The first episode of the new Netflix drama Soul Mate does what other recent shows in this genre don’t: They get to the emotional content right away. In other words, we find out where the show’s main characters are in their emotional lives when they meet, so we can also see things evolve as they become what the title of the show indicates they’re going to be.
SOUL MATE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Video of the Seio University hockey team training and goofing around.
The Gist: Ryu Narataki (Hayato Isomura) and Arata Oikawa (Koshi Mizukami) are teammates, best friends and roommates. They’re extremely close, and even on the ice the two of them play so well together there is a flow between them. But then one day, when Ryu is goofing on how the handsome Arata can’t keep the ladies away, Arata admits that the person he likes is Ryu.
Sometime later, Ryu finds himself in Berlin, rooming with his childhood friend Sumiko Shinonome (Ai Hashimoto). She wonders why he’s taking such a long break from hockey, and he just tells her he needs a rest. But he’s less than engaged; Sumiko takes him to a club and he’s barely there when she talks with a friend. In reality, he keeps thinking back to that evening when Arata told him how he felt about him, and watching the video he was making at the time.
Ryu goes into a church and sits in a confessional booth, crying out about how he seemed to “cast aside” Arata’s feelings. What we find out later is that, more than anything, Ryu was shocked by Arata’s admission. But the tension between the two best friends that happened after that was more than Arata could bear, and he jumped out a window. Ryu escaped to Berlin after that, with Arata in a coma back in Japan.
At the church, a fire erupts. Ryu passes out on a pew, but wakes up in the hospital after the person sitting in the other section of the booth saves him. When he’s called to the police station, he meets the guy who saved him, a Korean man named Johan Hwang (Taecyeon Ok). He thanks Johan, but when Ryu asks about what Johan was doing in the booth, Johan tells him it’s none of his business, and tells him to “have a nice life.”
To distract Ryu from his depression, Sumiko takes him to a boxing match, which is when he sees Johan introduced as one of the fighters.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Soul Mates is essentially Heated Rivalry without all the sex. It’s likely similar to the recently-released series Off Campus.
Our Take: While the first meeting between Ryu and Johan doesn’t end well, we all know that they’ll find each other again. After all, that’s the whole premise of Soul Mates. These two are destined to be together, and the show will examine how this relationship evolves over a decade. At first, the two of them will be friends, probably as close with each other as Ryu was with Arata. Then the idea is that it evolves into a soul mates situation; we’re not sure if it’s a romantic one or platonic one at this point, but it may not matter.
Soul Mate is slow and contemplative, with many scenes that are mostly silent, and it certainly deals with emotions and consequences far more than one of the shows we cited above (see our Heated Rivalry review, for instance). We don’t know a lot about Ryu in the first episode, other than his lack of reaction to Arata expressing feelings for him is eating him alive. He ruined their friendship, and he certainly blames himself for Arata lying in a coma.
Whatever little we know about Ryu, though, we know even less about Johan. There’s a ton of pain there, to be sure, but we have no idea why he was in the church when Ryu was there, and if he was involved in the fire. But we’re looking forward to seeing the two of them continuing to cross paths and developing their friendship, as well as seeing where it goes.
Performance Worth Watching: While he doesn’t have a lot of screen time in the first episode, we liked Taecyeon Ok’s mysterious portrayal of Johan.
Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: We see Johan punching his opponent. “On this day, our story begins,” we hear him say in voice over.
Sleeper Star: We liked Ai Hashimoto as Ryu’s friend Sumiko, who is a fun, artistic person and seems to be a stablizing force for Ryu.
Most Pilot-y Line: Johan tells Ryu that he knows “a little” Japanese, but he knows enough to be conversational with Ryu. That’s more than “a little.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. Soul Mate is an affecting look at the emotional journey of two people who find each other and form an ironclad bond. Yes, we’ve seen this in the recent past, but this series delves into the emotional aspects of this story more than we’ve seen from similar series.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.