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.

Somebody
(썸바디 / Seombadi)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hi y’all! The weather is so bad here right now, it’s been raining and snowing and it’s just cold and wet all the time. AKA the best weather to cuddle up with a blanket and a cup of hot tea and watch some K-Drama! Honestly I feel like even though this might not become a very lengthy review, I’ll still have a hard time constructing my arguments. All in all I have very mixed feelings about this and when I read other people’s reviews and comments online, I’m glad to say that at least I’m not the only one that got hella confused. It started out really good and interesting, but the more it progressed there were just more questions and less answers. I’ve debated a lot on how to rate this, because the acting and the cinematography were very impressive but, the story in itself left some things to be desired in my opinion. There were a lot of random events and I kept feeling like they weren’t really getting to the point. I hope I’ll be able to convey the way I felt about it clearly, so let’s just get on with it!

Somebody is an 8-episode Netflix K-Drama with episodes of about 55 minutes each. It’s about Kim Seom (played by Kang Hae Rim), a young woman with Asperger’s who is a genius at programming. We see her as a student in the beginning, helping out some game hall owner by rigging his arcade machines so it’ll be even harder to win any money with them. Seom makes it clear from the start that, as long as it won’t cause people to die, she doesn’t mind helping out even though it’s still considered to be illegal to do so. At a science fair she participates in, Seom’s self-made AI chatbot ‘SOME ONE’ is discovered by Samantha Jung (played by Choi Yoo Ha) who is impressed by the intricate detail in the observation and recording functions that Seom programmed in it. Skip to a while later, the two have started a popular social meeting/dating app called ‘Somebody’ together, with Samantha as the director and Seom as the co-director. However, the app has been suffering from some bad reputation, as it starts being associated with more rape and even murder crimes. When Seom, with her mad programming skills that allow the app to even recognize patterns in the way people chat with each other, is ordered to look into the account that’s suspected to be involved with one of these crimes, and she discovers that this same person has about 6 different accounts on Somebody. When she likes all of them in an attempt to get in touch with this mystery person, she immediately feels a connection with the way this man talks to her through one of these accounts. Seom, who has always felt very estranged from the people around her because of her Asperger’s, actually finds a kind of kindred spirit in this guy, especially after she meets him in real life.

I’m just already going to end my summary of the story here because I already can’t stop myself from inserting my own comments. Basically, what it comes down to, is that Seom is asked to look into a person that’s using Somebody, the app she developed, to meet young women, gets them to meet up with him in real life, and then murders them.
When Seom gets to talking with this person online, she immediately feels like he understands her like no one has ever understood her. He doesn’t blame her for killing an injured cat on the street because she took pity on it and couldn’t reach anyone to come save it. He even seems to encourage it, telling her he knows how she feels. They meet up already in the first episode, and that’s where we meet the guy, who is Sung Yoon Oh (played by Kim Young Kwang). Even though Seom is aware of the fact that he might be behind those murders, she can’t help but feel attracted to him, and he also seems to treat her differently, he’s kind to her and he doesn’t harm her in any way. After meeting him in real life for the first time, Seom slowly but surely gets pretty obsessed with him, even to the point of recording herself repeating what few conversations they had (both in-chat as in-person), and uses those recordings to masturbate to. She keeps wanting to talk to him more, but then he stops responding for a while and she’s left to think about their (imagined?) connection by herself.

In the meantime, Yoon Oh is not sitting still. We see that he is constantly busy, keeping in contact with several different women on the many phones he keeps from his victims, which he keeps almost everywhere, in his office, in saves in his house, in his car dashboard, etc. He uses a clever system in which he keeps deleting his own footsteps, so to say, by keeping his victims’ phones and creating new Somebody accounts with those using random pictures of sceneries or objects. Keeping himself mysterious but interesting, as there will always a curious person that’s drawn to one of these pictures that he can lure in. This also works for Seom’s closest human friend, Yeong Gi Eun (played by Kim Soo Yeon).

Seom still keeps the prototype version of SOME ONE, her self-made AI chatbot, in her home office and chats with it from time to time, referring to it as a friend. Through her conversations with SOME ONE, we learn that she used to have a close friend that came to her house a lot, but it’s mentioned that she ‘doesn’t come over anymore’. This friend is Gi Eun. She’s a police detective, but she has recently been in an undefined accident, and now she’s in a wheelchair. It’s never really explained what this accident was, and only later we learn that her friendship with Seom became strained after Seom spoke a bit insensitively to her after she got the accident (saying that it was her own fault or something). Anyways, the two aren’t that close anymore.
Gi Eun incidentally finds an account on Somebody that has a wheelchair as its profile picture and matches with it. Just like any other victim, she’s intrigued and immediately feels like it’s meant to be to find such a perfect match, a guy who also claims to be in a wheelchair.
They meet up one time in a forest where there’s an abandoned empty pool – Gi Eun has told him she misses swimming and would like to try it again, so he invites her there. It’s quite a long way away, and there’s zero people around. Yoon Oh reveals to Gi Eun that he’s not actually in a wheelchair and though she’s initially alarmed and startled, she still doesn’t see any red flags and they even end up having sex in the abandoned locker room of the pool.
After which he leaves her by herself and throws away her wheelchair.
Gi Eun manages to get back home, miraculously, crawling all the way back to her car and then managing to get back to a place where she can stop a taxi. Determined to find that bastard who threw away her wheelchair, she summons her other close friend Im Mok Won (played by Kim Yong Ji). Mok Won is a young woman who grew up at a temple and now works as a shaman, claiming she’s been possessed by a certain General. She can feel certain vibes and spirits from people. After having a dream in which a bunch of her friends appeared, she calls them all one by one to make sure they’re okay, but then gets super anxious when Gi Eun doesn’t pick up. Gi Eun goes to Mok Won’s house after the pool incident and asks her for her help. With this, they have no other choice to also contact Seom, as it involves a meeting that took place through Somebody.

I just couldn’t figure out what Seom’s deal was, to be honest. She knew about Yoon Oh’s truth, she knew he killed people, but she still felt a really deep connection to him and didn’t want to lose him because she feared she might never find someone like him again, someone so much like her. However, after hearing that her own close friend fell victim to him, no matter how much she probably didn’t want to believe it, it still felt like she didn’t want him to get caught. She kept telling Mok Won that the person who did that to Gi Eun wasn’t the person she was seeing, based purely on Gi Eun’s remark that he was ‘impotent’ during their intercourse and he wasn’t when he had sex with Seom. At one point I was really like, come on girl, are you that naïve or are you just really conflicted? Shouldn’t it be enough to stand up for your friend in this case? He literally came after both Gi Eun and Mok Won, and she still chose to follow her own feelings. I guess in this case her social handicap really came through – she just couldn’t relate to other people’s feelings, she couldn’t use her head and think of the right thing to do when her heart was telling her something different, even if it wasn’t the right thing. I get how desperately she wanted to hold on to him, because the connection she felt with him was that special to her, but still, priorities should be priorities here. She got in the way when Mok Won wanted to take a picture of her and Yoon Oh together to check with Gi Eun if he was indeed the same guy, and she just dragged some random colleague with her instead of Yoon Oh. I kept getting confused by Seom, I just couldn’t figure out what she was thinking.

Also, Gi Eun. Holy freaking moly. As a police detective, how could she be so incredibly reckless. When she got out of the woods the first time, I was kind of impressed, thinking ‘heck yes, she survived’. But then we see that he didn’t actually physically harm her, he just left her behind, so her being pissed at him didn’t come from fear or horror, but more from a place of genuine annoyance. She wanted to get back at him just for being a bastard that threw her wheelchair away. Honestly, how could she have underestimated him like that?
She did all that effort to sneakily get back in contact with him, even if it meant transferring some kind of bitcoin to an anonymous source who could get her info, only to just immediately give away who she was the second he responded to her message. It was basically like saying, ‘Hey there! Remember me, I’m still here!’ And then he just asked her to meet up again and she went, AGAIN, BY HERSELF. It seemed like she had some sort of plan to let someone know where she’d gone, but nothing really happened in the end.
He asked her to meet up at a neighborhood that was about to be demolished. The second she arrived at their meeting place, some construction workers came and repeatedly told her to go away, it was dangerous here, all the more because she was in a wheelchair and the alleys were really narrow. That should have already been the biggest red flag, the only she’d need. ‘He asked me to meet up here so I’d get caught in this demolition and wouldn’t be able to get out’. It was CLEAR AS DAY. BUT NO. She kept going back. She was literally told to leave by construction workers THE ENTIRE TIME. But no, she still thought, ‘Nah, but he’s gotta be around here somewhere’. In the meantime Yoon Oh just kept sending her vague messages about how long it was taking him to get coffee. Like, HOW MANY RED FLAGS DO YOU NEED. I seriously kept screaming to Gi Eun this whole part, I just couldn’t believe how stupid she was. She kept going further and further into that maze, the alleys got narrower, all around her buildings were being demolished and she still didn’t think it might be better if she went back. It would have been the most logical thing to do, even if she was that bend on meeting him. ‘Oh, I guess it’s dangerous here, I’ll just tell him I’ll meet him somewhere else in case he doesn’t know that our rendezvous place is getting demolished right this moment’. Like, he left her all by herself and threw away her wheelchair, but she still trusted him enough to just show up with coffee in a place like that? So yeah, at one point her wheelchair inevitably gets stuck and she is locked inside a closed-off neighborhood, she can’t even crawl her way out of there as it’s literally falling apart around her.
And then Yoon Oh suddenly appears in front of her, and she’s like ‘Oh, wow, he’s actually a psychopath.’ GIRL. She was miraculously lucky to have a psychic friend like Mok Won who just smelled that she was in trouble and they actually ended up finding her amongst the rubble. Gi Eun survived again, but still, it’s just like it couldn’t get through to her how dangerous this guy actually was. She kept talking about ‘catching this bastard’ while it seemed like she still didn’t fully recognize how genuinely dangerous he was. Just because he didn’t kill her, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have done it eventually. I don’t know, it was from this point on that this series started to get really frustrating to me.

Mok Won is a very unique character in itself. She has very distinctive looks, she’s very androgynous, and she’s also revealed to be a lesbian (she’s shown meeting another woman at a bar and getting intimate with her). Despite her ‘cool’ appearance and attitude, the whole motorbike lady image, Mok Won is very calm-natured and she’s very concerned about the people she cares for. Seeing her wear her traditional shaman hanbok stood in really stark contrast with her everyday outfits. In any case, as we’re not given too much information about how she got possessed or how she became a shaman at all, it does seem that she’s one of the few people who could actually get the truth out of people. Without even having met Yoon Oh, she can already feel that he’s got a lot of evil spirits about him from an object that Seom got from him (a small razor blade). However, despite her probably having the most information about Yoon Oh’s true nature even when everyone around her is keeping the truth from her, there was also only so much that Mok Won could do about it. She sets out to help Gi Eun with her quest to ‘catch the bastard’, but she usually just ends up hopping on her motorcycle to drive people around and save her friends’ asses from the guy.
She has one inside guy, nicknamed 79NewMoney (played by Lee Ki Chan) who ends up getting her the final evidence she needs (all the mobile phones from Yoon Oh’s house), and with this both Spectrum, the company that houses Somebody, and the police could actually do something to lure Yoon Oh out. But before that, basically the entire show, it was just talking about how they wanted to catch him but not actually taking any real action.

I have to agree with the comments out there that I think there were a lot of random things going on in this story. Sometimes a piece of truth was revealed which had all the effects of being a dramatic plot twist but didn’t make any sense to me.
I’ve read comments saying that the writers completely misunderstood the notion of Asperger’s and that they could’ve just made Seom someone who struggled in social situations – the Asperger’s in itself wasn’t actually that crucial to her character, it was crucial that she felt like a social outcast and had trouble communicating with people. The only reference made to autism was in her flashbacks as a child where her mom was teaching her how to recognize facial expressions in association to certain emotions. Seom kind of reminded me of the female lead in Murata Sayaka’s ‘Convenience Store Woman’. This woman doesn’t mention anything about having some sort of autism, but she’s just an ‘alien’ because she just can’t be on the same wavelength as others and ends up adapting to the people around her so she won’t get found out. There’s also mention of her acting a bit sociopathic as a child, so I felt like this might have been the same for Seom as well. In any case, Seom’s whole deal was that she felt alone and misunderstood and Yoon Oh, in his craziness, made her feel like she wasn’t alone for the first time ever.
As for Gi Eun, the fact that a guy leaving her naked and vulnerable by herself in an abandoned pool in an abandoned forest and threw away her wheelchair wasn’t enough of a red flag to make her cautious enough of him when he then asks her to literally ride her wheelchair into an active construction site. Gi Eun being a police detective ended up having nothing to do with the story, as she didn’t even manage to track him down. She tracked Seom’s phone as it was being driven around in a taxi while Seom herself was going off to Yoon Oh by herself without even noticing that it might be a red herring.
Furthermore, and I also thought this during the scene between her and Yoon Oh in that demolished neighborhood, maybe I didn’t read her expression right, but it still seemed to me like Gi Eun was strangely attracted to Yoon Oh even after what he did to her. After all that went down, one time Gi Eun is seen lying in her bed, repeating the swimming movements with her arms that Yoon Oh made her experience at the abandoned pool. At the end, after Yoon Oh has been killed, it’s almost as if she’s reminiscing him, she even kept the two lollipops he left her, even though they were pretty much signs of a threat to her before. She was dressed all in black, as if she was mourning him. That was just really strange to me.

By the way, didn’t anyone have a lock on their door or something? How he did he just walk into Mok Won’s and Gi Eun’s houses? Honestly, again I couldn’t shake my head at Gi Eun. They’d literally talked about him probably knowing where Gi Eun lived by now, and then when she suddenly hears someone coming up to her door in the middle of the night and opens her door and throws a lollipop inside, her first reaction is to go, ‘MOM IS THAT YOU’. Seriously, what the heck was up with that?! She should’ve been calling the police the second she heard any kind of noise, knowing that a serial killer was after her.

Mok Won being a shaman was also quite random. I mean, it was definitely handy to have a psychic person there, and I personally liked Mok Won’s character a lot as it seemed like she had a lot of trumps up her sleeve where her powers were concerned. One part that was kind of unnecessarily intense for me was that exorcism ritual. At one point, Seom asks her to perform a ritual for her and Yoon Oh (?) and then Mok Won has to do this whole intense ritual which ends with her jumping up and down barefeet on two metal cutters, basically. Like, what was up with the intensity of that? It did result in Mok Won’s awareness of Gi Eun’s dangerous situation (it was happening simultaneously to the rendezvous at the soon-to-be demolished neighborhood) and it also seemed like she got possessed by the spirits of one of Yoon Oh’s previous victims for a moment. In any case, that’s where Mok Won somehow became aware of the fact that Gi Eun and Seom’s guys were the same person. But yeah, that scene really got me going like o_O I was scared she was going to slice her feet open!

I was waiting for there to be this really intense backstory about Yoon Oh, about how he became the way he became. And then, that was kind of an anti-climax in itself. All the more when it was revealed it all just started one year earlier. There were all these signs that it might have something to do with his mom, as he didn’t reveal anything about his past but his expression changed whenever it was mentioned. So yeah, basically his first experience with Somebody one year prior ended in accidentally murdering the women during sex and then also taking on the guy that she additionally called for a threesome. The woman had literally asked for Yoon Oh to strangle her, in a rough sex play kind of way, and then he ended up using too much force. And I guess after that he just got used to that feeling? He started doing it again and again? And that’s how it came to be? For an origin story, I found it kind of disappointing, although of course it’s still not a joke how he ended up killing all those women. Like the woman he cut up and left in that silo, I mean, damn.
In the end, the employees from Spectrum/Somebody manage to create some impressive footage of Yoon Oh’s previous victims (they manage to create a moving image made from remaining pictures of the people’s Somebody accounts or something?) and then Yoon Oh suddenly keeps getting video calls from his former victims, which is understandably upsetting to him. This is the first thing that actually manages to set him off into an unstable condition, one where he isn’t the one with all the power.

I kept being really confused about Yoon Oh’s true feelings for Seom. In the beginning it felt like he indeed felt a bit differently about her, as he didn’t hurt her and I don’t know, the way he looked at her was just different. But he did set up that whole rape role play which victimized Seom, even though it resulted in her killing one of her assailants herself. He still set up that incredibly triggering situation for her, so in that way he did treat her like he did his usual victims, he just didn’t do it himself. I honestly thought for most of the show that Seom was idealizing their relationship and that Yoon Oh wasn’t actually romantically attracted to her, but just thought she’d be of use to him as the developer of Somebody and all. But then at the end he built her that space and he kept saying how much he liked her even when he was bleeding to death? So I guess he did have real feelings for her? The build-up in their relationship was just very vague to me. At one point Seom was completely head over heels for him, but then started doubting him again after seeing how he smashed up SOME ONE when he found out it recorded messages he typed but deleted before sending them. She knew the bad things he’d done, but after experiencing a sort of euphoria herself after killing her assailant that one time, she felt like she understood him as well. It was like the both of them kept going on and off where their mutual feelings were concerned, and that’s what made the slowburn very slow. That’s why, when Seom killed him, I was still not sure what had driven her to that decision, as she’d just admitted to Gi Eun on the phone earlier that he was such a special person to her, someone she’d never find again if she chose to give him up.
From other people’s comments, I’ve understood that the way she murdered him had a connection to the way she murdered that injured cat in the beginning, to stop its suffering. However, in what way exactly did she feel like he was suffering? Also, it probably had to do with the fact that he used her precious app, Somebody, to kill people. Just like she confirmed with that game hall owner in the first episode that what he was trying to do wouldn’t end up killing people, I guess she did ultimately have enough justice in her left to feel that that was wrong? It didn’t seem to bother her in the beginning, I mean she knew from the start that he was the murderer using Somebody to meet his victims. But somehow, after he openly admitted to her that he’d been using her app to do so, suddenly it became intolerable? As I said, I have more questions than answers here. Even though killing him off seemed like the only way to solve everything (the way she did it though, slicing him through the eyes with the razor blade he gave her, yikes), it still didn’t solve a lot of questions I had. And I guess now I’ll never know, haha.

One final event I want to mention which just confused me even more was the whole deal with that Hong Gong Joo (played by Kang Ji Eun). She only appears briefly before as the owner of a restaurant that Yoon Oh delivers Gi Eun’s phone to after Mok Won manages to reach him on it and asks about the whereabouts of her friends. He claims Gi Eun left this phone behind in that restaurant and that she can pick it up there. Hong Gong Joo claims like she doesn’t know anything, and only reveals a little more after Mok Won pays her.
Her restaurant is also in that neighborhood that gets demolished, and when Gi Eun is confronted by Yoon Oh in that state, she discovers a body among the rubbish that’s left there, although it’s not immediately revealed who it is.
At the end of that episode, we suddenly get an entire flashback of Hong Gong Joo and how she met Yoon Oh. He was a regular at her restaurant and she treated him very warmly, and in return he taught her how to use Somebody. Through Somebody, she met the 79NewMoney guy and they ended up in a relationship together (?) even though they’d seemed completely unrelated when we saw them in a scene together before. When 79NewMoney started spying on him for Mok Won and he went after him, I guess Yoon Oh felt like Gong Joo was also in on something and then he just strangled her and it’s revealed that she is the body lying under the rubbish. The moment the flashback started I got really excited, thinking it would reveal a whole new plot twist, about how that woman was in cahoots with Yoon Oh or something, but when it ended I was just like, ‘Okay… so…. What?’ Like, I didn’t even see how it mattered what he did with this woman, how it had any additional value to the story. It wasn’t important what their relationship had been, and she could’ve just disappeared along with the restaurant without it being explicitly shown that Yoon Oh also killed her because that would’ve been anyone’s first guess. So I really didn’t understand that flashback, especially the part where she apparently met and started dating 79NewMoney through Somebody. It seemed really irrelevant.

Talking about ways this drama showed its controversy, I can’t leave out that I was pretty astonished by the amount of sex and nudity. It took on a pretty arthouse kind of style, which kept me engaged, but yeah, lots of sex and nudity. I did appreciate them normalizing a lesbian relationship for once, because that really doesn’t happen a lot in K-Drama, but the R-ratedness of it sometimes did make me a bit uncomfortable, especially when it just became repetitive. Yoon Oh is shown having sex with several different women in the show, each time equally intense. They definitely didn’t shy away from showing a lot of boobs and butts! I can only say that this is probably a certain taste that you need to have in movies or series. I personally didn’t care for it so much, it did give the series an additional sense of maturity and reality, and I’ve seen people actually being grateful for it in comparison to regular K-Dramas in which people get all fidgety about even holding hands or calling each other by their first name. This show deals more with people’s feral instincts than with pure feelings in relationships, and in a way I think it was good for them to put a dating app like Somebody in such a light, less romanticized and more of a tool to enable spontaneous booty calls. After all, that’s mainly what these apps are used for in real life.

I just kept wondering how these women, Yoon Oh’s victims, could be so gullible. How they just went out to meet up with someone they just talked to for 10 minutes on an app. This is personally the reason why I can’t do dating apps. People always ask to meet up within one day, or even a week of chatting. I’ve personally experienced being invited out by a guy to come visit him on the other side of the country after only talking for a week. I just instinctively don’t trust these situations, and the way Yoon Oh approached his victims was so full of red flags that I couldn’t understand how all these women were so gullible. Apart from Gi Eun, who took good faith to an entirely new level, I’m just talking about the women that Yoon Oh killed in-between. Okay, he was sneaky and maybe you wouldn’t expect someone to already have an ulterior motive when you ‘incidentally’ match with them on an app like that. But doesn’t anyone just have a basic sense of caution when they register on these apps in the first place? I thought that by now, everyone knows that everything that happens online has potential danger, that you always have to be careful with people you meet online because you can never know their true intentions for sure.

My rating of this drama actually dropped from a 7.5 to a 6.5 after the first couple of episodes. From the trailer, it had looked so promising and interesting, I thought initially Seom was a detective of some sorts herself who found herself attracted to a serial killer and that in itself was kind of refreshing? As in, it would make for a pretty conflicting but refreshing story, one of its kind. I also couldn’t wait to see Kim Young Kwang as a serial killer. I don’t like how this series kind of romanticized Yoon Oh, as in, who it tried to make you feel for him while he was being a first-degree creep and murderer. And yeah, a lot of the story was kind of messy and confusing and random. Apart from that, I couldn’t help admiring the arthouse style. I felt like I was watching a movie and this kept me watching. I kept hoping for some sort of all-explaining final plot twist, something that would finally explain everything, but it didn’t happen. The acting was good, the characters were intriguing despite being occasionally frustrating as heck, and I still think it had a lot of potential. The first couple of episodes were really interesting to me, but at some point it just felt like they were going in circles with how they were going to deal with Yoon Oh, or if they were going to deal with him. It didn’t work directly towards a concrete solution or ending point, and the build-up of that was a bit too slow and took a lot of (random) detours. I really find it a pity, I had pretty high expectations of it to be honest.

I’ll make some cast comments before concluding this short review. I feel like I went through it pretty fast for a change!

Kim Young Kwang was my main reason for wanting to watch this. I was initially kind of scared that this drama would change my perspective on him, as I’ve always found him and his smile adorable. While this drama definitely put him and his smile in a different light, I think he was a really good casting choice for Yoon Oh because he was able to portray the duality to his character so well. He’s extremely charming, but then you forget to notice how big/tall and strong he actually he is, and how he can just take you into an unescapable headlock within one second. It’s definitely one of the more impactful roles I’ve seen of him, in the sense that he’s showed me a side I hadn’t seen of him before. I know him from things like White Christmas, Pinocchio, Gogh The Starry Night, Lookout and Room No. 9 and the movie On Your Wedding Day in which he starred with Park Bo Young. I’ll definitely see more shows with him in the future, so I think I’ll just have to delete him as a psycho killer from my brain so I can at least see him smile without feeling anxious, haha. But yeah, despite my dislike for the romanticization of his character, I also felt myself hoping there was something inside him that could redeem him.

I hadn’t seen Kang Hae Rim in anything before, but I kept thinking I knew her from somewhere. She just fit in so well that I assumed she was an actress, but I found out she’s only done 2 dramas so far. Interesting to see her casted in such a peculiar role as Seom as one of her first acting jobs. I think she definitely succeeded in making Seom into the social alien that she was, she has a really fresh and innocent look but as soon as she’s released to her instincts, she’s definitely a wild one. It was interesting to see her character plunge into that wildness after meeting someone she connected with so much, how it immediately went to wanting physical intimacy rather than first exploring the boundaries and being healthily cautious, she just jumped right in. There were several things I couldn’t understand about her, as I’ve mentioned before, like how she kept choosing heart over head even when she knew her boyfriend serial killer was targeting her best friend, like you’d think she’d be a bit more conflicted to say the least. But I could also very well understand how much it meant to her to finally have found someone she could relate to so much, and who could relate to her like no one else could. I get that she wanted to hold on to that, but the fact that he was a serial killer didn’t change. All in all, I think she did a great acting job here, I kept trying to find out what was going through her head.

This is actually Kim Soo Yeon’s first ever drama role! Again, I hadn’t seen her in anything before, but I can’t believe that this was her first acting job. In the first couple of episodes, I really liked Gi Eun, I really admired her for crawling her way home from that abandoned people being all like ‘I’m gonna kill that bastard!’ but then how she acted after that just didn’t make sense to me, it was like she was continuously underestimating Yoon Oh while she should have known, or at least had her police instinct to tell her that the guy was a walking red flag/warning sign. I just didn’t find it credible to make her go through that while she should’ve known better, and how it seemed like she kept forgetting that she was in a wheelchair. I couldn’t really figure out what she was thinking in the end, and how she even thought of dealing with Yoon Oh even when she caught him. So in that case, making her a police officer didn’t really have any influence on her character and it only helped in the sense that she had some people from work that she could ask for favors from time to time.

Not me almost spitting out my tea when I realized Kim Yong Ji is Na Ri from The King: Eternal Monarch ?! Talk about an image change, hallelujah. I honestly didn’t even recognize her, although her distinctive features did made me feel like I’d seen her before. But Na Ri?! Nah, I wouldn’t have thought of that. It’s impressive how she turned into a completely different person. I mean, The King: Eternal Monarch is the only thing besides this I’ve seen her in so I can only refer to that one as an example, but I was really flabbergasted when I found out. I find it a very interesting choice to make her a shaman with such a wild night life on the side, and I also liked how much the writers normalized her attraction to other women, and the relationship with her eventual girlfriend. The shaman aspect, the fact that she was spiritually able to sense danger around her friends, was very convenient, almost unrealistically convenient in this case. I have a lot of questions about her character too, although I think her priorities were the clearest of all, as was her expression of concern for her friends. I want a friend like Mok Won, too, haha. Although her ‘help’ also didn’t really result in anything in the end, either.

I’m only now realizing how full of actors-I-don’t-know this series is! Even though everyone looked so familiar. I had the same with Choi Yoo Ha, aka Samantha. She was also quite a peculiar character. I couldn’t really put my finger on her relationship with Seom either. It seemed like she cared about her a lot, but on the other hand it also sounded like she just needed Seom to keep Somebody going, but that she didn’t really care that much about her personally. In the scene where she planned to corner Yoon Oh at her office and he just told her Seom already knew everything, I did feel like she wanted to keep Seom to herself because she kept seeing her as that socially awkward high school student from that science fair where they first met, someone who would always be a child and needed someone to protect her.

All in all, I guess I just really couldn’t figure out what the characters were thinking, in general, haha. Unlike regular K-Drama we don’t get to hear their thoughts out loud, no one is talking to themselves. Of course, that’s what makes it more unpredictable and realistic. In many a sense, this drama really does the reality of contemporary society justice, because if there’s one show that doesn’t romanticize anything, from life to work to relationships, it’s this one. It also didn’t romanticize the Somebody app, like for example what they did in Love Alarm. It shows a dark and feral side to people that seek comfort in casual meet-ups and one night stands, rather than basing a whole story on the build-up of one seemingly perfect relationship. Highlighting the imperfection of human beings using this kind of cinematographic arthouse style was something that still kept me curious, because I was expecting for there to be some sort of concrete wrap-up at the end. However, I couldn’t help but get disappointed and frustrated and confused. I ended up with more questions than answers, and even when the final threat was eliminated at the end, I still felt like he got away with everything that he did, that Seom gave him an easy way out. I would have liked to get a bit more backstory on all the characters that would’ve explained their responses to things, because now a lot of things they did seemed really out of character for me. I wish I could’ve rated it higher because I still think it had a lot of potential, but it just wasn’t executed in a way that pleased me, personally. I’m still glad I gave this show a chance as it’s completely not my usual genre. I like that Netflix is sharing more of these unconventional Korean shows, because I honestly had no idea they also made these kinds of K-Drama besides all the romanticized usual ones. I can totally understand how this show would come as a breath of fresh air for people who’ve always rolled their eyes at the sometimes unbearably pure and immature nature of regular series, and I do appreciate its depiction of harsh reality as well, as it can’t always be covered up. In any case, I’m going to go back to my list now, which undoubtedly is filled more with more ‘regular’ shows. I personally can’t deny that I’m more of a light, casual, romantic show lover, as that’s the kind of comfort I personally seek for in Asian drama series.

Thanks for reading all this way, and I’ll be back (probably next month) with my next review. I still have so much to watch, I can’t get more behind than I already am.

Until next time! Bye-bee! ^^