SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Manhole
(맨홀: 이상한 나라의 필 / Maenhol: Isanghan Naraui Pil)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

This drama was on my list after I saw a trailer in which the four main characters were doing a silly dance and I thought it looked funny and interesting. Especially since the summary said it was going to be about some people travelling back in time through a manhole, which sounded pretty original.
Just before this I watched Todome no Kiss, which also included time travel, so it was kind of fun to roll into another time travel story again, one of a completely different nature.

First of all, the story. It’s about Bong Pil (played by Kim Jae Joong), who is kind of a problem child; he is studying to be a police officer but keeps getting into trouble and is quite frankly all over the place. Especially when his neighbor/childhood friend/crush of 27 years Kang Soo Jin (played by Uee/Kim Yoo Jin) is getting married to a man she’s only known for a few months. He still isn’t over his feelings for her and he wonders where it went wrong because at a certain point in their pasts, he is sure that they liked each other. However, he was never able to confess his feelings honestly because he always freezes when that timing comes and always messes up in the end.
Soo Jin is getting married to pharmacist Park Jae Hyun (played by Jang Mi Kwan), who seems to be the very friendly and well-mannered ideal son-in-law.
Pil and Soo Jin’s other friends include: Yoon Jin Sook (played by Jung Hye Sung), Jo Seok Tae (played by B1A4’s Baro/Cha Seon Woo). Jin Sook is Soo Jin’s best friend, who’s secretly had a crush on Pil since high school but chose not to pursue it because she knew Soo Jin liked him too. Seok Tae is desperately studying for the civil servant exam, and is even a bit distant to Pil and the trouble he always brings with him, but he’s in love with Jin Sook and wants to impress her by passing his exams and becoming a civil servant with a stable job.
Then there’s their neighbors Oh Dal Soo (Lee Sang Yi), Hong Jung Ae (Seo Min Ji) and Yang Goo Gil (Kang Hong Seok). Dal Soo is a free spirit, later revealed to be a rich director’s son, but he chose not to follow into the business and start his own business with Jung Ae so they could stay together. Jung Ae has been in love with Dal Soo since high school. Goo Gil is a bit of a third wheel to the two, he is Dal Soo’s best friend but he is in love with Jung Ae and treats her really fondly, even though she always pushes him away.
Everyone treats Pil a bit indifferently since they all seem to be aware of the fact that he is a hopeless case, and that it’s his own fault for never facing his feelings for Soo Jin and they are all rooting for the newlyweds.
One night, when another conflict arises between Pil and Soo Jin in the park, Pil is sucked in by a strange manhole and is teleported back to his high school period.

That’s how it starts. First of all, I want to use this introduction to criticize the summary of this series that was written on wiki-d.addicts. The summary says, very compactly, that ‘Bong Pil and his five friends travel through time through a manhole to prevent a wedding from happening’. This, however, is not what the series is about.
For starters, Bong Pil is the only one traveling back and forth through time. His five friends never join him. Only Soo Jin joins him two times at the end of the series, but that’s it. They never travel together.
Secondly, the summary makes it sound as if Pil voluntarily and actively travels back in time to prevent the wedding from happening, or making sure Soo Jin and her husband never meet or something like that. This is also not true. I’m not even sure if you could actually say Pil ‘travels’ through time, since this suggests a voluntary action. Pil is being teleported and put back in time by this manhole against his will: he has no say in it whatsoever. That’s why, at the beginning of these teleportations, Pil has no idea what is going on or why this is happening to him. He doesn’t know if the manhole wants him to do something, and, if yes, what and how. He just slowly figures it out as he goes and then makes his own path and decides for himself what he wants to change. Actually, in the beginning he is so clueless that he changes a situation in his past and then, when he comes back to his own time, finds his own future has completely changed because he altered this certain situation. There are so many butterfly effect episodes in this series that at a certain point I found it hard to keep track of what was changed and if it was the past, present or future they were in now.
Because of all these things that happen in different timelines, a lot of it got mixed up in my head and I don’t even remember every single thing. It was quite a lot to take in and sometimes things were really confusing.

The series starts off as light comedy, where you’re just laughing at what’s happening and how bizarre it all is. Because first it seemed like every episode would just be ‘Pil goes back in time, changes something, and comes back to a present that’s different from his original one’ and it was funny to anticipate what kind of developments his past alterations would have on the future when he’d come back.
It gets more interesting when his past alterations also start changing the futures of his friends and neighbors, and starts pairing them up differently. In one changed future, Pil finds himself engaged to Jin Sook, and while Dal Soo and Jung Ae are a couple in real life, in another changed future Dal Soo chose to follow into his rich family’s heir position and Jung Ae ended up with Goo Gil. In another one, Jin Sook and Seok Tae are a lovey-dovey couple.
But then another plotline enters and creates a feeling of urgency to alter the future and, indeed, stop the wedding from happening. Now this is not because Pil is that selfish and he just wants Soo Jin to himself and doesn’t like the pharmacist so he wants to sabotage their wedding – no, he is actually, reluctantly but still, prepared to let the wedding happen if it makes Soo Jin happen. But the thing is, he finds out her husband is actual a really bad person and that’s why he wants to protect her. Jae Hyun turns out to be an ex-convict with serious anger issues, and he even starts beating people up in the streets at night randomly just because he feels agitated or angry.
Pil encounters several of these cases, each of them leading him a little closer to the truth about Jae Hyun. But how do you provide proof for things that you’ve seen in other timelines?

It takes Pil many many time leaps to get to the point where he’s able to show Soo Jin what a monster her husband actually is. And of course, Soo Jin initially never believes him, she’s disappointed in him that he’s so nasty to Jae Hyun and even breaks their friendship because of his accusations at a certain point (or should I say, in a certain timeline).
The moments that Pil manages to get emotionally close enough to Soo Jin still end up the wrong way, because there’s another malfunction in this manhole business: every night at 00:00, Pil is teleported back one way or another. So even when he’s in the past, and he’s just about to confess to Soo Jin, as the clock strikes 12 A.M., he is teleported back to the future. So there’s a lot of frustration from the viewers’ side, I believe. It takes a long time before the things are said that need to be said, before the actions are taken that need to be taken.

On the site where I was watching from, the series had a lot of bad reviews. Everyone was complaining about the series’ bad writing and their frustrations with the characters. True, there were a lot of situations that could’ve been handled more efficiently and just created frustrations about the characters’ unwise reactions. At a certain point, when Pil travels to the future for the first time where he has already become a police officer, he’s on the phone with Goo Gil, but then Goo Gil gets beaten up (by Jae Hyun). And even though Goo Gil already told him the location, instead of immediately running there or even calling for back-up, Pil just keeps screaming and asking into the phone what’s going on and if Goo Gil is okay, although he can clearly hear everything is not okay and Goo Gil is getting beaten up. On the other hand, I can fend for Pil’s character here that while he might already be a police officer, the Pil that traveled there hadn’t yet become a police officer. So he wouldn’t have known what to do in such a situation yet, while his future self would’ve. Sorry if this is confusing to read – I usually enjoy time travel stuff, but this one was really over-the-top with the butterfly effects that even as I was watching I was thinking ‘how am I ever going to write an understandable review about this’.

The thing I liked most about the whole series was the ending. As I mentioned, the last two times Soo Jin was for some reason also put through the manhole and traveled back in time as well. In the very last case, both Soo Jin and Pil (who actually died after being stabbed by Jae Hyun) are teleported back to their own original present, the one Pil originally left from in the first episode, back to the day of Soo Jin’s wedding. Soo Jin, with all her new memories intact, is now full aware of Jae Hyun’s true nature and there’s a sentimental ‘runaway bride’ moment where Pil comes dashing in and Soo Jin kicks Jae Hyun in the shins and they run away together. After that, they’re no longer summoned by the manhole and get married and they’re really cute together.
One compliment I have to give Kim Jae Joong is that he acted Pil’s feelings for Soo Jin really well. The way he looked at her, and just randomly took her face in his hands and hugged her… that was pure love acted out very well.
One thing about Pil’s character that was both interesting as bothering for me was that, in his high school period apparently he was in the track team, meaning he could run fast. But as kind of a running gag, they keep mentioning that he ‘always had a slow start’. And this keeps happening through the whole series. He doesn’t only have a slow start in running, but also in figuring out the whole manhole thing and… actually anything. It also kept occurring to me that in all the pursuing scenes, Pil was never fast enough. He always missed the culprit.
On the other hand, it was nice to see that throughout the series, Pil visibly became more mature. In the beginning he is a loose cannon, just running about, making a fuss about everything and nothing and just being dissatisfied with his situation and Soo Jin getting married. But as the time leaps keep happening, we see him gradually become calmer, more tired even, and in the end when he finally saves Soo Jin from Jae Hyun, he is actually more mature than we’ve seen him before. So the manhole also helps him become more mature I think.

The last ‘funny thing’ that happens in the series is also something I find very ambiguous. It is semi-revealed that the manhole thing is being executed by weird little firefly-like aliens. It is not revealed what they are or what their intentions are. However, in the end, they comment on Pil and Soo Jin and contemplate how interesting the love is that they feel for each other and that they want to experiment more than that. Looking for a new victim, their eyes fall on Goo Gil, who now seems to be kind of the fifth wheel, because Dal Soo and Jung Ae are also back together as if nothing changed. So then suddenly Goo Gil gets teleported and he comes running back to Pil and Soo Jin for counsel, and they just laugh at him and that’s the end. I didn’t really understand why they added that super-short new storyline, but oh well. At least everything ended well and everyone got together and Jae Hyun got psychological help and everything was well. But they sure went through a LOT to come to this final happiness.

To come back to the point of the weird aliens, there’s another thing that bothers me. Because even though the manhole seems to belong to these creatures, it seems that they have no hand whatsoever in what happens to Pil. In the end, when they see him and Soo Jin together, they just comment ‘Is he the one that’s been using our manhole?’, as if they hadn’t even noticed before.
So really, the intentions of the manhole aren’t clarified at all. It doesn’t seem to have had a logical reason for putting Pil back in time. Even if it wanted Pil to fix past mistakes and make sure he and Soo Jin end up together, take some responsibility! Because now it just seems as if the manhole acted by itself, and the alien thingies that supposedly controlled the damn thing weren’t even paying attention to what was happening or they didn’t care. They keep taking Pil, dragging him back and forth and then in the end it’s like they didn’t even have a reason, or they didn’t even do anything on purpose to let this happen. So the whole argumentation of what happened and why was kept really vague. Also what the heck was actually up with the manhole? It’s never clarified.

Now I would like to make some remarks on the actors. I actually knew Kim Jae Joong from a Japanese drama called Sunao ni Narenakute, in which he spoke Japanese. So this was the first time I actually heard him spoke Korean.
I didn’t know Uee, I’ve seen her name before, but I didn’t know her. I thought she looks a lot like Han Seung Yeon, or maybe the other way around. Han Seung Yeon could play Uee younger version, they have very similar face types.
For the rest I only knew Baro from God’s Gift 14 Days and I knew Jung Hye Sung from several dramas in which she portrayed her versatility and playing very cheeky and funny characters (Blood, Moonlight Drawn By Clouds, Oh My Venus). I’ve seen Kang Hong Seok once before in Chicago Typewriter. So a few familiar faces in the cast.
Also Jang Mi Kwan has played in one other drama, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, in which he also played a psychopath/serial kidnapper. I hope they give him other roles as well so he doesn’t become a typecast actor.

Apart from the main cast, I want to give one minor character a shoutout for her acting. I’m talking about Jae Hyun’s ex-girlfriend, Park Young Joo, who keeps following him after he’s already married Soo Jin. She claims that she’s the only one who truly understands him, even though she becomes a victim of his anger issues as well. The actress who played this role, Park Ah In, was really good in my opinion. Because she had to play a mentally unstable role but still maintain a normal posture. The best acting was when Jae Hyun almost strangles her and lets go at the last minute: the way she acted out the after-reaction of being almost choked to death was really realistic, including all the weird and ugly gasping sounds. As I probably mention a lot, I respect Asian actors who really go all the way in their acting and throw away their shame, because I criticize the tendency of women in dramas to always appear ‘pretty’. It’s unrealistic. You can’t be pretty all the time. Not when you’re crying/gross sobbing, and certainly not when you’re almost strangled. So well done to this lady.

To sum it up, I had a lot of confused thoughts about this drama. I didn’t find it as good quality-wise, but it was definitely entertaining. It was a nice break from all the emotional stuff I’ve been watching lately.
I might even change the summary on wiki.d-addicts myself, because it’s really not a good synopsis of the series. In the end, Pil goes as far for Soo Jin as he can, and it takes seeing him die for Soo Jin to truly see that she’s loved him all this time, no matter how she covered it up. It’s nice that it had such a sweet ending, because at a certain point, after Pil messes up time(line) and time(line) again, as a viewer you start thinking ‘maybe they’re not meant to be after all’. And then they still prove us wrong.
The friends in the end didn’t really have that much to do with the time travelling, Pil never tells anyone (or he does and they don’t believe him). But it was important to see how the alterations affected them as well, because that’s what gave true insight in their personalities. Without the alterations, we would’ve never known how much Jin Sook has been suppressing her feelings for Pil. There were times she couldn’t suppress them and in such an occasion she even sabotaged Pil and Soo Jin’s relationship when he was in the army (by hiding Pil’s letters to Soo Jin and making Soo Jin think he never wrote her back). Without the alterations we would’ve never known what would’ve happened if Dal Soo took another path, what would’ve become of Jung Ae and Goo Gil and to their triangle-relationship. So I believe the happenings mostly helped create character development for the side characters and of course the main storyline of trying to unmask Jae Hyun was what was needed to re-light the love and trust between Pil and Soo Jin.
But I still believe there were a lot of small, unnecessary elements in there, ones I can’t even remember now. But I feel like I’ve seen so many things happen, and in the end it was really just about one thing: getting Pil and Soo Jin to finally confess their true feelings to each other and getting together. Even though the alien thingies that started everything didn’t even want to take responsibility for letting all of this happen.
It took Pil and Soo Jin a long, long, way. This time it was a bitchy manhole that brought them together, but maybe it can be seen as a kind of metaphor. And it’s a good way to look at relationships: to really make sure you have no regrets. Pil was vexed that he never got to say how he felt to Soo Jin and had to watch her get snatched away by someone else, a stranger, and the manhole started helping him get back at that. Starting sending him back to situations in which he could’ve confessed but he kept failing until he got the gist of what was happening.
Even though none of the characters seemed to be witty enough to get it fully, in the end it all came together and that’s what matters.
Sometimes things take a long way. The important thing is that it’s worked out, and then the long way just becomes the effort we put into it.

SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Todome no Kiss
(トドメの接吻(キス) / Todome no Kisu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

The reason I started watching this drama in-between was -again- because of a gifset on Tumblr. This time it wasn’t a gifset depicting any content of the story, but a simple two-frame gif of Yamazaki Kento making a funny face. That was the initial reason I looked up the drama and started watching it. I watched this in-between because the other drama I’m currently watching is longer than I expected and I needed some light J-drama humor in the meantime.

When I started watching the first episode, I was torn by two different emotions. On the one hand it starts off really intense and angsty and creepy, but on the other hand I also found it hilarious and couldn’t really take it seriously.

The story is about a male host, ‘Eight’ – real name Dojima Otaro (played by Yamazaki Kento), who seems to be the most superficial host there can be. His acting performance is on point, he is the most popular host in his club and he has many female customers he occasionally sleeps with and meets up with outside of work. He only takes the richest customers because of his obsession with money, and apart from that he doesn’t care about the women’s feelings at all. He’s repeatedly called ‘scum’ by both his customers as other people who know him.
However, one time during his job when he is alone in the host dressing rooms, a strange-looking girl suddenly appears behind him, telling him that he will die, and she kisses him. As she kisses him, Otaro feels his heart stop and he falls down dead to the floor.
The next moment, he wakes up 7 days earlier in the past.

Now up until this point, I was like ‘okay what the heck is going on here’. I have to say the first episode immediately piqued my interest because from the start there were already so many questions I wanted answers to. Who is that woman? Why does she want Otaro dead? Why is he going back in time? It gave me some serious Re:zero vibes as well, as he goes back in time every time he gets killed, gaining more information along the way.
Even though in the beginning Otaro is super confused and scared and tries to change the situation so he won’t encounter the ‘kiss woman’ again, she keeps on finding him and kissing him and he keeps dying and going back to the past. After a while, though, he starts getting the hang of it and learns from it and uses the information from each time leap to his advantage.

Otaro has a tragic background story which has led him to become such a snob. When he was a young child, he and his little brother Kouta snuck on board of a cruise ship of which their father was the captain. At that moment, a rich family was holding a special party on that boat. Somewhere in the night, a terrible accident happened and the ship capsized, causing a great scandal and catastrophe. Otaro and Kouta, who had just managed to save a little girl that had fainted, also got caught within the crisis and little Kouta was swept away by a sudden wave of water.
After that, Otaro’s father got the blame for the whole accident and Otaro was bullied for being a ‘murderer’s son’ and when financial problems and loan sharks started targetting them as well, his father left his mother and him. His mother, struck by grief and unable to let go of Kouta, kept saying she believed he was still alive and even kept searching for him. Otaro got enough of his broken family and started working jobs, getting abused, until he got himself into selling his body. He uses the money from his host work to pay off his household’s debts.
‘His advantage’ here including seducing a certain socialite’s daughter whose heritage is about 10 billion yen – the other story line in the series.

During the series, it turns out that the ‘kiss woman’ whom he thought was targeting him for some reason, is actually trying to save him. The girl, named Sato Saiko (Kadowaki Mugi), somehow gained the power to kill someone by kissing them and whenever that happens, she too dies and goes back in time. It is later revealed that she was the little girl Otaro and Kouta saved on the ship 12 years ago, and she gained this power after surviving the incident.
She manages to save him from an obsessive stalker colleague at the host club called Kazuma (Shison Jun), using her power to bring him back to life rather than kill him. After using her power several times, and continually getting closer to his 10 billion-prize, Otaro offers Saiko to make a deal with him: she will agree to kissing him when he wants to go back to change something again, and in return with every kiss he will grant one of her wishes. Saiko agrees, and they proceed with the ‘no-emotions-attached-kissing contract’. However, as they experience many personal and emotional things together (including saving his own mother’s life and giving Saiko the chance to say goodbye to her grandmother before she passes), a bond of trust begins to grow between the two and before long Otaro doesn’t treat her the same way as the other girls.

In the meantime, to go a little bit further into the second storyline, there is the plot of the Namiki Family, the socialite family Otaro is targeting. As it happens, it’s the same rich family aboard the cruise ship at the time of the accident.
Their daughter Mikoto (Araki Yuko) is supposed to take over the family business, but the board won’t let her do it alone -because she’s a woman I suppose. She needs to marry first. She has an older brother, Takauji (Arata Mackenyu), but he is adopted and not officially allowed to take over the group. To complicate matters even more, Mikoto and Takauji are secretly in love with each other.
When Otaro sets his eyes on Mikoto, he unlocks way more than just the suspicion of the Namiki group, he comes across a secret that is way bigger than that: the fact that Takauji was actually responsible for the cruise ship accident and the fact that his uncle is using the evidence to manipulate him into taking over Namiki Group by forcibly marrying Mikoto. He doesn’t want to at first, but as things get more intense and Otaro starts butting in more, Takauji is overwhelmed by feelings of greed and his desire to protect Mikoto at all costs, so he becomes a bad guy.

The series is only 10 episodes, so to make a long story short: Otaro goes back in time a lot of times (while everything together adds up to six months in real time he only spends two months in time-leap time) and in the end everything checks out and they are able to catch all the bad guys and lock Takauji up and he is able to marry Mikoto and his dream finally seems to come true. The 10 billion is about to be within his grasp…
And then Takauji escapes from prison and attempts to assault Otaro at the wedding and Saiko jumps in front of him and gets killed. And that is the moment that Otaro realizes he is actually in love with Saiko. But now that she is killed, kissing her doesn’t work anymore. And then he is left alone feeling anything but happy.

One of the things I liked about the drama is that the ending was actually really interesting. They didn’t go for a standard ‘happily-ever-after’ ending. The whole ending was based on Otaro’s character development. We could see how much he’s grown from that snobby host into this person who’s seen and experienced death and was able to go back and even in a certain way gain control over life and death for a while. We see that he slowly but surely starts reflecting on his actions and becomes a better person to Saiko (and because of Saiko). And then, when Saiko dies in front of him, we see him fall apart and that was some amazing acting (well done, YamaKen).

Throughout the story, as a seemingly comic relief kind of character, there is a homeless person called Harumi (played by the impeccable Suda Masaki) who, always surrounded by his homeless friends, sings songs and comments on Otaro and Saiko as they pass and sometimes even seems to know things about what’s going on. Something also feels off when he kisses Saiko and nothing happens.
In the end, after Saiko’s death, he comes to Otaro’s house and reveals that he – just like Saiko – is someone who can go back in time by kissing someone. He also survived a near-death experience through which he gained this power. He gives Otaro the idea of going back again, but warns him that through him, Otaro would go back not 7 days but 3 months. Which means that when he goes back, Saiko won’t even know his name yet and everything they have built up in the past 3 months will be wiped clean.
My first thought was: isn’t it better then to wait 3 months and then go back to save her at the right moment? That way she’ll still remember everything.
But Otaro chooses to go back anyway and go for a clean slate. Starting off with his pursuing of Namiki Mikoto. When he returns in time, he just deals with everything from the get-go: he urges Mikoto and Takauji to just tell each other how they feel, he takes the evidence tape from Takauji’s uncle and destroys it on the spot, he tells everyone what they need to change and do and so creates a future in which everything he fought so hard for the previous 3 months will never even start happening. Takauji comes clean to Mikoto about the accident and everything and they decide to get married. Otaro deals with Kazuma before he can get too obsessive and makes sure he gets fired from the host club.
Otaro meets Saiko but, as Harumi predicted, she doesn’t know anything about him yet and it leaves him heart-broken but still relatively okay.

There is a 15-minute special following 1 year after the end of the last episode, in which Saiko -her interest piqued by what Otaro told her- visits Otaro and he tells her about his ‘dreams’ (the things they went through together). In the end, she tells him she can’t give up on searching for their memories together and that’s she’s interested in getting to know him better. So you could say it’s still a happy ending for them.

One of the main interesting points in this series (imo) was that in the beginning, our main character -and thus the character perspective that we follow- is an unsympathetic person. Otaro initially acts like a real scumbag, not caring about anything or anyone but himself and his own happiness: obtaining 10 billion yen even if that means marrying a woman he doesn’t even love. Lots of times I was just shaking my head at him, mumbling ‘you jerk’, along with the rest of the characters. It was kind of typical that Saiko would be able to change that part of him and then he would turn into a good person, but it all happened very naturally. It wasn’t like from one episode onto the other he was suddenly a softy or anything. But we can see him slowly get less excited about the 10 billion and even though he goes through with the marriage, we already see he’s not really okay with it. It really took seeing Saiko die for him to fully realize what was important to him – and then it was too late. But as the audience, we still don’t feel a 100% affection for him (at least I didn’t). Of course, he changes and he does become a better person in the end.
But I find it interesting when the main perspective we follow as watchers is one that we can’t fully empathize with.

I learned that there would be a second season called Todome no Parallel, which tells every episode from the original series from a different point of view. The most interesting thing – and I really hope I can explain it well – is that in the last episode Harumi tells Otaro that whenever he goes back in time, the timeline that he leaves at that point doesn’t disappear, it goes on. So in that timeline he will still die and with that that world will go on. So they made an episode for everytime that Otaro went back in time, showing what happens after he time leaps. The happenings that he ‘erased’ still happened in parallel timelines. I’m a scifi/time travel geek so I’m kind of psyched about this and I really want to watch it.

Okay, so that’s most of it for the story. I want to point out a few actors that particularly stood out to me. First of all, Yamazaki Kento himself. I know he’s super popular and in the last couple of years has appeared in a LOT of dramas and movies, most of them also anime-adapted movies like Chihayafuru, Shigatsu ha Kimi no Uso and Orange and now even Saiki Kusuo no Sainan. I personally have only seen two things, Suki na Hito ga Iru Koto and Orange and in both of those he played a very subdued character, someone who doesn’t talk much, and is even a bit aloof. So it was really interesting for me to see him play such a charai host character, including the smirks, the touching his bottom lip with his finger, the hairwax, everything. It was really refreshing to see another side of his acting. I’ll probably watch more of him, see if there’s still more he can deliver.
Then there was Kadowaki Mugi. I didn’t know her, I saw she played in Tantei no Tantei but I didn’t recognize her from that. But she immediately piqued my interest. In the beginning of the series you think she’s a very creepy woman since she keeps appearing to ‘kill’ Otaro, but when it becomes clear she means to save him she becomes this super cute awkward little person and even though maybe some people might think she’s not that pretty or something, her acting compensated that well enough. I actually thought she was really cute, especially because she wasn’t a standard pretty girl. I actually thought she was prettier than the actress playing Mikoto, who was supposed to play a beautiful rich girl.
Also, Takauji. From the first appearance on, I was already kind of interested (excuse my menkui). When he loses control he gets these dead-killer eyes which made him look very scary… But it was really funny to see, when Otaro goes back 3 months in the end, that at that point he was still the puppy Takauji who wasn’t being manipulated yet. At a certain point, in his madness phase, he has a monologue about his love for Mikoto which was so. freaking. good. I don’t know the actor from anything else but well done!

I wasn’t really sure about what to think of the ending. On the one hand it felt legit that Otaro wanted to see Saiko again and I can’t disagree that everything that happened and the reason why she died wouldn’t have existed if he hadn’t insisted on pursuing Mikoto. In the end, he also sees that his greed for the 10 billion wasn’t worth losing Saiko for, and that is probably the most important message of the series.
On the other hand, it felt like everything that had happened, the whole content of the drama, was annulled. Because he went back and made sure everything was solved on the spot so none of the drama afterwards would happen. I feel like that is how we feel too at many moments; ‘If only I could go back and make sure that didn’t happen in the first place’, ‘If I’d known that before, I would’ve done something about it earlier’.
This drama clearly played with that, and Otaro keeps on finding a way back. I liked that both he and Saiko died for real at a certain point and each time they would still find a way to reverse it, even though in those cases it meant kissing another person.
Right, I want to give Japan a big applause for allowing this: a woman kissing a woman and a man kissing a man. On national television. And not modestly, no, full mouth-on-mouth. I was kind of surprised because normally they don’t do this in Asian dramas. But the moments I actually cried out ‘oh hell yes’ were when Saiko resorted to kissing Mikoto to go back, and Otaro having no choice but to kiss Harumi. I can only imagine how this must have been for Yamazaki Kento and Suda Masaki, I can’t help but laugh just by thinking about it.

In the end, it was a funny fiction story, but there was an important message in it as well. I think it has a lot to do with making the right choices, thinking about what is most important. It isn’t always something you can see from the start – and of course in reality we don’t get the chances Otaro gets to go back in time to save people and change happenings. So it’s important to set our priorities straight and be aware of what we hold dear. It might take a while, and we might need other people to show us the way, but if it can save you from opening up other wounds, it will be worth it.
I’m looking forward to watching the sequel.