Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Abyss
(어비스 / Eobiseu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hey everyone, I’m back! It’s been a while, but if you know about this drama series then I think you can understand why this took me a long time to finish. I was planning on finishing it in March, but you can’t predict what life will throw at you to get in the way, so I ended up finishing it in April instead, a full month (!) after my last review. When I started this drama, from the start I had NO idea how I was going to write a review about this, so I really hope that I can make it a worthwhile analysis. Because of the intensity of the drama and everything that happens in it, I will try even harder to not linger on details too much but focus mostly on my own thoughts while watching this. As it’s a quite lengthy drama in which a LOT of heavy stuff happens, here too I would like to add a trigger warning: this drama (and consequently this review) deals with themes such as: crime, (serial) murder, (child) abuse, and trauma. It may look like a fun scifi drama from the poster, but it was much heavier than I expected, so be prepared! Now, without further ado, let’s get started!

Abyss is a 16-episode Netflix K-Drama with each episode lasting for about 1 hour and 5 minutes. The story as a whole is quite complicated, but let me try to phrase it as simply as possible. It’s about two people, Cha Min (initially played by Ahn Se Ha) and Go Se Yeon (initially played by Kim Sa Rang). They have known each other since high school and there have been some tensions between them since Min has always has a crush on Se Yeon, but she’s always rejected him. Se Yeon used to be the most popular, pretty girl in school and while Min was from a wealthy family, his looks have never been a advantageous feature for him. As adults, Min is now the director of his mother’s company Lan Cosmetics, whereas Se Yeon is a successful prosecutor. At the beginning of the series, she is in charge of a case known as the Eomsan-dong Serial Killer case.
To get straight to the point: both these people die in the first episode. Min is the first, and his death is the one that sets everything in motion. Whilst hanging from a rooftop in a failed suicide attempt – his girlfriend just dumped him and he’s not taken it well – he is hit by a mysterious alien object that launches him into the sky. He is revived, however, by two equally mysterious figures. They revive with a glowing marble they call ‘Abyss’, and when he comes back to life, his appearance has completely changed into that of a handsome, tall young man (welcome Ahn Hyo Seop). He gets to keep the marble and the alien people tell him to they urge him to make good use of it, but to “keep it safe rather than use it if possible”. They don’t give him any additional information before they disappear again. Min now has to deal with the consequences of his revival, namely that no one recognizes him and no one will believe his story that he is Cha Min. He meets Se Yeon a couple of times, too, but isn’t able to disclose any info about what happened to him to her.
Not much later, Se Yeon herself is murdered in her own home – she becomes a victim of the very serial killer who’s case she’s investigating. After Min hears what’s happened to her, he manages to sneak into the mortuary and revives Se Yeon with the marble, but Abyss has the same effect on her as it did on him: she transforms into a completely different person (welcome Park Bo Young). As it turns out, when revived by Abyss, your appearance changes to ‘what your soul looks like’. Now, the two only have each other to rely on and in their new bodies, they strive to solve the case that is ruining so many lives around them.

We already find out in the first episode that the most likely suspect to be the serial killer is Oh Yeong Chul (played by Lee Sung Jae). We first meet him as a successful surgeon, and he is associated with the case because his special way of suturing is a match with the signature mark of the serial killer – he sutures his victim’s wounds up in a specific way after he kills them. However, Se Yeon gets a little too close to confront him, she visits him at the hospital one time and that’s enough for him to know he needs to get rid of her.
The cruel fate is that Oh Yeong Chul actually got murdered himself on the night of Se Yeon’s murder. He was attacked by the father of one of his earlier victims and was left on the street near Se Yeon’s house. He was found there by Min, who had just received Abyss and immediately (although unknowingly) uses it on him. I mean, yeah, you find a severly wounded man on the street, your first instinct would be to help him, right, it wouldn’t occur to you that this is actually the devil himself. Anyways, so Min actually revives the Oh Yeong Chul by accident, who then goes back on his way to kill Se Yeon. Things be messed up.
Abyss leaves a mark on Oh Yeong Chul as well. Although he doesn’t change appearance altogether, he is made to look much older than he originally was. Which gives him an advantage because people don’t recognize him immediately either and he can pull off the ‘innocent grandpa act’ for a while.
Let me just say that, if I thought Come and Hug Me was intense for a drama about a serial killer, Abyss was that + 5.0. The serial killer in this story was a complete psychopath with 0 empathy for anyone, not even his own family members. He completely believed that he had the right to kill all those people and this is what made him all the more dangerous. Because he didn’t even need a motive. Someone could just bump into him on the street or get a bit too close to a place where he was hiding something, and he would chase them down and kill them that same day if possible. It was INTENSE.

The whole main story is basically a cat and mouse game between Min/Se Yeon and Oh Yeong Chul. And it just didn’t stop. Just when they get Oh Yeong Chul arrested, it’s revealed that he had an accomplice, the person who actually killed Se Yeon that night because she was still (be it barely) alive after Oh Yeong Chul’s attack. And then they started searching for this accomplice. Just when they find out who the accomplice is, Oh Yeong Chul escapes and they have to go back after him. It was just an endless loop of a situation that didn’t seem to get better and that kept dragging multiple people with it in its merciless step.
Mostly, Oh Yeong Chul’s own family. We find out that, not only is he an active serial killer, but he also used to be a monster at home. He abused his wife and (step)children to no end, eventually driving his wife to losing her mind. He hid her in a very desolate and hard to locate nursing home. His children both disappeared from his household along the way, but are quickly reunited with him again after he kills Se Yeon. And here’s where we’ll connect the dots.
Seo Ji Wook (played by Kwon Soo Hyun) is Se Yeon’s colleague prosecutor and the son of a famous Judge. He works with Se Yeon on the Eomsan-dong case and is seen persuading her to leave the case to him in the first episode, but she refuses. After she’s murdered, we don’t see a lot of emotional response to her, which seems weird because it seems like they were on good terms. However, something seems off about him and his relation to the case they were working on together.
On the other hand, we have Jang Hee Jin (played by Han So Hee), the girlfriend that Min was attempting suicide over. She was introduced to Min by Se Yeon, and they seemed to be quite lovey-dovey for a while, but she wasn’t sincere about their relationship (I believe). I think I remember her admitting at some point that she was initially mostly interested in Min’s money and social status, however she did get more annoyed when she realized he was still completely head over heels for Se Yeon even when he was with her. Anyways, she’s kidnapped and held captive by Oh Yeong Chul for a period of time in the beginning of the series. At first we don’t know why this is, but she is forced to help him a couple of time and even when she’s released, she’s still kept on a leash because somehow, it appears he knows something about the whereabouts of her mother who she’s been wanting to find.
It takes a while to unfold, but then it’s revealed that Ji Wook and Hee Jin used to be Oh Tae Jin and Oh Soo Jin, Oh Yeong Chul’s kids (or stepkid in Hee Jin’s case). They’ve both changed their identities after cutting their ties with their abusive father – Tae Jin got himself adopted by that Judge (who had some skeletons in his own closet) and stood in for that Judge’s own comatose son, and Soo Jin went her own way as well. Their relations to Oh Yeong Chul still get them very much involved in this case, especially when Hee Jin is put in the dire situation of being manipulated by her step-father whilst she is being ‘protected’ by Min and Se Yeon and knows about their Abyss-related secrets as well.

I think it’ll be better to discuss the main characters in more depth one by one. There is just too much to unravel here and I’m afraid I will lose my structure if I don’t go step by step.
Let’s start with Se Yeon. Despite being from a not exceptionally wealthy family (her parents own a chicken restaurant), she is the pride and glory of her parents. She’s exceptionally pretty, all the guys in school are pining for her, she’s very smart and sharp, and a force to be reckoned with as a prosecutor as well. We only get to see here in her original appearance in the first episode and some flashbacks, but we find out the most about her while she’s in her new ‘form’, as I’ll call it. While from the start it seems like she’s always been a little harsh on Min, it is later revealed that she has wavered about her feelings for him before, but that the timing was never right. Throughout the series, she becomes more and more aware of the fact that Min has always been her closest ally, that he’s always been by her side more than anyone else. And of course, the events they go through brings them closer to each other than ever.
One of the most interesting things that stuck with me as I was watching the series was why she took on the appearance that she did, because in her case, her new appearance actually belonged to someone she knew. Lawyer Lee Mi Do, a rival figure of Se Yeon’s at work (who very conveniently undertook major plastic surgery around the same time that Se Yeon’s appearance changed, so even when she came back, they didn’t look anything alike). Anyways, I really wondered how it could be that Se Yeon took on Mi Do’s exact appearance. According to Abyss, people revived by it would take on the appearance of their soul, so why did her soul look like her rival? Was it because they weren’t as different from each other as they’d initially thought or something? She did end up being on better terms with Mi Do (after her plastic surgery played by Song Sang Eun), but in the end I still wondered why in her case she changed into someone, an existing person, that she personally knew. It would’ve been interesting if it was a bit more elaborated on how Abyss worked in that aspect.
In the beginning it does work in her advantage, because Mi Do is someone known to her colleagues and her appearance enables her to get back into her office, at least. It’s also beneficial in the sense that she can make use of Mi Do’s ex-boyfriend who works at the police force (I will talk in more detail about him later), so at least she has one person on her side there as well. But overall, Se Yeon goes through a great deal. Not only is she murdered and revived by Abyss TWICE, she suffers a great deal of grief, loss and betrayal in-between as well. She has to deal with not only herself, but also her parents and other people like the real Mi Do being targeted by Oh Yeong Chul. She can’t tell her parents or anyone who’s not in the loop about Abyss the truth about who she really is, and that kills her inside. The only one who truly understands what she’s going through and helps her through it is Min, and their relationship is built up as such that, at the end of it, she’s become so dependent on him that she doesn’t want to be apart from him ever again.

Cha Min actually manages to get back into his own life quite smoothly, he manages to convince everyone including his own mother that he’s had a complete make-over/plastic surgery/metamorphosis and everyone seems to buy it, with as an extra argument that no one is really surprised he would resort to this because of his former looks. Anyways, he’s able to get back to his own job and his own life, he doesn’t have to hide who he is like Se Yeon. And even though he is a bit cross at her in the beginning for how she’s treated him, and about how this situation has messed up his life as well, it’s just in his nature to be kind. He treats Se Yeon the same as he’s always done, because his love for her has never truly wavered, even when he was with Hee Jin for a while. He also still feels very guilty about the fact that he’s apparently revived Oh Yeong Chul so that he could go on to kill Se Yeon, even though of course he couldn’t have known about any of that. He feels that he needs to protect Se Yeon at all costs now, and sticks by her side like glue.
The only family Min has is his mother, since his father died away of a disease when he was in high school. His mother (played by Yoon Yoo Sun) is one of the only characters in the series who is completely kept in the dark about everything that’s happening. She’s just the mother that cares about her son. She does help him track someone or find out something a few times, but not aware of what she’s actually helping him with. I think it was a good decision of Min to keep his mother out of it all, because it would’ve only put her at risk too and Oh Yeong Chul would’ve definitely come after her as well at some point.
Min too goes through a lot. First he’s accidentally killed by aliens, but he also gets murdered again by Oh Yeong Chul at some point and loses consequently Abyss to him for a while. He tries his best to protect everyone but sometimes doesn’t succeed and he has to watch how several people he cares about around him get involved and endangered by the whole situation. We see him struggle multiple times with using Abyss, and that proves that he really also doesn’t want to use it lightly. In the beginning it seemed like Abyss didn’t really matter to him that much, that he just thought it gave him a handsome new face and was thankful for that, but he did figure out how it worked faster than Oh Yeong Chul did when he temporarily became Abyss’ owner and Min was definitely more careful about using it after he accidentally revived a serial killer with it. He carried a lot of worries with him and although he was always trying to lighten the mood and make sure Se Yeon felt safe, we could see it start to eat at him, especially at the end.

Park Dong Chul (played by Lee Shi Eon) is the police officer I mentioned before. He used to be Lawyer Lee Mi Do’s boyfriend, and even after they broke up because she went abroad, she still has a hold on him because as soon as Se Yeon (looking like Mi Do) shows up, he’s back at her feet. This initially works mostly in Se Yeon’s favor, but she does start to feel bad about using his good intentions like that, especially when Dong Chul starts suggesting they get back together. When the real Mi Do returns with her new face, he has a hard time adjusting to that as well. Anyways, Park Dong Chul is a very important character in this series since he’s the main characters’ direct link to the police investigation of Oh Yeong Chul, and they are able to accomplish a lot together. He and his colleagues occasionally make mistakes, it happens, but he does prove to be in the right occupation as he keeps pushing that the case isn’t finished yet, even though it really irks his boss. He is also let in on Abyss, even though he can’t see it (only people who have been revived by it can) and on the whole transformation of Se Yeon and Min. He’s the best ally they have throughout the series and he’s just generally a good guy who wants to serve justice to wrongdoers.

Hee Jin, as I mentioned before, is just a very easy target for Oh Yeong Chul. Because of their ties from the past, and the hold he has over her because of her mother, she can’t refuse him easily simply because she doesn’t have the physical power to go against him. As we say, ‘a cornered cat make strange leaps’. There is no logic to what she does, why she initially keeps working with Oh Yeong Chul even though she knows she’s much safer under the protection of Se Yeon and Min. The only thing that justifies her actions is that if she cut ties with her stepfather again, she really wouldn’t have had a single chance to find her mother again. Her mother, Jang Sun Young (played by Lee Ji Hyun) has become so mentally damaged due to the emotional and physical abuse of her ex-husband, but I found it remarkable how she recognized Hee Jin as her daughter IMMEDIATELY, despite the fact the last time she saw her was probably in when Hee Jin was a teenager (I’m not 100% sure about their timeline). Anyways, seeing them getting reunited was very heartwarming for as long as it lasted. Too bad that she also recognized Ji Wook as her son and never suspected for a minute that he could be in league with his father. The mother led Ji Wook to them multiple times because of her blind trust in him, and this is what ultimately became her downfall.
All in all, Jang Sun Young can be seen as the biggest victim in everything. She was abused by her husband, forced to raise her daughter in fear after her son left their household without even looking back at his mom and younger sister and just tried to save himself. After being admitted to a nursing home because she wasn’t able to take care of herself anymore, she was tricked by her son again into going somewhere ‘safer’ while he was just trying to keep her away from her daughter. All the while she trusted him, although she wasn’t mentally stable anymore she did still recognize her children because they were all she had left. After being temporarily reunited with her daughter, her ex-husband and son kept kidnapping her and hurting her and even dragged her barely conscious body away after she’d just woke up from being physically assaulted again. She barely woke up again, only to be killed cruelly by her own son, who then continued to stuff her body into a suitcase only to dump it in the ocean.
That was the scene that broke me the most. Ji Wook throwing that suitcase into the water right in front of Heejin, who was unable to do anything but scream at him to stop. Jang Sun Young deserved better, she was such a fragile but brave sweet woman and it was awful how it ended for her. Out of all the things that happened in the series, this was probably the thing that angered me the most.
I completely understood why this drove Heejin to abandon all sense of fear and plainly ran her brother over with a car. At that point, nothing mattered to her anymore. I also think it was a good move of her to move to the countryside after everything was wrapped up and Ji Wook was prosecuted. The city now only carried these extremely bad memories for her, and even though she used to be such a city girl, it showed maturity of her to start her own life over, away from everything. And honestly, what else did she have left for her in the city? Not much, as far as I can tell.

Seo Ji Wook is such a complicated character. In the beginning you just can’t say for sure whether he’s also being manipulated by his dad or that he’s willingly helping him. It doesn’t seem like he has sympathy for his father, he also chose to walk away from him, but it seemed to me as if he simply couldn’t cut his ties with him. Maybe he realized that he was too much like him after all. I honestly don’t understand what went on in Ji Wook’s head. When he first took Jang Sun Young away from that nursing home, a part of me still believed that he also didn’t want his mother to end up in his father’s hands, that he was also concerned for her wellbeing. But then he just went and killed her. And that was the point where I really thought, Okay, yep, we’ve lost him, there’s nothing to redeem him now. It was in that moment when Oh Yeong Chul died for real, that he seemed to accept his fate and the moster that he had become. He even went as far as to threaten his adoptive father, who kept covering for him for a while. I was really glad when the Judge deciding that he wasn’t going to cover for him anymore, because he did become aware of what his son made him do wasn’t right and it was better to confess to his own crimes, even if that meant endangering himself. You could say that Ji Wook (or Tae Jin) was even worse than Oh Yeong Chul, but I would personally put them on the same level. Oh Yeong Chul was delusional, he couldn’t see the harm in his acts, he justified every single murder he committed, so you could say his mental state fed his actions. But Ji Wook’s case was so ambiguous. He was so hard to read, but it did seem like he was sociopathic because of his lack of emotion and sympathy towards, anyone really. For a while I believed that Ji Wook wasn’t like his father, and in this I drew comparisons with the father-son relationship in Come and Hug Me as well. But Ji Wook did follow in his father’s footsteps, for whatever reason. The only reason I can think of is that he would always be traced back to Oh Yeong Chul, because he’d aided him before, and he was just fixed on remaining Seo Ji Wook rather than Oh Tae Jin. This is the only motivation I can think he’d have in killing Se Yeon, because she was getting too close to identifying his father as the serial killer and she might find out he was involved as well. But then again, his lack of self will in this was really confusing to me. I just couldn’t tell what his own motives or thoughts were. I think he could’ve just as well cut those ties with Oh Yeong Chul, because he was basically in the same position as Hee Jin. He could’ve chose to save his mother rather than becoming the same monster as his father. I believe that was his own choice, so I would still put him on the same level of monster as his father. Honestly, this father-son relationship was so confusing, especially from the son’s side. Why make it seem like you’re running away from your father to give yourself a chance at a new life, only to reconnect and just help him along in his cruel deeds and becoming his accomplice, whilst still pretending you’re that other guy’s son? I really didn’t follow it anymore.

As I discussed a little before, Oh Yeong Chul was a classic example of a merciless murderer. He didn’t care about anyone and – in contrast to the guy from Come and Hug Me for example – also wasn’t concerned about his children whatsoever. They were only of use to him if they could help him with something, but otherwise I really believe he wouldn’t have had a problem killing them either. He was a monster from the start, an abusive husband turned serial killer all the while living under the disguise of a revered surgeon. He had no filter, he just literally killed anyone who got in his way, even in the most trivial way.
However, he had one major weakness that ultimately became his downfall: Abyss. Even when he acquired ownership of the marble, he never fully understood how it worked. He eventually convinced himself that, if he were to die and be revived by Abyss again, his face would change again and he would be able to get away once more. So his plan was to inject himself with some lethal stuff and get Hee Jin to help revive him with the marble, not knowing that only the owner was able to revive people and yeah, he wouldn’t be able to revive himself when he died. So that was cleverly played by Hee Jin, admittedly, leading him to believe that. Anyways, although that’s what floored him (literally) in the end, he did manage to leave a legacy in the form of his son. So you could say that, even after his son left his household – which seems to have been to get away from him – he still managed to get Tae Jin right where he wanted him: at his disposal.

I’ll go on to a few criticisms, so points that annoyed me or that I think could’ve been explained a bit more clearly.
First of all, Hee Jin. I’m not going to lie, Hee Jin really aggravated me in the beginning. While it’s more than understandable her mother was her main concern, and it can be seen as admirable that she’d do anything to find and protect her mother, she just went about it the completely wrong was. It was SO obvious that Oh Yeong Chul was NOT the person to trust here and that he only followed his own interests. She should’ve known that he didn’t care one bit about her mother and wouldn’t simply let her be reunited and then leave them in peace for eternity without ever bothering them again. Still, she kept falling for his promises. She kept caving to him, believing that he would actually help her find her mother. After being kidnapped by him herself, I understand why she’d feel like he had a hold on her, but after being betrayed by his promises time and time again, she should’ve realized that she should just stay away from him! Instead he managed to keep her on a leash multiple times, and she kept falling for it. She even went as far as to tell him about Abyss and that the woman looking like Mi Do was actually Se Yeon, that she looked differently because she was revived by Abyss, and all of that! She ratted out the two people who were on her side the most, especially Min. In the beginning, Min was still very concerned about Hee Jin, it was clear he still cared about her – as she’d suddenly vanished after she’d broken up with him – but after this happened he was able to move on from her for good, she’d proven that she really couldn’t be trusted anymore. That being said, after she’d already betrayed them twice or so, they kept leaving her alone! I would’ve said, Rule number 1, never leave Hee Jin by herself again. Every single time they did, she grabbed her phone again to secretly correspond with someone claiming to have info on her mom, when they left her to go somewhere by herself, she kept being kidnapped or assaulted… she just really shouldn’t have been left alone ever again after her initial escape from Oh Yeong Chul. It was just frustrating how they kept making that same mistake, and I found myself screaming in disbelief at the screen every time this happened again. She just seemed like such a weak character in the beginning, and even when she tried bluffing her way through this, she just ended up powerless again. I have to give her credit for manning up in the end, I mean, she did manage to trick Oh Yeong Chul into his own downfall at the end, and she did become more mature, but it just took a very long time to get there.
Secondly, and this also always baffles me in drama series: how severely everyone underestimated Oh Yeong Chul. I mean, whenever anyone got a whiff of where he was, they just blindly went after him, no back-up, not even a weapon or ANYTHING to defend themselves with, they kept going after him empty-handed and then were always ‘surprised’ by his counter-attack. Oh, what a surprise, he’s carrying a syringe with him, I should’ve thought of the fact that he would never be empty-handed even while on the run! Honestly, I don’t know what they were thinking – they probably weren’t, they probably just went after him blindly – but it KEPT happening.
And the same thing happened when they went after Seo Ji Wook. Even after they already knew it was him, and they just needed to find a way to legally arrest him, they still left him alone long enough to get away. When they pulled that clever trick in legally finding evidence in his house, the police just walked out whistling and left him there and I was like ?? You have him right here! Now you’re going back to your station to officially declare the evidence as sufficient material to arrest him for, but in the meantime you’re giving him enough time to leave his house and get another burner phone and everything! Like, sometimes the police was just so negligent and naive in believing that now they’d got the guy, he would just keep still until they came for him to lock him up.

As far as more explanation goes, I really would’ve like more information on Abyss. I was really looking forward to seeing those alien people again at the end, where they’d come claim Abyss back or at least appeared again to explain something. Even when they first gave the marble to Min, they didn’t say anything, they just told him to ‘keep it safe’. For what? Why would they give him Abyss in the first place if they didn’t even want him to use it? Even at the end, when Min temporarily disappeared because he used up all the chances he got to use Abyss, he managed to come back and I was SO curious to hear what had happened. I was really looking forward to that flashback where he’d explained why he’d been able to come back, waiting to see those alien people again – but then I didn’t get the flashback at all. I guess another alien person appeared and told him ‘I told you to only use it when necessary, now you’re doomed to live on your planet in pain and invisibility forever’. And I was like ??? That’s all you’re going to give him? After everything he’d been through? You’re just going to call him out on his own stupidity in overusing Abyss? In retrospect, I think those alien people were pretty irresponsible with the marble themselves too. I really just wanted to know more about Abyss, how it worked and what the heck its use was, changing people’s appearances when reviving them. Especially because it worked differently every time. Se Yeon and Min were both turned into completely different people, Oh Yeong Chul was just aged up, but neither Hee Jin nor Ji Wook went through any major physical change after being revived. I just really would’ve liked to know more about what the whole marble thing was about. Now it really just seemed as if it ended up in the wrong kind of situation, there just “happened” to be a serial killer case going on surrounding its new owner, but it actually never originally had anything to do with the case. The aliens just gave it to Min to make up for the fact they accidentally killed him. And they also seemed to sometimes forget about Abyss, with everything that was going on. Only when it would suddenly start to glow again would they go, ‘Oh right, we still got this thing’. As the series is called ‘Abyss’, I really would’ve thought the emphasis and focus would’ve been more on Abyss and what it entailed. So I’m not sure if I’m completely satisfied with how this was wrapped up, although of course I was happy it ended well.

All in all, although it may sound like I’m quite critical about this series, I do think it was very good. Honestly, I was just surprised by how intense and heavy it was from the start, and that it was more than I expected, but it did give me an amazing thrill. It never stopped being thrilling and exciting and I was really eager to see it through, so I do think the writers did a very good job. It was a very extensive series, and so much happened, and everything was so intricately connected to each other, both the people as the circumstances and the events. The serial killer and his accomplice proved themselves to be a very challenging duo, and the story really kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. The minor annoyances I’ve mentioned don’t take anything away from the quality of the drama for me, they were just behaviors of the characters that I couldn’t really relate to.

Let me make some cast comments before I wrap up.

First of all, Park Bo Young. I believe it’s my first time reviewing one of her dramas, which is crazy! Anyways, she’s one of my favorite actresses. She always manages to proof that she’s so much more than just a cute, tiny woman, because her acting is THAT good. I think this is possibly the most angsty drama I’ve seen of her so far, where her character the most intense of situations. I was curious to see how she would take over the character from Kim Sa Rang, which is the case in any drama where people switch bodies. I think she managed to take on the confidence of Se Yeon very well, but also showed a very vulnerable side to her, one that she initially only dared show to Min, and even then reluctantly. She really dealt with her situation admirably and I’m glad that in the end she was able to tell her parents about her real identity and the mother immediately believed her since she’d already thought before that she was similar to her daughter. Anyways, she may have been a little high and mighty in the beginning, but I did like she allowed herself to become more vulnerable and this also helped her mature in the sense that for example, she opened up to her real feelings towards Min. I think she did very well.

I’ve seen Ahn Hyo Seop in a couple of dramas, like Splash Splash Love, Queen of the Ring, Thirty But Seventeen, and he’s also on a couple of dramas that are still on my to watch list. I didn’t have a strong opinion about him in the beginning, but after finishing Abyss he has been added to my list of actors I really like. This guy, this beanpole, is SUCH a puppy. I thoroughly enjoyed his performance in this drama. I think it also enabled him to show various sides to his acting. His character, or at least what happens to his characters, sets the whole story of this drama in motion. Things would’ve ended very differently if he didn’t have Abyss, and in my opinion he did manage to use it wisely, but I also think it would’ve helped him even more if he’d known more about its uses from the start. One of the alien people told him he’d left him a manual on how to use it, but it kept appearing as fragmented warnings at random moments rather than that it was an actual manual that he could read in advance. Therefore he was forced to learn more about it along the way, as he was using it. Only at the end, when there was one final chance to use left, did it care to mention that ‘oh yeah, btw, if you use up the last use, you’ll disappear as well’. Like, he could’ve been prepared so much better! But he was a very sympathetic character and I also liked that, despite his unconditional love for Se Yeon, he wasn’t blinded by it, he didn’t stop caring for other people around him either, like Hee Jin, her mother, his own mother, Se Yeon’s parents… He helped a LOT of people and that just proved that he was a good person through and through.

The only thing that I wanted to remark on, something that still isn’t very clear to me, is why it was so necessary to transform the two main characters, and mainly Min. When he transformed after being revived, the alien people also seemed to be confused as to why he changed so much, but they explained it to him that he was reborn with a face that ‘would make his life easier’. However, throughout the series they kept bringing up that Min’s former looks weren’t something to be desired, and despite everything I really still find myself thinking about the sincerity of this. Because it really did seem like it was easier for Se Yeon to get closer to him because of his new looks. It definitely made the process of growing closer easier for them. I kept thinking how fun it would be if they suddenly were transformed back to their old appearaces in the last episode, and how that would’ve played out. Would it really have been proven that they had grown to love each other so much that their looks didn’t matter anymore? I couldn’t help but wonder about it. I’ve said this about Ahn Se Ha before as well, I feel like his looks are putting him in these kinds of roles a lot. Since he’s not seen as conventionally attractive, they keep casting him in roles of a guy that’s not attractive. And I think that must sting, in a way, knowing that you’re being cast knowingly because the role you’re playing shouldn’t be too handsome. It’s really a shame, because Ahn Se Ha is a great actor and he deserves to be acknowledged for that rather than that he might not have ‘the looks’. So I don’t know, even though they kept telling each other that their looks didn’t matter anymore in the end, I still wondered what would’ve happened if they’d suddenly woken up in their old bodies again, if really nothing would’ve been different. I just wonder!

It’s funny because I didn’t recognize Kwon Soo Hyun from anything, but apparently he’s been in a bunch of stuff I’ve seen, like High Society, Age of Youth, Laughter in Waikiki and Move to Heaven! He’s also in a bunch of my to-watch stuff, so I guess I will be seeing more of him! You know what they say: if you really grow to hate a villain in a story, it just means that the actor did a good job. I had the same with his character in this series. I was really hoping something would happen that would redeem him, I was hoping some sort of humanity would come out as some point that would make me relate to him, but it didn’t and the transformation he went through in this series was pretty remarkable. As I’ve discussed, I’m still not sure about his true motives, and whether he voluntarily chose to still be like his father or that he’d somehow felt like he didn’t have a choice. I have no idea. The only thing I will never forgive his character for is killing Jang Sun Young, that just went too far for me. Otherwise, I think he did very well, especially in keeping the charade of whether he actually had anything to do with the case or not. It wasn’t revealed all at once, so it really kept me on the edge of my seat.

When checking Lee Shi Eon on DramaWiki, I realize I know him from a wide variety of series, like Kill Me, Heal Me, High-end Crush, W, Star of the Universe, Reunited Worlds, I’m Not a Robot, and Hotel Del Luna. He is a familiar face in K-Dramas, let’s keep it at that. I really liked his character. He was the slightly awkward police officer who became a key figure in solving this big case and he responded to the situation like any regular person that suddenly learned about glowing marbles that brought people back to life. He was the character that had to deal with facts and physical evidence, he was not in a position to just believe everything that was thrown at him. And even after he believe it himself, he needed strong proof to support the evidence to the rest. He worked very hard, and I’m really glad that he himself never got into any seriously life-threatening danger by the serial killer. He remained one of the people that wasn’t able to see the marble until the end, and he was still one of the most important people in solving the case. I liked his team of colleagues as well, they were a fun bunch. The way they just barged into Ji Wook’s house with that warrant to pick up that piece of evidence really cracked me up. And also good for him that he got back with Mi Do! It took him some time to get used to her new face, but they were a cute couple and I also liked that Mi Do became a trustworthy person to Se Yeon in the end.

I’ve seen Han So Hee in a couple of things and I know that she’s recently been very active in new dramas as well, so good for her! I’ve seen her in Reunited Worlds and 100 Days My Prince and I will see more of her in future to-watch list dramas too. Her character definitely made a big impression on me here, I think this is the first time I really noticed her (that or I’ve just never seen her in a major role before). Anyways, despite my initial annoyance towards Hee Jin, I still think the actress did a good job portraying her. We shouldn’t be too hard on Hee Jin, because you can’t blame people who aren’t able to stand up for themselves in trauma-inducing situations like this. I kept judging her for continuously making the wrong choices, but she really just wanted to try everything to get a lead on her mom, and as we say, when cornered, we sometimes lash out in peculiar ways. She really killed me in the scene where she watched her mother’s body being disposed of by her brother, and afterwards I just really respected her determination to get revenge, although it didn’t work out exactly as she planned. I also think now that her decision to dump Min so harshly was for his own good – it was obvious to her that he still loved Se Yeon and, she chose to liberate the both of them so that neither of them would remain stuck in this set up relationship. So that might have actually been a noble thing of her to do, although the manner in which she did it still wasn’t nice, they were engaged to be married at that point, after all. Anyways, I think it was a very intense character to portray, but she did very well in my opinion. Both scenes that made the biggest impact on me featured her, the one I mentioned before, and in a good way, the scene where she and her mom were reunited. It warmed my heart when the mom suddenly ran after her in the hospital after recognizing her, because I just hadn’t anticipated that she would recognize her daughter as an adult. That was a really beautiful moment.

Lee Sung Jae, I will never look at him the same again, haha. And to think I only knew him before as the pasta restaurant guy from Jealousy Incarnate! What a character to portray. He was genuinely terrifying in his calm and threatening ways. He was sincerely scary, especially because he didn’t need a specific reason to kill his victims. He picked them quite randomly as he went about his day, so there wasn’t a clear routine in how he picked them out. The only thing that seemed clear as that it was always someone that had pissed him off, even the most trivial way. He didn’t have a pattern in that it were always people from the same sex or age, that really didn’t matter and that made him very unpredictable. There was just no stopping this guy, he would’ve gone on doing it forever if he wasn’t physically incapacitated. I was in disbelief in how merciless he was, because it made him all the more dangerous that he seemed so inhuman. He really didn’t care about anyone, and nothing would get in his way, he would never show mercy to anyone because he wasn’t able to empathize with people. He was a strong force to be reckoned with, for sure.

I want to give two last shoutouts, the first one obviously goes to Mrs. Lee Ji Hyun. I love this woman. She stole my heart in The Package, and now everytime I see her my heart just lights up. I cared about tout of all the people whose lives were wrecked by Oh Yeong Chul, she will always be his biggest victim. He and Ji Wook went through all that trouble to make sure this frail, mentally unstable woman never said anything again and it was awful. She wasn’t able to defend herself anyway, so their assault on her was just cowardly. Every murder is cowardly, but to go after such an easy target because you know she can’t even defend herself – that hurt a lot. I just wanted to emphasize how much I love this actress and how much I loved her character, she really did what she could until the end to protect her children, even though one of them betrayed her in the cruellest way possible.

I lastly want to mention the character Park Gi Man (played by Lee Chul Min). He was the father of one of Oh Yeong Chul’s earlier victims, a teenage girl named Min Ji. After her death, Park Gi Man cut ties with everything and everyone in his family, and he is seen in the beginning protesting outside Se Yeon’s prosecuting office that they should’ve dealed with Min Ji’s case better since the culprit is still out there. He has a few head-to-head confrontations with Oh Yeong Chul, they keep wounding each other but they keep recovering from it. I kept worrying because from the start it was clear that this man could prove to be a valuable asset to the case, and I was really scared that Oh Yeong Chul would still manage to silence Park Gi Man for good before he could share anything important with the police. He did play it on the edge though, because he also went to threaten that Judge that he knew that Ji Wook wasn’t his biological son, and because of that he also almost got into trouble because the Judge schemed a whole hit-and-run accident around him. In the end though, I was so glad that Park Gi Man was there when the Judge made the public announcement that Ji Wook was indeed not his biological son, I’m glad they ended up working together and that the Judge came to the conclusion that confessing his own crimes and therefore giving up his own reputation and career was still a better choice than trying to cover up for a fugitive.
Anyways, Park Gi Man was as much a victim of Oh Yeong Chul as a family member of one of his victims, and I’m glad he was still able to contribute to the case after repeatedly endangering his own life by going after the serial killer himself. This man really had nothing to lose and it was very brave of him.
I have seen this actor in Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, Duel and The Beauty Inside, but he definitely made an impact on me in this drama. In the beginning he was quite the suspicious man, because you weren’t sure of his intentions, and there was even the possibility that he would go after Se Yeon because she wasn’t dealing his daughter’s case properly and had ignored his protests. But I’m glad that he was on the good side, and it made him a kind of lone hero, the way he threw away everything and just went blindly after this killer to give his daughter’s spirit some peace.
So I just wanted to give a shoutout to this actor and this character, since they provided another side to the story, showing that the people that are left behind are as much a victim as the murder victims themselves.

Also, there was the old man! There was this elderly man that lived in Se Yeon’s neighborhood, and they had some quarrel about him always storing his cardboards under her house or something. Anyways, he was in the area the night Se Yeon got killed and he’s the one who tells her and Min that he actually saw a younger man leaving her house that night, the accomplice aka Ji Wook. This elderly guy keeps popping up, and in the end he is the only one who can see Min after he’s ‘disappeared’ and sentenced by the alien people to live in invisibility. Then Min finds out that this man actually has an Abyss marble of his own! How this man was linked to Abyss, how he got it, we don’t know and we don’t find out, but it was suggested that he knew more about it than it seemed. I was curious to know a bit more about this too, to be honest!

Lastly, can we please all appreciate the cameo of Jung So Min and Seo In Guk as the alien people?? I was SO excited to see them and they were hilarious! That’s also why I was hoping they would appear again at the end, but alas! I did wonder who the alien figure was who appeared to Min when he disappeared because it was definitely not either of them, although Min’s narration said ‘I met them again’. I would’ve liked them to appear again T^T Haha, anyways, bless that cameo!!

It seems like I managed to keep this review relatively short, I’m proud of myself, haha! Honestly, this series has such a loaded story, there are so many events, so many side story lines, so many characters that get involved in different ways, I could not even begin to note every single thing that happens. What matters is most is that Se Yeon and Min find each other in tackling this serial killer case together with some valuable partners, they make new allies along the way and they manage to bring both the culprits to justice, Oh Yeong Chul dies because of his own ignorance concerning Abyss, and Ji Wook gets prosecuted and receives a death sentence for everything he’s committed, not only murdering people himself but also aiding Oh Yeong Chul in his actions etc. So you could say it’s a fairly ‘happy ending’, Dong Chul and Mi Do get married, Se Yeon and Min get married. It was said that Abyss would disappear as soon as he would receive an even bigger miracle than the marble, and he thought that Se Yeon would be enough, but the marble finally dissolves the moment she finds out she’s pregnant, so I guess that was his last biggest wish.
I did find it a bit suspicious that they were already quite at ease with the situation and went on dates before Ji Wook was locked up for good, but I’m glad at least they got their peace in the end, and they got to live out their lives together in these new bodies. I did find it funny how Se Yeon suddenly started to question whether their baby would resemble them or their old selves, and that in the latter case, she was worried the child would look like Min, which was kind of a sting, haha. Anyways, it was a happy ending for our main couple.

Speaking of their chemistry, which I always like to talk about, I still wanted to mention that I thought it was really good. I never expect anything less from Park Bo Young because I know she always delivers in romantic scenes, my biggest references here are Oh My Ghostess! and Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, forever two of my favorite Park Bo Young dramas. (I am so excited for Doom At Your Service where she’ll be starring alongside Seo In Guk!!) Anyways. Their kissing scenes were really satisfying, there were no pufferfish instances, you could see how immersed the two were in their performed love for each other that it just all made sense. Very well done!

And with that final remark I will conclude my review of this very intense drama. No, I cannot stop repeating that it was intense, haha. It’s definitely not a light watch, but it did a good job of balancing the heavy events with lighter and romantic scenes, so it wasn’t just a continuous angst fest, which was good. I guess my only issue with it is that with the title being ‘Abyss’, I had thought that marble would really be at the center of the story, or it really would’ve been about the marble. Instead the marble just happened to appear within this already dire situation of the serial killer and in many ways it only complicated it, but it definitely was a good thing that it revived so many people and consequently enabled these people to help contribute to the solving of this case. It’s a good thing that it didn’t do much damage in the bad people’s hands, after all!

I am now moving on to another Netflix K-Drama that I’ve been interested in, I believe it has (or will have) multiple seasons so I’ll see when I’ll be able to put out another review. Thanks for reading and until next time! Bye-bee~~ ^^