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.

Wife I Know
(아는 와이프 / Aneun Waipeu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

This is a new series, it’s from this year and it just ended airing on September 20. It wasn’t on my list initially, but I started watching it with a friend when we were on holiday and we watched about 5 episodes together and it was interesting so when my friend left we watched the remaining episodes separately. I only finished it now, because I didn’t have a lot of time in-between. Actually when I started I was also still watching Meteor Garden so after episode 6 or something I decided to first finish Meteor Garden before continuing Wife I Know. In any case, it was interesting.

It hasn’t been long since I watched Go Back Couple (see my review here), but in the beginning this drama resembles it very much. It’s also about a married couple who can’t even look each other in the eye anymore and they somehow end up going back in time to the day they met and try to change their lives. There are some differences, though. Let’s just sum it up.
Wife I Know/Familiar Wife is about a married couple. Cha Joo Hyuk (played by Ji Sung) and Seo Woo Jin (played by Han Ji Min) met when Woo Jin was a student and got sexually harrassed by a guy on the bus. Joo Hyuk stood up for her and she stuck with him ever since. At first he couldn’t really be bothered, but he gradually noticed more adorable characteristics about her and despite their age gap, they ended up getting married and having two kids. However, flash forward: things have changed. They are fighting about every single thing now, no one makes time for the other, even to pick up the kids from school, Woo Jin is screaming at Joo Hyuk every single day and Joo Hyuk is fed up with his life. One night he is driving and suddenly he comes across a mysterious looking toll gate which only accepts 500 won coins. As it happens, a strange man in the subway gave him a 500 won coin from the year 2006, so Joo Hyuk puts it in and goes through the gate. There suddenly his car starts accelerating and the next moment he wakes up and he’s back in 2006, on the day where he first meets Woo Jin. He chooses not to stand up for her in the bus and goes on a date with the girl he liked in university, Lee Hye Won (played by Kang Han Na). Originally, he couldn’t make the date because he stood up for Woo Jin and had to go to the police station to testify against the pervert. But now he is on time for the date and they have a good time and kiss and then the next day Joo Hyuk wakes up in 2018 again and the woman lying next to him in bed isn’t Woo Jin but Hye Won. He has changed his own future, and, more importantly, his wife.

Okay, so up until now the things that differ from Go Back Couple are:
1. We initially only get to see Joo Hyuk’s point of view. We see how he gets screamed at by his wife for every little thing, we see how unreasonable she is when he seems to have a very good reason to be late (mostly work-related), we see how she throws away the one thing that makes life at home entertaining for him (his PlayStation) into the bathtub. We feel sorry for Joo Hyuk and understand his misery and his relief when he finds a chance to start over and get away from Woo Jin.
2. Joo Hyuk is initially the only one who goes back in time and keeps all his memories. In Go Back Couple, they were both zapped back involuntarily and couldn’t get back no matter how much they wanted to because they didn’t know why what or how.
Joo Hyuk, in contrast, has a way. While he has been zapped back in time by accident through a mysterious toll gate, he therefore knows that he will be able to go back through that toll gate and with the right coin. He can go to that place (although the toll gate isn’t always there) whenever he wants to, basically. That’s why in the first episodes he goes back several times to change the past to his liking until he finds he has changed his present the wants he wanted to. The coin I’m referring to is a 500 won coin from the year 2006 that is given to him by a strange homeless man on the subway who keeps talking about a black hole. it later turns out that the only way to go through that toll gate is to have a 500 won coin from the year you want to go back to.

The series plays with perspectives on an interesting level. While I can, for example, understand Joo Hyuk’s reasons for wanting to change his life, and his regrets of marrying Woo Jin, I had a hard time getting over the fact that he would just let his kids be erased from existence. He cries about it one time, ONE time, and more in a ‘please forgive dad, kids’ kind of way than in an ‘ohmygod what about my kids?!’ kind of way. This was also different from Go Back Couple, because both of them would burst into tears every time they thought about their child and really wanted to get back to him. Looking at it like this, Joo Hyuk can be perceived as quite selfish. At least I found him very selfish in that respect. He only cares about fixing his own regrets and in doing so, he even takes Woo Jin’s kids from her without her even remembering they existed.
On the other hand, in the new present, we see Woo Jin as a happy, quirky single woman with a great sense of humor, seemingly leading a very relaxed and healthy life. So initially me and my friend agreed on thinking, ‘maybe it’s better for both of them like this’. They both got out of the miserable marriage and now they’re both living their own happy lives. Joo Hyuk is now married to his first love Hye Won and this seems to be an ideal marriage. Hye Won is always patient with him, she lets him play his games, she kisses him goodbye when he leaves for work every morning… seems perfect.
And Woo Jin is doing great in the career department and works out and seems perfectly satisfied. Except for one thing, and this is when we also get more insight into Woo Jin’s side of the story.

Woo Jin’s father passed away when she was in high school, when he went on a 3-week business trip while he wasn’t healthy. In the present, her mother (a brilliant performance by Lee Jung Eun, whom I adore as an actress) is slowly developing Alzheimer’s and has the habit of disappearing randomly, causing Woo Jin great stress. She has tried to talk about this problem with Joo Hyuk several times, but he never had time for her – he was always late for work, it was always ‘for later’. So in that sense, Woo Jin was left all alone with her worries, plus the entirety of taking care of her two babies, because Joo Hyuk was never there to help out or even have dinner at home. She was feeling a lot of pressure for having to deal with a lot of very emotional things all by herself.
In the ‘new’ present, her mother still has Alzheimer’s and Woo Jin is still preoccupied by the fact that she sometimes just disappears. There is a lady who’s supposed to take care of her, but she keeps losing sight of her as well.
While Woo Jin and Joo Hyuk initially pass each other by several times, they’re inevitably reunited when Woo Jin starts working at the bank where Joo Hyuk works. They end up in the same team and Joo Hyuk has a hard time getting used to it. The horrible memories of Woo Jin’s monstruous screaming at him are still fresh in his mind, even though Woo Jin doesn’t remember him at all. She does, however, feel a strange familiarity to him, which she gradually interprets as her growing romantic feelings for him.
And even though Joo Hyuk tries to avoid her as much as possible, he keeps running into her and he keeps getting confronted with how familiar he is with her. Just like in Go Back Couple, they would sometimes just say things they knew about each other like, ‘no, she doesn’t drink coffee’, or ‘oh, he can’t eat that’ without thinking, which of course causes a lot of confusion. He keeps looking out for her despite everything, and tries to keep her from going out with his best friend and colleague Yoon Jong Hoo (played by Jang Seung Jo) – although of course having no legit reason to be against her having any relationship with anyone.
This contradiction in Joo Hyuk’s behavior was a bit confusing for me. Of course, he was still the person who selfishly went after what he wanted, but even now that he had his ideal life he still saw Woo Jin as someone who belonged to him in some way, and she couldn’t see anyone else, even though they weren’t bound together in this new present at all. He even goes so far that his new wife Hye Won gets suspicious about this ‘new woman at work’, while she usually doesn’t involve herself with his job.

Besides, Hye Won turns out to be not that perfect a wife after all. She’s the only daughter of a rich chairman, so she’s never had to do any household work by herself. When she buys food she just leaves it in the fridge to rot because she doesn’t cook herself. She doesn’t want to go visit Joo Hyuk’s parents in the countryside because ‘it’s so small there and they have only one bathroom’. She becomes the epitomy of a spoiled brat who cares only about appearances. Apart from that, she’s also slightly hypocritical. Because she meets a younger guy from the university she teaches at and this guy comes onto her and she doesn’t reject him – she seems to actually enjoy the attention and the fact that even though she’s older and married, she is still pretty enough to be pursued. She even takes off her wedding ring the first time they meet and have a moment. But when Joo Hyuk starts getting involved more with Woo Jin, mostly because of her mother disappearing and him also feeling responsible for helping out somehow, she starts reproaching him. Even though there was some blatant flirting going on between her and that younger guy, and Joo Hyuk was just concerned for his colleague (and of course there was all the complicated feelings he had towards Woo Jin, fair enough). But still. The point where I really started hating her guts was when she started to act plain childish because Joo Hyuk found it more important to stay with his mother at the hospital because she had to get surgery, than to come to some benefit dinner party her father had organized. The fact that she just could not apprehend how his mother was more important just made me lose all empathy for her character. She just turned into this really superficial, spoiled rich girl, even though she’d seemed nice enough in the beginning.
Joo Hyuk’s marriage to her was more than just a romance thing – her father was actually the head CEO of the bank where he worked, or at least had a lot of influence on a lot of banks, so whenever they were worried about something or something went wrong at work, Joo Hyuk could just go to his father-in-law and make things right, which was very handy.

By the way, I have to comment on how much room this series left for cameos. There were several scenes with different clients in the bank that started making a scene where I saw some familiar faces. I always like it when other actors make cameo appearances. The last one was the funniest, because Jo Jung Suk appeared as Kang Sun Woo, his character in Oh My Ghostess, the chef. So I don’t know why they made that reference there, but those little things in between make it more enjoyable for me. At that point, of course the main plot of the story had already been wrapped up – they had to fill the last two episodes with the ‘female lead’s first love turns up and stirs up some rivalry’ trope for some reason. But it was funny that they made that reference to that specific character Jo Jung Suk played in Oh My Ghostess.

I want to go over to the relationship between Jong Hoo and Woo Jin, but for that I have to briefly summarize what changed with Jong Hoo because of Joo Hyuk’s time trip. I hope this is clear enough.
“Original”:
1. On his way to a date with Hye Won, Joo Hyuk gets involved with Woo Jin because she is sexually harrassed on the bus and Joo Hyuk stands up for her. He misses his date with Hye Won because he needs to go to the police station with Woo Jin to testify against the pervert. Joo Hyuk is presently married with Woo Jin.
2. Around the time and place of the incident in the bus, Jong Hoo is in a hurry to catch a taxi to the airport, because his girlfriend is about to leave Korea. He makes it to the airport, makes up with his girlfriend and ends up marrying her. Jong Hoo is presently married.
“New Present”:
1. Joo Hyuk avoids the situation with Woo Jin and snatches a taxi away from someone else to be in time for his date with Hye Won. They have a lovely time, kiss afterwards. Joo Hyuk is presently married to Hye Won.
2. The ‘someone’ Joo Hyuk snatched the taxi from was Jong Hoo – Jong Hoo isn’t able to stop his girlfriend from going away. Jong Hoo is presently a bachelor.
Hence, Jong Hoo is now a single-ready-to-mingle and from the get-go, he and Woo Jin get on really well. They have the same sense of humor and Jong Hoo is the only one responding favorably to her personality at work in the beginning. Jong Hoo develops romantic feelings for Woo Jin, and although she likes him, she can’t really respond to them. They do start dating at a certain point because Woo Jin feels like he cares about her a lot, but as her own feelings for Joo Hyuk grow, she decides to be honest and tell Jong Hoo that this can’t go on.

Honestly, Seo Woo Jin is one of the best female characters I have seen in a Korean drama in a long time. She didn’t let herself be manhandled, she stood her own ground, she was very honest about her feelings, she was quirky and fun. When she felt she couldn’t stop falling for Joo Hyuk, she told Jong Hoo as soon as she could because she didn’t want to do anything behind his back and hurt his feelings even more than she already would by telling him. I think Han Ji Min portrayed her as a very cool, intelligent and funny person. I have only seen two other dramas with her, Rooftop Prince and Hyde, Jekyll, Me. In which she was okay, but she didn’t leave that big of an impression on me. It’s been a while since I saw her in a drama, but I really liked her acting in this series. Woo Jin’s character has a lot of layers, and we see a lot of different sides of her. The way she showed the transition from that happy, quirky teenager to a thoroughly emotionally tormented housewife was really impressive. I read one comment of someone who couldn’t watch the whole series because he/she found the wife ‘too obnoxious’. Now I don’t know who they were talking about, but I found Woo Jin everything but obnoxious.
I genuinely liked her character.

I had’t seen anything with Ji Sung before, although Kill Me, Heal Me is still on my list as a golden oldie. I have heard that he plays someone there with 7 split personalities so I am really curious to how brilliant and varying his acting skills must be. In here, his character was not that extravagant. As a viewer I both judged him and pitied him. Because in the end, after he finds out about Woo Jin’s mother having Alzheimer’s and basically everything from Woo Jin’s perspective, he starts to sincerely loathe himself to the point where he goes all ‘no one should be with me, I make everyone unhappy’. But he did a good job nonetheless.

My issue with Kang Han Na is that, in every drama I’ve seen of her so far, she plays the shallow, superficial girl. Fair enough, she turned out to be okay in Just Between Lovers, but she was still superficial as heck. In both Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo and Wife I Know, she plays the spoiled rich ‘princess’ daughter. There’s a good side in her, no doubt, but whatever happens in the story brings out the nastiest part of her character. I guess she’s now one of the standard ‘bitchy second female lead’ actresses who always get typecast for these kind of roles. A pity, I would like to see her in a more amiable and sympathetic kind of role.

I didn’t recognize Jang Seung Jo, although he apparently had a little part in The Package, which I also watched not too long ago, but when I saw what part he played there, I wasn’t really surprised that I didn’t remember him because he only appeared twice or something. He does have this really familiar kind of face and his portrayal of Jong Hoo was really nice. I liked Jong Hoo a lot, he was a very loyal friend and his cheerful scenes were really contagious, especially the part where I started to sing ‘I Will Always Love You’ from Whitney Houston just to piss Joo Hyuk off. Jong Hoo’s character was I think very important to occasionally show Joo Hyuk how selfish he was getting, or that he sometimes didn’t think enough about his friends.
I have to say overall, all characters were portrayed very realistically.

One more thing about some couples in the series: I like that the majority of the couples ended up together in both realities. For example Joo Hyuk’s sister Cha Joo Eun and his university friend Oh Sang Shik (adorably portrayed by the equally adorable Park Hee Bon and Oh Ui Shik, I’ve liked them in basically every drama they’ve appeared in so far). When Joo Hyuk changes the past and returns to his married life with Hye Won, he founds that his sister and university friend are married and even have a baby together. Even when he and Woo Jin return to the toll gate together at the end, go back to the past together and end up in a ‘new, new present’, Joo Eun and Sang Shik still found their way too each other and still end up married and pregnant.
Same, though in a less explicit way, is a cute couple in the KCU Bank team where Joo Hyuk and Woo Jin work. Maknae Kim Hwan and Direct Banking employee Joo Hyang Sook are attracted to each other and secretly start dating – and even after changing ‘presents’ again they still wind up together, this time driven by several discovered common interests. Kim Hwan was played by N (Cha Hak Yeon) from K-Pop group VIXX, and I really like him, he’s such a puppy and his character was a nice addition to the story.

There was one thing at the end that confused me a little. Joo Hyuk ends up telling Woo Jin about their past marriage and that he changed the past and even though she’s confused at first, she discovers that that truth explains a lot of things that have happened between them, how he knew so much about her and stuff, and she refuses to let him drown himself in his misery. She’s still in love with him even though she doesn’t remember their previous life, and she goes to the toll gate by herself. But Joo Hyuk follows her and they go through together. And once they get there, Woo Jin spends a lot of effort getting close to Joo Hyuk to restore their previous past as lovers, but Joo Hyuk still tries to avoid her. But at this point I really didn’t understand what Joo Hyuk wanted. Why did he go after Woo Jin through the toll gate? If it was to stop her, he should’ve made her stop the car and not just keeping riding next to her without saying anything. Because to me it seemed more like a ‘let’s go together/ if you’re going back, I’m coming with you’ kind of action. But then he still tried to keep away from her until he couldn’t deny his own true feelings anymore, the feelings saying that he had fallen for her again.

Oh, there’s another important thing left to say, and one of the reasons why I loved Woo Jin’s mother: for some mysterious reason, in the new present where Joo Hyuk was married to Hye Won, Woo Jin’s mother recognized him as her son-in-law. It turns out that Woo Jin’s mother also went through the toll gate in an attempt to meet her husband again before he died, but she failed and still ended up with Alzheimer’s.
The strange homeless man who hands out the coins seems to be some kind of a guardian angel who helped people who were miserable in life to get a chance to change things. But of course he couldn’t be held responsible for the consequences and whether going back in time would actually solve anything. But we see him one time waving to Woo Jin’s mother, and we see her smiling at him, causing much confusion as to how they know each other. At the end of the series, we see another person (though anonymous) go through the toll gate and the response to a lot of  ‘who was that person??’ comments, many people said, ‘it was just another miserable person who received a coin from the angel/homeless man’, so let’s just keep it at that.
But I think it was a nice touch, to give some extra depth to the character of Woo Jin’s mother, in her unstable state of Alzheimer’s, where it seemed like she knew more about the whole situation but we don’t know if we can trust her because she’s not in her right mind, after all. I found this an interesting addition as well.

Although there were a lot of similarities between Wife I Know and Go Back Couple, they were different in tone and emotional depth. I think Wife I Know dealt more with the question of ‘even if you could go back in time, would you be able to really fix things?’ And that it’s always important to look at more than one side of a situation and not jump to conclusions or selfishly try to get out of things without considering how it might be for the other person, especially when it’s about a marriage.
In the end, Joo Hyuk and Woo Jin actually return to the exact same relationship with all of the same elements (except maybe that Woo Jin’s mom no longer has Alzheimer’s and is a successful saleswoman), but the main difference is that they understand each other better. They now know how both of them feels and that enables them to work together and communicate much better, causing their relationship to be rid of the previous strains and stress. It took a whole time travel experience for Joo Hyuk to realize that he shouldn’t just have thought about himself and that him being more understanding of and there for Woo Jin was what it took to save their relationship.
There was a nice gesture at the end, when Jong Hoo was explaining to Joo Hyuk about his current situation with his wife which was almost the same as what Joo Hyuk went through with Woo Jin in the beginning. After having dealt with everything, Joo Hyuk is now able to counsel him on it. He tells him that this too is something that he needs to get through, and it will help if he thinks about his wife’s point of view. So in the end, Joo Hyuk really does learn from his actions and the consequences.
I feel like recently I’ve watched several dramas dealing with the concept of marriage and whether it’s actually that idealistic or not. It’s interesting how this keeps recurring as a theme in contemporary Korean dramas. It’s like they’re trying to shine some light on the whole ‘is marriage really everything in life’ issue that Korean people seem to be so obsessed about.

It was an interesting drama to watch, not that original after Go Back Couple, but still with another interesting take on relationships. I have to say I really like how Korean dramas deal with time travel, every time travel Korean drama I’ve seen so far has brought something interesting and refreshing to the table, and I’m looking forward to seeing more. For now, I will return to my original list, which still keeps getting longer.
Stay tuned!