Glitch: Episodes 2-10 (Series Review)

by alathe

Glitch is a short series that covers a lot of ground. It’s about aliens. It’s about cults. It’s about gleefully believing in the impossible. It’s about being a directionless millennial with a bunch of weird hobbies that you pursue with your weird friends, only half of whom know how to drive (badly). But, most of all, it’s about those intense, borderline-romantic girl friendships that never truly die.

EPISODES 2-10 REVIEW

After Shi-guk disappears, Ji-hyo goes from zero to conspiracy in a matter of hours. She tumbles down a rabbit hole she’s pursued in the past… alien abduction. After all, with the police looking skeptical, and Shi-guk’s smart-watch tracker suggesting he fell off the face of the planet, someone’s got to consider outside options. So, she joins a UFO forum, urgently messages its moderator, Moonhole, and drops work to crash their next meetup. Hovering at the doorway, she bums a cigarette light from a rakishly beautiful woman outside: all ripped jeans, insouciant sunglasses, and eleventy-billion tattoos. Meet Moonhole (Nana), our co-star!

If only Ji-hyo had known her identity before she loudly derided the club as a bunch of greasy otakus. Now, she can only cringe as she’s introduced to a motley gaggle of adorkable nerds. There’s CAPTAIN PRICE (Tae Won-seok), a gentle giant notorious for having been a military man, though currently more invested in protein shakes than war stories. There’s CHO PHILLIP (Park Won-seok), whose hair is as long as his ability to lie is abysmal. Lastly, there’s the baby of the group, KIM DONG-HYUK (Lee Min-goo), most likely to be found painstakingly informing his mother that he can’t attend school today, as he’s busy exploring the mysteries of the universe.

Ji-hyo pays for her faux pas when the UFO club begins its most important duty: playing Mafia. (Ah, Mafia: the staple of every nerd society! For a show that’s primarily about aliens, they sure don’t skimp on the realism.) Here, Moonhole angrily denounces Ji-hyo as a liar, before beating a swift retreat on her scooter — whilst Ji-hyo tears up the pavement in pursuit. Turns out, the two have history. Ji-hyo finally recognizes Moonhole as HEO BO-RA, the friend she broke up with in high school. Back in the day, Ji-hyo was a UFO fiend. Hiding out in an old van, the girls bonded over tales of the extraterrestrial — until Bo-ra convinced Ji-hyo to huff glue. Ji-hyo blamed the subsequent stupor, in which she went missing for several days, on this. Still, those aliens she sees? They resemble a drawing the girls made together; Bo-ra was the inspiration behind the green helmet.

Bo-ra’s not eager to forgive, but, her viewers are hungry for prime paranormal content, and Ji-hyo, with her tales of preternatural boyfriend-loss, is a veritable cash cow. She’s willing to investigate — camera in hand. Their first port of call is Shi-guk’s apartment, which has been mysteriously cleared. Our heroines nab the keycode by posing as would-be buyers. However, Bo-ra barely has time to break out her trusty elecromagnetic scanner (a must-have accessory for every alien-hunting professional) before their estate agent (Baek Joo-hee) returns, with clients in tow.

The girls heroically squish themselves into the loft, but the newcomers are busy with their… cult ritual? Yep, you read that right. Lights dim. Projected stars flash, as the EMI device squeals. In heavy VR visors, the ritualists begin to chant: a prayer for ascension, followed by a harmonic, rallying cry of, “Sella!” So, you know. Just your regular landlord stuff.

Having hit the conspiracy jackpot, Bo-ra has her eyes on a bigger prize. The next step is obvious: tail the realtor. Wait — what does Ji-hyo mean, let’s call the cops? Bo-ra sputters in disbelief, as Ji-hyo loftily declares she can’t be trusted. After all, she has the world’s most boring man alive to locate. But, Bo-ra refuses to let Ji-hyo blame a several-day disappearance on glue she didn’t even sniff. In actuality, Bo-ra stumbled through the field for hours in search of her friend. Upon her return, she was slapped, blamed, and ditched. Now, Bo-ra turns her back on Ji-hyo.

But, not the investigation. On that, she’s going full throttle, roping the Captain in as replacement sidekick. Stalking their quarry, they learn that the realtor is SISTER SEO, secret cultist of the Church of the Divine Light: a happy-clappy congregation who love to laugh, and pray, and sing… in honor of their alien deity. Or rather, as they say, “The Light” — the words “UFO” and “aliens” being far too gauche. Determined that the world must know what weirdness goes on behind locked doors, Bo-ra poses as a churchgoer to infiltrate a ritual, video-streaming all the while. It’s more than even she, connoisseur of weird, was banking on. It certainly floors Ji-hyo, who gapes at the stream, equal parts impressed and terrified. As starlight flickers in darkness, Sister Seo chants before a rapturous crowd. Strange light halos her face as she looks up — and levitates into the air.

Ji-hyo is outraged that Bo-ra would put herself in peril, but her friend is triumphant: they’ve gained a new lead. His name is KIM CHAN-WOO (Go Chang-seok), supposed member of the cult — but, he’s better known in the UFO community by his handle, DIRECT KIM. Years ago, his daughter was kidnapped by the New Beginnings Peace Corp (NPC), a sub-group of the Church of Divine Light. He’s terse on the details, but he does have one thing going for him… he’s laughably easy to rob. Ji-hyo, having fully committed to the madness, nabs his hard drive, and the girls beat a laughing retreat via scooter. The drive contains copies of pencil drawings — one of which depicts the bridge where Shi-guk vanished.

It’s on: our heroines, armed with hastily-gleaned tips from YouTube (the first step to any crime is a can-do attitude), break into Sister Seo’s car to retrieve the dashcam. This would be easier if either of them had more than notional knowledge of how cars work. Also unhelpful is the sudden appearance of Sister Seo and her good chum Chan-woo. The latter has the look of a man watching toddlers finger-paint over the Mona Lisa — or, alternatively, a very tired infiltration agent witnessing two inept millennials grind his best-laid plans beneath their heels. Too bad: our heroines are relentless! As Sister Seo drives off in the car, the girls lie low in the trunk.

They stop at an out-of-the-way house. This is where Sister Seo looks after her dementia-ridden mother (Sohn Sook), who devours TV with wide eyes as our intrepid explorers approach. In the back room are the drawings from the hard drive. There’s also a photo album, which Bo-ra swipes. From this, they learn that Sister Seo’s charge is BAEK YOON-SEO, who was supposedly abducted by aliens in the 1970s. The drawings are hers… and she’s still prolific. After our heroines leave, the NPCs gather to witness a miracle — the holy mother has sketched the face of their messiah! You guessed it: it’s Ji-hyo.

Meanwhile, well-meaning cop Byung-jo is chasing the coattails of this mystery, aided by Se-hee. There won’t be much of them in this plot summary, primarily due to the fact that they’re invariably two steps behind everyone else. However, I want it on record that their interactions are adorable: from their relentless squabbling, to Se-hee’s insistence that she’s virtually a cop by dint of proximity. Currently, they’ve arrived at a similar conclusion to our leads: the NPC hideout appears to be at New Hope Psychiatric Hospital, the place in which Yoon-seo was treated.

Time for a field trip! The UFO Club — and Ji-hyo — squeeze into the Captain’s death-trap of a car, plugging along merrily at half the speed limit. Turns out, Ji-hyo has all the road rage of a geriatric snail. At the hospital, they are confronted by what will prove to be the group’s nemesis going forward: a shortish gate. Luckily, Philip is able to distract the guards with his deeply unconvincing depiction of a man whose car has broken down. Perhaps inevitably, this deception crumbles when he comes face to face with the NPC’s finest soldier, SISTER ABIGAIL (Jung Da-bin): a fervent-eyed, gun-toting girl whose every move screams “child of a cult.”

Our heroines are forced to split whilst Bo-ra explores the half-deserted hospital. Their working theory is that the NPC have been kidnapping people who were abducted by aliens; this guess is confirmed when she stumbles upon a room full of captives in VR masks. Soon, she’s rumbled by the Chairman of the Church, MOON HYUNG-TAE (Kim Myung-gon): the light-worshiping husband of Yoon-seo. She barely escapes with her life. Meanwhile, Ji-hyo has broken into a truck, which the girls attempt to use as an escape vehicle. Sadly, they are scuppered by their greatest enemy, the gate. Ji-hyo is taken hostage; she cries out for Bo-ra to save herself.

Far, far elsewhere, a very confused man in Thailand receives the worst wake-up call imaginable, after an apparent suicide attempt. It’s Shi-guk.

The NPC subject Ji-hyo to the virtual reality equivalent of a prybar, in the hopes of accessing her memories of the night she disappeared. She’s just like Yoon-seo, whose writings about her alien abduction provided the church with its holy text. But, Ji-hyo resists this psychological attack: the subtle approach has failed. Unfortunately, when all you have is medical equipment, every problem looks like an opportunity for invasive surgery. Messiahs, says Hyung-tae, exist to be sacrificed. Ji-hyo wakes to glaring disorientation and a bandaged scalp.

Also — to Sister Seo. At Bo-ra’s insistence, Chan-woo finally took action, persuading his cultist friend to visit the messiah. With the tenuous grasp on reality of someone anesthetized about ten minutes ago, Ji-hyo manages to fake-threaten Chan-woo with a scalpel, persuading the cultists to part in her wake. From here, she runs — straight into Bo-ra, against whom she later collapses into a messy hug. Chan-woo, meanwhile collides with someone else: Sister Abigail. Or, more accurately… his daughter, KIM YOUNG-GI.

Ji-hyo has a newfound hole in her head, and a lot of unanswered questions. Arguably, the solution is a medical check-up, but our heroines opt for the next best thing: hypnotism. With the help of her therapist, MA HYUNG-WOO (Kim Nam-hee), Ji-hyo accesses her sealed-off memories. The night she disappeared, she encountered her father canoodling with her soon-to-be stepmother. Anguished, she fled to the van. Here, she encountered a bright light — a force that invaded her head, and left a chip behind. The aliens, it seems, chose her. Later, she learns that she kept repeating one thing when she returned: come back.

Meanwhile, Shi-guk has returned to Korea. Ji-hyo listens, horrified, as he explains how he tried to kill himself… he thinks. He can’t remember. He wants to find his cat. Guiltily, Ji-hyo realizes that one could draw unflattering parallels with her quest to find him. Meanwhile, Chang-woo returns to the UFO club, dragging a belligerent Young-gi. She insists that she wanted to warn the messiah; the church have announced that Ji-hyo is dead, and they’re eager to make this lie a reality. Soon, they’ll hold a funeral — well, more like a celebration — in which their followers abandon their inferior meat-bodies and ascend. Chang-woo scoffs. He’s heard that before. What they mean is mass suicide.

Ji-hyo realizes they intend to use her alien chip like a beacon. Could it really have the power to attract UFOs? Fearing the fate of the Earth, Ji-hyo convinces Young-gi to take her to the memorial.

Meanwhile, the Church of Divine Light prepare for the end of the world. It’s standard formal event stuff, really: flower arrangements, choir recitals, poison capsules… Ji-hyo arrives in time to interrupt Hyung-tae’s announcement of her death. It’s a weird moment for her worshipers, but she’s got a perfectly plausible explanation. She… was resurrected! Let’s go with that! After a moment’s hesitation, the crowd goes wild. With flawless poise, Ji-hyo insists that she is ready to receive “the gospel” in order to call down Father Light and bring salvation.

Bo-ra elbows her way into an audience with the messiah. She’s terrified for Ji-hyo. Does she really think that she’s saving the world from destruction? Stung, Ji-yo recoils. Was Bo-ra lying when she said that she believed her about the aliens? In a spectacularly touching fashion, Bo-ra curses. She doesn’t care if the world ends. She just wants to save Ji-hyo. But, Ji-hyo won’t have it: she orders her newly-acquired flunkies to exile Bo-ra. Flung onto the wrong side of a very short gate, Bo-ra looks sadly to the sky… as her face is bathed in otherworldly light.

Bo-ra plunges into the woods, in pursuit of the light. She crashes into Young-gi, who joins her in the chase. Frantically, they tear through the trees, only to come across the source. It’s a man-made drone. Elsewhere, Ji-hyo is presented with the gospel: an intricate box, containing… absolutely nothing. There was no chip in her head, explains Hyung-tae. He’s disappointed too. He really had hoped that she was the messiah. But, now that she’s complicit in the deception, the least she can do is usher her followers to a happy death. With this, Ji-hyo falls to the floor, drugged, having committed the cardinal sin of K-drama: drinking a beverage in the presence of the enemy.

She wakes chained to the stage, in a luminescent dress that’d put a Barbie doll to shame, as Hyung-tae preaches mass suicide to a drugged-up crowd. Just as they raise the poison to their lips, she dazedly finds her voice. She’s not the messiah! Moments later, there’s a gunshot, and the light dies. Young-gi has shot down the drone. After this, it gets messy: Byung-jo enters the scene, gun blaring. Some run. Many, however, remain, to punish the fake messiah. Now, Bo-ra intercedes, shielding Ji-hyo as she tries to unchain her.

Amid the chaos, all remaining lights flicker out. First, in the field. Then, the blackout bleeds across the city. Splitting the darkness is an unearthly light, coming from… an unidentified flying object. Ji-hyo and Bo-ra are submerged in radiance, opening their eyes to a bright white world. Between them floats a gigantic, long-limbed creature with staring eyes. It swims toward Ji-hyo, lumpy finger outstretched — and extracts a piece of matter from her head. As the girls wake, they face one another and grin. They know what they saw.

In the end, the ringleaders of the church are arrested. All, that is, except Hyung-tae. He meets his end before Chan-woo’s rifle — though, not before Chan-woo tells his daughter to call her mother, and be well. Meanwhile, Ji-hyo is not necessarily okay, but, she’s happier than ever before. She and Shi-guk have broken up for good — amicably, this time. She’s moving away from home, into a new flat her parents are determined to buy, with Bo-ra at her side. Maybe they’ll investigate Bigfoot together.

Shi-guk, meanwhile, is doing great… besides the house-sized alien staring down at him. That might take some time to get used to.

Glitch is an unbelievably fun drama, with buckets of love for its characters. Its strongest point is the sparkling chemistry between its leads. Jeon Yeo-bin and Nana play off each other with glee, but they can rip your heart to pieces when the situation requires it. I’m still feeling pretty emotional about the part where Bo-ra tells Ji-hyo that the church may be fake, but they can carry on looking for UFOs together. It’s as if, just as the magic was ripped away, the two of them were able to preserve it for themselves, keeping the wonder alive in their own private world. These characters love each other, so much that they’re inexorably drawn within each other’s — sorry about this — orbit. It’s visible every time we see a shot of them sitting apart, only to move closer together. It’s clear every time they exchange looks of total understanding.

This show also managed to satisfyingly have its cake and eat it. Yes, the cult was built on lies. Still, UFOs exist. Ji-hyo’s aliens were a mashed-up series of childhood recollections that served to emphasize her emotional detachment, and to highlight the Bo-ra-shaped hole in her life. But they were also, the show suggests, a way for her brain to comprehend the unknown by replacing it with the familiar. In short, they’re an absence: a symbol of half-recollected trauma, but also a symbol of potential — the potential of the unknown and the alien, but also the potential for love and familiarity.

Ji-hyo’s explanation for the alien interference in her life is an analogy: when humans rescue sturgeons, they add a tracker before setting them free. Not to recapture them. Just to see how far they’ll go. It’s a lovely metaphor for a young woman realizing that her life doesn’t have to follow a specific plan. She can make new friends, and reconnect with old. She can ditch her boring boyfriend (sorry, Shi-guk). She can infiltrate cults! She can quit her job at thirty, and move out of her parents’ house — after realizing, finally, that her parents are just people, who love her more than she knows. Instead of straining to ignore the aliens in her peripheral vision, she can wave a hand over an electromagnetic scanner and hope to see the needle spike.

I wish there’d been a little more about Ji-hyo’s parents. For all that her relationship with them seems central to her character, their screentime is oddly peripheral. Likewise, Byung-jo and Se-hee exist at the edges of the drama — which would be fine, except for the constant sense that there’s more to them than we’re seeing. What, for instance, is the narrative purpose of Se-hee’s friendship with Ji-hyo? Is Se-hee simply a busybody, or does she consider her friendship with Ji-hyo more profound than it is? The story seems to waver on this point. The writers had plenty to cram into these ten episodes, so I can’t entirely fault them, but these background characters intrigue me precisely because they don’t always stay in the background.

In any case, that’s a small quibble, because I had a blast watching Glitch. Perhaps this drama about ridiculous millennials resonated so much with me because I, too, am a ridiculous millennial. Ji-hyo is at such a relatable in-between period in life. On the one hand, she has a steady job; on the other hand, she hates it and would rather quit. She still lives with her parents. She feels massive pressure to get married, but she also can’t quite believe it when her peers actually do it — aren’t they all still too young?

Then, she comes out of her shell and meets a series of bizarre and wonderful people who also don’t measure their lives by conventional standards. They have impractical jobs, and take Mafia way too seriously, and delight in their own enthusiasm and nerdiness. In this drama, being thirty is about beginning to find freedom — not the least, the freedom to be weird.

The great thing about these characters is that they are not competent. They spend most of their time overwhelmed, they’re generally just doing their best, and sometimes they’re kind of useless. And that’s okay! We’re all fumbling our way through life. Every so often, metaphorically speaking, we all struggle to scale a perfectly climbable gate. Even Chan-woo, whose practicality is generally juxtaposed with our heroines’ devil-may-care approach to forward planning, has his difficulties with being decisive. Still, the show seems to say, sometimes it’s enough to watch a Youtube tutorial, cross your fingers, and hope nothing explodes. It’s all you can do, in life and in cult-scuppering.

On that note, the humor of this show is absolutely killer. As a faintly slapstick buddy comedy, this show works incredibly well. The car-related incompetence made me giggle every time. The dialogue is masterful because of its simultaneous weirdness and mundanity: every so often, a character will say something that is such a non-sequitur, yet so reasonable, that it cracks me up completely. In short? This is a show that wants to entertain — and it does so with tongue-in-cheek flair.

 
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