Signal: Episode 1

October 14, 2019 4:43 PM - Season 1, Episode 1

Profiler Park Hae-young hears a man calling his name through a discarded two-way radio. The voice starts talking about an unsolved crime. (Korean drama, Netflix)

Dramabeans episode 1 recap:
Heart-pounding and intense, tvN’s newest crime thriller Signal pulls out all the stops in its premiere, and boy am I diggin’ it. An unexpected connection is made when a two-way radio links the past to the present, adding to the already eerie mystery that surrounds a cold case. When a dogged profiler pairs up with a detective determined to get to the bottom of the truth, you can rest assured that they won’t call it quits anytime soon.

Even with all the information crammed into the first hour, Signal does a fine job of laying down the groundwork for what should be an exciting series ahead. Ratings-wise, the premiere pulled in an impressive 5.145%. All aboard for Signal!

posted by oh yeah! (5 comments total)

I went to a fan-discussion panel at DragonCon this year for 'K-dramas you should be watching' -- most of them were streaming on Viki rather than Netflix, but I think Signal must have been added to Netflix recently, as it wasn't there last I looked.

I'm not planning on doing a post for every episode, the Dramabeans recaps are way better than any attempt of mine would be. But, since it's a time travel murder mystery, I figure it's best to have an episode 1 thread first before I move on to watching the rest of the season and posting the full-season thread.

I enjoyed the first episode; it definitely got me hooked to want to go on and find out what happened to Lee Jae-han back in 2000, and whether the 2015 characters are going to be changing the past and retaining memories of multiple pasts a la 'Frequency.'

Oddly, it seemed as if Netflix blurred out nearly every photograph that appeared on-screen. Copyright protection gone wild? I would have thought they'd have cleared the Batman image since it was referenced in dialogue.
posted by oh yeah! at 5:11 PM on October 14, 2019

I enjoyed the first episode, and I wasn't sure if it was going to be a season focusing on a single case. It looks like not.

The blurred photos are a weird thing. Are there particularly stringent likeness rights in S. Korea? It seems like a picture of George Clooney as Batman could have been cleared, so I wasn't sure if this was just an intentional affect that might somehow pay off in the narrative later.
posted by figurant at 8:06 PM on October 14, 2019

It doesn't seem like the blurring happened in the original S. Korea broadcasts, judging from the unblurred screenshots in the Dramabeans recap they showed the Batman photo. That's what makes me think it was some kind of screw-up in the encoding of the video files delivered to Netflix, by human or bot.
posted by oh yeah! at 8:20 PM on October 14, 2019

Finished the season last night -- I feel like I should put a warning in this thread that the very end was a bit of a let-down, but, overall it was a very suspenseful and moving series. Full season thread posted now for more spoilery thoughts.
posted by oh yeah! at 12:17 PM on October 20, 2019

Oh hey, I didn't realize there was also an ep 1 thread! I've already made my general thoughts about the show known on the full series post.

Regarding the blurring of photos:

I haven't watched this drama on Netflix, but I have watched a couple dramas on Netflix (notably one of my forever faves, Reply 1997) that I had watched when they were airing on their original broadcast, and it seems like it's a copyright or permission thing, since it only happened when it was perhaps a TV show playing or a poster for a movie or something. So the production company may have gotten the right to use that image when it originally aired, but not for worldwide release on Netflix.

The same is true for music. I've noticed that some of the dramas don't have the music used in the original broadcast and will be switched out for something super generic, which was a little disappointing especially for some shows that go back in the past when a particular song is extra meaningful, so I wonder if that happened for Signal, too.
posted by paisley sheep at 12:41 AM on October 21, 2019 [1 favorite]