Control : First Impressions

There’s something missing when I watch CONTROL and I know exactly what it is – uniqueness.

When I watched these first two episodes of this drama, I failed to grow an attachment to the show. I failed to resonate with the characters, to know them, to want to solve the crimes with them. I don’t hate the characters but I don’t love them either. There’s a detachment, a dejavu to say. There’s not really that much character interaction on a personal level to understand them, the storyline for the past two episodes focuses so much on trying to solve the murder cases that you really don’t get an opportunity to sit down, take a breather, and observe them all in their own personal space.

CONTROL isn’t a bad drama, and yet it isn’t a great one. It’s an average police drama; a buddy one at that where a down on luck detective gets paired with a quirky, socially awkward, myopic university professor. It’s one of those dramas that you’ve seen over and over again, there’s nothing unique about the whole premise and so you watch it with as something to kill time with. How many times have we seen the murder out of revenge story? Or the murder for retribution? And while it is interesting to watch Naohito Fujiki walk around on crime scenes with such a detachment to the personal sensitivity of the issue, Nao Matsushita’s frantic lip biting, eyebrow raising, frazzled character seems so standard and run of the mill that you really don’t care for her at all.

There’s really nothing natural coming from the actors. Everything is exaggerated; the facial expressions, the reactions to sudden changes in the story, the emotional outbursts, and everything else. I don’t feel like I’m watching detectives solving a murder case, I feel like I’m watching actors play detectives solving a murder case. Yuu Yokoyama’s cadence when he speaks at times is so annoyingly slow that I just want to slap him upside the head and tell him to stop trying to act ‘cool’ and simply act like a ‘detective’. None of it is convincing me and it’s kind of frustrating to watch.

The music score also doesn’t seem to complement this drama at all. It’s fast, comical, and a bit out of place. I really do not understand if this drama is trying to be a comedy or a serious police drama.

I’m going to continue watching this drama. It doesn’t annoy me and I’m giving it room for the characters to develop and the actors to fall into place… I just hope that this trend doesn’t continue for all 10 or 11 episodes.