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.

Last Minute Romance
(막판 로맨스 / Makpan Romaenseu)
MyDramaList rating: 5.0/10

I saw a little trailer of this drama and I was excited to watch it because I knew the two main leads and the poster looked cute. I didn’t know at the beginning that it was a web drama so all 10 episodes were only 15 minutes long, but I thought maybe it would be a nice change in-between all the long dramas I’ve been watching.
I’m sorry to say though, that it fell short of my expectations.

First of all, I think the difficult thing with web dramas is the length itself. The writers/makers only have this much space and time to create a full story with a beginning, middle and end. It’s almost inevitable that some things end up being a bit rushed. Another thing is that web dramas usually lack the kind of originality that a full-length drama has; of course, because there is no time to show all kinds of intriguing plot twists. I watched a few short dramas before, such as Noble My Love, High-end Crush and Go Ho’s Starry Night and they were all fairly simple romance stories.

As for a summary, Last Minute Romance is about a young girl called Baek Se (played by Han Seung Yeon), who is in stage 3 of pancreatic cancer. Despite this, she maintains a carefree attitude and she works at a life-support center – there’s a phone on the bridge of Han River where a lot of people commit suicide, to be able to call this center for support and take counsel about the troubles they feel in their lives.
Baek Se doesn’t have a lot of time left, so she decides to skip her bucket list except one thing: her biggest dream, dating her favorite actor Ji Seul Woo (played by Lee Seo Won). Of course she knows that she won’t be able to date the actor himself, so she sets up an audition for Seul Woo look-a-likes, saying she’ll pay him 300 million won (her remaining insurance money) if he pretends to be Seul Woo and goes out with her. The auditions end in disappointment, but at work the next day she suddenly gets a phone call from a guy who says his life is miserable because he looks too much like Ji Seul Woo. She runs out to meet him and discovers that, indeed, he looks exactly like her idol. This guy is Yoon Dong Joon (also played by Lee Seo Won). He has in fact suffered a great deal of stress in his life because of his likeness to Ji Seul Woo and he hates the guy for it.
Despite his situation, Baek Se, in her excitement, offers him the deal of dating her while pretending to be Seul Woo and while he rejects it firmly at first, he eventually accepts because of the money. However, here is where the challenge starts for him, since he has never seen any of Seul Woo’s dramas and even though he is a stage actor, he is terrible at acting melodrama – and this so happens to be one of the conditions in Baek Se’s contract. He has to occasionally recite lines from Seul Woo’s dramas and treat her as melodramatic as possible, because she wants to feel like she’s in a drama.
As it goes, of course in the end she discovers the greatness of the Yoon Dong Joon as an individual rather than a fake Ji Seul Woo and falls in love with him for real.

As I said, the drama only has 10 episodes and every episode is approximately 15 episodes. Though knowing this, every episode felt extremely short and not a lot happened. Sometimes I really felt like, ‘what, this was it? Nothing happened!’ after watching an episode. When you have this limited time, I think it’s the job of the writers to make sure at least 1 exciting, dramatic thing happens in every episode.
Talking more about originality, there were a lot of references to famous dramas in this series. To illustrate the fame of Ji Seul Woo, they made it so he reacted scenes from eg. Goblin, Descendants of the Sun, Secret Garden, etc. These were meant as comical references of course, who doesn’t like a reference. But after a while I felt like the drama became more reference than a unique drama in itself. Because of all the references, the story lost its originality even more for me. Now I will most likely remember it as ‘that short drama with all the references’, rather than as ‘that short drama Last Minute Romance with that particular story’. Because the story in itself was promising, it was interesting. Even though we already how it’s going to end, but still we will cry when it happens. I had that with many dramas such as Koizora, I knew the guy was going to die at the end but I still bawled my eyes out when the moment came.

A reason, I think, why that didn’t happen with this drama, was that I thought they were handling the theme of cancer way too lightly. That was the one aspect of the drama which was supposed to give an emotional depth and heaviness to the story, but no one seemed to care about it. In the beginning, it even seemed like Baek Se was using it as a reason to force Dong Joon into the relationship, that she used it as a pity factor. He didn’t even believe her until much later I think, because she threw it in at a moment which made it sound like an excuse.
When pictures of Baek Se and Dong Joon meeting start circulating (because fans believe it’s Seul Woo), and Seul Woo gets notified about this and visits Baek Se to ‘very amiably’ put an end to the rumors, when he finds out she has cancer, he too uses that as a shield for the press. ‘I met up with her a few times because she has cancer and she only wanted to see me before she died. I care so much about my fans, I will pay all her hospital bills.’
It made me sincerely doubt the humanity of every character in the series.
And to boot, they completely skipped the scene where Baek Se actually died. We only see a few scenes of her where she isn’t feeling well, or keeps the toilet occupied while vomiting, and the fact that she has to take medicine regularly, but apart from that I didn’t get a very urgent feeling of ‘oh shit she’s really sick, this is really bad’. It was maybe not a great idea to use it in a short web drama, because its heaviness just didn’t suit the format. Overall I think the charm of web dramas is that they are light, romantic and comical and they don’t have to be original or emotionally draining. That’s what makes them a light watch for a rainy day. So I think I would’ve been more positive if this had been a full-length drama and a lot of things were approached more sincerely.

Another thing was the fact that Baek Se was an orphan. We didn’t go into any more detail about that, she only has one group picture from the orphanage at home and the rest of her apartment is one big Ji Seul Woo museum. She has one friend, one single friend it seems, Young Joo (played by Kim So Yi) who is a monk and who occasionally helps her out. Why this particular friend’s character was a monk, of all things, I have no idea. At first I was interested because it’s not a character you see in every drama: but when I realized they weren’t even going to explain anything about her, except that she was in the orphanage with Baek Se, I gave up again. I think this is also something they should have elaborated a bit more on.

The major guest appearance in this drama was Kian84, the actual writer of the webtoon, who played Dong Joon’s roommate. He’s the one who turned Baek Se and Dong Joon’s story into a webtoon, creating a rift between them when Baek Se finds out and believes Dong Joon is trying to make money out of their story.
All the little fights in the series were nothing to be taken seriously. I actually didn’t even like Baek Se’s character because she was reproaching Dong Joon for being a ‘fake Seul Woo’ while she was only thinking about herself. She wasn’t even thinking about the consequences. She just wanted to live in the fantasy of dating Seul Woo, but thoughts about what the other guy was feeling or what would happen if this actually started going somewhere and they had to separate because she was going to die, how that would hurt him… It made her seem really immature and dealing with stuff she wasn’t actually ready for. Of course, in her character’s defense, to be so young and be diagnosed with cancer, maybe she didn’t understand the full reality of it yet. She was just focused on what she still wanted to do – and I’m not saying it’s wrong to focus on yourself on your last moments – but she lacked just that bit of consideration towards other people. Which is also what made it really weird for me that she worked at a life-support center where she had to listen to people’s stories about how they hated their lives. It didn’t seem to me like she was genuinely concerned for these people, and what kind of comfort would this job bring her? Did it make her feel like she was saving other people who didn’t have to die while she was waiting for her own time to go? This would seem like a very pure reason, but what they showed of it in the drama didn’t scream sincerity to me at all.

It’s such a shame because both Han Seung Yeon and Lee Seo Won are really promising young actors. I really liked Han Seung Yeon in Age of Youth, she was one of the characters who had the most interesting character development. Lee Seo Won showed his own skills before in Uncontrollably Fond and The Liar and His Lover (I didn’t like either of these shows very much but he was one of the better aspects of them). So I think this drama didn’t do them a lot of justice, they can do so much better than this.

All in all, I didn’t really like it. The story had a lot of potential, but in my opinion they rushed everything so much I didn’t even get a chance to get used and develop empathy towards any of the characters. I only got a bit of empathy for Dong Joon because his struggle with looking like a famous person was the only real thing to me in this drama. You would think that maybe it’s a good thing if you’re resemble a celebrity, but this showed that it’s more like a nightmare, constantly having to look at yourself in commercials and movies and constantly being mistaken for him by people on the streets. Heck, he even needed to wear a face mask not to be mistakenly mistaken for the guy.
The only thing that made me go ‘aww’ in the end was when Dong Joon was finally recognized as himself by fans rather than being mistaken for Seul Woo. Because that was his goal as an actor and he finally got rid of his stigma as ‘the lookalike of…’
But except for that I’m afraid I didn’t exactly warm up to this drama. I had expected more of it.
I hope to see more promising work of Han Seung Yeon and Lee Seo Won in the future, because I still believe in them and am still excited to see their development.