SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Come and Hug Me
(이리와 안아줘 / Iriwa Anajwo)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello everyone! I’m back with a new review! It’s been a couple of really weird weeks, as I already briefly described in my previous review, so I was distracted by a lot of stuff, mostly health-related, but luckily the end seems to be in sight! I hope I’ll be getting back to my normal daily routine soon and out of this endless quarantine. It has given me more time to sit at home watching series, and that’s also one of the reasons why I went through this one so fast.
Honestly, I had to take breaks from this because it got pretty intense at times. It also didn’t help that I’m currently listening to a True Crime podcast, so the themes overlapped quite a bit and too much of it isn’t always a good thing. ^^” Anyways, I was able to finish this drama today, and I would like to express my thoughts on it. I have to add that the intensity of this series came as a surprise to me, because I’d assumed it would just be a cute romance story – I hadn’t looked into it as much before starting it. Anyways, I think it would be appropriate to establish some firm trigger warnings before moving on. This series deals with themes such as crime, physical assault, murder, loss, and heavy trauma.

Come and Hug Me is a series with 32 episodes (2 episodes back-to-back) of each 35 minutes. The story is about Yoon Na Moo and Gil Nak Won, who were both forced to change their names as adults because of the same case to which they are both related in a different way. The two meet when they are both 16 years old, in Busan.
Yoon Na Moo (played as a teenager by Nam Da Reum), lives with his fragmented family. I say fragmented because not everyone is blood-related and they’re certainly not very close with each other. There’s his father, Yoon Hee Jae (played by Heo Joon Ho), his stepmother Chae Ok Hee (played by Seo Jung Yeon), his older brother Hyun Moo (played as a teenager by Kim Sang Woo) and his younger stepsister So Jin (played as a child by Lee Ye Won). Chae Ok Hee is Yoon Hee Jae’s 2nd or 3rd wife, and she’s only the biological mother of So Jin. She works at her restaurant and isn’t home often, despite claiming to still have a good relationship with her husband. So Jin is the most fond of Na Moo, they’re often see walking together, or that he’s carrying her on his back. Hyun Moo is a troublemaker, he’s kind of a delinquent and has violent tendencies, like physically bullying classmates and bothering girls to hang out with him and his friends. He looks up to his father a lot, but also seems to suspect something to be wary of about him. He doesn’t show much affection, but it does show that he cares for So Jin a lot, by walking some distance behind her as some drunk people pass her on the streets to make sure she doesn’t get hurt etc.
And then there’s his father, Yoon Hee Jae. From the get-go, he gives us the creeps. There is something not right about this man. In the first few moments there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong, we see him give some money to Hyun Moo so he can hang out with his friends, and he fixes a sink at an old lady’s house. However, that’s where the vibe changes as he suddenly becomes poker-faced and takes out a hammer of his bag. That same night, the old lady and her husband are reported on the news to have been found dead in their apartment. Father doesn’t give any sort of response to it, though, he just tells his kids to sit down and have dinner with him. So Jin is clearly afraid of her stepfather, and Na Moo also senses some danger from him. But everything changes for him when Gil Nak Won arrives to town.
Gil Nak Won (played as a teenager by Ryu Han Bi) moves to Busan with her parents and older brother. Her mother happens to be a famous actress, and this is their new bought countryside home, away from the city bustle. Her older brother Moo Won (played as a teenager by Jung Yoo Ahn), is revealed to have been adopted by her parents later, after losing his own parents in a fire as a child. You would never guess that he wasn’t blood-related to them though, they are a very close and happy family, the four of them.
Nak Won and Na Moo spot each other on the road as Nak Won’s family is driving towards their new house, and there’s an immediate spark. They also turn out to be in the same class at school, and Nak Won is immediately interested in Na Moo. She finds it fun to tease him and flirt with him a little because his reactions are so timid – however when he occasionally returns a smile to her, she gets flustered too. They are just an adorably awkward couple. Na Moo has trouble letting Nak Won into his life, because of his tense family situation and, well, he just doesn’t want her to get close to his dad. An incident where his dad actually takes Nak Won’s lost dog to his dog farm and Nak Won comes looking for him, strengthens these worries. Na Moo manages to persuade his dad to let the dog go and is able to get Nak Won and her dog out of there, but his father definitely made sure to remember Nak Won and this is worrying to him.
He takes Nak Won home and meets her parents, who are very kind to him and ask him to be a good friend to their daughter.
In the meantime, Yoon Hee Jae doesn’t sit still. We see him kidnap a young woman who’s waiting at a bus stop after she refuses to get into his car. Right this evening, his wife Ok Hee decides to check up on him and goes looking for him at his dog farm – but then she sees him come out covered in blood and watches how he throws a bunch of stuff (a coat, a purse, a woman’s ID card) in the fire. Completely panicked, Ok Hee takes So Jin and runs away. They run into Na Moo, but he encourages them to leave before his father does anything worse. In any case, this confirms once again that his father is a really dangerous guy.
And then the final shoe drops. On Christmas Eve, Yoon Hee Jae manages to sneak into Nak Won’s house and kills both her parents. He attempts to kill the girl too, but then Na Moo comes in and protects her, even harming his own father in the process. Yoon Hee Jae flees, and the two teenagers are left alone in the big house, completely broken. When the police arrives, Nak Won hugs Na Moo and tells him to keep on living, that she doesn’t blame him, it’s not his fault, but he needs to keep on living. However, Na Moo of course blames everything on himself, on the fact that he still got close to her, and decides to live the rest of his life in atonement for his father’s crimes.

We then skip to 12 years later. Na Moo (now played by Jang Ki Yong), now Chae Do Jin, has been accepted at the police academy despite his own personal relation to a serial killer and is one of the best of his class. He joins the police force in the Violent Crimes division with a close team of friends and colleagues. He still has to deal with people talking about him behind their backs, that he’s a murderer’s son, because despite changing his name he doesn’t keep his relation to Yoon Hee Jae a secret per se.
After the incident on Christmas Eve, Ok Hee came back for him out of guilt of leaving him behind and he has been living as her real son under her family name since then, with So Jin (now played by Choi Ri) who helps her mother in her new restaurant.
Hyun Moo (now played by Kim Kyung Nam) was arrested for beating a classmate into a coma around the time of the incident, and he’s still in jail (although I’m not completely sure if that was for the same thing or for something else he did). He is in the same prison as his father and in his despair to gain his approval he is still quite violent, even when locked up. He still harbors a lot of grudging feelings, namely towards Moo Won, since he was the one who reported him back then.
Moo Won (now played by Yoon Jong Hoon) is now a prosecutor. He is still in close contact with his little sister, but still wishes to protect her as much as possible from any harm. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t present during the Christmas Eve incident because he just happened to come home late that night. Honestly, realizing that he had now lost TWO sets of parents, both because of a murder crime, was heartbreaking.
Gil Nak Won (now played by Jin Ki Joo), now Han Jae Yi, decided to follow her mother’s footsteps and become an actress, which she seems to have a knack for. Even though she’s still a supporting actress in the beginning, she does keep getting more jobs as lead roles as well, and slowly but surely she’s climbing up. However, she too is still haunted by what happened, and it’s very easy for people to discover that she’s actually the daughter of ‘that famous actress’ who got murdered by ‘that serial killer’.
Since Nak Won is now an actress who’s also appeared in several commercials, Na Moo recognizes her in a commercial and there’s even a cardboard figure of her next to the vending machine at the police academy’s canteen. They end up meeting a few times when he protects her from reporters, and the recognition is instantly mutual. So now they’ve found each other again, but there’s still so many complicated things and there are enough people around them who’d frown upon them getting together.
The families of Yoon Hee Jae’s victims are still around to blame everyone, and Yoon Hee Jae himself is still around as well, although he’s in prison. Actually, he has just published an autobiography called ‘I’m Not That Different From You’ in which he describes all the murders he’s committed, which infuriates the remaining relatives. When the news gets out that his son is winning an award at the police academy, the relatives even go there to throw eggs at him. When Hyun Moo gets out of prison he immediately starts wreaking havoc again because he feels that Nak Won and her brother are at fault for tearing his family apart. There also seems to be a new serial killer on the loose in the vicinity of Gangnam, attacking people with a hammer – Yoon Hee Jae’s signature weapon. All the while Yoon Hee Jae is biding his time and a particularly vicious reporter that will stop at nothing to get a juicy story out of them…
Will Na Moo and Nak Won ever find rest?
(I will proceed with calling the main leads by their actual names Na Moo and Nak Won to avoid confusion.)

So yeah, this series was overall VERY different from what I expected. From beginning to end, the tone is very angsty and dark, as Na Moo and Nak Won are confronted with their trauma every single day, it seems. Not a day goes by in which they don’t hear anyone whisper about their relation to Yoon Hee Jae behind their backs, it must be compelely exhausting for them as they’re both trying to move on with their own new lives but are just not given the chance to. Even when they finally decide to screw it all and just be together, there is never a truly relaxed moment, there is always something to worry about, always something in the back of their minds that feels like they can’t completely go for it.
Honestly, I think it was a major show of character for Nak Won to not blame Na Moo for anything. I mean, of course he wasn’t to blame, he knew his father was bad and he didn’t want him to do any harm. But in a lot of cases, even family members of a criminal can get indirectly blamed for their relative’s actions, we see that in dramas all the time. And still, 12 years later, the victims’ families still partly blame Na Moo because they need to express their anger to someone in front of them. It’s extremely complicated how this works, in my opinion. The people need someone to blame, and to see that the son of the man who murdered their relative is appointed Lieutenant at the police force must of course be a very bitter pill to swallow. They’re probably not concerned with whether he deserves to go on with his life or not.
Na Moo and Nak Won are, as a reporter also mentions in the last episode, truly each other’s salvation. The two of them understand each other like no one else does, because of their shared experience. And this is both incredibly touching and painful at the same time. There just always seems to be something between them that creates a wall. And this wall only crumbles down completely in the very last episode, when all gets solved and sorted out.

The middle part of the series is quite complicated to summarize, since a lot of things happen at the same time. I suppose the most important thing is that Hyun Moo is released from prison and around the same time, new serial killings start happening around Gangnam, which almost automatically makes Hyun Moo the prime suspect, as the victims are attacked with a hammer. Hyun Moo, whilst actually not responsible for this series of random attacks, is definitely after Nak Won and her brother. But at the same time, he also keeps tabs on Ok Hee and So Jin, hanging around the restaurant to see how they are doing and if they’re not being bothered too much by busybodies who know their connections to Yoon Hee Jae.
His grudge mainly lies with Na Moo, since he is the one that ‘sided with Nak Won after their father was locked up’. He is of the mindset that Nak Won and her brother are responsible for tearing his own family apart. It’s pretty obvious that Hyun Moo’s behavior is caused by the neglect he suffered as a child. Yoon Hee Jae always prioritized Na Moo, he never showed his oldest the same kind of affection he showed his youngest. It’s understandable, in a way, that he craved his father’s attention and approval. Yoon Hee Jae himself actually fed this, because he also kept filling Hyun Moo’s head with comments like how Na Moo took after him the most and how Hyun Moo would never be able to beat his younger brother. In fact, he was poisoning his oldest son’s mind with these statements. Because no matter what Hyun Moo did, however he acted out, he never told him he was proud of him, or that he did the right thing.
And it takes a while for Hyun Moo to accept that his father has never truly protected him. One night he attacks Na Moo at Nak Won’s house and even though he ends up stabbing his younger brother, he is definitely rattled by what Na Moo tells him about their father, about how he never protected either of them, and that he’s a real monster.
Hyun Moo is now sort of on his own, aware that he is being accused of these serial killings, but then he actually runs into the real perpetrator – a young guy who seems to be a kind of copycat of Yoon Hee Jae. The guy doesn’t seem to be in his right mind at all, he calls Yoon Hee Jae ‘his father’ (one moment I actually thought he was another illegitimate son of him or something), but he’s really just crazy. He’s responsible for every incident Hyun Moo is accused of, including the delivery of a bloody hammer to Nak Won’s dressing room, luring her to a set that’s completely build up as how her house looked on the night of her parents’ murder including the same song in the background and approaching her with a hammer, and also the murder on reporter Park Hee Young.

Let me talk talk about reporter Park Hee Young for a bit. Park Hee Young (played by Kim Seo Hyung) – the vicious reporter I mentioned before – had been around during the incident 12 years ago, and now got back into it when Na Moo and Nak Won find each other again. I didn’t particularly like her, she was really just interested in her stories and she didn’t seem to care at all about people’s feelings. She didn’t care that the people she was bothering were deeply traumatized, she kept provoking them and went quite far in trying to get something out of them, always carrying a recorder around to get things on tape, even without consent. She seemed to have no fear. She even visited Yoon Hee Jae in prison a couple of times, and one time this even led to him almost choking her against the wall. But she’d always just scoff and walk away with a confident smirk on her face. Even though she helped Yoon Hee Jae publish his autobiography, she didn’t seem to have any favorable feelings towards him, either. So it wasn’t that she was on his sight, but she really just wanted a story from both sides, I guess. One thing that did strike me was that they still seemed to be a bit alike in mindset: that people were just animals in this cage of a world, in which the strong needed to prey on the weak.
As she has her own news channel, she publishes a story about Na Moo and Nak Won and their true connection to each other, revealing the cruel fate that brought them together. Not long after this, Hyun Moo pays her a visit, just to talk – I’m not sure, but I don’t think he was there to physically harm her or anything. Anyways, their talk is disturbed when the same young guy Hyun Moo met before suddenly appears at Park Hee Young’s door. Hyun Moo hides in the closet as she opens the door – and the guy proceeds to assault her. He ends up killing her, again, with a hammer. When he notices Hyun Moo is there, he calls him his older brother and encourages him to come watch what he’s done, triumphantly.
This young guy is eventually identified as Yeom Ji Hong (played by Hong Seung Bum), and he met Yoon Hee Jae during their church sessions. I don’t remember the details of how he got in there, but Yoon Hee Jae was allowed to visit a nun who helped inmates find their ‘salvation’, and they were allowed to pray and things like that. In this time, Ji Hong became completely obsessed with Yoon Hee Jae, he was fascinated by him and his ideas and he started seeing him as a true father-figure, as he described his own father as a ‘weak coward’. For some reason, Ji Hong is not imprisoned anymore and now he’s going around attacking people on the streets with a hammer, so to say to pay hommage to Yoon Hee Jae.
Another person that keeps popping up is Jeon Yoo Ra (played by Bae Hae Sun), a woman who works as a nurse in a hospital, who seems to have deep romantic feelings for Yoon Hee Jae. I didn’t completely get where they met each other, but she had been writing him a lot of letters while he was in prison.
To be fair, and I haven’t mentioned this before, but Yoon Hee Jae could be a very charming man. As mentioned, he already had been married three times, and as manipulative as he was, when he was pretending to be nice, he was apparently a very charming person. Before Ok Hee saw him covered in blood at the dog farm, she was quite happy with their marriage and tried to ignore the rumors of her customers that he was having an affair and therefore didn’t answer her calls as much anymore. It was this envy that made her decide to go look for him, since she must have thought it wasn’t completely out of the question, as charming as he was, that he’d managed to seduce another woman.
Anyways, Yoo Ra was one of these women who fell for him, completely believing his side of the story that he did everything for Na Moo, and even went to prison to cover up for the fact that his son had wounded him on that Christmas Eve (I’d say that was completely irrelevant next to the fact that he himself murdered two people, but okay).
And then, with the help of Ji Hong and Yoo Ra, Yoon Hee Jae manages to escape. Somehow they manage to sabotage the van he’s transported in and make it crash, whereafter he is brought to a hospital – the one Yoo Ra works at. She is able to help him escape from there and brings him to a house that she’s prepared especially for him. In the couple of incidents he causes after that, she is the one who aides him, sometimes just as his driver, but she regularly carries syringes with her to also contribute to harming people. Besides Yoon Hee Jae’s allies being established, there’s also the thing with one of Na Moo’s police colleagues being in cahoots with the reporters – as in, he doesn’t really like Na Moo, also sees him as a murderer’s son, and initially helps out Park Hee Young with information. As it turns out, Park Hee Young had her own death recorded on a recording pen that this police officer got his hands on, and he ended up giving it to another reporter instead of reporting it as evidence to his own team.

If there’s anything we CAN understand about Yoon Hee Jae’s motives, it’s that besides his random victims, he held personal grudges against any ‘outsider’ that got close to his family. This is also presumably why he killed Nak Won’s parents, because they treated Na Moo so favorably. And then he discovers Go Yi Seok (played by Jung In Gi). Mr. Go is the head of Na Moo’s division at work and has been a kind of fatherly figure to him ever since he was in charge of him after the Christmas Eve incident. He was the one who took Na Moo to the station, and he was there when Ok Hee came to claim him back. He has been a kind of supporting mentor for Na Moo, he helped him in pursuing his police career, and he is still on good terms with Ok Hee as well. Yoon Hee Jae one time spots him patting Na Moo’s head from a distance, as well as hanging around Ok Hee and walking her home from the restaurant. And he doesn’t like that. So one night he attacks Mr. Go after he’s just left some food on Na Moo’s doorstep and walked Ok Hee home (or he was trying to catch up with her while she’d gone ahead). Na Moo goes in search of Mr. Go since he thinks he’s still near his house after delivering the food, and finds him in an alley, critically wounded. Mr. Go manages to tell him with his last breaths that it was Yoon Hee Jae who did it, and that Na Moo had to remember that the two of them were nothing alike. He passes shortly after.
After this, Na Moo is even more determined to catch his father and even threatens Ji Hong, who by then is held up because he turned himself in. Yoon Hee Jae goes on to abandoning all ties with his family. He’s now convinced that everyone, including his wife, has betrayed him, and he goes in search for her. He kidnaps her to her own house and is about to kill her when Hyun Moo storms in. Yoon Hee Jae attempts to kill both of them, but they keep trying to protect each other and in the end the police come just in time – there’s no time to kill them both and Yoon Hee Jae flees again. Na Moo finds his stepmother and older brother unconscious, hanging in each other’s arms on the floor, but luckily they both survive the attack.

It was kind of satisfying to see how shocked Yoon Hee Jae was when he passed Hyun Moo as they were both led to their respective trials in the final episode – he must have thought that he’d killed him since Hyun Moo took the most hits and actually lost consciousness.

Anyhow, the final showdown happens when Yoon Hee Jae and Yoo Ra manage to kidnap Nak Won, even though she’s being accompanied by a police car, and Na Moo and his father finally come face to face. Nak Won is being held by Yoo Ra, but she manages to overpower her and injects her with her own syringe, which tranquilizes her. Na Moo manages to hold his father down until the police arrives, together with Moo Won. After a final commotion, Na Moo shoots his own father in the leg and they’re finally able to arrest him again.
The final episode is mainly satisfactory because everything just plays out well. All the bad guys are locked up, all the good guys get their lives back. Everyone is finally able to find peace and one reporter helps Na Moo and Nak Won to bring the story of their love to the public.

All in all, it was a pretty intense drama to watch and the ‘happy ending’ really didn’t come until the very end. I was actually expecting a full playout of the Christmas Eve incident as well, since it first seemed to be only parts they showed, and I thought at one point they would play out the whole event, so how exactly Yoon Hee Jae murdered Nak Won’s parents and what he may have said to them or something, but this didn’t happen. The only thing we see is their feet sticking out from behind a wall, but we don’t actually know if Nak Won saw him do this to her parents, or if she just saw their bodies after it had already happened. Anyways, I’m also partly grateful they didn’t show it because it would not have been nice to see, of course. I only assumed that he murdered them because he noticed that they were being nice to Na Moo, as they even gave him some snacks to bring home, but it would have been sort of interesting to see a scene of where he at least met them in person, before committing this crime. I just felt like there was a little lack of buildup there, just from one moment to the other he had suddenly decided to kill them without having ever even met them. I thought there would be a more direct reason, but they never showed anything in particular.

Yoon Hee Jae. What can I say. The man was a nightmare. Seriously, I hope I don’t get nightmares about him. He was a classic sociopath, in that he really didn’t seem to see the wrong in his actions. He really convinced himself that he was doing everything for his son (no idea in what way), and that that justified everything. He was determined to make Na Moo just like him, and he’d phrase that as ‘wanting to make him stronger by taking away everything in his son’s path that made him weak’. Of course, in his logic, love and affection made him ‘weak’, not seeing that this was exactly what Na Moo was actually craving for. Meeting Nak Won was both the best and the worst thing that happened to him, but she meant the world to him and Yoon Hee Jae only saw her as something that made him weak and defenseless. He really seemed to see people as things, and that’s what made him so scary.
Honestly, the scariest scene for me was when Ok Hee visited him in prison that one time and he just started mentally messing her up, telling her that SHE was responsible for Nak Won’s parents’ deaths because SHE didn’t report him in time (she was planning to report him right after she left with So Jin, but her own feelings of guilt for what he’d done stopped her, she was too scared). But how he tried to guilt-trip her like, and even saying stuff like ‘Don’t ever let me see you with another man’… SHIVERS DOWN MY SPINE. Of course this was the line that resounded when he went after Mr. Go, and after his, after actually seeing her with another man, he lost his final bit of affection for her and then she didn’t mean anything to him anymore. He really only cared for Na Moo until the end. The rest of his family, as they started to break away from him one by one, stopped holding any meaning for him along the way. He literally attempted murder on his own wife, his own son, both of his sons even because he did swing that hammer at Na Moo during their final confrontation as well. Claiming that he only wanted to kill Nak Won since she got away from him last time, he ended up literally physically hurting his own relatives. His character was so intricate, because he was a monster, but at the same time seemed to at least have some feelings towards his family, even though they were the only ones who seemed to truly care about. I’m just really glad he never got his hands on So Jin, they managed to keep her away from him until the end.
The way all the characters were written emotionally, was very good in my opinion. There’s always multiple sides to a character and to a story, and I found it very good that while hating Yoon Hee Jae and finding his way of thinking disturbing and crazy, I still could understand his thoughts, where he was coming from. His motives were clear, despite being psychopathic.
This went for Hyun Moo as well. He didn’t go about things the right way, that’s for sure, but it became abundantly clear that he had been suffering immensely due to being emotionally neglected, and the need to prove his worth to his father, his only biological parent, seemed very natural. I’m glad he at least figured out what was really going on and how he ended up sticking up for his stepmother, even though he’d always claimed that she wasn’t his real mother and that she’d also abandoned him.
So when you look at it like this, I think that ‘family’ is definitely a very important theme in this drama, and mostly that you don’t choose into which family you’re born, but you can choose who you want your own family to be. Na Moo always felt cursed that Yoon Hee Jae was his father, and he became able to dissociate from him, because he didn’t want him to be his father, so he stopped seeing him as such. He has spent his whole life trying to move away from him, to be different from him, hoping that his father’s evil wasn’t in fact, hereditary. He found that it wasn’t, because evil isn’t something you are necessarily born with in your genes. In the few moments where he almost lost control, Nak Won was always there to stop him and make him realize again that he was not his father, that he was bigger than that. He also found a real mother in Ok Hee. In the end, she did care for him and for Hyun Moo as her own children, and this should be enough.
I also have to mention Moo Won in this example, because for him most of all, having lost his biological parents at a young age, and then his adoptive parents at a slightly later but still young age, he must have had a really hard time finding where he belonged. I’m glad that he had Nak Won until the end, but I really felt sorry for him because it felt like he was stuck in moving on as well. And of course, even though they were not related by blood, he and Nak Won also still found a family in each other. I have to say that at some points I was worried that he actually had some hidden romantic feelings for Nak Won, but I’m glad this didn’t turn out to be the case and he really was just very caring when it came to her. He also finally approved of her relationship with Na Moo after seeing them together when Yoon Hee Jae was recaptured.

Let me quickly mention a few important supporting characters before going on to the cast comments.
First of all, on Na Moo’s side, his two friends in the police force. Kim Jong Hyun (played by Kwon Hyuk Soo) and Lee Hyun Ji (played by Lee Da In). I really liked these two, they were such good loyal friends to Na Moo besides being his colleagues. Whenever they were working on the case they kept making sure he was eating and sleeping well, and they were just so supportive. Hyun Ji seemed to have a bit of a crush on him when she first met him and he helped her in her martial arts classes – I think she owed it to him too that she was able to graduate from the police academy. They both tried to protect him from unwanted media attention as well. They were just really good people and deserve a shoutout.

I also really liked Nak Won’s manager, Pyo Taek (played by Park Soo Young). He was such a funny little man, but he took Nak Won’s protection so seriously. It was revealed later that Moo Won had found him fighting on the streets and set him straight and introduced him to Nak Won. He seemed to be a little clumzy, he also had his leg in a cast in the beginning, but he really cared for Nak Won’s safety. Honestly, when the kidnapping of Nak Won happened and they attacked them both I was SO scared they were going to kill the manager. I’m really glad he survived the whole thing!

Reporter Han Ji Ho (played by Yoon Ji Hye) was one of the reporters who was also after the juicy story, but she wasn’t as vicious as Park Hee Young. She was the reporter who in the end became sympathetic towards them and agreed to write their story according to their own truths. It was nice to see how at least some people changed their minds from being an opportunist to a human being, the kind of reporter that was concerned with writing the truth and doing the victims justice, and not just publishing a story for stirring up the masses.

Lastly, Cheon Se Kyung (played by Jung Da Hye). She didn’t really appear as much in the end, that’s why I had to remind myself to include her in my review. In the beginning, she was just a snobby actress that treated Nak Won pretty disrespectfully just because she was a less famous actress than herself. But she ended up learning about Nak Won’s past and after that became a pretty good friend to her. I liked that she didn’t become this bitchy character that just remained an enemy to Nak Won, but she came around. I just wanted to comment that I liked her character development, even though as I said she didn’t really appear in the final episodes as much.

Okay, so let’s get to the cast comments! First of all, THESE KIDS. The teenagers who played the young versions of the main leads, AMAZING. Of course Nam Da Reum was amazing, we already knew that, but also this girl, Ryu Han Bi. I hadn’t seen her before but she was so incredibly endearing. I also liked the younger version of Hyun Moo and Moo Won, and the little girl playing So Jin was the CUTEST. Overall, I think they all did a REALLY amazing job. There are so many talented kids out there, man!

I’ve seen Jang Ki Yong in several dramas by now, including The Liar and His Lover, Go Back Couple and My Mister. I recently watched a movie with him in the lead role as well, Sweet & Sour, and that was the first thing I saw of him where he was the main lead. I think he’s a good actor, and he definitely gets the chance to portray his variety as well. Na Moo was an incredibly emotionally layered character, and he really had to show a very fragile side of himself as well, which I think he did very well.

I was wondering where I knew Jin Ki Joo from and then I realized she was the servant girl from Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo! 😮 This was the first time I saw her in a lead role, though. Apparently she was also in Splash Splash Love and Ruler: Master of the Mask, but I don’t really remember her from those. I have to say, although she didn’t perform badly or anything, I still found her character a little bit flat. Whereas the teenage Nak Won made such an impression on me, I couldn’t find those same characteristics back in adult Nak Won, but I suppose I also have to keep in mind that those cheerful behaviorism were mostly washed away by the trauma she went through. Even so, when it was just her and Na Moo, the old Nak Won could’ve come out just a little bit more in my opinion. I think this must have been a very emotionally draining role to play, because especially Nak Won was still a victim and had to relive that night over and over again and never got a moment of rest. So I still think she did a good job.

Heo Joon Ho. What an amazing actor but what an absolute creep. xD I really need to see something in which he plays a good guy, otherwise I will just keep associating him with evil! He was also the bad guy in Ruler: Master of the Mask. But I think they really cast him well because despite everything he really does seem to be a charming man, in a way, stong and well-built and all. He really was the perfect person to play this character, his expressions were spot on, the way he moved around and looked at people. I think it must have been a big challenge too, because he really needed to get into this monster’s mindset and talk about it as if it should make total sense why he did what he did. But honestly, I want to see something in which he plays a good guy. xD

KIM KYUNG NAM. Honestly, I didn’t even know he was in this but as soon as he appeared I went *screams*. If you’re wondering why, please read my review on The King: Eternal Monarch. That’s the only other thing I’ve seen him in so far (actually, apparently he was also in Bride of the Water God and Age of Youth, but I don’t remember him from there o_o), and he completely stole my heart there. It was so interesting to see him in this drama as such a different character, so aggressive but at the same time so tormented. In the beginning I really just felt for him because it was Kim Kyung Nam, haha, but I’m glad he came around. I just love this actor. Periodt.

Seo Jung Yeon is starting to become one of my favorite middle-aged actresses. I’ve seen her in multiple series before, like Valid Love, She Was Pretty, Descendants of the Sun, The King: Eternal Monarch and Run On. There’s also a couple of more dramas on my to-watch list in which she appears, including the one I plan to watch next! As far as I remember, she always plays mother(ly) characters, but here she really was amazing. I really enjoyed her performance. The duality of her character, how she was a mother to three children of which only one was really her own – the decision to run away with her biological child out of instinct, but then still coming back for her stepchildren… People may have called her cowardly in the beginning, but I really think that was just purely her instincts and at least she came back on it. She wasn’t heartless, it didn’t sit right with her to leave the two boys with this man in the end, and while she may have failed to show much of her care to Hyun Moo while he was in jail, she definitely lived up to it in the end. I really loved her in this series.

I only knew Choi Ri from My First First Love, she was also in Goblin, but I actually didn’t really remember her from that ^^” Anyways, it was funny to see her as such a young girl. In fact, she was 23 when this aired, so it’s not even as young as she seemed, but I still liked it. She didn’t have a major role, but I really liked the dynamic between her and Hyun Moo. As a child she was always kind of dismissive of her oldest brother, but she knew for a fact that he meant her no harm. The scene where Hyun Moo came to visit So Jin after stabbing Na Moo just proved to me that he cared a lot for her, and she also felt no fear at all towards him because she knew he at least wouldn’t do her any physical harm.

I feel like Jung In Gi always plays the kind father(ly) figure, and he’s been in so many dramas I’ve watched! Secret Garden, Flower Boy Ramyun Shop, Doctor Stranger, Pinocchio, The Girl Who Sees Smells, Who Are You – School 2015, Weightlifiting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Manhole… He’s just always a nice and familiar face to see. I think whereas Heo Joon Ho is always cast as a villain because of his face, Jung In Gi is always cast as a nice and caring father because of his face, haha. Anyways, I’m sad his character had to die 😦 I liked him.

I actually just saw Yoon Jong Hoon in Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung as the ‘dethroned king’ aka Cha Eun Woo’s dad! xD I don’t think I remember him from anywhere else although I see he was also in Age of Youth and he’s in some other series that are still on my to-watch list. And even in Rookie Historian he didn’t have a major role, so this was the first time I really saw him act out a secondary lead character. I liked his character, as in, I could feel a lot of sympathy for him. He always looked kind of serious, but his trauma of losing two sets of parents definitely explained that. I was glad to see him smiling so widely in the final episode when everything was sorted out – I really wished that he would be able to finally move on with his own life as well.

There were multiple actors in this series that I knew, so I won’t discuss ALL of them, but I want to still say something about Kim Seo Hyung, who played Park Hee Young. I’ve literally only seen her in The Great Seducer so far, but I see now she did this drama in the same year! Which explains why she still had the same short hair, haha. Anyways, I wasn’t really impressed with her character in TGS, not because of her acting but I just didn’t really care for the character, but she was SO good as the vicious reporter. I really wanted to punch her in the face and at the same time I wanted to believe she was still a good person. She really pulled off a very interesting character in this series, and even though her character didn’t survive, she definitely left an impact and even a kind of legacy. Although I didn’t like her character, I really liked her performance as an actress!

Of course, at the end, I have to mention the final scene, in which Na Moo and Nak Won literally come face to face with their 16-year old selves and literally say the phrase ‘Come here, I’ll give you a hug’. The fact that they used the title in this way gave me goosebumps. All the time I was thinking it just applied to the meaning of the hugs between Na Moo and Nak Won, but when they used the phrase like this, to give their own younger selves a mental hug for everything they’d had to go through… man, that went deep. That was really touching.
By the way, to go back a little to the reason why I kept using the leads’ real names Na Moo and Nak Won throughout this review, it was also because that’s what they kept calling each other. The names Do Jin and Jae Yi at some point seemed to stop having meaning, because in the end they really did end up as Na Moo and Nak Won. Besides, there’s the symbolism. Na Moo means ‘tree’ and Nak Won means ‘paradise’. In the final lines of the series, in the final episode, it is said: “The tree that stopped growing will grow at a ferocious pace. One day, everywhere each leaf touches, all becomes paradise.” I thought that was very beautiful imagery, so I really wanted to stick to their real names until the end.

In general, I’d probably not recommend this series as it is a pretty heavy one, with a lot of emotional drama and many shocking events. There’s a lot of violence and blood in it because, well, it’s about a serial killer so that’s what you can expect. It was definitely more intense than I’d thought, and the romance story that ran through it was very strained because of all these factors. Still, I think it was pretty good, and with this I mostly mean that it emotionally very realistically written. Despite the violent themes of the series, it’s in its core a series about healing, about two characters that went through something horrible together and find the salvation they need in each other even when the whole world frowns down upon the foundation of their relationship. It’s about overcoming that, following your own path in life even when so many things are working against it. It’s about family, and how you inevitably have to choose who you want that to be rather than just accepting that the family you have is what you have to deal with.
The struggle that Na Moo goes through is unimaginable, I’m honestly very impressed that he didn’t lose his mind or became messed up because of this childhood. But then it just goes to show that having even one thing, or one person to keep you sane, it can still save you from going down. And luckily Na Moo had this person. If Nak Won hadn’t been there, who knows what he would’ve become under the constant supervision of his father.

I’ll continue on with my ever-growing list now, and next up will be another one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, including another set of my favorite actors. Hope this review was enjoyable enough and I managed to provide some worthwhile comments.
Until next time! 🙂