There are some shows who spend too much of their first episodes explaining the situation. But sometimes the first episode of a show sets up the barest of story structure. That’s what we get with the Korean thriller Gold Land on Hulu.
Opening Shot: A van drives down a rainy road at night. A woman listens to a voice on a flip phone, then tosses it out the window. She breathes heavy as if she’s in a panic. There is a casket in the back of the van.
The Gist: Kim Hee-joo (Park Bo-young) wakes up in the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, Lee Do-kyung (Lee Hyun-wook), an airline pilot that everyone calls “the Captain.” She’s greeted by the landlady at the door, telling her that Hyun-wook is three months behind on rent.
He’s currently in Thailand but due to come back to Seoul any time. Hee-joo works at the airport as a security screener, examining packages that come off incoming planes. As she walks through the terminal where she works, she sees a strange man asking for her. When she talks to her supervisor about it, the supervisor said the man identified himself as her uncle, which they both knew was a lie.
Meanwhile, in Bangkok, Hyun-wook is accosted by thugs associated with a loan shark named Park Ho-cheol (Lee Kwang-soo). He’s owed money to He-cheol for about a year due to gambling debts. Because of that debt, a deal is proposed. He is supposed to fly in a casket, and it’s up to him to not only get it past security, but help transport it to the designated spot in South Korea.
For the security part, he turns to Hee-joo, who has to switch shifts with someone in order to receive the casket. Despite the alarms going off, she manages to get it through the x-ray machine and it’s loaded into a van. Hyun-wook ends up hijacking the van, telling He-cheol that he’ll exchange it for cancellation of his debt and a billion won.
Hyun-wook calls Hee-joo, who already had to abandon her apartment when thugs came looking for her, to meet him at a remote farm. He tells her that he’s about to make a deal for the casket which will allow them to start a new life, but if he doesn’t come back she should take the van and hide it. Inevitably, that’s what happens, and she drives the van to an abandoned mine shaft that she once visited as a child and holds terrible memories. Then she finds out what’s in the casket.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Written by Hwang Jo-yoon, Gold Land has a hint of Breaking Bad to it, as Hee-joo will do anything to protect what’s in the casket.
Our Take: One of the things that made us scratch our heads as we watched the first episode of Gold Land is that the only thing that establishes Hee-joo’s loyalty to Hyun-wook is that we’re told that they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. Viewers aren’t given a scintilla of history between the two, so it’s strange to us that Hee-joo would follow what Hyun-wook tells her to do to the degree she does, and she barely pushes back when he won’t explain why.
It makes for a weird dynamic in the first episode, because we’ll now have to believe that, once Hee-joo realizes that she’s now sitting on millions of dollars’ worth of gold that she’s going to protect it, despite the huge amount of danger it puts her in. We just wonder why she would even do that. Is it loyalty to Hyun-wook, a desire to sell the gold bars off herself, or some other misguided objective? Perhaps she thinks that Ho-cheol is going to kill her, given what she thinks happened to Hyun-wook.
But all we know about Hee-joon is that she led a pretty quiet life ahead of this, and that the mine shaft incident from her childhood left her deep emotional scars. Given that the entire first episode merely sets up the fact that she is now in possession of a couple of hundred pounds of gold, we’re not sure if we’re going to buy into what’s motivating her to hang onto this very dangerous casket.
Performance Worth Watching: Park Bo-young is appropriately scared and strong as Hee-joo. We just wish her character pushed her boyfriend more to find out why he’s in the situation he’s in.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Hee-joo opens the casket and finds it’s filled with gold bars.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Lee Kwang-soo as Park Ho-cheol, because he makes Ho-cheol such an over-the-top angry thug it’s almost ridiculous.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find, mainly because the first episode has such a basic, set-up-the-premise structure that there isn’t much that stood out as being clunky or eye-rolling.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the less-than-compelling first episode, we get the feeling that Gold Land is going to kick into gear as an intriguing thriller. But the first episode doesn’t do the rest of the season many favors, as it only sets up the most basic story framework.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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