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

Melting Me Softly
(날 녹여주오 / Nal Nogyeojuo)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello everyone!! It’s time for my first review of 2022! 😀 I hope everyone was able to have some nice holidays and I wish you all a belated Happy New Year! 🙂 Of course, a new year means a new batch of long-awaited dramas to watch, and therefore I am back! I started on this one as soon as I finished the previous one, but I have taken my time, as you can see when you look at the posting dates. That’s because even though I had one whole week of holidays at the end of December, after that I immediately had to go back to my fulltime work routine and this has been pretty exhausting. I also turned to some lightly entertaining variety/survival shows in the meantime when I wasn’t focussed enough to concentrate on this series. Not that I didn’t find this drama interesting, though! I’ve just been a bit scatter-brained, but I hope I can still make this a worthwhile review. I’m really glad I finally got around to watch this and I’m excited to share my views on it. It deals with one of my favorite tropes, time leaping! However, this time the time leaping doesn’t happen through some kind of magical or special enchantment or spell or time travel, but through science. Let’s go!

Before I start, I want to mention that my New Year’s resolution for my reviews is that I want to get more to the point. I know I tend to get quite lengthy with summaries and stuff, and if you read this after watching it, you’ll probably be like ‘yeah, yeah, I already watched it, no need to recap the whole thing, just get to your opinions!’ So I’ll try to do that more from now on. I’ll keep the summaries shorter and try to focus more on my analysis. These reviews are really still works in progress for me to figure out a style I’m most comfortable with, so please bear with me! ^^

Melting Me Softly is a 16-episode series, each episode being about 1 hour and 5 minutes long. The story starts in 1999 and ends in 2019. In 1999, we meet our protagonists for the first time. Ma Dong Chan (played by Ji Chang Wook), a well-known producer at TBO Broadcasting, is mainly known for his successful variety shows. He seems to have gold in his hands, as he’s famous for turning everything he works on into a huge hit. After finishing another hit show, he goes in search of something new and then comes across the concept of cryo-sleep. He then announces his next project will be the “24-Hour Frozen Human Project”, in which a man and a woman volunteer will be frozen in a cryo-chamber for 24 hours. Much to his demotivation, he can’t find anyone who wants to participate, so he then volunteers himself to go as the male volunteer. Now they have to find a woman.
Go Mi Ran (played by Won Jin Ah) is a 24-year old college student who earns money part-time by also participating in Ma Dong Chan’s variety shows. Her family is struggling with debts and her little brother Nam Tae (played as a child by Park Min Soo) has a mental retardation. Even though she initially refuses the 24-Hour Frozen Human Project, Dong Chan manages to change her mind by mentioning that cryo-experiments will become very successful projects in the future, to cure physical and mental illnesses that don’t have the means necessary to treat them right now. So Ma Dong Chan and Go Mi Ran become the volunteers of this experiment, led by Professor Hwang (played by Seo Hyun Chul) and his assistant Jo Ki Bum (initially played by Kim Wook). These two are currently working on an ongoing cryo-experiment and already have a couple of people in pods, although these people need to remain anonymous on the program. The only people allowed inside the lab besides the staff are Son Hyun Ki (initially played by Lee Hong Ki), Dong Chan’s junior at work, and a cameraman. However, as we all know the second they go in there, something goes terribly wrong. In the last hour of the experiment, Professor Hwang is called out by a mysterious phone call, and on the way to this caller, his car is blown up. His assistant has to shut off the experiment right away, the broadcasting people are sent away, the laboratory shuts down, and no one knows what happens to the cryo-volunteers. The whole lab seems to have disappeared overnight.
As time moves on and the outside world is obsessed with the mysterious disappearance, we see people on both sides of the volunteers struggling. Dong Chan’s girlfriend/fiancée-to-be, Na Ha Young (initially played by Chae Seo Jin), who also works at TBO, is desperate. She didn’t want him to go in the first place, and now it seems like she’s lost him forever. She attempts to find out more about what happened but is kept out of it and is eventually given a promotion as a news anchor. As the years go by, she tries to move on, as does everyone else. In the meantime, we discover that Professor Hwang is still alive, but he’s in a coma and Jo Ki Bum (now played by Lee Moo Saeng) is taking care of him. The lab has simply been moved elsewhere, so no one can find it.
And then we arrive in 2019, twenty years after the incident happened. Professor Hwang suddenly briefly wakes up from his coma to wake the two volunteers before collapsing again. Even when he wakes up next, he seems to have lost his memory and this is something he really needs to get back in order to ‘fix’ Dong Chan and Mi Ran. Because the thing is, even though they’re now finally out of their cryo-chambers, their body temperatures are stuck at 31.5 degrees. And as soon as it gets higher than 32, their lives are in danger. Only Professor Hwang knows how to develop the antidote, but they have to wait for him to get his memory back.
By the way, this may just be me, but was I the only one who found it strange how, after Dong Chan and Mi Ran both woke up from their cryo-sleep all undressed and sickly, just suddenly ended up walking in the middle of the city? Wasn’t that lab supposed to be hidden? How the heck did they suddenly manage to get fully dressed and walking through the middle of Seoul? How did they get there, did they take a subway or something? Maybe it was just a minor detail but it puzzled me.
Before that happens, Dong Chan and Mi Ran are both reunited with their friends and family, who all have aged 20 years. When Mi Ran realizes the truth of what happened, she is initially furious at Dong Chan and the broadcasting company, asking for the money she was supposed to get and her time back – although the latter is not possible, obviously. Dong Chan feels very sorry for putting Mi Ran through the whole thing and tries to accomodate her, but they also kind of need to stick together because they now share a condition and need to help each other out. So after initially going back to college, Mi Ran ends up working at TBO as an intern in Dong Chan’s team.
Dong Chan is reunited with his old colleagues and his family. This was one of the funniest parts for me, seeing everyone react to Dong Chan’s return and seeing how he didn’t age a day. To start with his family: while he sadly finds out that his father passed away while he was frozen, his younger brother Dong Shik (initially played by Kang Ki Doong) now looks exactly like his father – he’s even played by the same actor (Kim Won Hae, the best man.) He is married and has a young daughter named Seo Yoon (Oh Ah Rin), Dong Chan’s niece. His sister Dong Joo (initially played by Han Da Sol), is now an alchoholic who can’t get her life together (Jun Soo Kyung). Their mother (Yoon Suk Hwa) now owns a restaurant, since their once so rich family lost or sold everything after he disappeared. I don’t remember clearly what it was, but in any case they are not so wealthy anymore.
Dong Chan’s junior Son Hyun Ki (now played by Im Won Hee) has made it to Chief at TBO, but he’s incredibly shocked when Dong Chan returns. Not just because it’s a miracle that he’s still alive and still looks the same, but also because he and their boss Kim Hong Suk (played by Jung Hae Kyun) actually chose to hush up the whole thing. If any camera footage became available of that day in the lab, it would be very bad for the company and their respective careers, so the boss kind of scared Hyun Ki into going along with the hush-up as well. On the other hand, Dong Chan always treated Hyun Ki quite harshly, so there may have also been some personal grudging feelings involved.
The sadder reunion is with Ha Young (now played by Yoon Se Ah), who is now the main news anchor for TBO News. She is shaken to her core to see her lost lover looking exactly the way he did when she last saw him twenty years earlier, while she herself has now aged into her fourties. They do try to get back together at first, but when Dong Chan finds out how little effort she put into looking for him, he quickly falls out of love with her, leaving her crushed and unable to move on.
On Mi Ran’s side, she is reunited with her family, who did actually know about her situation. For some reason, Mi Ran’s parents got an anonymous note after the incident that their daughter was still alive in the cryo-chamber, but that it would take a while to wake her up. Why they didn’t inform Dong Chan’s family is still a mystery to me, because they were all kept in the dark, they didn’t even know for certain whether he was still alive or not. So that was kind of weird to me. Anyways.
Mi Ran also meets her friends from college, Kyung Ja and Young Sun (initially played by Oh Ha Nui and Song Ji Eun, now played by Park Hee Jin and Seo Jung Yeon). Her former boyfriend Hwang Byung Shim (played by Baro/Cha Sun Woo), is now a psychology professor at Mi Ran’s college, he changed his name to Hwang Dong Hyuk (and is now played by Shim Hyung Tak), and he is married to Young Sun. When he spots Mi Ran on campus, he can’t believe his eyes and immediately believes that they’re still meant to be together. Kind of tricky with a wife and a son, Hwang Ji Hoon (Choi Bo Min) who goes to the same classes as Mi Ran and even develops a crush on her as well which makes the whole thing even more complicated.

They find out about Professor Hwang’s condition and let him stay over in turns at Dong Chan’s and Mi Ran’s families’ place until he recovers his memory. They first keep it a secret from the rest of TBO that Mi Ran was the other cryo-volunteer, everyone knows Dong Chan’s involvement, but it was kept a secret who the second person was. However, the news get leaked, and Dong Chan also releases the truth about them being cryo-humans to the public.

I can’t even begin to imagine how confusing this situation must be. You wake up one day and find out you’ve traveled 20 years into the future and the whole world around you has changed. You are still in your 20/30-year old body while according to your ID you should be in your 40s/50s. People look at you weirdly when you have to explain how you still look so young. Also, the whole story about what happened to you, the thing that changed your entire life, has already faded in people’s memories, for them it’s in the past while it’s your current present. Most of the people at the company weren’t working there at the time of the experiment, so it’s not even a big ongoing news item. Only the people that personally knew you or were working closely with the project at TBO would know what happened, but the company hushed it up so well that not many people immediately made a link with who you are. And for Mi Ran even more so, since she wasn’t even a famous person. People didn’t even know she was in the experiment, not even her friends. Fake messages were sent to her friends to say that she’d abruptly moved to the US to study there and all they could do was wonder why she never replied to any of their emails.
It’s so bizarre. Of course it’s fiction, but this is something that could actually be realized one day, the cryo-sleep thing. Maybe it’s already being done, I don’t know.

I want to go into a bit more detail about several main characters and my thoughts on them. I think that the situation was a really complicated one in which no one was completely innocent, and everyone showed their true colors in the end.
Ma Dong Chan just seemed to have everything in 1999. He was the oldest son of a wealthy family, he had a girlfriend he wanted to marry, his career was going great. He’s a very confident guy, confident in his skills as a producer but also in his looks and attitude towards people. He may have been a little selfish in some aspects, and I did feel like he victimized himself a little as well, but that can’t really be helped if you look at what he went through. Anyways, he seems to be the golden guy for both his family and his company. It must have been really complicated for his colleagues when he disappeared, because what were they going to do without him? And it’s typical that they still chose to bury his memory along with the existing footage of that night. Little did they know that he would actually come back one day and they’d had to come face to face with the consequences of their past actions.
I didn’t find Ma Dong Chan a very complicated character to understand, he was pretty one-dimensional. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course, it can be pretty refreshing to have simple characters for a change who don’t have that much baggage or trauma from their past. And honestly, I believe that if his character was already complicated in itself, the situation happening to him would’ve also made him respond very differently and there might’ve been a whole different kind of drama. So I do think that it was the right choice to not complicate his character any further. What I liked about him was the responsibility he felt towards Mi Ran after they both got out. While he initially just saw her as a volunteer and wasn’t necessarily that interested in her personal life, of course he didn’t mean for this to happen. He’s as much a victim of the situation as her, but he still felt more responsible for putting her through this than himself. He was constantly concerned for her wellbeing, whether she was carrying the shot with her to reduce her temperature in case she became too hot etc. And when they’re on a field trip and it gets too warm and they realize Mi Ran has forgotten to bring her shot, he basically sacrifices himself to give her his when she faints, and this is like the ultimate proof for Mi Ran of how much he is repenting and how much he cares about her wellbeing. This is also the first scene in which they kiss, or rather, she kisses him, out of pure relief when he wakes up because it starts to rain and that cools his temperature down.
Mi Ran is an equally uncomplicated character, she is a very down-to-earth and bright person. Her main concern lies with her younger brother, because he’s being bullied for his mental handicap. Seriously, Nam Tae, both as a little boy and as a 32-year old boy, was so endearing. Even though he was being bullied, he just kept on smiling through his speech impediment and child-like behavior, he never cried or felt sorry for himself when some kids tied him to a lamp post by his backpack. Mi Ran at one point gives him a plastic whistle so that he can always call for her whenever he misses her or needs her. The scene where little Nam Tae was waiting outside of the house and kept blowing that whistle because he wanted his sister to come home BROKE me. And how he also found her by whistling on it when her family went in search of her after hearing she got out, that was so touching. He was so important to Mi Ran, and it’s important to remember that he played a very big role in her decision to participate in the experiment.
But yeah, Mi Ran is a very rational person, she’s smart, she has enough confidence to stand up for herself, she just skips through life. Once she’s settled into 2019, it also doesn’t take long for her to go back to college to finish her degree, and this is a very big decision. I would’ve imagined it would take a much longer time to process what happened mentally, but she came to terms with it pretty quickly. I really liked how naturally her affection for Dong Chan grew as well. And when she realized this, she didn’t go into denial, she just accepted it and went for it. I liked how straightforward she was.

By the way, I’d actually caught a glimpse of the shower make-out scene way before I watched this series, and it was also one of the reasons I put it on my list because I was like, ohh lala, haha. I expected things to get pretty heated, haha. In the end, this was the only real make-out session they had in the whole series, and I saw that some people weren’t satisfied with this. When they both got their normal temperatures back at the very end, I saw comments of people that suggested that, just because there wasn’t a final passionate kiss because they could now finally touch each other, it wasn’t a good ending. Although I have to admit I would’ve liked to see a final show of passion since they’d waited so long for that, but in my opinion that doesn’t immediately make it an unsatisfying ending. They still ended up happy together, they went to the US together to study/make video blogs… what’s unsatisfying about that? At least be happy they were both cured and still ended up together!

Let me talk a bit more about Na Ha Young. Honestly, she may have been the second female lead, the woman the audience didn’t root for even though she used to be male lead’s girlfriend in the beginning, but I felt really bad for her. I’m not saying that how she handled her situation was right per se, as in, she did get a little petty at some point, but it was just so clear and understandable how she felt that I couldn’t really blame her. I mean, imagine that: you have the coolest and handsome lover in the world, and then he decides to take on a risky project, you try to talk him out of it but he’s just that ambitious in his career, then the experiment goes wrong, as you feared, it causes him to disappear for 20 years, and then he comes back looking as dashing as he did before, whilst you are now in your 40s. You’ve tried desperately to forget about him, felt guilty about not continuing your search for him for years, and now you have to see him fall in love with another girl who is also still young and pretty. Of course she wasn’t over him. It was like seeing him the day she first met him. So yeah, I get that she let her grudge take over for a moment, because what else was she supposed to feel but miserable? The most important thing is that she came back on it, she tried so hard to get over him. After every conversation they had, she burst out crying, even after pretending to be so strong while talking to him. Hearing him say, ‘I don’t love you anymore’ was rough. Seeing him get closer and closer to Mi Ran was rough. I get that, and also that a part of her wanted him to go through the same thing, to get how she felt. I’m glad they did make up in the end, when she was able to tell him honestly that she did try to look for him but was denied any access to the case. After they’d hugged it out as friends, she started looking better and better, much healthier and happier. I wished she put that perm in her hair earlier, it looked so good on her! Before that everything about her was just very stiff, from her appearance to her expressions. Anyways, it was good to see her finally break out of that at the end.

I have mixed feelings about the whole side plot with the evil twin brother of the guy that was already in one of Professor Hwang’s cryo-chambers. I get that they needed a bad guy, or at least an extra threat that would put Dong Chan and Mi Ran in even more danger than their condition did. But mostly I think they just needed a plot tool to create that hitman that would stab Mi Ran at the end. Looking at it in hindsight, the whole evil twin brother’s deal wasn’t even that relevant to the main story, it was just an example of how some people were able to profit from having someone they were related to in a cryo-pod. In this case, it was Lee Hyung Doo (Kim Bup Rae) who pretended to be his brother Lee Suk Doo and tried to take over his company. He went to extreme lengths to keep any information about the cryo-chambers a secret, afraid the truth about his deceit would get out. He even went out to look for the lab to unplug his brother, he threatened Professor Hwang and even killed his own brother’s wife because she was going to talk to the press, or, more specifically, to Ha Young. He also threatened Ha Young. She’d once told him that she wanted him to put Mi Ran back into the pod out of spite, and he was now going to use that statement against her if she would publish the information she’d gotten about his conspiracy.
In the end, while Ha Young is hesitating, Dong Chan makes this decision for her. For him, the most important thing is that the truth gets out, because he’s sick of people covering stuff up for their personal gain (fair enough). Anyways, after Professor Hwang manages to wake Lee Suk Doo and Hyung Doo is arrested, I wasn’t completely reassured that this was it, the threat was gone. It just always happens that the bad guy manages to escape on his way to jail or something, you know? But no, he was actually arrested. Although not before giving his hitman the order to kill either Dong Chan or Mi Ran. What purpose this had, especially after they’d already brought out the truth about the cryo-experiment, I’m not sure. But the hitman manages to fatally wound Mi Ran, who jumps in front of Dong Chan, who was the original target. I just felt like this was the only true purpose of this hitman in the series. Other than that, as soon as the truth came out about the evil twin brother this whole scam was wrapped up pretty smoothly.

After getting stabbed, Mi Ran can’t get surgery because of her low body temperature (Dong Chan is by then already cured), so the only way to preserve her until they develop a new and faster antidote is to put her back into an ice pod. By the way, was I the only one who thought it would’ve actually been better if Dong Chan had been stabbed instead? I mean, I’d rather no one was stabbed at all, but if Dong Chan had been hurt, they would’ve at least been able to operate on him immediately since he already had his normal body temperature back. I found it interesting how much the perspective shifted to Dong Chan at the end, first we get to see his entire point of view of the week in which he needs to get adjusted to the antidote, and after that we also see the three years in which he is waiting for Mi Ran. I mean, three years seen from Mi Ran’s pod of course wouldn’t have been very interesting, but it did stand out to me that we kind of shifted more to Dong Chan’s perspective at some point.
Once they’re finally able to wake Mi Ran three years later, and everything is well and they are reunited and they start to consider the future, I was actually pretty turned off by Dong Chan when he kept forcing Mi Ran to stay with him. I mean, I get that he waited for her for three years, he went through a lot, and when she came back to him he never wanted to separate from her again. But he didn’t really seem to consider Mi Ran’s feelings in this. Mi Ran had aspirations in life, she wanted to travel, study abroad. She was still only 24, really, so she felt like it was too soon for her to get married, and she first wanted to be free for a while longer. I could totally understand that as well, after being stuck in a pod for now 23 years in total, it makes sense that she’d want to be free! But then Dong Chan literally used the ‘what about me? do you know what I went through while waiting for you?’ card and although I understood where he was coming from, it did turn me off. It should’ve been clear where Mi Ran’s feelings came from, and still he just wanted to keep her to himself and not let her enjoy her freedom a bit longer. When he said all that to her in front of his family, who were also pushing them to get married, she looked at him pretty startled, as if she also didn’t expect he would react like that. When he gave her the diaries that he kept while she was frozen to show her how he’d felt everyday, it was kind of like another way to persuade her to marry him. I don’t know, even though I liked them as a couple throughout the whole series, I didn’t really appreciate this final behavior of him, although, again, I understood where it came from. In the end, he travels with her to the US and decides to make YouTube videos about their lives there, the cryo-human couple now living their best life together.

I really liked Dong Chan’s niece, Seo Yoon. It was funny because she was only 8 years old but she seemed more mature than her entire family, lol. She gave such a refreshing and modern perspective on everything and she also gave Dong Chan the idea to start a YouTube channel, since that was so much more in trend right now than TV variety shows.

I also liked the TV show they started working on together at TBO, the Go Go 99, where they chose a group of people to participate in a fun field trip in which they would turn back time to 1999. They really struggled coming up with good and original ideas with their ’99 mindsets, since most had already been done, but this was a success. I liked that concept, and it felt like a really special project to Dong Chan and Mi Ran to work on, kind of affirming their own memories of their lives before the cryo-experiment, going back to their original life one last time.

Let me talk a bit more about Mi Ran’s friends, Kyung Ja and Young Sun. Kyung Ja is a very extravagant lady, her cousin is a former fortune teller (who actually made a pretty accurate prophecy to Mi Ran that she would meet the man of her dreams in 20 years time), and she herself is very free-spirited and open-minded. I see her as the kind who would just take meditation and yoga classes. Besides that and being kind of a gossip, she’s extremely loyal to Mi Ran. When she suspects Young Sun may have spitefully posted an article on Mi Ran being the other cryo-human, she immediately takes Mi Ran’s side. She also falls for Hyun Ki during the Go Go 99 project, which is pretty hilarious.
Young Sun has made a distinct change throughout her life. As a college student in 1999, she seemed quite ditzy – she also mixed up words and stuff – but seeing her as a housewife and mother, especially married to that lunatic Byung Shim, she changed a LOT. We see her struggle a bit with Mi Ran’s return in the sense that both her husband and her son now have a crush on her friend, but I’m glad she never took it out on Mi Ran. She also wasn’t the one who wrote that article, I still don’t know for sure who did, but it may have just been a random person since the laptop on which it was written from in Young Sun’s café was open for use to anyone, apparently. Anyways, I was really proud of her when she went through with the divorce from Byung Shim, because he seemed to be the worst husband and father ever, all he did was talk about Mi Ran, and he would even call Young Sun to help him out when he got into trouble, just because he knew she might just take pity on him and take him in again. I was glad that she drew her boundaries with him for good and kept kicking him out when he wouldn’t stop calling or just turned up at their house.
Hwang Byung Shim/Dong Hyuk was SUCH a pervert! I honestly had no sympathy for this man, not even as a comic relief character. He was just plain delusional, if you ask me. He actually cheated on Mi Ran in 1999, and now, as a grown man, he was suddenly convinced that they were soulmates again? I just couldn’t understand him, he kept making a fool of himself. He wasn’t acting as a husband to Young Sun or a father to Ji Hoon, and I just kept wondering how the heck these two wound up together.
As soon as Ji Hoon learns that his father also has/had a crush on Mi Ran, you could tell it really disturbed him. But I have to say he was a really loyal friend to Mi Ran, even after accepting that he didn’t have a chance with her. He would’ve still accepted her as a cryo-human, even as a friend of his mother’s who was actually 44 years old, but as soon as he learns she’s with Dong Chan, he respectfully backs away. Even when Dong Chan treats him coldly out of jealousy of how close he is with Mi Ran (Ji Hoon also ends up working as an intern at TBO), Ji Hoon still approaches him as a senior from whom he wants to learn, and in the end Dong Chan too has to accept that this boy is really alright. I liked Ji Hoon, he was a very respectful person and stood for what was right. He also didn’t approve of his dad’s behavior and chose his mom’s side without a doubt.

All in all, this series reminded be a bit of Thirty But Seventeen, in terms of the female lead waking up 20 years later from a coma-state finding herself having to adjust to a completely changed world, except in that case she’d also aged 20 years physically, which wasn’t the case here.

One scene I thought was pretty inspiring was when Dong Chan and Ji Hoon interviewed applicants for a show about another cryo-experiment. They just went around asking people if they would go into a cryo-chamber and for what reason. All the people they interviewed came up with really selfish reasons, that they just wanted to escape an inconvenient situation in their lives or something. And you could just see how turned off Dong Chan got with every new person. And then they met this couple who were willing to put their young child in one because of his rare disease, even willing to sacrifice the years they still might be able to spend with him making memories. I guess there really is no right or wrong answer here, no matter what people’s reasons are, it really is a life-changing experience that isn’t to be taken lightly. And I believe that it’s not a decision that should be made by anyone else but yourself. Of course it wasn’t anyone’s decision from the start to let this happen to Dong Chan and Mi Ran, but it still happened and it effected so many people around them emotionally as well.

Let me go on to some cast comments before concluding!

Of course, Ji Chang Wook was one of the main reasons I wanted to watch this, I just know how passionate he gets in romantic dramas and I like that he keeps doing more of those – I believe he used to do mainly action dramas in the beginning. Anyways, as I mentioned before I liked how uncomplicated his character was, and the minute he got himself into this predicament, he was very quick to become practical in how to make the most of it – he just went back to TBO to demand his job back even though officially 20 years had passed, he dealt with all the punches. And his growing affection for Mi Ran was also very nice to see, Ji Chang Wook can express a lot through his eyes in my opinion. On the other hand his performance didn’t feel very ‘special’ to me as in, nothing I haven’t seen him do before. I wish he could get more challenging roles in which he doesn’t just have to rely on his good looks, because I do think he’s a good actor. I can’t deny that the scene in which he and Ha Young first met, where he walks up to her in slow motion, was very heart-throbbing, but I also felt that his character’s uncomplicatedness made him a very ‘common’ character. I’m still going to watch more stuff with him though, there’s another drama with him coming up on my list, so I’ll be able to watch that soon as well, hopefully. All in all, I liked him.

I’ve liked Won Jin Ah since I saw Just Between Lovers, one of the first dramas I wrote a review on and that’s still one of my favorites so far. From just that series I could tell she was a really good actress. So I was very excited when I saw she would be acting alongside Ji Chang Wook, because I knew that at least meant the chemistry was going to be great from both sides. As I said before, I really liked Mi Ran’s character. I think the only part where I didn’t really like her response was when she saw Dong Chan and Ha Young hugging it out and just assumed there was still something going on between them. She then confronted Ha Young in the elevator, asking her why she didn’t get married yet. That just went a bit too far, and I agreed with Ha Young there when she was like ‘Are you that unsure of yourself?’ because that was just a bit petty of Mi Ran. And the insecurity itself also didn’t seem to be very like her, it seemed like from the start she was very confident in whatever she did and whoever she talked to. Anyways, other than that I really appreciated how uncomplicated her character was as well, no unnecessary drama, and just trying to cope with the situation that was being thrown at her. I liked how easy it was for her to go back to college again, she didn’t linger on the confusion or unfairness of her situation too much but just decided to make the most of it. I think she did a good job in this drama overall, as well.

I didn’t recognize Yoon Se Ah from anything, but apparently she was also in Just Between Lovers! :O I completely forgot about her character there. Anyways, as the older version of Ha Young, as I mentioned before, I found her a little stiff. Like, everything about her, from the way she dressed and walked to the way she talked and her expressions. The fact that this only changed after she was able to let go of Dong Chan for good may have had to do with the fact that she’d never been able to move on before. It literally felt like she was finally able to breathe again, put a curl in her hair and smile again, and that was really nice to see. I suppose it could be possible that she was emotionally paralyzed for a long time by what happened to Dong Chan and that this kept her from ever fully moving on, particularly when he came back and things between them had changed. She kept clinging on to the hope, because she was still so very in love with him, it was almost as if her life from 20 years ago started again, because those feelings towards him never changed. The scene where they’re both in the same hotel and she texts him to come over and he doesn’t but she has this fantasy where he does and they make out – the moment you realize that that was an illusion, it hit pretty hard I think. You could just see how much her hopes were being crushed, and again, I completely understood how she felt and why she acted petty at some moments. I feel like it’s always very easy to ‘dislike’ the female lead, especially when they’re going after the male lead, but I didn’t actually dislike her. I just felt very sorry for her. I wish I could’ve seen more of her character the way she appeared at the end, with much brighter emotions, but overall I think she performed well.

I really liked the 1999 cast, even though they appeared only briefly in the first episode and after that only to show who was who in 2019. I liked to see Kang Ki Doong and Baro, mainly. For some characters, I could understand why some viewers didn’t ‘like’ their older versions. It took me a long time to get used to Jun Soo Kyung as the older version of Dong Chan’s sister, because she was suddenly such a caricature while in 1999 there seemed to be nothing extravagant about her. I liked that they were able to get her back on her feet, because as soon as that happened she started to look more ‘normal’ as well.
I liked that they did that with Kim Won Hae, that he was first Dong Chan’s father in 1999 and then in 2019 he was Dong Chan’s brother. When his family appeared in that second episode, I found myself thinking, ‘why does the dad suddenly look that much younger oO’ and then when it was revealed that he was the younger brother I really laughed out loud. It was also a funny running gag that Dong Chan kept mistaking him for his dad, haha.
I would have personally never made the choice to choose Im Won Hee as the older version of Lee Hong Ki, that was a very big surprise. I last saw Im Won Hee in Move to Heaven, which was I think a very rare case of him playing a serious character with little focus on comic relief. Still liked him here, though, although he was kind of gruffy most of the time. He’s a funny actor.
By the way, it occurred to me that the people who were already ‘older’ or at least in their 40s/50s in 1999, were not recast as someone else in 2019, their hair just got a bit greyer, but the people who were relatively young (20s/30s) in 1999 all got older versions in 2019.

I don’t remember seeing Park Hee Jin, from the DramaWiki list I think I only know her from a guest appearance in Fated to Love You, but she was really funny. I know Oh Ha Nui from The Great Seducer, where she also played a really ditzy and naive girl. I liked that Kyung Ja became such a free-spirited woman without any visible sense of self-awareness.
I just realized that the young Young Sun was played by the female lead in My Secret Romance. She annoyed me a lot in that one ^^” but as Young Sun she seemed really sweet and pure. And of course Seo Jung Yeon, she was in the drama I watched before this as well and I mentioned in that review that she was really growing on me. I just really like her as an actress, and I liked to see in this role of Mi Ran’s friend that she changed so much from when she was younger. I kept wondering what the heck happened to make her decide to marry Byung Shim, because she really didn’t seem happy in her marriage. I liked that, even though she may have gotten some mixed feelings about Mi Ran’s return at some point, she would still never act on it, she would never become petty towards Mi Ran, she was still a loyal friend. I think she became much more mature and needed that time to figure out her stuff by herself. It was a very powerful move of her to decide to get divorced, because I felt like that was a long way coming. I liked her a lot.

I loved that young Byung Shim was played by Baro. So far I’ve only seen him in two other dramas, God’s Gift – 14 Days and Manhole, in which I equally enjoyed his performance. I’ve only seen Shim Hyung Tak before in Touch Your Heart, where he also played kind of a pervert. :’) So maybe that’s just his thing, haha. I had very little sympathy for his character, but I guess that means that he pulled it off pretty well in that case. It was impossible to feel sorry for him, from my side at least, because he was a mess. I think it was also good for him that Young Sun kicked him out, because he really needed to get his stuff sorted out by himself as well, and learn how to not keep depending on others. As I said before, he really didn’t feel like a father to Ji Hoon at all – their whole family relationship just felt weird to me since you didn’t see them have a single happy family moment together. I sure hope he doesn’t only get cast as these types of characters, though! I’m sure he has more to bring to the table as an actor.

I just discovered that Choi Bo Min is a member of Golden Child! I kind of had the feeling he was an idol, but I don’t like to assume, haha. Anyways, I thought he performed very nicely. He’s only done 5 dramas so far, so let’s see if he gets more acting chances. Ji Hoon was just a really likable character, even when he developed a crush on Mi Ran it never felt like he’d be an actual threat to Dong Chan, so it was fine – I just wanted him to have a nice college crush and then move on with his life, haha. I also liked how mature he was when he started working at TBO and didn’t let his feelings for Mi Ran become a problem when dealing with Dong Chan. He probably knew very well that Dong Chan was treating him so coldly because he didn’t like seeing the two of them so closely together, but Ji Hoon really stood his ground, saying that he and Mi Ran were good friends. And I liked how Dong Chan warmed up to him, because Ji Hoon really didn’t have any kind of intention to break them up or anything like that, he still wanted to continue working diligently at this company despite any awkward tensions that may arise. But these tensions didn’t arise because he didn’t let it become a dramatic thing. Again, I love how uncomplicated all the characters were in this series. He did a good job.

I didn’t recognize Yoon Na Moo from anywhere (it’s funny because the male lead from Come and Hug Me, the previous drama I watched, was called exactly this), but looking through DramaWiki I see he was in Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim. Both him and Park Min Soo, the young Nam Tae, were so incredibly sweet. It didn’t matter for me that he was suddenly a ‘grown-up’, because he really was still a child. I thought it was unfair for people to comment that the older version seemed silly or childish, because that was just his role. Nam Tae’s social development was lagging, so he was a lot younger in his mind. The beautiful thing was that he himself had 0 issues with it, he never once seemed to be down about his own condition. And that also made him quite inspiring. It shows that the people around mentally handicapped people sometimes make a bigger fuss about their conditions than the actual handicapped people.
I also liked the friendship that was created between Nam Tae and Professor Hwang when the latter had to stay over at Mi Ran’s house for a while. In the beginning he still made a fuss about the Professor’s snoring, but then at the end they really grew attached to each other and I also think he really opened up the Professor’s mind when he told him the reason he wouldn’t choose to go into a cryo-chamber himself, even if he got the chance to do so and maybe fix his retardation one day. I think the Professor also learned a lot about people’s minds and feelings during his recovery, and not just from a scientist’s perspective.

I want to give a final shoutout to Gil Hae Yeon, who played Mi Ran’s mother. I haven’t really talked about Mi Ran’s parents in detail, but I thought this actress was really good. She wasn’t overdramatic, I think she portrayed her emotions very realistically and it really touched me. Especially when Dong Chan moved in with them during the period that Mi Ran had to be frozen again. Her feelings towards him, how she didn’t blame him for anything, but then felt like it would be better for him to move on because she felt like THEY were hurting HIM by keeping him in their house… the duality of her thoughts and feelings was just very human in my opinion. I was impressed by her acting, even as a relatively minor character. So well done, madam!!

So yeah, I did enjoy this series. Especially the first few episodes I thought were very entertaining. It did feel like it dragged out a little bit at the end, when they kept postponing Mi Ran’s injection and you just knew that something was going to happen to her before she got it. But I still think it ended well, with everyone happy again. Yes, I would’ve also liked to see a final show of intimacy at the end, because it felt like that was where the whole thing was leading. I mean, they were constantly so eager about being able to be physical with each other, I assumed that they would jump on each other as soon as they got the chance, haha. So that was a tiny disappointment I guess, although the shower scene was very satisfying in itself. I liked that they added the cold shower not just because it made it steamy but because they literally didn’t have another choice – without it it wouldn’t have been possible because of their rising temperatures. So they used that as a very practical solution, haha.
I think the most interesting thing about it was the idea that time is a really fluid thing. People made a big deal about them having lost 20 years of their lives, but for them, in the end, they could pretty much pick up where they left off. It wasn’t the same as in Thirty But Seventeen, where she literally missed her entire adolescence and just skipped from 17 to 30 years old. Dong Chan and Mi Ran’s bodies were still in their 20s/30s, so that might have made it a bit easier to deal with. To quote Gandalf very randomly, ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us’. I think it was a major show of character for both of them that they picked up their new lives so quickly and make the most of it despite their inconveniencing physical conditions. They still lived with hope in their hearts that they would be fixed someday, and this was something that was actually going to happen eventually, so they just had to hold on and wait for that. Their situation was very bizarre and life-changing, but it didn’t turn out to be so incredibly bad. The message I got from it was pretty optimistic in that sense.

I’m glad I got around to watch this series finally, I may have expected a little more from it but overall I found it enjoyable enough. It actually took me a couple of days to finish this review because I struggled a bit with the structure of my arguments. I hope I was still able to make it a worthwhile review.
I’ll now resume with my list, going on with a Korean remake of an originally Japanese series that I first saw a long time ago, a kind of classic if you will, so I will be back soon with another review!

Bye-bee!! ^^