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

The One and Only
(한 사람만 / Han Saramman / Only One Person)
MyDramaList rating: 5.0/10

Hi everyone! June is here and so am I, with a new review. The weather is only getting warmer here, and while I try to enjoy it as much as I can, I also have started studying for a new endeavor. I’m still glad I was able to finish this series in-between, because I wouldn’t have wanted to drag it out longer than necessary. I’ll say from the start that the thoughts I will express in this review might belong to the ‘unpopular opinion’ category, as I’ve seen many positive and supportive reviews about this show. After debating on how to rate it, I’ve decided to go for a slightly lower rating based on the fact that I have more critical comments to list than things I liked about it. I do want to emphasize that I acknowledge the intended message, and that I don’t want to dismiss it based on its serious themes. The way they chose to go about it just didn’t really work for me. Let me just give a trigger warning: this series deals with themes like domestic violence, child neglect/abuse/abandonment, terminal illness and death.

The One and Only is a 16-episode K-Drama with episodes of about 1 hour and 10 minutes each. The story is about Pyo In Sook (played by Ahn Eun Jin), a young woman with an unfortunate past who works as a skin scrubber in a local sauna. Her mother disappeared from her life when she was young, and then her father basically dumped her at her grandmother’s place and never looked back. Growing up with her grandmother Yook Sung Ja (played by Go Doo Shim), In Sook has always been quite gloomy and pessimistic. She’s made peace with the fact that her life sucks and doesn’t really care much about living happily. The only person In Sook seems to care about besides her grandmother is a little girl from her neighborhood called Ha San Ah (played by Seo Yeon Woo). San Ah’s father Ha Yong Geun is an alcoholic with very abusive tendencies and is known to beat his wife and daughter in his drunken fits. San Ah’s mother Woo Kyung Mi, his main target, manages to sneak out of the house to earn some money so she can get San Ah out as well, nonetheless leaving her daughter alone with her dangerous husband for some time. In Sook and her grandmother have helped San Ah out several times when she was running or trying to hide from her father. Everyone knows about the girl’s situation, but it never changes and it always ends with San Ah having to go back home.
One day, In Sook has a dizzy spell at work and when she gets a check-up done at the hospital, she learns that she has a brain tumor. Not just that, but it’s already developed a lot and they’re hesitant to operate on it since it’s in a tricky spot as well. In Sook decides to register at the Morning Light Hospice, of which she sees an advertisement. She tells her grandmother that she’s taking a trip overseas and while feeling bad about lying to her and leaving San Ah behind unprotected, she moves into the hospice without anyone knowing.
At the hospice, she meets the nurses and her fellow residents, amongst whom her two roommates Kang Se Yeon (played by Kang Ye Won) and Sung Mi Do (played by Park Soo Young/Joy). While she’s getting used to all these new characters around her with all their different views on life and death, shortly after getting there In Sook receives a video call from her grandmother, all bruised and beaten by San Ah’s father. In a fit of reckless determination, In Sook, Se Yeon and Mi Do decide that, if they’re going to die, they can at least take one bad person with them, and they sneak out of the hospice to deal with San Ah’s father that same night.
When they get there, the three women are confronted with a young man who’s after the same thing as them: getting rid of Ha Yong Geun. This man is Min Woo Cheon (played by Kim Kyung Nam), a hitman who received an order to get rid of San Ah’s father and specifically, to retrieve his phone. In Sook ends up knocking Ha Yong Geun unconsciousness with a golf club and the four leave him there, assuming he’s dead. In Sook tells Woo Cheon to take San Ah to her grandma’s place and the three women return to the hospice, only to wake to the news that San Ah’s father was -indeed- found dead at the scene they left him in.
The police investigation, led by detective Jo Shi Yeong (played by Do Sang Woo), manages to get Woo Cheon on their radar quite fast, and they are also swiftly able to link him to In Sook, and before long the two of them become major suspects in the case.
Among the events that unfold as they are suspected of not only Ha Yong Geun’s murder, but also several consecutive murders, In Sook and Woo Cheon find out they have a special past connection and they fall in love with each other. In the meantime, In Sook finds her mindset changing as her and her fellow patients’ illnesses worsen. While in the beginning she’s bent on taking the blame for the murder of Ha Yong Geun -because nothing matters and she’s dying anyway-, being surrounded by her fellow hospice residents and sparked by her encounter with Woo Cheon, she slowly but surely starts to have second thoughts about how she wants to spend the limited time she has left.

I’ll keep the summary up to here, because there are already so many things bubbling up that I want to talk about. First of all, we can establish that the preface of the story is quite heavy. Most of the main characters have a traumatic backstory that includes a history with either domestic violence and/or child neglect/abandonment. Introducing San Ah’s DV situation so early on in the show sets the tone very strongly, only to top it up with In Sook’s terminal illness. It just immediately makes the overall vibe of the show very heavy and gloomy, with everyone being pessimistic about life in one way or another.
I think it’s very challenging to have a story with so many heavy themes, all the more if you don’t want to overdramatize things. In my personal experience in acting, overdramatizing things that are already heavy in itself can sometimes have the opposite effect on a scene. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened to me while I was watching this show. It happened quite frequently that they would overdramatize an already dramatic situation only to completely ruin the effect of the scene.
Honestly, in combining the women’s hospice situation with the police investigation, I felt like the writers struggled to keep in mind was most important. In some cases they added more drama and heaviness to the police investigation than to the hospice situation, while in other cases they dealt really lightly and casually with things that I would’ve considered taking more seriously. I also missed coherence in the events and construction of the story in general, and I didn’t feel a true and genuine connection between the main characters, even though that was the whole setup of the story.
Overall, I felt like they kept emphasizing the form and intention of things more in words than in feeling. I often didn’t actually feel the urgency of some situations, also because of the regular overdramatization. In my opinion, the severeness of the whole story was ‘pasted on’ more than that it came from a genuine place, and that sometimes also had to do with the acting. I’ll try my best to clarify that statement later on.

Let me start by summarizing all the main characters’ backstories and give my personal comments on them. Even for K-Drama standards, I honestly didn’t expect every single main character to have such a troubling past. As if getting diagnosed with a terminal illness in their 20s/30s wasn’t enough, all of them also happened to have had miserable childhoods.
I forgot to mention it before, but besides her abandonment as a child, In Sook also has a hearing impediment. She once had an ear infection as a kid, and some girls pretending to be her friends pushed her into a swimming pool, irreparably damaging her hearing. This is also a reason why she tends to keep to herself and not depend on others.
While her mother disappeared on her when she was still a child, In Sook’s father Pyo Kang Seon (Jang Hyun Sung) is still present in the story. He owns a café and In Sook even visits him to inform him that she’s sick. I assumed the reason why she told him and not her grandmother probably had to do with the fact that she felt more distant from him – it was probably easier for her to tell him without getting emotional. Anyways, her father never acted as a father to her and they’ve grown quite estranged from one another. When he suddenly starts acting more caring toward her after she goes into the hospice, I related to her feeling of discomfort, as it just felt weird for him to suddenly pretend to be a father to her after leaving her alone for so long. Especially after he tells her that her mother isn’t alive anymore, crushing any remaining hope she had left of ever seeing her again.
Seeing San Ah being left alone in her problematic home situation, In Sook relates to the little girl and becomes adamant about protecting her. Even if that means eliminating San Ah’s father and/or taking the blame for it – if it means San Ah can be happily reunited with her mother, it’ll be worth it for In Sook.
Honestly, while I do think that In Sook’s character was established the most clearly out of everyone and remained the most consistent throughout the story, I did find her kind of selfish in her decision-making. Taking the burden of Ha Yong Geun’s murder upon herself to protect San Ah seemed initially very selfless of her -seen from her perspective of having nothing to lose-, but on the other hand, in that almost heroic tendency she forgot to think about the people that she would leave behind herself, first and foremost her grandmother. What started out as a selfless, almost self-punishing quest to take all of San Ah’s misery along with her when she died, she didn’t consider other people’s feelings, she didn’t consult with anyone about the things she planned to do. Admittedly, she probably didn’t know how to, because she never had anyone to depend on before, but even after making new friends and forming new bonds at the hospice, she still didn’t let go of this tendency to take it all upon herself, even when there were actually more people involved. In the end, I actually thought she obstructed the police investigation a lot by claiming responsibility and continuously diverting the police’s attention away from the true culprit. No matter how selfless her decision was to do it all for San Ah, she was still only thinking about herself while this whole situation involved other people’s lives, lives that shouldn’t have been her responsibility to bear.
Also in the way she didn’t even communicate properly what was going on with Se Yeon and Mi Do, I really thought she could’ve handled it better. I didn’t see her as a victim at all, since she personally chose to deal with the situation as she did, and she didn’t need to be redeemed as some unfortunate soul who was dragged into a situation against her will. She had her plan all figured out, she’d already accepted that this was how she was going to spend her remaining time, and until the very end she kept rejecting her grandmother’s and Woo Cheon’s urges to still consider surgery and challenge life for as long as she could.

Woo Cheon grew up happily as an only child, but when he was still very young, his father attempted patricide. He drove their car into a forest and released carbon dioxide. Woo Cheon and his mom barely made it out; they were rescued by a young girl who just happened to be wandering through that forest by herself at that moment and who heard Woo Cheon banging on the car window from inside. Ever since then, Woo Cheon has remembered that girl and wondered what could have happened to her.
As if this event wasn’t traumatic enough, Woo Cheon also ended up getting involved in a classmate’s death. Even though it was an accident, said classmate’s mother decided to curse him and personally make his life a living hell. She made sure nothing came easy to him anymore. Even after the patricide, when his mother’s health took a turn for the worse, this woman even obstructed him from taking her to the hospital. This woman personally made her son’s alleged murderer miserable, and she caused Woo Cheon to end up in a ditch, despite originally being a very smart kid with bright prospects.
As an adult, being forced to wander in shady circles because of what that woman did to him, Woo Cheon got caught up in a business of contracted murder. Behind the cover of an air cleaner parts company, Woo Cheon had been executing many orders before he met In Sook. When he meets In Sook, he’s fascinated by her immediately, and when he sees her childhood pictures after bringing San Ah to grandma’s house, he is able to confirm that In Sook is the girl who saved him from the patricide all those years ago. In a crazy turn of events, the contract hitman falls in love at first sight and from there on he’s basically In Sook’s puppy throughout the whole show. He even goes so far as to become a caretaker at the hospice. While he’s initially ordered to get the phone from Ha Yong Geun, it doesn’t take Woo Cheon long to go against his orders and stick with In Sook as her health worsens. This sudden change in his behavior is very troubling for his workplace, as Woo Cheon is not the only one being pressured to deliver Ha Yong Geun’s phone to the anonymous client who ordered his murder.
Honestly, as much as I loved Woo Cheon in the beginning – Kim Kyung Nam was the main reason I wanted to watch this show – his puppylike behavior became a bit passive and tedious toward the end. At some point I found myself wondering, is he going to take any action at all? He just completely abandoned his workplace and colleagues just to quietly sit/stand/lie next to In Sook. In their scenes together, he only ever talked to her in the same monotonous whispery voice, and only hugged or kissed her when she was upset. Seeing him act so soft from the start made his alleged history of being a hitman quite hard to believe. He was such an emotional being, he cried over a picture of a foreign girl he didn’t even know, he put a flower in the hair of a dead man in a mood of pure sentimentality. Added by the fact that we aren’t actually shown any of his contracted murder cases, he just didn’t seem like the kind of guy who could kill someone in cold blood. I agreed with that police officer’s statement in the end, that ‘they didn’t actually have any evidence of the contracted murders he committed’. Like them, I also didn’t have any visual evidence apart from him seemingly ordering a car to hit a guy from a distance in the first episode. It definitely added to my skepticism regarding the true nature of his character.

To say a bit about the relationship between In Sook and Woo Cheon in general, although it started as a really cute and tender puppy love, as I just described it became a bit flat to me throughout the show. It was nice that they had built this bond, and that In Sook finally allowed herself to feel affection for someone, something she never thought she’d do, let alone in the limited time she had. But their whole endeavor of running away and going in hiding without a real plan or purpose, and then just sitting/walking/laying around in bed all day… At some point I really wondered if there was going to be any action in either of them. Like, the soft tenderness was basically all there was to their relationship. I liked the occasional spark, like when Woo Cheon would suddenly appear wearing a matching couple outfit, going against his own cringes, that always made me chuckle because that was like, an element of something new happening, some sort of event in their otherwise monotonous displays of affection towards each other.
I also didn’t really think the destiny element of them having met before as kids added a lot to their relationship. Woo Cheon could’ve just as well fallen head over heels for her at first sight without the additional link of her having saved his life in the past. It was a strong foundation to base his feelings on, of course, but in the end it only served as a tool to bring the two together after In Sook realized who he was. I would’ve liked to see them come together without this particular link, because it was such a special thing for In Sook to naturally open herself up to someone for the first time. Now it just felt like the fact that she’d been connected with Woo Cheon in the past was the main reason she let him in, and she wouldn’t have accepted him so easily if they had been complete strangers. I guess it bothered me a little that their relationship seemed to rely heavily (if not solely) on their past connection.
All in all I just felt like there were a lot of cases where they added a specific detail or instigating reason for something, and then completely lost sight of it later. Like, the importance of the foreign girl’s picture and the dog Woo Cheon was taking care of – they seemed to be really important things for Woo Cheon, but at some point they were just never mentioned again. Even in terms of In Sook’s hearing impediment, as someone on MDL sharply pointed out: they made such a big deal about her being hard of hearing, so much so that she didn’t even hear the fire alarm go off when a fire broke out at the hospice – yet from some point on it wasn’t really mentioned again and she also had no trouble hearing Woo Cheon despite his whispery way of talking. It’s like, they started off with a lot of specifics, and then just dropped them throughout the show, seemingly forgetting about them. All of that added to the messiness of the writing in my opinion.

Se Yeon was also a victim of domestic violence as a kid. She had to watch her mom get beaten by her dad, and when he would collapse on his bed afterwards, she was sent in after him to clip his toenails or soothe him in some other way.
As an adult, Se Yeon is married to a guy who, despite his genuine love for her, has let her slave away for his mother during their entire marriage. Tending to her demented mother-in-law’s antics, even bringing her own mother along in taking care of her, Se Yeon has become utterly unhappy and lonely in her marriage. Add to that the fact that she’s had a couple of miscarriages and the revelation that she has lingering attachments to a woman she was in a secret relationship with during her college days. She meets this woman, Ji Yoon Seo (Lee Young Jin) again by chance as her new divorce lawyer and this reignites a spark between them. Besides her fourth-stage blood cancer, Se Yeon has also developed a habit of sleepwalking, and this is how she’s introduced to In Sook on the first night she arrives at the hospice. It also turns out that she was sleepwalking the entire night of the attack on Ha Yong Geun, as she doesn’t remember anything about it the next day. Initially, this works to her disadvantage as Mi Do immediately pins the act on her as she doesn’t remember anything anyway (#TrueFriendshipGoals). However, Se Yeon ultimately remembers everything and becomes the peacemaker between In Sook and Mi Do, whose personalities clash the most. She also manages to work out her divorce case and make peace with her own mother and her in-law before she passes.
Honestly, even though I empathized a lot with Se Yeon’s backstory, her character just fell very flat to me. She was so passive the entire time and I couldn’t quite gauge her. I didn’t get any kind of personality from her. Like, she was a nice character, she was a good person, but I didn’t actually feel anything for her. If I did, her death would’ve probably made a much bigger impact on me. It was touching that she was able to see the green light and that she passed peacefully with her head resting on In Sook’s shoulder, but it didn’t make me feel anything within, for some reason. Her character was just too unspecific, there weren’t any specific traits about her that made her stand out to me and made me like her in particular.
I did like that it was normalized that she had a history with another woman, but again nothing was specified. Se Yeon herself remained very stoic, and even when she was talking about her own experiences I couldn’t figure out what she was actually feeling. Her dialogues mostly consisted of monotonous, sentimental phrases spoken into air more than directly to the others. She would reminisce about things a lot but they remained words more than that they became real feelings towards what she’d experienced.

Mi Do is a popular influencer with countless followers on Instagram. As a child, she was involved in a very tragic accident involving her younger brother. While she ventured out onto some rocks at sea, her little brother tried to follow her (supposedly, as we don’t get to see what actually happened to him) and ended up falling into the water, drowning. Mi Do has had to grow up not only with her own feelings of guilt, but also the guilt that her parents projected on her. She moved to Seoul and started posting a lot of information about herself online, in the faint hope that her parents would see her and take note of how she’s doing. Her parents never came to visit her after she’s diagnosed with stomach cancer, and despite the fact that she puts up a front and flaunts with her many rich and influential friends, Mi Do is actually very lonely. The only person who takes an apparent interest in her is her friend Goo Ji Pyo (played by Han Gyu Won), a chaebol who also invested in the hospice, if I remember correctly. Though Mi Do has a one-sided crush on him at first, at some point he starts returning her fancies and they even decide to get engaged and married, although his true intentions towards her are never fully confirmed. I personally never felt like he truly loved her, also in how his immediate response to Mi Do asking questions was to gaslight her and redirect those questions back to her, making her feel like she wasn’t being sincere towards him either. Their relationship seemed problematic to me because it felt like a yearning for attention from Mi Do’s side versus an act of charity towards his dying friend from Ji Pyo’s side.
At the end of the series, Mi Do’s mother visits her once, only to ask her for money. In a way, this helps Mi Do finally let go of whatever hopes she’s had of reconciling with her parents. She’s able to let go of her final regrets before she passes.
I’m not going to lie, I only started feeling empathic towards Mi Do in the final two episodes. When her mom came to visit and not only shamelessly asked for money rather than how she was doing but even accused her of lying about her illness on social media, that was appalling. That was the first time I truly felt bad for Mi Do, she didn’t deserve to be treated like that, least of all by her own mother. How her mom just stopped caring about her like that is beyond me. After losing one child, she couldn’t bring herself to love her remaining one, she even saw it as a betrayal towards her deceased child if she’d continue to love Mi Do. I totally agreed with Mi Do when she told her mom to just leave. No need for that kind of negativity, that’s not the kind of closure she needed when she was already at the end of her life. I’m glad she made peace with the fact that she now didn’t have to hope for anything from her parents ever again. In the final episode, I really felt sorry for her, you could see her just fade away, she was only a shade of the beautiful lively influencer that she was at the beginning of the series.
While the final two episodes kind of redeemed her for me, up until that point I never actually found her particularly sympathetic, to be honest. She was really self-absorbed, and although I understood that she didn’t like to be kept out of things, she didn’t make a habit of putting herself in other people’s shoes either.

Based on the summary from MyDramaList (which I now find to be very misleading), I expected the story to be about these three women forming a strong bond during their time in the hospice, contemplating life and death. It immediately made me think of Andante, which did a really good job of balancing the hopeful nature of the peaceful place with the cruel truth of the people residing there.
A hospice is a place where sick people who can no longer be cured are waiting for their end. There is nothing romantic about it. Of course I can understand that it offers some solace as a final resting place, a place to calmly spend what remaining time the patients have in a nice and peaceful environment. I assume that in this show, the objective was also to depict the hospice as a place for healing, where people without hope of recovery came together and made some nice final memories, despite having already accepted their fate.
I found it a bit difficult to construct my critical comments on this part because I really want to acknowledge the hopeful message they tried to convey through the hospice, but I just felt like they went about it in a way that I personally couldn’t relate to that much.
Honestly, I was kind of surprised about the fact itself that In Sook registered for a hospice, because it didn’t seem to be in her nature to ask for help or care like that. I didn’t find it characteristic of her at all to voluntarily get admitted to a place like that, and to voluntarily get herself surrounded by all these other people.
Anyways, as soon as she gets there she is greeted by a quirky group of residents, including the nurses. There’s Moon Young Ji (So Hee Jung), an ALS-patient who’s always accompanied by her young daughter Ji Hoo (Kim Soo Hyung). There’s Shaman Lady Cha Yeo Wol (Joo In Young), who has ovarian cancer, Oh Cheon Deok (Sung Byung Sook), an elderly lady who’s in the final stage of colon cancer but still has an incredible appetite, and finally Choi Sung Hae (Lee Hang Na) aka the ‘hope’ of the hospice, nicknamed as such because she’s been living relatively healthily for two years, which is longer than was estimated when she was first diagnosed with liver cancer.
Despite all being terminally ill, it was as if these people were introduced as a kind of comic relief side characters. The way they introduced themselves to In Sook was also a bit like, ‘Hi there, I am (…), I have this type of cancer. So what brings you here?’ While I can understand that they wanted to establish the hospice as a place of relief and comfort from everyone’s troubles, it still felt a bit weird to choose this of all settings to base the comic relief in, presenting it as a kind of fun club that In Sook was joining. The only moment I truly felt the earnestness of the hospice setting was when Young Ji passed away, because it felt like a kind of wake-up call that made everyone remember that they were all dying in there. Until something like that happened, everyone was just kind of carelessly frolicking around.
Adding to this, I was also weirded out by the frivolous characters of Sisters Magdalena and Veronica. Sister Magdalena (played by Lee Soo Mi) is the director of the hospice, and she’s a woman with a very jolly disposition and a preference for good wine. Now I suppose it’s not prohibited for nuns to drink wine, but she still didn’t seem very nun-like to me in personality. The same went for Sister Veronica (played by Yoon Bo Ra), who was clearly interested in finding a nice guy, or at least fangirling over handsome men. She even ended up with one of the police officers from the investigation.
All in all, I guess in hindsight I just didn’t really see the necessity of tying this suggestion of Christianity to the hospice. It could’ve just as well been a regular care home without people dressing up as nuns. Other than these two Sisters, I didn’t catch any other reference to Christianity. It wasn’t like they had masses or that the residents were encouraged to pray to God or anything. It was more like a volunteering service, with the remaining staff mostly made up of ex-convicts. What was the additional value of making the two women nuns rather than simply nurses? If it had been the point to make it a Christian style hospice, there should’ve been more consistent references to that. Would Shaman Lady Yeo Wol have chosen to stay at a Christian hospice? It just seemed a bit random to add in nuns but no further indication that there was a link to Christian faith at the hospice, and it only added to my feeling that the hospice was creating a certain ambiance purely for entertainment.

I guess my main criticism regarding the hospice was the fact that they mainly chose it and its residents for the comic relief parts. The decision to depict the hospice as a kind of fun daycare center with picnics and bazaars gave me an odd feeling, like they were really putting on a show to distract people from thinking about the fact that they’re dying. Of course, it can be a welcome distraction from thinking about it all the time, but I just didn’t think it was good to completely push it away. I would’ve personally tried not to depict the hospice like a more carefree and happy place than it actually was.
In the end, the ex-convict staff members and Woo Cheon are talking about how the hospice also healed their wounds during their service there, and that strengthened me even more in the idea that that was supposed to be the image that the hospice portrayed. I got the idea from the way they depicted it, but during the series itself this just wasn’t proven to me strongly enough. Again, only in the form, the way they tried to create the impression that the hospice was the kind of place that would make you feel like that. I didn’t actually feel it for myself, and that took away a lot of the experience. It was literally like listening to people talk about something great and not being able to relate in the same way, even though you were supposed to.

To conclude my comment section about the hospice, I lastly want to mention the case of Choi Sung Hae, the ‘hope’ of the hospice. At some point there’s this whole party celebrating that Sung Hae made a miraculous full recovery. That already made me go 🤨 because, really? The tumor just shrank and disappeared by itself? Seeing as she was always referred to as the ‘hope’ of the hospice, she was sent off memorably, giving everyone left behind hope that they can also still recover (or something). Heck, she even went on Mi Do’s livestream to give a sentimental speech about how she miraculously recovered. Well guess what, turns out it’s all a lie. She’s not recovering, she’s moving to a hospital to sit out the final part of her illness. Seeing as she’s the ‘hope’ of the hospice, she feels like she can’t show the others that she’s actually dying, and that’s why -in agreement with Sister Magdalena- they decided to make it look like she recovered. …I couldn’t agree more with In Sook at this point, because seriously? False hope is what you’re going for, in a place like this? The fact that she used her reputation as the hospice’s ‘hope’ to justify why she did this, I was like, are you kidding me? The people that called her that only did so because she managed to live longer than was estimated, they don’t actually expected her to live. I just couldn’t agree with this method of lying and giving the others false hope, even if it was to ease their minds. This was another thing that just baffled me about how they dealt with stuff at the hospice, they were so bent on keeping up a cheerful and hopeful front that they would even lie to their patients. These people were already preparing themselves to die, they didn’t even expect to make a full recovery anymore, so why give them even more false hope? Also, it seemed like some people were actually aware of the fact that they were being lied to, so really, what was the whole point of this farce?
It was so wry because I remember that this episode, which was also called ‘Hope’, was a pretty wholesome episode altogether. Different characters talked about different kinds of hope, and for the first time I felt something come together in the story. But then this happened. Like, fair enough, false hope is also hope, but I was seriously disappointed in how they dealt with this. Sung Hae felt like she couldn’t even be honest about her condition to her hospice friends, only because she didn’t want to disappoint them that she wasn’t actually worthy of the ‘hospice hope’ title. So much for keeping up a nickname!

I just want to talk a bit about In Sook’s circle, namely her grandmother, father, and San Ah.
Yook Sung Ja raised her granddaughter as her own child after her son left the young girl on her doorstep following the disappearance of his wife. She cares about In Sook more than anyone, and is also broken by the news of her illness more than anyone. After finding out about In Sook’s admission to the hospice, Sung Ja starts frequenting the place and helps out with the cooking. While also being kept in the dark of what’s truly going on, and only occasionally being surprised by news fragments of In Sook being suspected for murder, Sung Ja always stays loyal to her granddaughter and highly encourages her relationship with Woo Cheon, as she sees that he has the ability to make In Sook smile as she’s never done before.
Sung Ja was definitely one of my favorite characters in this show, this lovely yet edgy old lady who so powerfully faced life despite all the misery that happened in her direct environment. The scene where she’d just heard about In Sook’s illness and she had this monologue like, ‘I’ve only ever asked for one thing, for In Sook to be happy, why can’t she have even that?’, that gave me goosebumps. The way she just couldn’t understand why In Sook kept getting more misfortune thrown her way, she only wished for her granddaughter to smile and have some joy and love in her life. She knew her better than anyone else, knew what she went through with her parents and everything, and she was always there to cook her a meal and care for her, despite In Sook’s frequent fits of anger.
On the other hand, In Sook’s father Pyo Kang Seon kind of made a fool out of himself. He was very well aware of the fact that he had fully abandoned his daughter, and he did seem kind of awkward in his communication with her when she came to visit to tell him about her diagnosis. But then somehow he starts feeling extra bad about his behavior and starts trying to redeem himself as her father, even visiting her at the hospice and suddenly caring about Woo Cheon as In Sook’s boyfriend. Like In Sook, I was kind of like, ‘yeah, right, now you come running’ whenever he showed up, but I guess it was well enough that the whole family managed to make up. The scene where the four of them had a meal together and he kept giving Woo Cheon pieces was nice, I admit. But as a character he really didn’t have that much to add to the story.

If there’s any character that stole my heart in this show, it’s little San Ah. So young, yet so wise. I loved how she just saw through everyone at once. Even when she was intimidated by her father, she was always looking around, always staying alert. The fact that she didn’t drink the milk he was trying to feed her, immediately realizing there must be something in it, the way she just knew her mother had done it, and how she didn’t blame In Sook or her mother because she acknowledged they did everything in order to protect her. She was one of the most mature characters in the whole show. I liked how she also started coming to the hospice more and became friends with Ji Hoo. In hindsight, In Sook really shouldn’t have been that worried about how San Ah would turn out, the girl herself basically told her mother to turn herself in as she would stay with In Sook’s grandma, no worries. She was so wise and mature for her age, it was sad to realize that must’ve come from her experiences, but I was glad that there was at least one person in the story who acted smartly and didn’t make a bigger drama out of things. She really dealt with her situation better than In Sook did, I’d say.

I also couldn’t find it in myself to be angry with San Ah’s mother. I assume she felt horrible the entire time that In Sook was trying to take the blame, and I found it very brave of her to still decide to own up to her crime in the end. Honestly, as much as I loved In Sook’s grandmother, I did feel like she treated San Ah’s mom unfairly after she confessed she’d been the one who killed her own husband. Like, the first thing Sung Ja did was blame her for putting In Sook in the position of taking the blame. When she said, ‘I hate you’, to her, I really went, ‘Nah, granny, that’s not fair’. She and Kang Seon were both acting as if In Sook had been dragged into this mess, as if she had been forced to take the blame, they were pointing fingers at Kyung Mi and Woo Cheon and I was just like, NO. In Sook was responsible for all of it herself. She didn’t even talk to anyone before deciding out of her own volition that she would take the blame. Yes, San Ah’s mom could’ve turned herself in earlier, but it also made sense that she only did it after getting San Ah’s confirmation. The fact that San Ah forgave her was what made her feel okay to speak up. I kind of liked that she also did so without informing In Sook, because it just emphasized how self-absorbed In Sook’s actions had been. I wasn’t even angry at San Ah’s mom, she never asked In Sook to take the blame and it was brave of her to finally step forward when she did.

Let me get back to clarifying my earlier statement about how everything in this drama seemed to be ‘pasted on/performed’ rather than that it came across as genuine to me.
For one, the bond between the three women. I get that the idea was to let these three women grow closer as they all got involved in this murder investigation case, about how In Sook found solace in their company and how they would face their end together. However, truth be told, I only felt this strong bond between them for the first time in the second-to-last episode, right before Se Yeon passed. Before that, I got the idea of their friendship, but I didn’t actually feel it. It was like they were portraying the ‘form’ of the friendship and emphasizing it with words more than with conveying their true feelings in less literal ways. I noticed it a lot, especially with Mi Do (or Joy, in her acting). She acted for herself a lot. For herself, to herself, or within herself, I’m not sure how to phrase it in proper English. I just mean that I often didn’t feel like she was truly connecting with her co-actors when she was delivering her lines. It was in tiny details, like whether or not she was looking at someone while saying her lines. This would already make such a difference in whether or not she was really connecting with others. The fact that this happened frequently was a major reason why I didn’t feel a real connection between the main characters, until right before Se Yeon passed.
In terms of the story, this feeling of a lack of true connection was strengthened by the fact that In Sook kept all kinds of information from the other two. She chose to shoulder everything alone, keeping them out of the loop while they were just as involved as she was. On Mi Do’s side, she just went on reporting stuff to Ji Pyo whenever she felt pissed off at being left out of things. When she discovered that In Sook and Woo Cheon had already secretly come back to the hospice after disappearing for a while, she just assumed they’d been there all this time without telling her and grabbed her phone to call Ji Pyo. And she would’ve done so if Se Yeon hadn’t stopped her in time. This event was already towards the end of the show, when they should already have established some kind of solid trust foundation. Everyone was just acting out of their own interest. Like, okay, I get why Mi Do was disappointed by being kept out of the loop, but she also made everything about herself. She never put herself in In Sook’s shoes either. It was like they created this impression of being a ‘one for all, all for one’ unit-of-three, but in reality the characters’ behavior kept proving to me that they were still too absorbed in their own issues to really look at it from their friends’ perspectives.
It took until the final two episodes for me to finally feel that connection between them, when they pushed their beds together and lay there hugging each other, and when they sent Se Yeon off at the beach. That was the first moment I felt that the three of them had truly come together. Before that it just never felt a 100% real to me.

Creating the impression of a solid family vibe based on trust but not acting accordingly to it in reality wasn’t just reflected within the friendship of the three women alone, it also appeared within the hospice in general. For one, I felt incredibly sorry for Moon Young Ji, the ALS lady. She was the only patient in the side character group who was physically incapacitated and who constantly needed someone to take care of her and monitor her. Her daughter Ji Hoo was almost constantly present in the hospice to help out, but the nurses also occasionally asked fellow residents to take care of her. I don’t know if this is common, I guess it seems plausible as long as there are some healthier residents around who can help out. Anyways, I imagine that asking this from fellow patients relies heavily on a strong shared trust and mutual dependability. You would expect everyone to treat each other with appropriate care and responsibility, seeing as they’re all basically in the same boat.
In contrast to that belief, I was shocked to see how neglectful the main characters were towards Young Ji. They literally forget about her two times, all because they were too absorbed in their own drama, and she had to be taken to the ER both times. Like, she literally started seizing in bed and fell hard on the ground, unable to hold on to anything or call for anyone to help her. They even tried to blame it on the police getting in the way in the second case. Agreed, the police should not have obstructed Woo Cheon in getting to her, but he was supposed to be by her side already. If he had remembered that it was his turn to take care of her, the police wouldn’t have been an issue, so that was not a legit excuse in my opinion. It was his responsibility and he forgot about it in the first place. So much for shared responsibility.
Young Ji’s death genuinely made me cry. The way she was lying there with Ji Hoo in bed next to her… The reason her death hit me extra hard was because of Young Ji’s and Ji Hoo’s mother-daughter bond. Though only played out in a total of seven episodes, theirs was the only relationship in the show that I truly felt in my heart. They were so connected, there was no room for self-importance in their relationship, and that’s what made it so real and painful when Young Ji passed.
I did not get as touched by anything else or any other death for that matter, as much I did with Young Ji’s passing. I said what I said.

Until the end, I never understood why In Sook kept so much information from Se Yeon and Mi Do. Like, all three of them were involved, even though In Sook had been the one wielding the golf club. Se Yeon and Mi Do’s major worry throughout the show was the fact that they believed they killed someone, even though we already find out in the first half that this is not the case. For their peace of mind, In Sook should’ve at least shared with them that they weren’t responsible for the guy’s death. I didn’t understand why she kept her sick friends under that impression until the end, it was completely unnecessary to add to their already dire situations. She could’ve easily chosen to tell them without mentioning she knew it was San Ah’s mom. She could’ve just said, ‘hey, Woo Cheon told me that at his interrogation they said that the cause of death was suffocation, so it wasn’t us’. Like, there was no reason why she wasn’t honest about it, and that bothered me.
Also, I didn’t understand why In Sook and Woo Cheon, after discovering Goo Ji Pyo’s true nature, didn’t at least warn Mi Do not to tell him too much. If they wanted to spare her feelings because they knew she liked Ji Pyo (and honestly, I think Mi Do wouldn’t have believed them right away if they’d told her), they could’ve at least said something like, ‘hey, the whole situation is delicate, people are looking for us, let’s not share too much with other people in general, including Ji Pyo’. Now it just seemed like they didn’t even care to think about how Mi Do was connected to him, and how she might spill some beans to Ji Pyo. They knew she liked and trusted him, and she was going to marry him for god’s sake. Were they really just going to let that happen and let Mi Do live in oblivion while they knew she was marrying a murderer and a fraud? The only thing In Sook said in the end was, ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell you’, like, that’s it? You couldn’t? As in, you were physically incapable to? Girl had all the time and space in the world to tell them in private, they shared a room and the three of them already had several secret discussions after the golf club incident. I just don’t understand why she couldn’t at least ease their minds in that they didn’t kill the guy, and make sure they didn’t reveal too much to others.
I couldn’t blame Mi Do too much in this because she genuinely knew nothing of Ji Pyo’s involvement, but I did still think she could’ve thought to be more careful by herself. I facepalmed so hard when she got drunk and just went full-out, ‘Oppa, I may have killed a person’🤦🏻‍♀️. Even after that she kept telling him stuff about In Sook and Woo Cheon, while they were in hiding at that moment, in secret. Like, she could’ve thought not to talk too much about it in general as they were keeping stuff under wraps in general. This again added to what I meant when I said that despite creating the impression that they were a unit of three that had each other’s backs, in the end every character really just acted out of their own accord and interest, especially In Sook and Mi Do.

On a side note, it also bothered me how much the ‘I’m dying anyways’ line was used as an excuse on so many occasions. It just completely downplayed the severeness of the women’s situation, and again made me feel like it was all words and no real feelings. ‘What does it matter, we’re dying anyways’, ‘who cares if we get arrested for killing someone, we’re dying anyways’. Seriously, how to make light of something so heavy and serious.

Let me go on to the police investigation part of the story, introducing some of the main side characters in the police force.
In the first episode, we are introduced to police detective Jo Shi Yeong, a quite stoic and mysterious guy who seems to have a particular interest in the case, although we never find out what that is. Despite his prominent role in the first half of the series, Jo Shi Yeong’s character disappears completely after episode 10. The only thing mentioned about him afterwards is that he was fired for going against the story that they’d already brought out, about how the whole thing is a serial killer case and all three murders are connected. I assume that for whatever reason his character was written out of the drama, maybe there were some issues with the actor or management or something, but it was clear that this was not the intention from the start. When they mentioned Shi Yeong’s dismissal, I actually started doubting myself for completely missing that, but no, he really just stopped appearing from one episode to the next. I kept hoping he would come back, that he was still there and had been working on something in the background, but alas. It was a shame, because I was really interested in his character and his motivation to get involved in this case. He even reveals to his colleague that there’s something particular drawing him to the case. At some point Ma Jin asks him why he’s so emotional about this particular case and if it has to do with In Sook, to which he answers: ‘You know that’s not the reason’, thereby suggesting there’s something else. But then he disappeared and we never found out what it was.
He didn’t really get to do that much besides interrogating Woo Cheon and finding out he probably wasn’t the killer when Ha Yong Geun’s autopsy revealed that he died from suffocation rather than being struck down with a golf club. It was just at the point where he discovered a lead to Goo Ji Pyo, so I’m still bummed that we didn’t get to see him figuring out the case. Now Ma Jin had to do it all by herself.
Shi Yeong’s team leader Hwang Ma Jin (played by Lee Bong Ryun), starts carrying the entire case by herself as soon as the lead on Goo Ji Pyo is revealed. She singlehandedly goes against her annoying chief (seriously, that lady pissed me off so much) and even disobeys orders following her instinct that In Sook and Woo Cheon may not actually be guilty and that it might not be a serial killer case after all. Assisted by Oh Jin Gyu (played by Jang In Seob) -the officer who ends up with Sister Veronica- she keeps pushing for re-investigation and tries what she can to stop her seniors from releasing unconfirmed suspicions into the world.  

Truthfully, I got the impression that the writers didn’t really know how a normal police investigation worked. I definitely don’t claim to be an expert, but I listen to a weekly true crime podcast and there’s always a specific way in which the police force acts when they discover a murder. One of the first things they always do, is immediately get in touch with the direct family and partner of the victim, as it’s often the case that a partner or someone close knows more about it. Even if it’s just to get an alibi from them or take DNA or to just get them to cooperate in the investigation, I gathered that it was normal to rule out any involvement from direct family and partners first.
In the case of Ha Yong Geun, the police didn’t even talk to San Ah or her mother. They were his direct family members, the direct victims of his abuse which gave them a major motive, but the police didn’t even interrogate them or take DNA or anything. The fact that they didn’t even take San Ah’s mom in for questioning, and she was literally just living her life while they were running around in circles to locate In Sook and Woo Cheon was kind of wild to me. When San Ah’s mom ultimately decides to turn herself in it just felt like a big anticlimax to me. Not because she turned herself in, but because I thought ‘…This was literally the only thing that needed to be done.’ The whole story of In Sook trying to take the blame and her and Woo Cheon debating on whether or not to turn themselves in and then going in hiding again just felt so meaningless then. It was just a whole lot of drama about nothing, when the only thing that needed to be done to solve everything was San Ah’s mom owning up to her own crime.
The fact that the whole police investigation went on and on about In Sook and Woo Cheon’s involvements, and how they kept releasing unconfirmed suspicions to the public without 100% evidence made it all seem very unrealistic to me. Also, to hell with that chief police officer lady who was only ever screaming at people and pointing fingers, threatening to fire people if they didn’t just follow with the story that they had created even if it was false. She’d allegedly been the one to dismiss Shi Yeong, and after San Ah’s mom turned herself in, she herself also disappeared. They only mention that she got frustrated, went for a drink and ended up getting a DUI. Some top-notch police officers, that lot.
It all just seemed so unbelievable. A regular well-functioning police investigation team wouldn’t have acted like this, and they certainly wouldn’t have exposed all kinds of information to the public before the investigation was completely wrapped up and fully confirmed by all involved parties.
In Sook was definitely not helpful in obstructing the investigation by trying to take all the blame and be the hero for San Ah, but I also couldn’t understand why the police didn’t even think about the fact that In Sook may have been protecting someone in taking the blame. They just went along with her confession, but it should’ve been so obvious when her testimony didn’t add up. Seriously, the incompetence of the entire police force was baffling to me.
I was even disappointed in Ma Jin, although she was the only person who realized something wasn’t right after Shi Yeong disappeared and tried to do something about it. She was left completely alone in her attempts to prove her seniors wrong, and her attempts weren’t exactly steadfast. I remember a scene where she followed Goo Ji Pyo all the way to the hospice to ‘confront him’ there in the middle of the hallway, with Mi Do standing there as well, like really, this is how you think you’re going to get it out of him? He just denied knowing anything and she was left standing there, it was kind of lame.
The way the police tried to deal with the case was just super confusing and frustrating and it didn’t give me any assurance that they would figure out the truth. Instead they just started exposing In Sook and Woo Cheon on the news as murder suspects while they didn’t even have any concrete evidence for that yet. So either the writers were striving to portray the police force as a useless bunch, or they just genuinely didn’t know a thing about murder investigation procedures. It seemed like the latter to me.

Let me move on to the final batch of characters, and the truth about all the murder cases.
As mentioned before, Woo Cheon was working for a company that had as its cover parts for air cleaners, called Narae Cleaning. His closest colleague and older friend who stands by him in his work is Shin Tae Il (played by Ahn Chang Hwan). The order for Ha Yong Geun’s phone (and associated murder) came from a guy called Park Seung Seon (played by Choi Young Woo). When they can’t find the phone after Ha Yong Geun’s body is found, Park Seung Seon starts threatening Shin Tae Il to get Woo Cheon to return the phone. Apparently, the phone contains a video that was mistakenly shared with Ha Yong Geun, and he was murdered because of that, because he must have seen that video. The person who ordered Park Seung Seon in turn is Goo Ji Pyo, who apparently had some business in money laundering or whatever (I honestly don’t even remember what it was about because so much drama went into getting that phone back). In any case, Goo Ji Pyo, Mi Do’s friend and fiancé, is the anonymous client all along.
After Ha Yong Geun’s body is found with the flower in his hair, even though Woo Cheon placed it there in a random wave of emotion, people immediately start brandishing the ‘killer’ as sadistic, because why would someone place a flower on a dead man’s head, if not to mock him? When Goo Ji Pyo realizes the indirect involvement of In Sook and Woo Cheon, he keeps telling Mi Do that In Sook only has to turn herself in, and then everything will be solved. He even tries to get rid of Woo Cheon by himself. In any case, Goo Ji Pyo, Park Seung Seon and Shin Tae Il are constantly going back and forth threatening each other throughout the series. In the end it’s revealed that Goo Ji Pyo ordered Park Seung Seon to kill the second guy, but he made sure that the same pink flower was left the same way as it was placed on Ha Yong Geun’s body, to make it look like a serial killer’s signature.
I couldn’t help but find Goo Ji Pyo a little lame, in hindsight. To Mi Do, he had no issue pretending like he was a big shot, but opposite his father he was such a coward. As Park Seung Seon also said, he never got his own hands dirty, he didn’t have the guts to get personally involved but enjoyed sending people to do the work for him. He really thought he had everything sorted out, but then he was just put aside at the end. Shin Tae Il ultimately goes to the police to confess everything, exposing everyone’s involvement including Woo Cheon’s, something that was already hanging over his head for a long time.
By the way, small inconsistency note: was it just me or did they keep changing the name of Shin Tae Il’s daughter? In episode 4 when he comes to pick her up from school he calls her Eun Bi, but then later when he’s on the phone with his daughter and his family is threatened, he suddenly calls her Min Ji. Was that a serious mistake or did he have two daughters who we just never saw on screen at the same time?

All in all, I was extremely confused while watching this drama. I couldn’t pinpoint what the main focus was. Whenever I thought I’d understood the message, they gave it a twist that made me all confused again. I have to admit that the site on which I watched it didn’t have the greatest subtitles, so I may have missed some stuff because of that, but all in all I just can’t say that I understood this series at all.
It was filled with unnecessary drama that dragged on for too long while the solution was right there within reach the entire time. People selfishly took burdens upon themselves and dragged them around for ages, and then when the actual involved party decided to step forward with the truth they were like, oh, but what about my plan to take all the blame?
There were so many inconsistencies in the story, they didn’t deal well with characters and details that were apparent and held meaning in the beginning but just disappeared and lost meaning altogether throughout the story. The main characters kept choosing their own interests over others’ even towards the end when they should’ve already been depending on each other. In Sook and Woo Cheon were constantly going back and forth between turning themselves in or running from the police while there wasn’t even a reason for them to do either of those things. The bad guys were trying to initimidate and threaten each other to no avail, the police were making a mess by not even checking the victims’ direct relatives and just blindly following whatever vague lead presented itself to them…
The last thing I want to do is dismiss the serious and heavy themes that appear in this series. Whenever a show depicts themes like abuse, domestic violence, childhood trauma and illness/death, I just want to take them as seriously as they are. However, in this series I felt that these themes were used mainly for shock value and to make things additionally heavy and dramatic, and that just didn’t sit right with me.
Even after finishing it, I’m still not sure about the message of the story. While Se Yeon and Mi Do succumb to their illnesses and pass away at the end, In Sook suddenly makes the decision of undergoing surgery in the final episode after all. Turns out, she was actually curable this entire time, or at least partially. Letting that happen, showing that the chance for her to undergo surgery and (partly) recover was there all along, the enitre thing she put herself through became even more meaningless. It really took away the emotional aspect of the series for me, and I kept on wondering what the heck was going on and why people were acting so dramatically for no reason.
I found the ending also confusing, even though it’s a seemingly happy one. Despite Ma Jin’s earlier comment on how they couldn’t confirm that Woo Cheon had committed those contracted murders, he does end up in prison for a short while (about 3 months), and when he gets out he goes to see In Sook. We see a bit earlier that she ended up getting surgery, but also that it’s been effecting her memory. They have this lovely rendezvous on the bridge near In Sook’s house, but when they’re facing each other I did not know what was happening. Like, they didn’t clarify anything. Was she actually cured? Did she even remember him? She didn’t seem to immediately recognize him when they were walking towards each other, so I was just waiting for either of them to say something to clarify where they stood. I mean, in itself it was a sweet ending, they were reunited and all, but I still ended up with a bunch of questions about how their whole situation was finally wrapped up.

Before I go on to my cast comments, I want to mention a few more things. As I said in my introduction, there were a couple of things I appreciated which redeemed certain things for me, no matter how small.
First of all, THE DOG. I was bummed when it disappeared at some point, but I really lived for those few short scenes of Woo Cheon running around playing with the dog. It was so cute 😭💖. Gotta love the Drama doggos.
In terms of favorite characters, also in terms of acting, I would say In Sook’s grandma and San Ah. I also really loved Young Ji and Ji Hoo, their mother-daughter bond was extremely precious.
I also want to add in a little mention of Se Yeon’s husband who was dragged into the investigation because the golf club they used to attack Ha Yong Geun belonged to him. Although Oh Young Chan (Han Gyu Won – he has the same name as the actor for Goo Ji Pyo, don’t get too confused) was acting as kind of a jackass in the beginning (he deserved a slap in the face for blaming their loss of money on Se Yeon’s miscarriages), I did appreciate that he reflected on himself so well at the end. He came to visit Se Yeon when she was in the hospital for a short time, and he laid it all out to her, about how he knew that he had made her like this in their marriage and all that. That kind of redeemed him a little bit for me, also because it showed that he felt really bad for treating her like that and how much he and his mother had depended on her. At least he really loved her and he even made peace with her and Yoon Seo’s romantic past. I thought it was really good of him to reflect on their marriage like that, it was a surprise development in his character. It was also good to see that this helped Se Yeon get some closure on all the stressful things that were happening in her life, from her husband to her mother-in-law to making sure her own mom was well taken care of.
I already briefly mentioned it before, but I really liked the scene where the three women were lying in the bed together. This was the first time I truly felt their affection towards each other and I remember distinctly how In Sook was looking at Se Yeon with shiny, affectionate eyes. She was really looking at her, showing her love for her friend purely through her expression. This is exactly what I needed the entire show, more than words or pasted on performances of friendship. That’s all I wanted from this show, I wanted gazes and gestures that made words unnecessary. I wanted them to show theat they cared about each other without just trying to convey that by literally saying ‘I care about you’ without any feeling behind it. That’s what I meant to say by making you feel their bond more than just talking about it.

Now then, on to the cast comments!

Is it just me or does Ahn Eun Jin look like mixture of Jung So Min, Yoon Eun Hye and occasionally even Lee Min Jung? I haven’t seen her in anything before, so that was a fun element. Honestly, I don’t have any real remarks on her acting, I thought she performed pretty well. I guess I just didn’t fully stand behind the choice that the character made, but that had nothing to do with her acting. In Sook must have been a pretty intense role to play, as she has so many layers of buried trauma. It was nice to see her come out of that as her relationship with Woo Cheon deepened, a smile definitely suits her best! I’m looking forward seeing more -less gloomy- performances of her!

As I mentioned before, Kim Kyung Nam was the sole reason for me to put this drama on my list. I have to say that he did manage to impress me, purely because this is the third drama I’ve seen with him (after The King: Eternal Monarch and Come and Hug Me) and yet again he pulled off a completely different character from the other two dramas. I was all ready to dote on him as a problematic stray puppy kind of guy, but in the end I had hoped for a little more action in Woo Cheon’s character. He was so passive throughout the series that I even started to wonder if he was actually a hitman, because there was nothing to show as evidence for the things he claimed he’d done. I liked him the most in parts where a cheeky side came out, a smile or anything that deviated from the same blank stare he usually had when he was looking at In Sook. This is the first time I’ve seen him in a lead role, I hope he’ll get even more chances in the future!  

I also didn’t know Kang Ye Won from anything. As I mentioned in my character analysis of Se Yeon, I found it a pity that, even with such a clear and well-established backstory, Se Yeon still fell so flat to me as a character. She also portrayed a lot of acting that I mentioned before, where it just seemed like she was talking in front of her, more to herself than to the people she was actually talking to. I would’ve liked to see a bit more spunk in her character, like when she lit off the fireworks. I just wanted to see a bit of her as she’d been in her college days, when she was dating Yoon Seo, living her life fairly uncomplicatedly. I really wish that there was more I could comment, but that was what I thought about her performance, there could’ve been more to it.

If I had to grade the three drama performances I’ve seen of Joy so far, I would put this one in the middle, with a big between number #1 and number #3. On the one hand, I liked that she played a completely different character from what she showed in The Great Seducer and The Liar and His Lover. On the other hand, she was the main example of the ‘pasted on’ acting that I’ve been talking about during this review. She lay it on very thickly, to the point where it just became ‘form’, ‘exterior’ rather than actually conveying Mi Do’s feelings, her humanity and personality from within. It got a bit better at the end though, mostly when I finally started sympathizing with her character more, but for the most part she was so busy showing that she was acting as an influencer that I just didn’t really feel the genuinity of it. There’s another new drama of her on my list coming up, so I’m really curious what she’s going to deliver next. If she’s really going to keep doing dramas, there’s still a lot for her to learn, in my opinion.

Oh, how I adore Go Doo Shim. She’s one of those precious granny actresses that will always grab your heart as you watch them in a series. I’ve recently sobbed emotionally about her performance in Our Blues, and before that I’ve seen her in several shows like Gyeryong Fairytale, My Mister and High Society. I love that she has kind of a rough edge about her, it really makes her seem like a lady who’s been through so much in life. On the other hand, she can also portray a very kind and elegant side and a very dominating side. I’ve seen all these sides of her before in the dramas I mentioned I’ve seen her in. She’s such a great veteran actress and I can’t wait to see more of her. She really stole my heart again in this show.

Despite his sudden appearance after episode 10, I still want to talk about Do Sang Woo. What’s weird is that I cannot find anything written on why he suddenly disappeared from the show, so I guess that’ll have to remain a mystery. I realized I’ve seen him before in Backstreet Rookie, where he was kind of a jerk character. Honestly, I was so curious as to what drove Shi Yeong to get personally involved in this case, there may have been some additional connection with him if he’d remained a part of the show. It’s really too bad that an interesting and promising character like him, someone who could’ve really made a difference in the story, was suddenly Disapparated like that. Luckily he’s been appearing in more hyped shows lately, so at least he’s still going strong and working his way up!

While I was really glad to see my girl Lee Bong Ryun in this show, I kind of felt like they did her character here a bit dirty. I guess that she had to carry the entire story of what Shi Yeong should’ve come up with had he been allowed to stay on, but now she was suddenly completely on her own. Also, I didn’t actually get that she was Shi Yeong’s boss, or that she was the team leader at the start, I thought they were just on the same team. I guess they had to change some circumstances after Shi Yeong Disapparated. Anyways, as I know Bong Ryun to be such a steadfast and solid actress, it was almost a bit awkward to see her fail in some attempts to go after the right guy. I really would’ve liked her to get a bit more support from her stupid police colleagues! Anyways, I’m always happy to see her, and this was no exception. Just to give a summary, I’ve seen her so far in Tomorrow With You, While You Were Sleeping, Melting Me Softly, Run On, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, Extraordinary Attorney Woo and most recently in Crash Course in Romance.

Little Seo Yeon Woo, who played San Ah, truly touched my heart in this show. I loved how mature she was for her age. In general, I got the impression that the kids knew way better than some of the adults what was going on. I see that she’s been in 8 dramas so far, so I hope she will get many more chances to prove what an intelligent young actress she is!

I can’t believe that I didn’t immediately recognize So Hee Jung as Seung Wan’s mom from Twenty-Five Twenty-One! Like, I recognized her face, but I didn’t make the connection to that specific role at all! She’s amazing! She’s also appeared The Moon That Embraces the Sun, Lookout, Gyeryong Fairytale, Hotel del Luna and Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung. Although she only appeared for seven episodes, she portrayed the role of ALS patient so well that she managed to touch me more than several of the main character managed to within the entire series. Down to the voice and the smile hiding the pain, she was such an angel. I really loved her character and I was really mad for people to just forget to take care of her. She deserved better.

For Kim Soo Hyung, little Ji Hoo, this was apparently her first ever drama performance! She’s done a couple more things in the meantime, but I hope she gets many more opportunities. I really loved her innocent portrayal of Ji Hoo, and how she just never succumbed to any negative or evil feelings. She didn’t even blame the people who were supposed to take care of her mother, she harbored no ill fate towards anyone, and that made her so pure and sweet. I really loved her character.

I hadn’t actually seen anything with Lee Hang Na before, but she seemed so familiar. Although as I’ve established in my review, I had kind of mixed feelings about the comical aspect of the hospice residents characters’, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t perform well. Besides the fact that I just couldn’t understand why she’s pull something like that fake full recovery party just not to disappoint her fellow patients that she did actually get more sick, even though most of them probably already knew what was behind it, I think she was a nice enough lady. She just got lucky with a few more years, but still couldn’t make it through the end. At least, it was never confirmed that she died after leaving the hospice, but it was suggested she was deteriorating. Anyways, as a part of the cheerful trio, I liked her character.

I didn’t know Joo In Young either, but I see that she’s going to be in a few of my upcoming watchlist items, so I’m curious to see more of her acting! With her whole shaman getup and extravagant persona, she was one of the people who really became kind of caricature within the hospice, one of the people that strengthened in feeling a little bit odd about how seriously everyone was taking it. She and the elderly lady end up outliving Se Yeon and Mi Do, and to the end didn’t show any major signs of deterioration, although Yeo Wol definitely had more sulking moments. I think she hid the fact that she knew pretty well what the hospice was trying to do underneath her fancy shaman exterior. I would’ve liked to see a bit more depth or background information on her character, though.

I’ve seen Sung Byung Sook in a couple of things before, like You’re Beautiful, Secret Garden, My Love From Another Star, Doctor Stranger, My Shy Boss and Andante. She’s such a familiar face, another one of the K-Drama grannies that we like to see. It was interesting seeing her as a kind of funny character here, despite her illness. The fact that she was always munching on something and that she ended up becoming a ‘senior influencer’ under Mi Do’s guidance was pretty funny. She was a nice character within the hospice group.

Why did I just assume Han Gyu Won (Goo Ji Pyo) belonged to an idol group? He’s not an idol, and he’s actually my age, lol. Anyways, I see he’s really just starting out making a career in acting, he’s done 7 things so far. To be honest, I wasn’t that impressed with his performance, especially as the proclaimed ‘bad guy’. He made it way too obvious once it was revealed that he was shady. Because of his character he didn’t really get to show multiple sides of his acting, so I just hope he’s improving with every project he takes on.

This guy always freaks me out because he is basically Woo Do Hwan from the future. Like, they could literally be father and son. I just realized I recently saw him in The Silent Sea, where he was a nasty guy, but I didn’t immediately make the link when I saw him here, he looked very different in that other show. Anyways, he had a very typical way of portraying a shady guy, but he got to show many different sides, from confidence to fear, and that was nice to see. Who would’ve thought he actually ended up being a trump card when it was revealed he wasn’t actually dead as Goo Ji Pyo thought. That was a nice twist in itself.

Apparently, Ahn Chang Hwan was in Strong Woman Do Bong Soon and also had a cameo in Backstreet Rookie. Other than that I don’t know him from anything else, but he also has a really familiar face. I had mixed feelings about his character because while I first thought he was a good-hearted guy and would keep Woo Cheon safe, he did actually betray him a couple of times in order to ensure his own safety. It was sad when he learned that they were keeping his family hostage, but luckily Park Seung Seon came to the rescue. It was for the better that he came out with the truth in the end, stuff had been dragged out for too long. I liked that they gave him the additional quirk of a stutter, as that’s not something that is portrayed very often, I thought.

I just saw that Lee Soo Mi appeared in Crash Course in Romance as a guest appearance, but other than that I’m surprised to say that I haven’t seen her in anything yet. Again, she looks so familiar, but I guess not. It doesn’t come as a surprise that she’s a comical actress though, she did seem to have a knack for that in her portrayal of Sister Magdalena. I guess I just would’ve liked to see a more serious and collected side of her behind her ever-cheerful smile in pretending everything was jolly. Like, to have that duality in her character, where she actually was very well aware of the sorrows that happened under her roof, that would’ve made me appreciate her as the hospice’s director even more. It was already there for a bit, but there could’ve been a little bit more to proof to me that not everything was just fun and games to her. I would’ve also liked to get more information on how she came to run the place, or something, like get a bit more insight in who she really was.

It was definitely funny to see Bo Ra in this drama, especially dressed as a nun. I’ve seen her in a couple of things before, like Doctor Stranger, High-end Crush, and a cameo in My ID is Gangnam Beauty. She’s also in seasons 2 and 3 of Doctor Romantic, Teacher Kim, but I’ve only watched season 1. I should get on with those other seasons though, it seems to be a really popular series. Anyways, although I could appreciate Bo Ra’s character for her comic relief, she still contributed to the weird feeling that I got from the entire hospice. It’s nice that she gets more acting roles, though, good luck to her with further opportunities!

By the way, about the title of the series, I believe the Korean title can be interpreted in two ways: ‘the one and only’ and ‘just one person’. I personally thought it was interesting that they let both of these meanings come back in the story. In terms of ‘the one and only’, it talks about Woo Cheon, as he is identified as ‘the one and only’ person for In Sook. On the other hand, ‘just one person’ refers to the decision of the three women in the first episode to take someone, ‘just one bad person’ with them when they die. I thought it was quite witty that they left the interpretation of the title open for what it could apply to at different occasions in the story.

I’ve spent another entire day on this review, and I really struggled with it. I was actually laying awake last night trying to voice my opinions as to make it easier for me to construct my arguments, but as soon as I sat behind my PC, my mind just went blank and I had no idea how to go about it. I just started writing separate paragraphs on things I wanted to say and tried to make it into a whole. I hope it’s coherent enough to follow from beginning to end, but I’ll definitely read it over again to see if I can polish up some parts. (Edit: I came back the following day and completely restructured it while adding some parts I forgot to mention. What can I say, I care about my reviews.✌️)

All in all, I was not very impressed with this series. There were too many parts that didn’t make sense to me, too much unnecessary drama that kind of lost its meaning altogether at the end. I also found it kind of extreme that they added in so many heavy themes, especially when they were all just to show the main characters’ misery and it all sort of lost its purpose at the end. If the objective was to show how tough life could be, well, they succeeded in that at least. But I alsofelt like it lacked in the writing, coherence of the structure and the development of characters’ bonds.
I want to emphasize that I find it hard to be critical because I acknowledge the message that was intended, but this is just what I thought and felt while watching it. Despite the message, they didn’t manage to get it across very well, to me in any case. I really want to be as positive about it as I could be, but I need to stay true to my own opinions. If you don’t agree with me, please be kind in the comments and form a healthy discussion, please don’t be too hard on me in case I missed some significant detail or message. We all watch these shows with our own eyes, process them with our own minds, and these are the points that jumped out to me the most. Unfortunately, the few redeeming parts didn’t outweigh the things that I thought could have been dealt with better. There’s always the chance of a setback in discovering new dramas, it can’t be helped, you can’t like everything you come across. It is what it is.

I will be going on with my watchlist now, moving on to some more light, romantic and comic shows (I hope). Also, for the next two watch items at least I’m going to switch it up in terms of origin again, so please look forward to that!

Enjoy your summer and see you soon!

Bye-bee! xxx