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.

Another Oh Hae Young
(또 오해영 / Ddo Oh Hae Yeong)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

It’s been a while! I took my time to watch this drama as well, haha. I have to say I liked watching this as it was from a few years back and it was like a typical Kdrama-drama, like the original style Kdrama that I came to like so much. So I enjoyed it and took my time to finish it. This drama is from 2016, by the way, so not that old but still in style a bit old-school Kdrama (not in a bad way).

This drama had been on my list for a while as well, since I heard many good things about it. It was one of these classic must-watch Kdramas (in my head, at least) and I heard many good thing about the main female lead so I was curious. It was funny since the drama I watched before this had the same female lead, but her portrayal of this character was really different – it was nice see her in another good role, I think she’s a very good actress. I knew several of the actors/actresses in this drama, and almost all of them showed me a side to their acting that I hadn’t seen before, so that was a nice surprise.

Let’s get on with the summary, I will try my best to explain it in words. You know how in Kdramas there are always a lot of complications and intertwined relationships which are always very well explained in the dramas themselves but when you want to explain them in words you always get a bit tangled up? That’s what I’m going through now.
But I succeeded in Duel which was way more complicated, so I’m going to approach it in a similar way; by summing up the characters and then tying their stories together.
Another Oh Hae Young revolves about two girls with the same name: Oh Hae Young. Knowing Kdramas, you can probably predict beforehand that this will cause a lot of misunderstandings. You are not wrong.
The main female lead in the drama is ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young (played by Seo Hyun Jin).
The second female lead in the drama is ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young (played by Jeon Hye Bin).
These two girls went to high school together. Being in the same year and class, they got mixed up a lot. Because ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young was very popular and ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young wasn’t, the mix-ups were always quite awkward, especially for ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young.
‘Just’ Oh Hae Young has always felt inferior to ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young. She had to get used to painful experiences such as receiving presents and love letters that weren’t meant for her. And when ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young rejected a love profession, the angry boy would come and throw stones through the windows of the wrong Oh Hae Young’s house. Stuff like that. So when she graduates ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young is quite happy that she doesn’t have to see ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young again. Years later, she is about to get married and finally feels like her life will settle down. However, on the day before her wedding she is suddenly dumped by her fiance for the mere reason (and quoting) that he ‘couldn’t stand the way she was eating anymore’.
The main male lead is Park Do Kyung (played by Eric Moon/Moon Jung Hyuk). He creates sound effects for movies and dramas, just like his father did. He lost his father at a young age and was adopted into the family his mother had with another man with two other kids. He now lives in one house with his two step-siblings (an older sister and a younger brother) and his lawyer friend who for some personal reasons can’t return to his own house. Park Do Kyung was in a relationship with ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young. They were very much in love and engaged to be married. However, for reasons he does not understand, she didn’t show up at the altar – rather, she disappeared completely without saying a word, leaving him confused and desperate. After some time, because of some misguided information from his lawyer friend and other people, he learns that Oh Hae Young has left him and is now getting married to another man. Out of spite, he ruins this man’s business, hoping to ruin Oh Hae Young’s life as well for betraying him.
As you might guess, this turns out to be the wrong Oh Hae Young.
The second male lead is Han Tae Jin (played by Lee Jae Yoon), ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young’s fiance. Without any warning, his investors suddenly take back their investments in his company, leaving him not only bankrupt but also arrested for fraud. Just about to get married, he makes up an excuse to dump Oh Hae Young before their wedding to not involve her in this mess, knowing that she might not forgive him.
So, in short: Park Do Kyung is angry because he heard that his ex-fiance called Oh Hae Young left him for another man and therefore tries to ruin their life together, accidentally ruining another Oh Hae Young’s life.
The series starts with Park Do Kyung finding out he ruined lives of a completely unrelated businessman his wife-to-be who just happens to have the same name as his own ex-fiance.

This is the main storyline of the drama. There are some other storylines, such as ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young returning and starting work at the same company as ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young, recreating their high school experiences of mix-ups and very much tension between the two.
The other one is a bit more complicated and it took me a while to fully understand it either (I still can’t really say I understand it a 100%). Park Do Kyung suffers from strange visions. First they seem to be predicting the future, but then he starts having visions about ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young before he has even met her. I will come back to this later.

First of all, I want to talk about ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young. I really liked her character, Seo Hyun Jin was really good. ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young is very honest and straightforward about her feelings. She can get very emotional, but in a pure and child-like kind of way. When she is feeling down, she has the habit of putting on dramatic music and dancing on her own in the living room (unless her mother joins her). Before her life settles, she is kind of a mess. Unfortunate things happen all the time, but instead of feeling extremely embarrassed she just accepts it and faces the stares. For example when she accidentally crashes her bike into the mud, she would just swing the bike over her shoulder and walk home in her dirty mud-stained state, not caring about all the people staring at her.
Her mother (played by the impeccable Kim Mi Kyung) is having a hard time dealing with the eccentricity of her daughter. At a certain point she is almost embarrassed with her and kicks her out of the house.
‘Just’ Oh Hae Young ends up living in a house right next to Park Do Kyung (of course, because Kdramas). Park Do Kyung, now having met the woman he keeps seeing in his visions, is kind of freaked out. By now he has already realized that she’s the one whose life he has ruined and he mostly just feels sorry for her. But continually being surprised by her actions, he also finds himself attracted to her. Of course, he doesn’t allow himself to be, but it’s getting harder to resist, even more so when she expresses her growing feelings for him in her usual direct way.
So an inevitable relationship between the two starts here as well. This relationship, however, is brought into jeopardy by 1. ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young returning who is determined to get her life with Park Do Kyung back and 2. Han Tae Jin being freed by prison and finding out what Park Do Kyung did to him and that he is now seeing his former fiance whom he still has feelings for.

One thing that I have to say that I found a shame was that they didn’t show us a lot of the relationship between ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young and Han Tae Jin when they were together. There was one flashback scene, I believe, where you see them planning a trip I think and cuddling, but that’s it. Whereas for ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young and Park Do Kyung, we get to see a bunch of flashback scenes from their lovey-dovey relationship. I don’t know, maybe that’s why I couldn’t really fathom the relationship between ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young and Han Tae Jin, I didn’t see any scenes that really showed what kind of couple they had been. And that must have been important, because they were getting married so they probably loved each other a lot.

And then besides all this there is an additional part of the cast that also needs to be mentioned: Park Do Kyung’s family.
His mother (played by Nam Ki Ae) is a very selfish flashy woman who has been getting married time after time to rich guys and is now the boss of the company that both her sons work for. She’s a bit of a nasty person and it also turns out that she is the reason for chasing ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young away from marrying Do Kyung.
His older sister Park Soo Kyung (played by Ye Ji Won) is ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young’s boss. While she dresses super fancy at work, she drowns herself in alcohol pretty much every single night and we find out she is a pretty crazy person, often dancing around babbling in incoherent French and having drunken frenzies. I had to get used to her character a lot. In the beginning I thought she was just some comic relief character, but I didn’t find her very funny, more like over-the-top trying to be funny. But she has actually really good character development, I will say more about that later as well.
His younger brother Park Hoon (played by Heo Jung Min) is a bit of a useless delinquent type of guy. He works with Do Kyung in the sound effects department of their mother’s company, but he has a temper. He also expresses himself very loudly and likes to make fun of people but gets sensitive when people call him a delinquent. He has a girlfriend named Anna who works at several stores throughout the series and they have their own little bubble they live in.
And then, there’s Park Do Kyung’s childhood friend, now lawyer Lee Jin Sang (played by Kim Ji Suk), a guy who is obsessed with women and partying. He starts off as a player, having pretty much a girlfriend for every day of the week, until he gets busted of course. He is the one who encourages Park Do Kyung to get revenge on Han Tae Jin when they think they find out he’s the one ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young left him for. Apart from his hormonal behavior, he is a good friend and tries to help Park Do Kyung with his situation, feeling partly responsible. His character really grows as well, funnily together with Soo Kyung’s.

Apart from the usual drama tropes, I found it an enjoyable series to watch. There were a lot of moments where I was laughing out loud – the actors sure went all the way with their craziness. There were a couple of scenes in which some people got so drunk it really escalated. And I laughed a lot about ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young’s eccentricity.
Some things were very exaggerated though. For example the scenes between the two Oh Hae Youngs at work. It was almost sickening to see how much ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young was being adored by all the male employees. At a certain point I was wondering whether she herself was aware of how much she was being objectified by pretty much every male co-worker, including her boss. Especially at the company karaoke parties, there was one time when they were playing a game after they all got their physical age (?) from a medical check and they all had to act accordingly to the age they got. ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young got 40 and ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young got like 21 or something. And all these men were doting on her so much I kind of felt it was inappropriate.

As the relationship between ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young and Park Do Kyung develops (including some very passionate REAL kisses, thank you very much), of course there is the point where she finds out what he has done. This comes in the form of Han Tae Jin, out of prison, who confronts her with the fact that he was arrested and he only dumped her to save her reputation, not because he didn’t love her anymore. He also tells her that Park Do Kyung is the one who made them break up. Conflicted as heck – because even despite this truth she finds herself drawn to Park Do Kyung – they have a temporary break.
And of course, she spirals on ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young for ruining her life once again, and big-time this time. The scene in which she stormed in and physically attacked ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young was very intense and you could see how shocked ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young was. Of course, it’s not until later that she hears what has happened as well. She even goes around to Do Kyung to thank him for doing that while thinking of her. After being rejected again by him, she finally backs off and leaves the two of them alone.
After their temporary break, they feel that they still can’t let go of each other and everything is forgiven and forgotten.
The only one who is still not satisfied is Han Tae Jin. I actually knew this actor from some other dramas, first of all Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo in which he was a clueless but really nice guy and then Revolutionary Love in which I think he was a bit more angsty. He became very angsty in this drama as well, getting himself drunk and getting violent a lot after getting out of prison. He beats up Park Do Kyung several times as well. I don’t know, I prefer him as a nice guy because his face becomes very scary when he’s a bad guy.

Okay, now I’m going to go into the visions part. After first having several future visions of ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young, Do Kyung has a strong vision of himself laying bleeding on the street after being hit by a car and looking up at the night sky with snow falling down on him. In this moment, his last thoughts before (presumably) dying are of ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young.
It is eventually deducted by his psychologist that when he is dying in that spot in the future, his regrets about not continuing his relationship with ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young are so deep that these visions cross time to his past self, causing him to see this visions beforehand and warning him to change the course of his failed relationship with ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young. It took me a while to figure this out, only after the last episode I kind of understood it. It’s like having a glimpse of a bad thing happening in the future and trying to change that by changing a couple of things that happened in that vision. For example, one thing he saw in his dying vision was a newsflash that a famous singer had died, so he made sure that this didn’t happen. He also sees that Han Tae Jin is the person driving the car that hits him. While aware of the fact that this will happen, he one time spots Han Tae Jin almost falling off a bridge in a drunken state and, after hesitating seconds, he saves his life. Han Tae Jin catches a glimpse of his shoes before he loses consciousness. At the moment that the vision is about to be realized, Han Tae Jin stops himself from hitting Do Kyung with his car because he recognizes his shoes and realizes Do Kyung was the one who saved his life. So like this, Do Kyung is able to avoid his vision from coming true.
All in all, I found it a little bit far-fetched to add this to the story, because there were already several very strong plots that were all completed. The fact that they had to add this to show that his feelings for her were so deep they even crossed space-time was (even for a Kdrama) a bit cheesy for me.

But here’s something else that puzzled me about the ending, even though it was a happy ending in which Do Kyung and ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young get married. But right before that we see Do Kyung getting hit by a car all the same, during daytime and white flowers falling down on him from a drama scene they’re filming somewhere on a roof. So it almost seemed like he was still destined to die like that. He is brought to the hospital for surgery and everyone is just praying he will be okay, even starting to prepare the wedding already to keep their hopes up for his recovery.
And then suddenly we switch to the wedding. Suddenly Park Do Kyung has recovered, it was all well, nothing to worry about, happy ending. At first I thought this was ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young imagining things, because in the previous scene she said something about joining the other in already picturing the wedding.
But this turned out to be real. So I couldn’t help but think ‘then why go through the whole accident thing?’ It seemed kind of useless to me, just for shock value or something. Was it that the vision of him being hit by a car had to come true one way or another to put an end to it all? I didn’t really get it.

So that was it for the main characters, but I will say a bit more about the relationship between Park Soo Kyung and Lee Jin Sang (the older sister and the lawyer friend).
Jin Sang has been Do Kyung’s friend ever since high school (or even earlier maybe), and Soo Kyung has always been the older ‘noona’ that he respected. However, as things go in their hectic lives, one time Soo Kyung and Jin Sang get so drunk they end up sleeping together. Soo Kyung wakes up sober and realizes this, but Jin Sang has no recollection of it at all.
And then, Soo Kyung hears from the doctor that she’s pregnant. Jin Sang is with her at that moment, rejoicing for her, but she knows it’s his and she can’t tell him because she’s too embarrassed. Imagine getting pregnant from a drunken one-night stand with your little brother’s best friend. I can’t say I disagree with her. And also because Jin Sang is such a dissolute person, she doesn’t want to burden him with the fact that he knocked up a 44-year old woman. However, because she has fallen in love with him she starts treating him with more kindness and respect and, funnily, because of this he figures it out on his own. Now this is the point where the two of them really grow in their characters. Jin Sang seems desperate and pitiful in the beginning but suddenly his feeling of responsibility arises and he mans up and matures in a matter of several episodes toward the end. Soo Kyung also stops acting crazy and drunk and tries to make the best of the situation as possible. In the end, even though they’re still awkward, they do decide to stay together as they both start seeing clearly their feelings for one another.
Like this, the two characters who seemed to be the most frivolous and exaggerated in the beginning end up being two of the more mature ones. That’s some good writing I think.
I knew both actors before from other dramas, and Ye Ji Won’s character reminded me a bit of her role in Producer, where she was hilarious. I have only seen Kim Ji Suk in very normal casual roles, so it was really fun to see him in such a wild role, it showed a side to his acting I hadn’t seen before. It’s always nice when actors get such chances and surprise you.

As I mentioned her before as ‘impeccable’, I want to give one more shoutout to Mrs. Kim Mi Kyung, because she is just genius. I have seen many dramas with her and she is such a great actress. Because she’s middle-aged she usually plays mothers or other kinds of ahjumma. I remember the first time I watched her was in Baby-faced Beauty in which she was a stern but good-hearted fashion designer. She was also amazing in The Heirs, where she had to talk using sign language. It’s such a joy to see her in every role she plays, she’s truly a great actress. Much praise to her!

To sum it all up, I enjoyed watching it and I’m glad I can now say I’ve seen one of the classics. As I’ve stated, there were some things that I didn’t really understand and the ‘seeing into the future’ thing seemed a bit far-fetched to me (and I watch a lot of time travel stuff, so not a lot is far-fetched to me). Also, in the last few episodes it seemed like they abandoned the  original plot of the story (the two Oh Hae Youngs) a little. All of a sudden ‘Pretty’ Oh Hae Young was not appearing anymore and it just wasn’t about that anymore. In the last few episodes it was all about the love between ‘Just’ Oh Hae Young and Park Do Kyung and while that’s okay, it felt like it dragged the end out a little bit. The real plot has finished, now we have to fill the rest of it up with some more romance, or something.
Despite that, I liked it.

The next drama on my list is (if I’m right) a golden oldie (from 2015, fair enough) as well, so please bare with me! After that I will finally start watching series belonging to last year’s batch. It’s going slowly when you’re watching one thing at a time, but otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write extensive reviews on each of them like this.