Post #3707610

Holy fucking shit what was that? Absolutely not where I expected this series to go in season one. It doesn’t get totally away from the whole white savior thing as one might like, and the one black character on the show had suspiciously little to say about the whole situation but holy cannoli they talked about domestic slavery of Koreans in the US Army. This is a thing that I did not know about but in retrospect absolutely does not surprise me and I am going to go digging into that now. I have many questions about how this worked in practice. So, for just fuckin taking that shit straight on. I’m pretty impressed. Young Hi does feel very flat, and I feel like it might be leaning on stereotypes about Korean culture to justify why she wants to keep being a slave but I don’t know if that’s actually true. Her motivations aren’t really considered by any of the characters, or why she might do something like jump off the bus and hike back to be a slave. I can think of some, especially considering how they depicted Seoul, but they never really consider that explicitly. In lieu of a letter grade, I officially rate this episode “Jesus fucking Christ they talked about slavery being relatively widely tolerated in the US Army in the 1950s in episode five of season one of this television show in 1972; this would set the entire conservative media ecosystem’s hair on fire for months if this was a new episode of a show today and they did it in episode five”.