Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Fates and Furies
(운명과 분노 / Unmyeonggwa Bunno)
MyDramaList rating: 6.0/10

Hello hello! Welcome to my new review. We’re nearing the end of October, and with that, the end of the year! It’s going so fast, don’t you think? Anyways, I finally got to watch this classic which was recommended to me by my K-Drama bestie some years ago. It just goes to show how long it sometimes takes me to actually watch something after it gets recommended to me. I wrote the recommendation down and it finally came out on top of my watch list so here we are! I have so much to say about this drama, and I’ll admit right away that I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. It definitely felt like a more oldschool vibe, ‘classical’ K-Drama, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it also gave me a lot of frustrations. To me, it was like a mixture of High Society and Mask, but then plus 50 times the drama. But then, despite my frustrations, the ending kind of turned things around for me. I will do my best to explain my thoughts and feelings as well as possible. Let’s go!

Fates and Furies is a K-Drama from 2018 which you can watch in either 20 episodes of about an hour, or 40 episodes of about half an hour each. I watched it in the 20 episodes format. The story centers around Goo Hae Ra (played by Lee Min Jung), the daughter of a shoemaker who has a small workshop in Busan. After her father passed away, she was left alone with her older sister Hyun Joo (played by Cha Soo Yeon), and the two are very close. Hae Ra gets the chance to go to Italy to study shoe design there, and with her sister’s encouragement, she departs on her journey. However, she ends up tossing her studies and career prospects aside a couple of years later, when she hears that her sister back in Busan has been in a terrible accident. She returns to South Korea immediately to find that her sister is comatose, and they can’t tell for sure what has happened to her – except that it looks like a suicide attempt. In order to keep paying the hospital bills, Hae Ra succumbs to producing fake brand shoes in her father’s workshop, and simultaneously her debts keep piling up. When her long-time acquaintance Kim Chang Soo* (played by Heo Joon Seok) offers her a day job to show an Italian business man around town who’s there for a work meeting, she accepts it for the money. As Hae Ra speaks fluent Italian from the time she studied there, she can do some interpretor’s work as well. During this meeting where she is the interpretor for the Italian, she meets Tae In Joon.

*I just want to add right away that I’m actually still not quite sure who Chang Soo exactly was to Hae Ra. He seemed like a friend or an acquaintance that’s been around for a while, but she also owed him money and in the beginning I thought he was a kind of loan shark because he also threatened that he’d destroy her dad’s workshop if she didn’t pay him back in time. He becomes more of a dependable friend in the end, though.

Tae In Joon (played by Joo Sang Wook) is the eldest son of the CEO of the nationally established Gold Group. Gold Group owns several brands and businesses, among which Gold Shoes, a shoe designing company of which In Joon is the CEO. In Joon might be the legitimate first-born son of the CEO, but his mother passed away years before and he blames his father for what happened to her (we never find out the true circumstances of her death – I believe she had an illness? In any case, it seems like his dad basically turned his back on her).
The Tae household consists of the following people:
Father Tae Pil Woon (Go In Bum), Gold Group’s CEO.
Stepmother Han Sung Sook (played by Song Ok Sook).
In Joon’s half-brother Tae Jung Ho (Gong Jung Hwan), CEO of Gold Construction.
In Joon’s half-sister Tae Jung Min (Park Soo Ah).
There’s also Jung Ho’s wife Go Ah Jung (Shim Yi Young). Jung Ho and Ah Jung have a son, Min Woo, who was sent to the States to study (apart from a photograph he doesn’t actually appear in the series, he’s just mentioned a lot).
In Joon also has an uncle from his mother’s side, Hyun Jung Soo (Jo Seung Yeon), who works as the CEO’s secretary.

From the first encounter with the Tae household, we can see that this is not a healthily functioning family. Everyone seems to have a terrible temper – the CEO is regularly shown smashing things with his golf club, twentysomething rebel daughter Jung Min is constantly running away from home, misbehaving and screaming at everyone, and daughter-in-law Ah Jung is badly mistreated and even abused by her own husband and mother-in-law. Jung Ho is the opposite of a sweetheart, he’s done countless bad and heartless things that his mother has always been covering up for him. Jung Ho and his mother only really care about obtaining all the company shares including In Joon’s, and they will do whatever it takes to get them from him, even if they have to go against the CEO himself.
Understandably, In Joon prefers not to be in the same house as his family. He doesn’t have a good relationship with any of his family members and stays away from them as much as he can. His uncle is the only person on his side in the family, but in trying to maintain In Joon’s position at the company, he also frequently takes measures that In Joon doesn’t agree with.
When In Joon meets Hae Ra in Busan as she’s interpreting for his potential Italian business partner, he is instantly taken with her – all the more when he spots her hands and realizes she works in the shoe business. After Hae Ra manages to persuade the Italian guy to sign the contract and In Joon discovers the impressive designs she made when she was studying in Italy, he decides to bring her onto his own team at Gold Shoes in Seoul.

Now this is where we are introduced to the second set of lead characters in this series, Cha Soo Hyun and Jin Tae Oh.
Cha Soo Hyun (played by So Yi Hyun) is a very famous announcer who also works for Gold Group. She is In Joon’s fiancée, even though the two share no apparent romantic feelings for each other – it’s a purely political marriage. Soo Hyun may be famous, but personality-wise she’s also known to be very rude and unfriendly when the cameras aren’t on her.
Jin Tae Oh (played by Lee Ki Woo) is the CEO of a big department store chain called Centan. He resides in Hong Kong with his young sickly daughter Jennie (Kim Dan Woo), but returns to Seoul, seemingly to have his daughter get better hospital care. He also comes to see Soo Hyun, and there’s obviously some history between the two, but Soo Hyun brushes him aside. When Tae Oh finds out that Soo Hyun is engaged to In Joon, he starts plotting a sort of revenge against her, using Hae Ra to his advantage, whom he also met in Busan shortly before.
It’s only revealed later in the series how exactly Tae Oh managed to find Hae Ra in Busan and why he chose her of all people for this task. In any case, the series starts with Hae Ra accepting In Joon’s offer to come work for him at Gold Shoes while she’s simultaneously being pressured by Tae Oh to seduce In Joon so that the marriage between him and Soo Hyun will be cancelled. Let’s start from there.

I’ve mentioned before that I had mixed feelings about this series. One, because it frustrated the heck out of me, and two because I still found it had some interesting plot twists. For example, in regards to the way the series starts with these four main characters; it turns out that it’s really not just about them. A lot of the things they go through in the first half of the series can, in hindsight, actually be seen as ‘collateral damage’ or even ‘events that have nothing to do with the big picture’. All four of them somehow get wrapped up in a case that none of them personally have anything to do with. I found that very interesting.
I suspect it will be no easy task to try and explain everything in a review since there was a lot happening and there were many side plots to it, but I will try my best.

I will just drop from the start that everything ultimately revolves around the accident of Hae Ra’s sister Hyun Joo. Even though none of the four main characters know anything about it, they are all strung along in a plan/plot to reveal the truth about this case – even though it doesn’t exactly go as planned and it even takes a couple of casualties to find out the truth.

In return for receiving complete improved hospital care for her sister from Jin Tae Oh, Hae Ra moves to Seoul together with her best friend Kang Sun Young (Jung Soo Young) and her younger brother Kang Eui Geon (Jung Yoon Hak). Sun Young and Eui Geon have also known the two sisters their whole lives, and especially Sun Young is affected by Hae Ra’s plan to dig into it even deeper. She doesn’t think it’s a good idea for her friend to get too deeply involved, but she also can’t blame Hae Ra for wanting justice for her sister, especially when they find out it might not have been an accident.

As soon as Hae Ra gets to Seoul, she is immediately confronted by Soo Hyun, who instantly accuses her of being ‘just another poor woman who mistook In Joon’s generosity for an opportunity to get something more out of him’. So, before Hae Ra has even decided to go along with the seduction plan, she is already accused of having malicious motives towards In Joon, and this prompts her even more to actually go along with the plan, even if it’s just to piss off Soo Hyun. The two women are not very amicable with each other, to say the least.
As it happens, Hae Ra doesn’t even have to make a lot of effort to win In Joon over – he’s already fallen for her at first sight, and the only thing she has to do is just keep appearing in front of him so he’ll start believing in their ‘fate’ more and more. When she gets the job at Gold Shoes on In Joon’s recommendation, Hae Ra is not welcomed warmly by the rest of the team at all. The Design team is very fond of In Joon, but they do not approve of Hae Ra, especially when she keeps turning up late or sometimes doesn’t even turn up at all. In Joon just seems to accept everything she does, and feels like the only thing he needs to do is protect her, both from Soo Hyun (who has already slapped her in the face several times by now) and from his family, as even his uncle sends people to chase her away from In Joon. This does work in Hae Ra’s favor, as she can pretend to be a victim that’s being bullied by everyone, and it will only make In Joon take care of her and protect her even more. But once she seduces him, once she gets him to give up everything for her – what then? What’s her next motive? And what actually are her own feelings about the whole situation and In Joon? And why is Jin Tae Oh so bend on taking revenge on Soo Hyun? Why does he need Hae Ra’s help to remove In Joon from the equation? So many questions!

As it happens, just as the seduction plan is starting to go somewhere, Hae Ra gets her hands on some evidence that In Joon was the person who took her sister to the hospital on the night of her accident. His signature is on the hospital admission receipt and he paid for her intake. After that, Hae Ra also finds the original papers from her sister’s examination, which say that ‘it might not have been a suicide’. So what, was her sister murdered then? What the heck went down there while Hae Ra was in Italy?
Slowly but surely, Hae Ra is strengthened in her belief that In Joon’s family has something to do with her sister’s accident, and this ultimately shifts to the belief that In Joon himself is responsible for it.
I would like to emphasize that these beliefs were all based on fragmented pieces of indirect evidence from people who were all biased against In Joon, or people who were bribed to say he was involved in some way. It was frustrating because even though we as viewers know from the start that In Joon is innocent, Hae Ra doesn’t, she doesn’t know anything. She lacks any knowledge of In Joon’s personal life or even his relationship with his family that’s out to ruin him, and just goes on to suspect him based on those indirect pieces of evidence. Of course it doesn’t help that Stepmom and Jung Ho have a hand in bribing people with their influence – wherever Hae Ra goes to question someone, all it results to is leading her further along the path of suspecting In Joon’s direct involvement. As her evidence keeps growing, her seduction plan gradually turns into a revenge plan, and she ultimately decides that she will even marry In Joon in order to find out what happened to her sister. I’d say you find out such things before you legally bind yourself to someone and become a part of their family, but hey, who am I?

Needless to say that In Joon is actually innocent. The whole thing was another misdoing of Jung Ho, as he fooled around with Hyun Joo when he was in Busan one time, and ended up getting her pregnant. After refusing to get an abortion like Jung Ho immediately orders her to, Hyun Joo ends up visiting him at his house to confront him and his family with the fact that she’s going to have the baby and that she’ll report/sue them if they don’t register the child as Jung Ho’s.
Later that night, outside the house In Joon finds her unconscious in her car full of carbon dioxide, and takes her to the hospital. That’s the only thing he did, the only way he was involved. He walked into her as he was leaving the house and she was in front of it earlier that evening, and when he returned later, she was unconscious in her car. The only thing he might be considered ‘guilty’ of is that he was forced by his uncle to hush it up even when he knew that his brother was responsible for it.
One of the indirect pieces of evidence that Hae Ra gets her hands on is a CCTV picture of In Joon and Hyun Joo meeting outside the Tae residence. Of course this (again) doesn’t prove anything, in fact they literally just passed each other on the way in/out, but still to Hae Ra this is clear proof that In Joon had something to do with her sister’s accident because, look! This means they knew each other!

It still seems weird that Jin Tae Oh knew how to find Hae Ra to seduce In Joon, as if he knew that her presence in the Tae family would unchain something. In fact, he didn’t know that. He was visited by a mysterious person in Hong Kong, who gave him a letter with the instruction that he should find a Goo Hae Ra in Busan and get her to meet Tae In Joon, and that she would destroy him. So in this regard, Tae Oh was also utilized without being personally involved in the case.
Tae Oh’s only concern was to get Soo Hyun, the biological mother of his sickly daughter, to donate her kidney so his child may live. He’s not even interested in getting back together with Soo Hyun, but seeing her doing so well after turning her back on him and Jennie just makes him very angry, and that instills the need in him to get her engagement to be torn apart. In a way you could say he uses the situation to his advantage; he simultaneously gets Hae Ra to meet In Joon, but it becomes his own plan to make her seduce him to get back at Soo Hyun.

Soo Hyun is already struggling with maintaining the image of her ‘successful’ engagement to In Joon, but when Tae Oh suddenly pops up and confronts her with the fact that their daughter is sick, she doesn’t want anything to do with it. It’s like, she’s already under enough pressure as it is, why does her ex suddenly have to appear too and complicate stuff even more? It’s clear that he’s out to bother her, as he even complicates a collaboration that Gold Shoes wishes to make with Centan. He also doesn’t hold back his frustration towards Hae Ra when she initially doesn’t seem to make much progress in her seduction of In Joon. Soo Hyun becomes more and more suspicious of Hae Ra, because once she starts digging in Hae Ra’s past and motives, she also starts feeling like she may not have the best intentions towards In Joon. Honestly, I did feel like Soo Hyun had some feelings for In Joon, but that she just protected herself because she knew In Joon didn’t feel the same way about her. She still got mad when she spotted In Joon and Hae Ra together, and when he stood up for Hae Ra and not her in their confrontations, so I do think she was hurt by his actions. In the end, In Joon really should’ve listened to her and picked up her calls as she tried to contact him just before Hae Ra drugged him – it would’ve saved him a lot of trouble.

As Hae Ra becomes more determined about her plan, she even asks her friend Sun Young for help. Sun Young just happens to work at a massage salon where a lot of rich ladies come to, including Stepmom. Sun Young is urged by her superior to keep her mouth shut because her Busan accent is so strong it will annoy the clients. Surprisingly, Stepmom takes a liking to her, assuming she’s a mute, and goes on to blab about her entire family to her during the massage sessions. Sun Young is urged by Hae Ra to take advantage of her position and even takes to snooping around the Tae residence when she’s asked to come there to give Stepmom a massage at her own home.

In the meantime, we also have Ah Jung, Jung Ho’s wife who’s being treated as a maid after her family went to ruin and she became ‘useless’ to the Tae family. It’s revealed later that the CEO himself was responsible for her family’s demise. Ah Jung is like a ghost in the Tae residence, she doesn’t say a word and just has to stand by Stepmom’s side at all times. However, she has installed several wiretapping devices in different parts of the house and has been recording all the family’s conversations for at least three years, probably to use as evidence some day. Why is it taking her so long to publish them, though? She’s literally being treated like trash every single day, she’s not even allowed to see her own son. Whenever she brings up the topic of getting Min Woo back to South Korea, Jung Ho just starts beating her. It’s clear she will never accomplish anything in this house, so what’s making her stay on for so long?

Then there’s also another storyline of Jung Min and Eui Geon. Eui Geon accepts a day job to hang out with this rich girl and while they initially hate each other’s guts, they slowly become closer and even fall for each other in the end. Even though Jung Min is a brat, she doesn’t have any inkling about the true nature of her family’s bad deeds, and she also doesn’t wish her brother In Joon any real harm. She’s just too young to be kept in the loop of what’s really going on at home.

Hae Ra only finds out that it was all Jung Ho and his mother’s doing after In Joon has already been arrested and sentenced to jail for two years. In those two years, she decides to start a new revenge plan to get back at Jung Ho and to clear In Joon’s name. She keeps her position as a trusted figure towards Stepmom and helps out when Jung Min runs away from home to bring her back etc. She takes over the CEO position of In Joon at Gold Shoes, which must have initially felt like the ultimate betrayal to In Joon – first she locks him up, then she takes over his company – but it’s actually to make sure Gold Shoes remains a business. Jung Ho was planning to get rid of it, and now he’s just using it as a slush fund, for which Hae Ra is also gathering evidence to eventually publish, thereby also risking her own involvement.
In the meantime, Stepmom and Jung Ho are keeping the CEO sedated at home, as he would cause too much trouble since he revealed that he actually planned to give his entire company shares to In Joon. With anonymous help from Hae Ra, the pieces of evidence make their way to In Joon, and once he has literally all the existing proof (including all the tape recordings from Ah Jung), he very satisfyingly takes care of Jung Ho and his stepmother. He makes a deal with the doctor taking care of his father to wake him up again, he publishes the recordings in which Jung Ho admits to several crimes and he even manages to get his shares back. All’s well that ends well.

Let me leave it at this for now. I will move on to a couple of points that were either the source of major frustration to me, or which I found unexpected in other way before proceeding with my cast comments.

First of all, Goo Hae Ra herself. I may have already made a couple of sarcastic comments above, but honestly, even though I always try not to get too mean about characters, even if I didn’t like them, I just couldn’t help myself with her. It’s been a while since I’ve truly disliked a female lead in a K-Drama this much and it all has to do with the lack of clarity in her motivation and choices. Nothing she did made any sense to me. For one, she seemed incredibly passive throughout the whole series. If you think about how much the character had to deal with, finding out there’s more to her sister’s accident than she thought and then falling for the guy who may have been involved in that very case, I was expecting some serious emotional acting, but instead I was never fully able to read what was going on in her head. It may have been the actress’ acting that just didn’t sit well with me, but I honestly didn’t know for sure what Hae Ra was feeling or thinking during the entirety of the show. I don’t even know for sure if she was actually really in love with In Joon, seeing as she let her suspicions towards him win so easily over her own alleged romantic feelings for him. And this is pretty intense, because she even kissed him, she slept with him, and agreed to marry him. I just assumed from the start that the whole trope was gonna be, her falling for the guy that she was planning revenge on, but I just couldn’t tell for sure by the way she was acting. I felt like it was still too easy for her to just throw him under the bus. If her feelings for him had actually grown, that would’ve been much harder for her to do. Now I just didn’t feel any kind of chemistry from her side. She just kept smiling and saying, ‘yes, I love you too’ and ‘yes, I will marry you’, and then after In Joon put their engagement in motion, she suddenly started acting all distant and angry at him… I mean, if she had an actual clear plan to take revenge on him, she would’ve been able to see how confusing her behavior was to him, because she literally changed her attitude towards him overnight, but it didn’t seem like it was a deliberate choice – it just seemed as if she literally didn’t know what to do. It just wasn’t clear to me at all what the actress was trying to convey through her character.
It also seemed like she was bluffing a lot of the time, even when confronting Soo Hyun or someone else. It was like she just wanted to seem like she had her stuff together, but she really didn’t. She just kept stating that she would now choose her own path, and yes, she would seduce and destroy In Joon, but when she was with him, she really didn’t do anything at all. She always talked in the same tone, and she always had the same look in her eyes, and it never told me anything. It was kind of a bummer, because you just always want to be on the main character’s side and at least know what’s going on inside their head.
The fact that she acted so confident and mighty about her seduction/revenge plan and then didn’t even bother to do some basic background research on In Joon’s relationship with his family, for instance, was just unbelievable to me. I mean, come on, it wouldn’t have been so hard for her to find out that his stepmom and half brother would do anything to frame him. In fact, she should’ve known about that if she even slightly looked into In Joon’s life, but no, she just focussed on gaining his trust without actually knowing what kind of person he was. She also just blindly accepted everything that Stepmom told her, that In Joon was the one who’d gotten her sister pregnant and all that. She blindly believed any kind of indirect evidence, no matter who gave it to her, she never even went so far as to thoroughly check the evidence she got. She literally trusted Chang Soo to provide her with useful info while he was even more of an outsider to the whole case than she was. I can’t believe that, when In Joon had just been arrested and Chang Soo came to her with the news that it was actually Jung Ho all along, she literally yelled at him, ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner??’. As if that was Chang Soo’s fault! She was the one who just went ahead with the incomplete clues she had and put an innocent man behind bars for two years without double-checking anything. And then to think that even after she reported him, she was like, ‘hmm, something still doesn’t feel right’. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.
Even when she “confronted” In Joon, it wasn’t even a confrontation. If she actually wanted to confront him, she would’ve asked him the question and he would’ve responded ‘I didn’t do it’ and everything would’ve been explained there and then. But no, she actually drugged him first and waited for him to pass out on the floor before she went all, ‘I know what you did’, when he couldn’t even defend himself anymore. Like, how does that make sense? I guess she wasn’t even looking for a ‘why’ anymore because she already accepted that he was the culprit. She just went about her ‘revenge’ the completely wrong way, and in trying to bring justice to her sister she only brought her the opposite.
Also, was I the only one who found it incredible that for the entire two years that In Joon was in jail, Hae Ra didn’t manage to do a single thing to get him out earlier or clear his name? She just let him sit there, she never even paid him a visit or sent him a letter to let him know how sorry she was and that she was working on a plan to clear his name and bring Jung Ho down. Not a single thing.

Also, what a BS plan was it to make In Joon and Soo Hyun believe that Hae Ra and Tae Oh were dating. Seriously, when they ‘revealed’ that as a way to explain how they knew each other, I was like PFFF YEAH GREAT PLAN GUYS. That was such a weak attempt in trying to still their suspicions and it also made NO sense. Tae Oh had basically just admitted to Soo Hyun the reason that he wanted to take revenge on her, and Hae Ra had been actively flirting with In Joon, and now they just showed up together like, ‘Hi, we’re dating’ and it was just so fake. I could tell Soo Hyun didn’t believe it for a second, and In Joon was just like, ‘well then why the heck were you flirting with me, woman?’ Seriously, that was just so lame and it was almost funny how they were sitting there next to each other with their confident expressions. And then Hae Ra literally caved only a day later. ‘Actually, it was a lie, we’re not really dating.’ REALLY. YOU DON’T SAY. Honestly, they could’ve made up any kind of excuse, they could’ve said they were childhood friends, cousins twice removed, ANYTHING. Honestly, what the heck did they think they were going to accomplish with this fake news?

Moving on to the more serious part of the show, I thought it was completely unnecessary for Sun Young to die. I get that maybe they wanted to raise the suspense by making people find out the truth but then obstructing them from telling Hae Ra in time, but this was just plain shock-value. During a snooping session at the Tae residence, Sun Young stumbles upon Ah Jung’s hidden tape recordings and listens to the one from November 2015, which is when Hyun Joo’s accident took place. There she hears the whole recording of Hyun Joo making a scene about her baby and that it’s Jung Ho’s, not In Joon’s. Sun Young then flees the residence in a very emotional state, and bumps into Stepmom, who automatically sends some security guards after her because she assumes she stole something. While being chased and simultaneously trying to reach Hae Ra on the phone, Sun Young is hit by a truck and the tape recording is run over by a car. As if it wasn’t frustrating enough that a piece of concrete evidence was ruined, Sun Young just got unalived altogether. Like, fair enough, if Hae Ra had found out the truth at this point, the series would’ve been over very quickly. But I still found it a very drastic decision to kill Sun Young off. She was such a nice character, and completely uninvolved with the whole case. She literally died for something she didn’t even understand and shouldn’t have been wrapped up in. Part of me did partially blame Hae Ra for urging her to find out more about the Tae family, because it just seemed like she was asking other people to do the dirty work while she just tried to win In Joon’s trust and didn’t even bother trying to do any research or snooping by herself. She really put other people at risk while all she did was make sure In Joon trusted her, which he already did 100% from the start.

I got even more mad at Hae Ra when she then went on trying to string Eui Geon along in helping her out as well, even though he resented her partially too for what happened to his sister. Hae Ra actually went all ‘those people killed her’ to rile him up, and I was like, uhh no. That’s simply not true. The Tae family was insane, but they didn’t kill her, Sun Young’s death was, as bitter as it is, an accident. Stepmom just assumed she was a thief and cleared her name to the cops out of ‘the goodness of her heart’, but she wasn’t even aware of the tape recordings or what had made Sun Young flee the house. Sun Young herself got overemotional and didn’t watch out well enough. I’m very sorry that it happened, but that’s the truth.
I also didn’t think it was necessary to kill off In Joon’s uncle. Of course, in his case, his death was fully orchestrated by Jung Ho, and it was also a very unfortunate moment because he was just about to deliver all the evidence of Jung Ho’s involvement with Hyun Joo to In Joon. It wasn’t unexpected of course, because like Sun Young, every person that was even close to revealing the truth (or part of it) was taken out of the equation in one way or another, and Stepmom openly spoke about how she wasn’t afraid to bury/kill anyone if it benefitted her son. Still, since in the uncle’s case the evidence was (partly) saved, I also couldn’t completely agree with the fact they just killed him off. I would’ve liked to see Chang Soo secure the evidence and take the uncle to the hospital to recover. Oh well.

Regarding In Joon, MY GOSH I felt so sorry for this guy. He was the main victim in everything. He was the most innocent person, and yet everyone was framing him, blaming him, punishing him for things he wasn’t even responsible for. He had been all alone ever since his mother passed away, and just when he thought he’d found a companion in Hae Ra, she also went straight ahead and betrayed him. What a sad world. He deserved so much better.
Although it did take me some time to warm up to him in the beginning, simply because he was also quite stoic in his expressions, in hindsight I think he had the most reasonable feelings of any characters’ in the show. Once he started getting romantically involved with Hae Ra, there was no doubt about it, he made it abundantly clear how he felt about her, and he also made it clear to her, unlike the other way around. I guess his love for her also blinded him for the lack of affection that she showed him in return.
When he got out of prison, I thought his resolve was really believable, as well as how hurt he’d been by Hae Ra’s actions. I’m glad how satisfying the last couple of episodes were because justice was actually restored and In Joon got all his shares back and everything. You could clearly see how mixed he felt about Hae Ra helping him out the way she did at the end, risking her own career as well. I believe he never really stopped loving her, but that he was mainly telling himself to resent her, even after discovering that she was also, partly, a victim of the situation since she was misguided by his stepmother. Imagine being betrayed by the person you’re so in love with, the person you’re planning to marry and for whom you gave up your prior engagement and all of your company shares. Does that immediately eradicate all the feelings you ever had for that person? I think it’s more complicated than that. He definitely resented her for what she did to him, but I also believe he couldn’t find it in himself to completely banish her from his life forever.

Cha Soo Hyun was undeniably ‘the bitch’ in the beginning of the series, but I really think she made a big development in character. She didn’t change completely, but she did mature. I liked how Jennie still hit a sensitive chord with her, even though she was the one who tried to get rid of her as a baby. She did end up donating her kidney and she did come to the airport to say goodbye and allowed Jennie to call her mom before Tae Oh took her back to Hong Kong. I guess Soo Hyun also got a bit tired of the whole family politics, even from her own mother as she kept forcing her to go on blind dates after her engagement to In Joon fell through. She may not have become a more friendly person per se, but I think at least the events put things in perspective for her. It’s kind of funny to think how Soo Hyun, even as the second female lead, literally didn’t have anything to do with the whole Jung Ho/Hyun Joo case. She was just very suspicious of Hae Ra and cared enough about In Joon to warn him about her, with good reason. I liked that she didn’t end up poking her nose into that whole affair, it was already messy and dramatic enough as it was without more unrelated people getting involved. And this at least gave her the opportunity to disappear for a while unnoticed as she anonymously got her kidney surgery.

Same went for Tae Oh, I honestly believe he just saw an opportunity to use the situation he was provided with to his own advantage and utilized it to bother Soo Hyun. The only thing he wanted from her was her kidney (I couldn’t help but chuckle as I literally muttered out loud, ‘guess what, he needs her kidney’ before he actually said, ‘I need your kidney’), but he just decided to be petty towards her for the last time before he got what he wanted. I’m actually glad they weren’t forced back together because that would’ve been unrealistic. It was clearly in the past what they once felt for each other, and this was just the last piece of closure for both of them.

I think it was mostly just frustrating because the viewer gets information that the lead character doesn’t. When we know that the lead character is taking a wrong turn, we cannot correct them and that just sucks because we’re forced to watch them screw up. I think that was one of my main issues with Hae Ra. She only saw what was right in front of her and she didn’t think to look beyond that. If she was truly making a ‘plan’, she should’ve been prepared to go the extra mile and do the extra research. But she just went along to gain In Joon’s trust, focussing completely on him as a person, without even thinking about asking him about his life or what background he came from, looking for anything concrete she could use against him. If she was seriously planning on marrying him, wouldn’t that be a normal thing to inquire about? What kind of family you’d actually be getting yourself into?
I guess that’s also what made their relationship seem so one-sided to me. In Joon was completely smitten with her and did all kinds of things for her out of his own volition because he thought about her all the time. Hae Ra didn’t do anything for him. Even when they met at work she just acted passively and was almost surprised to see him act like a boyfriend, even after they’d already slept together. Weird.
I also think that the ending in which In Joon suddenly decides to forgive her after all, was kind of forced. He’d been so clear about not forgiving her, or at least that it would take him a very long time to forgive her, and now suddenly he was like, you know what, I get that you’re sorry and it seems that we’d both make the same choice again even after knowing the truth, so hey, let’s hug it out.

However frustrated I was during the main part of the series, the ending did change things for the better and even surprised me a little. At some point I only had two burning questions: one, when Ah Jung would come out with those tapes, and two, when the heck Hyun Joo would wake up. I was just waiting for that shot of her in the hospital where they’d zoom in on her hand and showed how her finger moved. She just had to wake up, I felt, in order to conclude all this. To have this whole case unravel while she was unconscious and then just end it without her ever waking up just felt implausible. So when it happened, I was like YAY FINALLY. It only happened in the final episode, and then soon after, the final plot twist is revealed: the fact that Ah Jung was actually behind all of it. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it.
I didn’t expect her to be behind everything, I just thought she’d become a more important figure when she’d come out with those evidence tapes. Despite all the reasons she had against Jung Ho, I still don’t fully understand why she went to Hong Kong to tell Tae Oh to bring Hae Ra and In Joon together. I mean, I already knew it was her from the first time Tae Oh talked about it, even though then only the back of her head was shown. I already knew it was her, but I was curious about her motives. I thought at first that maybe she’d been forced by Jung Ho to go there and instruct Tae Oh as such, but now that turned out not to be the case. Maybe it was just to place Hae Ra close to their family so ultimately the truth about Jung Ho’s deeds came to light? But then things really didn’t go quite as planned, I imagine.
I do understand why she did that to Hyun Joo, though. I didn’t believe she had any malicious intent towards her. Jung Ho had been treating her so badly and she’d been gathering evidence against him for so long, I could only imagine she was out to get him and didn’t want him to get his hands on any other victims. So I was kind of relieved when it turned out that she did it involuntarily, in her despair not to allow another child of Jung Ho into the world. Of course, it’s not right what she did and she’s lucky that Hyun Joo survived, but I could understand where she was coming from, at least. She was also a major victim of the family’s misdoings, and all she cared about was just getting her son back, but other than that I still don’t believe she had any malicious intents towards anyone but her husband and mother-in-law. She even helped In Joon by giving him all the tapes in order to clear his name, so maybe she also saw how her orchestrating Tae Oh to get Hae Ra in touch with In Joon had gotten out of hand, and it was her way of making amends? I’m still not completely sure about that part.

Okay, now I want to go on to some cast comments before I conclude!

I’ve only seen Lee Min Jung before in Boys Before Flowers and Big, which I don’t want to talk about ever again. As I’ve already mentioned in Hae Ra’s character analysis, I wasn’t very impressed with her performance in this series. I don’t know if it was also bad writing, but I just didn’t like the way she acted. She lacked energy and everything was just constantly one tone, one expression. For such a dramatic story as this, I would’ve expected her to give more, especially in the scene where she heard her sister regained consciousness, like what the heck was with that weak response? I found it really difficult to decipher what emotions she was trying to convey and I was just frustrated with her the whole way through. She was like this in Big as well, and I had really hoped to see her in a series that at least wasn’t as badly written as that one. Unfortunately, I was not very convinced by her in this one, either.
Apparently, she and Joo Sang Wook also played a couple in Cunning Single Lady, a drama that I’m also still interested in. I really wonder how their chemistry is in that show. Anyways, I just hope she can prove to me that she’s capable of more, because I liked her so much in Boys Before Flowers but I’ve never seen the same kind of energy she had there from her since.

I’ve only seen Joo Sang Wook before in Fantastic, and it’s been a while since I watched that so I can’t remember a lot. I just remember he had a much more energetic role than he had here. I still thought he portrayed a very sympathetic character in this show, a guy from such a complicated family finding himself falling for a complete stranger, only to be harshly betrayed by her. Even though he might have been quite stoic in the beginning of the series, his responses always made sense to me and I still think he’s the main victim of everything that went down in the story, I truly felt for him. I think I’ll see more of him as I continue with my watch list. I can’t deny that I have gotten a bit interested in Cunning Single Lady now, even if it’s just to see how their chemistry was in that show, as it was basically non-existent in this one.

As I looked her up, I guess I know So Yi Hyun from Heartstrings, but that’s also too long ago for me to remember. Even though I disliked her character at first, I’m glad the writers at least gave her some relatable layers throughout the story. She was raised in a world of connections and family politics, and it may have stripped her from attaching too much value to any real emotions or feelings she may have had. Her confrontation with her daughter proved that. She could be so sharp, but she did try to warn In Joon because she cared for his safety and she did donate her kidney to her daughter because she did want her to grow up and live healthily. It’s not even that she made a whole change in personality, but I do think she matured for the better in the end. I still ended up liking her more than Hae Ra. I said what I said.

As much as I love Lee Ki Woo, I keep getting sad when he gets casted as unfriendly people, haha. I had the same in Just Between Lovers, whenever he appears on screen I just want to like him. When he first appeared here, all sweet with his daughter on the plane, I was like Yayy~ Lee Ki Woo~ but then the way he started acting towards Hae Ra when she couldn’t live up to his expectations was just mean. He made a big fuss about getting his revenge on Soo Hyun and although Hae Ra didn’t even have anything to do with that, he vented it on her and that wasn’t fair. However, I do like how he also just stuck to the part that he was actually responsible for and took his hands off Hae Ra once she started making her own radical decisions on how she would continue to take away everything from In Joon. At least Tae Oh had the decency to apologize for the part that he was actually responsible for, and also revealed that Ah Jung was the woman who’d come to visit him in Hong Kong and started the whole thing in the first place.
I want to see more shows in which he plays lovable characters though! He’s such a bean and I’ll probably never get over the fact that he was my first major K-Drama actor crush ever, after seeing him in Flower Boy Ramyun Shop.

I liked how overall, this series had a lot of actors that I didn’t know very well. Most people I recognized by face, but when I looked them up I was like… I guess I know them from this and this but I honestly don’t remember them that well.
For example, the stepmother, played by Song Ok Sook. Her face seems SO familiar to me, and according to DramaWiki I’ve seen her in several shows like Rooftop Prince, I Miss You, Fated to Love You and Missing 9. From the last one I know she was the reporter, but from the ones before that I’ll just have to believe that I know her from there. The thing is, even though she was one of the major bad guys, I kind of liked her character. She was really shrewd, but she just acted with such a good energy that I kind of liked how nasty she was, haha. It just all comes down to the commitment of the actor, I guess. She was funny in her own way, and then would just pretend to be oblivious until she was exposed and something in her would just change and be like, ‘huh, I’ve underestimated you…’ and I liked that.

Gong Jung Hwan was really well-casted for this role. I’ve seen him in Blood, Cinderella and the Four Knights, Ruler: Master of the Mask, and recently in My Absolute Boyfriend and Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung. I think this is the first show where I’ve seen him as a real villain and it suited him very well. He really pulled off the heartless bastard and that look he would get in his eyes… damn. Creepy stuff. Honestly, Jung Ho was a scumbag. Not a single thing he did came from the heart, he was always just thinking about money. He even persuaded his mother to regain the money he lost and needed back over getting back Jung Min, her own daughter, because that just wasn’t important to him. He didn’t care about anything or anyone but himself, not even within his own family. He really got what he deserved in the end. I loved the scene where he was giving the speech about how his father was in critical condition and they just rolled him in in a wheelchair like, ‘Hi, you were saying?’

Shim Yi Young is also such a familiar face, I feel like I’ve seen her in several things, but not in many major roles. I most recently saw her in Love Alarm as the second (turned first?) male lead’s mom. She just has this really sweet mom vibe, I think. It was hard watching her get treated so badly by her in-laws and even her own husband. When Jung Ho walked in on his mom slapping her and just went ‘take her to another room and hit her there, don’t do it out in the open’, I was like, are you for real, sir?!?!?! She got it really bad, and I really wanted her to get out of that house. Especially when Sun Young died after discovering those tapes, and Ah Jung realized one tape was missing, I was expecting something to happen but it still took another two years before she decided she’d release the tapes for In Joon’s sake. In the end, she used two things that she’d actually meant for herself for other people, the tapes and the carbon dioxide. I guess that just means that she didn’t plan anything out in advance and her plans also kept changing, so maybe it wasn’t that odd that she hadn’t left the house yet, maybe she kept waiting for something more to happen that she could add to the list of Tae family misdeeds.

I just found out that Park Soo Ah is former member Lizzy of Orange Caramel! I haven’t seen her in any dramas before. In any case, I think she was a good casting choice for Jung Min, she really was a brat, haha. It’s funny how with every member of the Tae family I was like, yeah, they definitely got their temper from their dad. I liked how Jung Min matured and changed throughout the series, mostly because of Eui Geon, I guess. After what happened to Sun Young he started blaming her family and told her he didn’t want to see her again, and she just resigned to going back home, but she never forgot about him. It was cute how she, as such an unruly kid, got attached to someone like that and for once there wasn’t any additional drama about her dating a guy from a poorer background – there were actually more important things going on this time. And the scene in which she was made to overhear how her mother chose Jung Ho and his money over getting her back home was thought out very well from Hae Ra’s side, I’ll give her that. I like how in the end she and Eui Geon were videocalling as husband and wife.

I’ve seen Jung Soo Young in Who Are You – School 2015 and Jugglers, but even though I don’t specifically remember her from there, her face is definitely very familiar. As I said, I really didn’t agree with the death of her character. She could’ve just remained a supporting character on Hae Ra’s side. Despite becoming a trigger to Hae Ra’s urge to find the culprit ASAP, I really don’t see why she had to die. It was sad. I thought she was a really nice character to have, she lightened the mood and it’s just always nice for the main character to have a comfort person to rely on once things get tough.

Apparently, Jung Yoon Hak is a member of K-Pop group Supernova. I don’t know them, but okay! I felt bad for him because for the carefree person that he was and should’ve remained to be, he went through a lot. His older sister and only remaining family (as far as mentioned) was taken from him because of something their friend had told her to do, so yeah, if you’re going to put your blame somewhere… I gave him all the reason to want to stay away from Hae Ra and the whole situation for a while. I even got kind of mad at Hae Ra when she just made her way back into his life and basically gave him the same task that Tae Oh had laid upon her, to get back with Jung Min because that way he could also get his hands on her shares. I mean, what the heck gave her that right? Anyways, I’m glad he ended up back with Jung Min because they loved each other and no other reason. He was a very sympathetic character, and a good loyal figure, but I still felt for the way he had to get involved in the whole thing.

I’ve seen Heo Joon Seok in Oh! My Lady, The Girl Who Sees Smells, Suspicious Partner and Our Beloved Summer. Another familiar face. Despite his dodgy appearance and vibe in the beginning of the series, Kim Chang Soo turned out to be a hero. He turned out to be one of the best characters. He always cared about Hae Ra and her sister’s safety and tried as best he could to help Hae Ra out with gaining info, but as a complete outsider, you can’t expect him to get everything from the right source, either. I didn’t blame him at all for providing Hae Ra with incomplete evidence because that was literally all that he could get his hands on. He did, however, warn her several times not to go in too deep and that not everything might be what it seemed. In my opinion, he did warn her not to just believe anything she heard – it was all on her for going ahead while she didn’t have 100% certainty on the evidence. Yes, I’m still bothered that she dared blaming Chang Soo for that. Anyways, in the end he also became sort of an ally to In Joon, as he helped him to get a moment with Hyun Joo alone after she woke up. He also was the hero who just happened to follow the uncle at the time of his accident and found out firsthand from him that it was all Jung Ho and he even managed to save most of the evidence. At first, when it seemed like he only took the photograph from the burning pile of papers I was like, you could’ve taken the other documents as well!! The photograph of Jung Ho and Hyun Joo is also still indirect evidence!! But then it turned out he did manage to obtain most of the evidence and put everything on a USB stick, clever guy. I really liked his character, he was the type who would get into scrapes for people and not get a thank you for it, but still do it again.

Cha Soo Yeon didn’t really have a lot to do in the show besides lying in a hospital bed unconscious, but I still liked that they didn’t just use her as Hae Ra’s Achilles heel, but that she remained her own person and that she regained consciousness at the end. I didn’t know the actress from anything else, but I liked how resilient she made Hyun Joo appear, not simply backing off after Jung Ho simply ordered her to get an abortion and disappear from his life as if nothing happened. I also appreciated that, when In Joon came to visit the Busan shoe workshop in the final episode, she apologized to him on behalf of Hae Ra. I think it must have been a very uncomfortable talk between the sisters when Hae Ra had to tell her how she went after the wrong guy and Hyun Joo naturally understood how much In Joon had come to suffer under the whole situation, while she never had any beef with him. I just thought that was really considerate of her, especially since she was the last person who owed anyone any kind of apology.
I see the actress hasn’t done a lot of dramas yet, but I hope she’ll get the chance to act more in the future as I did think she performed well for the limited screentime that she had. Even without the screentime, I still liked her more than I liked Hae Ra. Again, I said what I said.

One final special shoutout to Im Ji Gyu and Jo Wan Gi, who respectively played In Joon’s assistant Kim and Gold Shoes factory worker Kim Seok Jin, because they were the only good people who stood by In Joon’s side until the end. They were the two people waiting for him outside when he got out of prison, and they were the most loyal to him throughout the entire show. I really loved these guys.

So yeah, this was a pretty complicated review to write for me and I’ll definitely have to go over it again to see if I didn’t miss anything. Anyways, yes, it was quite a complicated story but I still thought it was well written, especially how it wrapped up in the end. There were some events in-between that didn’t make much sense to me, like the Hae Ra/Tae Oh-dating pretense and I did initially think that putting Jung Min and Eui Geon together was kind of a stretch, but all in all they managed to resolve these things in the end. My main problem was just with the female lead, as I found her so unbelievably stupid. Seriously, the summary on DramaWiki starts with ‘Goo Hae Ra is a smart and beautiful woman’, well. She might have been smart in her approach to ‘seduce’ In Joon, but in her deduction skills and approach to execute her revenge plan, she really could’ve taken a basic course on distinguishing indirect evidence from definite evidence. Even to a noob like me it was unrealistic how she went ahead with her plan to ruin someone without even making 100% sure whether or not she got the right guy. I also still think that, if she had any intuition at all, she would’ve known that In Joon was innocent, I mean come on, they even slept together – did she seriously not find out a single thing about his personal life? Did she really just sleep with him without a single thought in her mind? Anyways, guess I’ll just have to live with this frustration now, haha. Apart from that, I liked the ending and how justice was finally served. That was very satisfying indeed.
I probably wouldn’t recommend this drama, though, because for me unfortunately the frustrations still weighed heavier than the things I thought were good about it. I definitely thought they solved the problem well, but it took a very long time, literally until the second-to-last episode.

I will now go on to something much lighter and more entertaining, I hope, and then I can start on my next batch of watch list items, of which I haven’t even decided the order yet so that should be a nice surprise for the both of us!

I’ll be back soon, bye-bee!!