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.

Somehow 18
(어쩌다 18 / Eojjeoda 18)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hi y’all! Just thought I’d write a short review in-between!
If you’re following my reviews chronologically you know I just finished It’s Okay to Not Be Okay a few days ago. I said that now I’d be going back to my original to-watch list and take a break from watching K-Drama on Netflix. But the next item on my watch list just happened to be a web drama, which I already finished within 2 days. It’s going to be a short review for a short drama, but I still wanted to share it with you!
This drama has been on my list for a long time, probably since 2018 or something. The summary sounded interesting, and one of the themes was time travel, which is -as you might know by now- one of my favorite themes. So I really wanted to give it a try!
Note: I said in my last review that I was ready for some lighter content again, after being swept away in the emotional psychological whirl that was It’s Okay to Not Be Okay.
TW: this drama is about suicide.

Somehow 18 is a web drama, which means the length of the series itself and the episodes is quite short. I found it a little difficult to find it, to be honest. There are two ways to watch it: either in 10 episodes of each 15 minutes, or in two longer episodes of each 1 hour and 10 minutes (aka 5 episodes per 1 part). I was only able to find a low-quality version of the 10-episode variant on YouTube, but after watching that I also found the 2-episode variant on KissAsian, which has much better quality video and subtitles. So I would probably recommend the 2-episode version.
The story is about Oh Kyung Hwi (played by SHINee’s Choi Min Ho) who is an orthopedic surgeon. Despite his successful career he can’t stop thinking about when he was in high school 10 years earlier, the girl he had a crush on committed suicide. He keeps going back in his head to his final interactions with her in the days leading up to her suicide and he just can’t think of a single reason why she would take her own life.
The only people that have to listen to him go on about this are his older sister Oh Yi Do (played by Kim Bo Mi), and her husband, who happens to be Kyung Hwi’s childhood friend, Jang Seul Gi (played by Kim Hee Chan). Seul Gi used to be in the same class as Kyung Hwi and also knew this girl. Incidentally, he was the reason Kyung Hwi started to get bullied, because he always avoided problematic situations and was the kind of person who would hide behind anyone or anything in order to not get involved himself.
In flashbacks of his high school days, we see that Kyung Hwi was severely bullied by a group of troublemakers in his class and he himself tried to take his own life at school two times. Each time, however, he was stopped by this girl, Han Na Bi (played by Lee Yoo Bi). Looking back on it, it just doesn’t make any sense to him that she told him to live and then took her own life.
On the day that would be her birthday, Kyung Hwi hears a mysterious message on the radio, asking if he would go back in time if he could. Looking up, he suddenly sees Na Bi standing outside the window, like a mirage. He follows her and opens a mysterious luminous door – and when he wakes up the next morning he is back in his 18-year old body, back in 2007, a week before Na Bi is supposed to kill herself. And then he decides to stop it from happening.

Because he is now a 28-year old in an 18-year old body, he is much wiser and manages to stand up to his bullying classmates better, as he remembers many incidents and is able to avoid them. It seems that some things are just meant to happen, and they still do, but slightly differently than in the original timeline. Kyung Hwi is only interested in Na Bi and approaches her more directly, even if that means freaking her out a bit in the beginning. As he starts digging into her personal life, he discovers something that he believes had the biggest influence in her decision to take her own life. One year earlier, Na Bi had gotten into a terrible bus accident with her two best friends, of whom one died instantly while the other remains in a coma. Besides being crippled by guilt and trauma of not being able to help her friends out of the bus in time, Na Bi also has a bad relationship with her father. Around the time of her suicide, she was trying to get the guy her comatose friend liked to visit her at the hospital at least once, to no avail. All of these struggles combined, piling up with the bullying that occurred after she helped Kyung Hwi out at school, took its toll on her. As Kyung Hwi learns more, he starts to actively get involved. He goes to the guy and convinces him to try and understand how Na Bi feels, eventually causing him to visit the hospital. He talks to her dad and convinces him to have a meal with her and not just leave an envelope of money on the table for her birthday. And he convinces Na Bi not to commit suicide in a very heartfelt way. He succeeds in taking her mind off her guilt for a while, and they actually become friends, together with Seul Gi, who also stops being a coward as a result, inspired by Kyung Hwi’s newfound courage to stand up for himself.

While we see the story in this drama mainly from Kyung Hwi’s perspective, as soon as he goes back we also get a glimpse in Na Bi’s experience of what happened, including flashbacks about her friends. Seeing how she went through what she went through, it’s not hard to understand that, under the amount of sorrow she’s already in, every tiny thing that adds to that sorrow can be fatal. This becomes blatantly obvious when, even after Kyung Hwi manages to calm her down and makes her feel good about being alive again for a moment, it all fades away instantly when her comatose friend passes away. As the girl’s mother yells at Na Bi that it’s all her fault, you can just see how she slips back. And that really made me realize that for these people, happy moments are just temporary distractions that ultimately still don’t outweigh the unhappy ones. Fortunately, in Na Bi’s case, Kyung Hwi has saved her at this point and she still decides to keep on living because of him, even after slipping back for a moment. By then, Kyung Hwi has become the light in her life that’s strong enough to keep on living for.

But, as is usually the case with time travel, events always find a way of happening anyway, even if they differ slightly from the original scenario. In this case, for example, even though Kyung Hwi manages to avoid most of the bullying himself, the events he remembers still happen, but with different people, including Seul Gi. He realizes this quite quickly, just like he catches on fast that he has travelled back in time and that he has to save Na Bi.
In the end, he is able to save her, but at a price. After learning that Na Bi must have found out that her comatose friend passed away, he goes looking for her, scared she’ll still slip back. But then Na Bi calls him to tell him that she decided not to take her own life because of him. They meet and walk towards each other on a crosswalk to finally be united for good… and then a car comes out of nowhere and heads straight for Na Bi.
Basically, if Kyung Hwi hadn’t been there, and if he hadn’t been extremely alert for anything that was happening to her, Na Bi would still have been destined to die, or at least get into a serious accident right there and then. But it’s because Kyung Hwi realizes this, that he is able to push her out of the way – and then is hit by the car himself. A soul for a soul, apparently.
In the hospital, Seul Gi gives Na Bi a letter that Kyung Hwi wrote to her ‘in case anything would happen to him’. In this letter, he writes the truth about how he travelled back in time to save her.
The series ends with a travel back to the future 10 years later. We see the same opening scene as in the first episode, only now it’s Na Bi who’s an orthopedic surgeon. Kyung Hwi has been in a coma ever since the accident (note: he still looks exactly the same even after being comatose for 10 years) and she’s still taking care of him, believing what he wrote in his letter. Because of him, she now has a successful life, a good relationship with her father, and she has been able to put aside her guilt toward her friends enough to allow herself to live a happy life.
The drama ends on the day that Kyung Hwi originally went back in time, with the same mysterious voice on the radio saying that the next song they’ll play has been ‘requested by a caller who’s been waiting for a long time for someone to come back from a long trip’. In the final shot, we see how Kyung Hwi wakes from his coma with a smile on his face.

Even though his first thought after going back to high school was ‘ahh I should have watched a time travel movie’, I found that Kyung Hwi got used to his situation very quickly. He came to terms with the time travel in itself and also immediately connected the dots with the message he’d heard on the radio and that the reason must be Na Bi.
It also doesn’t take him too many incidents to realize everything still happens, in a way, and even takes it upon himself to humiliate his bully publicly, because Na Bi did that for him in the original timeline.
The only way he can know for sure that his actions change anything, is through Na Bi’s diary. He took her old diary from the original timeline with him and as he starts effecting Na Bi’s life in the new timeline, she writes new things in her diary that replace the original content. This is how he can see, even for a little, what she is thinking and if his plan is working, even if it’s slightly privacy-violating.

The only time where I went ‘uh-oh’ for a moment was when he didn’t tell her about the phone call. They are on a boat together at that point, on her birthday, one day before she is supposed to commit suicide. Na Bi goes to the bathroom and Kyung Hwi answers her phone to learn that her comatose friend isn’t doing well and probably won’t have much longer. Realizing that this must be the phone call that originally drove Na Bi to kill herself, he decides not to tell her about it, since he wants to make sure she lives through the next day.
I personally think that, even if she had taken the call at that point, with Kyung Hwi by her side, she would have still been fine. Although it might have effected the mood enough to stop them from having their first kiss that evening.
In the end, luckily they didn’t make a big deal out of the fact that he hid this from her. Having watched too many dramas, I was just instinctively scared she’d find out that he had taken the call and didn’t tell her and would get mad at him for not allowing her to say goodbye to her friend for the last time.

Because it was a short drama, I get that there was no time for the usual g r a d u a l build-up in relationships, but I still think Na Bi let Kyung Hwi into her life pretty swiftly. After he kept running after her to make sure she didn’t do anything reckless, continuing to stand up for her while she didn’t ask for it and fixing her bad relationships for her, I understood why she was initially very suspicious of him. But still, after he pulled down that bully’s pants and ran off with her as she’d done in the original time, it seemed like she’d accepted him as a good person. The three of them (incl. Seul Gi) even went to an amusement park right after, and the next day Kyung Hwi was already like ‘am I your boyfriend now?’, so it went quite fast.

The bus accident was terrible (I’m weak for big tragic accidents), and my K-Drama instinct told me it was going to happen, just like how I just knew there was going to be car coming when they started walking down that crosswalk in slow-motion at the end. But what I did think was inconsiderate of Kyung Hwi was that, when he took the hit of that car knowing he was going to get seriously hurt, he literally put Na Bi through the exact same experience of what happened to her friends. I was really worried that, seeing the next person she’d opened her heart to get into a traffic accident AGAIN ‘because of her’, she would be triggered back into her trauma immediately. Once again she would have to sit next to a comatose patient, hearing his parents blame her for everything… I was positively surprised that she was able to stay optimistic for 10 years after that.

I’ve seen Choi Min Ho in two other dramas before, To The Beautiful You and Hwarang. I remember he got a lot of negative comments on his acting in TTBY, but I like Hana Kimi and all its adaptations so it didn’t bother me that much.
I didn’t really like Hwarang that much, but that didn’t have anything to do with him in particular.
As for this drama, I found his acting quite alright. His transformation from high school geek with big round glasses and poofy hair to his adult look was funny, lol. It was cool to see how he could pull off both an adult and a kid with the same face, although he definitely acted a bit younger in his flashbacks of his original high school timeline.

Watching Min Ho in this drama now hits differently, of course. As many people will know, his fellow SHINee member Kim Jong Hyun committed suicide only a couple of months after this drama aired in 2017. Even though this series tries to keep it light and eventually has a happy ending, it definitely shines a light on young people facing so many fears and doubts and pains in their lives that they just want to get away from it all. Even though all you want is to scream at them not to give up and to keep on living, some people just can’t handle the pressure. It is highlighted in this drama that many young people don’t even take their own lives because they want to die, but just because they want to escape or take away the pain. I can’t even begin to imagine what Min Ho and his fellow members must have felt like. I just want to take this moment to remember Jong Hyun and many other young and talented people who couldn’t take this life any longer. May you find some rest, peace and quiet where you are now, beautiful souls.

I realized as I looked her up that I know Lee Yoo Bi from her role in Pinocchio, where she was the second female lead. I saw she was also in Uncontrollably Fond, but I don’t remember her from there (admittedly, it’s been 5 years since I watched it). I also saw her in the movie ‘Twenty’, although I don’t remember much of that either, except for the fact I watched it (I thank my mind for giving me the idea to write reviews so I’ll actually remember people). Anyways, I liked her performance here a lot. She was the embodiment of someone who looks strong and doesn’t show any ‘outer signs’ that she’s struggling with life. But when she had a scene alone, there was plenty of space for her to show the layers to her character. She made me feel sorry for her without becoming ‘pathetic’ and that isn’t as easy as it seems. So I think she did a great job portraying both strength and fragility as Na Bi.
(By the way, I love how the way Kyung Hwi said her name sounded like hanabi, the Japanese word for ‘fireworks’. But in Korean her name means ‘butterfly’ so that’s equally pretty.)

I’ve seen a few dramas with Kim Hee Chan such as Producer, Cheese in the Trap and School 2017. He has a very familiar face. I found his character interesting, because he was such a blatant coward but you could still see that he didn’t want to be one. He wanted to have the courage to help his friend but he was just so scared for himself. At least he told Kyung Hwi in his face why he acted like that. I had people like this in high school who would just disappear from my side when a bully appeared without a single explanation or apology afterwards. Those are the real cowards. At least Seul Gi had the common sense to owe up to his cowardice, haha.

The woman who played Kyung Hwi’s older sister also looked really familiar to me, and after looking her up I think I remember her mostly from My Love From Another Star, where she played Yoo In Na’s stylist. She was very feisty in this drama haha. In retrospect I would’ve liked to see a little more of the romance development between her and Seul Gi, because now it really seemed as if Seul Gi just married her because he felt indebted to Kyung Hwi after how he’d treated him in high school. I really hope there was at least some real romance between them!

I could find really little info on the rest of the cast, even though it was a really small cast. Still, I think everyone involved should be credited. I want to know who the voice on the radio was, haha.

All in all, it wasn’t the worst drama I’ve seen, it was intriguing enough that I wanted to see it through. I really wondered how it was going to play out and I’m glad it ended in a happy ending, even if it was a bit unrealistic. Apart from the fact that being considerate of people and ‘you never know if someone might be suffering’, I’m wondering if there was any additional message to the story besides raising awareness. I actually felt a little sad as well, thinking ‘so many people may have been saved from this fate if there had been someone to talk to them like Kyung Hwi talked to Na Bi’. But on the other hand I think a lot of people may still have faced the same end, even after being talked to like that, because in the end, the other person can never fully understand what you’re going through. Healing from depression/trauma is a long and rough process and you have to stick it out to the end, otherwise the urge to give up will bring you crashing down with no one to catch you.

However! I don’t want to end this review on a sad and dark note! I just hope everyone is taking care of themselves, I’ve been talking to some friends lately who are also facing some difficulties at the moment and I’m really proud to see people take some distance to recharge and choose their own (mental) health above their stressful jobs or other outward factors. It’s important to take care of yourself, because even though your body may physically warn you, your mind sometimes has the tendency to keep going beyond its limits. I hope everyone is able to take plenty of rest, these are stressful times, and I will keep writing reviews for your entertainment, haha. Being unemployed isn’t all bad, I’m currently also taking a lot of time to rest up 🙂

The next couple of dramas on my list are several that I’ve really been looking forward to! I’ll be back with another review in due time! Bye everyone! ^^