Title: Hayabusa Shouboudan / ハヤブサ消防団
Rating: 7 /10
Recommended for:
For those who like suspense dramas that start slow but turn up the pace from the midpoint and are fans of the cast especially Nakamura Tomoya and Kawaguchi Haruna
*Do not read further if you do not want to see the spoilers!
Liked:
- While the first three episodes of this drama was slow-burn (at least to me) and I almost felt like dropping it, the tide turned, thankfully in time to keep me engaged enough to last till the end. If you can be patient enough to last through the lull at first, what happened from Ep 4 onwards should be considered fairly rewarding.
Suspense stories set in a fairly enclosed and secluded local community are not rare but there is a reason for such a location to be chosen as the stage of this case. I think that the horror of what happened actually lies not in who killed who but rather what prompted these people to do what they did and the potential effect of the evil plot if it had been successful. I personally don't quite like cult-themed stories but the build-up to what resulted in the state of affairs and the careful planning to seize an enclosed community for the cult's selfish goal were really chilling to watch.
I haven't read the original novel by Ikeido Jun but after doing some research, it looks like the settings were slightly tweaked here and there although the general direction and key elements of the story should be largely the same. As such, for those who may have read the novel before, the drama should hopefully give you some surprises here and there and still make it worthful for you to sit through.
- For fans of Nakamura Tomoya, it should be very satisfying for you to see him as the lead and the narrator. From a struggling author who was quite helpless about his life to becoming a local hero to save the community from the "mental invasion" by a cult, I think he managed to portray this transition pretty convincingly. Kawaguchi Haruna's character started off as pretty mild but when the big reveal happened at mid-point, that was when it got way more interesting. A very nice deviation from her usual image and style although I was hoping that Aya could be an even more extreme or evil person.
Disliked:
- As I mentioned above, the slow-start style of handling suspense dramas is always a bugbear these days because for people who don't have the patience to stay on or are not convinced that things could get better (and if so, when will that happen), they would most likely not hang around to watch the whole drama. That is why there is a need to keep the interest going even if it takes as many as 3 to 5 episodes to get the engine up to full speed. Perhaps a more palatable method would be to limit the background setting and build up to be contained within 2 episodes or drop more hooks right from the start to lure the viewers to hang on longer for the next episode.
