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.

Boku no Hatsukoi wo Kimi ni Sasagu
(僕の初恋をキミに捧ぐ / I Give My First Love To You)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hiya! It hasn’t been long (just a couple of days actually) since my last review, but I finished this one really fast since it’s pretty short. Also, I got my booster shot today and I can feel my arm getting sore so I’m hoping to finish this review before I won’t be able to lift my arm in the morning. xD Anyways, I’m back with a new, be it short, review!
There was a slight confusion on my side about which one I wanted to watch. Apparently, there was a movie version in 2009 featuring Inoue Mao (MAKINO <3) and Okada Masaki. DramaCool put the wrong picture to the wrong version, so that was a bit confusing. Since I knew I would be finishing this drama in a few days, I also watched the movie version just to see how they would differ from each other. This drama version is from 2019, so exactly 10 years later. It feels like ages ago that I last watched a Japanese drama and I forgot how short they tend to be. But I still have a weak spot for these kinds of series. You just know they’re going to break your heart, you know you’re probably going to cry, but you still watch them. It reminded me a little of Koizora, which also has both a movie and a drama version. Okay, I’m drifting off. Let’s get started with this review!

Boku no Hatsukoi wo Kimi ni Sasagu is a 7-episode drama about two teenagers, Kakinouchi Takuma (played by Nomura Shuhei) and Taneda Mayu (played by Sakurai Hinako). They’ve known each other since childhood, and have been in love with each other since childhood. Takuma, however, has a serious heart disease and it’s already been established that he probably won’t live longer than 20. The two kids met in the hospital, since Mayu’s father (played by Namase Katsuhisa) works there. He even happens to be Takuma’s attending doctor. While Takuma’s parents (played by Kojima Kazuya and Ishida Hikari) worry about their child’s life and health and if/how he can ever be cured, Takuma sometimes sneaks out of the hospital to play with Mayu, ignoring the fact that any kind of strain can be dangerous for him. It is because of these happenings, from their childhood to their teenage years, that Takuma’s mother has taken a strong dislike towards Mayu – she thinks she has a bad influence on him and only helps worsen his health.

The first thing I found interesting to see here was that the relationship between Takuma and Mayu already differs from the beginning compared to the movie. In the movie, they’re already a couple and they’re even already quite intimate with each other. In the drama, as soon as we’re introduced to Takuma and Mayu as teenagers, Takuma is initially avoiding Mayu. He loves her, but he knows that she’ll never be happy with him, because he will eventually leave her due to his illness, so he tries to stay away from her to save her the heartbreak. Mayu is feisty, though, so she doesn’t let him off so easily. She even follows him to high school, which he picked to get away from her. Doesn’t matter, she still follows him. Ironically, Takuma’s mother was actually responsible for this, since she came to Mayu to ask why Takuma was suddenly going to that particular school and if that had been Mayu’s idea. Instead, she gave Mayu the information she needed to also transfer to that school.
So now they’re in the same class. Takuma quickly makes a friend, Suzuya Ritsu (played by Sato Kanta). Ritsu’s older brother, Suzuya Kou (played by Miyazawa Hio) is the eccentric ‘prince’ of the school – he’s that popular ikemen senpai that all the girls fawn over and also boasts his charms freely to whoever wants (or doesn’t want) to listen. Kou becomes interested in Mayu from the day of the entrance ceremony when she confronts Takuma in front of everyone and chases him down when he tries to run away.
Mayu becomes close with two classmates, Yuiko and Satomi (respectively played by Yahagi Honoka and Fukumoto Riko). They are also in the same archery club.
This is basically the main cast of the series, Takuma and Mayu, their parents, their classmates/friends, and Suzuya Kou. It’s a really simple and easy-to-follow story without any distracting side plots.

So yeah, of course the story is about Takuma and Mayu getting together and then facing Takuma’s health issues. There are some minor storylines that create obstructions to their relationship, but these of course only draw them closer to one another. The most apparent one is the one featuring Kou as a potential love rival, although we already know from the start he won’t be able to get in the way of Takuma’s and Mayu’s mutual attraction to each other. Kou was initially a bit annoying to me, he was really charai (really don’t know how to translate this properly to English, flashy, gaudy, not hesitant to hit on girls?) He literally introduces himself to the first years at the entrance ceremony as his Tinder profile. And then he immediately takes a liking to Mayu, he calls her ‘Hime’ (‘Princess’) and he keeps telling her to stop pursuing Takuma since he’s going to die anyway (his place? not his place? you tell me). It turns out that Kou and Ritsu’s father had the same disease as Takuma and passed away, despite telling them that ‘everyone would be okay’. So now Kou has become a bit sceptical about these kinds of things. It was a bit annoying how he kept butting into their business at first, he just assumed he had the right to tell Takuma and Mayu to stop going after each other because Takuma would eventually die and leave Mayu behind crying, like his father did to his mother. I get that he wanted to protect Mayu from that (although I still found it very hasty of him to already push his feelings onto her like that), but in my opinion, it still wasn’t his place. He was just interested in ‘obtaining’ Mayu at that point. What is it with men in Japanese dramas always talking about how a woman is their possession or that he will ‘take her’/’make her his’? I’ve watched a couple of Japanese movies before this and the male leads were ALL like this. Not cute.
Anyways, he actually gets a chance when Mayu at some point starts to believe that Takuma has really rejected her, but that doesn’t last long because Takuma changes his mind after Mayu and Kou get in a car accident while on a drive. After that, Kou is out of the picture again just like that. He dealt with it maturely though, this is actually the point where he starts to act more ‘normal’ and moves on with his life.

I have to say that I don’t necessarily mind side storylines as long as they contribute to the main story and help create stronger bonds between the lead characters. However, two of the storylines in this series actually led to two people dying, and I did find that a little bit extreme.

First of all, Teru-chan. Teru (played by Baba Fumika) is a teenage girl with a similar (or the same?) heart condition as Takuma, who also knew him from when they were kids in the hospital. They meet again as teenagers, and then Takuma starts visiting Teru daily, much to Mayu’s discontent. Of course, to Takuma, this is only a friendly favor, he knows how lonely it gets to be in the hospital all by yourself, and he doesn’t want Teru to feel lonely. However, Mayu is right to be wary, because it does seem that Teru has ulterior motives. She is very clingy towards Takuma, keeps texting him that he needs to come visit her every day, that she only has him as her company. At some point, she even starts acting like they’re a couple. As in, when some nurses assume this about them, she doesn’t deny anything. As soon as Takuma wants to clear things up about this, she ‘suddenly’ gets heart cramps. It doesn’t take the nurses long to figure out she’s actually faking these attacks. We’re led to see Teru as a bit manipulative. I also thought that, no matter how sad her situation was, it wasn’t right of her to use her illness as a way to manipulate someone into staying by her side. I personally call this ‘pulling a Terius’ (yes, a Candy Candy reference). Anyways, she plays on Takuma’s good nature to stay by her side and even gets him to almost kiss her. Purely for the reason that she doesn’t want to die before being kissed, but she definitely has in mind that this will impact his relationship with Mayu, so it’s still not a very nice thing to do. I was honestly surprised that he agreed to it. Or at least, he backed out at the last moment, but he didn’t seem to hesitate at first. In the movie, he’s too busy staring at her in a confused way until she just kisses him herself without his full consent. Mayu sees this, of course. It’s the kind of drama where everyone sees everything at the wrong moment. Okay, I’m drifting off again. Long story short, Takuma doesn’t feel like he can face Mayu with his true feelings before he’s honestly told Teru that he’s not romantically interested in her. When he does this, however, Teru gets an actual heart attack and dies. Right there, on the hospital roof. I really didn’t know what to think of that. I felt it was kind of random, and also still wasn’t able to completely feel sorry for Teru, because it just seemed like she wasn’t able to face the truth. Hearing this from Takuma, while she must have already expected it because she was so busy changing the subject every time he brought it up, shouldn’t have had such a fatal influence on her. But yeah, she passes away.

And then there’s Kou. Honestly, when I watched the movie, this was the most random thing ever. But I guess that had to do with the fact that when this happened to Kou in the movie, Takuma and Mayu weren’t even that close to him (yet). He had just given up on his one-sided crush on Mayu (which no one asked for, certainly not Mayu) and just when he got himself another (random, unnamed) girlfriend he suddenly got hit by a truck. In the drama version, Kou’s story is build up much better, in my opinion. He got more introductory screentime and the accident only happens after we’ve already seen him become more mature and move on with his life after Takuma and Mayu get together.
In the drama version, as I said, he and Mayu get into a car accident together. They both come out fine, but it turns out later (too late) that Kou’s injury was more serious than they thought. He suddenly passes out on the street while buying a necklace for his new girlfriend, Yumi (Matsui Airi), who we also already knew as Kou’s friend in high school, so she was not some random, unnamed girl he just got together with as a rebound. We see how their relationship develops, her crush on him, and how he ultimately accepts her as well. To me, Kou’s death had way more impact in the drama series also because this couple was properly established. We actually get to feel sorry for Yumi as well, because they only JUST got together and were a supercute pair.
And then the most painful part: Kou’s heart potentially going to Takuma for his transplant. Again, it felt a bit weird in the movie because Takuma refused to do the transplant if it meant ‘taking a friend’s heart’ while they really weren’t even close in the movie at that point. In the drama version this felt like a much more dramatic decision since they were actually on good terms by then. Takuma still decides not to do it, and Kou’s mother also decides to withdraw the donor agreement, so they’re back to square one.

I’ll end my analysis with the different endings of the two versions. In the movie, Takuma dies. There isn’t another option besides that heart transplant, he’s not getting it, so he takes Mayu out for one last date and then he’s gone. And then Mayu gets married to his ashes, which is… something.
In the drama, there is the second option of a risky heart surgery which Takuma agrees to take. Takuma and Mayu get married in the hospital, with brain-dead Kou present as their witness, which is… also something. Takuma leaves Mayu his will just in case he doesn’t survive the surgery.
But the final scene is of Mayu on the school roof, looking up when ‘someone’ says her name and we see her smile at that person. Honestly, I hate these kinds of endings. They did this in Big and My Absolute Boyfriend as well. Just show us that it’s Takuma! Why is that so hard?? Anyways, it’s suggested that he survives the surgery. So much for all the dramatics. Just kidding, it’s a good thing he survived, of course. But still.

I’m glad that I watched both versions, especially because they were so different. When watching the movie I was wondering if I wasn’t spoiling the series for myself already, but I was glad to see that they weren’t exactly the same. Of course there were some parts that were the same, but the drama series extended some parts to create more storylines and development for the characters.
One thing I did prefer about the movie version though, was the intimacy between Takuma and Mayu. I know that Japanese dramas are shy when it comes to kissing and other intimacy scenes, but in the movie Takuma and Mayu are seen smooching a lot of times, and I mean PROPER smooching. It just made them seem so much more like a couple that really loved each other, including the physical needs part. I mean, they even ‘had sex’ on their school campus, and even though they left the graphic bit out, they did show some really passionate kissing leading up to it. Meanwhile in the drama series, it literally skipped to ‘after’ they ‘had sex’. Like, they were talking outside after Takuma had decided not to take the transplant, and the next moment they were suddenly under the sheets in a hotel room and the deed had already been done. What a letdown! T^T I was missing intimacy, period. Even their few kisses didn’t seem to match their alleged ‘burning passion’ for each other, especially from Takuma’s side since he’d been holding it in for so long. In the movie, I really liked how passionate he was about this, just openly declaring that he wanted to have sex with Mayu. It was refreshing! I guess they needed to keep this drama series more teenager-approved or something. Oh well.

Let me just make some cast and character comments before I conclude.

I’ve seen Nomura Shuhei in a couple of dramas before, like Koinaka and Suki na Hito ga Iru Koto. I don’t actually have a solid opinion about him, haha. I think he’s okay, but I would need to see more of his acting to make a judgment of his acting. I do believe that this is one of the more cheerful roles that I’ve seen of him, which is typical since he was a heart patient who knew he was probably going to die within a year. But I have the feeling I’ve only seen him play stoic, tough guys that didn’t show much emotion before. So I’m glad to at least have seen one different side of him!

I really liked Sakurai Hinako in this, I’ve never seen her in anything before. I liked her energy from the start. I think she did that entrance ceremony scene more powerfully than Inoue Mao to be honest (I’m sorry Mao-san T^T). She just had a really nice presence, and I liked how well-balanced her bubbliness and gutsiness were. She also wasn’t shy to show her vulnerable sides. As an actor, I felt like she had a lot of opportunities to show her variety because she didn’t fit into just one category of ‘heroine’.

Kou was actually the one character that gave me too much manga-vibes. Like, he acted like a cartoon character in the beginning, the whole show around his introduction. If someone would do that in real life, people would be like ‘the F is this guy doing’. He was the only one that gave me some minor cringes in the beginning, also with him calling Mayu ‘Hime’ and all that? It just was too much like how this kind of character would be portrayed in a manga or anime. I’ve seen Miyazawa Hio before in Todome no Kiss. He has such a unique look! I just found out his mother is half-American. I really love his light eye color. I mean, I might have been cringed out a little by him in the beginning of the series, but you can’t deny that he’s the perfect typecast for a ‘prince’ type. He is really handsome. And he does mature, after letting Mayu go and moving on, we see him still agree to go out with Yumi and that he does really like her. So somewhere I was hoping they wouldn’t kill him off the way they did in the movie, but I guess his death is one of the key events in the original story. It was a shame, and also so sudden that out of nowhere, he just died on the spot, in the middle of the street. Of course, when he mentioned just before to Yumi on a date that his head was hurting a little, I was already like UH-OH. But yeah, I liked how he portrayed Kou’s character better than the movie version, to be honest. In the movie his character just wasn’t very well-established and you didn’t really get an impression of who he really was behind his antics.

I kept wondering where I knew Sato Kanta from… only to find out he was Irie-kun in the Itazura na Kiss movies!!! O_O He couldn’t have been more different in this series, hahaha. He was just the kind and loyal classmate friend. I find it an interesting decision that they made him Kou’s brother in the series. He wasn’t related to him in the movie. In the movie, the only family to mourn for Kou were his mother and grandfather, but here it was his mother and Ritsu. I guess it was an easy way to bind the characters more closely together? I did feel bad for Ritsu though, because at some point it looked like he would lose his brother and his best friend at practically the same time 🙁 I liked him in this role. It even made me completely forget about him being Irie-kun, which is impressive. xD

Speaking of Itazura na Kiss – different version though – Honoka-chan! I’ve loved Yahagi Honoka ever since I saw her in ItaKiss, her portrayal of Kotoko is still my favorite so far. Plus she’s so cute. T^T I keep feeling like she’s a main actress, but apart from ItaKiss I’ve only seen her in supporting roles, like in Kizoku Tantei and Nee Sensei, Shiranai no?. I was really happy that she was such a supporting friend and really wanted to help Takuma and Mayu get together. I also liked that there seemed to be something growing between her and Ritsu, and now all the more since they turn out to be a Kotoko and Irie-kun from two different versions, haha. Her character didn’t have any back story or development per se, but I don’t think that was necessary. It’s also nice to have some simple supporting characters there that are always on the main leads’ sides.

Matsui Airi also seemed very familiar to me, and after searching DramaWiki I see I must know her from Yamada-kun to Nanajin no Majo and Watashi Kekkon Dekinainjanakute, Shinaindesu. She has a very familiar face. I liked that her character was created in this drama, she didn’t appear in the movie, at least not as Kou’s classmate before they eventually started dating. Although she was cold to Mayu just a little bit in the beginning, after it was clear that Mayu had rejected Kou and Yumi was able to make her move, she became more friendly with Mayu as well. And honestly, she didn’t even make her move as in, pushed herself onto Kou. Their dating relationship just happened from both sides, and that was nice to see. I would’ve loved to see more scenes of her and Kou together before he died, though. T^T

I feel like such an oaf! I thought I recognized Baba Fumika from somewhere, only to realize she was the main lead in Nee Sensei, Shiranai no?! She was Hana, of course! I’m just shook with how bad I’m getting at recognizing Japanese actors’ faces, but it’s probably because I watch too many K-Dramas. :’) Anyways, of course she wasn’t a popular character and I admit I got very annoyed with Teru as well, especially when she started faking her condition just to keep Takuma by her side. But Takuma’s reasoning actually made it easier to forgive her for that. It was still sad that she had to die like that, of course, she was only 17. But like Kou, I also found her character very typical. You always have that girl that pretends to be sweet and you can’t be mean to her because she’s sick, but secretly she’s not completely pure after all in her greed. I couldn’t blame her for wanting company, but it wasn’t nice of her to hog Takuma like that, also very much with the intention to keep him away from Mayu. But I guess, as I always say, if you don’t like a character, that usually means the actor did a good job!

Ishida Hikari is Ishida Yuriko’s sister! I’ve seen Ishida Yuriko in several dramas before, but it’s funny that her sister is also acting in dramas. I’ve only seen her before in Kirawareru Yuuki. I guess you always have to have ONE objecting parent in a love story, right? I mean, you can dislike Takuma’s mom all you want – and I do think she was occasionally out of line for dismissing Mayu like that – but it was also very easy to understand where she was coming from. I don’t think she actually hated Mayu. She was just thinking of her son’s safety and she saw how willingly he threw aside all restrictions when it came to Mayu. She was probably just worried that he’d do something stupid and end up hospitalized for good and her way of venting out that worry was to blame it on Mayu. That wasn’t right. But hey, she’s a mom with a sick child. You can’t completely blame her for only wanting to keep her son safe. I sometimes found her acting a bit too scripted, as if it wasn’t really coming from inside and she was just portraying the worried mom in her voice tone only. So I would like to see some more of her acting variety. Other than that, I think her character made sense in her objection, although it may have made her look like ‘the mean mom’. She wasn’t that bad, in the end.

Namase Katsuhisa is in literally everything, haha. I’ve seen him in Gokusen, Gakkou no Kaidan, Ishitachi no Renai Jijou and Kizoku Tantei and he’s also in some dramas that are still in my to watch list. He’s just such a classic actor. I like that this time, his character wasn’t responsible for the comic relief (I believe he gets casted as the hysterical principal a lot), but he was a very kind doctor and father to Mayu. Even though he and his wife weren’t always home together since they both had irregular jobs, there was no friction in their marriage and they got along just fine. Seeing your daughter in love with your patient, knowing that she might lose this boy she loves so much, that must give so much stress as a father. I think he remained relatively calm under it, mostly staying out of their relationship at all and just leaving them be (which was probably for the best). But it did give his character some pressure, since he had to balance being a father and being a professional doctor in this case that became quite personal. He was a minor character so maybe you wouldn’t stop to think about it, but it did occur to me that it did something to him as well. I’m just glad he was supportive of their relationship but still didn’t hide any information from Mayu about Takuma’s health. Was he allowed to though, with patient confidentiality and all that? Oh well.

Overall, it was very clear to me that this drama was based on a manga. There were some really typical situations and characters in there. Still, it didn’t bother me too much. It dealt with some heavy themes, after all, and I think they pulled that off well enough.

I’m not sure what to say in regards to the message of this story. I guess what can be taken from it is that it’s important to know that life is short and we are all given limited time, some less than others. I consider it a luxury to have good friends and even a lover in this time to share that limited time with. The relationship between Takuma and Mayu is really something special, you could really say that they’re destined for each other. They just never felt the need to look elsewhere from the moment they met as children.
And I think it’s also important to note that for a sick person, in the end it’s up to them to decide what to do. There’s always a lot of fuss being made by family and friends who all have their own opinions about what the patient should do, but in the end, the patient has the final vote in deciding what will happen to them. I think that’s something that Takuma’s character shows very well in this series. Against everyone’s expectations and hopes, he refuses a transplant, the safest way to save him, because he doesn’t feel right about taking his friend’s heart – and taking away the hope for recovery from his friends’ family.
It also felt right that in this drama adaptation of the movie 10 years later, they suddenly DID have another option besides the transplant. It was literally as if time had passed and medical science had progressed in the meantime. The only thing I found a bit of a bummer was that they made such a big deal of that surgery, and then didn’t even show Takuma when he recovered. We only hear his voice say ‘Mayu’, and then we’re left to just throw a party for him by ourselves that he apparently recovered. It built up to a dangerous surgery and then ended with not making a big deal out of it, after all. That’s how it felt to me, in any case. In the end, I would say the main message is probably to enjoy life and make the most out of it, especially when you’re in a situation where you’re not able to enjoy it for a regular lifespan.

Again, as I mentioned before, I’m glad I watched both versions. I feel like it contributed to this short review as well, because I was able to throw some comparisons in there. In summary, I would say I liked the drama version better, but I liked the relationship between movie Takuma and Mayu better, they just looked more like a naturally affectionate couple. I found the differences in writing choices interesting, such as making Ritsu Kou’s younger brother. It added more content of Kou being able to approach Ritsu to usher him into helping out with getting to Mayu etc. And also to add Yumi to the equation, although of course she ended up heartbroken. The drama version allowed me to feel more sympathy towards all the characters than the movie version. It just felt more spaced out, if that makes sense. It was definitely not the best Japanese series I’ve seen, but it was cute enough.

I’m now moving on to some Netflix K-Dramas again, I’m excited to start the next couple of series. I’m officially starting on my 2019 batch, y’all! So stay tuned and I’ll be back.

Bye-bee! ^^

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bye-bye!!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time! 😀

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me go on to some cast comments before concluding!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bye-bee!! ^^

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung
(신입사관 구해령 / Sinipsagwan Gu Hae Ryeong)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hi everyone! It’s been a crazy two weeks for me, so I took my sweet time finishing this drama. I won’t go into too much detail of what happened but it involved a sprained back and an infected housemate so I was pretty distracted and not always in the mood for certain things I was watching at the moment. But I really wanted to finish this one this weekend, so here we are! I hope everyone is taking care of themselves!
So as I said I took my time finishing this, not just because I wanted to move on with it but because I was genuinely interested in how things would turn out. I believe it’s a while since my last historical drama, but for some reason I always find it very refreshing, so I make sure to keep putting them on my to watch list. This one was a bit longer than the previous K-Dramas I watched on Netflix, so it definitely took some more time, but I’m glad I got around to finally watching it. Since I didn’t watch it in one go, I really hope that I’ll be able to write down my thoughts on it as properly as possible.
Now, without further ado, let’s go!

Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung is a 20-episode Netflix K-Drama, with each episode about an hour long. It takes place at the beginning of the 19th century in Joseon and centers on Goo Hae Ryung (played by Shin Se Kyung), a 26-year old woman from a well off family who loves to read. In the beginning, she takes jobs to read books aloud to court ladies and women from other noble families who can’t read – as it was unusual for women to be able to read and write at that time. However, when the rare opportunity rises for her to become a female historian at the royal palace, she takes it with both hands to get out of being forced into marrying and becoming a typical housewife. Hae Ryung lives with her older brother, Goo Jae Gyung (played by Gong Jung Hwan) ever since her father passed away when she was still little. Her brother has a governmental position as Third Inspector.
On the other hand, we have Yi Rim, also known as Prince Dowon (played by Cha Eun Woo), the youngest son of the King, who has been isolated to live all by himself in Nokseodang, at the far end of the palace grounds where no one is allowed to come. The truth about why he was sent there is clouded in rumors about him having some sort of sickness, but this isn’t true. Anyways, he lives there only with his personally assigned eunuch, Heo Sam Bo (played by Sung Ji Roo) and two court ladies to escort him. Even though his father dislikes him, his older brother, Crown Prince Yi Jin (played by Park Ki Woong) is very fond of his younger brother. Unknown to anyone, Yi Rim really likes to write stories. As he was forced to live at Nokseodang his entire life, he longs for the outside world and secretly writes romance novels under a pseudonym which is very popular amongst women, not only in court but also outside. One day, after publishing his latest volume, he manages to go out into the village for himself to see how his book is received. It is there that he meets Hae Ryung for the first time, in a book store.
While he is initially taken with her appearance, he is put off by the fact that she openly yawns while reading his book and even tells him how boring she thinks it is. After this first encounter, they meet again a couple of times, and it is only after Hae Ryung becomes a historian that she finds out he is actually a member of the royal family. Still, she keeps going to Noksaedang to work and while Yi Rim initially sees her as some kind of rival and wants to tease her, he gradually becomes romantically fond of her and vice versa.
As Hae Ryung passes the exam, she is one of four to enter the palace for the first time as a female historian. The other three are Song Sa Hee (played by Park Ji Hyun), Heo Ah Ran (played by Jang Yoo Bin) and Oh Eun Im (played by Lee Ye Rim). All of them are from wealthy families and have their own reasons for wanting to become historians, but their first couple of weeks don’t go as smoothly as they’d hoped. They are bullied relentlessly by their male superiors, sent on bothersome errands, and are kept away from the real, important work. However, as they gradually start proving their worth to everyone, they eventually also gain the respect from these seniors and the Office of Royal Decrees becomes a place filled with decent historians who all really respect their work.
Besides the budding romance between Hae Ryung and Yi Rim and the daily events in the life of a historian in the royal palace, there is another major storyline. The one about Hae Ryung and Yi Rim’s true backgrounds. As it turns out, Hae Ryung is not really Jae Gyung’s sister and Yi Rim not really King Yi Tae’s youngest son. Also, since the beginning there is this book that keeps being mentioned, The Story of Ho Dam, but this book is strictly banned from the kingdom, along with anything else that traces back to before the dethronement of the previous King, which is a forbidden subject. It’s like the current King has a secret that he desperately wants to keep hidden, but what could it be?

First of all, let me just say that I found it very interesting to learn about the real purpose of historians. I’ve never really noticed them in previous historical dramas, they were never really mentioned or pointed out, but now my view on them has changed completely. Historians are basically people who have to record all that happens in the royal palace, from recording meeting between officials and the King to recording the daily lives of the people living at the royal court. This has always been a task for men, as any government official position used to be only for men, but in this drama four women are given the chance to be the first female historians, and they are also stationed at different places around the palace grounds to record all the conversations that take place, for historical archiving purposes. Therefore it is of the utmost importance that the historians record the truth. In a sense, you could say that the historians have more power than the King. It is also mentioned in the drama, I believe, that ‘a good King should fear his historians’. And the way this drama played out, it definitely ended with a victory for the historians. I just wanted to comment that I really liked to get more insight in how these historians were working in these times. They have to carry around their sachaek (I believe this is their notebook in which they record their daily records) with them, and no one besides historians are allowed to read what they have written. It is very confidential work and it always keeps the higher ups on their toes when historians are present, because they know whatever they say will be stored in the royal archives and traced back if necessary. The power of writing and books was one of the most present themes in this series.

This was a very satisfying historical drama for me to watch since it didn’t portray the female characters as meek and submissive as women are often portrayed in historical dramas. On the contrary, Goo Hae Ryung is one of the strongest female lead characters in a (historical) drama I’ve seen so far. She is ahead of her time in intelligence, and she has her emotions under control at the right moments. She’s unbelievably mature, and always manages to stay calm and brave in even the most dire situations.
It was really interesting to see her dynamic with Yi Rim, who was like a puppy blinking his eyes into the sun for the first time. He wasn’t just younger than her in years (they had a 6-year age difference), but also in experience, and she manages to fascinate him with all her knowledge of the outside & Western world that she’s learned from books. She could also be really witty and mischievous with her humor, especially when it came to making Yi Rim flustered. Yi Rim is very naive and pure in the beginning of the series, but the more he discovers about his own family’s history, the more mature he becomes. He remains very pure in his feelings for Hae Ryung, though. Hae Ryung knows what and what not to do and when it’s safe to do it, but Yi Rim would sometimes forget his own position in his longing for her presence and attention.
What I kept finding interesting was that they both committed fully to their secret relationship, completely aware of the fact that they were prince and historian, which equalled = not possible. From the beginning they both should have known that this would not be allowed. And I was also kind of impressed with how well they managed to keep it between them. Only the servants around Yi Rim knew about it since they constantly saw them together, but honestly I was expecting this whole drama to happen – when the royal family would find they were romantically involved. This didn’t happen, though, and I’m partly grateful for it. Hae Ryung only backed off the moment that Yi Rim suddenly had to get married and they went in search of a bride for him, when it became a real issue. Before that, it seemed like she didn’t even care about who he was, although she knew that she didn’t want to marry into the royal family. It was difficult for her, but here too she was more realistic and mature than Yi Rim, who even went to see his grandmother the Queen Dowager to tell her he was in love with someone else and didn’t want to get married. But at some point it felt like Hae Ryung was trying to prove to herself it didn’t bother her and that was really painful to watch. She actually took the job of recording the potential bride candidates while they were reciting how they would make the perfect bride for Yi Rim. At this point I was really just shaking my head to the screen, mumbling, ‘Why are you doing this to yourself, girl??’ And of course, she found out she couldn’t take it, after all. But her feelings were very complicated. As much as she loved Yi Rim, she didn’t want to become a princess herself because that was the kind of life she absolutely did NOT want. On the other hand she also didn’t want Yi Rim to throw everything away for her, and she knew that he was certainly prepared to do this since he told her multiple times. So she decided to be the bad guy and push him away. While I usually hate this kind of trick to push someone away in order to ‘protect’ them, it did make sense to me why she did it. And I think Yi Rim, besides being a little heartbroken, also understood why she did it, and that it wasn’t that she didn’t love him back. Because even when they were ‘apart’, they were still able to get along just fine. As the storyline unfolded, they even teamed up to help each other in their respective quests to find out what had really happened to both their fathers.

The plotline of Hae Ryung and Yi Rim’s respective origins is gradually built up throughout the series. I think this was very well done. They mixed important clues with the daily happenings in the palace, and made it so that the final pieces really fell together in the last couple of episodes.
Throughout the series, there are a couple of ‘arcs’, as I’ll call them, that one by one bring the two closer to the truth. I liked how everything that happened had something to do with the big reveal at the end. Even if it was just some information they learned through this ‘arc’, or some person they met, every tiny thing gradually brought them closer. The banned book is already mentioned in the first episode, and at that point we don’t know anything about it yet, but the names from the book and the secret organization keep popping up, and as more people start reacting suspiciously to those, it becomes clearer and clearer that they have a bigger role in the story than we initially thought. In the end, everything seems to revolve around the dethronement of the previous King, who has become a taboo because his dethronement involved rumors about high treason and very inexcusable actions from the King’s side.
The first important ‘arc’ would be the smallpox epidemic. When news of an epidemic spreads, the King decides to send Yi Rim out on his first official mission as a prince, to visit an area that has allegedly been struck by the illness to show his face and comfort the people. Excited for his first mission, and therefore acknowledgement by his father, Yi Rim decides to go. Hae Ryung travels along with his delegation as their historian. This is when they come upon one major case of governmental corruptness: they are keeping the severity of the disease a secret of the capital. While the royal family thinks that the disease is already subdued and the people are well taken care of since they send so much medicine and food their way, other officials have interfered. They have actually barricaded these villages so no one can get in or out, trapping all the sick people inside without any medicine or food. The people who know about it are just trying to exploit the situation and make money out of it, for example by charging extra for medicine since people are desperate for it. Hae Ryung and Yi Rim discover this as they manage to get into one village, and here they meet Mo Hwa (played by Jun Ik Ryung), a female physician. We have already seen this woman before a few times, as she seems to be an acquaintance of the Queen Dowager, Hae Ryung’s brother, and Eunuch Heo. Her true identity isn’t revealed until later, but what’s clear is that she studied medicine under an organization called Seoraewon. This organization also seems to be linked to the previous King, and is therefore also a taboo. Their meeting with Mo Hwa is an important event.
The second major ‘arc’ is when a foreigner is suddenly captured in Joseon. A Frenchman called Jean Baptiste Barthélemy (played by Fabien Corbineau) suddenly appears and is questioned at court, but then he escapes. While he hides at Nokseodang with Yi Rim and becomes friendly with him, his servants and Hae Ryung, the King is paranoid with the rumors that he is here to spread Western (and therefore barbaric) Catholicism to Joseon. This leads to the discovery that there are actually quite some Catholics living in the Joseon, even in the palace. One of the historians Hae Ryung works with, Song Seo Gwon (played by Ji Gun Woo) turns out to be a Catholic and barely escapes beheading by agreeing to be exiled. Anyways, this Frenchman also turns out to be linked to Seoraewon, as he was actually on his way to meet with Mo Hwa when he got caught by guards. He manages to escape Joseon safely in the end.
The notion of Catholicism being spread to Joseon seems to be a very big thing to the King because this was also one of the rumors of which the previous King, his brother, was accused when he was dethroned.
It was nice to see an actual foreigner appear in a historical K-Drama, and I liked that they did him and his character justice. He just really looked like he belonged there for some reason! He spoke Korean very well, and I also liked how naturally Hae Ryung and Yi Rim took to him.
For me personally, the funniest thing was when they were trying to figure out from which country he was and after first speaking to him in Chinese and Japanese (yes, because he looks real Asian, guys), they suddenly started speaking Dutch! I was not prepared to suddenly hear my own language in a Korean historical drama, haha, so that was definitely a funny moment for me.

To get closer to the big reveal at the end, I need to explain a little more about the royal family and Mr. Bad Guy. So at the top of the Royal Family there’s the Queen Dowager (played by Kim Yeo Jin). She had two sons, Yi Gyeom and Yi Tae. Yi Gyeom was dethroned because of his alleged treason and now Yi Tae is King. So the King I’ve talked about until now is Yi Tae.
King Yi Tae (played by Kim Min Sang) can be described as a kind of grumpy, stubborn man who doesn’t like to be contradicted. He is very paranoid about comments that lead to people doubting his authority and is quick to punish people for it. Compared to him, his son Yi Jin seems to be a much juster and kinder person, who cares about justice and fairness and sees the good in people. When things kept happening and the banned book kept popping up, the King became so antsy that I kept on wondering what was going on. At one point he kept interjecting people at the slightest comment with, ‘Are you saying I don’t deserve this throne??’ as if it was some sort of panicky response. It made perfect sense in the end of course, but at first I just kept thinking that they should just make Yi Jin King already.
It just seemed like he wouldn’t give anyone a chance, everything/one that even slightly questioned his authority had to be beheaded or thrown in jail. This is also exactly what he tried to do with the people he discovered were Catholics, but luckily Yi Jin managed to avoid many of these punishments by stepping in, only to be reprimanded by his father for being ‘too weak’.
Moving on to Mr. Bad Guy, King Yi Tae was very close with the Second State Councillor, Min Ik Pyung (played by Choi Duk Moon) and together they often shared a drink as friends outside of their close work relationship. Min Ik Pyung climbed up from being a respectable historian to a position of power that he didn’t want to yield to anyone else, he became very greedy. His daughter is now the Crown Princess, Yi Jin’s wife (which made her completely miserable life since they both don’t have any real feelings for each other and Yi Jin keeps putting off having to sleep with her) and his son, Min Woo Won (played by Lee Ji Hoon) is a First Historian at the Office of Royal Decrees and Hae Ryung’s direct superior.

I have to address Woo Won properly since he can officially be seen as the second male lead of this drama even though he wasn’t in any way romantically involved with Hae Ryung (and thank god for that).
Woo Won and Yi Jin were childhood friends, they are of the same age and grew up together in the royal court and they are still very friendly with each other, even in their professional work relationship. Woo Won was initially very admiring of his father, but he is also very aware of how corrupt his father is becoming. At one point it is revealed that Woo Won used to be happily married, but when his bride’s father was suddenly convicted of treason and beheaded, his young wife took her own life shortly after and this event has completely changed Woo Won. He has become very stoic and dedicated to his work as a historian and rarely goes against his principles. As a First Historian, one of the higher up historians, he sometimes clashes with his juniors (including Hae Ryung) when they consult him about something that would be the right thing to do but that would go against the rules. He also argues with Song Seo Gwon when he discovers that he is a Catholic in secret, and is baffled by how devoted his junior is to this faith. However, he ultimately relents when they discover the big secret of the banned book and find out that the work of historians has been meddled with in the past – that’s when they all decide to stand tall against the royal court officials and even the King himself.

Let me go back a little to the life of the Royal Family, starting with the Queen Dowager, who was one of my favorite characters. She was the mother of the King, and therefore the grandmother of Yi Jin and Yi Rim. I have to say I sometimes got a little mixed up on how exactly the whole family was related since the King occasionally said things that just confused me. He said something to Yi Rim at one point about how his roots were filthy from the start (which made me go ‘uhm aren’t you part of his roots, sir?’), and at another moment he also said something to the Queen Dowager that made it sound like they weren’t fully related. This confused me because it seemed that she was definitely his biological mother. Anyways.
The Queen Dowager cared more for Yi Rim than anyone else seemed to, she was constantly worried for his health and wanted to make sure his future was secured. She was also the one who started executing the plan for him to get married and picking out the right bride for him, much to Yi Rim’s own dismay.
Yi Rim gets increasingly curious to his backgrounds when he starts having dreams about the dethroned King Yi Gyeom and when the Queen Dowager suddenly takes him with her to visit Yi Gyeom’s grave, people start to get really aggrevated with him, since the dethroned King is still a taboo and they were not allowed to publicly visit his grave like that. Also, Yi Rim can’t find any kind of record about his own birth, and no one wants to tell him anything, even the Queen Dowager.
In the end, it turns out that his birth, the dethronement of the previous King, and the fall of Seoraewon are all linked to each other and are therefore all in the same records, which have disappeared. The historian who kept these records was beheaded when he refused to yield them over to King Yi Tae and they have been missing ever since. However, with their amazing team work, Hae Ryung and Yi Rim manage to figure out it’s hidden in Nokseodang, Yi Rim’s living quarters.
When they find it, Hae Ryung brings it to the Office of Royal Decrees to examine it with the other historians and this is where the real battle begins: the historians against the King and his officials.

As it turns out, Yi Gyeom and Hae Ryung’s father, under the pseudonyms Ho Dam and Yeongan, set up Seoraewon together. Seoraewon was an educational institutation that enabled peasants and women, in all unprivileged people from lower ranks to learn about Western cultures, languages, and medicine. Mo Hwa and Jae Gyung both joined this organization when they were teenagers, and they both studied medicine under Hae Ryung’s father. The unusual treatment for the smallpox also came from him. Hae Ryung, officially named Seo Hee Yeon, was only 6 at this time. They also invited foreign guests to help with the lectures, such as Jean Baptiste’s older brother Dominique (played by the same person).
For some reason, with the help of Min Ik Pyung, false rumors were spread about Seoraewon. He managed to convince Yi Tae that people were being experimented on, killed and tortured at the organization, and that King Yi Gyeom was trying to get foreign people to spread Catholicism to Joseon. He managed to capture young Jae Gyung and his friend and after killing his friend, he forced Jae Gyung to change the contents of a letter from the King to Dominique in which he bid him a good journey. Jae Gyung was forced under sword point to write that the King asked Dominique to bring Catholicism to Joseon so that this could be used as ‘evidence’ for the dethronement. With this false proof, they attacked Seoraewon, slaughtered everyone there and in the end Min Ik Pyung even pierced King Yi Gyeom with his sword.
This was all on the same night that Yi Rim was born. Mo Hwa, who was attending the Queen Dowager at the time, was there when Yi Rim was born. Eunuch Heo helped her escape the palace with the baby.
Yi Tae was standing next to him, but from his shocked expression when Min Ik Pyung killed Yi Gyeom, I had the feeling he didn’t know he was going to do that and he must have probably felt guilty. Guilty enough to keep at least Yi Rim alive.
After this coup and betrayal, the Queen Dowager has been forced to live in the same palace as the man who killed her oldest son, hearing him call her ‘mother’, while fearing that he might one day get rid of Yi Rim. That’s why she’s been so protective of her youngest grandson all this time.
The messed up thing is, that King Yi Tae also starts manipulating Yi Jin, saying that if he brings out the truth about the forged documents, it will cost him the throne as well, as Yi Rim would be the first legitimate heir to the throne as Yi Gyeom’s oldest son. This does make Yi Jin waver a little (I felt so bad for him >__<) and he initially disapproves of the historians’ petition, written by Hae Ryung, to re-examine the documents they found.
During that night 20 years before, just before the attack on Seoraewon, Jae Gyung comes back to the house, admits to Hae Ryung’s father that he had to forge the King’s letter. Hae Ryung’s father tells him to take his daughter away, and so Jae Gyung takes little Hee Yeon and flees. From then on, she has been living as his little sister Goo Hae Ryung, not even remembering what really happened to her father.
As it turns out, Jae Gyung is the one who ended up writing The Story of Ho Dam, and when I think back about this, this kind of proved my theory from the beginning of the series. I had a feeling he had something to do with this, purely because of his response to mentions of the book, but it really turned out to be him in the end.

The most powerful scene of the whole series is the one in the final episode, when they are holding a banquet for King Yi Tae’s 20 years of being King. Here, all the confessions that were left unspoken are laid out on the table. Jae Gyung confesses how he was the one who forged the King’s letter as he was threatened by Min Ik Pyung, and then Yi Rim, Hae Ryung and the rest of the historians, plus the few official people on their side, all start pleading. I got goosebumps when Hae Ryung, while being held at sword-point, looked the King right in the eyes and told him that even if he should slash her throat, the historians would keep writing. No matter how the King yelled, all the historians kept writing. It was such a powerful moment. In the end, even Yi Jin joined them in pleading to right the wrongs. This final scene made a very big impact on me, because it really showed how much power the historians had, just by writing things down.

The series ends with a jump to three years later, Min Ik Pyung has by now died (either naturally or by punishment we don’t know), Woo Won is invited back to the historians’ office after finishing his father’s mourning period, his sister is no longer married to Yi Jin. Yi Jin still became King, because Yi Rim had no intention of taking the throne from him and is now in a very happy and free relationship with Hae Ryung.
I really liked how the show ends with a shot of Hae Ryung going back to work, because that showed all the more that this was the story of how she got through this, how she made her own path, and how even her relationship with Yi Rim didn’t necessarily define her. She was just Historian Goo Hae Ryung and she got there all by herself. It was a nice and powerful ending.

Now that I’ve covered the main story, I still need to discuss a couple of other characters before I go on to some cast comments.
First of all, Song Sa Hee. I’m kind of sorry I didn’t bring her up in more detail earlier as she was also one of my favorite characters. It seemed like she would be a kind of second female lead, but again, not involved in any kind of romantic triangle or square with Hae Ryung and Yi Rim (again, thank god).
She was the daughter of one of the higher government officials, someone at the same level as Min Ik Pyung, and everyone was surprised as to why she decided to become a historian, because she would be able to live very comfortably as she was. But she felt trapped. One thing she said that really hit me was that she didn’t want to live as a flower or a beautiful painting, as was expected of higher rank daughters. Becoming a historian would enable her to make her own way, her own life. She was the most serious one of the four female historians, the other three were drawn a little closer together by their love of gossip, but she always joined them for a drink when they had some time together away from their superiors. I was really glad that she didn’t become Hae Ryung’s enemy, even though she didn’t really open herself up to be friends exactly either. In the beginning, it seemed like she was even kind of spying for Min Ik Pyung, but she soon got sick of his tactics and wanted to stop. She was definitely on the historians’ side and also acknowledged her own father’s corruptness when it emerged. The most heartbreaking thing was when she was suddenly selected as one of Yi Rim’s bridal candidates. Min Ik Pyung had endorsed her and it was so sad when she came to him begging to let her out, because this was exactly the kind of life she wanted to avoid. Also, for another reason. As she was often stationed at Crown Prince Yi Jin’s quarters to record, the two of them had build some sort of bond. Sometimes it even seemed like there was a really tender thing blossoming between them (I definitely shipped them). Anyways, I believe she even admitted having some feelings for Yi Jin to the Crown Princess when she was spotted leaving his quarters early in the morning. They had been talking all night, but of course it was interpreted as that they had been doing more than that. After that, Sa Hee disappears for a while and only rejoins the historians later when they find the missing records.

I really enjoyed the two other female historians, Ah Ran and Eun Im. They were the moodmakers of the bunch, especially Ah Ran was a lover of gossip and occasionally shot off her mouth. The two of them are the only ones that bust Hae Ryung and Yi Rim together, but they manage to keep it a secret. In the end, I don’t really know exactly how necessary this was, that these two know, except that it made for some fun scenes where they kept interrogating Hae Ryung about their progress. But I would have expected it to become an issue when for example Ah Ran would shoot off her mouth again about it. In the end, nothing happened, and shortly after they found out, Hae Ryung and Yi Rim were forced apart by the marriage talk anyway, so I didn’t think it would’ve made a big difference whether they had found out or not.
It was funny to see them get into a fight with Yi Rim’s two court ladies, and Hae Ryung’s attending maid Seol Geum (played by Yang Jo Ah) was also a very funny character in that she couldn’t keep her mouth shut whenever she heard a juicy rumor. There were a lot of gossip lovers among the ladies, that’s for sure!

Let me get on with the cast comments!
So not long before watching this, I watched Run On, also with Shin Se Kyung, and I’ve seen other dramas with her but this was the first historical one I’ve seen of her! I have to say, this might be my favorite role by her so far. Shin Se Kyung has a knack for playing witty characters, and from her first appearance on I felt that she was a modern mind stuck in the Joseon period. She pulled it off really well. And I also liked how many different emotions she was able to portray, because despite her ability to keep her composure, she definitely cried and she definitely got angry. I really liked her in this drama!

This is the second drama I’ve seen with Astro’s Cha Eun Woo after My ID is Gangnam Beauty and I have to say I was kind of shocked! He was SUCH a different person! Now I know that acting is supposed to be like that, but I was really impressed with his versatility. Seeing him smile so much after watching My ID was almost kind of alarming, haha. I liked his character development a lot. In the beginning he was such a baby, every experience opened up a whole new world for him and seeing him fall for Hae Ryung was the cutest thing ever. He would just be completely dazed for the entire day after she’d snuck in a peck, it was so adorable. I definitely spurted out my drink when he was waiting for her in the final episode with that rose in his mouth, lol. I liked seeing this new side of his acting that I hadn’t seen before.

Now I have seen some series with Lee Ji Hoon, like School 2013, Legend of the Blue Sea, Gogh The Starry Night, even Blood (although I don’t remember much of that), but he’s always been kind of a minor side character or the second male lead who didn’t even stand a chance. It was so nice to see him in a main-ish role and I was VERY impressed with his acting. When he acted out that flashback scene where he found his wife who’d hung herself… My goodness, his expressions and acting were just amazing. I’m glad I got to see this side of his acting and it’s definitely made me more aware of him. I’m very glad that they didn’t make him fall in love with Hae Ryung because that would’ve just been very unoriginal and weird. I was actually glad to watch a drama without this typical quartet of people, it was refreshing!

I hadn’t seen anything with Park Ji Hyun yet, but I really liked her performance. I thought her character was very layered and I’m glad she wasn’t just a one-dimensional rival character or anything like that. In general, I liked how every character in the show had depth and showed growth. I was really rooting for her and Yi Jin to get together somehow, haha, even though I knew it wouldn’t happen since Sa Hee didn’t want to live that kind of life, just like Hae Ryung. I would like to see more of her acting in the future!

I kept wondering where I knew Park Ki Woong from, because he looked so familiar. And I figured out the only other thing I’ve seen him in was The Musical! Which is ancient! It’s been a really long time since I saw that and remember that it wasn’t a very good drama ^^” Anyways! I really liked him in this. He was a very likeable character, and even to the point where he was manipulated by his father, led to believe that his younger brother which he adored so much would actually take the throne away from him, I felt for him. You could see that it all went against his morals, and he handled it as well as he could. Also, I really liked his scenes with Sa Hee, he seemed so relaxed with her and he has a great smile! I liked him.

As I mentioned, the Queen Dowager was also one of my favorite characters. I have seen Kim Yeo Jin in previous dramas like Sassy Go Go, Moonlight Drawn By Clouds and lately in Itaewon Class, and she’s the typical mother kind of actress, but I loved seeing her as such a powerful and relentless female character in this drama. And when you learn about her side of the story, about having to live with the son that partook in killing her other son, it just makes her so strong, because she never once acts like a victim of what happened. I was really impressed by her acting since I haven’t actually her act so elaborately before, she was always just someone’s mom in other dramas with not a lot of personal screentime. Now I want to see more! I see that there are at least some more dramas with her on my to-watch list, so yay!

I’m sorry, I realize I haven’t said anything about Eunuch Heo Sam Bo yet! He needs to be mentioned! He was the most loyal person to Yi Rim, he was always with him and while he was mainly a comic relief character, his intentions were incredibly pure. He had been taking care of Yi Rim ever since he was born and had been nothing but a friendly figure to him. The scenes with him were always enjoyable because he was such a ‘good’ character. I didn’t know Sung Ji Roo from anything else but I kind of expected him to be a comedian or something! He certainly pulled off the comical scenes very well, haha.

Of course I knew some of the middle-aged man actors from several series as well. There were a lot of familiar faces in the Officials and the historians as well. I recognized the actress who played Eun Im was also in My ID is Gangnam Beauty because I remember writing in detail about her character since I liked her there as well.

There were also several actors and actresses that I didn’t know, so that was also nice. I like it when there’s a balance between people I do and do not know, haha.

Okay, so, to get to the conclusion of this review: I actually already rewrote stuff as I was writing it because I started out very incoherently. I hope it turned out for the better! Anyways, I enjoyed watching this drama. For a historical drama, it was very refreshing and unlike other stories as it focussed on strong female characters and the power of the written word. I really like the theme of the historians and how important they were. At the same time, it also tackled the issue of how women were looked down upon, in general, but all the more at the royal court. The starting period of the female historians was sometimes hard to watch since they were harrassed by literally anyone, just because they were rookies. I liked how all the events contributed to the final plot, how it gradually revealed little bits of the final truth. The build-up was really nice, also in the relationship between Hae Ryung and Yi Rim. I wondered at first what the whole side story of the banned book would bring to the story, as the other storylines were moving along just fine, and I guess I was worried that that additional storyline would be add too much extra drama to the story, but I think it was just the right amount. And they really wrapped up each plot before they started on to the next, so it didn’t feel like a mix of too many dramatic storylines happening at the same time.
It may not have been the most exciting historical drama I’ve seen, but it kept me interested and curious as to what would happen and what Hae Ryung and Yi Rim’s true origins were. I was positively surprised how it ended, and how they were able to become free together, just as they’d once only dared to imagine. I still can’t help but admire how they managed to not get busted while they were secretly dating around the palace grounds! That part went very smoothly indeed, haha.
I don’t have a lot of criticism, so it may have turned into a more analyzing review than a critical one. There were a lot of interesting events and the final message was very good in my opinion. I can’t emphasize it enough, but I found it really fascinating to learn more about these historians, especially since they appear to be so in the background, but they actually have so much influence and power. To think that we currently have access to this kind of information because of what they wrote back in those days!

I’ll be moving on with the next K-Drama on my list, I believe this will be a very dramatic one again, so I’ll be back soon with a new review! I hope this was at least a little bit enjoyable to read, I’m still trying to get back into a rhythm after these past few weeks. In any case, until next time! 🙂

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.

Master Devil Do Not Kiss Me
(恶魔少爷别吻我 / E Mo Shao Ye Bie Wen Wo)
MyDramaList rating (for both seasons): 6.5/10

Hiya! Back with a new review. It actually didn’t take me as long as I’d expected to finish this, but it turned out the episodes were really short and this made it very easy to binge it. I watched the whole thing on YouTube, since the quality was better on there. My first confusion with this one was that I thought the first season alone would be 46 episodes and then there would be another season, so you can imagine my surprise when suddenly at episode 23 it said ‘Final’. xD Anyways! I don’t remember why exactly I put this on my to watch list, but I’m a sucker for romantic comedies so that was probably the biggest reason. I do have to say that it was really different from what I expected, so even though the story itself won’t be so difficult to discuss and analyze, there were some things that I found peculiar or that I didn’t really get at the end, so I’d like to mention those. Also, I didn’t know any of the actors, which doesn’t occur often! I usually know some people from other series by face at least, but this time I didn’t have any reference to use for any of the actors, which was kind of nice, in a way! Really made me able to watch it with a clear and open mind. Well then, let’s get to it, shall we?

Master Devil Do Not Kiss Me is a Chinese drama consisting of two seasons, with a total of 46 episodes (23 per season), every episode about 20 minutes long. I will be talking about the two seasons as one, so I won’t make a big distinction between the first and second season since there really wasn’t a difference in flow of story between the two season. The only things that changed were the opening and ending themes, and several dubs.
The main storyline is about An Chu Xia (played by Xing Fei), who suddenly loses her mother and gets ‘adopted’ into the household of the rich Han family. When Chu Xia’s mother passes, she agrees to donate an organ to Mr. Han, and this saves his life. Mr. Han’s wife visits Chu Xia’s mother to thank her for this, and agrees to take care of Chu Xia and raise her like her own daughter – that’s the final agreement between the two women and so Chu Xia is taken into the Han’s household. Making this whole experience even more unpleasant than it already is, Han’s only son, Han Qi Lu (played by Li Hong Yi), is not very welcome to Chu Xia. They’ve already met once before and that encounter didn’t go very well. And now they have to live in the same house. More than that, Chu Xia has to start going to the same school as Qi Lu, where he publicly announces to everyone that she is his maid. Chu Xia, partly glad since this school is where her mother also studied fashion design, has to deal with a lot of bullying from schoolmates since Qi Lu has quite the reputation – whoever crosses him goes on the blacklist. Besides that, there’s also Mo Xin Wei (played by Zhang Xiao Wei), a girl with a big crush on Qi Lu, who decides to make Chu Xia’s life a living hell together with her faithful sidekick Wan Zi (played by Li You Tong/Sunday Li). The only people on Chu Xia’s side are her best friend Meng Xiao Nan (played by Qie Lu Tong), who even transfers schools with Chu Xia so she won’t be alone, and Feng Shao (played by Li Cen Yi), a guy from Chu Xia’s former neighborhood who is like a big brother to her. Two other people that become her friends are Ling Han Yu (played by Zhang Jiong Min), Qi Lu’s best friend, and Jiang Chen Chuan (played by Fu Long Fei/Jason Fu), who transfers to their school at the end of season 1 and starts pining for Chu Xia’s romantic attention, later revealed to be Xin Wei’s cousin. And then finally there’s Xiang Man Kui (played by Yang Zhi Ying/Katherine Yang), Qi Lu’s ex-girlfriend who returns from abroad suddenly after leaving Qi Lu a year earlier, wanting to get back with him.
The series in its entirety shows how Chu Xia copes with life in her new environment, both at home and at school, while facing many obstacles from petty people who are for some reason determined to ruin her life. In the end, of course, Chu Xia and Qi Lu fall in love with each other.

Let me say right from the start that the first episode was a MESS. It doesn’t happen often that after just the first episode I was like, ‘What the heck did I just watch?!’. First of all, to the end I never understood the whole getup that Chu Xia and Feng Shao were donning in their old neighborhood, with their weird wigs and all that. We see Chu Xia leave for a milk delivery, but then she bumps into Qi Lu (their first accidental kiss) and her pendant slips into his bag. Qi Lu and Han Yu are on their way to their school bus, since their class has a military training field trip. Chu Xia goes after them on her scooter to get her pendant back, but then gets involved in a whole hostage situation – the school bus is hijacked. In the meantime, Chu Xia’s mom gets a phone call that customers are not getting their milk delivered and she can’t reach Chu Xia because her phone was confiscated by the ‘hijackers’ and when she runs out into the street to search for her daughter, she is hit by a car. Chu Xia doesn’t find out what happened to her mom until she gets back from the fake hijacking incident. Because, yeah, the hijacking is fake. It’s part of the military training, which already explained why the hijackers were not being very intimidating despite the fact that they were pointing weapons at their students (seriously though, what kind of a messed up military training is that?!). Plus the hijackers were making a big deal about Chu Xia being the milk delivery person, and they let her go quite easily. Anyways, it was a BIG mess. There was already SO many dramatic things happening from the start, and it took a while for things to settle down. Like, I know they had to create a situation in which Chu Xia would be forced to start lodging at Qi Lu’s house, but this premise was quite extreme and far-fetched in my opinion. Especially when later in the series, things tone down a lot and the craziness from the beginning really disappears to make way for just Chu Xia’s storyline of surviving her new life. But really, the hostage situation AND her mom dying, all in the same first episode… I can’t lie because it did draw me in, in a strange way, but I still found it pretty extreme.

For me, this series was a kind of messy combination version of Hana Yori Dango and Itazura na Kiss, even though they still managed to not copy everything from those classics. But they combined the ‘enemies to lovers’ trope with the ‘FL ends up living at ML’s house’ trope, so a lot of things happening felt kind of familiar to those prior series. Chu Xia comes from a poor background, she’s been living with her mother ever since her father ‘disappeared’ when she was a baby. Even though her mom had been a genius fashion designer, she ended up owning a milk delivery business in a backstreet neighborhood called ‘Cat Ear Alley’. This is where Chu Xia grew up, between the hoodlums and street people. She grew up with Feng Shao as they both had to learn how to fend for themselves, and Chu Xia helped her mom deliver milk. After her mom’s accident, Chu Xia is suddenly pushed into this rich household, where she gets to wear fancy dresses and where she’s fed and cleaned and where she’s allowed to follow her dream to become a designer herself. It’s a really big turning point and she’s constantly struggling with it, because she doesn’t have a background to be ‘proud’ of like most other students, and certainly not like Xin Wei, who’s constantly out to make her feel bad about that. But she keeps going, continues to be proud of where she came from and where she’s headed, constantly positive and looking forward, and that’s really admirable.
Honestly, I was so glad with Chu Xia as the female lead. She wasn’t a pushover, she stood up for herself and for things that went against her justice, even when everyone else turned a blind eye to it. Even though her classmates betrayed her time and time again, she never held a grudge, and she really saw people for who they were based on her instinct. It was so satisying to see her look at all the BS that was happening around her and be all like, ‘People, honestly, aren’t you tired of this?’ I think, in all the Chinese series I’ve seen so far, Chu Xia was by far one of my favorite main characters. She just responded so logically and realistically to everything around her while a lot of other characters were kind of stuck in their stereotypical ways of responding to situations.

I mean, the characters were pretty stereotypical, in general. Chu Xia was the strong and independent girl from a poor background who fights her way through the social class system to prove her worth (reminiscent of Makino from HYD). Qi Lu is the cold and mean son of a rich household, until we find out this was caused by his ex leaving him heartbroken and he has a hard time getting back to normally express his feelings again when he falls for someone new, so he’s the typical cold on the outside, warm on the inside type of person. Xiao Nan is the typical best friend who’s a complete romantic and falls in love every day with another guy, until Chen Chuan appears and she settles on him. Even when she finds out Chen Chuan likes Chu Xia, she never turns on her friend, she’s the most loyal person Chu Xia has by her side, although she’s kind of a ditz. Xin Wei is the classic bitch character, and even to the very end she doesn’t show any kind of reflection on her actions, even when her friend Wan Zi finally exposes her at the end. I had the least understanding for her, she was just rotten to the core. Of course, she must have had a lot of insecurities, she constantly felt like she had to use backhanded tricks to humiliate Chu Xia in front of everyone in order to win from her, but I never once had a shred of empathy for her. She just went about it the wrong way, making herself a worse and worse person with every step. Chen Chuan is the second male lead of whom everyone knows he’ll never stand a chance, but we still kind of support him. He was just a very likable character, even though he was very competitive when it came to Chu Xia and sometimes he didn’t know how to leave her alone, when he saw that Chu Xia and Qi Lu were really going for each other, he took a step back and left them alone. Same went for Han Yu, even though he was also romantically interested in Chu Xia, he kept making way for Qi Lu when it became clear that his friend liked her as well. He never passed on a chance to tell Qi Lu off for treating Chu Xia badly though, at one point he really went more to her side than to his, but he was a loyal friend to both of them to the end.
Man Kui is the initially mysterious ex-girlfriend who comes back and keeps her intentions a bit ambiguous for a while. In season 1 she only appears in Qi Lu’s flashbacks up to the point where she leaves him after winning a designing competition and being offered a chance to go to study fashion design in France. She returns at the end of season 1, and then we first don’t really know what to think of her. She seems nice enough to Chu Xia at first, but then she does become a little petty because she also wants Chu Xia gone from Qi Lu’s side. She teams up with Xin Wei for a while, but then ditches her and Xin Wei responds to this by trying to frame both Man Kui and Chu Xia, and this finally puts things in perspective for Man Kui. I think that, even though Man Kui only really appeared in season 2, she still had a lot of character development because at least she was able to reflect on herself and decided not to stay selfish like Xin Wei. Even though I didn’t really like her character that much, that much I could respect about her. What was funny to me was that the adult characters were all the most animated characters, like the young people were the ones going through real things, but the adults were mostly there for comic relief, especially the teachers. They just showed how frustrating it could be for students to go their own way, even if that meant going against school rules, for the sake of expressing their creativity and personal skills. There was this one teacher, the one everyone hated, who kept treating Chu Xia like a bad student, accusing her of cheating and stuff, just because she thought outside of the box a little, and that was really frustrating.
Something that kept happening which I felt really uncomfortable with was the ‘adults’ around Chu Xia making decisions about her life, and then I primarily mean in terms of marriage. First of all, while Qi Lu’s mother, fondly called Sister Yuan (played by Hao Yang) was the best substitute mom Chu Xia could wish for, reminding me also of the mom from Itazura na Kiss, she decided that Chu Xia would be Qi Lu’s fiancée without asking either of them for approval. It was in a protest against this that Qi Lu started going around telling people Chu Xia was his maid instead. Afterwards, when Han Yu’s grandfather discovers her as he also knew her mom, he basically already starts preparing her marriage to Han Yu. At the same time, Chen Chuan is going around telling everyone Chu Xia is going to marry him. That scene where those three people were discussing who Chu Xia was going to marry and she was just standing there, blank-faced, it was SO uncomfortable! It’s so weird to think that it still goes like this in some cultures, that young girls really have no say in what their future is going to be like because the older people will arrange everything for them. I don’t know, that part just really pissed me off. Just, any part in which people started talking on behalf of Chu Xia, I was like ‘SHE CAN SPEAK FOR HERSELF THANK YOU VERY MUCH’. -__-”

While I found the series in itself enjoyable enough, it lacked a lot in structure and build-up. One of the biggest example of this was the build-up in Chu Xia and Qi Lu’s relationship. Of course, we know, that the enemies will become lovers eventually. But their build-up was so confusing at times that in the end, I’m even wondering about the drama’s title, because it didn’t really make sense to me anymore. I thought that it was because Qi Lu told Chu Xia to call him ‘Young Master Han’ as she was his maid, and even though she refuses this she does call him that occasionally as a joke. In the summary on DramaWiki it says that Qi Lu’s nickname at school is ‘Master Devil’ because no one dares to oppose him, but I can’t remember that being explained clearly in the series. But okay, that explains the ‘Master Devil’ part, also because he is very unpleasant to Chu Xia in the beginning. But I don’t really get the ‘Do Not Kiss Me’ part, even after finishing the series.
They have two accidental kisses, where they literally bump into each other and their lips accidentally touch. When this happens in the first episode when they first meet, Qi Lu immediately finds it strange that he doesn’t have an allergic reaction to being ‘kissed’ like that, since apparently he’s not been able to take that kind of intimacy ever since Man Kui left him. Anyways, so there’s two accidental kisses, one time Chu Xia kisses Qi Lu in a game of truth or dare (which was super weird because their lips were kept out of the shot?! Like you only saw their eyes which made the ‘kiss’ look really fake), Qi Lu kisses her one time in a fit of passionate rage but this was just really bad timing because they were fighting and it was not consented (Chu Xia also pushed him away immediately). And then there are multiple scenes where it’s just the two of them and they’re about to kiss but are interrupted at the last moment. Even when they finally officially ‘confess’ to each other, there is not a single mutually consented, both on the same page, romantic kiss between them. It literally ends with him hugging her after dramatically telling her he likes her, which we all already knew because he’d already told her that several times before. So yeah, bit of an anticlimax. And it was such a pity! Because they had a really nice chemistry! I was constantly excited when they had scenes together because I felt like their feelings would just be piling and piling up until they’d finally have that long-awaited kiss…. and then it didn’t happen.
Also, the timing between them was kind of off. Qi Lu is the first one to realize his feelings for Chu Xia, and then he immediately starts preparing to confess, even though Chu Xia really isn’t there yet. Like, at one point, he tells her this whole confession (the one where she’s in the shower and doesn’t hear it), but I was really like… even if she did hear that confession, I figure her reaction would be a legit ‘what the fuck’. Because at that point, even when he wanted to publicly tell her through a megaphone at the end of season 1 that he liked her, Chu Xia at that point was not looking at him romantically yet AT ALL. She only really decided she liked him when she found out he was the person who’d been rooting for her through messages on that wall back in Cat Ear Alley. He took one of the stray cats home and she discovered this and, recognizing the cat, she knew it had been him. Only then I felt like she finally realized her honest feelings for him, before that, it would’ve just been awkward if he’d confessed, because she just would’ve said no. So yeah, even though it happens a lot when one lead character realizes their feelings before the other one does, it felt like Qi Lu really didn’t think about how Chu Xia would feel if he suddenly told her his feelings out of the blue like that. Like, when he first asked her to date, it just felt so awkward because it was kind of ‘Hey, who are we kidding, we know this is happening, let’s date already’ and Chu Xia was like ‘???the heck you talking about bro???’
What I really found really shitty of Qi Lu was that he just started flirting with Man Kui in front of Chu Xia, like he’d suddenly bring her into the house to cook and make comments about how happy he was to have Man Kui because Chu Xia couldn’t cook for the life of her, and all that was just really mean of him. And then they’d go out for dinners with the three of us, while Chu Xia knew she was going to be a third wheel, and they’d just reminisce about their past together and Chu Xia was just like CAN I LEAVE PLEASE?! Especially because this was when she was actually finally starting to like him. This just made her really confused, for good reason. Like, first he tells her he likes her, pushes her to be his girlfriend, and then this?
I was SO happy when she told him off for acting like a jerk there I even wrote down what she actually told him because it was so spot-on. xD She said, “Don’t speak to me in that tone, like I did something unforgiveable to you. What do I know? I only know that you and Man Kui are being all lovey-dovey and that you’re treating me like air. I also know that you two had a candle-lit dinner in which you burned me like a candle to lighten your mood. Han Qi Lu, face your inner heart already. If you like her, then get back together. Don’t eat from your bowl while looking at the pot. I am not a buy-one-get-one-for-free item in your relationship.”
After this quote I applauded. I was so happy she saw how he treated her for the exact BS that it was instead of acting all pitiful and butt-hurt about it.
The second shitty thing he did was to reject her so heartlessly when she was finally ready to confess back to him. She finally gathered the courage to tell him she liked him back, and he was like ‘nahh I don’t want to be in a relationship right now’ and I legit went BITCH WHAT. Even when he ‘justified’ himself because he wanted to let her go follow her dream and he didn’t want to cause her to miss out on that, he gave up on his own selfishness when it came to her, the way he told her was just mean and not okay. He made her CRY, I can’t forgive him for that. Team Chu Xia all the way!
So yeah, even though I like the enemies to lovers trope because it always adds in that little spice and aggressiveness which I secretly kind of dig, this series made a bit of a mess of how their feelings were communicated to each other.

I really liked the story they added in season 1 about their teacher You Tian and his hidden desire to pursue a career in art. The part where they made the whole exhibition from all his work for him and all that. You Tian (played by Feng Xiao Tong) was the nicest teacher in school, and I also liked his relationship with the school nurse Maria who kind of disappeared at some point. In season 2, when he comes back to teach after finishing his art school classes, they suddenly added this weird and unnecessary part where he suddenly had a foreign fiancée and that caused more tension between him and Maria because they were obviously into each other. But then the fiancée found out about You Tian and Maria and ran out crying and bumped into the other teacher and suddenly told him he was very handsome — and that was it. After that, both Maria and the fiancée completely disappeared from the story! Which was a shame because Maria was kind of an important side character who helped Chu Xia out a couple of times as well.
(By the way, I can’t seem find any information about the actress who played Maria, she’s not added in any cast lists on DramaWiki or MyDramaList, and I can’t even find this series on AsianWiki, so if anyone has any info on this, please let me know so I can at least credit the actress!)

In the last part of season 2, Chu Xia gets to participate in the same designing contest as Man Kui a year earlier, which will give her a chance to study in France. It is during this already tense period that the final big plot twist is revealed: Chu Xia’s father. Worst of all: he is also Xin Wei’s father. Which means that not only Chu Xia and Xin Wei are half sisters, but Chen Chuan and Chu Xia are also cousins. Chu Xia of course wants nothing do it with him anyway, she’s never had a father and even though she’s been curious about his disappearance, she doesn’t want to joing the Jiang family. When Xin Wei finds out, she loses it. Feeling like Chu Xia is now even trying to take away her family from her after stealing Qi Lu away from her, she puts in motion her most extreme plan. Frame both Chu Xia and Man Kui during the final round of the competition, by having Man Kui kidnapped so she can’t come to prove Chu Xia’s innocence. This is where it just got really messy and even her friend Wan Zi decides that she’s going too far. In the end, everything is solved, luckily, but it still was a really nasty event. And all Xin Wei could do was just scream at Chu Xia, calling everyone a liar and she even repeatedly badmouthed Chu Xia’s mother. She was just being SO disrespectful that I actually didn’t flinch when her dad slapped her because honestly, she deserved that at the least. She was completely crazy. And then it was like ‘Okay, well, I guess it was a misunderstanding, in that case Chu Xia is the winner!! :D’ and everyone went like ‘Yaaayyy’ and Chu Xia was like ‘Hello?! That’s it?! Anyone care to explain wtf just happened?!’ Like, the transitions between happenings and scenes was really weird and unnatural sometimes.

Another storyline that was introduced but then completely ignored again was the one about Gao Gan and his crazy girlfriend. Gao Gan was a very unpleasant classmate of Qi Lu’s, also from a rich background, with a big grudge towards Qi Lu and, consequently, Chu Xia. The girl that he was in love with was obsessed with Qi Lu, and she was kicked out of school by him just before Chu Xia came. The crazy girl even came back to school once to threaten Chu Xia with a knife, she was nuts. Anyways, we find out that Gao Gan (played by Bai Cheng Jun) loves her and wants to get back at Qi Lu for driving his girl nuts, even though she just really had some serious issues. But hey, petty people be petty, and they blame everything on someone they can actually blame and hurt. So he even kidnaps Chu Xia in the beginning of season 2, and he helps Xin Wei in her final scheme by kidnapping Man Kui before she can get to the competition to vouch for Chu Xia. I called him crap-bag in my head for the entire series, because he was just such a lame douchebag. And yeah, he only showed up one more time, all bad-guy like, look I’m cool because I’m kidnapping girls now. But there really wasn’t anything more to his character besides that, they just made him come back when they needed a bad guy. And the crazy girlfriend also didn’t appear anymore after making such a dramatic scene.
Wan Zi was also a character that I deeply disliked, even though she did come around in the end when she found out Xin Wei’s plan to frame Chu Xia like that, then she finally got a conscience. But honestly, Xin Wei had been treating her like trash as well, so I can understand. What bothered me mostly about Wan Zi was the actress though, and in particular her acting. She was like a robot doll, completely not communicating with other actors while she was doing a scene with them, she just said her words straight ahead while pulling the continuously same startled facial expression. She was just as petty as Xin Wei in the beginning, until Xin Wei took over with her madness. They kind of reminded me of the bad girls from Love O2O, even though there the ‘friend’ was worse than the ‘bitch character’.

I’ve seen this comment a lot while watching the series, and I have to agree it’s kind of funny and that they should’ve called the series ‘High School Gossip Please Don’t Kill Me’ or something like that. It was CRAZY how the gossip escalated. They made it funny to include this same flow of rumours being spread by the same group of people, and with each person the story was pulled more and more out of context until it became pure nonsense. Like, Chu Xia is in school for 1 day and there’s a rumor that she’s pregnant with Qi Lu’s baby. This also reminded me a lot of how Makino was bullied in HYD. Like, I get people can be petty, but you know it’s serious when they start putting tacks on your chair, that just goes too far. I was so proud of Chu Xia how she kept herself going through all that. And I love that at least she had Xiao Nan with her in class. That time when she came into class and her books were all shredded and ripped up and then Xiao Nan came in and just calmly replaced all her books because she’d already gone to the bookstore to buy new ones for her… Friendship goals, to be sure. And there were these three people in their class who also called themselves Chu Xia’s friends but whenever she was facing new rumors, they just shut her out again because they were too scared to stand up for her and get in trouble themselves. Those were not friends, they were only nice to her when they figured Chu Xia actually stood a chance against the higher power, then they suddenly started flocking to her side. Before that, they really only wanted her to help them out but they never did so in return.
So I guess you could say ‘friendship’ is a very important theme in this series. Chu Xia certainly found out who her real friends were, and in the end they really had a nice group of people who would always help each other out.

I would like to make some character and cast comments now before I move on to my conclusion.
As I mentioned before, I really didn’t know any of the actors from other series before, so I’m basing my opinions purely on what I saw from them in this drama. I’m not going to pay too much attention to the cringe-worthy dubbing in this, only that I believe they actually changed some of the voices for season 2. I remember wondering why Chu Xia and Xiao Nan suddenly had completely different voices. Honestly, is it too much to ask to just let the actors act with their own voices? What’s the point in always adding this over-extreme mismatched dubbing to it? Anyways.

To start with my favorite girl, Chu Xia. I really liked Xing Fei’s performance. She made me really feel for her character, all the more because she seemed to be the only character that just responded normally to the weird situations around her. She had a really natural attraction to her, like, she seemed really fun to hang around with and that’s probably what attracted all these guys to her as well, even though that was never her intention. It was just impossible to hate her, unless you were Xin Wei and you just looked for reasons to blame her for literally anything bad that was happening in your own life. Even though she was kind of over the top in the first episode, as soon as she took that weird wig off, she became a really likeable person. She had really good views on what was right and wrong, she didn’t hold grudges, she knew how to mind her own business and just couldn’t understand what made it so hard for other people to do the same thing. She thought outside of the box, knew how to apply her knowledge instead of just following the rules in how to use it. She showed everyone how strong she was in her mind and soul, and that was really nice to see. I can’t emphasize enough how happy I was with a female lead like her.

I just found out that there’s actually a 5-year age difference between Xing Fei and Li Hong Yi! Xing Fei was 23 at the time this series came out and Li Hong Yi was 19. I see on his DramaWiki page that he’s been doing a LOT lately, so maybe I’ll get to see some of his other more recents series in the future. Even though his character was kind of stereotypical in that he was supposed to be the cool and jerkish guy who actually had a tiny heart and just wanted to be loved, I did enjoy his performance. I really loved his eyes, especially in the way he looked at Chu Xia, he really showed his emotions through his gaze very well. He really was like a little child sometimes, getting all petty when he couldn’t immediately get what he wanted. And this also made him a bit endearing, despite the fact that he kept saying really insensitive things to people. I’d actually expected his character to be way more predatory, for some reason. I thought he would be this kind of dangerous guy who would really constantly treat her as his maid and claim her to be his possession. But maybe that’s because when someone is called ‘Devil’ in a Chinese drama, I always think of ‘Devil Beside Me’, and Qi Lu really wasn’t as bad as Mike He’s character there. Anyways, I’m kind of curious to see more of him now that I see he’s doing a lot of dramas lately.

Qie Lu Tong was really good as Xiao Nan, I really loved her character, even though she was kind of ditzy in the whole romance thing. She was the daydreamer who would just create romantic scenarios out of nothing, which was in complete opposite to Chu Xia, but still they were like sisters. I loved how she just transferred to Chu Xia’s new school, how she just got her dad to do that, plainly so Chu Xia wouldn’t have to be alone. And even though she pouted a lot through rather than take action by herself, she was the most loyal person to Chu Xia, up to the very end. Even when Chen Chuan didn’t like her back and she had to watch him make advances on Chu Xia, she never started envying her friend, she never turned bitter. She still tried to be a good friend to Chen Chuan, and in the end it rewarded her when he finally started noticing all the things she’d been doing for him ever since he found out Chu Xia was his cousin. So yeah, I see that she hasn’t done a lot of dramas, but I hope to see more of her, because she played a very likeable character.

In the end, Han Yu didn’t have as big a role as I’d expected, because in the beginning I thought he and Qi Lu would be like the two friends from Love till The End of Summer. But he kind of disappeared for a while, and then when he came back his place as the second male lead was kind of taken over by Chen Chuan. But anyways, he was a really likeable character. Even when he didn’t hide his true feelings for Chu Xia, he never forced himself on to her, he always respected her feelings and stepped back immediately when Qi Lu started showing interest in her, even though he didn’t like it. He was a real good friend, and I felt like he actually became more Chu Xia’s friend than Qi Lu’s, as it seemed that he and Qi Lu got out of touch a little when he went away. But I liked that, even when his grandfather started pushing them together, he never seriously went along with it and he really didn’t want Chu Xia to be bothered by it, either. I see on DramaWiki that Master Devil was the first show he did, and that he’s also in some more recent dramas, so I hope that I can watch something with him again!

I don’t know why exactly, but Li Cen Yi gave me Kim Young Kwang vibes! I really liked his character, he was like the big brother-type of friend that you could always depend upon. It did seem in the beginning as if he also had a crush on Chu Xia, but then all of a sudden he had a girlfriend, and it looked like this was a big relief to Chu Xia. I think she would’ve been worried how to face him after she heard someone imply that he liked her. Anyways, he was a really cool guy, always jumping in to help Chu Xia out. I liked how him, Chu Xia and Xiao Nan were already friends from before Chu Xia transferred to that school. Even though Feng Shao couldn’t attend school with her like Xiao Nan, he did find other ways to stay close, like for example he was suddenly helping out with gym classes and stuff? And I also liked how Chen Chuan and he got their sort of bromance bond. Feng Shao really tried to think about what would be best for Chu Xia, and that’s why he support Chen Chuan in his pursuing of her, because he didn’t like Qi Lu (with good reason). But yeah, in the end it was all up to Chu Xia, no matter his good intentions. He was a good friend throughout, and just a very likeable character to have in the series. I liked his performance a lot, how calm and casual he always was, but still oozing that subtle ‘don’t mess with me or my fam’ coolness.

Although I did find Chen Chuan a little bit annoying at times, there would always be a moment where he corrected himself and always made me go ‘Ahh, okay, now that was nice of him’. He is initially attracted to Chu Xia because she treats him like no other girl has treated him before, and he gets reeled in by her gutsiness and determination. He does tend to be a bit clingy, especially starting from season 2 when he’s just determined to stay by her side, but Chu Xia makes it very clear to him that she doesn’t like that. I think he knew from the start that she wasn’t into him, but he still believed that if he’d put in effort, he could make her look at him. In the end, the plan failed mainly because he finds out they’re actually related, but she’s still really important to him and he finally pushes Qi Lu to her, in his own words ‘I just want to support my cousin’. I would’ve liked to see him noticing Xiao Nan more, though! She stuck by him whenever he was in a ditch, I secretly hoped that they’d start dating when Chu Xia went to France, but then the series was suddenly already over. xD Anyways, he was a likeable character, without a doubt, even though he could’ve been a little more respectful at times, especially in moments where he was just really greedy for Chu Xia’s attention. I thought it was really mature of him to help Chu Xia and Qi Lu out in the end, even though it hurt.

Even though I hated Mo Xin Wei, I can’t deny that Zhang Xiao Wei is really pretty. I almost found it a waste that they casted someone so pretty as such an unlikeable character. I’d really hoped to see some maturity from her in the end, like in Love O2O and Love till the End of Summer where the bitchy girl characters all came around in the end to apologize for their immature behavior to the female lead. None of that here. I really tried to get some understanding for her character, but she really was a lost case.
The actress did a great job portraying her like that though! It’s a whole different kind of challenge to portray a character that the viewers will have to hate. She really lost the right to any kind of redemption with her last scheme, that just went too far. And all I could think was how little she must actually think of herself, that she felt like the only way she could ‘win’ from Chu Xia was to use these kinds of tricks to make her feel bad. All in all, I’d have to compliment the actress for portraying the character so well. Let’s not forget that the actors are not their characters, haha.

I personally found it kind of a pity what they did with Man Kui. I mean, she was established to be this amazing girlfriend to Qi Lu in the past, but then when they found it necessary to suddenly bring her back and act like nothing had happened between them, they suddenly started making her really pitiful and kind of petty at times as well. She would fake being in pain in order to get Qi Lu to pay attention to her, and then she took advantage of the fact that people were starting to speculate about them dating again by making Chu Xia feel like the third wheel. I’m glad she came around eventually after what Xin Wei did at the end, because just before that she’d also still been determined to hurt Chu Xia. Her character was just really ambiguous to me, like even though I wanted to like her, I couldn’t because she was being so fake. I was glad Chu Xia started noticing this at well, realizing that the pot lid that had supposedly burned Man Kui’s hand wasn’t hot at all, etcetera.
But anyways, I can’t deny that her character was interesting, even though I was really confused as to how much she was exaggerating about being sick and in pain. In the end it all just became kind of unimportant, and this also took away from the credibility of her character, so that was a pity.

It was really nice to watch this after finishing such an emotional cookie like Move to Heaven. Agreed, as I said, this wasn’t a very ‘good’ series in terms of structure and storyline build-up, but I found it very enjoyable nonetheless. Sometimes you’re just in the mood for something light and weird, that just makes you laugh out loud and make you forget about the weight of the real world.
I’m glad I gave it a shot, and I also saw that they have a lot of Chinese dramas on YouTube, so that makes it very easy to watch. I have several more Chinese dramas of similar genres on my to watch list, for a fact I know some are also with Xing Fei, so I’m looking forward to those! I’m also glad I took the time to write a serious review on this, even though I went through it so swiftly and there wasn’t a lot to really take seriously in the story. I actually liked that it was a mixture of all kinds of classic romance stories combined because I really like those, no matter how cliché they are. Even if it’s just for light entertainment, it will do.

I’m going back to some K-Dramas now that I’ve also really been looking forward to. I hope to be able to finish my batch of 10 dramas in 5 months before the end of this year and still write some worthwhile reviews as I go through my neverending list. 🙂
Bye-bee~! ^^

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.

Move to Heaven
(무브 투 헤븐: 나는 유품정리사입니다 / Mubeu Tu Hebeun: Naneun Yupumjeongnisaimnida / Move to Heaven: I am a Trauma Cleaner)
MyDramaList rating: 8.0/10

Hi everyone! Back again just within October with another review. This drama wasn’t originally on my watch list, but my friend recommended it to me after she’d binged it in two days and after hearing her reaction to it I became curious and I decided to watch it in-between my watch list items. And I’m really glad I did. In the midst of everyone going crazy about Squid Game, I was busy discovering this precious gem! It really is a hidden jewel, it’s short but so strong in message and greatly acted, so I would really recommend it to anyone who is interested in series with serious themes like loss and healing, and stories that are slightly slower paced.
I will give more reactions later on, let me first start with a short summary before I go on to discuss some of the themes and messages that I feel were important in this series. And after that, as usual, I will make some cast comments and conclude my final thoughts.

Move to Heaven is a 10-episode Netflix K-Drama, each episode around 53 minutes long, so not as long as the usual Netflix K-Drama. It’s about a 20-year old boy with Asperger’s named Han Geu Roo (played by Tang Joon Sang), who helps his father, Han Jeong Woo (played by Ji Jin Hee) with his trauma cleaning service, Move to Heaven. Trauma cleaning involves cleaning up the rooms and final belongings of people who have recently passed away. Jung Woo has raised Geu Roo by himself since his wife died when Geu Roo was still young, and it has been the two of them ever since. When Jung Woo unexpectedly passes away due to a heart failure (it turns out he was sick for a while but never told Geu Roo because he didn’t want to worry him), Geu Roo suddenly finds himself alone and stuck in how to continue. With his guardian gone, his father’s lawyer Oh Hyun Chang (played by Im Won Hee), brings in Geu Roo’s uncle, Jung Woo’s half-brother, Cho Sang Goo (played by Lee Je Hoon). Sang Goo initially doesn’t care about his nephew, his main objective for this 3-month ‘job’ is to get his hands on the house. He doesn’t seem to have any lingering sentimentalities towards his brother and he just finds Geu Roo and his behavior weird and unsettling. Since Geu Roo won’t let him sleep in his father’s room, he’s forced to set up a tent in the living room. He’s a messy person with a seemingly small sense of responsibility towards anything or anyone. And then to finalize their band, there’s Yoon Na Moo (played by Hong Seung Hee), Geu Roo’s neighbor and best friend who is constantly worried about him. When Sang Goo is assigned as his new guardian, she immediately decides to stay with her friend to make sure his weird uncle doesn’t hurt him. Eventually, the three of them continue the work for Move to Heaven together, and Sang Goo slowly but surely comes to terms with his new responsibility, especially after he is faced with some lingering resentment towards Jung Woo. Geu Roo in the end will have to let his father go, as he initially refuses to return his father’s ashes to the burial service.
In-between these uncomfortable new changes in both Geu Roo and Sang Goo’s worlds, several cases in their Move to Heaven will help them get their own closure and in the process, they will grow closer to each other, in their own unique ways.

I just want to say right off the bat that this series draws a beautiful portrait of humanity, of how people can react differently to loss and how they choose to process it. While cleaning up these rooms, Geu Roo collects several valued belongings from the deceased and puts these in a special yellow box in order to give them to someone, as a memento of the deceased. The simple but beautiful determination of Geu Roo is that he can’t have peace before he delivers the yellow box to someone, even if people refuse to accept it. Like the deceased themselves, Geu Roo needs to find a place for their final belongings and memories, before he can move on. Every single case depicted in the series is meaningful, everything has a purpose, and sometimes something about a case even leads to something that has to do with Geu Roo or Sang Goo’s own troubles. I think they really did a great job balancing the Move to Heaven cases next to the main characters’ own storylines and character development. In the beginning, we aren’t given too much information about how Geu Roo has lived all these years with his father, or what Sang Goo’s relationship with Jung Woo exactly was, except that he doesn’t seem to be very fond of him. But all these things are explained, eventually, without taking the attention away from the important messages that the Move to Heaven cases hold. To balance these two important storylines equally at the same time without one of them becoming less important or interesting, that seems pretty challenging but they really pulled it off very well.

You might think after seeing the ‘trauma cleaning’ aspect of the story that the series will be very heavy and emotional, it also made me think of the Japanese movie ‘Okuribito’ (‘Departures’) at first, but in the end I feel like this series mostly focusses on themes like ‘hope’ and ‘healing’ than really on ‘death’. Of course, for each case, we see how the person passes away, or at least what the main cause of their death is, before we move on to the next day, when the body has already been removed, and all that’s left is their room with all their personal stuff left in it. In some cases, the room is the place the person died in, but in other cases not. Still, since it’s their personal space that they left behind, Geu Roo and his father always made sure to, before they started cleaning, address the deceased respectfully. They always announce that they are trauma cleaners from Move to Heaven, and that they will help the deceased with their final move (to heaven). Despite the fact that every episode is emotional in a way, because all the stories are touching and heartbreaking (I’ve been reduced to a puddle of tears multiple times), it always ends in a hopeful tone. The belongings will find their way to a certain someone, they succeed in reminding relatives of the deceased of their attachment to them, etcetera. But it is mainly Geu Roo’s determination to keep doing the work, also as a legacy to his father, that is so touching.

Let me talk a bit about the main characters in more detail. There really aren’t that many characters in this series, besides the main characters there are some minor characters that they meet during one or more of the cases, and then there are the ‘clients’ of Move to Heaven and their stories.
As I mentioned, Han Geu Roo is a 20-year old boy with Asperger’s. Some of his quirks include that everything needs to proceed in an orderly manner for his mind, he can’t handle change very well, he doesn’t look people directly in the eye when he speaks, he listens to classical music while he works, he has a photographic memory, and he LOVES the aquarium. Whenever he’s stressed, he starts repeating all kinds of different rays and sharks and other fish to himself to calm himself down. He often visits the local aquarium to look at all the fish and has even helped out the staff by pointing out that some fish are sick or need to be moved. Really, ever since he was a kid, he’s loved the fish, and he even has a mobile of fish above his bed. He has been eating the same kind of breakfast his father prepared for him for so long that even after he passes, he still makes the table for his dad and doesn’t let his uncle sit in his seat. He can’t eat broken egg yolk, and he doesn’t like to be touched. His father was only allowed to hug him on specific occasions, but even then, Geu Roo is not comfortable with it. In the beginning of the first episode, after seeing how used Geu Roo is to his father being around to take the lead, as soon as Jung Woo dies, you can’t help but immediately worry about him. ‘Who’s going to take care of him now?’ ‘What’s going to happen to him now?’ We immediately feel like he won’t be able to take care properly of himself, even though he seems to be doing pretty great even as Sang Goo enters the house and turns out to be completely useless in taking care of the household. Even though the Move to Heaven seem to distract him from fully processing his father’s death, Geu Roo really is not able to let him go until the final episode. His dedication to his father’s memory, his father who was all he had after he had to watch his mom fade away due to terminal cancer, becomes even more touching when we find out that Geu Roo was actually adopted. Jung Woo, who used to be a firefighter, found him abandoned as a premature baby, severely hypothermic, in a desolated water tank in mid-winter. After making sure the baby was sent to a hospital and recovered, he and his wife got so attached to him that they ended up adopting him as their own son. Geu Roo, at some point, has become aware of this, he knows that he has been adopted but is still able to distinguish that Jung Woo, although he wasn’t his biological father, was really his father who loved him very much.

Cho Sang Goo is Han Jung Woo’s younger half brother, from a different father. His father was extremely abusive to their mother, and although Jung Woo promised to save Sang Goo, he didn’t show up when they’d agreed to meet to run away, leaving Sang Goo to fend for himself. Sang Goo went on the wrong path, and ended up fighting illegally in a gambling den. Even after he officially stopped fighting, the lady who took him in, Madam Jung (played by Jung Ae Yoon) has been blackmailing him into fighting again. The reason he stopped fighting was that he was forced to fight a young boy who he’d trained himself to be a boxer, and knocked him into a coma. About halfway throughout the series, the comatose boy dies, and Sang Goo takes to cleaning up his belongings by himself, stricken with grief and guilt. Besides that, he also finds out the real reason what happened to his brother why he didn’t show up that time when they would run away together, and he discovers that Jung Woo has actually been looking for him for a long time. Gradually finding closure for his personal issues, Sang Goo grows as a person and also starts to become a more caring guardian for Geu Roo. In his final evaluation talk with Lawyer Oh, he hears that Geu Roo has asked for him to remain his formal guardian and that brings tears to his eyes as he accepts.

Yoon Na Moo has been Geu Roo’s only close friend ever since he and his father moved into their street and it is revealed in the end that she has also had a crush on him since she first saw him. Her parents own a food stand next to their house and her mother in particular (played by Jung Young Joo) doesn’t really like her daughter hanging out with Geu Roo so much, and she’s definitely against it when her daughter declares she wants to start working at Move to Heaven for real. Her father (played by Jung Seok Yong) is more easy going than his wife and occasionally covers for his daughter when she sneaks out. Na Moo is the most loyal friend that Geu Roo could wish for. She constantly worries for him, she checks up on him, she hangs out with him. She works parttime at the aquarium Geu Roo frequents and checks up on the fish in the tanks for him. As suspicious as she is of Sang Goo, she keeps tabs on him as well, spotting him leaving the house in the middle of the night, and even following him one time to the gambling den where she sees him fight. Her prior concern lies with Geu Roo, so she’s immediately worried that he’s a violent criminal, but as she joins them on cases for Move to Heaven and gets to know Sang Goo better (mostly through bickering), she finds that he might not be such a bad person after all. Na Moo is probably the person with the least background information of the three main characters, but that didn’t bother me. It was refreshing that at least she could just be the loyal friend without too much baggage herself, who just cared about Geu Roo’s wellbeing more than anyone.

I want to go through the cases one by one very shortly, especially the ones that had some lead or reference that reflected onto the main characters’ personal lives and troubles.
The first case depicted in the first episode, the last one Geu Roo executes with his father, involves a young man who got hurt in a construction accident at work. He was urged by his superiors to go check on this error and got hurt but was forced to hide his injury – later revealed infection – as he wasn’t allowed to take days off or slack off from work. As they go to deliver his final belongings to his parents at his funeral, they discover that both his parents are deaf. His work superiors are making lightly of his death, denying any kind of involvement and just give the mother an envelop of consolation money while behind her back they’re talking about how convenient it is that they can’t hear what they’re saying. Hearing this, Jung Woo can’t stay still and starts reporting the whole situation to the young man’s mother, who in turn scolds the work superiors severely in sign language, as Jung Woo translates. In the final episode, we see that Jung Woo initially learned sign language because Geu Roo initially wouldn’t speak as a child after they adopted him, but did pick up sign language signs very fast and it was their first way of communicating. (The first time Geu Roo spoke was when the three of them first visited the aquarium and Geu Roo became so excited he started naming all the fish and this was such a beautiful moment that I had to mention it.) Anyways, after finishing this case, Jung Woo leaves Geu Roo at the funeral hall with the small fish tank there to take care of something outside, but he never returns as on the way back he suffers a heart attack.
The second case involves an old lady who was found about three weeks after she passed, leaving a big mess in her room due to her body’s decay. Her son and his wife only seem to be interested in her money and they urge Geu Roo to clean up as soon as possible and bring them any cash he finds. As this is Sang Goo’s first mission to assist Geu Roo in this ‘weird and disturbing work’, he is immediately disgusted by the relatives’ behavior towards their deceased mother. In the end, as they discover that the lady had been saving up to buy her son a nice suit as she promised him a long time ago, they manage to persuade her son to listen to the story and he ends up accepting the box with her belongings. In this episode, I was so shocked to see how some people are so self-involved that they would only care about material mementos than that their family member has died. It was probably the toughest case to persuade someone to take the yellow box, but these were two very touching episodes.
The third case involves a woman who was murdered by her stalker and how this man was brought to justice. Through this case, Geu Roo meets the prosecutor for this murder case and she appears to help him out once more in the final episode when they take down the gambling den. This case creates a lead to Sang Goo’s own past of domestic violence, also as he runs into a woman on the streets that’s clearly trying to run from her abusive partner several times before he decides to take action.
The fourth case involves a promising doctor who was fatally injured during a hostage situation in his hospital, and his regrets to have walked away from the love of this life because he was too concerned for their future. I was SO glad to finally see an unmasked portrayal of a homosexual relationship in a K-Drama. True, there was no kissing, but there was definitely intimacy in hand holding and skinship that wasn’t censored or anything, so I think that’s a big step.
The fifth case (one of my major crying episodes) involves an elderly couple who decided to leave this world together and called Move to Heaven in advance for their own case. The wife had been hospitalized for a long time and the husband, despite his age, was still accepting chores from ungrateful snobby people after he had been forced to leave his longtime job at a construction agency. It was heartbreaking to see how this old man (played by Jung Dong Hwan by the way) kept smiling through the shit that other people threw at him and how there seemed to be literally no one who cared enough about him to accept his final belongings. There was one little girl who cared about him, and there was this flashback where she brought him an airconditioner that she and her classmate had been saving money for. They bought it especially for him to keep cool during the hot summer, but when she wanted to give it to him, some nosy neighbor guy butted in and started telling her off! He was like ‘you can’t just give that kind of thing to him, how is he going to pay for the electricity bills’ etcetera and I was like ??? HOW ABOUT YOU MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS SIR? But yeah, this episode really showed how ungrateful some people could be. I was really glad that in the end, one manager from the construction company recognized him as someone who’d been there even when he’d started out himself and all these company’s employees came to pay him their last respects. In this case, they meet social worker Son Woo Rim (played by Choi Soo Young/ Girls’ Generation’s Sooyoung) for the first time. She’s put in charge of cases in which the deceased don’t have any other family (left).
The following two episodes were mainly dedicated to Sang Goo’s past. We see the whole story about his past with domestic violence and also how he discovers that Jung Woo was involved in a major department store collapse on the day they were supposed to run away.
The final case we are shown is one of a American-Korean man who was adopted overseas as a baby and set out to find his birth mother back in Korea based on one photograph, which ends in a heartbreaking misunderstanding. The main purpose for this case is established when we find out Geu Roo was also adopted and, if it weren’t for Jung Woo and his wife, would also have been sent overseas for adoption. This case means a lot to Geu Roo since he recognizes that he would have been the same as this person if it weren’t for his adoptive parents. Social worker Son Woo Rim appears in this episode as well.
The final episode is for Geu Roo to come to terms with his father’s passing as he’s asked to return Jung Woo’s ashes. He fully comes to terms with the fact that even though both his parents aren’t physically around anymore, he still carries them with him in his heart and he can still see them when he wants, since he has precious memories of them. Admittedly, this episode made me bawl like a baby as I watched Geu Roo slowly get his own closure and is finally able to clean up his father’s room by himself.
The series ends with Geu Roo being visited by a mysterious young girl his age who asks for her own service, as she claims she is going to die soon.
Now, as shocking as this final new potential case is, we see that Geu Roo is immediately very taken with this girl, maybe even in an unconsciously romantic way from the way he stares right at her all wide-eyed and flustered. But I did find it quite odd to end the series with this, and so I really hope the rumors about a second season are true. If this would be the case, I would also really be interested to see social worker Son Woo Rim again, as it was clear that there may have been something budding between her and Sang Goo as well.

I would like to make some cast comments now.
First of all, I need to establish that Tang Joon Sang is, and if he already isn’t should be, a national treasure. I was already doting on him as the youngest member of the squad in Crash Landing on You, but now that he’s getting more main roles in series I am just so proud of him. My friend also watched Racket Boys and she is convinced that he’s going to be the next generation top actor because he’s so good. I really, really loved his performance in Move to Heaven. What an incredibly challenging role it must have been for him. In some cases, I’ve tended to get a little annoyed by characters with Asperger’s, mainly because I would just not be able to deal with some of their behavior, even though of course I know they can’t help it, but in this case, I had to keep reminding myself not to hug him through my screen because he wouldn’t like that. xD What an incredibly vulnerable but determined character he created. I cannot believe how, in the last episode, he managed to be so emotionally devastated and still didn’t produce a single tear. He was able to portray all these emotions through his face as Geu Roo, without even crying or smiling widely, you could still see ‘Ah, Geu Roo is happy/satisfied’, ‘Ah, Geu Roo is sad/worried now’. Just like how he has to learn how to read other people’s emotions, we get to learn his and that was really endearing. The way he finally came to terms with his father’s (and also, still, his mother’s) death was both heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time. I couldn’t help but root for him and care about him just like Na Moo did. A really good performance, overall.

I’ve only seen Lee Je Hoon before in Tomorrow With You (which is also REALLY good by the way), but there are some other series of his on my to watch list and I can’t wait. I think he’s a really good actor and very fun to watch. The physical transformation he went through to give the first strong impression of Sang Goo as he entered Geu Roo’s house for the first was very impactful. He actually pulled the scruffy look off very while in my opinion! It was fun but also touching to see his character transform and even though he seemed like a jerk from the start, I immediately felt like that was probably just a mask and that he’d have a really tiny heart. He ultimately does allow himself to get touched by the stories they encounter during their Move to Heaven work, and as he realizes how much he starts to care for his nephew. The dynamic between him and Geu Roo was really enjoyable to watch as well.

I hadn’t seen anything with Hong Seung Hee before, but for some reason she gives me Go Ah Ra vibes? I think she was casted very well for the role of energetic and gutsy Na Moo. I love how selfless all her actions were, like she even cared more about Geu Roo than about herself, not thinking twice to follow Sang Goo to a dangerous gambling den at night with no protection whatsoever. When it was revealed that she liked Geu Roo romantically, which didn’t come as that big of a surprise but still, I still liked how he respected Geu Roo’s feelings and took her distance, like she had already made peace with the fact that he would probably never accept her romantically but she could at least stay by his side as his friend. I can’t help wondering though, if they indeed make a second season and the butterfly girl becomes a potential romantic interest, how Na Moo will respond to that. I found it a pretty unexpected turn of events when the new girl was introduced right after even Na Moo’s father mentioned that he believe Na Moo and Geu Roo had been meant for each other from the start, also since their names apparently have similar meanings.
Anyways, I liked her character. I feel like some people might find her a bit annoying because of her nosiness, but she did it for all the good reasons and it was clear that she had nothing but good intentions in her heart, so it didn’t bother me at all.

I have seen Ji Jin Hee before as the bad guy in Blood, but from the moment he appeared in Move to Heaven I knew I would love him. He was the best man, the best father to Geu Roo you could imagine. Of course, halfway through the first episode, I had this feeling that something was going to happen to him, as K-Dramas go. But I’m glad he didn’t disappear after his character passed, he still appeared reguarly, first in flashbacks but then in the final episode also as Geu Roo’s memory of him. It really seemed like he wasn’t completely gone throughout the series, and that matched so well with what he told Geu Roo to remember: that the people we love who die never completely disappear, because at least one person still alive will remember them and keep their memory alive, either in their mind or their heart or both. He was such a selfless, amazingly sweet father character and I really enjoyed his performance.

Furthermore, it was nice seeing Im Won Hee again, I feel like it’s been a really long time since I last saw a drama with him and he always has more comical roles so it was also good to see him in a serious role. Although I did crack up whenever he almost choked on his tea whenever someone entered his office unannounced. xD

And it was funny to see Choi Soo Young after I’d just finished Run On in which she was one of the female leads. Her character as the social worker was so different from her character in Run On that I was kind of impressed with her versatile acting skills. Apparently she’s signed with an acting agency, so I hope to see more of her in the future! I know I have at least one other series with her on my watch list. 🙂 She was a really human, genuine character who sincerely cared about the people under her care, and also didn’t shy away to show how involved she was in their cases. If there will be a second season of this series, I would like to see her again as well, maybe she and Sang Goo can become a cute couple or something, haha.

All in all, I really enjoyed this series. It was beautifully written and with great acting. I literally don’t have anything that I didn’t like about it or found peculiar or confusing, except for the open ending I guess, but I just hope that that means we’ll get a second season! I think this is really a hidden gem of a series, I also probably wouldn’t have discovered it if it weren’t for my friend’s recommendation. It talks about the people who leave us, yes, but most importantly it talks about what they leave behind. Not only in belongings, but also in memories. And that there will always be at least one person who will accept to continue remembering them, even when it seems they have no one left to say goodbye to. Passing can happen in so many ways, by old age, by own choice, by accident, by illness, but no death is less important than the other. Every single person who passes had a life, and in some tragic cases, they weren’t able to fulfill their future goals. But then it always comes down to the people still alive to carry on in their memory. And we need to remind all those people wasting their time on complaining when they’ll take away the trauma cleaning car since it attracts too much unwanted attention to the neighborhood about what’s most important.
Besides this, I was really interested in the whole notion of the trauma cleaning service. It was again something that made me go, ‘Right, of course there are services like this’, but I really never stopped to think about it. I would think you’d need to be quite strong to be able to clean out the room of a dead person without feeling any attachment, but of course it’s okay to care, and I liked that they made such an effort to at least figure out what happened to the person, what were the circumstances of their death, and who was the final person that would care the most about receiving their last possessions. Like, in some cases it even became kind of a detective-like mission and that was really nice because you know this wasn’t meant for entertainment, but for the sole purpose of giving someone’s last belongings to someone who cared, so that even after they passed, their memory would still be in good hands. And I thought that was really beautiful.

So if you’re interested in series that focus more on story and character development and serious themes, even though that means it may not be as quick-paced sometimes, I would really recommend this because it really is very healing and it shines a very hopeful light on the idea that through this work, the main characters made sure that indeed, the deceased never truly left their loved ones.

I’ll be going about my next watch list item again, but I may definitely insert more of these in-between series. Sometimes it’s nice to divert from the path to make an interesting newly discovered detour. 🙂 Thanks for reading and I’ll be back soon! Bye-bee! ^^

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.

Run On
(런 온 / Reon On)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hiya! Back with a new review!
I took my time with this one as well, which was fine because it wasn’t a very eventful drama, so I just put on an episode when I was in the mood. I was really curious since I saw it on Netflix and it also seemed to have an interesting cast, so that’s why I put it on my to-watch list.
When I started it, I was kind of missing some action, but after I finished it I have to say I found it a very refreshing drama, and the simpleness and realness of it really makes it one of a kind.
If you’re a fan of action, or seek out dramas with an exciting storyline, you may or may not be able to appreciate this as much since it really mainly focusses on the characters and their personal journeys.
I’d also like to devote some words to the title, since it turns out that ‘Run On’ doesn’t necessarily have to do with physical running. There were several interesting things that jumped out to me in this drama, so I’m excited to share my review on it. Since there isn’t too much to cover in terms of storyline, this review will focus primarily on the characters and their relations to/with each other.

As for a short summary: Run On is a 16-episode Netflix K-Drama, with episodes of a bit over an hour, about two very different people who meet by chance and then are drawn to each other despite their differences. Ki Seon Gyeom (played by Im Shi Wan) is a national athlete, and the youngest child of a famous actress and an assemblyman running for president. He has lived his live for his family, to be the son that makes his parents proud, but this has caused him to become very detached from himself. Then there is Oh Mi Joo (played by Shin Se Kyung), a translator/interpretor who mainly works in the movie subtitling business. Mi Joo is an orphan and has always had to fend for herself and live for herself. She has some people around her who she’s close to, but she works late into the night and sometimes sleeps during the day, so she’s never had to depend on anyone else before. As a movie fanatic, Mi Joo is a big fan of Seon Gyeom’s mother, Yook Ji Woo (played by Cha Hwa Yeon). Seon Gyeom and Mi Joo meet coincidentally at first, but then keep meeting more often after getting to work together.
On the other hand we have Seo Dan Ah, (played by Choi Soo Young), the CEO of her own investment agency called DANN who happens to sponsor Seon Gyeom and other famous athletes. Seo Dan Ah comes from a complicated family, she has two half-brothers whom she’s not close with, and she’s constantly looked down upon by her oldest brother for being a woman – as she ‘naturally’ won’t be able to inherit their family’s company. She comes across a painting at a café which intrigues her, and when she inquires about the painter, she finds out it’s still just an art student. But she’s intrigued with his work and approaches him. This art student is Lee Yeong Hwa (played by Kang Tae Oh), who is immediately quite taken with Dan Ah. Something interesting blooms between the two of them as well as they get more involved with each other, a bond that starts with a push-and-pull over a painting.

What I want to say from the bat is that these four main leads were, from the start, not like any other drama with a four lead system like this. First of all, even though they all knew each other, there was no rivalry between them whatsoever. I found it funny because where you usually have the four leads clearly divided into two pairings of one woman and one man, in this case the two men and the two women also had very interesting relationships with each other. Even though Mi Joo was very wary of Dan Ah because of her eccentric personality, they did become closer at the end, be it in their aloof ‘you’re weird but you’re okay’ kind of way. Seon Gyeom and Yeong Hwa also became friends and even started sharing an apartment. Of course the couples were very clearly divided into Seon Gyeom & Mi Joo and Dan Ah & Yeong Hwa, but it never caused too much chaos within their group. Yeong Hwa occasionally sought comfort with Seon Gyeom when he was upset about something that had to do with Dan Ah, but that was about it. Also, there was a lot of talking amongst them. They all talked about their feelings a lot, and I feel like in other K-Dramas they leave that out a bit to create misunderstandings and add to the drama, but in this case it was really refreshing to see the main characters all have such meaningful conversations with each other.

I mentioned in my introduction that the title ‘Run On’ didn’t only have to do with physical running. Since Seon Gyeom is a national track athlete and there is actual running in the series – Mi Joo and Dan Ah also participate in a marathon at some point, it would be easy to also link the title to that. But, also after reading some other reviews, I think it’s safe to say that the title refers more to a metaphorical running. That is, how everyone runs along their own life, their own journey. And it’s logical to mistake this for a race sometimes, having to catch up with other people, feeling like you’re stuck in the same place or you can’t seem to go any faster than you’re currently going. But I think this series really showed that everyone runs their own path differently. And also, that things like relationships or things that are usually marked as ‘happy endings’ are not the same for everyone. I think they did a really good job in depicting this, and not only through the four main characters, but also through the side characters. I have to admit that in the beginning, I was a little unsure of why so many minor characters were introduced, especially because I didn’t really get how relevant they would be in the rest of the story yet. But in the end it became clearer to me, or at least this is how I felt, that it really was meant to show the journeys of different people, not just the leads. Every single character was running their own journey of life in this series, and even though they all got stuck at some point, they were guided towards the pace that was right for them. I also really liked how this became clear in Dan Ah’s words to Yeong Hwa in the end, ‘You’re already running towards the finish line while I’m just walking towards the halfway point.’ Everyone has their own pace in life, and even when you meet someone that you’re attracted to, it’s not always easy when you find out their pace is different from yours. This was especially clear in the leads’ romantic relationships. Seon Gyeom and Mi Joo ended up taking a chance on it, while Dan Ah decided it was for the best to not have Yeong Hwa struggle to adjust to her pace and vice versa.
After taking some time to collect my thoughts about this drama before starting on the review, it really dawned on me how healing this series actually was. It was warm, realistic, and very comfortable to watch.

I would like to talk in a bit more detail about the main characters’ personal journeys.
Of all four, you could say that Seon Gyeom had the most storyline, also because his family was also featured more regularly than any of the other leads’ family members. The series starts off with something that triggers Seon Gyeom’s realization that he has never lived for himself, his desire to obtain his own life outside of his father’s influence. It also immediately illustrates Seon Gyeom’s character as a person who lives his life for others rather than for himself. In the first couple of episodes, when he’s still an athlete, he discovers that one of his teammates is being abused by a couple of other athletes. Their real beef is with Seon Gyeom since he always beats them in races, but since they can’t touch him because of his status and reputation, they take out their frustration on the youngest of the team, Kim Woo Shik (played by Lee Jung Ha). Seon Gyeom realizes this at some earlier point but Woo Shik keeps saying that he can take it. Until one time, when Seon Gyeom finds him beaten bloody in a shed one time. Woo Shik ends up at the hospital for his injuries. Seon Gyeom is the only one who refuses to turn a blind eye to this violence – even the coaches tell him to back down and not say anything about it. Even when Seon Gyeom attacks the two athletes responsible, he is baffled to see that everyone is trying to cover for him and make sure he gets a minor punishment, even though he himself wants to be kicked out if that’s what it takes to stand up for his friend. He ends up admitting to a whole group of international journalists that he won’t run anymore because he attacked his teammates and he resigns from being a runner. This comes as a shock to his father, naturally, who just wanted him to stay put. Now that Seon Gyeom is (finally) starting to rebel, he can’t control him anymore. The relationship between him and Mi Joo begins for real when he persuades Woo Shik to tell the true story about his abuse to a reporter and Mi Joo helps translate the interview into English so it spreads to international magazines, in order to clear Seon Gyeom’s name for having allegedly ‘meaninglessly assaulted’ his teammates.
While jobless, Seon Gyeom puts in a lot of effort to get Woo Shik back on his feet and training and starts searching for new agencies for him. He also helps persuading an old trainer of his to come back to work for the tracking team at his old high school, he helps a young girl from the tracking team from getting harrassed by her bully’s family, and he helps his sister get out of a scandal. He does a lot for other people while remaining jobless himself, until he finally gets a job as an agent in the last episode. He gets Woo Shik to be represented by DANN agency.
It was very realistic how Seon Gyeom, however justly his actions were for his teammate, finds himself to be a little aimless in being unemployed, but he gradually manages to pick himself up. He still can’t shake the habit of getting up early to run every day, and other than that, he finds ways to spend his time and makes some unexpected friends on the way. It really seems like his own personal journey begins only after he quits the tracking team. From that moment on he actively decides to choose himself, no matter what the repercussions for his family (actually, his father) would be. He finally sees the light and decides that he can’t go on like that anymore.
What’s so endearing about Seon Gyeom’s character is that he takes this huge decision and then ends up with the aftermath realizing that he’s actually not sure what to do next. And then he grows closer to Mi Joo and becomes increasingly interested in her life, which is so different from his. They don’t even share a lot of common traits or interests, but still they can’t help gravitating towards each other. I found his character very interesting because even though sometimes it seemed like he knew exactly what he was doing, exactly what his goal was, he also appeared very naive and oblivious. Even in his relationship with Mi Joo, it seemed like it took him a while to really pinpoint what it was he was actually feeling for her, and when she struggled because of his dad’s involvement in their relationship, he had a hard time understanding this, it seems. Or at least, what he should or could do to make things better. But I think it became very clear that, as soon as they took some distance from each other, he started missing her more and more. Until he finally managed to turn his feelings into words and asked her to please not break up with him.

Oh Mi Joo is also a very interesting character. She went through a lot by herself as a kid, because she was an orphan, and she’s had to fend for herself and discover what worked for her and what not. It was in a difficult period during high school that she discovered the soothing of sitting in a dark cinema watching a movie. And the movie quote that most inspired her to keep ‘running on’ was ‘Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up again’. It’s mentioned only once in the series I believe, when she tells Seon Gyeom about it, but I feel like it’s really a metaphor for the entire series as well. The dialogue in this drama was just so good! Usually there’s a lot of talking without much actually being said, but in this drama, the dialogue was one of the best parts of it. Sometimes talking really is the best way to really get to know each other. And I think it was a very part of Mi Joo’s character that she chose to become a translator/interpretor, because she wanted to convey beautiful messages into other languages as well. So that people all over the world would be able to get inspired by a quote like that, even if it’s spoken in a different language. Her job is literally to be a medium of conveying messages from one audience to the other, and I think that’s also why she was able to read other people so well. I actually wrote down a quote from one of the first episodes where Mi Joo has just started getting to know Seon Gyeom and she says, ‘His life is filled with everyone around him but himself, whereas I only have me’, which is basically the foundation of both of their characters. She already had part of him figured out from the start and that was really cool about her in my opinion.
Slightly unrelated to the story, I personally was very inspired by Mi Joo’s character. Personally, I’ve always loved translating, and I’ve considered making a career switch to focus on multi-media translation and subtitling multiple times. So when I got a glimpse of Mi Joo’s work in this drama, I went like, OH MY GOD I WANT TO DO THIS TOO. I still haven’t gotten anywhere regarding final decisions or plans, but the way they depicted this line of work in this drama and the way Mi Joo talked about really sparked something in me again. I’m really grateful that this drama showed me this and reminded me of this back-of-my-mind dream of mine, just when I was struggling with my current slightly unfulfilling job.
I kept feeling very detached from Mi Joo for some reason, but I ended up realizing that this was exactly what her personality was like. She wasn’t used to having people around her to care for and who cared about her. She wasn’t used to coming home to someone in particular, or to stay up waiting for someone to come home. That’s why, when things started to get ambiguous between her and Seon Gyeom, she had a really hard time figuring out where she was standing. She kept trying to keep a distance from him as to not give herself any expectations, but then he would give her expectations and then suddenly vanish, leaving her anxious. So I think the whole push-and-pull feeling between was very realistic when you look at their respective personalities. Seon Gyeom was also not used to someone actually caring about where he was, where he slept, what he’d eaten, so it didn’t cross his mind to inform people of that. Despite her detached personality, Mi Joo was very confident about herself and her skills in translating. She speaks fluent English, she was confident with her own looks, etcetera. It was just really about the worlds they lived in and whether to could succeed to align those, since blending them didn’t seem to be an option, what with Seon Gyeom’s father in the mix.
One of my favorite moments was when they were at the premiere of Yook Ji Woo’s new movie and Seon Gyeom’s father turned up unexpected, allegedly to ‘support his wife’, while she just wanted him gone. But they ran into Seon Gyeom and Mi Joo there and even after his father semi-threatened her to ‘go back to her own place’, she just took Seon Gyeom’s hand and said ‘I’m really good at finding a ‘place’/’seat’, so let’s go.’ That just showed so much grit and I loved how her personality set her apart from regular K-Drama female leads. Find yourself someone as bold as Oh Mi Joo! And it was really endearing from her side that she would sit through the entire ending credits just to see her own name as the translator at the very end. Even if everyone else had already left the cinema hall by then, even if no one noticed it or considered the person who’d enabled the subtitles for them so they could understand the movie’s message, it was enough for Mi Joo to see her own name, as it was her own tiny reward. Of course, in the final episode, she gets a much bigger reward as a director she used to work with in the past (adorable guest appearance by Kim Seon Ho!) came to tell her that, because of her translation of his movie that didn’t do well in Korea, his movie was now getting acknowledged abroad big-time. You could just tell that that meant so much to Mi Joo, even if she didn’t get any material award or whatever, she really just thrived on those tiny rewards, and that was really endearing and humbling.

Seo Dan Ah was possibly one of the most interesting characters to me in this series. I REALLY liked her character. She also had grit, but in a different kind of way then Mi Joo. Dan Ah was a selfmade career woman, she had had to fight her way up in her male-dominated family, constantly trying to dodge any obligations pushed her way. When they started waving marriage in her face, she told her family she was gay just to get out of marriage interviews. I personally liked how she so openly talked about liking women, even if it was to spite her brother, and even threw it back at him when he used the expression for ‘coming out’ the wrong way. Still, of course, it’s not okay to use the gay card as an excuse just because it’s convenient for you while there are others actually struggling with coming out for real because society will not accept them for who they are. In this regard I really appreciated her apologizing to Ye Joon (I’ll get to him later) in the end, for using something he was actually struggling with as an easy excuse to get out of something. Overall I had a lot of respect for Dan Ah, and I also really felt for her because she was working SO hard while pretending to have her shit together all the time, and when she suddenly finds herself falling for someone younger, she still can’t grant herself that relationship. She still values Yeong Hwa’s individual journey without her more than her own with him in it.
In the beginning, she seems quite eccentric, not only in her personality and use of words, but also in her interests. She finds herself intriguid by Yeong Hwa’s paintings without having met him before, and it was really fun to see how much joy she took from bumping into Mi Joo, because Mi Joo was really trying to avoid her. Dan Ah is quite cheeky, she likes to tease people, and she doesn’t seem to care a lot about people’s personal lives if they don’t involve her. I personally thought she was being a little cold to her younger brother, the idol, when he was so bent on getting along with her. I wondered why she insisted on denying him as her family, because he personally didn’t do anything wrong in my opinion. But then it was even more satisfying when she finally acknowledged him in the final episode after their father had died and she still managed to become the Vice President of his company. She’s had a life similar to Seon Gyeom’s, in that she was never allowed to fulfill any dreams she had of her own, simple ones like playing soccer, and that that resulted in her feeling like everything she liked would at some point be taken away from her and leave her with regrets. This is also exactly the reason why she broke up with Yeong Hwa, she just couldn’t put herself through it again. Towards him, of course that was a little unfair, because she’d already decided it was going to end before it even started (I personally relate to this A LOT ahem). But in this case, Yeong Hwa really loved her back, and there really wasn’t a real reason why they had to break up besides Dan Ah’s personal mindset. But then again, as I said in the beginning, happy endings come in multiple forms. Even though I would’ve loved to see them end up together or even see a proper mutual kiss between them, they decided it was best to say their goodbyes to each other in order to grant each other their personal journeys at their own pace.
One thing that I didn’t fully understand, though, was Dan Ah’s sickness. It’s mentioned and shown before that she has some sort of illness and she needs to get injections or something, and then she collapses during the marathon which is when Yeong Hwa finds out about this. But other than that, it didn’t come back. They did show that her younger brother also had some problems and her father also fell ill in the end, so maybe it was hereditary? I thought they were going to do something major with that plot tool in the end, but they didn’t, so I didn’t really understand what additional purpose it had to Dan Ah’s character other than something else she had to cover up with her sassy personality.

Lee Yeong Hwa was a very likable character. He was pure, honest to his feelings, and definitely not a pushover. After Dan Ah suddenly expressed her attraction to him after first treating him like nothing more than someone providing her with a painting, he didn’t immediately fall back in pace with her. He took a step back, saying ‘stop playing with my feelings like that’, and I respected that a lot about him. Even though he was undeniably in love with Dan Ah, possibly from their first meeting on, he never invaded her space. The chemistry between them was SO good, and it was also really illustrated by their theme song. I LOVED that OST, it’s called ‘Starlight’ by Jang Hyo Bin, and the instrumental in itself is already so enticingly seductive, it just captured their chemistry brilliantly. I kept waiting for a moment where they’d just jump on each other, haha, but that didn’t happen. Dan Ah kisses him one time before their feelings actually align, but during their ‘alignment’ they only have a couple of sweet hugs, and Yeong Hwa kisses her on the forehead once when they say goodbye in the final episode. I really craved for some more intimacy from them, or at least one passionate kiss like the one between Seon Gyeom and Mi Joo in her bedroom, but on the other hand I also respect that it didn’t happen. If they had gotten intimate with each other, it would have probably been even harder to break up and I feel that Dan Ah was holding in A LOT but that she didn’t let it happen because of her dooming knowledge of that it would probably not work out, which is also a little sad.
Anyways, back to Yeong Hwa, so he’s an art student with the real intention of becoming a painter after graduating. He makes very interesting painting with a lot of colours, I personally liked the style a lot. But somehow Dan Ah is able to permeate through that and see what kind of person he is through his paintings and this intrigues him in turn as well. When we see him in class, he seems to be a very popular and liked classmate. His best friend is one of his college mates, Go Ye Joon (played by Kim Dong Young), and Yeong Hwa also tutors his little sister Go Ye Chan (played by Kim Shi Eun), who is secretly passionate about boxing despite her mother’s disapproval. Ye Joon’s and Ye Chan’s mother is Dong Kyung (played by Seo Eun Kyung), and she actually works at Dan Ah’s agency as well. She’s the person who ends up giving Woo Shik a chance to be represented by DANN. This family is one of the units of other characters that I described earlier to also be part of the group that’s running their own journey. We find out that Go Ye Joon is gay and that he has a crush on Yeong Hwa, however he has never been able to come out to his family. When he finally does, his mother chooses to walk away from him, blaming herself for not keeping a closer eye on him. In the meantime, Ye Chan is following boxing classes despite her mother’s strict disapproval, and when she’s found out, she is taken off the lessons immediately. But even as minor a character Dong Kyung was made out to be, it was a nice little side arc their family was featured in, because it was also part of Dong Kyung’s journey to accept her children for who they were and let them do what they wanted. I really liked that in the final part where you see literally everyone, also characters that only appeared in one or two episodes, running their own journey, going on with their lives and getting somewhere, Dong Kyung actually took boxing classes together with her daughter.
Going back a little to Yeong Hwa, I just think the best scene to illustrate his character was when Ye Joon came out to him and told him that he was his first love. Instead of feeling awkward about it, Yeong Hwa just started crying and hugged him so tightly! It was really endearing to see how much he cared about his friend, how he had had to hold this in for so long and that he finally told him. Yeong Hwa was just the best person.

It was so interesting how some characters who I really didn’t think that much of in the beginning really all had their own significant journeys in this drama, it really showed how everyone’s paths were important and that everyone just needed to find their own pace to get to their own finish line, or even just get to the distance they were aiming for without a finish line.
It was also interesting how Yook Ji Woo, when introducing her new movie in the first five minutes of the first episode, simultaneously created an introduction for all four main leads. She gives a basic summary of the theme and after each description, we are shown one of the four leads, as if it’s already foreshadowing that this is going to be a story about them. She says, ‘It’s one of those ordinary love stories where one can be a nutjob (Seon Gyeom), a loser (Mi Joo), a psychopath (Dan Ah), a piece of trash (Yeong Hwa), or someone’s first love.’ All of them did actually turn out to be someone’s first love! The cinematography was really cleverly done, from the start. I probably missed a lot of the symbolisms or foreshadowing, I’d really have to watch it another time to get a new perspective with all these new things I realized in hindsight!

Let me talk a little about Seon Gyeom’s family.
Even though his parents were still together, when Ji Woo chose to become an actress, she dived completely into that and I feel that it was also a way to get away from her husband. Seon Gyeom’s father, Ki Jeong Do (played by Park Young Gyu) is by far the most selfish and unpleasant character in the entire series. He literallly only cares about his own promotion and that his family does what he says in order to compliment his image of being a caring husband and father, while he is actually the opposite of that. Ji Woo isn’t even used to him showing up at her premieres and she really doesn’t even want him to – she’s created her own life and career apart from him now. He only turns up at her events when he wants to fake-show what a loyal husband he is and to complain about Seon Gyeom’s inobedience to her, of course blaming his entire upbringing on her. The worst part is that, as soon as Ji Woo opens her mouth and starts threatening with divorce, he also becomes super toxic and manipulating, scoffing about how she could possibly think that her life is her own now and that he can wreck her life just as easily. He also really doesn’t seem to care about his children’s happiness, as long as he profits from it. His oldest daughter, Seon Gyeom’s sister Ki Eun Bi (played by Ryu Abel) is a professional golfer who has done nothing but make her father proud. She has also lived according to his wishes, even though she does have a lover back in the United States who she’s still pursuing because he keeps running away from her family (with good reason). However, her father is involved in creating rumors that she and another candidate running for president are dating when they go on a golfing trip together. He just wants to show her off to his colleagues, but some pictures get taken of her trying to help the other candidate guy positioning his golf club. During this, Seon Gyeom also shows up to cuss his father out and take his sister away, although she shushes him to stay out of it. This causes so much embarassment for Ki Jeong Do that he vents his frustration on Mi Joo. Pictures have been taken of Seon Gyeom and his new girlfriend and he knows exactly where to find her since she accepted money from him before to ‘spy’ on Seon Gyeom in the beginning of the series. He threatens her that she is the reason his family is now falling apart and this in turn causes Mi Joo to temporarily break up with Seon Gyeom, because she just can’t stand being treated like this again (with good reason). Anyways, Seon Gyeom’s father is literally the worst. He’s such a childish and despicable man.
I was a little confused at the end though, because it almost seemed like Ji Woo wasn’t even aware of what her children had been going through while she’d gone off being an actress. She was still a very loving mother to them herself. But then, when they ended up getting Eun Bi out of that scandal, Seon Gyeom was like ‘I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago, I’m telling mom. Apparently it’s normal to tell your mother about it when father has done something wrong’. But that just made me go, huh? Did Ji Woo really didn’t know about this? I mean, couldn’t they have done something about it much sooner? Because now they called their mom and she was all ‘CANCEL THE PLANE TICKETS TO HOLLYWOOD, I’M OFF TO SAVE MY CHILDREN’, but it just really struck me as odd that this only happened NOW while it had been happening for at least ten years. Does that mean that Ji Woo really wasn’t involved in Jeong Do’s life anymore at all? She certainly knew what a nasty man he was, did she really leave her children with him because she thought he’d be okay to them?
Anyways, I’m glad she finally went to him in the final episode and slapped him in the face so hard and just shoved the divorce papers under this nose. That was so satisfying, seeing him lose literally everything because he’d set everyone against him himself. He really dug his own grave.
I like how one of the reviews I saw on MyDramaList was like, ‘this drama is so sweet, it’s like a very sweet white chocolate with 99% sweetness and that remaining 1% of bitterness is Seon Gyeom’s father’ xD

I think I’ve now covered the most important events and characters, so now I’d like to make a few comments on the cast.

Im Shi Wan looks SO familiar to me, but when I check DramaWiki it seems like I only know him from The Moon That Embraces the Sun where he was the female lead’s younger brother’s teenage version. I didn’t have any other reference of his acting to compare with, but that can also be a good thing. Anyways, I just think he was adorable in this drama. Sometimes I couldn’t really figure out what he was thinking, since he kept pushing people away despite looking very approachable. He could sometimes be unexpectedly sassy in stark contrast to his innocent appearance. But he really did make me laugh out loud a couple of times and I think he had great chemistry with Shin Se Kyung. I’d like to see more of him in the future!

This might be the first review I write for a drama with Shin Se Kyung, but I really like her. She’s really different from other actresses, she always brings something refreshing to her roles. I really liked her in The Girl Who Sees Smells. I liked her a little less in Bride of the Water God, but that drama was generally not very worthwhile so I’m going to blame that on the writing. I just remember how her energy was pretty much nowhere to be found in that drama, and maybe it had to do with the fact that she played someone with depression, but I still didn’t really like it. But that didn’t stop me from following her new dramas! I’m also very soon going to be watching Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung, which is going to be the first historical drama I see with her, so that’ll be exciting! I think she ultimately portrayed Mi Joo very well, seen as it’s a pretty complicated character. Even though she was the female lead, we only get a few quick flashbacks into her youthly struggles, and I think that’s because she personally doesn’t dwell on those too much. The focus isn’t about where she’s been, but on where she’s going, and that is also a very important message within the whole ‘Run On’ story. She was living in her own world most of the time, but she never shied away from talking to people about how interests, she was never ashamed of her life and line of work, even though other people would probably frown at her lifestyle (Seon Gyeom certainly did). But the good thing was that he didn’t try to change her, because she definitely wouldn’t have wanted that in the least. It was cool to see this composed and mature character from her, she portrayed a really human and realistic person. Also, she’s freaking gorgeous.

It was my first time seeing Choi Soo Young AKA Girls’ Generation’s Sooyoung in a drama, but it felt like she belonged there! Her acting was so natural and cool. I really liked how she portrayed the many layers of Dan Ah, from her eccentric and mischievous outside to her tormented and vulnerable inside. In one of the final scenes from the last episodes, where the four leads were eating snacks together, I was watching her acting in the background and it was so natural! Her timing and continuous background acting even if she didn’t have lines were really good. This may sound like common sense but you’d be surprised to see so many actors only act when they have lines and just ‘shut off’ when the other person is speaking until it’s time for their next line again. She really surprised me in this drama, or should I say jumped out to me. She was able to convey so many different emotions, and I really enjoyed watching her performance.

I LOVE Kang Tae Oh. He’s one of those actors that will just always bring a smile to my face. I’ve written reviews on a few of his dramas before, such as Short and My First First Love, but he still mainly gets side character roles and it’s such a shame because he’s so good and I always love watching him. I think he was a really good choice for Yeong Hwa, because he just has that youthful energy (I just found out he’s only still 27?!) and that great smile. I especially loved the scenes when he was with his friends and at college where we got to see how he was perceived by his college mates and he just was so naturally bubbly. I think Dan Ah becoming his first love made him mature very fast, not only because she was older, but also because he got to deal with some serious feelings, also in the way they broke up in the end. He went from bubbly boy to mature guy! I also really like that they made him a painter. I always like to see art in dramas, and I guess he didn’t actually paint these by himself in real life, but these paintings were really amazing. I liked that the paintings became kind of the rope in the tug-of-war between him and Dan Ah. I also really liked their chemistry, as I said before. Well done!

The final two people I want to mention before concluding are May and Jung Ji Hyun.
Park Mae Yi (or Mae Hee?) – nicknamed ‘May’ for convenience (played by Lee Bong Ryeon), is Mi Joo’s closest friend but also her colleague/team leader? I’m not entirely sure anymore but I feel like she was Mi Joo’s boss in a way as well. She was someone who lived with Mi Joo and they ate together a lot, but you could see that they also knew each other well enough to leave each other alone at the right moments as well. May never worried about Mi Joo when she was pulling allnighters and when Seon Gyeom enters her life, she just very easily leaves them be. Even though she appears to be a big part of Mi Joo’s life, she also has her own journey, which ultimately leads her into a relationship with Jung Ji Hyun (played by Yoon Je Wook), Dan Ah’s secretary. That scene with the failed surprise birthday party for Dan Ah where they met was hilarious xD They were introduced as a couple to the rest of the group completely out of the blue, no one had paid any attention to it, but that’s exactly what I liked about it, because it just proved that really everyone was running their own paths, whether noticed by other people or not. Even the people in the background you don’t pay attention to have their own journeys to travel, their own races to run.

I really liked the ending sequence where it was just a collection of footage from all the characters, even the special appearances and the minor side characters, and how they went on with their lives. I think this definitely illustrated the essence of what ‘Run On’ was about and wrapped it up all nicely. I haven’t gone into too much detail about the individual events such as Mi Joo’s interpretor’s job with the foreign staff, Seon Gyeom and Mi Joo’s team endeavour to bring Seon Gyeom’s old coach (played by Seo Jung Yeon, she’s a great actress) back, etcetera, but I think I was able to review on the essence of the series and the things that stood out to me the most. One last shoutout goes to Kim Won Hae as the bartender because I just love this man no matter what kind of roles he plays. I feel like his character may have had another purpose, but I think I just wasn’t able to recognize it as I’m not too great at recognizing symbolisms and metaphors as quickly as I’d like to. xD Anyways, I really liked the cameos and guest appearances in this drama.

As I mentioned before, if you’re all about the action and the passion and the exciting plot twists, this drama might not exactly be your cup of tea, but if you’re okay with a simple, romantic and healing story about life that focusses on a couple of people trying to love themselves as well as others, then I’d definitely recommend it. The dialogues are great, and the whole message of the story is so human and realistic. I didn’t cry, personally, but I can definitely imagine people relating to the characters in more deeper ways. The themes were good, I was glad to finally see someone come out as gay in a K-Drama, and it was just great to see everyone talk out their feelings and misunderstandings like that.

Thank you for taking the time to read my review, and I’ll be back soon with a new one soon. The next one on my list is supposed to be a real tearjerker so let me just get my tissue box before I start…. Until next time!

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.

Perfect World
(パーフェクトワールド / Paafekuto Waarudo)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello everyone! It’s time for another review. This time I watched another Japanese drama for the first time since Nee Sensei, Shiranai no? I like to switch it up between dramas from different countries every once in a while, because of the differences in acting styles and stories. I don’t actually remember when or why I put this drama on my list, that’s how long it’s been on my to-watch list. When I told a friend of mine who also watched a lot of Japanese dramas that I was going to watch this one, she told me to keep some tissues nearby because I was definitely going to cry. With that advice in the back of my head, I was mentally prepared for a tearjerker, but in the I got mostly tear-eyed because I was touched rather than that it was super sad. I had also prepared myself for the worst to happen at the end, like dramas such as Koizora that you keep watching even though you know what’s going to happen, but luckily this one had a very happy ending.

Fun fact: I watched the first episode of this drama on Dramacool with English subtitles, but when I went back some days later to continue, I suddenly couldn’t find any subs anymore! Like, even that one episode that I watched with subs suddenly said ‘RAW’. And I couldn’t find any of the episodes with subtitles anywhere else, either!
So I ended up watching it without subtitles and I’m glad to say I could follow it just fine, it’s just a pity for everyone else who can’t understand Japanese without subs, because I don’t think it would even be that hard of a drama to sub. Anyways, it was a good exercise for me, because watching without subtitles made me have to focus on what was happening even more, rather than just putting it on in the background while doing something else.

Perfect World is about Kawana Tsugumi (played by Yamamoto Mizuki), who is working at an interior design company but even though she has had a hidden passion for drawing since high school, she only has a clerical position. One day, when she has to deliver some documents to another design team who is having a nomikai at a pub, she meets her former classmate (and major teenage crush) Ayukawa Itsuki (played by Matsuzaka Toori). He used to be very good at basketball, but when she casually asks if he still plays, the whole table falls silent. When it’s time for Itsuki to go home, Tsugumi realizes that he is in a wheelchair, that he was in an accident when he was 20 and that he’s paralyzed from the spinal chord down and will never walk again.
While initially mostly embarrassed about her brazen question, Tsugumi quickly finds herself attracted to him again nonetheless and they start hanging out more. Itsuki is an interior architect and starts motivating Tsugumi to pick up drawing again since she used to be so good at it (she just didn’t have the courage to take the entrance exam for art school) and Tsugumi keeps him company during several social outings. They grow closer and closer.
However, as they both feel their feelings grow deeper for each other, Itsuki initially holds back since he has sworn to never fall in love again since his accident. His high school girlfriend that he was going to be engaged to broke up with him and all his college friends also disappeared from his side, so he is too afraid that him being in his handicapped state will only cause trouble for Tsugumi. However, they keep overcoming obstacles and eventually confirm that they are, in fact, really in love with each other. And then the real drama begins.

First of all, I just want to say how much I appreciate this drama for its realness in depicting the difficulties that handicapped people have to face in their daily lives. Even though one might think of it as a minor inconvenience to be in a wheelchair, there are so many things we don’t think about. This drama really opened my eyes as to how wheelchair-unfriendly some places or streets can be, and how negligent and tactless people can be about it.
Maybe it also had to do with the fact that around the time I was watching this, there was also the Paralympics on TV, and for some reason I suddenly saw more cases of disabled people making the most of their lives and that really made me more aware of this. It wasn’t long ago that I realized that the reason that some disabled people sometimes seem so much more happy and positive in life than non-disabled people, is because nothing is probably going to be worse than their disability. That’s something they have to live with for the rest of their lives, and any other worldly troubles probably seem irrelevant compared to that. I’m not saying this is the case for everyone, and of course I don’t completely know what I’m talking about because I’m not disabled myself, but that’s how it seems to me sometimes.
Here, it also struck me how much it seemed like Itsuki also had accepted his fate, as he even made jokes about how he would sometimes wet himself and stuff. When he was denied entrance somewhere because of the wheelchair-unfriendliness, he would just smile and thank the person for their effort. But throughout the series, it became more and more clear how much he still struggled with this life, and most importantly, with the influence his life had on the people around him. This is one of the reasons why he initially keeps pushing Tsugumi away, because he doesn’t want to cause her any inconvenience and he’s also convinced he won’t be able to give her anything.
At one point, when they’re in a restaurant or bar with the wheelchair basketball club Itsuki eventually joins, some rude guys start cussing them out, saying things like ‘if you know you’re going to be blocking the way, why come here in the first place’ and stuff like that. Tsugumi also gets caught in the crossfire when these guys get physical and Itsuki blames himself for not being able to protect her, all he can do is just sit and watch from his wheelchair. Tsugumi doesn’t care about this at all, but it shows how much Itsuki is actually still bothered by his condition. And then, when Tsugumi starts overexerting herself by making sure to come visit him every day after work, she ultimately faints on a train platform and actually falls onto the rails. Here, again, Itsuki isn’t able to do anything from his wheelchair, and even though they undeniably love each other so much, he ends up breaking up with her purely because they can’t make each other happy.

Let’s move on to the external obstacles that their relationship faced. From Tsugumi’s side, there’s her family: her father (played by Matsushige Yutaka), her mother (Horiuchi Keiko) and her little sister whom she lives with, Shiori (played by Okazaki Sae). When moving to Tokyo, Tsugumi made a promise to her father that she would have to return to Matsumoto if she hadn’t found a partner by the time she turned 30. Now that that time has come, she’s mentally preparing for that to happen, but it’s put on hold when she meets Itsuki again. At the same time, Tsugumi’s childhood friend Koreeda Hirotaka (played by Seto Koji), who has had a crush on her since high school, has been biding his time to propose to Tsugumi. When Itsuki, his old rival, returns into her life, he is filled with anxiety. Tsugumi’s sister Shiori, who is secretly in love with Hirotaka, has already accepted that he will only ever have feelings for her sister, so she’s actually rooting for them to be together. Shiori is of the mind that dating a disabled person can only bring inconvenience to both parties, but mostly to Tsugumi.
As it happens, one of Itsuki’s work colleagues, Watanabe Haruto (played by Matsumura Hokuto), is also disabled but in his case he is able to walk. He was in the same hospital at the same time as Itsuki during his revalidation and that’s where they met. Haruto has a metal prostethic leg, and this has gotten in his way of seriously dating because all the girls get grossed out by it. Haruto actually meets Shiori as a ‘rental girlfriend’, as that is her part-time job. They click really well and have a great time together, but again, when she spots his metal leg, she goes silent. Eventually, they meet some more times and become friends and even though she initially refuses Haruto’s romantic advances, she ends up giving in to him at the end of the series, when she’s finally over Hirotaka and everyone moves on with their lives.
Tsugumi’s parents are not pleased when she tells them she’s dating a person in a wheelchair. Both of them, but mostly her father, only focusses on all the inconveniences the life as a wheelchair-bound person’s wife will bring her, that she might not be able to have children with him, this and that. A lot of external worries, the way they feel about each other is of no interest to him. When Itsuki and Tsugumi break up, he believes it’s for the best and when Hirotaka starts making new advances on Tsugumi, he’s more than happy to accept him as his future son-in-law.

I found it kind of surprising, to be honest. Hiro was always talking about how he was going to propose to Tsugumi, even though it was very obvious that she would say no, since she had no romantic feelings for him whatsoever. But he still just kept on saying it, as if him asking her to marry him was just a formality that she wouldn’t be able to refuse. Even when Tsugumi was single again and apparently she and Hiro were “together”, she still didn’t seem to be romantically interested in him. It was like she was his girlfriend but he wasn’t her boyfriend. He became a little forceful at some point in my opinion, like one time he even kissed her while it really didn’t seem like she wanted to kiss him back. It was like he was just playing house without even considering her opinion, she just had to go along with him if he said he wanted to marry her. So that put me off a little. I think he always knew that he was never in Tsugumi’s heart, but he just kept on trying to push his way in, and we all know that’s not how it works.
When Tsugumi eventually agreed to his proposal, he also seemed surprised and acted like a boy who’d just heard his friend would give him a toy that he’d asked for but didn’t really expect to get from him. It was like, ‘Wow, you’re actually agreeing to this?’ Almost as if, despite his own determination, he never actually expected her to agree to it. Which was kind of contradicting, so I didn’t really understand what he was thinking. xD

From Itsuki’s side, there was Nagasawa Aoi (played by Nakamura Yuri), his former nurse from when he was first hospitalized. She stopped him from trying to kill himself once and has been looking after him ever since. Itsuki doesn’t know this is also because she is in love with him. She is so used to always having been his caregiver that she’s pretty intimidated by Tsugumi – out of fear of Tsugumi taking her place in Itsuki’s life as the person taking care of him, she also does and says some spiteful things to make Tsugumi insecure and to keep them apart, even though she does have the humanity to realize what a petty person she’s turning into. I think you could see her as a kind of parallel to Hiro, the person who stuck with Itsuki for a long time, liking him without being liked back but just expecting to be by his side forever, and then suddenly feeling threatened by Itsuki’s actual romantic feelings for someone else.

Besides a couple of people such as Itsuki’s ex-girlfriend, his mom and the people from his work, everyone seemed to have a problem with their relationship. It was such an obvious case of heart over mind. As became apparent in Tsugumi’s father’s final talk with Itsuki, he believed that in a relationship, and definitely in marriage, it was about being able to support each other, both physically and financially, it was about securing a stable future for each other rather than the feelings itself. He is unable to accept Itsuki as Tsugumi’s boyfriend until he gets a heart attack and has to go into rehabilition after his surgery – aka he has to spend some time in a wheelchair himself. Going through that, and then seeing how Itsuki came from Tokyo to Matsumoto every single day to support Tsugumi emotionally, finally brought him over the edge. But apart from that, it really struck me as particular that everyone rejected their relationship so much just because Itsuki was in a wheelchair. In my opinion, Itsuki and Tsugumi were the ones that were the most aware of their situation than anyone, and so they would be perfectly able to decide for themselves if this was working for them or not. As long as they didn’t see the problem with it, why should anyone else take offense?
But I guess that’s the cultural difference for you. A man with a broken body was considered as damaged goods.

I really loved how gradual the build-up of Tsugumi and Itsuki’s relationship was. Like, it was so natural, but you almost immediately felt a spark between them. Tsugumi had some trouble accepting Itsuki’s situation in the beginning, but once she got over that she was a 100% willing to assist him in whatever matter, and I think Itsuki was kind of overwhelmed by that because his other friends had all left him as soon as he became an ‘inconvenience’. But for Tsugumi, it was just the natural thing to do. I loved how they both started supporting each other. How Itsuki encouraged Tsugumi to start drawing again and that it wasn’t too late for her to apply for a job as a freelance interior designer with her talent. How Tsugumi brought Itsuki to that disabled basketball club, showing him that he also didn’t have to give that up even after his accident. They gave each other so much, and the few intimate scenes they had, however pure, were so loaded with love that it didn’t even bother me that they didn’t get physical. The scenes where they were just sitting together and Tsugumi lay her head on his shoulder, the scenes where they hugged, the two scenes where they kissed… That delicate intimacy was really all that was needed.

I was a bit confused about Shiori’s anger towards Tsugumi when she ‘dumped’ Hiro to get back to Itsuki, but I guess it had to do with the fact that Shiori really wanted Hiro to be happy if he wasn’t going to be with her, and now that her sister had hurt him she took it out on her sister. But the thing I was confused about was that here it appeared she was on Hiro’s side more than on Tsugumi’s. She still thought Itsuki’s disability was causing problems for her whole family, and she didn’t think too much about her sister’s feelings for him. I would’ve expected her to be also at least partly happy for her sister that she was able to still follow her own heart and be with the person she really loved. I guess that was something that put me off a little about Shiori. But other than that, I liked her and I really wanted her to end up with Haruto, and with that, to get rid of her prejudice regarding disabled people.

Haruto was also struggling a lot, not only because he kept being rejected by girls because of his leg. In the beginning he seemed to be more sensitive about it than Itsuki, but I think he was just able to voice his true feelings better while Itsuki was still feigning that he was okay. I think these two had a nice bond in the series, like they were actually more than just colleagues. You didn’t really see them be real friends, as in, that they hang out a lot together, but I think they became closer after Itsuki also joined the basketball club that Haruto was in, too. And they just had a common ground, they understood each other in that way.

I was kind of dreading that they were going to pair up Hiro and Aoi after they’d come to terms about the fact that Itsuki and Tsugumi were going to stay together, but I’m glad that didn’t really happen. They both went on with their lives, Hiro even created a popular and succesful app to calculate people’s romantic compatibility and he seemed pretty happy. I’m glad for his sake that he got to talk it out with Itsuki after Tsugumi had called off their engagement.

All in all I think the series was wrapped up real nicely. Nothing was forced, there were a few dramatic occurrences, but they were placed in the order of events just right, and I’m really glad it had a happy ending where everyone just accepted that the feelings of the two mattered the most, that it was up to them.

I didn’t know Matsuzaka Toori from anything, but my friend told me that, because he was in Kamen Rider/Samurai Sentai, she was initially a little confused to see him in this role because all she could see was Shinken Red. xD
I thought he performed really well, he has a really kind face in my opinion and he definitely had a lot of different emotions to portray. And as always, I will give credit for the fact that he was allowed to cry.

Yamamoto Mizuki looks extremely familiar to me, but the only thing on DramaWiki I can see is that I probably know her from Koinaka, although I don’t even remember who she was there since that’s been too long ago for me. Anyways, even though I sometimes found her a bit angsty and fidgety, I really liked the warmth she could show in her expression as well as her body language towards Itsuki. And she definitely did show some guts in taking her life in her own hands instead of just following along with everyone else’s expectations of her future!

I was so surprised to see Seto Koji there! And by that I mean that, I only recognized him because I’d seen he was in this, but I barely recognized him! This was such a different role from what I’m used to seeing of him, but I guess that just proves he’s a good actor haha. As I mentioned, at some points I didn’t really like Hiro purely because he didn’t really ask for Tsugumi’s consent in anything, but I’m glad that he was able to let go in the end and also just follow his own path, with or without a partner.
I love Seto Koji <3 I think the last thing I saw him in was Watashi Kekkon Dekinainjanakute, Shinaindesu, where he was this young and carefree second male lead. I also loved him as Kuranosuke in Kuragehime, because he was such a great crossdresser. I want to see more of him now!

I remember Nakamura Yuri from somewhere too! Her face looks soooo familiar, but I just can’t figure out what I know her from. Anyways, I guess despite her role as a kind of second female lead that never stood a chance at romance with the first male lead, she still portrayed a very human and realistic character. Although I was mentally referring to her as Ms. Nightingale in the beginning of the series, she did become a better person.

Also, and I really can’t let this review end without mentioning it: CHAKOOOOO T^T The little dog that Itsuki started raising and that became a part of their family. The dog was so freaking cute T^T A little Chiba-inu. I want one too.

I really liked the ending theme song by Suda Masaki, ‘Machigai Sagashi’, as well. And I loved his tiny cameo at the end as the person who registered Itsuki’s and Tsugumi’s marriage xD

By the way, their marriage felt a little somber to me. I was thinking that this would be their moment to be the happiest, that they would be crying and laughing and celebrating, but everyone was so serious! I get that it was an emotional moment for everyone, especially the married couple, but I had actually expected a bit more of a festive occasion since this was the moment where they were finally able to be together. Or maybe it was just me.

So yeah, it’s a short review but I did enjoy this series. It was really real and raw at times, but it definitely shone a light on the difficulties that disabled people have to deal with in society. I’m glad they chose this topic to cover, because I think that, in general, we definitely could be way more aware of this.
I would say it was about true love and acceptance, about truly caring about the inside more than the outside, even if that means having to fight the external elements. It was a really beautiful love story about truly caring for each other despite the challenges of life and society. I’m up for more of this kind of realness!

Next up is another Netflix K-Drama that I’ve looking forward to watching. See you next time~!