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.

The Third Charm
(제3의 매력 / Jesamui Maeryeok)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

It’s review time! I’m really glad to go back to my list and watch some older dramas that I’ve really been looking forward to watching. This series has also been on my list for a while and I’m glad I finally got around to watching it!
Again, I went into it without knowing any details about the story, and I let myself be surprised. I’ve been kind of looking forward to writing this review because I have several things to say about it and I just love how going back to some more older dramas always feels refreshing. For some reason I find it easier to write reviews for these kind of series than for more hyped and intense series (referring directly to Crash Landing on You & It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, for which it took me more than a day to finish my final reviews). Even though this series is also 16 episodes each with a length of a little over an hour, it still felt ‘easier’ to watch than when I’m watching something on Netflix.

Let’s start! I really wanted to watch this as soon as I saw the main leads and the teasers/trailers that I saw looked cute.
It still turned out quite different from what I’d expected. I’ll first give a general overview of the three parts the series is divided in, before going into more details.

The Third Charm depicts the 12-year love story between On Joon Young (played by Seo Kang Joon) and Lee Young Jae (played by Esom/Lee So Young). What’s interesting from the start in this love story is that these two are complete opposites: Joon Young is a classic nerd (even in appearance), who is really picky in everything he eats and does. He always organizes all his stuff neatly, he can’t eat spicy food, is afraid of heights and gets drunk really easily. He prefers to live by the rules. Young Jae, on the other hand, is a free spirit. She lost her parents and lives with her older brother. She can’t afford to go to college so she works part-time in a hairsalon – her dream is to become a professional famous hair designer. She loves the spontaneous, and is actually quite jealous of college friends who are able to play around and hang out whenever they want since they have no trouble paying for their tuition, or their parents pay it for them. Young Jae loves spicy food, especially when she’s upset, and she’s just really playful.
The story starts in 2006, when both of them are 20 years old. Joon Young and Young Jae meet for the first time in the subway when they’re both on their way to a college entrance exam – Young Jae calls out a pervert for feeling up a woman and drags him with her to the police office. Joon Young, who actually wants to get away as soon as she starts meddling because he doesn’t like to get involved in other people’s business, ends up still going to the police station as well since he took some evidence pictures. In the end, they both barely make it in time for their respective exams, but Young Jae is too distracted that she’s not able to concentrate and fails – she’s not allowed to enter the hairdresser’s school. So she keeps working part-time at the hairsalon.
One time, some of her friends who are in college, together with one snooty girl, invite her to a blind date with some college guys because their last participant couldn’t make it. Coincidentally, this blind date is with Joon Young and three of this friends. When everyone chooses partners to go their separate ways, Joon Young is forced to stay behind to wait for the girl who’s late. When this turns out to be Young Jae, they have a surprisingly fun ‘date’ at the amusement park, but at the same time he allows Young Jae to bulldozer all over him. He’s forced into rollercoasters, forced to eat extremely spicy tteokbokki, and ends up participating in a beer drinking contest, which he wins after getting completely wasted. Joon Young is under the impression that Young Jae is a college student as well, because she doesn’t tell him otherwise. After getting her number through his friends, he’s able to find the hairsalon she works at and they meet a couple of times and eventually kiss.
On their official ‘1st day of dating’, Joon Young invites Young Jae to a party but this party is ruined when the snooty girl humiliates Young Jae publicly and tells everyone that she’s not a college students and that she’s from a poor family etc. etc. Young Jae is really embarrassed by this and leaves. After that, she seems to have disappeared. When Joon Young finally tracks her down, she is really cold to him and says that she doesn’t want to be with him, breaking his heart.
Then, the series skips to 7 years later, New Year’s Eve 2013, when they’re both 27. They meet again. Joon Young is now a police officer, something that Young Jae told him he’d never be when they first met. He has always held a grudge against Young Jae for breaking his heart, but finds himself back at the beginning when they meet again and they start dating pretty soon after. Despite their different personalities, you can see how much they adore each other. They will visit each other at work, bring each other food, sneak kisses in-between conversations, etcetera. Ultimately, they do break up again, and I will talk about this later, but I think it’s fair to say that it also had to do with several love rivals and the realization that maybe they really were too different and they wanted different things in life. Young Jae probably felt that Joon Young would have to sacrifice some things he’d like just to go along with what she’d want, and she couldn’t do that to him. Anyways, they break up.
Then, instead of a time jump like the previous one, this time we follow Joon Young through another 5 years of time. After his breakup with Young Jae, he quits his job at the police station and travels to Portugal. First it seems like a break, a holiday to clear his mind, see the world and figure out what he does next, but it turns out to be quite an emotionally draining journey. He doesn’t speak the language, he walks until his feet start bleeding and he feels really alone. Then, one night, when he’s exhausted, he comes across a small restaurant and when he tastes the food, he makes a decision: he’ll become a chef. He applies for culinary school in Lisbon, and studies to become a chef. After five years, he decides to come back to Korea to start his own restaurant there. Not long after he starts his business, he meets Young Jae again when she visits his restaurant with her husband. They meet again when they’re both 32. But Young Jae has changed. Joon Young has moved on, is even about to get married himself, but Young Jae is very quiet and even seems sad.

Okay, so I’ll keep it at that for the three parts. So the series at first starts with Joon Young and Young Jae meeting again in 2013, then it goes back to show the whole 2006 flashback, and then it resumes the story from when they meet again in 2013. After that, we follow them through their relationship at 27 and then we follow Joon Young through his 5 years in Portugal. Young Jae’s story is revealed in bits and pieces in the last couples of episodes.

Okay, so, let’s go back to the circumstances regarding their first breakup in 2006. When Young Jae disappears after being humiliated by the snooty girl, that’s actually not the only reason she breaks up with Joon Young. We later find out that, on that same day as the party, Young Jae’s brother was in a very serious accident. He worked as a construction worker and fell down a 4-story building. He becomes paralyzed from the waist down, he can’t ever walk again. Facing this new situation of having to care for her brother, Young Jae is even more confronted with the fact that she can’t do whatever she wants, she can’t live carefree like her college friends. Now she has to work twice as hard to also take care of her brother. She snaps at Joon Young because of this reason – she doesn’t have time to date or frolic around anymore. Joon Young always thought that somehow it was his fault, that he’d made her angry, even after looking for her and telling her that he didn’t care she wasn’t in college. When they meet again in 2013 and she tells him the reason had nothing to do with him, he’s even more confused. I believe he ends up hearing the story via her brother. After that he comes running to her, and they kiss and start dating again. So, for the first breakup, we can say: Young Jae breaks it off because of problematic circumstances in her family.

When they are dating in 2013, Young Jae incidentally meets Choi Ho Chul (played by Min Woo Hyuk), a plastic surgeon who just got out of a marriage. He becomes interested in her and starts pursuing her, even after she tells him that she has a boyfriend. Joon Young also becomes aware of him and initially gets a little jealous and suspicious, also because he sees Ho Chul help Young Jae out and they sometimes run into each other/spend time together and Young Jae doesn’t tell him. Young Jae keeps convincing him that there’s nothing between her and Ho Chul, but Joon Young still thinks she hasn’t made it clear enough to the guy because he keeps going after her. She rejects Ho Chul at least two times while she’s dating Joon Young. He even tells Joon Young he’s going to confess to her, even though his feelings are one-sided, and she rejects him again.
In the meantime, a new Public Service Center employee called Min Se Eun (played by Kim Yoon Hye), starts crushing on Joon Young. They have a lot in common personality-wise and she just really starts to like him. When a work situation gets both Joon Young and Se Eun to be admitted to the hospital, Young Jae one time spots them sitting together. Whether she is alarmed by this or not isn’t really clear, but Joon Young tells her afterwards that they were just sharing some canned peaches as they were both involved in the same accident. Even though they come clear to each other about meeting other people, even though there are no romantic tensions anywhere, for some reason their relationship becomes super strained.
This is where I lost track for a moment. I didn’t understand what was going on and wondered if I had missed something. Everything seemed to be good between them, they both stopped worrying about love rivals… but somehow after that they suddenly stopped talking. It seemed like they couldn’t talk to each other anymore, after each short and meaningless phone call one of the two would just break down and start crying. When Young Jae breaks up with Joon Young, we find out he was actually planning to propose to her. Like… how could they suddenly have wound up so far apart from each other? Young Jae breaks up with him saying something about how she keeps feeling apologetic towards him. For what? Call me dense, but I really didn’t understand what was going on, haha. Was it because he’d said something about wanting to live in the countryside, and when she said she wanted to stay in the city he said ‘alright, I’m fine anywhere as long as I’m with you’? Was it about that, that she felt like he wouldn’t be able to do what he really wanted as long as he was tied to her? They never really spoke out what they were feeling, not to each other, not to anyone. From this point on it became increasingly difficult for me to understand what both of them were thinking. Why did he quit his police job? Why did he go to Portugal, of all places? No explanation.

When Joon Young returns from Portugal in 2018, he is dating Se Eun. During his stay there she came to visit him one time and gathered all her courage to confess her feelings to him. We don’t see his direct response, but we have to assume that he accepted her feelings as they are together after that. They’re even planning on getting married.
Joon Young starts a special restaurant with just 1 table. This allows him to get one pair of customers per reservation, and he is able to customize their meal completely depending on the customers’ occasion. When he’s finished serving the food, he regularly just goes outside to give the customers some time alone to chat and finish their food. It’s quite a unique concept, I’ve never seen anything like it before. Anyways, one night suddenly Young Jae walks in, together with Ho Chul. During their dinner, Ho Chul says that ‘this will be their last dinner together’ and ‘how surprising it is that she meets Joon Young again like this after all this time’. It isn’t until a couple of episodes later that we get the whole truth, and this is where stuff gets dark.
As it turns out, after their breakup, Young Jae ended up dating Ho Chul after all (which was already weird to me, that she still chose the guy she rejected several times since he kept persistently chasing after her while she was already in a relationship). They even got married and moved to Portugal, Lisbon. Apparently, she and Joon Young had been living in the same city for 4 years or something. They never met even once. Young Jae and Ho Chul even had a daughter, Choi So Ri. However, something terrible happened. On So Ri’s fourth birthday, she got separated from her mom while they were getting her birthday cake. So Ri went after a cat on the street and got hit by a car.
Young Jae lost her child. After that, she and Ho Chul tried for a couple more years to make their marriage work, but Young Jae became completely unhinged, resorting to alcohol and falling into a severe depression as she blamed herself for not keeping a close enough eye on So Ri. She even attempts suicide. Ho Chul tries to do whatever he can, but Young Jae eventually decides they should get a divorce. They move back to Korea and have their last dinner together before officially divorcing at Joon Young’s restaurant. Then Ho Chul leaves Young Jae by herself and disappears from the rest of the story.

Honestly, I had mixed feelings about Ho Chul. I didn’t want him to get together with Young Jae, in the beginning, I didn’t really find him all that appealing. When he went so far as to serenade ‘Come What May’ to her in public, I was really like, ‘dude… do you know about the concept of ‘boundaries’?’ Like, his singing was amazing, no comments on that, but she had literally told him she had a boyfriend by then, and she had told him that she wanted to stay away from him because she didn’t want Joon Young to feel uncomfortable. Okay, they can’t help it if they run into each other, but this guy didn’t want to give up. He even called her to pretend to be his date to a wedding where his ex-wife would be, since he immaturely wanted to prove to her that he was moving on with someone else as well. And then he sang her a super romantic love song, a song that he had actually wanted to sing to his wife on his own wedding. Like, that’s all kinds of wrong to me.
When they entered that restaurant together and called each other names that suggested they were married, I was like, ‘no! no way!’ I really didn’t like that she’d still gone with him, of all people. Anyways, despite everything, in the flashbacks with their daughter, he was a really adorable father, he was doting on So Ri so much and they looked like a sweet family, I’ll give him that. Young Jae also seemed to be really in love with him during that time, the way she looked at him while they were laying on the bed holding So Ri’s tiny hands.
But after what happened, even though he must have struggled as well, he couldn’t deal with Young Jae anymore.
I couldn’t help but feel a little sad for him, since he’d already failed in one marriage, and now another one PLUS the loss of a child? That was harsh. But then he just left Young Jae on her own in an empty apartment while she clearly wasn’t able to take care of herself yet, and just ‘left the chatroom’. Like, that was literally his last appearance. And I found that kind of a weird way to say goodbye to him. Like, it almost felt a bit unfair towards his character. He had worked so hard, put in so much effort as the second male lead, and then this was what became of him.
I don’t really know how to explain this, haha, it just felt like an anticlimax of sorts.
A tiny thing that bugged me was: how did they come across Joon Young’s restaurant? Since it was such a special concept restaurant, they should have looked it up, but then wouldn’t they have seen at least something about Joon Young being the owner? Like, he even did this big interview, and he was the only person working there. There should have been some information about him being the owner, I don’t believe they made a reservation without even discovering ANYthing about that it was his restaurant. Now it was just like ‘oh wow, what a coincidence’, but it didn’t make sense to me. Also, from Joon Young’s side, doesn’t he check his reservations? He should’ve been able to see if someone named ‘Choi Ho Chul’ made a reservation and then he would’ve recognized the name? I don’t know, I feel like this shouldn’t have been purely coincidental.

While I’m on this topic, the relationship between Joon Young and Se Eun made zero sense to me as well. We don’t get to see how their relationship is established, exactly. We just see that Se Eun comes to Portugal to see him because she likes him and she’s able to muster up her courage to confess at the airport, when he comes after her to give her a final souvenir before she leaves. At the moment of her visit and until she confesses, I’m pretty sure Joon Young did not have romantic feelings for her. So that’s probably why it felt to me as if he’d accepted her confession because he didn’t have any reason not to. He was getting over Young Jae, he was turning his life around, and she was a nice person who cared for him and there were no problems in their communication since they were very alike.
Even after he comes back to Korea, whenever we see them together, I always just got a friendly vibe from them. He was never as intimate with her as he was with Young Jae, we never even see them kiss casually. Just a few hugs and they hold hands a couple of times, that’s it. Comparing that to how he was with Young Jae when they were dating, I could already feel there was something not right about it. Or maybe I was just biased haha. Anyways, when Se Eun meets Young Jae, she doesn’t know who she is (I actually went ‘riiight, she doesn’t know her’, lol). When Se Eun just joins the police force and starts liking Joon Young, she isn’t even aware of the fact that he is dating someone already, and that that’s Young Jae. When she finds out, she automatically becomes a little uncomfortable, although there shouldn’t be any reason to by now. She’s already getting married to Joon Young, it’s not like he’s suddenly going to be drawn back to his ex, right? He got over her, right? But then Se Eun does the stupidest thing. She sets Young Jae up on a blind date with one of her colleagues. Like, she actually meets up with Young Jae and goes like ‘Aren’t you going to meet any other men?’
I was really glad when Young Jae casually called her out, being like ‘Would that put your mind at ease?’ and Se Eun really felt bad about doing it, eventually, but still. What the hell? She had no right whatsoever to do that. Her own insecurities lead her to wanting to make sure all possible distractions are out of the way, she can’t risk Joon Young paying attention to his ex all of a sudden, even though Joon Young himself was already setting his boundaries clearly enough. Even when Young Jae calls him, he hesitates. And of course he cares about her, especially when she’s depressed like that. He wants to make sure she’s okay, even if he personally can’t do anything about it and he is actually a bit annoyed by the fact that she’s not doing well. He would’ve preferred her to be happy and married and living her life so that at least they wouldn’t get caught up in each other anymore. That’s something Joon Young had to deal with. Not Se Eun. It was none of her flipping business.
When Joon Young finds out she did this, naturally, he’s pissed at her. BUT, and this is where their relationship really went downhill and where I really felt this wasn’t right, when he confronts Se Eun and asks her why she did it, she deflects the question. We’ve seen her scold herself for doing it, calling herself a loser, but she can’t even explain to Joon Young why she did it. All she does is throw back at him ‘hey but YOU didn’t tell me she was your ex’. First of all, that has nothing to do with it. You meddled in someone else’s business just to make yourself feel better. And the worst part was that Joon Young complied with this. He went ‘yeah you’re right, I should’ve told you, it won’t happen again’.
Like??? What about Se Eun’s apology? He was the last person who should have been apologizing there.
The final piece of evidence I needed to determine they’re relationship wasn’t as strong as they made it appear, was when she said ‘you know, you’ve never been angry at me in 4 years, you only get angry now and it’s because of her’. I’m sorry, but if you haven’t had an argument with your partner in 4 years, I don’t believe that’s necessarily good. You’re supposed to fight and make up to become closer. If you’re going to share your life together, you can’t expect to NEVER have a fight. So that was the final drop for me.
Honestly, I was wondering if they were going to force Joon Young and Young Jae back together after she reappeared, because at that moment things were progressing so rapidly with Se Eun that it’d seem really weird for him to suddenly go back to Young Jae after all. But when that happened, I was really like ‘okay yep, that’ll do it’.
That’s also when I lost all my existing sympathy for Se Eun. When he called off their family meeting, basically saying he couldn’t marry her after all and she burst out crying in her room, I didn’t even feel that sorry for her, which is maybe a bit mean. But they just weren’t meant to be. She would have had to accept how deep his attachments to Young Jae were and she would have had to accept that Young Jae, or even her memory, would always be with Joon Young, no matter how hard she tried to keep her away from him. It was like, even though she was so timid in the beginning, she became so confident after getting together with Joon Young that she felt like she had the right to meddle in other people’s relationships. Nope, she made a very wrong decision and it cost her a wedding. And the fact that she wanted to take the high road just seemed silly because she just really made Joon Young feel bad while she was the one who did a stupid thing. When he told her he couldn’t go to their family meeting, she went all ‘let’s say I’M the one who broke off the relationship’ Are you that shameless? This happened partially because you messed it up, girl. Because of this Joon Young was punished by his parents, and it just wasn’t fair. He couldn’t help it that he couldn’t control his feelings for Young Jae, but he was still willing to suppress himself and make Se Eun happy. And this is what he gets as thanks? This girl needs to sort herself out – and then let herself out.
Also, when Joon Young asked Se Eun once if she’d be willing to move to Portugal after they’d get married because ‘they were happy there’, I kept thinking ‘?? they met there once, right?’, but after that I realized that after that she probably visited him more often, lol. Just because it’s never shown how their relationship ‘happens’ – we just skip to 5 years later – and because we never see that ‘they were happy there’, made it a bit unrealistic, or at least, difficult to imagine.

What I did think was funny was that, in the case of this series, the unusual thing happens: both main leads end up with the second leads at some point. We actually get to see what it’s like when the second leads ‘win’. And then still lose, in a way, because the relationship doesn’t turn out the way they had hoped for. But I can’t say that I’ve seen many dramas where the second leads actually stood a chance and came this far. So that was quite original.

On that note, I think a main theme in this series was the notion of ‘things not turning out as planned/hoped’. What I thought was very realistic was that it was very much about ‘you never know what happens in life’. Not just in relationships, but also in careers and events. A lot of unpredictable things happen in both the protagonists’ lives. Young Jae’s brother ends up in a wheelchair, she becomes a famous hair stylist, she gets to work on a fashion show, she meets and leaves the same person multiple times, she marries and divorces, she loses a child, she gets depression, her best friend gets cancer, her brother marries her best friend, she opens her own hairsalon.
Joon Young falls in love with the same person thrice, becomes a police officer, moves to Portugal, becomes a chef, opens his own restaurant, calls off his marriage.
Although I was initially really confused about the episode where Joon Young went to Portugal for the first time, I ended up thinking that this might actually be an interesting choice the writers made. After his breakup, he didn’t know what he wanted to do anymore. So he decides to go to an unfamiliar place for whatever reason, doesn’t matter, some things don’t need to be explained. When you’re looking for yourself, you shouldn’t have to explain anything to anyone. And when he decides to become a chef and stay in Lisbon, of course at first it’s like ‘okay lol random’, but then it just really felt like it was okay to make a sudden career switch like that. You never know what life will throw on your path next.
In retrospect I really think this was an important theme throughout the story. We may have thought at the beginning that this was going to be a romantic love story and they would still find their way back to each other in the end, but it still turned out differently. Even though Joon Young admits to his parents that he still has feelings for Young Jae after ending his engagement with Se Eun, he doesn’t force himself on her. In the end, it’s not even established that they get back together romantically or anything. I can imagine Young Jae not wanting to get married again, by the way. But he just chooses to stay by her side, even if it’s just as friends. That’s how much he cares about her, it’s not that he needs to be in a romantic relationship with her, per se. I thought that really showed how deep their friendship had become as well, besides their past romantic attachments.
In that aspect, I think it set itself apart from ‘normal’ K-Dramas. To show that ending up in a happy relationship with your significant other isn’t the end and there’s so much more to life, so many chances you still have, so many roads left to take. It’s okay for Joon Young to take his time discovering what he really wants to do, as it is okay for everyone to do so. So in that way I thought the story was really realistic. I’m glad they revealed everything in the end and that Young Jae ended up telling Joon Young the whole story about her daughter in the end.

I have to admit, this did come as an anticlimax for me, as well. Young Jae turns up, enters his life again, and she’s not taking care of herself, only eats instant food, gets drunk, etcetera. And she doesn’t tell him anything about what happened, so Joon Young is a bit hesitant to approach her again. He helps her get back on her feet (literally) a couple of times, but still makes it clear that they shouldn’t keep in touch that much, since they both have their own lives now, apart from each other. Of course, in the end, he’s doing this mostly to convince himself to forget about her. But then they happen to meet again, I believe this is just after he gets off the car with Se Eun after he gets into a fight with her, and they bump into each other quite casually. And then suddenly it skips to Young Jae saying ‘so yeah, that’s what happened to my kid’. Like??? That was hella casual! I thought there would be this whole buildup to her finally being able to talk about So Ri to Joon Young, but not only did they skip the whole story, they even made them decide to have this conversation while they just HAPPEN to bump into each other. It’s not even that they arranged to meet to have a serious conversation, they just met on the street and she suddenly decided ‘oh well, I might as well tell you everything that happened to me in Portugal now’. It was so anticlimactic!

I have to talk about a couple of other characters, now. Joon Young’s family consists of his mom and dad, who are both teachers (his mom the Vice Principal, his dad Geography, that’s how they met as well) and his sister, On Ri Won (played by Park Gyu Young). He doesn’t have a really good relationship with Ri Won, she likes to tease him a lot, but she is a very unique character with a loathing for capitalism. She ends up dating one of Joon Young’s friends from college.
Let me talk about this, haha. Hyun Sang Hyun (played by Lee Sang Yi) is Joon Young’s college friend and he was always the shameless playboy. He was never looking for anything serious and just objectified girls and dumped them after they became too invested in the ‘relationship’. In the beginning, I found him quite the jerk. In 2013, he owns a bar and Ri Won works there part-time. When one of the girls he’s seeing becomes really depressed after they break up, Ri Won makes him realize that none of the women he’s been seeing all this time were actually 100% okay after the breakup. When he realizes how much pain he has unknowingly caused them (because he thought they were all just like him, just looking for something light and casual, and they didn’t mind the breakup) he starts crying (?) and Ri Won comforts him. After that, he’s suddenly completely into Ri Won. When some guys from her college come visit and hit on Ri Won, he marks his territory and kisses her in front of them, saying that she’s his girlfriend. I call boundaries.
After that, they’re suddenly dating. So Ri Won decided to accept him? Even when she never gave any indication that she was interested in him? Okay. And then around the time that Joon Young moves to Portugal, she suddenly announces she’s pregnant. She refuses to marry Sang Hyun because of her anti-capitalism thing, and she prefers to remain co-parents. Sang Hyun, suddenly the weaker party in the relationship, keeps begging her for a wedding, but she acts kind of coldly towards him, saying that she liked him better when he was the ‘free spirit’ he used to be.
In the end, in 2018 when their daughter is 5 years old, she surprises him with AND a second pregnancy AND a marriage certificate. Which she got without him. Lol.
The point I want to make is that, starting with Sang Hyun, some of the side characters’ development didn’t make much sense to me. I didn’t understand why he started crying after finding out how much he’d hurt those girls, because it never seemed to matter to him before. I’m not even sure if that actually is the reason he cried. I didn’t understand why, after the whole playboy thing, he suddenly fell for Ri Won when she comforted him ONCE. And when he kissed her I was all like ‘UHM EXCUSE ME SIR’. But then they were suddenly together? And pregnant?
Besides that part I did find them a funny couple at the end. The last scene, where she reveals her second pregnancy and the marriage certificate really cracked me up. His expressions! He was so overjoyed, lol.

Young Jae’s brother, Lee Soo Jae (played by Yang Dong Geun), was occasionally very hard to gauge. He seemed an interesting enough character, it was very sad what happened to him and we have sympathy for him because he’s a good guy and he really has a nice bond with his sister. It’s the two of them, after all. In the 2006 flashback from before the accident, he had a girlfriend and they seemed really smitten with each other, but in 2013, she is gone. At first we are led to wonder what happened, she couldn’t possibly have left him after he had the accident, right? Later we are shown that she chose to stay with him through his revalidation, but Soo Jae overheard some people scolding her for wasting her life on him while he was never going to be able to walk again. Feeling sorry that he would be the one tying her down while she could have her own happy life and have children, he acts out the ‘I’ll act like a jerk to push you away but it’s actually because I care about you and want you to be happy’ trope and breaks up with her. He meets her by chance later, and seeing that she’s happily married with a young child, he seems kind of relieved.
After the accident, to get his act together and don’t give in to depression at the prospect of never walking again, Soo Jae starts to read a lot and then decides to become a script writer himself. He works hard to get his manuscript accepted by publishers, allthewhile trying to maintain his work as a barista, working from a van on the side of the road. Since he’s in a wheelchair, he struggles a lot. When his roadside coffee business is suspended because he doesn’t have a license to sell on the streets, he dives into his writing and eventually, his work is picked up by a producing company and he becomes rich because they make a famous movie out of it.

Baek Joo Ran (played by Lee Yoon Ji) is Young Jae’s best friend and, in 2013, boss at the hairsalon she works at. Despite her reputation, Joo Ran’s love life is a disaster. She’s incredibly motivated to find love, marry and have children, but she just never seems to meet the right guy. She often makes a fool out of herself, and when even a fortune teller tells her that she’s doomed to fail at love, she gives everything she has, even joins social clubs to meet men etcetera. There is one fun arc where she meets one man and it seems to be perfect in every way – except for the fact he is really very attached to his dog. The dog keeps getting in the way because she doesn’t like to be left alone, and the guy dotes on her and gives her kisses and everything. In the end, he busts Joo Ran when she’s angrily chasing after the dog and he breaks up with her. Despite her extrovert personality, Joo Ran’s desire for a man really says a lot about her.
She meets Soo Jae during a work trip and they become friends. In 2018, she’s still close with him, and their relationship is a bit weird. You can tell they care about each other, but they still refuse to date. Then, Joo Ran suddenly receives the news that she has Stage 3 cancer. She suddenly starts seeing things in a new light, realizes how hard it must have been for Soo Jae when he learned he could never walk again, and decides to tackle chemotherapy. She only tells Young Jae, who helps her cut her hair (am I the only one thinking that the short hair looked so much better on her than her previous hairstyle, btw?), but Young Jae eventually tells Soo Jae and he comes to visit her at the hospital and takes care of her during her chemo. They get married at the end of the series and it was very cute.

I think I’ll attribute the unpredictability of the characters’ development and their individual stories to the main theme I described before, that sometimes, people change or make switches or decisions you wouldn’t expect from them. While I have to admit that sometimes I found it a little weird how something turned out, it didn’t bother me, necessarily.
It just made it interesting to me. Although I did wonder if it was really necessary to make the second half of the series so heavy, what with Young Jae losing her child AND Joo Ran suddenly getting cancer? It went quite dark there for a bit.
And in both cases, they didn’t immediately reveal all the details until a little later. Young Jae’s flashbacks to her trauma were revealed, as I mentioned, in bits and pieces throughout the episodes following, but in Joo Ran’s case I actually found the ‘suspense’ a bit unnecessary. I mean, the doctor says ‘We have bad news, you see this lump over here’… that’s enough to know ‘oh no she has cancer’. But we only find out for sure when Joo Ran calls Young Jae over to shave off her hair, a couple of days later, and then the news is all dramatic, ‘I have cancer’, while we already knew that for at least an entire episode. So they kind of missed the impact of the timing there a little. The series ends while Joo Ran has to come back to the hospital (she got to go home after finishing stage 2 of the chemo) and the doctor is all friendly, saying that she’s doing well. So we don’t find out if she manages to beat it, and we are also left wondering whether her marriage to Soo Jae suddenly is because they decide they actually really love each other (which I don’t doubt), or if it’s also so she can still fulfill her dream of marrying before it’s too late. Anyways, the wedding itself was cute.
Ri Won was definitely one of the most unpredictable character, because her personality was just so ambiguous. She seemed a little quirky, she’s had guys come after her since high school but has always been very good at playing hard to get. She acts really dry and sarcastic most of the time, but she does give Sang Hyun some loving gazes when he’s not looking. I actually made a few GIF sets of her expressions throughout the series, lol. I love Park Gyu Young.
She’s not one to show a lot of physical affection, but I guess that’s also part of her charm.

SPEAKING OF WHICH (gosh I’m becoming increasingly better at creating bridges between paragraphs, lol), I spent a lot of time wondering about the title, “The Third Charm”. In the beginning, when Joon Young meets Young Jae again in 2013, he says something about ‘there’s two types of women and today I met the third one’. At other moments I occasionally thought, maybe it has to do with ‘third time’s a charm’, since they meet three times, and stick together after the third time. But the concept of ‘charm’ also keeps coming back in other ways. Several characters make comments about other people, pointing out some part or characteristic of their personality that might be considerate negative but, ‘that’s their charm’. Young Jae says something like, ‘Joon Young is picky and stubborn, but that’s also his charm’. Ri Won also says something to her daughter along the lines of ‘You’re sleeping all soundly now but you’re gonna yell as soon as I leave the room, aren’t you? Well, I guess that’s part of your charm’. In any case, the word ‘charm’ is used pretty often. And I still think ‘third time’s a charm’ also has something to do with it.

By the way, I saw that one of the additional posters from this series shows Joon Young and Young Jae walking side by side through a street with a European-looking tram, so I’m guessing that has to be Portugal. But this is strange, because they never actually meet there. They find out they both lived there at the same time, but they never met even once and there’s no scene where they walk through the streets of Lisbon like that. Usually a poster depicts a scene from the series, but I wondered about this. Is this foreshadowing? They both look like their 2018 appearances, so can we imagine from this that one day they will return to Portugal together? Maybe it sounds trivial, but I was just curious about this, haha.

I want to make some additional cast comments before I conclude, since I think I pretty much wrote down my major comments on the series and the story.

I love Seo Kang Joon. If I liked him before, I love him now. Just before finishing this series I read back my review for Are You Human Too?, the last drama I saw with him, and I really like how he’s able to show versatility in his acting. His acting was completely different from earlier things I saw of him (also counting Cheese in the Trap). Joon Young is a real introvert, and I loved how he pulled off the ‘nerdy’ look in the beginning, he went all out with it, haha. He’s definitely not shy to show different sides of himself. Honestly, I related so much to him in the 2006 period, haha, I literally sat there like, ‘omg… I found my male version’ xD I can’t eat spicy food or handle rollercoasters either, so his reactions to those things just hit the spot for me. I really liked him in this series.

The last thing I saw with Esom was Because This is My First Life, in which I loved her. I really like her as an actress, also because she always seems to portray female characters that aren’t standard to the usual heroine. In BTiMFL, she was a queen fighting against sexual harassment of women on the workfloor, and here, as well, she wasn’t the typical heroine. I really liked how she pulled off the playfulness of Young Jae in the beginning and how she slowly but surely turned into an adult with serious problems and eventually, faced a serious tragedy. She showed different phases of a woman growing up and dealing with life in all its severity. I think she did really well, I also really liked her chemistry with Seo Kang Joon.

I don’t know what it is, but even though I only discovered Park Gyu Young last year, she’s suddenly in everything I watch, haha. I didn’t know she was in this! And again, she was completely different from the other two roles I’ve seen of her so far. How is this woman able to transform like that? It just makes me love her even more. Even as a side character, the male lead’s sister, she managed to grasp her moments of screen time and made them her own. Even though I was occasionally genuinely annoyed by her character in the beginning, when she was still just the annoying little sister, that’s just because she pulled it off so well, haha.

I remember Lee Sang Yi from something… when I went to check I saw he’s been in Manhole and Andante, both of which I wrote reviews on, but I don’t remember him very clearly. He just looks very familiar. Except for his sudden change in personality and the fact I didn’t have any real empathy for his character – I hated him at first and after he got together with Ri Won he became kind of a wuss – it wasn’t all bad. He became kind of funny at the end. It just didn’t feel like they had a clear idea of what they wanted him to be like, making him switch from douchebag to puppy like that. I still want to know why it was exactly that he cried like that after finding out those girls still held grudges toward him. Was it really because of that? Because then it felt like they just suddenly chose to reveal a different side of him and it was just a little too sudden for me.

I didn’t know Min Woo Hyuk, and when I looked him up I found out he only did 5 dramas so far. He is a musical actor, which I kind of guessed after his rendition of ‘Come What May’, because he sang like a musical actor and he was really good, so no surprise there. The part where I liked his character the most was when Ho Chul and Young Jae were living in Portugal with their little girl. He was really sweet as a father. The scene where he kept coming back to the bed to look at his daughter even though he would be late for work was adorable, he came back four times lol, each being like ‘I’ll just look at her for a little longer’. I also liked how he came up with the name Choi So Ri, as it was a pun on their last names. I didn’t really like his character, but that was not because he was a jerk or anything, but because I just boycotted his relationship with Young Jae. He was a nice enough person, but yeah… that was about it.

I’ve seen Kim Yoon Hye once before, in Heartstrings, where she was the superskinny arrogant dancer girl that CNBLUE’s Min Hyuk fell in love with. I see that she was also in Flower Boy Next Door, but I don’t remember much of that (also don’t really want to remember it). Although I didn’t really like her character, she performed well enough. She also made a nice personality transition from timid girl to a mature woman with more confidence, although she messed up her own chances of happiness in the end.

It took me a moment to figure out Lee Yoon Ji was the teacher from Dream High! My God, that takes me back. I haven’t seen her in anything since that, haha. I was glad to see she got rid of the typical old-style hairdo, although her hair in this series was not a very big improvement (sorry not sorry, my opinion). We meet her character for the first time 2013, where she’s the slightly hysterical friend who just wants to get laid (or married, nice bonus). She’s desperate to find a man, but she does have a preference for guys with a nice body. I found the arc of her with the dog-obsessed guy really funny. I couldn’t but think that, when she was diagnosed with cancer, if it was really necessary to put her character through that. It just seemed like the final drop to confirm she was doomed to be unfortunate, first in love and now in life. It seemed like a cruel fate. I’m glad she still found a good guy in Soo Jae, because he definitely wasn’t the kind of guy she would’ve gone for when she was still up and about in her hunt for men. On the other hand, I started liking her a lot more in the second half of the series because we suddenly went through this seriously rough patch with her. Her expressions were usually a bit all over the place, but the scene that really hit me was when she’d just found out about her cancer and she was in her car after leaving Soo Jae (who wasn’t paying attention to her) and she started crying. It wasn’t just a melodramatic sobbing scene, the horror on her face was what made it for me. You could see how absolutely terrified she was, she was crying out of fear, not purely out of sadness. That really gave it a different load and was very impressive and heartbreaking.

When I looked up the actor Yang Dong Geun, I found out I know him from Missing 9, where he was a prosecutor, that’s where I remember his face from I guess. He looks so familiar, though! I wonder if I really only know him from that.
Anyways, I found his acting really amusing in this drama. I say amusing for lack of a different word to describe it, haha. His character went through a big change after his accident, so in the flashback in 2006 he is really different than how he is from 2013 on. I also wondered why they gave him the weird long haircut, when he changed it back to short in 2018 I thought it suited him much better. I wasn’t able to read all of his expressions, he would sometimes make these ambiguous faces, squinting his eyes, baring his teeth, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that, haha. Sometimes I thought he’d gone a little weird, haha. But he was always a really sweet brother and he cared a lot about Young Jae. He was also really fond of Joon Young. The scenes where I felt for him the most were 1. the flashback in which he woke up in the hospital after his accident and he completely panicked because his legs suddenly didn’t work anymore, and 2. the scene in 2013 where he transports a super heavy bag of rice from the hallway to the kitchen all by himself and it’s almost impossible, but he really wants to do it, and afterwards he’s in so much physical pain, and when Young Jae calls she’s all like ‘omg why did you do that by yourself, I would’ve done it!’ and you can just see that he doesn’t want to rely on her that much… That really hit hard in the feels.

One thing that really bothered me, by the way, was the behavior of some rude people in different situations. This is not a critique on the series or story or anything, but I still wanted to mention it because it made me really angry.
Young Jae is introduced as the kind of girl/woman who won’t stand for injustice, even if that means publicly calling someone out for behaving badly. There are three incidents (‘three’ again, I see a pattern) in which she drags someone to the police station for behaving badly in public, and in all three cases the people responsible are pleading they’re not accountable. First of all, at the first encounter between her and Joon Young, it’s a pervert, this creep guy sliding his hand down the bottom of the girl/woman standing in front of him. At the police station, he raises his voice and is all like ‘I’m a doctor, I have a surgery, I have no time for this, I want you to do an investigation on her from randomly framing an innocent man!’ … I don’t think people should ever, EVER try to rationalize their behavior because of their occupation. Because it has nothing to do with it. If you’re a doctor, you’re even more despicable for touching someone like that. I don’t care if you’re a lawyer or a dentist or a college professor, touching someone’s body without their consent has the same consequence for every person, regardless of what they do. So I really respected Young Jae for standing up for these victims, even though she was by herself and the police system occasionally dismissed her accusations. The second time happens on the train/subway as well. There’s a man in a wheelchair trying to get in, but he’s not able to because people literally push him out of the way. As she’s rushing to get on, a woman’s bag gets stuck on his wheelchair and she starts pulling all annoyed and I was like ?? WTF? Can’t you see there’s someone in that chair? What the hell are you doing?? And then Young Jae helped him on and the woman was only complaining about how her bag got ripped and gave the guy side-eyes for ‘being in the way’ and ‘why is he even trying to get on the train while it’s the rush hour, it’s just a nuisance’. Excuse me? The man was an elder, too, have you no respect for your fellow human beings?!
By the way, what in the world happened to ‘first let people get off, then get on’? Isn’t this a universal rule? I really didn’t understand, one time Joon Young wasn’t able to get off the train because people were impatient and just barged on board without waiting for people to get off first.
The third time was the worst (again, in a sense, ‘third time’s a charm’). A little boy is almost fatally hit by a car. Young Jae, traumatized from what happened to her daughter, sees it happen and is almost triggered. She helps the little boy up while the two people from the car get out only to scold the boy. He should’ve watched where he was going, he almost wrecked their car. ‘Doesn’t he have parents, what the hell is he doing here’. When they drive off Young Jae throws something at their car, and they end up at Joon Young’s old police station. But honestly, those people almost killed a little boy and they were only concerned about the freaking car. I couldn’t believe my ears. What the heck is wrong with those people? And they kept calling Young Jae the lunatic for damaging their car. I just… I had no words.

There was this one part that I still want to manage before finishing, because I feel like it had some deeper meaning. When on the work trip, Joon Young and Young Jae are taken to a small house in the countryside. There’s this old man and his wife isn’t able to leave the house, but he asks Young Jae to cut her hair. He also ends up asking Joon Young to fix this old radio that his wife likes to listen to. I feel like something happened here. Because on the way back, they had the conversation about where they’d want to live and Joon Young went along with Young Jae’s choice, and that seemed to still something in Young Jae, as if she suddenly became unsure about something. Joon Young went to fix the radio and for some reason, started crying while he did. I really feel like something happened that I either completely missed or that I wasn’t able to identify. Joon Young fixes the radio, and when he goes outside to show it to Young Jae, he sees her talking to Ho Chul, who is then confessing his feelings to her. She rejects him (again), then turns around and sees Joon Young. She asks him if he fixed the radio and he says ‘Yes’, but something is wrong. From that moment on, something is just wrong between them and I don’t know what it was. I’m guessing the radio may have been some sort of metaphor. If anyone has any ideas about this, please let me know, haha.

All in all, it was an interesting series to watch, and I’m glad I did. It was definitely different from other romance dramas. I still think there were a lot of plotholes, though, things that weren’t shown but we were just supposed to accept.
In the end, not all questions are answered and a lot of things are left up to our own imagination. We don’t even know for sure what will become of the bond between Joon Young and Young Jae. For some reason I don’t see them get married, at least not for a while. Maybe they’ll just enjoy each other’s company with no strings attached.
I liked that it made me think about changing paths in life, and that it’s never too late for that, and that life changes people. I think Young Jae also says something about this in the final episode, ‘You never know how life will turn out. It’s up to us to put in effort for our own future.’ If they had structured some things a little bit better and worked out some more details (and showed them) about what happened in the blank spots, things may have been more clear to me. For example, the part I just described above about the radio, the part where I lost track was when they stopped talking to each other, and because they didn’t enounce their thoughts, it also wasn’t clear to me what they were thinking and feeling and I ended up as confused as Joon Young when Young Jae suddenly broke up with him.
I probably wouldn’t watch this again, because it’s not the sort of drama I’d rewatch. It was okay, not the most impressive series I’ve watched but also not a complete waste of time.

By the way, I really liked the soundtrack! I added about 4 or 5 songs from the OST to my ‘to-download’ list 🙂

Thanks for taking the time to read my review! I will go on to my next watchlist item, which is also a series from 2018.
(After I re-read some of my old reviews I’ll probably also go through them again to do a thorough spell-check, because I keep seeing a lot of typos and errors, haha.)

Until next time!! ^^