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.

Big
(빅 / Bik)
MyDramaList rating: 4.0/10

Hi everyone! Back with a new review~ I have a couple of days off from work and this allowed me to finish this series in a relaxed way and to write a review without feeling rushed.

I’m excited to fill another blog post with content because I do have a lot to say about this drama. It’s been on my list out of curiosity, I knew it was old but I remember seeing the advertisement way back in the day when I just started watching K-Dramas and I still thought it’d be one of those golden oldie classics that you had to see once.
I’ll start with some basic summary and character information before I go on with my personal comments.

Summary: Big is a 16-episode drama about teacher Gil Da Ran (played by Lee Min Jung) who has had a miraculous love story encounter. At a friend’s wedding, she bumped into a guy and fell down a flight of stairs while trying to catch the bridal bouquet and this left her with a fractured spine and some other injuries. However, the guy she bumped into, Seo Yoon Jae (played by Gong Yoo), happens to be a doctor who commits to Da Ran completely, and not just to tending to her injuries. He claims he feels responsible and will need to take care of her the rest of his life – they get engaged. A romance book love story, don’t you think? Da Ran certainly is very giddy about it, because Yoon Jae seems like Prince Charming reincarnated. However, as their wedding day approaches, she starts feeling more and more anxious because he keeps calling off their dates due to busy work.
In the meantime, a transfer student from America arrives in Da Ran’s class, the 18-year old Kang Kyung Joon (played by Shin Won Ho). He and Da Ran meet first on the bus on the way to school, and then turn out to be student and teacher. Kyung Joon is a bit cheeky, being used to doing what he wants in The States, but he and Da Ran keep bumping into each other a couple of times and he seems a bit interested in her.
One day, Da Ran has a phone call with Yoon Jae and she asks him whether he really loves her or not. Upset as she is, Kyung Joon takes her on his motor bike to a place near the river. Yoon Jae calls back to say that he’ll answer her question in person and Da Ran waits for him.
As Yoon Jae is on his way to her and Kyung Joon is on the way back, they are both involved in the same car accident and both crash through the guard rail and into the river. Yoon Jae attempts to save Kyung Joon.
Hearing about the accident, Da Ran hurries to the hospital only to hear that Yoon Jae didn’t make it. However, something miraculous has happened.
Yoon Jae’s body, already in the morgue, suddenly wakes up. But it’s not Yoon Jae. As it turns out: Yoon Jae and Kyung Joon have swapped souls. Kyung Joon is trapped in Yoon Jae’s 30-year old body while Yoon Jae is in Kyung Joon’s, who is in a coma. Da Ran is the only person who believes him (after he repeats some things they talked about at the riverside that only Kyung Joon would know).

So, that’s how the first episode starts. I have to say that, despite the initial cringe-worthy editing (that tumble off the stairs lmao) and typical oldschool acting, I did find it quite amusing to watch. It was so bizarre that it was hilarious and Gong Yoo acting like a teenager really cracked me up.
The rest of the drama mainly focusses on the dilemma at hand: how can they switch back, the practical impracticalities of Kyung Joon staying in Yoon Jae’s body… and of course the complications of Da Ran slowly getting attached to Kyung Joon’s personality rather than Yoon Jae’s, even though it’s still her fiancé’s body and face. Quite confusing.

Okay, so, what do we have to deal with? Because it’s not just about Da Ran and Kyung Joon/Yoon Jae. We are led to believe that Yoon Jae was wavering about the wedding and that he even may have had an affair with his doctor colleague Lee Se Young (played by Jang Hee Jin). He had a key to her house which he hadn’t given back yet.
On the other hand, there is Jang Ma Ri (played by Suzy), Kyung Joon’s friend and self-proclaimed girlfriend from The States who comes to Korea to find him. She eventually also finds out the truth and keeps butting in with what’s happening.
Then there’s Da Ran’s and Yoon Jae’s respective families. Da Ran’s family owns a dumpling restaurant and her younger brother Chung Sik (played by Baek Sung Hyun) goes to the school she teaches at – he also falls in love with Ma Ri. Yoon Jae is from a family that’s quite well off, his father is a doctor. His parents both live in America as well, but eventually come to Korea.
Kyung Joon was raised in L.A. by his single mom who had her own famous restaurant, but she was shot in front of him by gangsters one night and this traumatized him for blood. The only relatives he has left are his uncle from his mom’s side and his wife, who help him accomodate when he comes to Korea but are actually more concerned with his inheritance and how much money they can make by selling the house he lives in. They own a restaurant in Seoul in the image of the restaurant Kyung Joon’s mother used to own.

And now the underlying secrets that are only revealed at the end of the series. It is shown that, even before the accident, Yoon Jae and Kyung Joon both own a version of the same drawing or painting. It shows two angels reaching out for each other and the word ‘Miracle’. It takes a long time before this is explained, but it’s clear quite early on that them swapping souls has something to do with the connection of them both having this picture.
I remember thinking halfway, ‘what if they’re actually brothers, lol’. But then that actually turned out to be the case. We hear multiple people say different confusing things, when Yoon Jae’s mother finds out about Kyung Joon in the hospital and that they were both in the same accident, she reacts really suspiciously, making phone calls saying ‘I found him’ and stuff.
And it becomes clear that Yoon Jae’s father has been looking for this ‘missing kid’.
In short: Kyung Joon is Yoon Jae’s younger brother – but he was born through a surrogate (Kyung Joon’s mom) because Yoon Jae’s mom couldn’t have another child. Yoon Jae was very sick as a child and they decided to have another child purely for the purpose of becoming a donor for Yoon Jae should he relapse. (I remember a situation like this from Grey’s Anatomy, where there were two girls, sisters, and one was always getting hurt or sick and the other basically existed as a donor for her.)
So… that was a little messed up.
Kyung Joon, whilst in Yoon Jae’s body, basically discovers all the truths there are too learn about his own life and Yoon Jae’s.

I read a couple of reviews from mydramalist and such, and I have to agree with most of them in that this drama definitely dragged on. And dragged on. And dragged on. And dragged on.
In the budding love between Da Ran and Kyung Joon, in the development of the situation with Kyung Joon’s body, in resolving what to do in general.
I mean, I can imagine how confusing it must be for Da Ran when she falls for someone who is not her fiancé… but who is in her fiancé’s body. Even so, she dragged on how she really felt for a long time and this became quite annoying at some point. Also with Kyung Joon’s body not waking up… I remember getting impatient and thinking, come on guys, just get on with it.
Let me get into a little more detail about a few things that annoyed me.

First of all, Gil Da Ran herself. I know Lee Min Jung from a couple of other dramas (of course I loved her in Boys Before Flowers where she kicked butt), but honestly, I think Da Ran’s character was wasted on her. She’s a great actress, but Da Ran is not a very well-written character. I personally thought she lacked personality and she was way too submissive. She literally couldn’t take decisions by herself or stand up for herself and mostly just followed ill advices given to her by people that wanted her to separate from Kyung Joon. Instead of listening to her own heart, she kept taking detours and she kept avoiding having to come clean about how she was really feeling. And this caused her to also become very whimsical. Like, I think she changed her mind a dozen of times, but as unpredictable as possible. One minute she would be like ‘nah I can’t do this, this is wrong, I need to wait for Yoon Jae’ and then she would be reminded of something through something and she’d suddenly be like ‘but no! I feel more for Kyung Joon now!’ and then on repeat.
When she ultimately publicly announced her love for ‘KKJ’ (whom everyone at that point thought was someone she was having an affair with), she seemed so happy with herself while literally no one besides Kyung Joon knew what she was talking about. So in that sense she was living in her own little world. She never spoke about anything with anyone, she didn’t confide in anyone, she just kind of made of lame excuses or reasons when a suspicious situation occurred.
On the other hand, I can only imagine how her seemingly going on-and-off with Yoon Jae was super confusing to her parents. One day she was happy with him, the next day they were broken up, oh no wait they’re still together, oh no what they’re split up? Oh but now she loves him again? What’s going on???
Da Ran didn’t get her act together, and this for me showed how instable her character was. It seemed like the writers hadn’t thought about her character/personality in terms of how she would deal with this situation. She was fluctuating and wavering and couldn’t make up her mind about what she wanted to do. And this made it hard for me to keep up with her, along with the fact that I couldn’t find a single aspect of her character that resonated with me because of her lack of individuality.
Honestly, when she decided to go full on Kyung Joon at the end and started acting all crazy, she did just seem like a crazy person to me, because it was like suddenly she was given personality traits and they came out of nowhere.
Also, with all the fuss made about her being a teacher and Kyung Joon’s nickname for her being ‘Gil Teacher’, we literally see her stand in front of a class ONCE. There’s a few scenes of her sitting with her friend in the teacher’s office, but there’s actually not a lot of footage where we’re shown what kind of a teacher she is. As timid and indecisive as she is in the rest of the series, I was actually quite curious as to how she would handle a class of teenagers. Seeing as the only scene where we see her teach, is also a scene in which the kids make fun of her and she isn’t able to shut them up. Although this was a very rude situation – I mean, the kids were actually bullying her and making fun of her for breaking her spine? – it also showed that Da Ran wasn’t able to stand up for herself, even in her job. So that made the whole ‘she’s a teacher’ idea a bit incredible to me.
By the way, the whole thing where she broke her spine falling down the stairs also felt a bit extreme. Like, we don’t actually get to see her when she’s injured, it just skips to after she’s already completely healed, so what exactly was the point of mentioning she was so badly injured if it actually didn’t have any further repercussions in the story? Was it really just to create a bridge for the development of her relationship with Yoon Jae? Because if so, they could’ve decided on way less extreme things. I mean, they could have still had the encounter if he had just romantically caught her, or he would’ve helped with some minor injuries. But making this whole thing up about her fracturing her spine and him deciding he would forever take care of her… It all felt a little forced and unreal to begin with.

Second of all, Ma Ri. I was initially surprised by the fact that Suzy was advertised so much all over this drama, there’s even a poster with just her and Gong Yoo, while she was just a side character. And honestly, I didn’t think it was about Ma Ri at all. But the promotion stuff was probably because it was Suzy, and not because the character she played was actually all that important. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Suzy and I think her acting has progressed amazingly in the last couple of years, but this was still in the time of Dream High and she just got away with playing this cocky but endearing self-proclaimed second female lead. I didn’t find Ma Ri that endearing though, she was stubborn and a little arrogant and self-absorbed and she showed 0 respect, even to older people. She only cared about Kyung Joon and herself. Even when Da Ran’s brother Chung Sik basically threw himself at her feet, she just stepped on him.
And then she had the audacity to tell Da Ran and Kyung Joon how they had been disregarding everyone’s feelings (most of all hers). While she had done the exact same thing to Chung Sik and never apologized for it, just took it for granted. I get that a lot of people would let her get away with it because she was just a little irrational girl and she was actually a good kid, but I think she lacked basic manners. And when she started butting in and basically manipulated Da Ran into telling Kyung Joon to go back to his own body so she could be with Yoon Jae again when he woke up. Here, too, I blamed Da Ran for not standing up for herself, but tbh Ma Ri had no right to start blaming others just because she was jealous Kyung Joon fell in love with someone else. As one review mentioned, and I agree with this as well, it was a pity that there were two potential female love rival characters created, and nothing was done with them. Se Young’s character had way more potential than just being brushed off as the seductive ‘other’ woman. In the end, we never even find out what the real extent of her relationship with Yoon Jae was. She first tells Da Ran they slept together a few times, but then afterwards she’s like ‘I lied, he never actually came to my house after I gave him my house key’. So I don’t even know if there even was an affair at all. And the second one being Ma Ri, who, as I quote from this review ‘is mostly just an annoying fly on the wall with weak purpose’. I agree that it would have been different if there was actual romantic history between her and Kyung Joon, but now everything from her was just one-sided and Kyung Joon didn’t even want her to be there.

And then the most unfair thing: how literally everyone is talking about Yoon Jae and Kyung Joon as if they’re not there and as if they don’t have a say in their own lives. Kyung Joon literally has to watch from someone else’s body how his uncle betrays him and how Yoon Jae’s parents talk about him as a ‘tool to save their real son’. Yoon Jae is literally in a coma from 15 episodes and doesn’t get anything.
Which brings me to the most frustrating and confusing ending that I’ve seen in a while: nothing is solved. We get a ‘1 year later’, Ma Ri sends Da Ran an email saying that they both switched back and they both have no memory from before the accident. Yet, 5 minutes later, someone gets off the bus behind Da Ran, calls her name, and we get a reenactment of the scene from when she and Kyung Joon first met. We hear the voice (which is Gong Yoo’s, without a doubt), but for some reason they don’t show his face. I don’t know if this was to keep the viewer guessing, but for me it was so obvious it was still Kyung Joon in Yoon Jae’s body and I’m just confused. So, they never switched back? The whole point of the series, the one thing that the drama should have been leading to… doesn’t happen? What the actual fudge?

It feels like I watched a whole bunch of episodes that didn’t actually resolve anything. And even when the main story was already so flimsy, they still added other irrelevant minor side stories to characters that really didn’t need one? Like, the love story between Da Ran’s colleagues? And the fact that Da Ran’s school’s principal and Kyung Joon’s uncle all had connections to Da Ran’s parents in the past? Honestly, these were really irrelevant and didn’t add anything to the story. I wished they’d spent that screentime on actually fixing the main story’s foundation.
One more critical comment about Da Ran’s teacher colleagues. So there’s this teacher who has a crush on Da Ran but is too scared to face her and Da Ran’s friend helps him but falls for him herself in the process.
But, seriously, this whole side story was unstable as heck as well. Because the first thing the male teacher does in his quest to pursue Da Ran is introduce himself to her parents. Like, without her consent, without her even knowing he is romantically interested in her… He just introduces himself to her family, who then assume there’s something between them and practically immediately accept him as their new son-in-law?
I mean… what?

Just a quick comment in between, this male teacher character was portrayed by Moon Ji Yoon, who passed away in March this year at the age of 36. I’ve seen him in several dramas, and I was surprised to see him so young in this one. I kept this in mind while I watched this series, just to remember him. Rest in peace, dear sir.

Anyhow, to sum it up, this drama had potential from the beginning. I’ve read several reviews that shared the opinion that it started out very good and interesting, but for a lot of people it started to drag from about episode 8~10 on. I was really curious as to how the series was going to play out and how they would deal with the soul switching and stuff, but in the end I’m kind of let down.
The only thing that saved this series for me was Gong Yoo. Because honestly, his character was the only character that saw things as messy as they were. Kyung Joon was the biggest victim in the entire series, being trapped in a body of a stranger, who then turned out to be his brother, and to be in love with a woman who was actually meant to be with the person whose body he’s just temporarily inhibiting. And yet, everyone found a way to make their own feelings bigger than his. He was the guy who couldn’t do anything about his situation. He was the center of the mess and he couldn’t do anything to change it and he just had to watch his dear ones circle around him, trying to figure out something to do.
And even though Da Ran kept continuously telling him that he was just a kid and that he shouldn’t act so childishly, he was honestly the most mature character in the entire series. At least he acted appropriately for someone who was put in that bizarre situation. And I felt like he had all the right in the world to lash out and act crazy because, come on, the whole situation was so messed up! I can imagine losing your mind a little and just wanting to run off and whatnot. Instead he had to watch other people decide what to do with his body.

I had really hoped that they would’ve played out the ending a little more. At least solve the thing! Show Kyung Joon in his original body again. Because now the whole ‘Da Ran coming to terms with falling in love with a high schooler’ came down to nothing. It was still Yoon Jae’s body in the end. We’ll never see her actually hold hands with Kyung Joon and deal with society’s criticism regarding age gaps in relationships. I mean, they made such a big deal about their feelings, they dragged it out for so freaking long, and still they gave us nothing in the end. So that was a shame.

I really liked seeing Shin Won Ho in this drama. I’ve seen him in some dramas from 2016/2017 and he looked exactly the same as in 2012? (lol)
It was a shame that he didn’t get to act more in this series, that he just had to lay in a hospital bed forever. I really liked his character and his acting in the first episode and I was actually wondering how it would look when he and Da Ran would end up together.

Lastly, there were two actual kisses in this drama, of which the latter was a tiny bit more satisfying to watch because at least they were on the same page for a moment, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I would’ve liked. Even after that second kiss, where you finally thought Da Ran would give in to her feelings for Kyung Joon and forsake Yoon Jae, she still changed her mind after that. In the end, we all have to wait for indecisive and timid little Da Ran to come to terms with something that we’ve all been ready for since the first 5 episodes. It wasn’t fair to keep Kyung Joon in doubt for so long, the boy has it tough.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this drama. It starts out interesting, but then halfway it suddenly seemed like the writers didn’t know what they were doing anymore and how to fix the thing they’d started, and the ending is just one big question mark. The series literally doesn’t have a conclusion. The crisis isn’t solved. The answer isn’t given. It’s really not satisfying.

Gong Yoo was the reason I could keep going, because he just brought the sense that everyone and everything else lacked. His intentions and his feelings were clear from the start and he was, in a way, like us: he was just waiting for the rest to catch up and come to a solution. Which didn’t come.
And Da Ran and him just kept going back and forth about what they wanted and how they felt and they kept lying to spite each other but Da Ran always went too far in and just couldn’t see that it was a facade and he actually cared for her and was just hurt by her own indecisiveness. It got very tiring.

So for now I’m done for a while with golden oldies. Watching this really made me appreciate how far K-Dramas have come in their originality in theme and plots. This was just a bit too overly dramatic and indecisive story writing for me. I’d expected more from Lee Min Jung as an actress, because I know she can bring much more to the table.
A lot of the side characters were either too irrelevant, or could’ve been made so much more relevant. What’s most important is that the main story wasn’t solid and the main crisis in the series wasn’t solved. And that should’ve been the most basic thing, solving the issue that needs to be solved. It just leaves you with a lot of questions and unresolved stuff.

So now I’m finally starting a drama that I’ve been looking forward to for so incredibly long. I’m probably going to watch it on Netflix.
Until my next review! ^^