-solving methods may never catch on, not least because of the disconcerting, mind-warping hallucinations they encourage. Seeing a host of cockroaches charging up your trouser legs would leave anybody on the launch pad to lunacy. ‘Visions of sublime creation’ There’s nothing quite like spending time with Professor Brian Cox for making one feel utterly irrelevant. How small our squabbles seem, how tawdry our bickering, when he sets off among the stars to explain how we and everything around us came to be. His latest travelogue, Universe (from BBC Earth, on Cable TV channel 721, myTV Super channel 401 and Now TV channel 220), is a five-part jaunt across what he calls the “dark, cold and lifeless ocean” that surrounds us. And even if he isn’t actually hitching a ride on the back of the Hubble Space Telescope, he has plenty of spectacularly crafted CGI images with which to dazzle us. If being wide-eyed has a sound, it’s the sound of Cox in awe of “visions of sublime creation” from billions of years ago. Universe is a joyride through “images from the edge of time”, some of which are reaching us from not long after the Big Bang, when the cosmos was still working out what to put where. But there’s more to the series than a collection of pretty postcards. Plain-speaking Cox, who makes the ineffable graspable, is on a quest to wind back time to establish how the universe was formed. And it’s a mission sure to render us galactically gobsmacked.