I'll start without spoilers and provide a warning when the spoilers start.

This drama could have been a very successful average thriller or it could have been an extraordinary revenge story. But instead horrible writing, outrageous plotting and some, frankly, troubling moral backlighting led to the only drama I've ever watched in my life that actually kept me awake because of how angry I was.

And it is hard not to focus on the troubling moral themes when I think about this drama. However the reality is that these troubling moral themes are directly responsible for the otherwise inexplicably bad storytelling decisions. I can't read the writer's mind, but choices were made that were supported by blatant moralizing to the point that one assumes the writer had an Opinion.

When Blind began you already knew that one of those battered boys from the hellish orphanage was involved somehow in what was going on. In the first episode we're introduced to very heavy material and a seemingly delicate approach to its attendant issues.

However, as the story progressed I came to realize that the writer didn't seem to view the adult survivors who endured that hell as actual people. Not in the sense that the other characters were. This is never stated explicitly. But more often than not these adult survivors were half-wrought caricature villains or, rarely, caricature victims who had lost most personhood in their embodiment of their trauma. And even when they were portrayed as human, time and again I felt a divide between them and the characters who were "normal." Like a black uncrossable chasm of wrongness would forever separate normal society from the survivors of unspeakable abuse so much so that those survivors simply couldn't be part of society. Not that they shouldn't, or ought to barred from it, but that they were so broken that they were incapable and it was frankly burdensome to society for them to try. This wasn't some megaphone message or anything, but the omnipresence of this mentality shone through the writing like a sizzling neon sign on a foggy hillside.

An argument could be made that these adult survivors were all depicted as irreparably damaged by their time at the orphanage to really convey how brutal the abuse was, or abuse in general. And I might even agree with that if it weren't for all the other things I had begun to notice. Too, I might not even have cared had the writer not deleted the final episode in place of a flaccid PSA about how murder is bad.

Here begin spoilers:

There were times when this was almost really good. The backstory of the abusive orphanage and the way every single juror was connected was very cool. The tiny pieces of information we received made us desperate for more, the relentlessly gloomy atmosphere just built and built...

The boys in the orphanage were organized by number. In the flashbacks we can identify them by the numbers on their shirts. Boy Number 11 is calm, paternal, self-sacrificing and noble. Boy Number 13 is characterized early on as somewhat off, perhaps a bit sociopathic, perhaps just angry and broken. Regardless, he's definitely unhinged and worrisome. When we originally suspected that Taec Yeon's character Song Joon was Boy Number 13 and thus possibly the serial killer, his brother and many others all suspected him as well. Though not for that reason, as no one else knew that he was possibly number 13. They suspected him because he already had a history of being generally violent and unhinged.

I feel like I should add a sidebar here that none of the characters, from about the last quarter of the drama onward, behaved with even a modicum of logical consistency. But I'll get to that in detail later.

When we first got the twist that Song Joon's adoptive brother Song Hoon was actually one of the survivors of that hellish orphanage, the kind and warm Boy Number 11, and not Song Joon, (who was just the biological son of terrible parents) it was a great twist. At that time I figured the plot was going to progress as follows (please indulge my creative liberties for a moment): Song Hoon, aka Boy Number 11, knows that his orphanage brother, the worrisome Boy Number 13, is the real serial killer out there wreaking havoc and getting his pound of flesh in murderous, gleeful bulk. However Boy 13's chaotic rampage is ruining Sung Hoon's (Boy 11) carefully planned scheme to expose the orphanage and get justice, given that he was a judge and, for about eighty percent of the drama, portrayed as an unwavering crusader for justice. However he had vowed to protect Number 13 when they were children so now he finds himself in this troubling situation where he feels obliged to continue doing so. And also is sort of forced to "use" Number 13's wonton murders in his plan. A thing that seemed to be torturing him. This made logical sense. It fit the events, it fit his character, it fit what hints we were seeing on the screen, I felt it had even been foreshadowed a bit. And in the end, I thought, the big issue for him was going to be which brother he would choose to protect, the murderous and unhinged Number 13 whom he had vowed to protect when they were children, or his adoptive brother Song Joon who worshipped and admired him. Which would he choose? Could he choose? That's where I thought we were going. But no. This is very much not what happens.

For one thing, every plot twist except the revelation about Sung Hoon was not a plot twist. It was the writer changing his mind mid way and then failing to rewrite previous episodes before they were filmed. So the twists contradict previous narrative and then clumsily try to make up for it. The absurd planted memories thing is the best example. We were given Sung Joon struggling with vivid memories of his time in that orphanage and then later the writing tried to convince us that not only had these been planted memories (???) but that this somehow served Sung Hoon's plan. (It didn't, trust me. According to this writer Sung Hoon only did that to mess with Sung Joon because of who his parents were.) That confused me. How could a person who treated other children with uncompromising compassion choose to treat another child with cruelty? To punish that child's parents? Perhaps I could believe that. But how could the same boy who protected other vulnerable children in the same breath mistreat a vulnerable child? It would have made more sense according to his character up to that point for him to view little tiny Sung Joon as another vulnerable victim. After all, the monsters who had been abusing the orphans were Sung Joon's biological parents. And they hadn't exactly been treating Sung Joon well.

What's more interesting is that prior to the revelation that he was not Number 13, the idea presented was that Sung Joon was violent and unhinged BECAUSE he was Number 13 and all those bad things had happened to him. When they revealed that all those memories had been planted it became this bizarre thing where, at first, it attempted to the prove the fallacy by saying, look: even when the memories are false it still makes a person unfit for society and inherently dangerous. But then later they just forgot about it entirely. Like the fact that he found out that the memories were false just deleted his violent tendencies.

Let's talk about Sung Hoon for a moment. This was one of the clumsiest and most absurd attempts I have ever seen at a complex and nuanced character. And the actor cannot be blamed. He did a remarkable job despite the horrific writing. This whole thing was honestly a criminal waste of a very talented actor's time and energy. This wasn't complexity. It was a writer who couldn't figure out who this character was from one episode to the next. A writer who couldn't comprehend the psychological damage and emotional trauma of profound abuse beyond "abused = broken and deranged, right?" Is he a staunch and unyielding defender of justice? Does he want to stop Number 13 from hurting people because hurting people is bad? Or does he agree that those people needed to be hurt? Is he conflicted about how much he loves his brother Sung Joon because it makes Number 13 feel abandoned? Or does he revel in the pain he causes the innocent relatives of his abusers? Is he trying to help people, like the troubled girl he seemed interested in sponsoring, or does he have a psychopathic lack of feeling for all life as we were meant to believe when he signed off on the cold-blooded murder of those two women? Was all of this a game to him, or was it justice for which he would gladly bleed or give his life? These weren't questions that were meant to be ambiguous. The writer emphatically stated that each of the above was the one single truth at various phases of the final act. This could have been layered and possibly, possibly interesting and even believable but instead it was so contradictory that it seriously destroyed my suspension of disbelief more than once. And Sung Hoon was the ONE character they had to get absolutely right. But they bungled so much that it was, frankly, embarrassing to watch.

Morally speaking, Sung Hoon represents a significant part of my biggest issue with this drama. Aside from the writer's inability to manage the writing of a killer's motives, it also seemed that they were relying on the viewer's understanding that he was too ruined to be good. The fact that they ineptly tried to make him conflicted while also embodying this idea made him an incomprehensible knot of confused contradictions. The writer wanted him to be sympathetic, but, you see, murder is bad and so he also had to be the epitome of evil. The nuance attempted in the writing of Sung Hoon had the delicacy of a sledge hammer. One gets the impression that the writer couldn't understand why someone would want to murder. Anyone who wants to murder is pure pitch black evil, plain and simple. Which idea was beaten into the narrative like an evangelical preacher pounding on his pulpit.

The writer bent the narrative into outrageous contortionist positions to really drive home the idea that Sung Hoon was a sadistic, inhuman monster. But after his arrest there was very, very little time spent getting into the crimes of those who looked the other way when things were happening at that orphanage. Almost no time was spent examining (or condemning) the deep, insidious and pervasive evil of that level of indifference. And the reality that every female orphan was sent to the "vacation home" never to be seen or heard from again was just not really a huge issue to the characters or writer. Sure, there was a montage where lots of people connected with the orphanage were rounded up by the police, but this felt like an afterthought. Their crimes certainly didn't seem like much of anything compared to an adult survivor committing murder. These were all just a bunch of average lowlifes. Sung Hoon was, apparently, Satan incarnate. Best exemplified in the social worker's bizarre moral contradictions by which she, without hesitation, completely washed her hands of Sung Hoon, dropping him like he was on fire, but could still socialize comfortably with a person who had done nothing all those years ago while watching young boys scream for help as they were being dragged through the forest by grown men. What's more, this person had "foreseen" that those boys would become murderers and had advised the evil guards to kill them there and then. And the social worker knew this.... It's hard to decide if her character is morally bankrupt or the writer.

Towards the end, the writer began the Campaign Against Murder™, and thus we were served the inane, scoldy moral superiority of the social worker (a likable character prior to this) who took it upon herself to carry out some of the most empty and imperious exhibitions of moralistic canting that the writer could think of. So egregiously meaningless and self-congratulatory as to feel like they meant for her to look absurd. I kept waiting for someone to tap her on the shoulder and say "hey, you're being both naïve and arrogant." Given my heightened level of annoyance at this point, it had begun to feel like the mere fact that she hadn't been one of the abused orphans was enough to gold plate any effort she made.

According to the moral landscape of this drama, the absurd measures she took to "help the victims" were going to be more effective in raising awareness than Sung Hoon's revenge plan. By the way, placing those two things on the table as the only two possible solutions for a problem that ugly and complex made me want to dropkick my computer into high earth orbit. For one thing, half-wrought moralizing has no place in a bleak revenge drama. You can't hold up a violently abused child and a horrendous murder and pronounce "one does not justify the other and that is the end of this conversation you can all go home I've fixed society." Unless a writer has the chops to extract the really uncomfortable layers of moral, ethical and social nuance in a story like that, they have no business touching it with a ten-foot pole.

Too, the core premise of the title, that evil can survive when people simply turn a blind eye to bad things, was never properly explored. The people who did that, who looked away or who got scared or who were paid to keep silent were ultimately treated by the narrative as victims themselves, with perhaps a little shame on their heads but nothing, nothing compared to Boy Number 11, obviously. Those other people didn't do anything bad, they just watched as little children were chained up in their underwear, beaten half to death, sexually abused, starved, passed around like candy and sometimes deliberately murdered and all they did was, you know, nothing. I mean, that's completely understandable, right? Lots of regular people would probably do nothing, right? Right? It's unnatural and unreasonable to be so angry about that you want to murder. Right?

On top of that, when Sung Hoon was revealed to have endured a long history of self harm, his brother, the "hero" of the story called him an evil coward. And said that not even this (or a suicide attempt) was enough to make up for what he had done. Which heavily suggested that people who self harm are not suffering from crippling emotional pain but are actually overwhelmed by guilt for real crimes. And thus self harm, too, can be seen as another indicator that the person is unfit for society.

The writer did convey that the monsters who ran the orphanage treated their own children like angels but the orphans like dogs because to them orphans were dogs. Which is, incidentally, another facet of the same problem that created such a clunky plot as this. This idea that those orphans were so removed from society that "good" people could treat them in ways too unspeakable to recount without, somehow, it having any effect on their humanity, again, strains credulity. But there's something ugly there that I can't be bothered to explore. Something about when the orphan survivors misbehaved innocent lives were lost, but when the regular people misbehaved they only actually caused harm to the lives of the nameless orphans...

There was something in there about the cycle of violence, but the credibility of such a message was lost in the noise of garbage.

I liked all three characters for most of the drama. But when Sung Hoon was revealed to be the killer, the way the other two treated him and the mentality behind that treatment was so inhumane and contradictory to their previous selves that not only could I not take it seriously from a storytelling standpoint but I no longer respected them as human beings. As far as I was concerned they could both go walk off a cliff and I wouldn't care.

Maybe now that I've got all that out of my system I can actually move on with my life.