Tunnel season 1

A thai series. It was going to be such a positive review, I was rather enthusiastic despite a few little things that I could overlook, but then I watched the last episode and the disappointment clouded everything else, it is so wrong to leave it like that… it’s a real shame because this series was so good, very well done, and the actors that played Thanthai and Danika were really good, I liked them a lot, specially Thanthai. Everything was done well… and then they overlook the story making sense, like it was a small detail that didn’t much matter…

I mean, of course I wanted a happy ending, it’s just that to me this is not at all a happy ending, it’s just a mess. I will not watch it again or recommend it. 

I’ll go in more details about the ending after I’ve written about all the episodes, which by the way are written as I was watching them, so in the first I still didn’t know anything that happened later…

Ep 1 we see a cop getting hit on the head, but then we go back to 8 months ago when cop Peera saw the body of the first murdered girl. Strangled, left on a field. In these 8 months he started courting Panwad,  they got married and are a beautiful couple. At work it doesn’t go as well: other bodies are found, all girls, all strangled. One is Nan, a friend, and another is 26 y.o Usa, who left behind a grieving husband and child. 

Thanks to a couple of young girls looking for their missing dog, he finds Mr Prakan. He killed a few dogs already, and buried them in the garden. Prakan said  “do you need a reason to kill someone?” But they had to let him go because he had a witness giving him an alibi for all the murders…

They’ve found five bodies, but there were dots on their ankles - that the doctor’s report did not either mention - and their number moved up from 1 to 4 for the first four girls, then they found a fifth girl with six dots, so Pee thinks there’s another they haven’t found.

Pee is determined to catch him, and investigates alone late at night, and follows a shady figure inside a cave/tunnel, but gets hit on the head with a rock. When he finally wakes up, we can see his surrounding inside the cave blurring a little, something is happening. When he gets out, still dizzy, he walks back to the police station, only to find another man sitting at his desk, so he throws him out! Just like that. They were both like ‘you answer to me!’ No communication at all. The man then gets keys to get back in and then Pee handcuffs him to a cell… and leaves him there… is this really how they act? Thai men, or maybe just policemen? Or is it only because he’s still a bit confused? He doesn’t seem enough confused to change his behaviour…

That guy was Lt Thanthai, and he said so, and Pee acted like this! Pee starts looking around, there’s a phone he’s never seen before, and when he tries to call his boss, it’s a wrong number… then he notices many things changed, machines he’s never seen, like a fax stating that Peera as been appointed to that station in May 2018, while to him it’s 1986… (it’s 1985 or 86?)

2-

Pee doesn’t know any of these cops and doesn’t want to be a newbie. He figures if the tunnel brought him in the future, it’ll take him back too… but even after he runs through it again and again, he’s still in 2018.

It’s a nice scene when he and Wad are both in the tunnel but different years, so they can’t meet.

She found out she’s pregnant.

The inspector worked with him back then, but they haven’t recognized each other, well, Pee hasn’t, the other won’t think it’s the same man! 

He couldn’t arrest a woman who killed an abusive man in 1986, now he learns that she killed other two (or three) men and was in a mental hospital before killing herself with a pencil left by criminologist Dr Danika. Now this criminologist will assist the police in their future cases. Neither Pee or Thanthai think she’ll be of help. She also teaches a class.

A leg with five dots is found.

3-

Pee doesn’t know modern ways of investigation, of course, like dna or missing persons database. Thanthai should work with him as partners but he acts like a real jerk, not listening to anything he says about the case and discarding all his questions, not even letting him ask the doctor anything…that’s not a detective, that’s an arrogant jerk who doesn’t care about the victims. He calls it nonsense without even hearing what it is.

Well, at least it’s comforting to see that the inspector doesn’t like Thanthai’s attitude either. 

Pee searches alone since nobody listens to him, and he finds her, the identity of their last victim, a girl who was almost killed 30 years before but survived, escaped, changed her name, but it appears that he found her again, and finished the job… The inspector learns of this, of the dots on the body, and wonders how could Pee know about it, since the old files got burned and only those who worked on it know the details. Pee says nothing, either he doesn’t want to appear crazy, or he actually thinks he took the place of someone else with the same name, since there is a new cop appointed to the station and a home rented in his name. 

They continue, investigating whoever might have been near her, and Pee has the bad habit of beating up whoever he slightly suspects of having killed her… 

Whenever they find some footage or stuff like that, they pass it on to Dr Danika, and from time to time she calls Thanthai with ideas. She helps, and they find the man who killed this woman, because she rejected him. Pee thinks he’s found his serial killer and can now go home to his wife.

4-

He can’t go back to his time, yet. 

Danika is Pee’s next-door neighbour.

Because of how Pee talked when they were drunk, saying his goodbye because he believed he was leaving for good, inspector Suchart now wonders… so he follows him; Pee was looking for information on his wife Panwad… so now Chart knows who is, and he cries, he thought he was dead, he searched for so long… Chart says the murderer was never caught, but the murders also stopped. There’s still the mystery of the policeman named Pee of this time…

They have a case of breaking and entering, they stop Thanwa as a suspect; while they’re alone, Pee gets him to talk, the boy promises not to run away and only go home to his 7-y-o sister, and tells them what the next target will be. None of the other cops believe it, so Pee goes there alone, and indeed he sees two guys escaping. Thanwa has been killed, and the little girl saw it all hidden in a wardrobe, and remained there for hours before they found her. Pee is so fed up that Thanthai keeps ignoring him that he confronts him and fists start flying before they’re separated. The poor girl is in shock and doesn’t talk. Thanthai calls Danika - who buys Ferrero Rocher for her ^_^ -  and keeps visiting her, and Thanthai hears her say that as a child she witnessed the murder of her parents and then stayed to see the house burning down and never said anything to anyone and she regrets it now, so the child speaks to her and it’s helpful to her, although I don’t think that much important to the investigation because I think the two guys, arrested for the thefts, accused each other of the murder as well. 

At the end, we see another girl has been killed, and the cops say that every time this happens Thanthai goes there even if it’s not his area because he thinks he knows who did it, a serial killer he caught a couple of years before, Prakan, but his partner let him get away… 

5-

or so the cops say, but what I saw is that the guy stabbed two cops and vanished. We also see that Than became a cop because when his grandpa died he learned that his mom had been murdered, didn’t die of an illnesss, so he swore to catch him.

Pee finds out that the other Pee of this time is the guy who was driving fast the night he got out of the tunnel, when he first arrived in this time. 

A guy has been murdered, a fighter probably caught by surprise, so they investigate everyone in that diner, or whatever it is. Nobody can come and go because it’s raining like crazy and the water is already so high that cars can’t move, so the other cops can’t join them. 

And yet Danika does…

For a while Pee and Than interrogate those people alone, only sending messages with their boss because of the bad reception due to the awful weather. Then Danika arrives saying the culprit has been caught trying to escape, so they’d relax; Pee does not believe in what she does, he’s old school, he uses fists, he doesn’t believe in observing and profiling… he is rude to Danika every time he sees her, and says things like women should stay away from police business, stuff like that. 

It’s Than that finds evidence of what the cops will find out investigating. That the teacher killed him because when he was in the army with his son, that guy beat his son to death, brutally, he liked to beat people up. The old teacher wanted to forget about it, but that guy even now didn’t have the slightest remorse, even laughing about it, so he followed him into the toilet and killed him.

Thanthai empathize with him, even says out loud that he also wants to kill his mother’s murderer, but that’s not the right path, and the teacher cries, but when he picks up the knife again to kill himself, it’s Danika who launches forward to stop him.

Suddenly there’s a cop with handcuffs to take him away? 

It’s a very cute scene when Than cleans the blood in her hand, they’re so cute :-)

6-

Pee keeps investigating cop Pee’s disappearance, while Than asks Danika’s help with Prakan, and since I didn’t recognize his father, only now I realize he must have been that child, in that case Pee investigated, the woman who left a husband and a child… and Pee is not interested in this dead woman, he doesn’t know it might be the same murderer but still… he seems to think that case is closed but he should know it’s not. 

This ep’s case is of a poor girl whose identity has been stolen: many people and banks insist she owes them money, her fiancée left her and another guy said he was Marisa’s boyfriend, but not hers, the other girl’s using her name.

There were other victims, one girl even killed herself; they investigate and find the girl that stole their identity using all the information they gave her when trying to buy a home for them and their fiancée. 

Thanthai receives a call for the inspector and finds the dead body of this age’s real Peera.

7-

Thanthai finds two wallets of the same man? He doesn’t know what to think so he keeps it a secret, and calls the doctor there to look at the body. Pee and Chart keep looking for him, not knowing he’s dead.

The three of them meet where dead-Peera once worked, so Pee tells him someone stole his identity… at least showing that he doesn’t know he’s dead.

Thanthai talks about it with Danika, then keeps investigating with Pee. Dead-Peera was investigating the serial killer case from 30 years ago. There’s finally a confrontation between Pee and Thanthai, Pee tries telling him the truth and of course Than arrests him. He must think again when Chart shows him a picture of them together 30 years before, and then Thai’s father comes in and they recognize each other, and so Pee now knows Thai is Usa’s son. 

8

Pee, Thanthai and Danika think it’s the same Prakan that killed back then and also now. He was 18 when Pee suspected him. 

When they investigate a series of fires, Pee gets injured saving Thanthai, maybe  he would have for everyone, but he feels more responsible for him now that he knows he’s Usa’s child, that he held when he was little.

They find the kid that loves fires and arrest him. Thai and Danika like each other, and he smiles when he sees her. 

The burnt shop was the one Panwad used to work in, and so they learn that eventually she married again, and Pee is upset. They talk to the man and discover they never married and that she already had a child, a little girl, but she died 20 years ago in an accident. He’s devastated, but there’s a new murder, Prakan again. (Is Danika his daughter? I thought not at first because I thought her parents died in a fire, but we see she has a whistle now, like the one Panwad gave Pee, so it must have been her adoptive parents who died in a fire) 

9

Intense episode, another girl is murdered and left near where Usa was found. Prakan sends Thai a phone and calls him to taunt him from time to time. Prakan was in a mental hospital for 8 years, brought there by his mother because he had killed his younger sister - even though it was her, his mother, that gave him an alibi when Pee questioned him years ago. In a phone call, Prakan says he killed the last one but not Tohroong… and like I feared, we see that the doctor is the other murderer. He was playing too nice to be real, he had to be a murderer.

When Prakan tells Thai what if the next body he found was the woman he loves, Thai starts calling Danika and rushes to her place, worried .-)

10

Doctor Thiti and Danika both agree on the two-murderers theory - he would know - but the two men want Prakan. When Prakan calls again, Danika tells him he believes him; Prakan knows who she is because Thai led him to her… I think. Pee scolds her, thinks she has no feelings and cares not for the victims but only of her research. Danika talks to Thiti and he suggests playing bait, so she does, she puts makeup on, wears a red miniskirt, curls her hair and wears her whistle…

Thai says Pee’s daughter was adopted in England, that’s true, I had forgotten about that.

Danika gave an interview saying on tv where Prakan would kill next, then walks there at night alone… the guys learn about it from Thiti. That’s not how playing bait works… While they’re looking for her, a guy calls Thai to reveal that Danika is Pee’s daughter…

They have her position and hurry there; Prakan gets her and ties her hands, but she manages to blow her whistle, and I almost cried when she did, it was a very intense moment. Pee heard it, saved her, saw the whistle and everything clicked.

11

Thai fought with Prakan and caught him. Pee stayed with Danika at the hospital, and talks with Thai about her. Danika wakes up and gives her testimony to Thai, also tells him that Prakan confessed to the murders, but not of two girls with the dots on their ankles. Now she cries, admits she’s not well and he hugs her. Now that he’s arrested, Prakan denies everything. Danika suggests using his mother, and the mother does go to talk to him, saying he should be dead. Now he confesses murdering Thai’s mother 30 years before, that he didn’t really do, but he witnessed it. Pee has proof of this, because he saw that man smoking, but Prakan doesn’t.

Thai told the doctor about Prakan witnessing the murder…

12

Thiti visits Prakan in prison and talks to him, and his words lead to Prakan killing himself in his cell, leaving the word Bruce as a clue, it’s the Christian name of the doctor. They don’t know it’s him yet.

Danika thinks what brought him to kill again was when Napa was killed, the woman with five dots that survived 30 years before, and therefore the murderer might be one of those who knew about it… but Thai only thinks of the agents, it’s Pee that sees all the clues that lead to him. He has proof when they talk on the phone: Thiti wants to meet at the tunnel and finish it. Thiti also killed dead-Peera because he was investigating him for a man’s murder. He killed dead-Peera’s grandma and then him. Now they fight in the tunnel.

Thai tells Danika that Pee is her father. The whistle proves it’s true.

13

While they fought, Pee turns back to his own time, and goes to Wad, who is now six months pregnant, five months have passed, in both times.

It’s weird that we still see Thai and Danika and the others now. Thai retraces Pee’s steps and learns that he was after Thiti. 

Pee can’t use the pen he took from Thiti’s office because they don’t have dna yet in his time. 

Napa, who was still Duangporn because she had not yet changed her name, speaks with Pee and accepts to testify so nobody else will get hurt.

(In 2018 Thiti talked about the dots being made with a tattoo device or an ink pen… in 1985 it could not have been a pen, or Napa would not have the dots 30 years later… )

Pee tries to arrest young Thiti and chases him inside the tunnel… and is back in 2018.

14-

Once again, Wad waits and he doesn’t come back home…

It’s really hard for Thai to realize that the man he played chess with actually killed his mother.

Pee left Thiti’s pen in 1985. Now back in 2018, he hugs Danika as his daughter… 

They arrest Thiti even if they don’t have any proof, hoping he’d confess, but he calls their bluff, and they’re ordered by their superior to let him go. They’re also worried because he did the autopsy on dead-Peera so he knows Pee is not him.

It’s so annoying that Pee tries to keep Thai away from Danika now that he knows she’s his daughter. :-/

He spends time with her, talking about Wad. She always thought she was alone…

Now there’s a scene here: Danika, who is slowly getting back her childhood memories, now remembers seeing Thiti’s pen as a child, and her mom keeping it safe for Pee. She goes to get it, but Thiti gets to  her first. He  had put a bug inside the chess king he gave Thai, and heard everything. When they searched Thiti’s house, mostly empty, they found pictures of victims: he hadn’t stopped killing, he killed old people with injections, which is what brought dead-Peera to him.

15

Thiti has kidnapped Danika, and takes her to a place where he lived with his mom as a little child, a place the cops don’t know. He wants her to give him back his pen, and she’s smart enough to buy time, saying it’s in England with a lot of her stuff… she calls a friend there asking her to send it to her. This Kate finds it suspicious and calls her contact in Thailand so they learn about this. She’llbe alive for three days, then he’ll know they don’t have his pen. Danika tells him all she thinks about his past and his terrible mother and how he’s killing women to kill her, and yells in his face that he’s as bad as Prakan, killing because he likes it, without a real motive. He almost strangles her for that.

Suddenly it’s time for the pen’ to arrive and the cops stay there to catch him but he was smarter than them because he can still hear everything they say. So he sees it’s not his pen. Now finally Thai understands and they find the bug. Finally they investigate a bit more, and find the right house but the police had the sirens on so he heard them and took her away… but she manages to escape and they get her, poor girl. Now she can get the teddy bear he bought for her when he got back to 1985, which is where Wad had hidden the pen. It’s still there, and they send it for a complete dna and fingerprints analysis. Danika goes back to that house (alone) and finds his diary. He won’t stop ‘cleaning the world of dirty people’ and the cops hunt him. Danika reads the old diary and is sure she’ll be the next victim, and tells her dad. Thiti is already in her house when she gets back.

16

They were waiting outside and can now save her, but just barely. They arrest him. They have proof now, and his arrest is all over the news. They can only arrest him for the recent victims, but hope he’ll confess to the old ones too, for the victims’ families. In the 90s he  had killed too, he’s killed 26 people totally, that they know of - I don’t know if he had the picture of the taxi driver he killed as a kid with the pen, but maybe he did since they talk about it…

First they try talking about his mom to him, but get no reaction. Thing is, he started because of her, but kept going to ‘clean the world’, to ‘punish the dirty ones’, so Thai learns that his mom died because she smiled at a man who helped her pick up her things after they bumped into each other…

They all inform all the victims families that he’s been caught. Pee says goodbye to Thai, he wants to go back home to Wad…. Obviously. The goodbye to Danika is really weird more than touching because, well, if he goes back she’ll grow up with him right?

Danika and Thai go with him to the tunnel and she hugs him. He walks through and back to his own time… and we see him helping a pregnant woman, with the same common last name, who will name her child Peera after him :-)

We also see Pee with a child Danika and also Thanthai, and next to each other they look the same age… :-/

This means they’ll grow up together… I mean, Wad invited him along because his father was busy that day, but like it happened once, it will surely happen again…

Now, let’s talk about this, from less important to the most important point at the end:

1- First of all, the smallest detail that maybe I missed something, so someone could know this: throughout the episodes they showed Danika as a child, I mean that when her real mom died she was like 6 and then she was adopted in England, her parents fought a lot and one night the house went on fire and they died, and we see in that scene a child Danika watching the house burning; then she came back to Thailand to be adopted by an old professor, a good woman, and again we see her as a child, definitely pre-teen… so how could she still have some of her stuff in England? How could she have friends there as if she had lived or studied there? Did she go to university in England? Why, though, since they teach it here too, like she is now teaching it here, and while she was living with a professor?

2- The cops know that Danika will be with the murderer for three days and go: phew, she’ll be alive for thre days, we have time to prepare… are they not worried at all what might happen to her in these three days? This is a nice, happy-family show so nothing horrible happens to her, but they couldn’t know about that… and only after their plan goes bad, Pee finally remembers to be an investigator and finds out more… he should have done that before, in those three days.

3- I understand that Danika was just so happy to have a family member alive, she thought she was alone… but still, she’s not bothered in the slightest that up until that moment he had not liked her a little bit? And showed it openly?

4- Like with Danika before, the child that played Thanthai in the last episode was not the right age, in my opinion. He should be at least three years older than Danika, or four, since when we first saw him Wad was not even pregnant.

5- I should believe that he used his pen to make the dots on the girls ankles? Even in the 80s? And Duangporn still had the dots 30 years later? What kind of pen is that? I know they said only one factory produced that ink, but really, still visible after 30 years? 

6- Here we are, to the nonsense. Pee is shown living happily with his family and doing his regular job, without the smallest hint of having to catch Thiti. If he doesn’t now, it means 20 more people will die, murdered. He should at least record Duangporn’s testimony, will he do that? Not that it will matter much by itself, without catching him, because he’ll kill many people without adding the dots, that was just for the girls, for whatever reason, so nobody would make the connection to him…

The scene when that woman gives birth and calls her child after Peera is sweet, but totally ruined by knowing that that capable, brave young man will die alone, killed by Thiti.

There’s also the fact that the future will not playing as we saw it for sure, for various reasons: he’ll get to 2018 in his own time, as an old man; I would hope he will have the decency to tell Chart that he is alive, even if he’s been transferred; Thanthai and Danika are growing up together, as we can see.

Danika will not suffer trauma after trauma (no dad to start with, mom dead, adoptive parents dead, people thinking she killed them, which lead to her closing into herself) and maybe she will not become a criminologist since she won’t be raised by the old professor.

I mean, I guess Wad will not die because now that he is here she won’t have to work late at night.

Pee has showed more than once that he doesn’t think it is the right job for her, he worries too much, and she is now growing up all smiling and cheerful, so she’ll probably choose another path.

Thanthai will still go through the same pain and become a cop instead of a doctor because nobody thought of catching Thiti… 

I mean, they could have added a few small things, you know, like showing that he was using what he had learned in the future to find Thiti, how can he do nothing just like that… 

What we saw is already non-existent, unless in an alternate universe, in which case it will stay the same in that AU, but will still not exist in this version of Pee’s future, where they’ll have to catch him again… because this show is all the other way around, usually they go to the past so what they do there remains when they go back to their present, but here Pee went to the future to do things, so when he comes back to his present, it is actually the past so those things have not happened at all yet and might never happen now that he is living differently.