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

Room No. 9
(나인룸 / Nainrum)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello everyone! Amidst the chaos that the current world is in at this time, although of course I’m not completely closing myself off from what’s happening out there, I can’t help but find comfort in distracting myself. And how better to do that than with another exciting K-Drama? To be honest, this series was not the kind of genre I would usually watch, but it’s been on my list for a while because I did think it would be good and interesting after I saw the trailer. I am excited to share my thoughts on it. As far as I remember, this series was on my list because of Kim Hae Sook (and Kim Young Kwang probably also had something to do with it). I’m not that into legal dramas, but I found it very thrilling, especially at the end. I feel like the last couple of years there have been a lot of legal dramas coming out, so I guess it’s a pretty popular genre these days. The one thing I always hope with legal dramas is that the, in some way, speak about the truth and may even criticize some shortcomings the real legal world has where needed. I feel that it’s important to use this way of drama-making to educate people on these things as well. Because no system is flawless, and we need that handful of people who are brave enough to go against the higher power to fight for what’s right. And this drama was also an important example of such a case, I believe. Let’s get started!

Room No. 9 is a 16-episode drama, with each episode lasting about an hour. The core of this story consists of three main characters. A lawyer, her boyfriend from a wealthy family, and a deathrow inmate who claims to be innocent even after 34 years of imprisonment. Let me talk about them one by one.
Lawyer Eulji Hae Yi (played by Kim Hee Sun), is on top of the world. She works at a big law firm named Damjang, owned by the very powerful SHC Group, and praises herself with a 100% victory rate in her cases. She has a luxurious life style, nothing to worry about financially, and she’s also dating the younger brother of SHC Group’s director. However, she’s not a sweetie, per se. She’s ambitious, and won’t get involved in other people’s emotional business. Her father used to be a great prosecutor, but after he lost everything after losing a case, she cut off ties with him to start her own career at Damjang. She sacrificed her family for her job, because the latter means everything to her. The person behind her promotions is her boss, Damjang and SHC Group’s director, Ki San (played by Lee Kyung Young). At the start of the series, Hae Yi is preparing a case for his teenage son Ki Chan Sung (played by Jung Jae Won), who got into a reckless car accident in which two pedestrians were killed.
Hae Yi’s boyfriend Ki Yoo Jin (played by Kim Young Kwang) is Ki San’s younger brother (although there’s a remarkable age difference between them) and therefore Chan Sung’s uncle. He is a doctor at Sanhae Hospital, which is also part of SHC Group. He’s been chasing after Hae Yi ever since he was a student and saw her working at a café, but she rejected him before because she wasn’t interested in dating students. After graduating though, she accepted him because ‘she didn’t mind dating younger men’👀 And now they’ve both been waiting to propose to each other for a while. They seem like a lovely couple. However, after receiving a few weird boxes, Yoo Jin starts digging more into his own origin. As far as he knows, his father was Ki Se Woong, Ki San’s father, who raised him as his own son. But he never knew his birth mother, so he sets out to find out more about who she was. This gets him involved in a lot of messy family secrets, that also have to do with the case Hae Yi gets entangled in.
Thirdly, there’s Jang Hwa Sa (played by Kim Hae Sook), a deathrow inmate who’s been imprisoned for 34 years, since 1984. She was convicted of killing her lover, Chu Young Bae, by poisoning him. Chu Young Bae also happened to be Ki San’s half-brother, and Ki San has been doing everything in his power (of which he has a lot) to keep Hwa Sa in prison. Hae Yi is also called in for support in this when Hwa Sa appeals for a reduced sentence. Since she’s been an exemplary inmate, she has a good chance, but because Hae Yi interferes by provoking her to hit her, her appeal is denied again.
When Hae Yi is visiting Hwa Sa in prison one time and the two of them are together (in Room Number 9), Hwa Sa sees Ki San on the news and gets a heart attack while gasping Chu Young Bae’s name. Yoo Jin happens to be there at that time as well and when he prepares the defibrillator to resurrect her, Hae Yi trips on the chord, and falls on top of Hwa Sa. Something weird happens with the defibrillator, we see it glitching and there’s some blueish light emanating from it, and when the two women wake up, they have swapped bodies.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting anything magical or non-fictional to happen in this drama before I started it, but this definitely made things more interesting to me from the start. I thought it was just going to be about a lawsuit, and about Hae Yi getting dragged into Hwa Sa’s case and discovering the truth about everything that happened. But starting with the magical defibrillator, things got really messy.
In a nutshell: Hwa Sa is innocent. She fell in love with Chu Young Bae (as a young man played by Yoon Park) in 1984 and loved him so much that she went along with whatever he told her, even when it was to rob SHC Group’s safe or commit double suicide together. She would do anything for him.
While robbing the safe, Young Bae was busted by Ki San (as a young man (also) played by Kim Young Kwang) and during their chase afterwards, Ki San was pushed over the stairs and broke his neck in the fall. Young Bae decides to put his older brother’s body next to Hwa Sa’s unconscious one in the car to cover up his crime, blaming the murder of this unknown man on Hwa Sa. He himself went on to live as Ki San. So what happened was that he took over his brother’s identity and ultimately ended up inheriting everything there was to SHC Group, which he never had any entitlement to as Chu Young Bae.
However, Hwa Sa recognizes Ki San on the news, that day that she gets the heart attack and switches bodies with Hae Yi. Being in Hae Yi’s body is the biggest advantage for her since she can now actually do something, go out there and try to figure out a plan to bring fake Ki San to justice. She only has her friend and fellow ex-inmate Kam Mi Ran – nicknamed Pal Pal (played by Kim Jae Hwa) – to help her. Pal Pal has been taking care of her dementing mother while Hwa Sa was in prison. She doesn’t get very far until Yoo Jin figures out the thing with the defibrillator and manages to swap them back, though. Just before they switch back, they also find out that Hwa Sa has 4th stage pancreatic cancer, which limits her time to request an appeal even more.
Hae Yi is less than impressed by Hwa Sa’s efforts, although she does find out more and more dirt about what’s been going on at SHC Group. In the end, it’s revealed that a small but influential group of people around Ki San has helped him cover everything up, they falsified the autopsy report on the real Ki San, faked the cause of death, and everyone who came close to exposing them (including Hwa Sa’s mother) was silenced in one way or another. It really seems impossible to go up against them, and that’s why Hae Yi is also initially scared to take the risk. After all, she’s come so far to get where she is.

Let me just say this: the award for most selfish female lead in a K-Drama definitely goes to Eulji Hae Yi. I could not believe how, after everything she went through with Hwa Sa, even swapping bodies and learning about her case, she still betrayed her. She promised she’d help her, then she just handed her appeal papers over to Ki San so he could get rid of them. All because she didn’t want to end up living like her father. How much is justice worth to you then! It’s not like her father was living in a ditch! He didn’t live in luxury but at least he wasn’t miserable and he found peace in standing up for the justice he believed in even though it cost him all that. That should be seen as something to be admired. But no, she only cared about her own reputation, a reputation she literally got by begging Ki San and taking care of his dirty errands to cover stuff up so he or his son didn’t get in trouble. She only realizes the extent of everything in the second-to-last episode, and that’s when she finally turns around and helps Hwa Sa get her appeal papers back and suddenly starts fighting back. But it still didn’t make full sense to me.
It was mentioned in a voice-over before that her affection for Yoo Jin had more to do with his background and connections to SHC Group than with her genuine feelings for him. I even thought at one point she was just going to dump Yoo Jin, because he wasn’t important anymore. But then Hwa Sa and Pal Pal helped her save Yoo Jin at the hospital and suddenly that was enough reason for her to change her mind and go to Hwa Sa’s side? Hwa Sa had always been friendly with Yoo Jin, it wasn’t a surprise that she’d help save him when he was in that kind of danger. And still Hae Yi was like, ‘You helped save Yoo Jin, now I know that you’re truly a good person and innocent’ and I was like ??? I think it was abundantly clear from the start, even if you just look at how Hwa Sa was as a person, such a calm and serene woman. She opened her heart and trust to Hae Yi several times, being betrayed again and again, and now Hae Yi was suddenly the person to conclude that Hwa Sa was worth trusting? It was weird. I just found it weird that they waited so long for Hae Yi to come around and they had to stuff all the thrilling stuff they did to get Hwa Sa’s files in order before it was too late into the final two episodes. I still feel like Yoo Jin was the deciding factor in Hae Yi changing her mind, though. Because where she initially did everything in her own interest, she came around after realizing in how much danger Yoo Jin was. I think it was when she fully realized how dangerous Ki San was, that she finally came around and that should’ve already been clear from way before. I just found it weird that this was suddenly the deciding reason for her to help Hwa Sa after all.

Another reason the above weirded me out was because the relationship between Hae Yi and Yoo Jin felt really dry to me. I mean, it’s obvious that Yoo Jin is way more into Hae Yi than the other way around, and this is also proven when, even after she betrays him (along with Hwa Sa), he still keeps finding reasons to forgive her and get back to her. Apart from a few hugs, they don’t share a single kiss or show any kind of intimacy throughout the entire series. I would’ve liked to see a bit more of how they were together as a couple, because I suspect they must have done stuff together for them to want to get married, right? I really hope it wasn’t all just Hae Yi’s plan to marry into a rich family, although it may have been part of the reason in the beginning. I still feel like there could’ve been a bit more physical evidence of how close they were. Maybe this is just my preference, because I love cute couples and I like watching good kissing scenes, but their relationship just felt very platonic to me all in all. Of course, Hae Yi wasn’t really the type for expressing affection in public, but also in the scenes where it was just the two of them. I think there was a build-up to a kiss ONE time, but then they got interrupted or something. Anyways, it could be that seeing Yoo Jin in physical danger finally made Hae Yi aware of her true deep feelings for him, but it just came a bit out of the blue for me. She was being so distant with him, even after saving him. I guess I just found it really hard to fathom her.

Let me talk about Yoo Jin and his connection to the magical defibrillator, because this is a very peculiar part of the story. We find out that Yoo Jin is the real Ki San’s son. Seeing that young Ki San is played by the same actor as Yoo Jin in the flashbacks might have already given this away to the viewers, but it takes Yoo Jin a long time to find out because all the documentation and pictures of the real Ki San have been covered up and deleted by Young Bae and his team. Anyhow, Yoo Jin eventually finds out through the doctor who falsified Ki San’s autopsy report that he looks identical to the real Ki San, someone he never knew. And then he starts searching for his birth mother. His parents met during their mutual study abroad in Chicago, and his mother died after giving birth to him in a hospital that afterwards was taken down by SHC Group as well (don’t be suspicious, don’t be suspicious). On the night he was born, apparently a meteor fell from the sky and landed just outside the hospital’s window, and the impact killed almost everyone in the room. Only baby Yoo Jin survived, and the light emanating from the meteor did something weird to the defibrillator next to him. So anyways, for some reason he has a connection to that power. The defibrillator he uses when Hwa Sa has that heart attack is the same one from the time when he was born, they kept it for some reason, but it responds to him with that same light and glitching and somehow works as a body-swapper with Yoo Jin as the key since it doesn’t work without him. He figures this out by himself, and that’s why he knows thath he needs to be the one to change Hae Yi and Hwa Sa back. After they’re changed back and Yoo Jin discovers his whole origin, the defibrillator kind of disappears from the story. That is, until Young Bae suddenly finds out about it and then does THREE attempts to switch Yoo Jin and his hospitalized son, out of pure despair. Luckily he failed all three times, but jeez, THREE attempts. This guy just kept trying even when Yoo Jin became aware of this plan of his.
In hindsight, I wonder what the whole deal with that device was, in general. It seemed to be really important for Yoo Jin’s personal plot in the beginning, when he went to visit that old hospital and there was the flashback of his mom there and the meteor outside and everything… but then afterwards, once the two women were switched back and Yoo Jin discovered everything about himself, it really didn’t have a purpose anymore. I honestly expected Hae Yi and Hwa Sa to be swapped for most of the series, that it would give the device more mystery and that they’d really had to figure out why it did that, but it actually only took a couple of episodes to figure it out. So was this thing really just used as a plot tool to explain why only Yoo Jin could use it, to connect him to the device? Did they have to add this one particular magical element to it, what with the whole meteor crashing into earth killing his mother and everyone who witnessed his birth? It seemed a little dramatic, even for a K-Drama.

Another thing I didn’t understand was Ki Chan Sung. Yes, I did just call him that. I just did not understand this kid. He seemed to be living the high life under his father’s great influence, but underneath he was really messed up. As it turns out, somehow he already figured out that his father was Chu Young Bae. But then he started killing people? And instead of admitting why, he turns it back onto his dad for pretending to be Ki San and then basically keeps trying to commit suicide to get out of giving an explanation for his deeds. Even if it had something to do with his father faking his identity, I still don’t see any reason why he had to kill these particular people. What was the motive? I was so confused and annoyed about this!
Just to briefly recap: at the beginning of the series, Hae Yi’s manager at work is Ma Hyun Chul (played by Jung Won Joong), and he is the only person who agrees to work with her when she’s trapped in Hwa Sa’s body, the only person who believes her at that stage. But then there’s an incident in his hotel room while Hae Yi (aka Hwa Sa in Hae Yi’s body) is there, and he ends up dying. It’s initially shown as that Hae Yi/Hwa Sa killed him since she hit him over the head with a whiskey bottle (he admitted to her that he was the one who had assaulted Hwa Sa’s mother when she was pushing for evidence and caused her head trauma and consequential dementia, so yes, Hwa Sa snapped). However, ultimately it’s revealed that that blow to the head didn’t actually kill him – poison did. Poison that was in the bottle of whiskey. Which Chan Sung gave him earlier that day.
Also, when they discover who Yoo Jin’s birth mother was, they also discover that Yoo Jin’s biological grandmother came to Korea to talk to Ki San (unaware that Young Bae had taken over his identity) and that Chan Sung run her over with her car a few hours later (aka that ‘reckless’ car accident).
I just don’t get what Chan Sung’s reasons were, and he never said anything. He just tried to get out of it by trying to kill himself multiple times. Honestly, what a sad display that was. He got himself paralyzed from the spine down, kept whining about how he wanted to die, and even made some attempts in the hospital himself. I couldn’t help but think that I didn’t want him to get away with it so easily by dying, he should at least fess up why he felt the need to kill those people, because none of his vaguely expressed motives made any sense to me.
As a matter of fact, the whole SHC Group family had problems with their personal reflection skills, if you ask me. Everyone just kept blaming everything on other people. When Chan Sung got hospitalized Young Bae blamed everything on Hwa Sa, he snapped yelling that it was her fault that Chan Sung ended up like that. Heck, he even came into her hospital room and tried to strangle her. DUDE. Hwa Sa literally had NOTHING to do with his son. HE was the one who ruined HER life, took advantage of her love for him and sent her to rot in jail for 34 years for a crime she didn’t commit on a man she didn’t even know, and still he had the audacity to blame everything on her. He just couldn’t deal with his own failures. When something upset him, he always vented it out on other people. He really was a despicable piece of evil.
And that secretary/bodyguard of him, Park Chul Soon (played by Jo Won Hee). He also didn’t have a conscience. He did everything Young Bae asked of him without ever thinking for himself. He even trained his own son to be the exact same kind of person to Chan Sung, which was just so toxic – I’m glad his son testified against Chan Sung in his trial. Anyways, I just couldn’t understand how everyone, even the people who were asked by Young Bae to do really weird things (like kidnap and drug Yoo Jin, bring him to the same room as Chan Sung, tie their wrists together and hit him with an ancient defibrillator) just did it without questioning him! I mean, they went like ‘?’ once, but then they were all like, ‘Oh well, he probably has his reasons for needlessly using a defibrillator on someone he forcibly drugged to bring here, there’s probably no need for me to be suspicious’… -__-
It proved to be a really hard challenge to go against Young Bae, but when they did and Hwa Sa’s appeal was approved, the final two episodes were just really satisfying to watch.
I still can’t about the fact that Young Bae made THREE attempts to switch Yoo Jin and Chan Sung, THREE. Three times he sent men out to kidnap or drug his own nephew and put him in his son’s paralyzed body. Do you even have a heart if you don’t bother to think twice about this decision? I don’t think so.

Oh, I realize I haven’t talked about Oh Bong Sam yet!! Oh Bong Sam (played by Oh Dae Hwan) is a police officer who keeps getting into trouble and getting suspended from his team time and time again. I really liked his character, he was a really refreshing personality in-between all the seriousness of the legal people. He gets attached to Hae Yi when Hwa Sa is in her body, and even develops a crush on her. At some point this became a bit annoying because this occasionally clouded his judgement about her. He just assumed everything she did was cool and admirable, unaware of the fact she was actually still betraying people right under his nose. Despite this he was very reliable, and in the end he helped them gather all the necessary information they needed for Hwa Sa’s appeal as well. I liked the scenes with him and his friend who was officially retired from the police force but still ended up running around in circles for him. Bong Sam may have been a little naive in blindly trusting Hae Yi, but his gut feeling was always right and he always caught the bad guy they were chasing, so he really proved his worth. And he also didn’t force his crush onto Hae Yi, he also just accepted he didn’t stand a chance against Yoo Jin when all was done. I kind of liked how he just confronted Yoo Jin with the fact that he was allowed to have a crush on Hae Yi as long as he didn’t act on it and didn’t even bother with how Yoo Jin might feel about it. It felt to me as if Yoo Jin liked him too, because he was smiling when Bong Sam was telling him all this, and not in a denigrating kind of way.
I liked how Bong Sam followed his gut feeling, and he was always yelling at his team to just believe him when he said he felt something was off. To his team he was kind of a troublemaker, that’s also why he got suspended so many times, he just did whatever he wanted. When he felt something was off, he just shot off without asking for permission from his team leader first etc. But I think he was really cut out to be a cop, because he did have the correct kind of ‘tingle’ for the job.

Let me make some cast comments combined with some more analyses on the characters!

This is the first drama I’ve seen with Kim Hee Sun, but it seems like she’s a pretty famous actress. I recently saw a video about some new upcoming dramas and there was another one with her in there.
I think she did a really good job portraying the stoic Eulji Hae Yi, who wasn’t allowed to break down. She carried her confidence very well, but at the same time I kept hoping to see a more vulnerable side to her as well. I just always look for sides I can relate to in main characters, so she definitely kept me on the edge of my seat in that regard! I would like to see more of her acting because I don’t know her range, but I think they made the right choice in casting her for this role. And even though it took a while, I like that in the end we did get to see some humanity in her, her feelings of greed confronted with her conscience of how she’d gotten so far, and then compare that to what was happening to Hwa Sa. In the end, she even went back to her dad and they started their own tiny law firm to help people who are in similar situations as Hwa Sa, who can’t find anyone else to help support their case. So she definitely made a change for the better.

I think I have mentioned it multiple times before, but I LOVE Kim Hae Sook. She’s so incredible. To me, she is like the Judi Dench of South-Korea. She was one of the major reasons I wanted to watch this drama, even though it wasn’t my preferred genre, but I just knew she would be amazing. I recently saw her in Start-Up, but I’ve also seen her in About Time, Pinocchio (where she played Kim Young Kwang’s mom by the way!), and I Hear Your Voice. I know she’s done much more, but these are the ones I’ve seen where I’ve grown to love her as an actress.
Of course, her character had several physical limitations. Not only that she was in prison, but she also had a limp, and then it turned out that she was also incurably sick. She was in no condition to figure out a whole appeal case that already exceeded the statute of limitation, but she still did it. She accepted all the help she could get and she didn’t allow herself to die until she got acquitted of her charges. She may have been weak in body, but she was so strong-willed in her mind. You could just see how she had to push her body sometimes because she was so frustrated. She just wanted to get on with it, but then the cancer pains would kick in again, she had to go to the hospital again. Not to mention she had to go through the constant threats on her and Hae Yi’s lives as ordered by Young Bae. It was of course very sad to see her pass away at the end, but I really think that she made peace with it. She’d said that she wouldn’t die before showing her mom that she got acquitted and before seeing Young Bae be exposed for all the wrong he did, and that’s exactly what happened. It must have been such an incredible load off her that it was okay for her now to let go. It was sad, but also beautiful in a way. Overall, I just loved her here, as I do in every series she appears in. But it was the first time for me to see her in a lead role, which was really nice!

What can I say, I love Kim Young Kwang. He always makes me smile. I don’t think I’ve done a review on a drama with him before, though! Guess there’s a first time for everything. Amongst the things I’ve seen, he was in White Christmas, Pinocchio, Gogh, The Starry Night, and Lookout, indeed none of which I’ve written a review about. There are still some dramas on my list that he appears in, so I’ll probably be able to make up for that in later reviews.
I think Yoo Jin was one of the major victims in this series. He really had nothing but goodness in his heart, his feelings for Hae Yi were sincere, he didn’t even have ambitions taking over his family’s company per se, he was content being a doctor. Not only did he have to figure his whole existence out by himself – where he really came from, who his parents were – but then he found out his whole family had been lying to him from the start. His older brother turned out to be his uncle who degraded him to a position where he couldn’t take the company from him like his father had, and then he even tried to swap his body with that of his son, which would’ve left Yoo Jin either comatose or paralyzed locked up in his younger nephew’s body without even knowing what happened to him. He really didn’t deserve all this, being ambushed THRICE because of his crazy uncle’s desperate plan to ‘save his son’. I don’t think even Chan Sung was thinking of this when he mentioned he was always envious of Yoo Jin, Young Bae just twisted everything to his own messed up logic of blaming everything on everyone but himself. He didn’t care about ruining people’s lives if it ended up improving his own. I just felt really sorry for Yoo Jin, he was such a good guy and Hae Yi also didn’t treat him fairly all the time. I’m glad that they made up in the end and still made plans to get married, I do think this whole experience brought them closer together.

I couldn’t place where I knew Oh Dae Hwan from but I see now that he was in Shopping King Louie! Although I don’t remember him from there, haha. Anyways, he has a really familiar face! As I mentioned before, I thought his character was really refreshing. He was pretty casual and laid-back for a cop and I liked his accent. I guess he was the kind of guy who may not have been an exemplary officer at the station, but he had a way with people that made them like him, and this resulted in his connections. He always had people he could contact for favors and old colleagues to help him find stuff, so that was really clever. He could have done without the crush on Hae Yi, especially because it didn’t really lead anywhere, but I did find it kind of cute to see him get excited by himself. And at least he didn’t act like a child when he too had to accept that it wasn’t going to turn into anything. I loved the part where he and Yoo Jin figured out by themselves that they should check on Hae Yi and Hwa Sa that night that the assassin stole into their house (being given a housekey by Park Chul Soon, the bastard) and that when they chased him down to the parking lot, even when Yoo Jin left, Bong Sam was able to take him down on his own. I was scared for a moment that he wouldn’t be able to take him on, I was like ‘Yoo Jin why are you leaving him there by himself???’, but then he just tackled the guy and cuffed him, haha. I liked how stable his character was, and I liked the actor’s performance.

I really liked Kim Jae Hwa in this series! Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her play such an important role in a drama before that wasn’t purely for comic relief. I’ve seen her in Surplus Princess, Uncontrollably Fond, Fantastic, Individualist Ms. Ji Young, and recently in Run On, but I feel like all her roles were just minor ones, like someone’s colleague or something. So I really liked seeing her in this, she was actually one of my favorite characters. She may have appeared a little eccentric in the beginning, but that’s what made Pal Pal so charming, I think. Especially the way in which she just clung to Hwa Sa’s side and was ALWAYS there for her. She didn’t seem to have anyone else in her life she cared about as much as her, and this originated from the bond they made during their time in prison together. Hwa Sa was like a warm older sister to the other girls and women, it also became clear from the way everyone dotingly called her ‘eonni’. Pal Pal didn’t shy away from anything if it meant protecting Hwa Sa. She even volunteered as the diversion multiple times, to distract the guards so that Hwa Sa and Hae Yi could slip through. I also liked her weird thing with Hae Yi’s lawyer colleague (played by Im Won Hee, who I just saw in Melting Me Softly). I loved how she was just so confident in herself and her looks as well. It was shown that she had multiple elderly guys, maybe even sugar daddies? that she called ‘oppa’ who also helped her get things, so she also definitely had her connections although she didn’t get into trouble anymore after being released from prison. I loved how she could be such a comical and uplifting factor in the series and still have emotional depth. That scene when the assassin broke into their house and she almost got seriously hurt when she tried to attack the guy from behind – that had me scared for a moment! Her devotion to Hwa Sa was just so admirable, and when she’d get snappy at Hae Yi she was usually right to do so. I don’t know, I felt like she also had a very good gut feeling about people. I really liked her!

I’ve seen Lee Kyung Young in several other things, like Hidden Identity, Sense8 (!) and Bride of the Water God. He’s done a lot of movies, apparently. I know his face, but this was probably the most impactful role I’ve seen of him so far. I just couldn’t believe that Young Bae turned into this, that the greed had already torn at him so viciously from his youth that he would be able to do something like this and just move on with his life without looking back, knowing he’d ruined so many innocent peoples’ lives. It made it really hard to sympathize with him. He was a classic bad guy, the powerful CEO who had all these people fix his dirty work for him so that he didn’t even have to lift a finger himself. He cared about Chan Sung like he cared about no one else. His son was his legacy, I think he really only cared about Chan Sung taking over SHC Group because that was the final thing he needed in taking away everything from the real Ki San. Making Chan Sung the heir instead of Yoo Jin, even getting rid of Yoo Jin just so that Chan Sung could have all the playground who wanted, that’s all he cared about. He was so caught up in his own maddening life of deceit that he’d also helped his son grow up with a kind of megalomania, that nothing could ever touch them as long as they had all the right people in tow to help them cover up their dirty tracks. This guys just didn’t see any wrong in the things he’d done, that was his problem. Also LOL at that time when he heard his assassin had been compromised and he cussed him out by yelling ‘That parasite!!’ and I was like, not him calling someone else a parasite while he’s literally been living someone else’s life for 34 years. :’) He just really didn’t see any fault in himself. But I also was a bit puzzled by his duality. We never heard directly from him what his feelings for Hwa Sa were, or used to be. It seems like he was able to do this to her without a single shred of remorse. But then he had to stop himself from strangling her because he suddenly saw her as a young woman laying there. And when Hwa Sa passed, he came to visit her grave and asked her if she was comfortable before walking away. I wonder what that was about. Actually my major thought was, How the heck is this guy still walking freely outside? Didn’t they just convict him for everything he’d done? Anyways, I guess the fact that I hated the character has to mean that the actor did a good job at playing the bad guy, haha.

Jung Jae Won looks so familiar to me, but I haven’t seen anything he’s done. I kind of expected him to be an idol group member, but I guess that might have been a little presumptuous of me, haha. Anyways, I honestly don’t know what to think of Chan Sung. As I mentioned before, I found him very sad. And kind of pathetic. It felt like he had the whole world to roam through freely under his father’s influence, but then he suddenly did those crazy things, he killed two people on purpose and then chooses to commit suicide just so he doesn’t have to give an explanation. And then he became miserable in the state that he put himself in. I just didn’t follow what was going through his mind. Was it because he suddenly grew to hate his father when he found out about his lies? Still no motive to kill those two people. To me it just seemed like he lost his mind all of a sudden. He suddenly turned out to be a monster. I could definitely see where he got his violent tendencies from, he was most definitely Chu Young Bae’s son. But just… I don’t know, maybe I missed something here, but until the end I just kept wondering what this kid’s deal was. When Young Bae was ousted on the news, he just screamed at him that he reaped what he sowed and that final scene of him yelling ‘Chu Young Bae, I’m hungry!!’ on repeat, to hurt his father even more in calling him by his real name instead of ‘Dad’… Like, I don’t know what suddenly made him hate his father so much, it’s not like him pretending to be Ki San did Chan Sung any harm, on the contrary, he was able to live like a freaking prince. So this I didn’t quite get.

Just one final comment about Mrs. Son Sook, who played Hwa Sa’s mother Mal Boon. Honestly, she’s such a tiny frail cute old lady, I couldn’t help but want to give her a big hug whenever she appeared. She was also the granny in My Mister, if I remember correctly. I see that she’s in a couple more series that are on to watch list, so at least I’ll know I’ll see more of her soon.
It was heartbreaking to find out what had happened to her, that she was assaulted by Ma Hyun Chul while pleading for the appeal of her daughter. She was really invested in defending her daughter’s case until she got hit in the head and then she even forgot about her daughter completely as a result of that injury. Hwa Sa really had a lot to endure, and I can understand why she snapped when she heard from Ma Hyun Chul’s own lips that he’d done that to her. This old lady is just really precious!! T^T

Overall, I did enjoy watching this series. I thought it was good, and especially towards the end it got really thrilling. There were some things that were still left open, or that I didn’t really understand in the end at least, and I still wonder about the true purpose of using that magical defibrillator in an otherwise completely non-fictional story. It’s worrying to know that things like this happen in real life, bad people get away with stuff, they get away with murder and are even allowed to live on for years and years until finally one person decides to speak up. I really hope that this series was also a way to express a certain criticism on corruption in the legal world. Judges are bribed, professionals are paid to give false information, and if they as much as put a toe out of line and speak out about the indecency of these ethics, they’re either threatened or just get rid of. I still can’t forgive Young Bae for the dog, by the way. He did a lot of terrible things, but when he had Ma Hyun Chul’s dog killed as a threat to him?! NOPE.
But yeah, even though it wasn’t my cup of tea genre-wise per se, I am glad that I watched it and at least there were still plenty of things that kept me excited about finishing it.
I liked how both Hwa Sa’s appeal and Yoo Jin’s identity verification case were wrapped up neatly at the end and justice was restored (although as I said I still don’t get why Young Bae wasn’t arrested).
Something Hae Yi says in a voice over at Hwa Sa’s burial was really beautiful. I wrote it down, it was:
“In a place someone has passed through, a flower blossoms. In someone’s memory, in someone’s heart, a flower blossoms and then leaves. Jang Hwa Sa did this, too. Jang Hwa Sa blossomed the meaning of that flower in my life. I still don’t completely understand it. But, “a person must be beautiful themselves”. So someday, maybe I, too, could become a flower in someone’s heart.”
I think this final inner monologue just proves how Hwa Sa helped Hae Yi become a better person. She finally acknowledged the good influence that Hwa Sa had on her, the influence that she initially chose to ignore and walk away from. But it turned out to be exactly the kind of warmth that she needed. She needed to learn to care about other people. She needed to become a ‘beautiful’ person herself first.

As a final note, just to comment on the title of the series, ‘Room No. 9’, I just realized that on the poster/flyer (the one at the top of this review), the text on the left reads, ‘That’s where it all started’. And yes, that’s true. The starting point of their lives getting all mixed up, was Room No. 9 at Hwa Sa’s prison facility. And I believe this same room also was used in a flashback, in any case, I think that must have been the main reason to use this as the title. The place where it literally all started, the place where they swapped bodies for the first time. Nothing is mentioned about this room, no one even mentions the words ‘Room Number 9’ throughout the entire series, but I also can’t really think of another title that would be fitting. Sometimes I just like to have a theory about the title, especially when the word or phrase itself isn’t literally spoken in the series, but I guess for this one it made sense.

I’m going to watch a Japanese series next, it’s been a while. I hope I can come back with a new review soon! Please all stay safe and healthy, and thank you to the people who read my reviews! I’ve been getting some really nice comments lately and it’s really nice to know I’m writing stuff that entertains people and gives them information they seek. Thank you so much for your kind words of support! I will keep working hard on my writing style to make sure they remain entertaining for people to read. ^^

Bye-bye!!

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

My Absolute Boyfriend
(절대 그이 / Jeoldae Geui)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hiya, it’s review-time~! I finished this one quite fast, I feel like it’s been a while since I went through a drama so quickly. Anyways, since it was the Korean remake of a story I already knew and saw two other versions of (Japanese & Taiwanese) I guess being familiar with the story helped with getting through it so smoothly. I still wanted to see it because the thing with remakes is that every version adds something new, and I’m always curious to see how different cultures adapt the same story to fit their own frame of mind better. Even though they’re all produced in Asian countries, you can really see the differences between a Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese or South-Korean remake.
Overall, I tend to think that Korean dramas are better at building up drama and romance, but you never know what to expect. In this version for example, although of course I’ll go into more detail later, I both liked and disliked some things more than in other versions. I have to admit it’s been a very long time since I watched the original Japanese and the Taiwanese remake so I don’t remember everything from those versions as clearly, but I do remember some things were different.
I guess you could say that Zettai Kareshi/Absolute Boyfriend is a drama like Hana Yori Dango, Hana Kimi, Itazura na Kiss, a drama that has gotten remade multiple times. And it’s also one of those dramas of which I’ll watch every remake just because of the reason above – I want to see what they manage to add to it in comparison to the previous one. It’s not a story that I necessarily love as much as Hana Yori Dango or ItaKiss, but I’m still always curious to see it in different remakes. I think I’ve made my point clear enough now, haha. Let’s get crackin’!

My Absolute Boyfriend is a K-Drama with 20 episodes of around 70 minutes, or 40 back-to-back episodes of each around 35 minutes (I watched the 20-episode version on DramaCool). It’s about special make-up artist Eom Da Da (played by Bang Min Ah), who works with her team Real on dramas and movies to provide dummies, special action make-up and help with effects such as blood spurting out of a wound and stuff like that. Again, an occupation that you might not think too much about. Anyways, she and her team are currently working on a hit drama series called Doctor AlphaGo, about a robot doctor who saves patients but at the same time has to beat enemies wanting to destroy him because he’s a robot. The main character of the show is played by top star actor Ma Wang Joon (played by Hong Jong Hyun). We find out soon that Wang Joon and Da Da have actually been dating in secret for 7 years. It seems like they’re still going strong, but they’re both visibly struggling with the fact that they have to keep seeing each other in secret. The only person aware of this is Wang Joon’s manager Yeo Woong (played by Ha Jae Sook), who is like an older sister to both of them and helps them keep the secret. Da Da is an extremely dedicated girlfriend, but because of Wang Joon’s schedule, she’s often left disappointed even though she prepared stuff for him. Some years earlier, Wang Joon made a promise to Da Da that, when he receives his first Best Actor Award, he will announce their relationship to the public, something Da Da has been waiting for for a very long time. Imagine her excitement when he gets nominated and actually wins the award! But then, he doesn’t mention her. At all. Not even as a ‘thanks for your support’. And when she’s discovered by his team in his house (because she was waiting for him there to surprise him), Wang Joon even calls her a stalker and says he doesn’t know her, leading her to be sent to the police station. That’s it, that’s the last drop, she breaks off their relationship there and then. She’s waited long enough.
Around the same time, Kronos Heaven, a company specializing in creating robots, is just finishing their newest dating companion robot, called Zero Nine (played by Yeo Jin Goo). Especially Nam Bo Won (played by Choi Sung Won), who made Zero Nine, is very proud of his creation. But when he discovers that the first person to order Zero Nine is Diana (played by Hong Seo Young), he gets scared. Diana is a rich heiress with sociopathic tendencies. She was the owner of one of the previous robots Bo Won created, Zero Seven, and brought her back completely destroyed. So naturally, Bo Won doesn’t want his new creation to go to her. Against the orders of his boss Go Ji Suk (played by Jung Hwan) he escapes with Zero Nine and sends him somewhere to get him back later, just to keep his colleagues of his trail. Zero Nine is then, by accident, sent to Da Da’s house. Da Da, who is at that moment expecting a dummy from overseas, naturally assumes this is that dummy and takes it to work on set, but when she opens the box she’s extremely startled by how human it looks. One thing leads to another, Da Da trips and falls on top of the ‘dummy’ and accidentally kisses it on the lips. This just happens to be the way Zero Nine is activated and it thus recognizes Da Da as his ‘Girlfriend’.
So now Da Da is in an even bigger predicament – she JUST broke up with her boyfriend of 7 years and literally a day later she suddenly has a dating robot on her hands that keeps calling her ‘Girlfriend’ in public. Now that she has been recognized as the customer by Zero Nine, she needs to sit out the trial period and Bo Won tells her she needs to keep the robot for a week – after that, she can return him.
While she initially struggles with dealing with Zero Nine’s advances as her new ‘dating companion’, we also find out that Wang Joon is definitely not over Da Da either. In fact, he has been receiving threats including bloody messages and pictures of him and Da Da with her face crossed out, saying that he needs to break up with her or they will do something to her. We find out Wang Joon was actually planning to propose to Da Da when he won that Award, but that’s exactly when the first threat arrived. He hasn’t told anyone else about this.
As she spends more time with Zero Nine, or Young Gu as she starts calling him (literally 09/zero nine), Da Da finds herself more and more attracted to the robot, and Young Gu also starts portraying more human emotions than Kronos Heaven anticipated. In the meantime, Wang Joon goes on a solo quest to get Da Da back and figure out who this new handsome stranger is that suddenly appeared at her side calling her ‘Girlfriend’.

So first of all I want to link one of the main points I want to make about this drama back to the point I made in my review of Are You Human Too? Which is that with dramas about robots, and especially dramas in which the main character ends up falling for the robot/chooses the robot over another person, I never really quite know what to make of it. What is the message here? Because again it felt like they were making a parallel between the first and second male leads. Young Gu was a robot designed to cater to its customer’s needs, but he wasn’t meant to develop any real human emotions. On the other hand, Ma Wang Joon, who is a human, fails to recognize his true loving feelings for Da Da and when he finally does, he has missed his chance for good. I never really know what to think with these stories. On the one hand I should say, you know, if it makes sense to you and it makes you feel good, by all means do your thing! And of course it is also happening in Japan for example, that people actually marry robots. I can understand that having a robot for a partner eliminates any chance of them looking at someone else, since they are programmed to only care for you. But on the other hand, I think it’s still important to consider that they are still machines inside. They don’t have a heart and they can break or overheat or be reset without any lingering feelings or memories. I was swaying a lot between these different thoughts while watching this drama. I just wasn’t sure what to feel. Just thought I’d drop that in advance before continuing any further.

So yeah, I believe there was a lot to unwrap here about people’s intentions versus their actions. When Da Da first started warming up to Young Gu, it also felt to me as if it was just convenient for her to have someone be by her side at all times after what happened with Wang Joon. She loved him a lot, but he stopped reciprocating the effort she put in at some point. With Young Gu, she indeed didn’t have to worry about him cheating on her or leaving her or whatever. He was always the kind, sweet gentleman who did exactly what she wanted, told her the exact things that she wanted to hear, always cared about her wellbeing… I can understand how that would make a person feel at ease with the situation.
But I did feel as if she may have given Wang Joon another chance if they hadn’t missed each other that one time, when he invited her to dinner and she was going on that Han River cruise with Young Gu. If they hadn’t missed each other there, they might have actually had that talk that was necessary to fix their relationship (although I still found it a bit presumptious that Wang Joon brought the ring he was going to propose to her with, she definitely wasn’t going to say yes to that all of a sudden). But that didn’t happen, and to Da Da this was probably also proof that they would keep missing their timing. The moment had passed and it was too late. But I did feel a sting of wryness there, because I did find myself rooting for Wang Joon a little bit. However, I really didn’t agree with the way he dealt with things. He should’ve told Da Da about the reason why he didn’t keep his promise when he won that Award, I get that he had his reputation to worry about and he probably also thought he was protecting her by doing that, but he really should’ve told her about the threats. They involved HER! Forget about not wanting to make someone worry, she had every right to know about it and this would’ve cleared up SO much. And then he got all pushy and invasive in his attempts to get her back while she kept telling him it was too late. And then suddenly coming out to the press after months that he had loved her for 7 years – he should’ve done that from the start. I semi-appreciated the gesture but it really was just one desperate attempt after another and it just made everything worse between him and Da Da. He went about it the completely wrong way, in my opinion.
Also, the way he kept affirming Da Da’s negative thoughts. Even when she was happy with Young Gu, and just wanted everyone to accept that instead of telling her how wrong and unhealthy it was to date a robot, he kept telling her this wasn’t right for her, Young Gu would end up leaving her, they would never be able to grow old together, etc. I felt kind of bad for Da Da because she asked multiple people for advice and most of them all basically told her that she would get hurt if she decided to keep dating Young Gu. But she still managed to decide on her own, based on her own feelings, that she wanted to be with him. Anyways, it felt as if, even after admitting that he’d lost to Young Gu, Wang Joon still used every opportunity he got to keep reminding Da Da that ‘as he told her’, she made a mistake in choosing Young Gu over him and that just wasn’t necessary.

In the beginning, I occasionally found Da Da a little bit annoying in the way she treated Young Gu. It sometimes felt like she wasn’t treating him as any sort of thing, but she also didn’t seem to consider the robot factor much. Like, she would scold him for doing a certain thing or reacting a certain way and I would be like, ‘uh yeah, but he’s a robot, remember, he doesn’t pick up on human/emotional signals like that’. When she scolded him for waiting for her at that Han River cruise when she literally said, ‘I’ll be right back’, as well. As a robot, being told ‘I’ll be right back’, of course it wouldn’t register as ‘it’s okay for you to leave because she’s not coming back’. I mean, okay she did apologize after scolding him, but it did feel as if she was using him to vent her frustrations about her own situation a lot and it wasn’t really fair.
But then when she started developing real feelings for him, she suddenly started treating him completely differently, but still not really as a human or a robot. In the end, it was explained as being accepting of ‘whoever/whatever he was’, but it still didn’t feel a 100% right to me for some reason. I guess you can say that she did start to care about him as a being with feelings and she didn’t want him to suffer any pain, even though he probably couldn’t even feel physical pain.

Let me use this segue to talk a bit more about Diana. She’s introduced as a bit of a mysterious person, watching on from her balcony, but it’s immediately clear that she’s a source of concern for Bo Won. When we get to see more scenes from her household – which is basically just her and a team of maids and guards who are all equally uncomfortable with her except for her main companion Ran (played by Go Min Jung) – she immediately comes across as a spoilt princess who will never accept a ‘no’. When her maids do something that upsets her, she will cut their hair off and put extreme doll-like makeup on them to punish them. Sometimes she even physically hurts them. She always gets whatever she wants and she surrounds herself with ‘toys’, mostly dolls and puppets. She isn’t interested in people, she doesn’t trust people, so she prefers the company of toys since these at least won’t betray her. She’s very bent on getting her hands on Zero Nine, or ‘Ken’, as she planned to call him. Thanks to the help of a mole at Kronos Heaven, Hwang In Hyuk (played by Kwon Hyun Sang) – she’s keeping him on a leash saying she’ll pay for his mom’s hospital bills – she stays on top of everything that’s discussed at the lab concerning Zero Nine. She has no filter and no shame when it comes to just showing up at people’s places, whether that’s barging into the Kronos Heaven office or Da Da’s house to take Young Gu with her.
We find out that as a teenager, Diana was involved in a fire – which eventually caused the loss of her right hand, which is now robotic as well (maybe that’s why she decided to try out robotic toys?) – in which all of her cousins just left her behind. The only person who watched over her when she finally got out of that house was Ran, and even though she clearly isn’t always on board with Diana’s actions, she never argues with her and just lets her have her own way. It isn’t until the very end that Ran finally advises her to stop obsessing about that robot toy and to stop hiding behind her past.
Diana was that bad guy that was so annoying because she kept coming back, even after Young Gu had left her to go back to Da Da on his own free will again. She was the kind of bad guy that made you go ‘Ughh not her again, why isn’t she leaving it alone already??’ I honestly also didn’t understand why she kept going after Zero Nine, but I guess she just had that, ‘if I can’t have you, no one can’ logic.
She even went as far as to order the next robot in the sequence, Zero Ten, and give it Ma Wang Joon’s face. Then she kidnapped the real Wang Joon and sent his robot version in his place to still lure Da Da away from Young Gu. Which was a really weak plan, because everyone immediately noticed something was off with this Wang Joon. Admittedly, the scene where Da Da had no other choice to kiss Zero Ten so he would identify her as his girlfriend and stop attacking her, and the fact she had to do this in front of both the real Wang Joon and Young Gu, was pretty funny.
By the way, I have to say that Zero Ten/robot Ma Wang Joon gave me a 100% more robot vibes than Zero Nine did throughout the entire series. Yes, he looked human, but he was still stiff enough in his movements and taking in information to make it obvious that he was a robot. I didn’t get any of that sort of ‘robot vibes’ from Zero Nine. I don’t know if that was the acting, but I just thought Zero Ten was a much better robot than Zero Nine, lol.
Anyways, it just sucked because even after they were able to sue Diana and make sure she could never order anything from Kronos Heaven ever again, she still came back to sabotage Young Gu’s recovery when they discovered his approaching meltdown. It was really just never enough for her.

Although I did like how the drama started out, it did feel to me as if they dragged out the last couple of episodes way too long. In truth, I wanted it to start wrapping up as soon as Da Da and Young Gu reaffirmed their true feelings for each other and everyone was happy. Instead, the ‘Young Gu meltdown’ took a really long time to play out. And this was also the moment where things started to bug me more, especially because it felt like they were dragging every single event out and made it even more dramatic than it already was. At some point people just started to be really slow-witted and there were some choices in events that just didn’t make sense to me, and I blame it all on plot stalling.
The first time it happened was when Diana kissed Young Gu to make him recognize her as his girlfriend to take him back to her house and Da Da was all like ??? ‘He ChAnGeS tArGeTs WhEn He’S kIsSeD bY sOmEoNe ElSe??’, while that was literally one of the first instructions she found when she first got Zero Nine. It just seemed as if she didn’t pay any attention to the instructions she got when she was first introduced to Zero Nine, everything that Bo Won told her. Had she also forgotten that he identified her as his girlfriend after she kissed him?
Then, when they had established Young Gu’s meltdown due to his overexposure to human emotions. I think they mentioned the word ‘meltdown’ at least three times when he was right there next to them. And then after the fourth time Bo Won mentioned it, Young Gu was suddenly like, ‘Meltdown?? Hyung, what are you talking about??’ Like, did he seriously not hear them talk about that the first three times? He was RIGHT THERE when they were talking about it. Maybe these sound like trivial annoyances from my side, but they were all just ways to stall in my opinion. Stalling in responses of characters, stalling in having the same discussion multiple times so that everyone is informed one by one, just to dramatize everyone’s individual reaction to the situation, before actually moving on to said inevitable situation.
Also, the heart cooler incident. Talking about predictable plot tools. As soon as they announced that it was going to be delivered at the airport, or as soon as anything was going to be delivered or picked up ‘tomorrow’ or something, as a K-Drama audience we just instinctively know that something is going to get in the way. Firstly, I found it really lame for In Hyuk to have this whole ‘coming to his senses’ moment regarding Diana, and then still just came back to her with ‘so how much are you going to pay me?’ Like seriously dude, I thought you finally came to your senses?! I just didn’t understand why everyone suddenly decided to trust in Diana’s better nature after all that she’d done? The SECOND she appeared on that balcony holding the heart cooler, I was like ‘she’s gonna drop it’. Are you telling me NO ONE else saw that coming? Well, obviously none of the characters did. I would’ve been in a starting position as soon as I saw her standing there, ready to catch it. But everyone was just in COMPLETE SHOCK when she dropped it on the ground, as if they honestly hadn’t expected her to do something like that. Come on, guys. This is the woman that stabbed her maids in the hand with tiny scissors if they so much as glanced at her in a way that she didn’t appreciate. It was ABSOLUTELY typical of her to go through all the trouble of obtaining this heart cooler just to smash it on the floor before their eyes. It was freaking DIANA. The way everyone acted in this scene was just so unbelievable to me that I couldn’t see it as anything else than another way to over-dramatize stuff and to stall what inevitably needed to happen – Young Gu’s meltdown.

I personally wasn’t that into Young Gu and Da Da’s relationship. It’s probably just a matter of taste, but I didn’t find what they had very ‘exciting’ or ‘passionate’. Everything was just ‘nice’ and ‘sweet’ with Young Gu. I guess for Da Da it was really nice to just have a solid figure there for her after what she’d gone through with Wang Joon, and she probably also wasn’t looking for anything wild and passionate at that stage. And of course Young Gu did a lot of really sweet things for her. The few times when he acted a bit more ‘daring’ (this was mostly in the beginning when it was still 100% his programming) I thought it created a much more interesting situation, but Da Da kept pushing him away when he got too close to her. In the end, while they do have some kissing scenes, they’re all really calm and romantic, they’re all a special moment, and it never gets more heated than that. I really think it’s just my personal preference, but I always like it when there’s a little more fire between the main couple. Of course, as a robot, Young Gu couldn’t take too much fire, and he DID literallyt overheat at one point, so maybe it was a bit too much to ask for from the start, haha. But to me he was just ‘sweet’ and it didn’t take many other forms than that, which made it a bit ‘meh’ at some point for me.

Young Gu didn’t only become more human in expressing his emotions, he also developed more and more human traits. Including selfishness. One of the many events from the last coupe of episodes that were just stalling tools to me was when he was supposed to be sent to the Kronos Heaven head office in Switzerland to get reset. Bo Won had explained that resetting him would stop the meltdown, but it would also erase all his memories of Da Da. At the last moment, Young Gu suddenly told Bo Won that he didn’t want to erase his memories. So basically he decided it would be better to lie to Da Da about being fixed just to spend more time with her until his inevitable meltdown. I did not see how this was a good option for Da Da, but hey, I guess robots can act on their own wishes now. Anyways, it was such a waste of decision. He decided to do that, to fake having been fixed just to spend more time with Da Da, only to be completely miserable the whole time he watched her be all happy because she thought he had been miraculously fixed. I also thought Da Da was a bit naive in this though, because did she honestly believe that it would be suddenly so easy to find a solution to fixing him after having to go through so much trouble to get that heart cooler from Switzerland because it was the ONLY one left in the world? (I’m not sure about the time it took since they didn’t put any ‘so much later’ text in the screen.) So he was just being miserable because he was still malfunctioning and then when she found out through Wang Joon and everyone else (because everyone else was informed except Da Da? What was that about?) he was suddenly like ‘Let’s break up.’ Like??? Everything just stopped making sense to me. It seemed like Da Da was kept out of a lot of stuff involving her, first with the threats Wang Joon got and now with this. They both impacted her a lot but still she was the only one who wasn’t informed of anything. So much for honest relationships! Anyways, that was such a weird logic from Young Gu, in my opinion, to decide it was better to keep lying to Da Da and then only hurt her even more when he’d still suddenly disappear or meltdown in front of her while she would think he’d been completely fixed.

And then that ending. Three years pass since Young Gu’s meltdown, and Bo Won only now reveals to her that he has been in the Kronos Heaven lab all this time. He just wants her to be able to say a final goodbye since Young Gu will be collected by the head office reps ‘tomorrow’ (again, this kind of situation). Da Da says her last goodbye to Young Gu and just when she walks out the door, we see Young Gu’s finger twitch. In the next shot, Da Da is walking through the rain and someone appears in front of her with a mint-colored umbrella. She looks up at him in surprise, then smiles widely – but the face of the guy with the umbrella isn’t revealed. We earlier saw this same umbrella in Wang Joon’s car. But length-wise, it could’ve also been Young Gu. My point is, what the heck was the point of not revealing who this was? It was exactly like the ending of Big, which is probably one of the worst dramas ever, but that aside, even if it were either of the two, why not at least reveal who it was? I couldn’t deduct anything from Da Da’s face. I feel like she would’ve been much more shocked if it were Young Gu suddenly standing in front of her again, but it was a way too bright and happy smile for it to have been Wang Joon. What gives, writers?? And apparently this is one of the reasons that people were wondering if there was going to be a second season. I don’t think so (also don’t hope so), but I just didn’t see why they would suddenly make it a mystery of who was suddenly standing in front of her? It wouldn’t make sense to me if Young Gu suddenly got all better out of nowhere and was suddenly fully dressed in a fancy coat holding Wang Joon’s umbrella over her head. I don’t know, it was just weird and unnecessarily mysterious how it ended. It literally made me go ‘wtf’ when the final screen froze to announce it was the end.

Before going on to some cast comments, I want to talk a little more about the different relationships between the characters. I realize there are a lot of side characters that I haven’t talked about much yet, and I want to introduce them properly rather than just mention them once in the cast comments.
So as I said, Yeo Woong, Ma Wang Joon’s manager, is the only person aware of the relationship between him and Da Da. She has always been rooting for them, but when the whole reason comes out that Wang Joon broke up with her, she is that noona-figure who scolds him for being such a brat and hurting Da Da. Honestly, she was probably my favorite character in the whole series. She was such an awesome person. And I found it adorable that she fell in love with Nam Bo Won. It took Nam Bo Won a while to see the true beauty in her, because he was first distracted by Da Da’s team member, but she kept treating him indifferently, so in the end he noticed Woong and they eventually got married. In the three years later part it’s also suggested that they’re pregnant.
Baek Gyu Ri and Yoo Jin (played by Cha Jung Won and Kim Do Hoon) are Da Da’s faithful friends and Real team members who always work with her on set. Baek Gyu Ri is a bit older than Da Da but is a very loyal friend to her. She’s someone who looks mostly at a guy’s looks before his personality, and although it takes her a while to accept the fact that Young Gu is a robot when they all find out, seeing how happy Da Da is with him makes her give up on trying to push her back to Wang Joon. Yoo Jin is a very enthusiastic guy who also bonds with Bo Won a lot since he also has a lot of interest in robotics. In the three years later part, Bo Won has started his own robot doctor company and Yoo Jin is working with him there as well. These two people, although side characters, were very important supporting figures for Da Da, they were always there for her and cared about her wellbeing a lot. While at first they may be seen as more comic relief, they got more serious contribution to the story when everyone was filled in on the fact that Young Gu was a robot. I also felt like in the latter half of the series, when the ending fillers started, they got more scenes just to fill up the remaining episodes than was actually necessary. The whole Bo Won X Gyu Ri X Woong scenes were entertaining but they were really just side plots and didn’t have anything to do with the main story.
I feel like the Kronos Heaven boss Go Ji Suk also deserves a bit more credit because even though he was pretty rigid in the beginning when Bo Won ran off with Zero Nine, he definitely made the right choice after seeing Diana’s behavior for himself and then sided with the good guys. He first criticized Bo Won about getting too attached to his creations, and admittedly, I also thought Bo Won was very emotionally attached to Zero Nine, almost treating him like his own younger brother or son, even. I get that working with robots can make you either very attached or detached, but at least the boss got a little more attached to Zero Nine’s wellbeing. Hwang In Hyuk was a very sad person, he had money problems but I still don’t think that validates why he still went back to Diana instead of siding with his own team, especially after hearing how Bo Won still petitioned for him to get his job back after he betrayed him. So that was just too bad of him.
Lastly, I’m still going to mention that jackass CEO of Wang Joon’s company, Geum Eun Dong (played by Hong Suk Chun) was Wang Joon’s CEO, so Woong’s boss, and it turns out he was the one behind the threats. He didn’t want people to find out about Wang Joon dating a special make-up artist, Wang Joon was ‘his’ actor and ‘he’ was responsible for his success and no one else could have him. He even went as far as framing Da Da for ‘accidentally’ putting makeup with peanut elements on Wang Joon while he was allergic to that, he SLAPPED Da Da in the face in public to accuse her, and when he couldn’t get Wang Joon back he just decided he’d take another rookie actor and try to beat Wang Joon with him. He was just a very immature person. I liked how in the final episode he introduced his new actor to Wang Joon (Wang Joon had quit his agency and Woong had now started her own agency so she could be the CEO herself), and he said something like ‘this will be the next Ma Wang Joon’ and Wang Joon was like ‘don’t make him the next Ma Wang Joon, make him the first Ma Gwi Hoon’. I really felt that, I always find it so stupid when agencies (also for idol groups) do this, like ‘this will be the next [insert existing group name here].’ No, don’t make a group or a celebrity just to follow into someone else’s footsteps, that shouldn’t be your job as a manager. Help them become their own unique artist! So I really appreciated Wang Joon’s comment there, and also that in the three years later part, Young Gu’s disappearance hadn’t made him attempt any new advances on winning Da Da back. He really learned his lesson. I think everyone learned their lesson.

So let’s move on to some main cast comments!

First of all, Yeo Jin Goo. Although Yeo Jin Goo is one of these actors that I’ve sort of grown up with (starting from my 20ies, lol) from a child actor to now a main lead actor. I believe he is a good actor and that he is really able to portray a lot of emotions. It’s just, and I’ve also mentioned this before in my last review of him in Hotel Del Luna, he has a typical acting style. Whenever he’s cast in a ‘regular’ romantic comedy, I don’t think it gives him a lot of room to express as much as he’s able to. I mean, he just has this one typical smile and expression that he always uses the same way. I also really felt that in this drama. I remember seeing him for the first time as a child in The Moon That Embraces The Sun and I was so impressed with how he expressed his emotions. But now everytime I see something knew from him, it kind of feels the same as what I’ve seen before. After also seeing him as a host presenting the Girls Planet 999 survival show, it seemed to me that he really is just like that as a person himself as well.
As I mentioned earlier, he never really felt like a robot to me in this series, he was still doing way too much with his face and body. Comparing it to how Hong Jong Hyun acted when he was Zero Ten, the difference was huge. And while on the one hand I also thought yes, but he’s supposed to be an extremely human-like robot, the only moments I felt like he was a machine was when he smiled that exact same way or when he was standing outside Da Da’s door processing something. So I guess I would’ve found it more credible if he still acted a bit more robot-like, although I think that’s really hard. Anyways, his character was just a bit too similar to what I always see of him, always just the nice, gentle attitude. I did like seeing him portray more bold moves, like sweeping Da Da off her feet in the beginning asking her if she was going to sleep alone – that really felt like a robot being programmed to respond to his ‘girlfriend’ saying ‘I’m going to sleep’. I can just imagine Yeo Jin Goo cringing at that himself, lol. Other than that, he had a few random skills like the whole carnival he pulled in that indoor amusement park, the super hearing and seeing through things. And then, randomly, being able to see which tickets were being sold at the cinema(?) I think they could’ve made the buildup in Young Gu a bit clearer, as in, the exact moments when he started upgrading and became more human, because now it just blended in together. I still found him more human than robot most of the time. So yeah, I wish I could say I really liked his character and performance here, but he was just okay to me. Sorry!

I hadn’t heard or seen anything of Bang Min Ah before, but I discoverd she’s in a K-Pop girl group called Girl’s Day, apparently! Anyways, I liked her as the main character. There was nothing wrong with her acting, and I could relate to her portrayal of Da Da on many moments. I guess it would also drive me crazy being in that situation, being forced to take care of a romantically affectionate robot just when you’re trying to get over your ex of 7 years. I think I’ve talked about her character enough in the above analysis, that sometimes I found her a bit more annoying and sometimes I felt sorry for her. She was the main reason why I wasn’t really sure how to feel, as I mentioned in the beginning. Watching this drama, I wanted to root for her for following her own heart and not mind what anyone else was thinking. She had to deal with a couple of scandals by herself, but nothing brought her down, which was pretty admirable. She had a group of really reliable people around her, she talked about her feelings, which was good. I think it was good of her to stick to her own mindset and decide that she wanted to be with Young Gu because as her father had told her, she should be with someone who would love and look at only her. On the other hand, I kept feeling like she sometimes forgot to consider that he was still a machine, or that she simply didn’t want to acknowledge that anymore. When she was leaning with her head to his chest she would say ‘I can hear your heart beating just like mine’ and I would be like ‘does he have one, though?’ and when he cried it was like, ‘oh, his coolant is leaking again, it’s not actual tears’, but I think she chose to believe that he could be as human as she wanted him to be? Or something? Honestly, I’m not sure because their relationship was still pretty complicated. Anyways, I liked her performance!

I was SO excited to see that Hong Jong Hyun was in this! I haven’t seen anything from him since Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo. Yes, I have a bit of a weak spot for him. Which is probably also a reason why I kept wanting to root for his character, haha. I couldn’t help it. I guess I have a thing for guys with RBFs that light up when they smile. I’ve not even seen that many other things with him, only Oh! My Lady (which is ages ago and I don’t remember any of it) Wild Romance (in which I acknowledged him for the first time and liked him even though he was a bastard xD), White Christmas (which is amazing) and Moon Lovers. I still want to see The King Loves with him in it. Has he ever been the male lead before? I feel like I’ve only seen series with him as a side character or the second male lead.
Anyways, I felt sorry for Wang Joon when it was revealed he actually never stopped caring for Da Da, but as I mentioned, I still think he went about it the wrong way and had to deal with the consequences of his own actions. He needed to accept that he’d missed his chance and in order to do that, he needed to let go of the whole ‘I’m Ma Wang Joon’ attitude. He needed to be a boyfriend to Da Da, not the famous top star actor who happened to be dating her. So I think that’s what Da Da found in Young Gu instead. Although I did find him desperate and petty at times, I never thought of Wang Joon as a bad person. He dealt with his own issues, maybe it took him a bit longer, but he still did it and I do think it made him a better person. He stopped forcing his own regrets and feelings onto Da Da, he did remain to be a little cheeky, but I was glad to see them get along better in that final three years later part. And when he asked her to come to the US with him for his Hollywood debut, he immediately accepted her rejection as well. I think he turned out for the better at the end.

I’ve only seen Hong Seo Young in one other series, The Liar and His Lover (which I’d like to forget about). Appearance-wise, she reminded me of the best friend from She Was Pretty, with the short blonde hair. Honestly, I don’t know why, maybe it was the Diana role or Hong Seo Young herself but I got incredible IU vibes from her. As in, I feel like IU could’ve played this role very well or something? Something about the way Hong Seo Young smiled, the playful mischief and how she could switch from mischievous to menacing with one look in her eye… I don’t know why, but I just felt like IU could’ve also nailed this role. I was reminded of her, I suppose. Anyways. xD I think it’s pretty challenging playing the role of the character that everyone is going to hate, but I actually liked how she did it. I really disliked her character, but I still was able to appreciate the performance of the actor separately from that. Honestly, whatever backstory Diana had that made her that way, it didn’t really matter. Also when she had that final breakdown moment and finally gave in to what Ran was saying to her, when we even saw a flashback of her as a kid in that fire, I didn’t even feel sorry for her on anything. I didn’t feel like I needed to feel sorry for her. To introduce that kind of empathy towards her at that point was really just a little too late. I think this story didn’t need the bad guy to have a validating backstory, she was just the evil rich lady who wanted to get her hands on her toy to abuse it however she liked. In the end, she did kind of take a turn for the better, even going to the US to receive psychotherapy and all that. And I think it was good for Young Gu to explain to her that he wouldn’t have developed these human feelings if she had been his owner purely because Diana would’ve never treated him the way Da Da did – like the way he was, not as a robot or a toy or even a fellow human. I think she learned, in the end, and I appreciated that. All in all, I think she did pretty okay.

I feel like I’ve seen Choi Sung Won in way more than just My ID is Gangnam Beauty, but DramaWiki tells me otherwise o_o He has such a familiar face! I think Nam Bo Won (also love how it’s a pun on the Korean pronunciation of ‘number one’) was one of the best-hearted characters in this drama. He was a good guy from the start, his heart in the right place and he cared about the robots he created as if they were his own family. I really agreed with Yeo Woong when she told him she believe Young Gu was a good person because he was created by a good person like Nam Bo Won. He cared so much for Young Gu, shed actual tears over him and did so much to prevent him from being mistreated. I think that he must have also been very relieved that he ended up at Da Da’s place, because it was probably the best thing that could’ve happened to Young Gu, also in terms of scientific progress. He was now the first humanoid ever to express such intricate human emotions. I liked Nam Bo Won a lot, and I like that he also got some more character development and even a love storyline of his own! That just proves that you should never judge a book on its cover, never just look at someone’s face but always consider their heart and personality. Nam Bo Won was really the Number One person in this series!

I find it strange that no one has made a page for Cha Jung Won on DramaWiki yet even though she’s already appeared in multiple drama series! She does have one on AsianWiki, for whoever is interested. Among the dramas I’ve seen apparently she’s been in She Was Pretty and While You Were Sleeping! Maybe I will make her page on DramaWiki myself, who knows, haha. I’ve done it before. Anyways. xD
I think there needed to be different kinds of people around the Da Da and Young Gu couple, different people who would think about their relationships in different ways. I could very well understand Gyu Ri, even though I still found it a bit much to openly push Da Da and Wang Joon together while no one else had a problem with Da Da and Young Gu. She was a relatable character exactly because she was loyal but also a bit shallow. I still liked her, even though she mostly cared about appearances, because she was still a good friend and loyal ‘eonni’ to Da Da. I liked her in this drama.

I also didn’t know Kim Do Hoon from anything else, I see that he also hasn’t done many dramas yet. I think Yoo Jin, while in the beginning he may not have been established as a very important character, really proved his loyalty and worth throughout the series. If there was one thing the dragged on plot stalling was good for, it was to give us more scenes of the side characters in which they developed themselves into the most trustworthy companions to the main cast. I also liked that they decided to make him follow after Bo Won and pursue his childhood dream of working with robotics. I liked him!

To conclude I wish to make some comparisons to the previous remakes I watched, for as far as I can remember. The thing that was different from the start was the initial relationship between the three leads. I remember that in the original version, Da Da’s character was not in a relationship with the second male lead, but with some other guy, who cheated on her. She came across some love robot order app and in a mood of envy and desperation, ordered the robot herself. The second male lead was a different character who worked at her company and started showing interest in her, but they didn’t have any prior relationship as far as I remember. In the Korean version, the female lead and the second male lead were in a long-term relationship and there were complications/misunderstandings surrounding their breakup which led the second male lead to try and win her back. In the Japanese/Taiwanese version, she orders the robot herself in a mood of rage at that cheating bastard, in the Korean version it gets delivered to her by accident. I just realized that in the Taiwanese version, the female lead was actually Goo Hye Sun, so a Korean actress dubbed over in Taiwanese. Anyways, moving on. In the Japanese version, the female lead actually ends up with the second male lead at the end of the series, although I believe there was a special episode in which the robot came back to shake things up between them again.
I believe that in the Japanese version (is it that obvious that I remember the JP version better than the TW version? yes) the ‘rival’ who appears to kiss the robot and steal him from the female lead was her friend/colleague from work and not anyone like Diana. It was someone who wasn’t aware of the fact that he was a robot but who was definitely aiming to seduce him despite him being her ‘friend’s’ boyfriend.
I liked that they gave Da Da the special makeup artist job, it was again something that wasn’t common and also made for a direct lead to her involvement with Ma Wang Joon. I believe in the Japanese version, she was just an office worker and I don’t even remember what kind of company it was. I just remember cream puffs, although I’m not sure if that had anything to do with her work either. xD And I also remember that the creator of the robots in the Japanese version was a much older guy than Bo Won and definitely did NOT get his own romantic storyline. I guess it’s not for everyone.
Anyhow, there were definitely some adaptations made and I liked seeing the writers take this remake on with another completely different take on it. It was definitely much more dramatic towards the end, and I’m still not sure if I agree with the ending. I don’t even fully understand the ending, to be honest.
At least the first half of the series was pretty enjoyable for me to watch.

I hope I was able to make this another worthwhile review, I definitely went on to my analysis more quickly rather than give an extensive summary of all the events that happened, so I’m proud of myself for that. Progress! I’m going to continue with my list now, some other dramas that may or may not have been hyped at the time they came out. Most of them are Korean, but there’s also another Japanese one coming up and after that also more Chinese ones, so I hope I can keep providing reviews for a bigger variety of Asian drama series.

Until next time! 😀