Hometown 홈타운 [tvN]

I cannot decide if Hometown had a bad script or bad screenplay.

Hometown started promisingly enough: a schoolgirl abducted and killed in a small town where a nerve gas attack happened at the train station 10 years ago.  A detective, unable to get over his wife's death during the nerve gas attach, suspected that the schoolgirl's murder was linked to the nerve gas attack.

And so Hometown began in a small town which seemed to be forever rainy (at least in most of the episodes) and gloomy.  Though I thought that a filter was added to the camera lens or post-production had artificially coloured the landscape a few notches grey, because there were obviously quite a few scenes where it looked like there were strong rays of sunlight on the characters.

So from a murder case seemingly linked to an enrichment centre where the centre director appeared to be a drug addict and drug mule for a criminal gang, Hometown started descending into a bizarre alternative retelling of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, with cult members bizarrely wanting to have the Guru (who gassed their relatives 10 year ago) lead them to the "end of the future", whatever "end of the future" means.  I'm not sure if it was a quirk of translating the original korean words into English, but there was no explanation of what the "end of the future" was, just a phrase that the cult members kept repeating.

There were simply too many plotlines started and left abandoned, and even for the plotlines developed till the finale, there were no proper closures either.  I thought previously that the concept of Mouse was too ambitious, but at least there was attempt to explain the plotlines.  Hometown simply allowed plotlines to lapse, character backstories undeveloped and in the end, I'm not sure what story was meant to be told.   

Still, the cast did an admirably job making their characters believable.  Most of the cast were new to me, however a few faces did pop.  The actor playing Yong-tak was one of the detectives in The Good Detective - not a leading role, yet he left an impression.  The actor playing the Proxy was Juk Chang in The Devil Judge - I was surprised how a wig and facial hair made him almost unrecognizable from Juk Chang.  Yoon Kyung-ho is never a lead in the dramas I watched, yet he always manages to leave an impression with his performance.