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.

Drama Special: What Is The Ghost Doing?
(귀신은 뭐하나 / Gwisineun Mwohana)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hi everyone! I wanted to get in another short review to make up for the long radio silence, haha. And I also just found out that this was only one episode, since I hadn’t really watched any of these ‘Drama Specials’ yet! I figured they were maybe 3 episodes or something, but they’re actually more like short movies!
I think I’ll watch more of these short special single drama episodes, they’re actually quite nice and easy to watch.
Honestly, I don’t even remember why I put this on my to-watch list, maybe it just sounded interesting to me.
This will be a short review, but I hope it’s still enjoyable to read 🙂
Let’s go!

What’s The Ghost Doing is the 5th episode from KBS Drama Special Season 6 (2015). The story is about Goo Cheon Dong (played by Lee Joon), who got dumped harshly by his girlfriend Cha Moo Rim (played by Jo Soo Hyang) 8 years prior, as he was about to propose to her – or actually, in the middle of his proposal. She told him the reason was that he was a loser, both in daily life and in the bedroom, and left him. This has had a major impact on Cheon Dong, as not only has he not been able to get over this cruel and unexpected rejection, he has also had issues with ‘performance’ in the bedroom because of what she told him. Her words still follow him everywhere, and he wishes that ghosts would just take her (or her image, at least) away from him so he would be able to go on with his life.
One time, when he is at the hospital for another examination regarding his ‘performance issues’, he somehow ends up at a funeral ceremony that’s being held in the same hospital (for patients there), and he finds out it’s Cha Moo Rim’s funeral. Not only that, she is sitting right next to him, in a white dress, sighing about how she doesn’t remember how she died. So, before even getting over the fact that his ex-girlfriend who dumped him 8 years ago has passed away, he immediately has to face the fact that she is now a ghost, and he is the only person who can see her.
She says she doesn’t know how she died, and asks Cheon Dong to help her out, first of all by finding her boyfriend. Cheon Dong refuses at first, but with some ghosty tricks she eventually scares him into helping her out.
At her house, they find an ID card belonging to a doctor at the hospital they were both at, a psychiatrist called Seo Joon Hyuk (played by Oh Sang Jin). Moo Rim asks Cheon Dong to tell the doctor what she wants to convey to her, but when Cheon Dong finally gets the chance to speak to Joon Hyuk, Joon Hyuk’s fiancée comes in.
Moo Rim is devastated, believing that her boyfriend was cheating on her, and disappears. When Cheon Dong confronts Joon Hyuk and even punches him in the face for being such a jerk, they both end up at a police station. When Cheon Dong mentions his name to the officer, Joon Hyuk immediately recognizes it and tells him that he was Moo Rim’s doctor before she died.
So then Cheon Dong finds out the truth, about Moo Rim’s death, but also about why she dumped him all those years ago. It turns out that Moo Rim had been suffering from early age Alzheimer’s and as her health and memories were deteriorating, she decided to break up with Cheon Dong to spare him the hurt, even though it became a bit more messy than she’d hoped. She even showed up when he enlisted, to see him one more time, but he misunderstood and thought she came to see off someone else, her new boyfriend. After that he never saw her again.
Because of her deteriorating health, she started mistaking Joon Hyuk for Cheon Dong, and that’s how she probably had the lingering feeling that Joon Hyuk was her boyfriend.
With the advice of another patient at the hospital who’s also able to see ghost because of her former occupation as a fortune teller (played by Lee Yong Nyeo), Cheon Dong goes in search of the place that holds the happiest memory he and Moo Rim shared, the place they first fell in love. He finds her there, all pale and about to vanish, but when he calls out to her with a phrase from when they first met, she ‘wakes up’ and recognizes him again and they are able to have a proper make-up and goodbye before she has to leave for real.
After she vanishes, Cheon Dong goes on with his life in peace, working at his parents’ guesthouse, but he still sees ghosts of people standing by their living relatives who are still grieving their deaths.
The series ends at quite a humorous note, as another ghost approaches Cheon Dong for help since Moo Rim has apparently been going around telling other ghosts that Cheon Dong is great at helping ghosts with their final wishes.

So yeah, you could say there is both light and dark in this drama special. In the beginning, it felt like kind of a joke, the whole dumping and how miserable Cheon Dong was being pestered by Moo Rim’s last words to him. And I kept wondering what the real message would be, even after Moo Rim appeared as a ghost. The way she acted towards him was really casual and it almost seemed like she had no feelings whatsoever about the way she had treated/broken up with him. Especially when she started talking about her boyfriend, and how Cheon Dong was mean for not understanding how much it hurt to not be able to say goodbye to someone you love – I really felt bad for Cheon Dong for a moment there. But afterwards, when the whole Alzheimer’s story became apparent, it struck that she genuinely didn’t remember. She didn’t even remember he was her boyfriend, she referred to him as a normal friend, which was already a little odd. But even as a ghost, she didn’t remember, and Cheon Dong had to help her to.

It was really all a matter of perspective here, and I think they were both a little ‘at fault’, even though I don’t want to point fingers since they both were helpless in one way or another. Of course there is something to say for Moo Rim wanting to push Cheon Dong away rather than putting him through Alzheimer with her, but by not telling him anything she also made him go crazy with ignorance. For Cheon Dong, it was easy to just blame her for everything, since she was obviously the ‘mean witch’ who had shattered his pride by dumping him with those words.
But what was important is that, at the end, when they both found out what they didn’t knew or remembered about their relationship, they immediately reconciled and reaffirmed their feelings for each other. Cheon Dong was able to let go of her quite fast when she said that she had to go now, because something had also fallen off him with her reaffirmation. He was able to reflect and apologize, and so was she.

When they showed Cheon Dong afterwards, seeing all these ghosts standing by their living relatives, it really hit me that that was it: it was about how the people we love will always stay with us after they pass. Maybe not in a literal sense, they might not actually be ghosts standing next to us of course, but their memory will always be as clear as that. And I found the imagery of it, the little boy stroking his mother’s arm, the husband walking with his wife and kissing his little child on the head, the daughter locking arms with her father, really heartwarming. Because why would they stop doing those things after they died? It had a more heartwarming than freaky feeling, and that was pretty interesting for a ghost-themed drama because this theme usually brings with it more darkness than light. So in that sense I thought it was quite refreshing.
Of course the end made me think of The Master’s Sun all over again, a living person becoming a medium for ghosts who want to finish something in the living world, so maybe that was kind of a reference to that? I don’t know.
It was short but still filled with varying emotions and despite my impression at the beginning I did actually enjoy watching it. It stopped being silly as soon as the Alzheimer’s was introduced, also because Moo Rim was only 29 and it just put the whole thing in perspective.

I don’t think I knew Lee Joon from anything else before although he looked a bit familiar… In the beginning, as he is still acting a little crazy due to being haunted by Moo Rim’s breakup words, his acting might have been a little over the top, but I think as soon as the theme of the special became more serious, he also adapted to that pretty well and in the end he really showed some serious and good acting skills.

I knew Jo Soo Hyang from a couple of things, and she has been cast as the snooty and even the bully character quite some times. It was fun to see her as a ‘good’ character, acting all cutesy and tsundere to get what she wanted. I don’t think I’ve seen her smile this much as she did here. Of course this special is from 2015 and she’s done a lot since then. I’d like to see more of her!

I saw Oh Sang Jin was in My Love From Another Star and 20th Century Boy and Girl but I honestly don’t remember him from there… oops. Anyways, we are led astray about his character from the start, as we believe what we’re fed. I totally went along with Moo Rim’s story that he had been two-timing her, but it became clear pretty quickly that he was oblivious to what was happening.

Lee Yong Nyeo is just basically typecasted as the fortune teller/shaman lady! I hope it’s not a completely consistent stereotype since she’s really good, so I’d like to see some other kind of roles from her as well.

So yeah, I actually enjoyed watching this. Even though it was only one ‘episode’, it still had a good build-up, I was still flowing along with all the plot twists and the ending was just really sweet and touching.
It was a nice short watch before I’m resuming with my list – next up is another recent hype item that I’ve been looking forward to a lot! Hint: it’s also on Netflix. So I will see you soon with a new 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.

Lovestruck in the City
(도시남녀의 사랑법 / Dosinamnyeoui Sarangbeop / City Couple’s Way of Love)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hi everyone! I’m finally back! 😀
This drama marks the end of another batch; I finished 10 dramas within 6 months! I’m definitely not on the top of my drama-watching game at the moment, but I really want to get on with all the series on my list I’ve been looking forward to watching, so I’m gradually getting back to it. After finishing a very time-consuming project and getting sick from exhaustion after that, I finally managed to finish this one.
After watching a couple of really slow-paced, dragging and emotionally heavy series, I really appreciated the lightness of this one! It was a very easy and quick watch, so let’s get on with the review! 🙂
So the main reason why I wanted to watch this in the first place was, suprise surprise, because of the two main actors. I like them both a lot and wondered how their chemistry would be! I was not disappointed.

Lovestruck in the City is a 17-episode Netflix K-Drama (each episode is only 30 minute!) and it tells a couple of different stories from a group of young people living in Seoul, and how they think about love and relationships.
The group consists of six people who all know each other in real life as well, and they are all more or less divided up in couples. First of all, there’s Park Jae Won (played by Ji Chang Wook) and Lee Eun Oh (played by Kim Ji Won). They have shared a passionate summer romance in Yangyang. While Jae Won only planned to stay there for one month, this girl he meets on the beach makes him extend his stay for another month as he is completely smitten with her. Besides his love for old cameras and taking pictures, he also really loves surfing, so he took a break from his job to go to Yangyang and help out at a surfboard workshop. On his first day, he is picked up by a beautiful and energetic girl who immediately leaves a strong impression on him. He finds out her name is “Yoon Seon Ah” – but we later find out this is actually Eun Oh. Anyways, he spends a wonderful summer with her, their chemistry is on point and they even get married, although it becomes more and more obvious that Jae Won is way more serious about it than Eun Oh/”Seon Ah”. As he falls for “Seon Ah”, Eun Oh really comes to see it as just a summer fling, since she knows she is not really Seon Ah. We find out later that Eun Oh escaped to Yangyang after going through a hard time in Seoul in which her boyfriend cheated on her and she didn’t get the job she was pining for – a free-spirited girl called Yoon Seon Ah did and that’s why she chose that as her fake name while she was in Yangyang where no one knew her and she could be a totally different person from the ‘ordinary’ Eun Oh. Of course she didn’t know things with Jae Won would turn out so dramatically. When Jae Won is called back to Seoul because of a business emergency, he leaves his beloved vintage cameras with “Seon Ah”, because they have promised to meet in Seoul later. However, “Seon Ah” eventually calls him from a pay phone to tell him they shouldn’t meet anymore and that she’s keeping his cameras.
Heartbroken while completely oblivious as to what went wrong, Jae Won goes back to his architecture company, while Eun Oh prepares to go back to her own life in Seoul as well, running her own small marketing business called O3.
Then we have Choi Kyung Joon (played by Kim Min Seok) and Seo Rin Yi (played by So Joo Yeon). Kyung Joon is Jae Won’s cousin who also works at his architecture company as a Director. He and Rin Yi have been in a relationship for 5 years at the beginning of the series. Rin Yi is best friends with Eun Oh, and Kyung Joon also knows her. Naturally they both also know Jae Won, but they never make the connection that the ‘camera thief that broke Jae Won’s heart’ and Eun Oh are the same person.
Then we have Kang Geon (played by Ryu Kyung Soo) and Oh Sun Young (played by Han Ji Eun). Kang Geon is childhood friends with Eun Oh and Rin Yi and he lives in the same house as Eun Oh, as he took care of her place while she disappeared to Yangyang (no-one knew where she went by the way, she just went off the grid for a couple of months). Kang Geon once was in a relationship with Sun Young, but they’re both more loners, despite the strong connection they still have towards each other.

So this drama gives us glimpes of all the relationships, past or present, between all these main characters. I think it was a pretty unique concept for a drama, it didn’t have the typical build-up in storyline as you kept finding out news things about everyone. I also think there was a lot of wisdom in it, as all these different personalities all have very different views and opinions on dating in a big city. I think the only ‘typical’ drama storyline was the one between Jae Won and Eun Oh and how they found each other again in Seoul. Jae Won finds out that “Seon Ah” wasn’t real and we get to see Eun Oh’s story of what happened and how she became this other person.

I have to say the part I enjoyed the most was the flashback episode of how Jae Won and Eun Oh met in Yangyang. Their whole life there together, that Jae Won taught her how to surf, them sleeping in the caravan and dancing in the rain, plainly just the love of two people portrayed so passionately. Their first kissing scene, where they both just got out of surfing and were still in their surfing suits and the build-up to that kiss was absolutely S I Z Z L I N G. They really had amazing chemistry!! And it really gave a good basis for the bleak aftermath, how Jae Won was so distraught after finally thinking he met the love of this life and suddenly she disappeared. We are let to wonder a bit more about Eun Oh, since she doesn’t reveal her story until later, but then when she does it also makes perfect sense for her to just want to run away for a bit to someplace no-one knows her.
What I mean is that everyone had a fair perspective and everyone’s feelings were valid. And that’s what made the show really real and accessible.
I also liked that the relationship between Jae Won and Eun Oh remained interesting even after they’d met in Seoul and Jae Won found out who she really was. It was a kind of involuntary push-and-pull, like they were both saying they moved on and didn’t want anything to do with each anymore even if they’d meet again, but then they did and they still held on to those beach memories; Eun Oh got all the pictures they took together developed from the cameras, she even kept their wedding rings, so it was clearly she wasn’t completely letting it go. This one time the tensions between them went up so high it bursted out into another passionate kiss (this build-up was so predictable but I was still very much waiting for it to happen), and then after that they still weren’t okay with just getting back together as if nothing happened. Eun Oh set her boundaries with Jae Won, saying that she needed time to ‘figure herself out’ first, and even though he didn’t completely understand, he took that distance. Which, in turn, confused the heck out of Eun Oh and made her even more interested in him again. Like, the reality of their relationship, how it was all confusing and all-over-the-place, rather than romantic and destined-to-be, was pretty nice to watch. In the end Eun Oh was the one who asked Jae Won if he’d want to get back together in her own time, and that went pretty well.

What I also liked was that it has an open ending and it doesn’t necessarily have happy endings for everyone. It actually ends with Kyung Joon and Rin Yi breaking up whilst Jae Won and Eun Oh are finally getting back together.
To talk a bit about Kyung Joon and Rin Yi – they come from very different worlds, social class-wise, but they still seem to be a very good match and they love each other a lot.
Rin Yi is a very easygoing girl, she works four parttime jobs because she likes to work, even though it doesn’t pay spectacularly, and still have enough free time. As a director of his uncle’s (Jae Won’s father) group, Kyung Joon cares a bit more about what kind of lifestyle he’d want for Rin Yi and towards the end he gets a little bit more fussy about that. He clearly has a judgement about how Rin Yi is living, and although it’s valid because he cares about her and wants the best for her, Rin Yi makes it perfectly clear that this is how she likes it. She is completely comfortable with her way of living. She breaks off their 5-year relationship after she finds out Kyung Joon has actually been lying to his family about what she does for a living, telling them she’s prepping for grad school, because he cares too much about what other people might think when they learn Rin Yi works four parttime jobs. This hurts Rin Yi’s feelings so much, also because her mother used to lie about her to other people as well (which Kyung Joon didn’t know, otherwise he probably would’ve taken that into consideration), and she breaks things off. The series ends with them breaking up and especially Kyung Joon having a hard time with it. In a typical K-Drama, they would’ve probably made them get back together in the end, to wrap everything up, but I find it kind of interesting that they left it like this. It definitely wasn’t very satisfying, but now that I think about it, I do feel that it contributes to the main theme of the drama – that relationships are fluctuous, especially in a big city in modern society where everyone has different opinions. So in a way I get that they may have made this choice to show that even a 5-year relationship isn’t a guarantee. Anything can happen, and that’s what makes love and dating in modern society so turbulent.
Geon and Sun Young also don’t get back together, Sun Young actually breaks up with him twice. We don’t actually get to see a lot of them together. We just see the first scene where they meet for the first time (which ended in a one-night stand). After that we’re only TOLD about their relationship, but we don’t actually see them kiss or anything, not even in flashbacks. However, even through words and glances they make it clear how they feel about each other.
I found it a pity though, I would’ve liked to see a bit more of their relationship! And also because Sun Young’s reason for breaking up with Geon in the first place was a misunderstanding (she thought he had feelings for Eun Oh), they never made it clear to one another. Sun Young reveals that she actually wanted him to come after her, to pursuade her to try again, but when he didn’t, she also gave up. Geon is pretty passive throughout the series, like he doesn’t really seem like the type who would put in a lot of effort to get back with someone, even though he is definitely a good guy. But he’s more of a ‘I’ll put myself aside for my friends’ kind of guy, he’ll put away his own needs. This becomes very clear when he’s pretty down in the dumps after Sun Young dumps him for the second time, but then when he sees Eun Oh is having an even harder time, he lets her have the spotlight for her story, and when they ask him afterwards what his deal was, he casually just mentions it, brushing it off as ‘not that important’. I actually felt a bit sorry for him in that moment. Of course it was a very emotional scene where Eun Oh finally told her two best friends that she was the camera thief Jae Won always talked about, that she was “Seon Ah”. So it would be a bit awkward to go after that, to be honest. But still, I’m glad at least Eun Oh felt bad for him, Rin Yi was literally just like ‘But you already broke up three years ago, wtf’.

What I also found interesting was how they suddenly inserted Oh Dong Shik’s story in the end. Oh Dong Shik (played by SHINee’s Choi Min Ho) was a police officer who appeared a couple of times as a side character. Sun Young landed at the police station a couple of times when she passed out drunk on the streets, as well as Jae Won when he started drinking while thinking about “Seon Ah” and he would come to the station, drunk, to tell them to catch that camera thief.
However, in the final episode, Oh Dong Shik suddenly got his own little romance story. There was this popular young actress, Hae Na (played by Hong Soo Joo), and they turned out to be close in real life. It wasn’t specified how they knew each other, she just called him ‘oppa’ and came over to his house sometimes to play games. Oh Dong Shik is a very humble and well-mannered guy, so he keeps trying to make her leave as he’s scared she might be busted hanging out at his place and he doesn’t want to ruin her reputation. Hae Na doesn’t hide that she likes him a lot.
It came a bit out of the blue for me, especially since they literally introduced Hae Na in the last episode, but it was still sweet. It was also interesting that they chose to spend the final episode on this completely new couple instead of working out more stuff with the 6 existing main characters.

At the end, I felt like the whole interview concept fell through a little bit. By the time they all sat in front of the camera again to say goodbye and took a group picture together (in which Kyung Joon and Rin Yi were very awkward), I was already feeling like ‘Ah right, this is how it started’. I feel like they could have maybe kept the interview/documentary thing going a bit stronger throughout the whole series, because it started to fade away to the background at some point and then when someone started talking into the camera again I was like ‘Oh, right, there’s supposedly someone sitting next to them with a camera, filming their whole private conversation’.
There were plenty of scenes where I felt like the supposedly present documentary makers weren’t there, though, where the scenes were just ‘normal’ drama scenes. Like with the final break-up scene between Geon and Sun Young, I didn’t feel like there was anyone sitting opposite them, filming the whole thing. There were moments when the ‘cameraman’ was clearly there, because in those scenes at least one person would keep sneaking nervous glances at the camera. But there were also a lot of scenes that were definitely not part of the interview. Sometimes it wasn’t completely clear to me what they were going for, where they filming everything or not? This also went for the scene in which Kyung Joon and Rin Yi met Eun Oh’s cheating ex-boyfriend and his new wife at the architecture company and assaulted him for hurting Eun Oh, and the scene where they broke up in Kyung Joon’s car. Those were legit, focussed, acted scenes, and not part of the interview/documentary, I’m positive.

This won’t be a very long review because it’s not a very long drama and I believe the message was very simple and clear, so I’ll just go on with my cast comments now.

Ji Chang Wook is one of my major K-Actor crushes, I still have a couple of his dramas on my to-watch list. I can’t believe this is the first Ji Chang Wook drama I’m writing a review on! Gotta change that 😉
Anyways, I like that he brought in this versatility in his character, like people all agreed on how different Eun Oh was from her “Seon Ah” impersonation, but Jae Won was also a different person in Yangyang than he was in Seoul. He was a beach boy, man! The tan, the hair, the surfboddd! And then in Seoul, he was like a tormented romanticist who couldn’t move on properly. I liked to see another different side of him. Ever since Suspicious Partner, still one of my alltime favorites, I’ve been enjoying seeing him in romantic roles, rather than in action stuff which he used to do mostly before. I liked his performance, how he also showed this playful and romantic side to him.

I swear, Kim Ji Won is growing on me with every new role I see of her. This may be my favorite role of her I’ve seen so far. I saw sides of her acting I’d never seen before. Before, she’d usually be cast as the bitchy character because of her RBF, but seeing her as “Seon Ah”, all giddy and laughing and free-spirited, it was like she was a completely different person! I believe it’s the first time I’ve seen her laugh so much in a drama. I really loved her performance. I still am baffled on how Eun Oh was able to make such a switch in personality, how she was able to let go and change into “Seon Ah” for the summer, because it really did feel like a different person. But I really related to her when she was struggling with ‘who she really was’. I’ve actually had a talk about this with my own therapist one time, that there were so many different sides to me that I couldn’t show to anyone and I had this idea I needed to pick ONE to define who I was, and then my therapist was like, ‘but why not just embrace them all?’ and that option just made my jaw drop. For Eun Oh too, it seemed like she wasn’t aware that she could actually be “Seon Ah” if she wanted to, that side to her personality was in her somewhere, it’s not like she put on a completely fake show. So she needed to be reminded that all those different sides to her were still all HER, all Lee Eun Oh. So she even got a bit of a psychological revelation there!

Of course I know Kim Min Seok from a lot of things, he’s been casted in stuff more and more these days! I think I’ve seen him in about 10 different things now. I like how he keeps getting opportunities to show off his acting skills and not just as a funny friend or side character. He’s been getting more main roles as well, good for him.
I didn’t know So Joo Yeon, but I know she’s in the Korean version of A Love So Beautiful which I also want to watch. She’s so cute!! Them dimples!! I really liked how comfortable she and Min Seok looked in playing out their relationship, they were really adorable together. Until the point where Kyung Joon started to get a little judgy about how she lived her life, I really had no worries about them, like I really thought they would just stay together. So that twist at the end, even though I believe there was definitely stuff to talk about, was very surprising. But I guess it really defined their characters as well, why Rin Yi chose to break up with him immediately. As she mentions after that ‘If there is a reason to break up, then it’s better to break up’. I liked how she put herself first like that, although I did feel a bit bad for Kyung Joon. Of course he shouldn’t have gotten involved in her life in that way, especially since she herself was perfectly okay with how things were, but she didn’t tell him about her mother. If he had known how her mother had treated her, he wouldn’t have done this to her, or at least not like this. So I did find it sad that they broke up, but I guess that’s all up to varying mindsets!

I recently saw Ryu Kyung Soo for the first time in Itaewon Class, I didn’t know him from anything before that. He hasn’t done that many dramas yet, mostly movies. Anyways, I liked Geon. At first he seemed to be a little like, the odd one out, the loner, the only single guy. But then his past relationship with Sun Young was revealed and we got to see more layers behind his casual demeanor and I grew to like his character.
I believe I have only seen Han Ji Eun in 100 Days My Prince where she was that gisaeng! I’ve also seen Fated to Love You, but that’s too long ago and I don’t remember her from there ^^” Anyways, I really liked her character. She was such a mess, haha. But there was still this very vulnerable side to her, which really showed in the scene where she officially broke up with Geon. You could see so many emotions, even though in the beginning it seemed more like she was just a very outgoing girl who wasn’t thinking of starting anything serious with a guy. I really would’ve liked to see a little more of the romance between her and Geon though, they left a lot to our imagination there.

I also really liked the guest appearances of Min Ho, and not to forget Lee Sang Woo and Park Jin Joo as Bin and Ra Ra, the two super friendly people on the beach. They were a couple: Bin owned the surfboard workshop where Jae Won helped out and Ra Ra had a ramyeon restaurant next to it where “Seon Ah” worked when she was there.
I really liked the scene when Eun Oh first came there and stumbled upon the restaurant and she ate and cried and Bin and Ra Ra were so nice to her, giving her all the food.

Also, that pizza place that Rin Yi worked at looked insanely familiar… I can’t help but feel that it was the exact same pizza place from It’s Okay To Not Be Okay?! It looked so familiar!! xD

The soundtrack was also really nice, with some cool Janet Suh songs, although I was a bit startled when the first song that started to play came on with ‘HELLO MY BITCH’ xD The subtitles said ‘Hello, My Beach’, and I was like, Nahh they’re definitely not saying “beach”‘ xD they even explained in the credit scene (where everyone dressed up, loved that) that it was about a woman, so maybe it was just censored.

Anyways, I liked watching this! It wasn’t too deep, not too heavy, it was easy to follow and watch because of the short episodes and the cast was small but strong. It definitely wasn’t the most spectacular thing ever, but I liked the concept and that it was a little different from the usual K-Drama setup. It was light, it was modern, it was original in its own way. And it still gave you things to think about! This is what I love about K-Dramas like this, even if the storyline isn’t even that major or dramatic, as long as it teaches you something about one specific thing (such as different opinions on dating in busy modern-day life) it already deserves some credit. As long as I can learn even a tiny bit from it about anything, then it usually gets a bonus point. I want to give a shoutout to the writers because the monologues and dialogues were VERY well written. It definitely gave me things to think about from a different perspective.

So thank you for reading this not so long review, I hope it was still enjoyable and I will be back with another one! 😉
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.

Encounter
(남자친구 / Namjachingu / Boyfriend)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello everyone! I’m finally back! As I mentioned in my previous in-between review, it’s been taking me a LONG time to finish the K-Drama I was watching. Due to a change in my personal situation, starting a new job (back in the office full-time) and an increasing lack of energy in my now sporadic free time, I really haven’t been able to get back into watching dramas as quickly as I’m used to! So yes, it actually took me 2 months to finish this drama.
I’m really glad I did finish it and am now able to get on with my list.
This time, I didn’t exactly have a problem getting through it like I had with The Beauty Inside. It was a combination of the fact that this drama is incredibly slow-paced and doesn’t really have an eventful storyline, and that I’ve sort of returned to my daily routine of working from 9 to 5, coming home tired, in which my weekends feel too short with everything I want to do and don’t get to. I went back to watching casual stuff on Netflix for a while, stuff I didn’t really have to concentrate on that much because I had a hard time getting back into really focussing on stuff with real emotional depth. Anyways, I really wanted to get back my love for watching dramas even though my weekly life is back to business, so I made an effort to finish this by the end of this month.

When I first saw a trailer/advertisement about this drama, I knew I had to watch it. With Song Hye Kyo and Park Bo Gum as the main leads, this had to be a worthwhile drama. Also it seemed to have a pretty big budget, what with the international filming locations and all, so I was really curious about the story. From the pictures I thought it would be a pretty serious and mature love story, and that turned out to be the case, although I was still surprised by their dynamic and the kind of drama they got involved in. All in all I thought it was a pretty good drama, even though it took me a while to get through it.

Encounter is a 16-episode drama (each episode about 1 hour and 15 minutes) about the relationship between Cha Soo Hyun (played by Song Hye Kyo) and Kim Jin Hyuk (played by Park Bo Gum).
Cha Soo Hyun is the daughter of a politician who is running for government, and to promote his reputation she has been married to the son of a big conglomerate called Taegyeong Group. However, he cheated on her and they divorced. Despite their divorce, Soo Hyun is still very much under the control of Taegyeong Group and namely her ex-mother-in-law. Her own mother has completely succumbed to pleasing Mrs. Taegyeong and forces Soo Hyun to act according to her bidding as well, even though Soo Hyun is very unhappy. She is literally living like a puppet, unable to break loose from the strings that tie her to the people who are responsible for her father’s success. If she ever chose to break from them, they would withdraw their support for her father’s campaign and her family would fall to ruin. Mrs. Taegyeong doesn’t play nicely. Soo Hyun is currently the CEO at Donghwa Hotel, a worldwide hotel chain, which again, falls under the control of Taegyeong Group.
On the other hand, we have Kim Jin Hyuk, a much more easy-going and free-spirited young man who just starts out at Donghwa Hotel as a new employee. He comes from a simple but warm family and is always kind and generous to people around him.
These two people from complete different worlds meet each other for the first time in Cuba. Soo Hyun is there to check out a potential site for a new Donghwa Hotel branch and Jin Hyuk is taking a last holiday before starting his new job. Jin Hyuk’s hobby is to take pictures, and he coincidentally comes across Soo Hyun walking by herself barefeet, in search of a famous tourist spot. They spend one evening together amidst the bustling Cuban night life and it makes a deep impression on both of them. They both find out about each other when they meet as boss and newly hired employee back in Seoul.

So the drama starts off with the refreshing scenery of Cuba, and it really got me in the mood. The scenery shots, the music, the night life, and then these two Korean people finding each other against Cuba’s exotic backdrop setting.
The *encounter* they have here will change their lives forever. Of course, when they come back to Korea and they meet each other again at Donghwa, their situation changes. For Soo Hyun, Cuba really felt like a dream, and the fact that she was able to warm up so easily to Jin Hyuk also probably had to do with that he was the closest friendly Korean person around, but afterwards she probably thought she’d never see him again and that made it a little easier to return to her secluded life back home. However, back in Korea, the fact that she’s his CEO doesn’t stop Jin Hyuk in pursuing her. I think it’s safe to say that it was pretty spot-on-at-first-sight for him in Cuba, or at least after that one night they spent together. When they meet again, he’s the first one that starts to think that there might be a trace of destiny at work.

As they slowly get closer outside of work, at some point the press gets a whiff of Soo Hyun spending time with someone in her private time and starts to sniff this out. This of course leads to gossip about Soo Hyun dating someone, and when it is revealed that it’s someone from her own company AND a younger guy to boot, the strings she’s attached to start to tighten again. Mrs. Taegyeong -her actual name is Kim Hwa Jin – (played by Cha Hwa Yeon) starts reminding her that she’s not allowed to do this kind of thing, that she has to remember her ties to Taegyeong. At the same time, Soo Hyun’s ex-husband Jung Woo Seok (played by Jang Seung Jo) is suddenly starting to show interest in her again, and also tries to one-up Jin Hyuk a couple of times.
Soo Hyun definitely starts feeling more and more tension regarding her own situation as her relationship with Jin Hyuk deepens, but she also doesn’t want to stop since being with him makes her feel so happy and free from her ties.
But, as Jin Hyuk and his family also start to get impacted by her reputation, dark clouds start looming over them. Soo Hyun becomes more aware of what her situation is doing to Jin Hyuk and his loved ones and even though he rushes on and never shows her that he’s struggling, she finds it harder and harder to ignore it.
They end up at different sides, after all. Jin Hyuk is the person who wants to keep fighting for their love and who is confident that if they’ll fight through it, their love will conquer all. Soo Hyun, through her past experiences, is a bit more anxious and even though she initially promises him she wants to make an effort as well, seeing him and his family start to struggle because of her relationship with him eventually causes her to decide to break up.

I’m going through my summary really fast now, haha, but I feel like I need to tell the storyline in its essence rather than focussing on every tiny little detail. You may understand that spending two months on a series kind of also fades away the memories of many specific events in the first half of the series ^^”
Anyways, the most important theme of this series is really the relationship between Soo Hyun and Jin Hyuk and how they, as two people from different worlds manage to make their love work in the end, despite their differences in age and social status. They encounter a lot of hardships, unwanted attention, gossip from their surroundings, but the story is about how their love conquers it all in the end. How Soo Hyun eventually manages to break free from her ties and is able to go to Jin Hyuk without anything holding her back.

Honestly, I think one of the several good things about this drama was how the lack of real storyline leaves a lot of time to focus on all the different characters’ relationships. Even the side characters all got just enough screentime to build up sympathy for. For most of these characters, even if I personally didn’t find them that interesting, I constantly thought ‘oh well, it’s not like there’s a lot happening at the moment anyway, so they might as well give everyone some character development’. And I didn’t feel like there was anyone or anything that fell out of place.
The focus was of course always on Soo Hyun and Jin Hyuk, but we also get to meet their friends and families well enough to develop an opinion about them. Even though I really didn’t feel any attachment to the Taegyeong Group people, I do feel like it was important to show them because that emphasized how hard Soo Hyun’s life under their control was/had been.

I love how the drama started with a short introduction runthrough of Soo Hyun’s life and that the camera followed her from the back. We see everything that’s happened to her up to the point where the series’ story begins, so how she’s helped her father in his campaign, how she married Woo Seok, how she divorced him, etc. It was pretty interesting, also cinematographically, that they chose for this intro into Soo Hyun’s life. Showing her like that, from the back, not showing her face or the expressions she’s making as she walks through this pre-determined path, like a kind of puppet who has no control over her own life (at least that’s how I interpret it in retrospect), was pretty powerful.
As a seemingly detached, cold woman who doesn’t smile that often, Soo Hyun really wasn’t looking for romance, especially after going through that awful experience with her ex-husband. It really just ‘happens’ with Jin Hyuk and it takes a while before she also lets herself agree to it. Because of her experiences she tends to focus more on the outside, what her surroundings will say and think, and since she’s lived as a puppet of Taegyeong for so long, she initially doesn’t have the courage to step out of that by herself. When Jin Hyuk starts helping her with that, she’s as much surprised as she is relieved to discover how good that actually feels.

Of course she has people around her who are on her side and also wish that she could do as she pleases.
First and foremost, her secretary and friend Jang Mi Jin (played by Kwak Sun Young). Mi Jin is very professional at her job and tries to help Soo Hyun to keep a low profile as much as possible as to not get into trouble with Taegyeong, but whenever she gets the chance, she loves to let loose in her free time. When she’s with Soo Hyun in Cuba in the beginning, she urges her friend to come have fun with her, but Soo Hyun is bent on going to sleep early – she also takes sleeping pills for that. Mi Jin is also very active on dating apps where she looks for business-minded guys who fit her high standard. She’s a very loyal friend to Soo Hyun and despite her initial discomfort with the main couple’s relationship, she eventually still tries to help them out as much as she can.
Besides that, there is Mr. Nam (played by Go Chang Suk), Soo Hyun’s driver and a close friend of her father, who is also very supportive of the couple’s relationship and immediately sees what a good guy Jin Hyuk is and how good he is for Soo Hyun. We occasionally see him arranging for them to meet in secret or driving them to go see each other etcetera. Jin Hyuk’s boss Kim Sun Joo (played by Kim Hye Eun) is also friends with Soo Hyun’s father and Mr. Nam, and she kind of watches over Jin Hyuk at work, although she doesn’t really get involved in their relationship. When the news gets out that Soo Hyun and Jin Hyuk are in fact dating, she’s one of the few people who doesn’t make a big deal of it.
As for Jin Hyuk, besides his family he has one good friend and colleague at the same company, Jo Hye In (played by Jeon So Nee). She has had a crush on Jin Hyuk since they were in college together, but when she finds out about him and Soo Hyun, even though she’s uncomfortable with it at first, she decides to be the bigger person and lets her crush go. I liked that even when she was offered a chance in the beginning to contribute to an article to give Soo Hyun a bad reputation for dating an employee, she didn’t take it and decided to not get involved with it, no matter her personal feelings towards Soo Hyun. She turned out to be a really loyal friend to Jin Hyuk, even when she did confess her past feelings to him in the end, she never forced him to accept them or do anything with this knowledge. I liked her character.
Outside of the office, one regular place the main characters often end up at is Chan’s Moon Snails, a restaurant that an acquaintance of Jin Hyuk’s owns, Lee Dae Chan (played by Kim Joo Heon). He isn’t really kept inside of much of the stuff that’s happening, but he’s just a good friend and he eventually gets into a special kind of friendship with Mi Jin.

Within Jin Hyuk’s family, his relationship with Soo Hyun also has repercussions. His father (played by Shin Jung Geun) runs a fruit stall and his mother (played by Baek Ji Won) often makes syrups from these fruits. His younger brother Jin Myung (played by Pyo Ji Hoon / Block B’s P.O.) just came back from the army and is the typical messy carefree type. By the way, I was kind of shook by how much P.O. actually looked like the woman who played his mum? Like, she could’ve been his real mom for all I knew xD Anyways, together they’re a very warm and cosy family, but when Jin Hyuk’s mother gets a whiff of the rumors surrounding her son – and when she realizes it’s because he’s dating his boss – she starts worrying a lot. Their family gets involved in different situations, people around them start asking them for favors because they think their connections to Soo Hyun can get them or their family members somewhere, and this is pretty inconvenient for Kim Jin Hyuk’s family. Jin Myung even gets in a fight once because his former classmate starts gossipping about Jin Hyuk. In the end, Jin Hyuk’s mother goes to see Soo Hyun and asks her to please break up with her son. Even though this isn’t the only reason, it’s definitely one of the main reasons she decides to break it off with Jin Hyuk. She can’t handle seeing the person she loves suffer because of her, and to stop that she’d rather take her distance from him than watch him deal with it and allthewhile feeling guilty about it.
I read a lot of disapproving comments regarding this action of Jin Hyuk’s mom. Of course, and she was more than willing to admit that herself as well, she shouldn’t have gotten involved. It was only natural for her to worry about her son, but nothing gave her the right to go behind his back and ask the woman he loved to leave him. She defends herself by saying ‘I’m not a very understanding person’, but you could see she really regretted what she did after they actually broke up. I couldn’t hate the mom, I think she was a really nice lady, and when I think about how she really just did it out of concern for her family, I can understand why she did what she did. But yeah, it wasn’t the best way to go.
There’s something to say about the way Soo Hyun broke it off with Jin Hyuk, as well. Of course we’ve had our share of break-ups in K-Dramas, everyone uses another way to do it, but in this case I think, even though she was reasonable enough to be at least partly honest with him, she did leave him out of the discussion. She had her reasons, but he was as much a part of the relationship as she was, and it was him who had to deal with this ‘suffering’, so I really think she still should’ve discussed it with him before just ending it without even letting him know she was contemplating this.
On the other hand, while I get that Jin Hyuk respected her decision but didn’t completely agree with it, he really didn’t leave her alone after that. Even after she’d made clear she wanted to end it, he kept messaging her, he kept calling her, he kept confronting her that he would get her back. And even though I understood both sides, I still felt like he didn’t really respect her boundaries either. I still wanted them to work things out of course, but I feel like they both could’ve taken better paths to ‘fix’ things. In the end, Soo Hyun went overboard when Jin Hyuk sent her a bunch of pictures he took of her when they’d been together and she only realized how much she loved him when she saw her own expressions on those photos… and that was suddenly all the reason she needed to go back on her decision.
I have to admit that was a little sudden for me haha, I mean, she’d already admitted how much she cared for him, but suddenly this visual proof of how she’d looked when they were together was the final piece of evidence for herself?
By then, her father had already taken matters into his own hands, he’d seen how his current position was making his daughter suffer and he openly declared giving up his government position, going against Taegyeong to accuse them of providing him with illegal political funds. He literally threw everything overboard to save his daughter from remaining in this lifestyle and that was so brave and sweet of him.
I would’ve understood if Soo Hyun would’ve wanted a short break with Jin Hyuk just until things had settled down after what her father did and once Taegyeong would’ve been gone completely, before getting back together. But I didn’t get why it had to be over forever, especially when at least one party was still very much willing to go to great lengths to keep it going.

I really liked episode 14 because it was the episode where Soo Hyun really let go for the first time. She finally cracked, so to say, she finally expressed her feelings. She cried, she talked to Mi Jin about her struggles… all the things she had been swallowing down until then came out in that episode and I really liked that. Until that point she’d been holding back so much all the time, she constantly remained this slightly stiff lady and I really wondered what it would be like if she really let go of that, and then she did. This was probably the most important for Soo Hyun’s character, since she was the person who needed to let go the most. Jin Hyuk had always been really clear about his feelings and intentions. Although sometimes he could be a little straightforward and tactless (when he started to talk about marriage it nagged me a little that he wasn’t considering the fact that she’d been through a terrible marriage – of course she’d be hesitant to make the next step, no matter how much she loved Jin Hyuk) but he really put in a lot of effort for her. He made her things, he thought about her so much, every day, whatever he was doing.
The part with the masked ball where he’d ordered a special mask for her so that he alone would be able to recognize her… He just did a lot for her. Because that’s who he was, when he found something or someone he liked, he didn’t look back. And this was probably a bit difficult for Soo Hyun, since she was used to holding back and not giving too much after what happened in her previous marriage. Literally every single movement she made was being watched, so she never got to let loose. But she was definitely impressed with how much love Jin Hyuk was giving her and she was trying to give back as well, a little more modestly.

As I mentioned before, I wasn’t really interested in the Taegyeong family side of the story. All we needed to know was that Mrs. Taegyeong only cared about her group and she only used Soo Hyun’s family to hold onto the shares of Donghwa Hotel. She didn’t really care about Soo Hyun’s father, she was constantly threatening her and her mother that she could let go of his support just like that. So I really liked it when Soo Hyun’s dad suddenly decided to break with them himself.
I also found Jung Woo Seok a strange kind of character. In the end, I really didn’t know what to think of him. He was made out to be the jerk in the beginning, and when he suddenly started getting involved in Soo Hyun’s life again it first seemed like some jerk-action because he wanted to get back with her for some reason no one understood. And then suddenly he was all serious about her again? And at the very end they revealed that he had faked his affair because he saw how miserable Soo Hyun had been and he’d wanted to free her from his family. When he finally told Soo Hyun this it was so random and too-little-too-late and Soo Hyun was like ‘what do you want me to do with this information at this point’, lol. I really didn’t get it.
So yeah, I wouldn’t really call him the second male lead because he never stood a chance against Jin Hyuk from the start. He gave away his shot. He’s mentioned as part of the main cast together with Soo Hyun and Jin Hyuk, but I actually don’t agree with that either.

There were a lot of beautiful scenes, beautiful sceneries, and moments that were just really precious in which Soo Hyun and Jin Hyuk confirmed their love for each other. I loved that Cuba kept coming back as well. Not only when they went there physically, but also in their memories, that one song kept coming back, and just little things like the pictures Jin Hyuk took, Soo Hyun’s shoes that he kept the whole time… Just to emphasize how it would always be a place they’d return to as it became so important to them.

I also loved the animated sequences at the beginning and ending of each episodes. It reminded me so much of the animations in It’s Okay to Not Be Okay! It basically showed the silhouettes of Soo Hyun and Jin Hyuk as they went through several hardships, and they made beautiful fantastical animations to express these situations. At some point there was this big scary wolf keeping an eye on Soo Hyun, and then by the end of the episode the wolf was extinguished and at that point it had become clear in the episode that the wolf symbolized Taegyeong and Soo Hyun has brushed them off and still chose to be with Jin Hyuk. I really liked these symbolical representations!

I loved the scene where Soo Hyun came to visit Jin Hyuk in Seokcho, when he was transferred there to work at another hotel branch (also as a result of the gossip) and she just followed her heart and went to him and they had that rendezvous on that pier, with the sea in the background and the quote from that book: ‘if it’s the purpose of the sea to make waves, it’s my purpose to think of you’ ~ So romantic!
I liked the masked gala as well, when Jin Hyuk came from Seokcho in secret with the help of Mr. Nam, and he was like ‘This has nothing to do with work, I’m just here to bring Ms. Cha’s boyfriend to her’ and they had their first kiss outside of the assembly hall. I remember thinking ‘lol they’re in full view of the entire hall right now, if anyone looks behind…’ xD
As I said I really liked the scene between Soo Hyun and Mi Jin in episode 14, when Soo Hyun finally came clear about her feelings to her friend, and the two of them were just gross sobbing about the situation together.
I’ve probably already forgotten a lot of details about the first half of the series (super sorry), but overall I thought the acting and the cinematography were really good. I would’ve probably gotten through it a lot faster if the episodes had been a little shorter, but that can’t be helped. This format helped the build-up in all the relationships a lot.
I loved how mature Soo Hyun and Jin Hyuk were in their relationship was, too. There wasn’t even that much need for physical intimacy, they only kissed like 3 or 4 times, but there were a lot of scenes where they were just walking together, holding hands or just looking at each other fondly. Those scenes alone showed such pure adoration and affection, I thought they depicted their relationship very strongly. I think the main actors had pretty good chemistry together, as well.

I’ve only seen Song Hye Kyo in Descendants of the Sun, but of course I know her reputation as a big Hallyu star. It’s just that I haven’t seen enough of her acting so far to really get a good impression of her overall skills. I did think she portrayed a completely different character than in Descendants, I think Soo Hyun must’ve been a pretty challenging role to play. I liked how she kept herself to be this composed, even when she fell hard for Jin Hyuk she kept holding her head high, she never got super giddy or anything, it was just fond smiles at her phone when he texted her, when she was thinking about him… And then in episode 14 she really showed how this composed woman completely broke apart by the thought of having to leave him. I still want to see more of other stuff she’s done!

I’ve only seen Park Bo Gum in Moonlight Drawn by Clouds, but he already managed to capture my heart through that drama. I was really excited to watch him in Encounter. He was such a precious puppy T^T His smile is truly contagious! I think the role of the carefree, open-minded Jin Hyuk suited him very well. Especially the look he had in the first episode, when he was in Cuba, it looked so natural on him! I really enjoyed his performance in this drama <3

I’ve seen Jang Seung Jo before in Wife I Know/Familiar Wife where he also played something like the second male lead? I remember liking him in that series. Because of the ambiguous intentions of Woo Seok and how they were only revealed at the very end to be well-meant, it was a bit hard for me to find him sympathetic throughout the series, but I think that was just how his character was written and had little to do with the actor himself.

There were a couple of actors that I also knew from different dramas, it was fun to see Kim Joo Heon since I really only just saw him in It’s Okay to Not Be Okay and I didn’t know any other things he’d appeared in. I knew P.O. from Hotel Del Luna where I loved him, and he also had a fun character here. Besides being the careless younger brother he really did show how much his family meant to him and that also gave him a little more depth in my opinion.

Overall, as I said, I think it was a good drama in terms of acting performance, cinematography, the only thing was that the pace was really slow and I think it’s easy to lose concentration if that kind of series aren’t really your cup of tea.
Even though it took me two months to finish it, in the end my review isn’t very long because ultimately there’s not that much to talk about except the build-up in the relationship between the two main leads.
My apologies for undoubtedly failing to mention certain parts, but I really felt that ‘capturing’ the essence of the story was more important than summarizing each part individually. It was a story of a love between two people who, despite all the social forces that tried to push them apart, learned how to hold on and choose for their love for each other. The way they depicted these influences, ties to rich families and taboos about the private lives of well-known people and how connections with influential people can have so many repercussions on others who are less high in the social classes, was very contemporary and it’s scary to think that this is how it still goes in parts of the world. On many occasions I was thinking, ‘Why aren’t they leaving Soo Hyun alone? Who says she’s not allowed to date??’ but I guess that will remain my question for many more K-Dramas to come xD
The soundtrack was also really praiseworthy in my opinion, not just the Cuban song, but there were several songs that really struck the right chord and really fitted the theme and the emotions of the drama.

I’m really excited to go back to my list, next up is another hyped one on Netflix that I’ve been looking forward to for a while! Since it’s on Netflix, I’ll probably go through it a little faster, haha.

Until my next 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.

Nee Sensei, Shiranai no?
(ねぇ先生、知らないの? / Hey Teacher, Don’t You Know?)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hiya! It’s been so long since my last review! I’m still halfway with another Korean drama but it’s taking me a while, so I wanted to watch something light and short inbetween. The reason why it’s taking me so long has nothing to do with that I’m struggling to get through it, but my schedule has been super busy ever since May. I started a new job and am back at the office full-time, leaving me with very little energy to concentrate on basically any kind of hobby that I usually enjoy to do in my free time. I have been getting back to my K-Drama, but it’s just taking a longer time and it’s quite slow-paced. And then I suddenly saw a clip from this drama and when I checked it out, it turned out to be a really short one, only 6 episodes of 25 minutes. So to make up for taking so long until my next full-fletched review, here’s a little inbetween one! 🙂 I was in the mood for a typical Japanese romantic comedy, and this gave me enough fluffy feelings to write a short review about it.

As I mentioned, it’s a 6-episode short drama, based on a manga, and it’s basically about the writer of a popular shoujo manga series, Aoi Hana (played by Baba Fumika). Her writer’s pseudonym is Hanai Ao-sensei. She’s been writing romantic manga ever since she was 18 despite never having any real experience in romance herself. She works with her two faithful assistants Makoto and Koinuma (respectively played by Tanda Hazuki and Miyase Ryubi). One day, after submitting her new entry to her editor, she realizes that she really needs to look after her appearance more, as she tends to neglect her personal hygiene when she’s busy with work. In a hurry, she enters the nearest hair salon, only to find out it’s a super fancy place that doesn’t allow walk-ins. Just as she’s about to leave, she still gets invited in by a handsome hairdresser who offers to take care of her hair. This hairdresser is Kido Riichi (played by Akaso Eiji).
During their short encounter and small talk, Hana awakens something in Riichi and after he’s done with her hair he asks her to go out with him because ‘he’ll make her pretty everyday’.

So, the first thing here is probably that this went very fast, haha. He literally JUST cut her hair. Anyways, she went along with it and the second episode is already a leap in time to one month later. We learn that, although they have now been dating for a month, Hana tends to neglect Riichi when she’s busy with work, not replying to his messages for days. She feels bad about it, but she also can’t help that she loves her job and always forgets everything around her when she’s busy.
Riichi has fallen in love with exactly this characteristic of her, so even though he gets impatient, he always accepts it and he just keeps waiting for her to message him that she wants to see him, and then he comes running.
As Riichi helps her discover what a real-life romantic relationship feels like, Hana is also able to develop her manga writing skills, using many of the situations happening to her as inspiration for her stories. Eventually, her story clearly becomes a bit more mature in its depiction of a real relationship with physical intimacy etcetera, and although it also takes her some time for her to get used to that, she eventually makes peace with it, recognizing it as a good change in style.

Probably the most interesting about their relationship dynamic is how they reversed the stereotypical gender roles. In this situation, Hana is the workaholic woman and Riichi is the patient, devoted guy. However, when he does get her alone, he tends to get a little pushy, saying things like ‘I can’t hold back anymore’. When Hana tells him multiple times that it’s because of him that her manga is getting better, he keeps trying to get a ‘reward’ for it – suggesting that they finally sleep together.
Occasionally, it did make a feel a little awkward, but that’s probably because Hana looked so uncomfortable with it all the time and wasn’t really strong in setting her boundaries. She got better at it eventually, but sometimes I thought he was getting a little too impatient there. However, as soon as he noticed she wasn’t ready, or fell asleep while he making a physical advance on her (seriously though girl, how could you fall asleep in that situation?? XD) he always stopped, smiled, and backed off, so that was good.

Of course a Japanese romcom isn’t complete without (potential) love rivals. The salon Riichi works at is pretty fancy, as I mentioned, and he gets a lot of models and actresses as clients. One of them is the young and popular actress Hoshino Nanase (played by Yahagi Honoka), who doesn’t really hide the fact that she’s interested in Riichi. She even asks him to become her personal stylist when she starts a new drama role – and when this turns out to be for the live adaptation of Hana’s manga, things get a little tense. Despite being a big fan of Hana’s work, Nanase tries to act stoic towards her when she finds out she’s Riichi’s girlfriend. However, she still backs off immediately after getting blatantly rejected by Riichi himself. As expected of a short drama, they rounded off the potential threats to the canon couple’s relationship pretty fast and smoothly. Hana’s assistant Koinuma also (randomly?) turns out to have a crush on her but this crush is immediately exterminated when he meets Riichi for the first time. This came kind of out of nowhere for me, by the way, in the first couple of episodes he’s not even looking at her like that and then suddenly he’s like ‘I’ve always liked you’, so they may have made that a bit clearer from the start.

There isn’t a lot of drama in the series, mostly just Hana’s insecurities that are working against her. She’s the typical Japanese shoujo heroine, the one that just instinctively apologizes instead of saying ‘hello’ when she enters a room. It can get a little annoying, but I’m glad that they still gave her a little more backbone at the end. She gets a bit insecure and jealous when she sees another girl (who turns out to be Nanase) hugging Riichi in front of the hairsalon one time, but even though that shakes her a bit, it doesn’t turn into a big thing and after Riichi explains the situation to her, it’s all good again.

I just have to say, even though Riichi was like the idealest of the idealest guy here, he might as well have been a playboy. Like, I’m positive that he would’ve been able to fool her very easily with how he treated her. It was interesting to see them become such a fond couple without so little build-up, but at the same time it was somehow also very easy to accept. I’m kind of interested in reading the manga now, just to see how the build-up in their relationship is in the original work, since of course they had to make it real short for this drama.
But I did like how they made the story focus on the two of them. In every episode, the first part is from Hana’s perspective, and at some point we also see Riichi’s perspective on the same situation, like their first encounter in the salon or the time where Nanase hugged him in the front of the store. So from Riichi’s perspective, all we get is that he is so into Hana, he literally doesn’t look at anyone else. From Hana’s perspective, she’s constantly busy worrying about how other people see her and Riichi together, and when he catches him just looking at another woman’s picture, she already panicks ‘Oh my god is that his ideal type?? I can’t compete with that!!’ Riichi constantly has to calm her down and convince her that she’s the only one for him, but I can’t imagine it will be easy for him all the time.
Anyways, since there wasn’t any room for any real psychological development here, let’s just keep it at that it’s a cute love story between two busy and sleep-deprived people, and that was kind of a cute concept, different than usual.
I also liked how much their personalities complimented each other and how, in all aspects, Hana was the one who took the most time figuring that out. Probably one reason why Riichi is so quick in pursuing her after just meeting her once, is that, from the first time they meet at the hairsalon, he immediately recognizes that they’re alike. Alike in that they both have a busy job and love that job, and occasionally neglect their sleep are bad with keeping other people involved in their lives outside of work. We see in a couple of flashbacks than multiple of Riichi’s former girlfriends broke up with him because he couldn’t make time for them. Hana is the complete opposite of that and that’s what attracts him to her – she’s too busy herself to worry about him not spending enough time on her. And when they do make time for each other, then it’s an even more special occasion.
It takes literally until the final episode for Hana to realize the same thing, that they are actually quite alike. She watches him at the salon one time and then suddenly it hits her. And I feel like this was her in their entire relationship as well, haha. She’s just not used to having someone wanting to spend so much personal time with her, so it’s easy for her to forget about it as she gets absorbed in work, even though she does still think about him and misses him a lot. But I think that it reassured her as well to see that Riichi was kind of the same in that way, that he also loved his job and worked really hard for it. Even when she came to visit him and he was going to cut her hair, he still left her alone to tend to other patients and in his work, also didn’t necessarily prioritize her over his job. I kind of liked their dynamic, haha. Especially because from another viewpoint, you’d think they didn’t necessarily match that well. But that’s why I liked how in that particular way, they clicked like no other and that’s probably why Riichi, when he realized this, went all the way for Hana. And when she realized it as well, be it a little later, she did the same.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the amount of kissing scenes in this series. Japanese dramas tend to be kind of prudish with showing intimacy on screen, but Riichi really wasn’t embarrassed to show his affection towards Hana in public, even though it made her pretty uncomfortable in the beginning. What I did like was the moment when she stopped caring, when Nanase confronted her again saying ‘aren’t you intimidated by the fact that I said I liked him’ and she was just like ‘well, I was at first, but now, actually, nah, not anymore’. It just felt like she finally became confident enough in her relationship with Riichi that she didn’t back down anymore, she realized she really could have the best of both worlds. Being a workaholic/successful manga artist AND not having to worry about her relationship since Riichi completely accepted her, occasional negligence and all.

By the way, the title stems from a phrase that Riichi uses a lot in his narration towards situations with Hana. As ‘sensei’ is not only a word used for school teachers but also for doctors and, such as in this case, for manga artists, in his narration he refers to Hana as ‘sensei’. In each episode, at one point, there is a narration of his voice saying ‘Nee sensei, shiranai no?‘, followed by something like, a feeling that he gets from looking at her, or something.
When he’s directly talking to her, he always calls her ‘Hana’, so this really only happens in his narration and I guess it’s also a direct reference to the original manga series.

I barely knew any of the cast members!
I don’t know why, but Baba Fumika gave me immense Kim Yoo Jeong vibes at times oO like, sometimes she would make a face and she’d look so much like her? Maybe it’s just me, haha. Anyways, I like that she was able to give the character of Hana a bit more depth than just the skittish, insecure, typical shoujo heroine. I also really liked how she went through kind of a transformation herself throughout the series, from her typical sweaters and jerseys to her mature look when she went to work on the live adaptation in the end! She portrayed Hana’s development pretty well.

I’d never heard of Akaso Eiji, but I can’t deny he is really handsome. Riichi is really the ideal type of guy, attractive, caring, kind, occasionally acts like an abandoned puppy but you can’t reprimand him about it. And even though he falls under the infamous 3B that you shouldn’t date (actually someone told me about this when I was in Japan as well, so I knew about it, that Bandmen, Bartenders and Beauticians are the worst types of guys to date since they lack free time and spent a lot of time around female fans/customers/clients), he isn’t like the stereotype at all. His smile was really adorable too… I’m moving on now xD

Yahagi Honoka is probably the only cast member I know and I love her. Ever since Itazura na Kiss, where she still acted under her previous stage name Miki Honoka, I think she’s a brilliant young actress. It was cool to see her as a more mature and confident character here. Even though she acted a little bit childish when faced with her love rival, she couldn’t help herself when she realized how much she admired Hana and in the end was able to give up on Riichi pretty quickly.

I forgot to mention Hana’s editor, Kiritani (played by Wada Masanari). I was afraid that they’d make him into yet another love rival, after they suddenly pulled that with Koinuma, but I’m glad they didn’t go through with that. I still feel like, if there was more time, he might’ve become more interested in Hana, also when Riichi out of the blue brought him up as a potential rival while there is literally 0% going on between Kiritani and Hana, I thought that maybe in the original work he could be a love rival. Anyways, in this case I was glad they didn’t turn him into one. It was nice to see him turn from a cold-looking editor to a more sincere guy as he appreciated the changes Hana was going through as well.

Overall, I enjoyed it. It was short and fun and pretty heart-throbbing at times! It really made me want to write this kind of romance again. As I mentioned, Japanese romance series can be kind of prudish, but there’s also dramas in there that get pretty hot (!) and I’m always sort of pleasantly surprised by that, haha.

I really missed writing reviews, so I wanted to make this inbetween one, also just so I would still keep the hang of it, haha. I am already more than halfway through my K-Drama, so I may have another review ready probably some time next month 🙂 Please bear with me until then! 😀

Bye-beeee~!

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.

The Beauty Inside
(뷰티 인사이드 / Byuti Insaideu)
MyDramaList rating: 6.0/10

Hello everyone! It’s time for a new review~
It took me longer than expected to finish this drama. The episodes were quite long, about 1 hour and 15 minutes each, and although this was part of the reason, it wasn’t the main one. Before this I’ve watched plenty of long-episode dramas. It’s just, for some reason, I had a really hard time concentrating on it. A couple of times I was only able to watch a half episode and finish the rest the next day. And if I was able to finish one episode in one day, it was with a lot of breaks in-between and it ended up taking almost an entire (mid)day. I’ve never really had this before, and it kind of sucked because I was really looking forward to watching this. The main actors are great and the story sounded really interesting and promising, so I guess I had pretty high expectations.

I will try to put into words as well as possible what caused this confusion/distraction for me.
In general I’ve only read really positive comments about this drama, and I may be inclining a little bit to an unpopular opinion here, but hey, as a review writer you have to be brave enough to write your own honest opinions whether they match the mainstream viewer’s opinion or not.

So, okay, The Beauty Inside is a 16-episode drama remake of the 2015 movie with the same name. I actually watched this movie right before I finished the last episode of the drama, to see if there were any similarities or references in the drama that I missed. It turns out, there were. I’m glad I watched the movie, but I feel like I should’ve watched it BEFORE watching the drama, because now I missed out on some references to the movie.
Anyways, the story of the drama is about Han Se Gye (played by Seo Hyun Jin), who is a famous actress with a stellar reputation as well as a troubling one – every once a month, she ‘runs away’ and disappears for at least a whole week.
We find out soon that she has a very strange condition: one week every month, she turns into a different person. Regardless of sex, age, nationality, she literally changes into someone else. In her position as a celebrity, this is of course very inconvenient, especially since she can’t exactly predict when it’s coming. She has a vague schedule, like how women know around what time their period will come (I don’t know why but this seems to be the most logical explanation to me xD), but it still catches her off guard.
The first time this happened was 10 years prior to the start of the story, when she was travelling in Europe with her best friend, now turned manager Yoo Woo Mi (played by Moon Ji In). She woke up one day as a grandmother and panicked so much she ran into the street and almost got hit by a car. A gentleman saved her by pushing her away and getting hit himself. This stranger, as we basically all know from episode 1, is Seo Do Jae (played by Lee Min Gi). The accident damaged his brain and caused him to have prosopagnosia, aka the disability to recognize people’s faces. He is now the Director of his family’s airline company T-Way, of which Se Gye happens to be the main model. The only people who know about his condition are his mother (played by Na Young Hee) and his secretary Jung Joo Hwan (played by Lee Tae Ri). He’s keeping it a secret from the rest of his family and the company since any kind of weakness can be used against him and people may take away his right to inherit the company because he has an ‘illness’.
After Se Gye makes another dramatic getaway (at least she can feel it coming and has time to run away before she changes) and her reputation gets another negative blow, Do Jae has to deal with the reputation of his airline, since she is the face of it. Like, literally, her face is ON the plane.
After some (initially quite hostile) meetings, Se Gye and Do Jae come up with an agreement to help each other out, and they start fake-dating in order to help their respective reputations. During this period, they both find out about each other’s conditions. Se Gye unexpectedly changes when they’re on a plane together, and although Do Jae can’t know for sure, he realizes there’s something different about her. When he doesn’t respond to her changing faces, Se Gye quickly gathers that he’s not able to recognize faces in general and helps him out a couple of times so he doesn’t get busted in a public work situation. While they are fake-dating, inevitably, they fall for each other for real. After a while they decide to break up to the public, so to stop their fake-dating, and then start real-dating in secret.
Besides this main story of their romance, there is also a storyline about Do Jae’s stepsister Kang Sa Ra (played by Lee Da Hee) and Se Gye’s friend Ryu Eun Ho (played by Ahn Jae Hyun). Eun Ho also knows about Se Gye’s condition and is occasionally asked to watch her house and dog for her when she has to go in hiding. His ambition is to be a priest. Sa Ra is constantly trying to one-up her brother and wants to desperately prove she can make it as a Director of her own airline company by herself, as a woman. However, it takes a mental toll on her and she is actually very lonely and acts very coldly to people because she’s not used to other people’s warmth.

Let’s start from the beginning.
From episode 1 on, I found it hard to focus. I don’t know what it was, but I found it a bit difficult to establish the relationships between all the characters. For example, when we first meet Do Jae walking through the airport and meeting a bunch of people, they’re not actually ‘introduced’ to us – when he meets Sa Ra and doesn’t recognize her and she tells him off, we only learn that she must be some sort of relative because she talks about their grandfather. It wasn’t clear to me from the start that she was his sister, let alone stepsister. In Se Gye’s case, besides Woo Mi, her friendship with Eun Ho was also a bit vague, we don’t learn how they became friends or how they met, he’s also younger than them so I really wondered where they could’ve met.
And then the whole fake-dating thing started and that got me even more confused. Honestly, I just couldn’t really focus on their whole agreement, why they decided fake-dating would be the best option to solve their problems. And when they started dating for real, why did they feel the need to ‘break up’ to the public? Was that just to make it clear to themselves? Like, our fake-dating stops here, our real-dating begins here? But then they still appeared in public when they started real-dating, so what was the point? Anyways.

We get a couple of nice cameos in the series, several people that Se Gye turns into. It was nice to have cameos appear in the series, also getting their own little contribution to the story. What I liked about those first couple of episodes was that we really got to see her in that situation, how she was another person for a week. And also how, looking like someone else, she was still able to help other people. In these couple of cases, her changing into someone else actually helped in situations where she couldn’t have done much as Han Se Gye. When helping out a high school girl from being harrassed, it helped that she looked like a high school boy. When they desperately needed a child actor, it helped that she looked like a little boy. And even though lying about receiving the heart of a woman’s child wasn’t all right, it still helped that she was able to give that woman calm and comfort, and she couldn’t have done that if she hadn’t been in the form of a child at the time.
But after those few episodes ended, suddenly it seemed like the writers decided to go a different way, throwing several dramatic events in the mix. That in itself was fine, I mean, it’s a K-Drama; we expect dramatics, but here my main issue with being able to keep up with the series was established. To me, it felt like there was next to no build-up in any of the dramatic events. Things kept happening, and while the main actors were already crying their eyes out, I was still sitting there like, ‘…wait, hold on, what is happening?’ At some point it just stopped making sense to me at all. It wasn’t the actors, and it wasn’t the story in itself, but I just didn’t feel any connection between all the different events in the series. Even the side plots felt like they didn’t really have anything to do with each other, it became very incoherent.

The foremost example being the situation with Se Gye’s mother (played by Kim Hee Jung). She is introduced in one episode and literally in the second half of the next episode, she suddenly has stage 3 cancer and dies, in half an episode. What was that? It was so sudden and, sad to say, random to me that I just couldn’t keep up with the dramatic and I was just confused as to what the hell was going on. In retrospect, it felt like a plot tool to force Se Gye to get close to her mom, and then when she changed while her mom didn’t have much longer to live and she had to bury her mom looking like someone else, it felt as if the plot tool was also to create a situation for Se Gye in which she really hated her condition. Still, couldn’t they have created a different situation, or at least put her mother’s death at the end or something? For me it just really felt like, ‘Oh hi Se Gye’s mom, nice to meet you– oh okay you’re already gone, sadness’. And also the fact that, when she did visit her mom looking like this other woman, and her mom recognized her immediately, like, then what was the whole point of keeping it a secret? They could’ve given her mom more time, build up the relationship between the two throughout the series and create a different kind of situation in which Se Gye would end up telling her the secret. They didn’t have to kill off the mom after 1,5 episodes. That really confused the heck out of me. I still don’t see the necessity of it after finishing the series. What was the additional value of it?

I think the reason for a lot of the weird unclear build-ups was that the intended time jumps were really vague to me. At some point, Se Gye changes into an old man, and she goes in hiding and no one can reach her. Which is kind of weird, because everyone was kind of used to it by now, she never went off the grid so that even her manager couldn’t reach her. So I was wondering why she suddenly decided to be so mysterious and embarrassed about it. This was also the first change in which they didn’t show us her new face, like, they kept it hidden from us. In the end, when it was revealed, I was just like, ‘okay, so? It’s just an old man? Why the dramatic reveal?’ After watching the movie, I realized it must have been a reference to that because that same old man appeared as one of the changes in the movie as well. Anyways, I didn’t get it. And when she was like ‘My face isn’t turning back’, I found it really strange because to me it felt like she’d only changed two days earlier and she was being presumptuous by already complaining she wasn’t changing back.
Some time later, it actually turns out that already more than a week had passed. Okay. Well, if they hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t have gotten that. The time passing between events was really unclear to me, except for the times when it was literally mentioned on screen like ‘1 year later’ or something. So that all just added to my confusion.
And then the dramatics would all in some way, also be debunked. She changed back from the old man to herself after hugging Do Jae and then it was like ‘oh hey, nevermind!’ and I would just be like ‘…okay? You panicked too soon, girl!’
I mean, by then it was already established that the changes were unpredictable as heck.
By the way, can I also mention that I found it pretty extreme that Woo Mi actually got herself into an accident JUST to cover for Se Gye’s schedule while she was away? Like, she’s been dealing with her friend’s disappearances for so long and now suddenly for this one she needed to basically sacrifice herself like that? Even though she made sure she wouldn’t get seriously hurt, she still ended up in the hospital!

Let me just talk about the different characters and their relationships before I go on to some more critical comments.
First of all, Se Gye and Do Jae. I think there is a lot to say about their relationship. Besides my own personal opinion that the build-up in their relationship was a bit vague, of course the main message of the series is conveyed through their bond, as Do Jae accepts Se Gye entirely, no matter what face she wakes up with. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder, realistically, how it was so easy for Do Jae to accept it.
What I liked about the movie was that the woman in Do Jae’s position actually really struggled with getting used to being greeted by a stranger every day. Even though she loved the man very much, she couldn’t get used to it a 100%, which seems like a completely normal way of feeling in this situation. It made it really realistic and painful from both sides.
I feel like in the drama remake, there was very little processing required from Do Jae. He just accepted it like that, and was really quick to start saying things like ‘I don’t care, you will always look beautiful to me’ etcetera. So, in a sense, there was also a certain lack in build-up of their relationship. Their first kiss is in episode 6, which is quite soon for a K-Drama. And then all of a sudden they’re already at this point where they’ve accepted each other so entirely that they’re completely comfortable and warm with each other and everything.
Of course, we know from the first episode that it’s Do Jae who saved her that time when she first changed. So it really was a matter of time before she would find out and there would undoubtedly be some dramatic situation between them. However, as the truth was revealed, I had really hoped for Se Gye to stay as mature about it as she’d been throughout their whole relationship – I really liked how mature they remained, while being completely crazy about each other.
When Se Gye finds out Do Jae was the one who saved her life 10 years ago when she changed for the first time, and that his prosopagnosia was caused by that accident, she went into my personally most hated response mechanism:
‘Oh my God this is all my fault, I ruined his life, he’s like this because of me, I don’t deserve to be with him, I carelessly made comments about his disability before, Oh my god I’m the worst person ever, we have to break up now’.
She didn’t give Do Jae anything to say about it, even though this concerned him as much as her, if not more. He was the one who ended up with a damaged brain, after all, give him a chance to say something! But no, she literally just walks away without explaining anything, then tells him over the phone that he became like that because of her in the vaguest way possible. Even after she tells him in person, Do Jae doesn’t even flinch. Honestly, in this situation, Do Jae was so mature! He was the person who went ‘okay, well, then let’s fix this, let’s get through this together’, but he didn’t get the chance because she had already decided how everything between them should go and she just left.
I quickly jotted down some comments from when I was watching this part and I already saved it to a draft of this blog post in advance (I swear I haven’t done this since my frustration while I was watching About Time). These are some things I would’ve liked to say to Se Gye at that point:
1. Girl. It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask to change, you were panicking for all the reasons in the world because you suddenly woke up in an old lady’s body. You were scared. You didn’t ask for him to push you out of that car’s way. That was all him, because he’s a good person. Don’t put his actions onto yourself.
2. How the hell were you supposed to know that was him? Don’t go feeling all guilty about things you said to him when you didn’t even know and couldn’t possibly have known! Blaming yourself for saying things in oblivion to his personal situation – because he hasn’t told you his personal situation himself – is such a wasteful thing to do. True, you might feel bad about things you’ve said in retrospect, but don’t punish yourself like that because it’s not like you did it on purpose. If you would’ve known, you wouldn’t have said those things, that should be enough. He also didn’t mind, because he knew you didn’t know and that was okay.
3. THIS IS NOT JUST ABOUT YOU. Consider Do Jae’s feelings when he found out. You taking the whole thing on yourself and acting all dramatic? Imagine what HE must feel like. It makes absolutely no sense to shut him out now, he has as much stuff to process as you do in this situation, if not more. Walking away from him, shutting yourself off and then facing him coldly like ‘I did this to you, it’s on me to push you away’, even lying to his face that you don’t love him while that’s obviously such a lame attempt to push him away, hurting his feelings for no reason… NO. Just no. You don’t get to do that. It’s the two of you in this relationship. I was under the impression that your love was already strong enough to face a trial like this. This is the hardest trial you’ll probably face but you’re not even able to get over it by talking it through and facing it together?
Honestly, her reaction pissed me off SO MUCH. Going all crazy panicky, thrashing her pictures, groaning, crying. And all I could do was just sit there like, ‘oh my god girl CHILL’. I get that it was hard, okay, but she could’ve just been straight with him while she was there! She could’ve just sat up straight, face him, and say, ‘Okay, this is going to be really hard for the both of us but it’s also really important. That woman you saved in the accident that caused you this… that was me.’ And they could’ve addressed the issue right away, TOGETHER.
Also, when he came to her house and she told him again, ‘that old lady was me’, SUDDENLY he asked ‘What do you mean? How could that have been you?’ … Like, does this question even need an explanation? She literally just told him over the phone that she turned into that grandma the first time she changed, and that she was in Europe at the time. The way he asked it sounded as if he didn’t even know about her condition. Weird writing.

Also, after she went all dramatic and even RETIRED from the acting industry to sit by herself in a house in the countryside to wallow in self-pity, Do Jae actually went and solved ALL their problems by himself. He literally went to Europe to have a very risky surgery, he took the chance and cured his prosopagnosia. The worst thing: he did it for HER. So SHE wouldn’t have a reason to stay away or feel guilty anymore. He was fine living with his disability, he had gotten used to it, but he took the risk of that surgery for HER. Because SHE had decided it was a problem for them.
And then he went to meet her again and they reunited JUST LIKE THAT, like, ‘oh, now you’re cured we can be together again’. What?! Did that seriously take away all her guilt? If she was gonna be that dramatic, she might have kept it up because she still ‘put him through that disability for 10 years’. But now that she found out it was curable after all, suddenly all was well in the world again? They got back together really quick after that, to the point where I, again, wondered what the whole point of their dramatic break-up had been. They could have literally stayed together, figuring stuff out, and she could have supported him through the surgery. Oh well.

I wish to emphasize that Seo Hyun Jin and Lee Min Gi are two of my favorite actors. They are so great, and their acting in this drama was also great. What bothered me this time was really the writing and the pacing of the story. I’m really sad to say it, because I just want to assume every show they star in is amazing. This just didn’t do it for me, but I want to stress that I have no ill words about the actors, whatsoever.

So all in all, I wasn’t as into the main couple as I have been before in other dramas. One moment it felt like everything was going uncannily smoothly, like they got together pretty fast, and then when everything seemed to be going so well that nothing would ever be able to break them apart, this past event did and it made zero sense to me. Especially because they just made up like the break-up didn’t even happen, after he risked his life for surgery with a dangerously low success rate to come back to her, and she even got mad at him for a moment for risking his life like that. Girl, at that point, you really had no right to be saying that because he did everything for YOU. And she was also not able to live without him, so really, she didn’t have anything to complain about that in that regard.

Let me talk a little about Woo Mi and Eun Ho, Se Gye’s most trusted friends. We learn that Woo Mi has been Se Gye’s best friend for a long time, even before she became an actress. They were travelling in Europe and Woo Mi was the first person to learn about Se Gye’s condition, for some reason she was able to see that the old woman crying in front of her door was Se Gye. Honestly, Woo Mi is the most loyal friend Se Gye could have wished for. Sometimes I also felt like Se Gye was taking her a bit for granted. I mean, of course, she didn’t ask her to put herself through a fake accident just to distract the press from the fact that Se Gye hadn’t shown up for an interview or something, but when Do Jae asked Se Gye about her relationship with Woo Mi, she was weirdly casual about it. She was just like, ‘oh well, you know, we get along, and we’ll always get along’. I don’t know, I thought she’d say something a little deeper than that, since their friendship certainly looked deeper than that to me. Woo Mi isn’t just her manager, she is her friend, she cares and worries about Se Gye constantly, and Se Gye most of the time doesn’t even explain things to her. When she turns into that old man and doesn’t change back soon enough and goes into hiding, she doesn’t even call Woo Mi to give an update. When she finds out about her past connection with Do Jae and goes all emotional, she doesn’t even tell Woo Mi what happened, she just casually says ‘hm, maybe I should retire as an actress’. Like, what? Of all people, Woo Mi should’ve been the first person to know about these things! She really should’ve confided in her more. But Woo Mi was really too nice, even when Se Gye wouldn’t tell her, she would just be like ‘well, I guess you have your reasons’.
I was so glad when Se Gye finally told her about the thing and Woo Mi was like, ‘Get your act together!’, haha, she acted exactly as I would have.

In any case, it was clear how close they were, and that we got a flashback to see how far they’d come together. How exactly Woo Mi managed to become Se Gye’s manager, where they got the money from that, is a potential hole, but it didn’t really distract from the story. I think in their case it was most important to know that they were close friends.

Eun Ho, on the other hand, is another story. I kept feeling weird about it for some reason. Like, okay, we see a flashback where he visited them and then happened to find out about Se Gye’s condition, but other than that I have no clue how they became friends. If they knew each other from way back it would make sense that they also knew Eun Ho’s family, but he also seemed to be some years younger than Se Gye and Woo Mi. He was still living at home with his parents and younger sister.
The whole thing with Eun Ho was that he had this dream since forever that he wanted to help people, and this had resulted in an ambition to become a priest, of all things. His mother is against it, but eventually accepts it.

Just to say, I love Ahn Jae Hyun to bits. I really do, but his character was so ambiguous to me! His storyline really didn’t have anything to do with Se Gye and her condition, really, whenever I was watching scenes with him and his family it felt like I was watching a different series.

Moving on to his relationship with Sa Ra. This was probably one of the most random pair-ups I’ve seen between second leads in a K-Drama. Mostly because they weren’t even really second leads. They were in some way related to the first leads, but other than that their lives stood completely apart from theirs.
In one of the first episodes, when Se Gye wants to be alone with Do Jae to talk about their secrets, she sends Eun Ho to Sa Ra to distract her, since the latter was being nosy about her and Do Jae’s real relationship.
After doing so, Eun Ho and Sa Ra run into each other a couple of times, and it really does look like Eun Ho is following her for some reason. Their encounters are just too coincidental. So, naturally at one point, Sa Ra begins to suspect he is into her. When he tells her this is not the case, that he’s nice to everyone and that he wants to become a priest, she is thrown off guard so much she actually becomes more interested in him.
After she tells him she thinks she has feelings for him, she then sways him as well and he starts doubting his ambitions for priesthood, even though that has been his dream for forever. And then he ends up giving up his dream because Sa Ra becomes ‘his new dream’ and he feels like she needs him because she’s so frail and lonely by herself. Or something.
Anyway, my main issue with this was that it felt like they shoved two completely unrelated characters to each other and invented a mysterious bond between them. Honestly, in the end, Sa Ra treated him like a puppy, or even how she might treat her only child, asking for kisses on the cheek before he left the car. Like, I get that he was younger, but she didn’t have to keep treating him like that. She really went all Noona Girlfriend on him, showing off that she was older and wealthier by giving him expensive gifts. She even dragged him with her to his parents and asked them if she could have him without even notifying him, really as if she owned him. I don’t know, it felt a little off to me.
I never really felt a genuine chemistry between them, also because, again, I missed a real natural build-up in their relationship. What was confusing for me was that I first thought Eun Ho was interested in her, then he said he wasn’t and then I was like ‘okay, guess not’, and then he still became interested in her, haha! I honestly couldn’t keep up with anything that happened in this drama!

I have seen one drama before with Lee Da Hee, I Hear Your Voice, which is an absolute diamond!! One of the best dramas I’ve ever seen. (There is a Chinese remake of it called ‘No Secrets’ and I really want to see it but I’m also scared to be disappointed haha #dramaaddictstruggles.) I saw her recently when I watched the shows Queendom and Road to Kingdom, where she was one of the hosts. I didn’t know she was in this series, but it was nice to see her act again.
As for her character, I think she was one of the most layered ones. We get to see different sides of her, and we get to understand how much she’s holding back and how frustrated that makes her. The scene where she was having a meeting with a bunch of old men who all started to verbally sexualize her was really hard to watch. There were more of these cases, and it was clear how much she struggled with it, since she basically kept letting it slide for the sake of her company. When Do Jae got himself involved and put those guys in their place, I would’ve liked to see her do that herself, to be honest. It was nice to see how she called one of the scumbag directors to tell him herself as well, but it would have been more impressive if she’d kicked their butts by herself from the start.
I think she showed more layers than Se Gye, to be honest, which is really ironic since Se Gye literally lives someone else’s life every month. Despite this, I still felt like Sa Ra could’ve had more character development. She still stayed pretty much the same, except opening up a little more to Eun Ho and her brother and their friends in the end.
It was just that her relationship with Eun Ho felt a bit forced, as if they were determined to put two people together besides the main couple, but otherwise they really didn’t have any connection with each other whatsoever.

What really struck me in the beginning was that the relations in Do Jae’s family were quite interesting. At first I really didn’t think they were that close at all, but it was nice to see them grow toward each other a little bit more.
So you have Do Jae, his grandfather, his mother, his stepfather and Sa Ra. You don’t really get to know each of them all that well. I guess it was difficult for Do Jae and Sa Ra to both feel at ease in their newly assembled family, especially since Sa Ra has a different father. Especially since in the beginning there was a lot of sibling rivalry and Sa Ra also didn’t really warm up to Se Gye or anything.
I was kind of surprised because I really didn’t think in the beginning that his mom knew about his condition. Like, you just kept seeing her get upset when he didn’t recognize her, but I didn’t immediately get that she knew why that was. Also, in the beginning she seemed to be quite the icy woman, also disapproving of his relationship with Se Gye at first. It was kind of funny that she started to warm up to Se Gye after starting to think Do Jae might be gay, since she caught a guy in his bed once – of course, this was Se Gye who had just conveniently changed when his mom had come over, haha. After that she was suddenly the most welcoming mother-in-law ever!
His grandfather was the typical grumpy but goodhearted guy who scolded him a lot and called him a fool but actually liked his grandson very much. I sometimes found this guy’s acting a little too much, I have to admit. As if he could only make groaning and scoffing sounds. But I did like it when he turned up at that meeting when the bad director was trying to take over the company from Do Jae and grandpa dissed him in front of everyone.
I didn’t really get any kind of impression of Do Jae’s stepfather, he didn’t really appear that much but he seemed to be a bit of a pacifist between the other family members.

All in all, I actually didn’t really get why Do Jae had to keep his prosopagnosia a secret for everyone. I mean, there was a legit reason for it, he once had an accident. It’s not a life-threatening disease, it’s simply a visual inconvenience, but that doesn’t mean he can’t run a company. He can just have his assistant or anyone else help him out. I really hated that he didn’t dare come out with this news because those predatory other directors would use it against him and make everyone believe that he would be unfit as a Director. When that bad director found out, he literally was like ‘highlight this as an illness’, and then I was just like, Not on my watch, sir! Luckily they failed in that plan, and I thought it was very good of Do Jae to eventually tell everyone in his family AND even his team at work. There really was no use hiding it, especially compared to Se Gye’s uncommon condition which would be “slightly” harder to explain.

One more person before I go on to some more general comments: Chae Yoo Ri (played by Ryu Hwa Young). She was a fellow actress and pretty much Se Gye’s nemesis, even though everyone agreed that she wasn’t as good an actress as Se Gye. Anyway, Yoo Ri and Se Gye where always trying to outdo each other. At some point, Yoo Ri starts to get suspicious about Se Gye’s behavior and very nearly witnesses her change into someone else. When she tries to find a lead and sends someone after her, Se Gye busts her and pretty much threatens her. In this moment, I actually found Se Gye pretty mean. She didn’t have to go that far, even if it was a joke. She knew how petty it was what Yoo Ri was trying to do and she should’ve treated it as such. Instead, in the last episode, we see Yoo Ri traumatized for life, running away from everyone, scared someone would come for her… it was almost kind of comical but I found it a bit over the top. Was this really what became of her after Se Gye’s threat? If so, it was a bit exaggerated.

I actually really like Ryu Hwa Young, haha. I loved her in Age of Youth. So I couldn’t dislike Yoo Ri, for some reason. Yes, she was petty, but she was also trying to make her way in the world and she was just too aware of Se Gye. She should have left her alone and try to make her own path, but she kept trying to one-up Se Gye, and that’s what brought her down in the end. Still, I don’t believe she was truly evil, just not so smart ^^”

I can’t help but make a few comparisons to the movie here. Going into the movie thinking that the drama series was a remake of it, I was very surprised to find out that the two versions have almost nothing in common. The only thing they have in common is that the main character changes into other people. In the movie, it’s a man and he changes into a different person every day, which is even more exhausting. Also, it appeared that he only changed whenever he fell asleep – as he was able to stay the same person for three days because he kept himself awake. The woman he falls in love with has no condition whatsoever, and when she finds out about him, she accepts him as warmly as possible. However, as I mentioned before, she can’t get used to the fact that he appears as a stranger before her every single day. There’s also a mentioning of this, she tells him ‘you have to get used to it every day, whenever you wake up as a new person you need to figure out who you are, but I have to go through that as well’. In the end, he breaks up with her because he sees she’s neglecting her health because she’s so stressed out and tired. She still goes back to him in the end, she finds him again. The final scene is the only scene that corresponded with the drama remake, when Se Gye walks towards Do Jae and while she’s walking you see fragments of all kinds of different people.
What I loved the MOST about the movie was the fragments kept going while he kissed her, so it actually showed her kissing various versions of him, even women. I was really surprised they chose to show that, since same-sex sceneries are usually avoided. They didn’t do that part in the drama, but they did show several people walking up to Do Jae, mostly cameos from people from Another Oh Hae Young, haha.
Also, in the movie it’s revealed at the end that the man’s condition was actually hereditary; his father had it too and it’s the reason his father left them. I still feel like I would’ve liked some sort of explanation about Se Gye’s condition, even if it was something in her DNA or whatever, because it was such a big thing to happen for no reason at all.
Oh, and the whole thing with the man/Se Gye ending her cycles with ‘That’s it for today’ (or something along those lines) also corresponded between the movie and the drama.

Overall, I think the movie conveyed the message of the story much better than the drama. At the end of the movie I really felt like she accepted him completely, and this was I guess also shown in the final sequence where she was shown also kissing him as a woman, without judgement. I still felt like in the drama they stayed a little on the conservative side with this. Especially since they made Se Gye a beautiful woman and famous actress. I didn’t really get the feeling that Do Jae would kiss her if she didn’t look like her real self. I would’ve like to see it happen, haha.

I would like to say something about some specific parts of the series, like scenes and cameos that stood out to me.

First of all, while I liked it that Se Gye kept record of all the people she had been, that she photographed herself before she changed back and made a little movie of all of them, at some point I felt like that disappeared as she started changing more irregularly. For example, she changed back from her child appearance when she was in a car, same as the old man. When she was a middle-aged woman on her mother’s funeral, she literally changed as she was standing in the public bathroom where anyone could have walked in at that moment (quite risky). So she had no way of knowing she would suddenly turn back. And still, at the end, we see a portrait picture of that woman, as if she had still made a picture of herself looking like that. But… is that right? With her, and with the old man, when she changed back I was like ‘Ahh now she didn’t get to take a picture of herself looking like them!’ but … she still took the pictures? Okay, well, anyways, haha. In general I thought she could’ve been more careful, since she’d been going through this for 10 years and it still caught her off guard. Whenever she had a premonition or a feeling that it would come soon, she would still go out, instead of staying home. Lots of times she would be surrounded by people in a situation that was really awkward to suddenly run away from, when it happened. So that was a bit weird in itself, that she also never seemed to take any precautions in case it happened when she wouldn’t expect it – which is, basically, every single time.

There was this one flashback scene of Do Jae’s doctor talking to him and his mother after the accident, and this scene was so weird? Like, he opens with ‘We have a possible cure’, giving everyone hope, then it all went down from there. ‘Oh, no but actually it’s not a guaranteed success at all, it only has a success rate of 5% and you might actually die.’ Like, seriously doctor? You’ve got some nerve opening with the sentence ‘WE HAVE A CURE’ and then ‘BUT ACTUALLY WE DON’T’. This scene didn’t make any sense to me, writing-wise. ‘If you want to take a chance on this hope’ dude what hope? This isn’t hope, this is a 5% success rate. Pff. And then he still survived the surgery and again, I was like, then what was the whole ominous prelude for? You made me scared for nothing! I’ll keep saying this in every review, but Moon Woo Jin is the next generation superstar. This boy was NINE years old at the time of The Beauty Inside and he was PHENOMENAL. This boy, now twelve, is seriously one of the most talented child actors out there. I can’t wait to see him grow up through K-Dramas and eventually become his own male lead!!

I liked that they were watching The Third Charm in the series, haha. If you follow my reviews chronologically, you’ll know I watched that before this, so it was perfect! Se Gye was watching an episode of it on television and I was like ‘Hey!! I remember this!!’
Also, this series has officially gotten me hooked on the artist Rothy, her OST song ‘Cloud’ for this was basically on repeat the entire time, but I never tired of it. I knew one more song from her from the Romance is a Bonus Book OST, but thanks to this song I looked her up and I really like her style of music, haha. So a bonus point for the OST!

I feel like this has become a review that’s as incoherent as the series was for me. Seriously, I expected to finish this review within an hour or something, but it’s taking me so much time for some reason! I still feel like I’m forgetting stuff to mention. I haven’t said anything about Kingkang, her dog, but what can I say? It’s super cute.
I also feel like I haven’t said much about Do Jae’s assistant Joo Hwan, while he was supporting role, but that’s because there really wasn’t a lot of interesting things going on with his character. I don’t really know what to say about him except that it was occasionally funny. He really liked money, but I still think he was very loyal to Do Jae.
Honestly, Woo Mi and Joo Hwan had such a hard time dealing with whatever Do Jae and Se Gye were doing, they deserve more credit!

I think it’s time to close it off. I will probably get back to this review sometime and make it a bit more coherent, but I’m simply too tired now, haha. I want to get on with my list!
The actors were great, the storyline had a lot of potential, but I feel like they didn’t really know how to make this remake into something special that would still be a thing standing on itself besides the movie it’s based on. They made some interesting choices: to give this ability to a famous celebrity who is almost constantly watched by the media and already has a reputation to uphold, plus they gave Do Jae a disability of his own. Not sure what, in the end, this established together. If they hadn’t given Do Jae any disability, like the woman in the movie, it could’ve also been an interesting story, and more simple. But I guess they also wanted Do Jae to be someone with a ‘condition’ that he someone needed fully accept him for. In the end, it didn’t really make as big an impression as Se Gye’s condition, since in his case, he just came out with it and that was that. I also felt that the last episode wasn’t even really necessary. It felt like they’d already wrapped up everything they needed in episode 15 and the final episode was just kind of a filler to give more screentime to how happily everyone ended up together. Also, that final revelation that Se Gye had when she helped this old woman across the street and this somehow spurred a philosophical inner monologue in her? I didn’t really get that.

While it also dealt with good themes like prejudices, sexual harassment and the limited amount of privacy that celebrities have (I still get nauseous at scenes where people on the street see a famous person and feel that it’s alright to swarm to them and push their phones in the person’s face while they look obviously distressed), but I feel like they could’ve done more with Se Gye’s identity crisis. Besides the wardrobe full of clothes for every possible size and gender, we didn’t really get to see her take any interest in the people she became. She took their pictures, but she didn’t take any voluntary action. Usually she’d just sit in front of the TV with her dog until she changed back. I feel like the guy in the movie put way more effort in figuring out who he woke up as. It really felt like for Se Gye, it was more of a burden, and that was because she was made to be a celebrity in this version.
Let’s just say that, in general, I didn’t really get this series, haha. It started off pretty interesting, and after that it was just a domino of confusion. Again, I don’t think it was the actors at all, they did a great job, but the pacing was just really weird and the writing at times not so strong.
I will still watch stuff with Seo Hyun Jin and Lee Min Gi since they are still amazing actors and I’m still convinced they’ll do a lot more great stuff in the future!

Thank you for sticking through reading this lenghty review, I hope I was able to convey my confusion well enough. Next up is another series from 2018 that I’ve really been looking forward to, so you’ll see my next review 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.

The Third Charm
(제3의 매력 / Jesamui Maeryeok)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

It’s review time! I’m really glad to go back to my list and watch some older dramas that I’ve really been looking forward to watching. This series has also been on my list for a while and I’m glad I finally got around to watching it!
Again, I went into it without knowing any details about the story, and I let myself be surprised. I’ve been kind of looking forward to writing this review because I have several things to say about it and I just love how going back to some more older dramas always feels refreshing. For some reason I find it easier to write reviews for these kind of series than for more hyped and intense series (referring directly to Crash Landing on You & It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, for which it took me more than a day to finish my final reviews). Even though this series is also 16 episodes each with a length of a little over an hour, it still felt ‘easier’ to watch than when I’m watching something on Netflix.

Let’s start! I really wanted to watch this as soon as I saw the main leads and the teasers/trailers that I saw looked cute.
It still turned out quite different from what I’d expected. I’ll first give a general overview of the three parts the series is divided in, before going into more details.

The Third Charm depicts the 12-year love story between On Joon Young (played by Seo Kang Joon) and Lee Young Jae (played by Esom/Lee So Young). What’s interesting from the start in this love story is that these two are complete opposites: Joon Young is a classic nerd (even in appearance), who is really picky in everything he eats and does. He always organizes all his stuff neatly, he can’t eat spicy food, is afraid of heights and gets drunk really easily. He prefers to live by the rules. Young Jae, on the other hand, is a free spirit. She lost her parents and lives with her older brother. She can’t afford to go to college so she works part-time in a hairsalon – her dream is to become a professional famous hair designer. She loves the spontaneous, and is actually quite jealous of college friends who are able to play around and hang out whenever they want since they have no trouble paying for their tuition, or their parents pay it for them. Young Jae loves spicy food, especially when she’s upset, and she’s just really playful.
The story starts in 2006, when both of them are 20 years old. Joon Young and Young Jae meet for the first time in the subway when they’re both on their way to a college entrance exam – Young Jae calls out a pervert for feeling up a woman and drags him with her to the police office. Joon Young, who actually wants to get away as soon as she starts meddling because he doesn’t like to get involved in other people’s business, ends up still going to the police station as well since he took some evidence pictures. In the end, they both barely make it in time for their respective exams, but Young Jae is too distracted that she’s not able to concentrate and fails – she’s not allowed to enter the hairdresser’s school. So she keeps working part-time at the hairsalon.
One time, some of her friends who are in college, together with one snooty girl, invite her to a blind date with some college guys because their last participant couldn’t make it. Coincidentally, this blind date is with Joon Young and three of this friends. When everyone chooses partners to go their separate ways, Joon Young is forced to stay behind to wait for the girl who’s late. When this turns out to be Young Jae, they have a surprisingly fun ‘date’ at the amusement park, but at the same time he allows Young Jae to bulldozer all over him. He’s forced into rollercoasters, forced to eat extremely spicy tteokbokki, and ends up participating in a beer drinking contest, which he wins after getting completely wasted. Joon Young is under the impression that Young Jae is a college student as well, because she doesn’t tell him otherwise. After getting her number through his friends, he’s able to find the hairsalon she works at and they meet a couple of times and eventually kiss.
On their official ‘1st day of dating’, Joon Young invites Young Jae to a party but this party is ruined when the snooty girl humiliates Young Jae publicly and tells everyone that she’s not a college students and that she’s from a poor family etc. etc. Young Jae is really embarrassed by this and leaves. After that, she seems to have disappeared. When Joon Young finally tracks her down, she is really cold to him and says that she doesn’t want to be with him, breaking his heart.
Then, the series skips to 7 years later, New Year’s Eve 2013, when they’re both 27. They meet again. Joon Young is now a police officer, something that Young Jae told him he’d never be when they first met. He has always held a grudge against Young Jae for breaking his heart, but finds himself back at the beginning when they meet again and they start dating pretty soon after. Despite their different personalities, you can see how much they adore each other. They will visit each other at work, bring each other food, sneak kisses in-between conversations, etcetera. Ultimately, they do break up again, and I will talk about this later, but I think it’s fair to say that it also had to do with several love rivals and the realization that maybe they really were too different and they wanted different things in life. Young Jae probably felt that Joon Young would have to sacrifice some things he’d like just to go along with what she’d want, and she couldn’t do that to him. Anyways, they break up.
Then, instead of a time jump like the previous one, this time we follow Joon Young through another 5 years of time. After his breakup with Young Jae, he quits his job at the police station and travels to Portugal. First it seems like a break, a holiday to clear his mind, see the world and figure out what he does next, but it turns out to be quite an emotionally draining journey. He doesn’t speak the language, he walks until his feet start bleeding and he feels really alone. Then, one night, when he’s exhausted, he comes across a small restaurant and when he tastes the food, he makes a decision: he’ll become a chef. He applies for culinary school in Lisbon, and studies to become a chef. After five years, he decides to come back to Korea to start his own restaurant there. Not long after he starts his business, he meets Young Jae again when she visits his restaurant with her husband. They meet again when they’re both 32. But Young Jae has changed. Joon Young has moved on, is even about to get married himself, but Young Jae is very quiet and even seems sad.

Okay, so I’ll keep it at that for the three parts. So the series at first starts with Joon Young and Young Jae meeting again in 2013, then it goes back to show the whole 2006 flashback, and then it resumes the story from when they meet again in 2013. After that, we follow them through their relationship at 27 and then we follow Joon Young through his 5 years in Portugal. Young Jae’s story is revealed in bits and pieces in the last couples of episodes.

Okay, so, let’s go back to the circumstances regarding their first breakup in 2006. When Young Jae disappears after being humiliated by the snooty girl, that’s actually not the only reason she breaks up with Joon Young. We later find out that, on that same day as the party, Young Jae’s brother was in a very serious accident. He worked as a construction worker and fell down a 4-story building. He becomes paralyzed from the waist down, he can’t ever walk again. Facing this new situation of having to care for her brother, Young Jae is even more confronted with the fact that she can’t do whatever she wants, she can’t live carefree like her college friends. Now she has to work twice as hard to also take care of her brother. She snaps at Joon Young because of this reason – she doesn’t have time to date or frolic around anymore. Joon Young always thought that somehow it was his fault, that he’d made her angry, even after looking for her and telling her that he didn’t care she wasn’t in college. When they meet again in 2013 and she tells him the reason had nothing to do with him, he’s even more confused. I believe he ends up hearing the story via her brother. After that he comes running to her, and they kiss and start dating again. So, for the first breakup, we can say: Young Jae breaks it off because of problematic circumstances in her family.

When they are dating in 2013, Young Jae incidentally meets Choi Ho Chul (played by Min Woo Hyuk), a plastic surgeon who just got out of a marriage. He becomes interested in her and starts pursuing her, even after she tells him that she has a boyfriend. Joon Young also becomes aware of him and initially gets a little jealous and suspicious, also because he sees Ho Chul help Young Jae out and they sometimes run into each other/spend time together and Young Jae doesn’t tell him. Young Jae keeps convincing him that there’s nothing between her and Ho Chul, but Joon Young still thinks she hasn’t made it clear enough to the guy because he keeps going after her. She rejects Ho Chul at least two times while she’s dating Joon Young. He even tells Joon Young he’s going to confess to her, even though his feelings are one-sided, and she rejects him again.
In the meantime, a new Public Service Center employee called Min Se Eun (played by Kim Yoon Hye), starts crushing on Joon Young. They have a lot in common personality-wise and she just really starts to like him. When a work situation gets both Joon Young and Se Eun to be admitted to the hospital, Young Jae one time spots them sitting together. Whether she is alarmed by this or not isn’t really clear, but Joon Young tells her afterwards that they were just sharing some canned peaches as they were both involved in the same accident. Even though they come clear to each other about meeting other people, even though there are no romantic tensions anywhere, for some reason their relationship becomes super strained.
This is where I lost track for a moment. I didn’t understand what was going on and wondered if I had missed something. Everything seemed to be good between them, they both stopped worrying about love rivals… but somehow after that they suddenly stopped talking. It seemed like they couldn’t talk to each other anymore, after each short and meaningless phone call one of the two would just break down and start crying. When Young Jae breaks up with Joon Young, we find out he was actually planning to propose to her. Like… how could they suddenly have wound up so far apart from each other? Young Jae breaks up with him saying something about how she keeps feeling apologetic towards him. For what? Call me dense, but I really didn’t understand what was going on, haha. Was it because he’d said something about wanting to live in the countryside, and when she said she wanted to stay in the city he said ‘alright, I’m fine anywhere as long as I’m with you’? Was it about that, that she felt like he wouldn’t be able to do what he really wanted as long as he was tied to her? They never really spoke out what they were feeling, not to each other, not to anyone. From this point on it became increasingly difficult for me to understand what both of them were thinking. Why did he quit his police job? Why did he go to Portugal, of all places? No explanation.

When Joon Young returns from Portugal in 2018, he is dating Se Eun. During his stay there she came to visit him one time and gathered all her courage to confess her feelings to him. We don’t see his direct response, but we have to assume that he accepted her feelings as they are together after that. They’re even planning on getting married.
Joon Young starts a special restaurant with just 1 table. This allows him to get one pair of customers per reservation, and he is able to customize their meal completely depending on the customers’ occasion. When he’s finished serving the food, he regularly just goes outside to give the customers some time alone to chat and finish their food. It’s quite a unique concept, I’ve never seen anything like it before. Anyways, one night suddenly Young Jae walks in, together with Ho Chul. During their dinner, Ho Chul says that ‘this will be their last dinner together’ and ‘how surprising it is that she meets Joon Young again like this after all this time’. It isn’t until a couple of episodes later that we get the whole truth, and this is where stuff gets dark.
As it turns out, after their breakup, Young Jae ended up dating Ho Chul after all (which was already weird to me, that she still chose the guy she rejected several times since he kept persistently chasing after her while she was already in a relationship). They even got married and moved to Portugal, Lisbon. Apparently, she and Joon Young had been living in the same city for 4 years or something. They never met even once. Young Jae and Ho Chul even had a daughter, Choi So Ri. However, something terrible happened. On So Ri’s fourth birthday, she got separated from her mom while they were getting her birthday cake. So Ri went after a cat on the street and got hit by a car.
Young Jae lost her child. After that, she and Ho Chul tried for a couple more years to make their marriage work, but Young Jae became completely unhinged, resorting to alcohol and falling into a severe depression as she blamed herself for not keeping a close enough eye on So Ri. She even attempts suicide. Ho Chul tries to do whatever he can, but Young Jae eventually decides they should get a divorce. They move back to Korea and have their last dinner together before officially divorcing at Joon Young’s restaurant. Then Ho Chul leaves Young Jae by herself and disappears from the rest of the story.

Honestly, I had mixed feelings about Ho Chul. I didn’t want him to get together with Young Jae, in the beginning, I didn’t really find him all that appealing. When he went so far as to serenade ‘Come What May’ to her in public, I was really like, ‘dude… do you know about the concept of ‘boundaries’?’ Like, his singing was amazing, no comments on that, but she had literally told him she had a boyfriend by then, and she had told him that she wanted to stay away from him because she didn’t want Joon Young to feel uncomfortable. Okay, they can’t help it if they run into each other, but this guy didn’t want to give up. He even called her to pretend to be his date to a wedding where his ex-wife would be, since he immaturely wanted to prove to her that he was moving on with someone else as well. And then he sang her a super romantic love song, a song that he had actually wanted to sing to his wife on his own wedding. Like, that’s all kinds of wrong to me.
When they entered that restaurant together and called each other names that suggested they were married, I was like, ‘no! no way!’ I really didn’t like that she’d still gone with him, of all people. Anyways, despite everything, in the flashbacks with their daughter, he was a really adorable father, he was doting on So Ri so much and they looked like a sweet family, I’ll give him that. Young Jae also seemed to be really in love with him during that time, the way she looked at him while they were laying on the bed holding So Ri’s tiny hands.
But after what happened, even though he must have struggled as well, he couldn’t deal with Young Jae anymore.
I couldn’t help but feel a little sad for him, since he’d already failed in one marriage, and now another one PLUS the loss of a child? That was harsh. But then he just left Young Jae on her own in an empty apartment while she clearly wasn’t able to take care of herself yet, and just ‘left the chatroom’. Like, that was literally his last appearance. And I found that kind of a weird way to say goodbye to him. Like, it almost felt a bit unfair towards his character. He had worked so hard, put in so much effort as the second male lead, and then this was what became of him.
I don’t really know how to explain this, haha, it just felt like an anticlimax of sorts.
A tiny thing that bugged me was: how did they come across Joon Young’s restaurant? Since it was such a special concept restaurant, they should have looked it up, but then wouldn’t they have seen at least something about Joon Young being the owner? Like, he even did this big interview, and he was the only person working there. There should have been some information about him being the owner, I don’t believe they made a reservation without even discovering ANYthing about that it was his restaurant. Now it was just like ‘oh wow, what a coincidence’, but it didn’t make sense to me. Also, from Joon Young’s side, doesn’t he check his reservations? He should’ve been able to see if someone named ‘Choi Ho Chul’ made a reservation and then he would’ve recognized the name? I don’t know, I feel like this shouldn’t have been purely coincidental.

While I’m on this topic, the relationship between Joon Young and Se Eun made zero sense to me as well. We don’t get to see how their relationship is established, exactly. We just see that Se Eun comes to Portugal to see him because she likes him and she’s able to muster up her courage to confess at the airport, when he comes after her to give her a final souvenir before she leaves. At the moment of her visit and until she confesses, I’m pretty sure Joon Young did not have romantic feelings for her. So that’s probably why it felt to me as if he’d accepted her confession because he didn’t have any reason not to. He was getting over Young Jae, he was turning his life around, and she was a nice person who cared for him and there were no problems in their communication since they were very alike.
Even after he comes back to Korea, whenever we see them together, I always just got a friendly vibe from them. He was never as intimate with her as he was with Young Jae, we never even see them kiss casually. Just a few hugs and they hold hands a couple of times, that’s it. Comparing that to how he was with Young Jae when they were dating, I could already feel there was something not right about it. Or maybe I was just biased haha. Anyways, when Se Eun meets Young Jae, she doesn’t know who she is (I actually went ‘riiight, she doesn’t know her’, lol). When Se Eun just joins the police force and starts liking Joon Young, she isn’t even aware of the fact that he is dating someone already, and that that’s Young Jae. When she finds out, she automatically becomes a little uncomfortable, although there shouldn’t be any reason to by now. She’s already getting married to Joon Young, it’s not like he’s suddenly going to be drawn back to his ex, right? He got over her, right? But then Se Eun does the stupidest thing. She sets Young Jae up on a blind date with one of her colleagues. Like, she actually meets up with Young Jae and goes like ‘Aren’t you going to meet any other men?’
I was really glad when Young Jae casually called her out, being like ‘Would that put your mind at ease?’ and Se Eun really felt bad about doing it, eventually, but still. What the hell? She had no right whatsoever to do that. Her own insecurities lead her to wanting to make sure all possible distractions are out of the way, she can’t risk Joon Young paying attention to his ex all of a sudden, even though Joon Young himself was already setting his boundaries clearly enough. Even when Young Jae calls him, he hesitates. And of course he cares about her, especially when she’s depressed like that. He wants to make sure she’s okay, even if he personally can’t do anything about it and he is actually a bit annoyed by the fact that she’s not doing well. He would’ve preferred her to be happy and married and living her life so that at least they wouldn’t get caught up in each other anymore. That’s something Joon Young had to deal with. Not Se Eun. It was none of her flipping business.
When Joon Young finds out she did this, naturally, he’s pissed at her. BUT, and this is where their relationship really went downhill and where I really felt this wasn’t right, when he confronts Se Eun and asks her why she did it, she deflects the question. We’ve seen her scold herself for doing it, calling herself a loser, but she can’t even explain to Joon Young why she did it. All she does is throw back at him ‘hey but YOU didn’t tell me she was your ex’. First of all, that has nothing to do with it. You meddled in someone else’s business just to make yourself feel better. And the worst part was that Joon Young complied with this. He went ‘yeah you’re right, I should’ve told you, it won’t happen again’.
Like??? What about Se Eun’s apology? He was the last person who should have been apologizing there.
The final piece of evidence I needed to determine they’re relationship wasn’t as strong as they made it appear, was when she said ‘you know, you’ve never been angry at me in 4 years, you only get angry now and it’s because of her’. I’m sorry, but if you haven’t had an argument with your partner in 4 years, I don’t believe that’s necessarily good. You’re supposed to fight and make up to become closer. If you’re going to share your life together, you can’t expect to NEVER have a fight. So that was the final drop for me.
Honestly, I was wondering if they were going to force Joon Young and Young Jae back together after she reappeared, because at that moment things were progressing so rapidly with Se Eun that it’d seem really weird for him to suddenly go back to Young Jae after all. But when that happened, I was really like ‘okay yep, that’ll do it’.
That’s also when I lost all my existing sympathy for Se Eun. When he called off their family meeting, basically saying he couldn’t marry her after all and she burst out crying in her room, I didn’t even feel that sorry for her, which is maybe a bit mean. But they just weren’t meant to be. She would have had to accept how deep his attachments to Young Jae were and she would have had to accept that Young Jae, or even her memory, would always be with Joon Young, no matter how hard she tried to keep her away from him. It was like, even though she was so timid in the beginning, she became so confident after getting together with Joon Young that she felt like she had the right to meddle in other people’s relationships. Nope, she made a very wrong decision and it cost her a wedding. And the fact that she wanted to take the high road just seemed silly because she just really made Joon Young feel bad while she was the one who did a stupid thing. When he told her he couldn’t go to their family meeting, she went all ‘let’s say I’M the one who broke off the relationship’ Are you that shameless? This happened partially because you messed it up, girl. Because of this Joon Young was punished by his parents, and it just wasn’t fair. He couldn’t help it that he couldn’t control his feelings for Young Jae, but he was still willing to suppress himself and make Se Eun happy. And this is what he gets as thanks? This girl needs to sort herself out – and then let herself out.
Also, when Joon Young asked Se Eun once if she’d be willing to move to Portugal after they’d get married because ‘they were happy there’, I kept thinking ‘?? they met there once, right?’, but after that I realized that after that she probably visited him more often, lol. Just because it’s never shown how their relationship ‘happens’ – we just skip to 5 years later – and because we never see that ‘they were happy there’, made it a bit unrealistic, or at least, difficult to imagine.

What I did think was funny was that, in the case of this series, the unusual thing happens: both main leads end up with the second leads at some point. We actually get to see what it’s like when the second leads ‘win’. And then still lose, in a way, because the relationship doesn’t turn out the way they had hoped for. But I can’t say that I’ve seen many dramas where the second leads actually stood a chance and came this far. So that was quite original.

On that note, I think a main theme in this series was the notion of ‘things not turning out as planned/hoped’. What I thought was very realistic was that it was very much about ‘you never know what happens in life’. Not just in relationships, but also in careers and events. A lot of unpredictable things happen in both the protagonists’ lives. Young Jae’s brother ends up in a wheelchair, she becomes a famous hair stylist, she gets to work on a fashion show, she meets and leaves the same person multiple times, she marries and divorces, she loses a child, she gets depression, her best friend gets cancer, her brother marries her best friend, she opens her own hairsalon.
Joon Young falls in love with the same person thrice, becomes a police officer, moves to Portugal, becomes a chef, opens his own restaurant, calls off his marriage.
Although I was initially really confused about the episode where Joon Young went to Portugal for the first time, I ended up thinking that this might actually be an interesting choice the writers made. After his breakup, he didn’t know what he wanted to do anymore. So he decides to go to an unfamiliar place for whatever reason, doesn’t matter, some things don’t need to be explained. When you’re looking for yourself, you shouldn’t have to explain anything to anyone. And when he decides to become a chef and stay in Lisbon, of course at first it’s like ‘okay lol random’, but then it just really felt like it was okay to make a sudden career switch like that. You never know what life will throw on your path next.
In retrospect I really think this was an important theme throughout the story. We may have thought at the beginning that this was going to be a romantic love story and they would still find their way back to each other in the end, but it still turned out differently. Even though Joon Young admits to his parents that he still has feelings for Young Jae after ending his engagement with Se Eun, he doesn’t force himself on her. In the end, it’s not even established that they get back together romantically or anything. I can imagine Young Jae not wanting to get married again, by the way. But he just chooses to stay by her side, even if it’s just as friends. That’s how much he cares about her, it’s not that he needs to be in a romantic relationship with her, per se. I thought that really showed how deep their friendship had become as well, besides their past romantic attachments.
In that aspect, I think it set itself apart from ‘normal’ K-Dramas. To show that ending up in a happy relationship with your significant other isn’t the end and there’s so much more to life, so many chances you still have, so many roads left to take. It’s okay for Joon Young to take his time discovering what he really wants to do, as it is okay for everyone to do so. So in that way I thought the story was really realistic. I’m glad they revealed everything in the end and that Young Jae ended up telling Joon Young the whole story about her daughter in the end.

I have to admit, this did come as an anticlimax for me, as well. Young Jae turns up, enters his life again, and she’s not taking care of herself, only eats instant food, gets drunk, etcetera. And she doesn’t tell him anything about what happened, so Joon Young is a bit hesitant to approach her again. He helps her get back on her feet (literally) a couple of times, but still makes it clear that they shouldn’t keep in touch that much, since they both have their own lives now, apart from each other. Of course, in the end, he’s doing this mostly to convince himself to forget about her. But then they happen to meet again, I believe this is just after he gets off the car with Se Eun after he gets into a fight with her, and they bump into each other quite casually. And then suddenly it skips to Young Jae saying ‘so yeah, that’s what happened to my kid’. Like??? That was hella casual! I thought there would be this whole buildup to her finally being able to talk about So Ri to Joon Young, but not only did they skip the whole story, they even made them decide to have this conversation while they just HAPPEN to bump into each other. It’s not even that they arranged to meet to have a serious conversation, they just met on the street and she suddenly decided ‘oh well, I might as well tell you everything that happened to me in Portugal now’. It was so anticlimactic!

I have to talk about a couple of other characters, now. Joon Young’s family consists of his mom and dad, who are both teachers (his mom the Vice Principal, his dad Geography, that’s how they met as well) and his sister, On Ri Won (played by Park Gyu Young). He doesn’t have a really good relationship with Ri Won, she likes to tease him a lot, but she is a very unique character with a loathing for capitalism. She ends up dating one of Joon Young’s friends from college.
Let me talk about this, haha. Hyun Sang Hyun (played by Lee Sang Yi) is Joon Young’s college friend and he was always the shameless playboy. He was never looking for anything serious and just objectified girls and dumped them after they became too invested in the ‘relationship’. In the beginning, I found him quite the jerk. In 2013, he owns a bar and Ri Won works there part-time. When one of the girls he’s seeing becomes really depressed after they break up, Ri Won makes him realize that none of the women he’s been seeing all this time were actually 100% okay after the breakup. When he realizes how much pain he has unknowingly caused them (because he thought they were all just like him, just looking for something light and casual, and they didn’t mind the breakup) he starts crying (?) and Ri Won comforts him. After that, he’s suddenly completely into Ri Won. When some guys from her college come visit and hit on Ri Won, he marks his territory and kisses her in front of them, saying that she’s his girlfriend. I call boundaries.
After that, they’re suddenly dating. So Ri Won decided to accept him? Even when she never gave any indication that she was interested in him? Okay. And then around the time that Joon Young moves to Portugal, she suddenly announces she’s pregnant. She refuses to marry Sang Hyun because of her anti-capitalism thing, and she prefers to remain co-parents. Sang Hyun, suddenly the weaker party in the relationship, keeps begging her for a wedding, but she acts kind of coldly towards him, saying that she liked him better when he was the ‘free spirit’ he used to be.
In the end, in 2018 when their daughter is 5 years old, she surprises him with AND a second pregnancy AND a marriage certificate. Which she got without him. Lol.
The point I want to make is that, starting with Sang Hyun, some of the side characters’ development didn’t make much sense to me. I didn’t understand why he started crying after finding out how much he’d hurt those girls, because it never seemed to matter to him before. I’m not even sure if that actually is the reason he cried. I didn’t understand why, after the whole playboy thing, he suddenly fell for Ri Won when she comforted him ONCE. And when he kissed her I was all like ‘UHM EXCUSE ME SIR’. But then they were suddenly together? And pregnant?
Besides that part I did find them a funny couple at the end. The last scene, where she reveals her second pregnancy and the marriage certificate really cracked me up. His expressions! He was so overjoyed, lol.

Young Jae’s brother, Lee Soo Jae (played by Yang Dong Geun), was occasionally very hard to gauge. He seemed an interesting enough character, it was very sad what happened to him and we have sympathy for him because he’s a good guy and he really has a nice bond with his sister. It’s the two of them, after all. In the 2006 flashback from before the accident, he had a girlfriend and they seemed really smitten with each other, but in 2013, she is gone. At first we are led to wonder what happened, she couldn’t possibly have left him after he had the accident, right? Later we are shown that she chose to stay with him through his revalidation, but Soo Jae overheard some people scolding her for wasting her life on him while he was never going to be able to walk again. Feeling sorry that he would be the one tying her down while she could have her own happy life and have children, he acts out the ‘I’ll act like a jerk to push you away but it’s actually because I care about you and want you to be happy’ trope and breaks up with her. He meets her by chance later, and seeing that she’s happily married with a young child, he seems kind of relieved.
After the accident, to get his act together and don’t give in to depression at the prospect of never walking again, Soo Jae starts to read a lot and then decides to become a script writer himself. He works hard to get his manuscript accepted by publishers, allthewhile trying to maintain his work as a barista, working from a van on the side of the road. Since he’s in a wheelchair, he struggles a lot. When his roadside coffee business is suspended because he doesn’t have a license to sell on the streets, he dives into his writing and eventually, his work is picked up by a producing company and he becomes rich because they make a famous movie out of it.

Baek Joo Ran (played by Lee Yoon Ji) is Young Jae’s best friend and, in 2013, boss at the hairsalon she works at. Despite her reputation, Joo Ran’s love life is a disaster. She’s incredibly motivated to find love, marry and have children, but she just never seems to meet the right guy. She often makes a fool out of herself, and when even a fortune teller tells her that she’s doomed to fail at love, she gives everything she has, even joins social clubs to meet men etcetera. There is one fun arc where she meets one man and it seems to be perfect in every way – except for the fact he is really very attached to his dog. The dog keeps getting in the way because she doesn’t like to be left alone, and the guy dotes on her and gives her kisses and everything. In the end, he busts Joo Ran when she’s angrily chasing after the dog and he breaks up with her. Despite her extrovert personality, Joo Ran’s desire for a man really says a lot about her.
She meets Soo Jae during a work trip and they become friends. In 2018, she’s still close with him, and their relationship is a bit weird. You can tell they care about each other, but they still refuse to date. Then, Joo Ran suddenly receives the news that she has Stage 3 cancer. She suddenly starts seeing things in a new light, realizes how hard it must have been for Soo Jae when he learned he could never walk again, and decides to tackle chemotherapy. She only tells Young Jae, who helps her cut her hair (am I the only one thinking that the short hair looked so much better on her than her previous hairstyle, btw?), but Young Jae eventually tells Soo Jae and he comes to visit her at the hospital and takes care of her during her chemo. They get married at the end of the series and it was very cute.

I think I’ll attribute the unpredictability of the characters’ development and their individual stories to the main theme I described before, that sometimes, people change or make switches or decisions you wouldn’t expect from them. While I have to admit that sometimes I found it a little weird how something turned out, it didn’t bother me, necessarily.
It just made it interesting to me. Although I did wonder if it was really necessary to make the second half of the series so heavy, what with Young Jae losing her child AND Joo Ran suddenly getting cancer? It went quite dark there for a bit.
And in both cases, they didn’t immediately reveal all the details until a little later. Young Jae’s flashbacks to her trauma were revealed, as I mentioned, in bits and pieces throughout the episodes following, but in Joo Ran’s case I actually found the ‘suspense’ a bit unnecessary. I mean, the doctor says ‘We have bad news, you see this lump over here’… that’s enough to know ‘oh no she has cancer’. But we only find out for sure when Joo Ran calls Young Jae over to shave off her hair, a couple of days later, and then the news is all dramatic, ‘I have cancer’, while we already knew that for at least an entire episode. So they kind of missed the impact of the timing there a little. The series ends while Joo Ran has to come back to the hospital (she got to go home after finishing stage 2 of the chemo) and the doctor is all friendly, saying that she’s doing well. So we don’t find out if she manages to beat it, and we are also left wondering whether her marriage to Soo Jae suddenly is because they decide they actually really love each other (which I don’t doubt), or if it’s also so she can still fulfill her dream of marrying before it’s too late. Anyways, the wedding itself was cute.
Ri Won was definitely one of the most unpredictable character, because her personality was just so ambiguous. She seemed a little quirky, she’s had guys come after her since high school but has always been very good at playing hard to get. She acts really dry and sarcastic most of the time, but she does give Sang Hyun some loving gazes when he’s not looking. I actually made a few GIF sets of her expressions throughout the series, lol. I love Park Gyu Young.
She’s not one to show a lot of physical affection, but I guess that’s also part of her charm.

SPEAKING OF WHICH (gosh I’m becoming increasingly better at creating bridges between paragraphs, lol), I spent a lot of time wondering about the title, “The Third Charm”. In the beginning, when Joon Young meets Young Jae again in 2013, he says something about ‘there’s two types of women and today I met the third one’. At other moments I occasionally thought, maybe it has to do with ‘third time’s a charm’, since they meet three times, and stick together after the third time. But the concept of ‘charm’ also keeps coming back in other ways. Several characters make comments about other people, pointing out some part or characteristic of their personality that might be considerate negative but, ‘that’s their charm’. Young Jae says something like, ‘Joon Young is picky and stubborn, but that’s also his charm’. Ri Won also says something to her daughter along the lines of ‘You’re sleeping all soundly now but you’re gonna yell as soon as I leave the room, aren’t you? Well, I guess that’s part of your charm’. In any case, the word ‘charm’ is used pretty often. And I still think ‘third time’s a charm’ also has something to do with it.

By the way, I saw that one of the additional posters from this series shows Joon Young and Young Jae walking side by side through a street with a European-looking tram, so I’m guessing that has to be Portugal. But this is strange, because they never actually meet there. They find out they both lived there at the same time, but they never met even once and there’s no scene where they walk through the streets of Lisbon like that. Usually a poster depicts a scene from the series, but I wondered about this. Is this foreshadowing? They both look like their 2018 appearances, so can we imagine from this that one day they will return to Portugal together? Maybe it sounds trivial, but I was just curious about this, haha.

I want to make some additional cast comments before I conclude, since I think I pretty much wrote down my major comments on the series and the story.

I love Seo Kang Joon. If I liked him before, I love him now. Just before finishing this series I read back my review for Are You Human Too?, the last drama I saw with him, and I really like how he’s able to show versatility in his acting. His acting was completely different from earlier things I saw of him (also counting Cheese in the Trap). Joon Young is a real introvert, and I loved how he pulled off the ‘nerdy’ look in the beginning, he went all out with it, haha. He’s definitely not shy to show different sides of himself. Honestly, I related so much to him in the 2006 period, haha, I literally sat there like, ‘omg… I found my male version’ xD I can’t eat spicy food or handle rollercoasters either, so his reactions to those things just hit the spot for me. I really liked him in this series.

The last thing I saw with Esom was Because This is My First Life, in which I loved her. I really like her as an actress, also because she always seems to portray female characters that aren’t standard to the usual heroine. In BTiMFL, she was a queen fighting against sexual harassment of women on the workfloor, and here, as well, she wasn’t the typical heroine. I really liked how she pulled off the playfulness of Young Jae in the beginning and how she slowly but surely turned into an adult with serious problems and eventually, faced a serious tragedy. She showed different phases of a woman growing up and dealing with life in all its severity. I think she did really well, I also really liked her chemistry with Seo Kang Joon.

I don’t know what it is, but even though I only discovered Park Gyu Young last year, she’s suddenly in everything I watch, haha. I didn’t know she was in this! And again, she was completely different from the other two roles I’ve seen of her so far. How is this woman able to transform like that? It just makes me love her even more. Even as a side character, the male lead’s sister, she managed to grasp her moments of screen time and made them her own. Even though I was occasionally genuinely annoyed by her character in the beginning, when she was still just the annoying little sister, that’s just because she pulled it off so well, haha.

I remember Lee Sang Yi from something… when I went to check I saw he’s been in Manhole and Andante, both of which I wrote reviews on, but I don’t remember him very clearly. He just looks very familiar. Except for his sudden change in personality and the fact I didn’t have any real empathy for his character – I hated him at first and after he got together with Ri Won he became kind of a wuss – it wasn’t all bad. He became kind of funny at the end. It just didn’t feel like they had a clear idea of what they wanted him to be like, making him switch from douchebag to puppy like that. I still want to know why it was exactly that he cried like that after finding out those girls still held grudges toward him. Was it really because of that? Because then it felt like they just suddenly chose to reveal a different side of him and it was just a little too sudden for me.

I didn’t know Min Woo Hyuk, and when I looked him up I found out he only did 5 dramas so far. He is a musical actor, which I kind of guessed after his rendition of ‘Come What May’, because he sang like a musical actor and he was really good, so no surprise there. The part where I liked his character the most was when Ho Chul and Young Jae were living in Portugal with their little girl. He was really sweet as a father. The scene where he kept coming back to the bed to look at his daughter even though he would be late for work was adorable, he came back four times lol, each being like ‘I’ll just look at her for a little longer’. I also liked how he came up with the name Choi So Ri, as it was a pun on their last names. I didn’t really like his character, but that was not because he was a jerk or anything, but because I just boycotted his relationship with Young Jae. He was a nice enough person, but yeah… that was about it.

I’ve seen Kim Yoon Hye once before, in Heartstrings, where she was the superskinny arrogant dancer girl that CNBLUE’s Min Hyuk fell in love with. I see that she was also in Flower Boy Next Door, but I don’t remember much of that (also don’t really want to remember it). Although I didn’t really like her character, she performed well enough. She also made a nice personality transition from timid girl to a mature woman with more confidence, although she messed up her own chances of happiness in the end.

It took me a moment to figure out Lee Yoon Ji was the teacher from Dream High! My God, that takes me back. I haven’t seen her in anything since that, haha. I was glad to see she got rid of the typical old-style hairdo, although her hair in this series was not a very big improvement (sorry not sorry, my opinion). We meet her character for the first time 2013, where she’s the slightly hysterical friend who just wants to get laid (or married, nice bonus). She’s desperate to find a man, but she does have a preference for guys with a nice body. I found the arc of her with the dog-obsessed guy really funny. I couldn’t but think that, when she was diagnosed with cancer, if it was really necessary to put her character through that. It just seemed like the final drop to confirm she was doomed to be unfortunate, first in love and now in life. It seemed like a cruel fate. I’m glad she still found a good guy in Soo Jae, because he definitely wasn’t the kind of guy she would’ve gone for when she was still up and about in her hunt for men. On the other hand, I started liking her a lot more in the second half of the series because we suddenly went through this seriously rough patch with her. Her expressions were usually a bit all over the place, but the scene that really hit me was when she’d just found out about her cancer and she was in her car after leaving Soo Jae (who wasn’t paying attention to her) and she started crying. It wasn’t just a melodramatic sobbing scene, the horror on her face was what made it for me. You could see how absolutely terrified she was, she was crying out of fear, not purely out of sadness. That really gave it a different load and was very impressive and heartbreaking.

When I looked up the actor Yang Dong Geun, I found out I know him from Missing 9, where he was a prosecutor, that’s where I remember his face from I guess. He looks so familiar, though! I wonder if I really only know him from that.
Anyways, I found his acting really amusing in this drama. I say amusing for lack of a different word to describe it, haha. His character went through a big change after his accident, so in the flashback in 2006 he is really different than how he is from 2013 on. I also wondered why they gave him the weird long haircut, when he changed it back to short in 2018 I thought it suited him much better. I wasn’t able to read all of his expressions, he would sometimes make these ambiguous faces, squinting his eyes, baring his teeth, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that, haha. Sometimes I thought he’d gone a little weird, haha. But he was always a really sweet brother and he cared a lot about Young Jae. He was also really fond of Joon Young. The scenes where I felt for him the most were 1. the flashback in which he woke up in the hospital after his accident and he completely panicked because his legs suddenly didn’t work anymore, and 2. the scene in 2013 where he transports a super heavy bag of rice from the hallway to the kitchen all by himself and it’s almost impossible, but he really wants to do it, and afterwards he’s in so much physical pain, and when Young Jae calls she’s all like ‘omg why did you do that by yourself, I would’ve done it!’ and you can just see that he doesn’t want to rely on her that much… That really hit hard in the feels.

One thing that really bothered me, by the way, was the behavior of some rude people in different situations. This is not a critique on the series or story or anything, but I still wanted to mention it because it made me really angry.
Young Jae is introduced as the kind of girl/woman who won’t stand for injustice, even if that means publicly calling someone out for behaving badly. There are three incidents (‘three’ again, I see a pattern) in which she drags someone to the police station for behaving badly in public, and in all three cases the people responsible are pleading they’re not accountable. First of all, at the first encounter between her and Joon Young, it’s a pervert, this creep guy sliding his hand down the bottom of the girl/woman standing in front of him. At the police station, he raises his voice and is all like ‘I’m a doctor, I have a surgery, I have no time for this, I want you to do an investigation on her from randomly framing an innocent man!’ … I don’t think people should ever, EVER try to rationalize their behavior because of their occupation. Because it has nothing to do with it. If you’re a doctor, you’re even more despicable for touching someone like that. I don’t care if you’re a lawyer or a dentist or a college professor, touching someone’s body without their consent has the same consequence for every person, regardless of what they do. So I really respected Young Jae for standing up for these victims, even though she was by herself and the police system occasionally dismissed her accusations. The second time happens on the train/subway as well. There’s a man in a wheelchair trying to get in, but he’s not able to because people literally push him out of the way. As she’s rushing to get on, a woman’s bag gets stuck on his wheelchair and she starts pulling all annoyed and I was like ?? WTF? Can’t you see there’s someone in that chair? What the hell are you doing?? And then Young Jae helped him on and the woman was only complaining about how her bag got ripped and gave the guy side-eyes for ‘being in the way’ and ‘why is he even trying to get on the train while it’s the rush hour, it’s just a nuisance’. Excuse me? The man was an elder, too, have you no respect for your fellow human beings?!
By the way, what in the world happened to ‘first let people get off, then get on’? Isn’t this a universal rule? I really didn’t understand, one time Joon Young wasn’t able to get off the train because people were impatient and just barged on board without waiting for people to get off first.
The third time was the worst (again, in a sense, ‘third time’s a charm’). A little boy is almost fatally hit by a car. Young Jae, traumatized from what happened to her daughter, sees it happen and is almost triggered. She helps the little boy up while the two people from the car get out only to scold the boy. He should’ve watched where he was going, he almost wrecked their car. ‘Doesn’t he have parents, what the hell is he doing here’. When they drive off Young Jae throws something at their car, and they end up at Joon Young’s old police station. But honestly, those people almost killed a little boy and they were only concerned about the freaking car. I couldn’t believe my ears. What the heck is wrong with those people? And they kept calling Young Jae the lunatic for damaging their car. I just… I had no words.

There was this one part that I still want to manage before finishing, because I feel like it had some deeper meaning. When on the work trip, Joon Young and Young Jae are taken to a small house in the countryside. There’s this old man and his wife isn’t able to leave the house, but he asks Young Jae to cut her hair. He also ends up asking Joon Young to fix this old radio that his wife likes to listen to. I feel like something happened here. Because on the way back, they had the conversation about where they’d want to live and Joon Young went along with Young Jae’s choice, and that seemed to still something in Young Jae, as if she suddenly became unsure about something. Joon Young went to fix the radio and for some reason, started crying while he did. I really feel like something happened that I either completely missed or that I wasn’t able to identify. Joon Young fixes the radio, and when he goes outside to show it to Young Jae, he sees her talking to Ho Chul, who is then confessing his feelings to her. She rejects him (again), then turns around and sees Joon Young. She asks him if he fixed the radio and he says ‘Yes’, but something is wrong. From that moment on, something is just wrong between them and I don’t know what it was. I’m guessing the radio may have been some sort of metaphor. If anyone has any ideas about this, please let me know, haha.

All in all, it was an interesting series to watch, and I’m glad I did. It was definitely different from other romance dramas. I still think there were a lot of plotholes, though, things that weren’t shown but we were just supposed to accept.
In the end, not all questions are answered and a lot of things are left up to our own imagination. We don’t even know for sure what will become of the bond between Joon Young and Young Jae. For some reason I don’t see them get married, at least not for a while. Maybe they’ll just enjoy each other’s company with no strings attached.
I liked that it made me think about changing paths in life, and that it’s never too late for that, and that life changes people. I think Young Jae also says something about this in the final episode, ‘You never know how life will turn out. It’s up to us to put in effort for our own future.’ If they had structured some things a little bit better and worked out some more details (and showed them) about what happened in the blank spots, things may have been more clear to me. For example, the part I just described above about the radio, the part where I lost track was when they stopped talking to each other, and because they didn’t enounce their thoughts, it also wasn’t clear to me what they were thinking and feeling and I ended up as confused as Joon Young when Young Jae suddenly broke up with him.
I probably wouldn’t watch this again, because it’s not the sort of drama I’d rewatch. It was okay, not the most impressive series I’ve watched but also not a complete waste of time.

By the way, I really liked the soundtrack! I added about 4 or 5 songs from the OST to my ‘to-download’ list 🙂

Thanks for taking the time to read my review! I will go on to my next watchlist item, which is also a series from 2018.
(After I re-read some of my old reviews I’ll probably also go through them again to do a thorough spell-check, because I keep seeing a lot of typos and errors, haha.)

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.

Somehow 18
(어쩌다 18 / Eojjeoda 18)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hi y’all! Just thought I’d write a short review in-between!
If you’re following my reviews chronologically you know I just finished It’s Okay to Not Be Okay a few days ago. I said that now I’d be going back to my original to-watch list and take a break from watching K-Drama on Netflix. But the next item on my watch list just happened to be a web drama, which I already finished within 2 days. It’s going to be a short review for a short drama, but I still wanted to share it with you!
This drama has been on my list for a long time, probably since 2018 or something. The summary sounded interesting, and one of the themes was time travel, which is -as you might know by now- one of my favorite themes. So I really wanted to give it a try!
Note: I said in my last review that I was ready for some lighter content again, after being swept away in the emotional psychological whirl that was It’s Okay to Not Be Okay.
TW: this drama is about suicide.

Somehow 18 is a web drama, which means the length of the series itself and the episodes is quite short. I found it a little difficult to find it, to be honest. There are two ways to watch it: either in 10 episodes of each 15 minutes, or in two longer episodes of each 1 hour and 10 minutes (aka 5 episodes per 1 part). I was only able to find a low-quality version of the 10-episode variant on YouTube, but after watching that I also found the 2-episode variant on KissAsian, which has much better quality video and subtitles. So I would probably recommend the 2-episode version.
The story is about Oh Kyung Hwi (played by SHINee’s Choi Min Ho) who is an orthopedic surgeon. Despite his successful career he can’t stop thinking about when he was in high school 10 years earlier, the girl he had a crush on committed suicide. He keeps going back in his head to his final interactions with her in the days leading up to her suicide and he just can’t think of a single reason why she would take her own life.
The only people that have to listen to him go on about this are his older sister Oh Yi Do (played by Kim Bo Mi), and her husband, who happens to be Kyung Hwi’s childhood friend, Jang Seul Gi (played by Kim Hee Chan). Seul Gi used to be in the same class as Kyung Hwi and also knew this girl. Incidentally, he was the reason Kyung Hwi started to get bullied, because he always avoided problematic situations and was the kind of person who would hide behind anyone or anything in order to not get involved himself.
In flashbacks of his high school days, we see that Kyung Hwi was severely bullied by a group of troublemakers in his class and he himself tried to take his own life at school two times. Each time, however, he was stopped by this girl, Han Na Bi (played by Lee Yoo Bi). Looking back on it, it just doesn’t make any sense to him that she told him to live and then took her own life.
On the day that would be her birthday, Kyung Hwi hears a mysterious message on the radio, asking if he would go back in time if he could. Looking up, he suddenly sees Na Bi standing outside the window, like a mirage. He follows her and opens a mysterious luminous door – and when he wakes up the next morning he is back in his 18-year old body, back in 2007, a week before Na Bi is supposed to kill herself. And then he decides to stop it from happening.

Because he is now a 28-year old in an 18-year old body, he is much wiser and manages to stand up to his bullying classmates better, as he remembers many incidents and is able to avoid them. It seems that some things are just meant to happen, and they still do, but slightly differently than in the original timeline. Kyung Hwi is only interested in Na Bi and approaches her more directly, even if that means freaking her out a bit in the beginning. As he starts digging into her personal life, he discovers something that he believes had the biggest influence in her decision to take her own life. One year earlier, Na Bi had gotten into a terrible bus accident with her two best friends, of whom one died instantly while the other remains in a coma. Besides being crippled by guilt and trauma of not being able to help her friends out of the bus in time, Na Bi also has a bad relationship with her father. Around the time of her suicide, she was trying to get the guy her comatose friend liked to visit her at the hospital at least once, to no avail. All of these struggles combined, piling up with the bullying that occurred after she helped Kyung Hwi out at school, took its toll on her. As Kyung Hwi learns more, he starts to actively get involved. He goes to the guy and convinces him to try and understand how Na Bi feels, eventually causing him to visit the hospital. He talks to her dad and convinces him to have a meal with her and not just leave an envelope of money on the table for her birthday. And he convinces Na Bi not to commit suicide in a very heartfelt way. He succeeds in taking her mind off her guilt for a while, and they actually become friends, together with Seul Gi, who also stops being a coward as a result, inspired by Kyung Hwi’s newfound courage to stand up for himself.

While we see the story in this drama mainly from Kyung Hwi’s perspective, as soon as he goes back we also get a glimpse in Na Bi’s experience of what happened, including flashbacks about her friends. Seeing how she went through what she went through, it’s not hard to understand that, under the amount of sorrow she’s already in, every tiny thing that adds to that sorrow can be fatal. This becomes blatantly obvious when, even after Kyung Hwi manages to calm her down and makes her feel good about being alive again for a moment, it all fades away instantly when her comatose friend passes away. As the girl’s mother yells at Na Bi that it’s all her fault, you can just see how she slips back. And that really made me realize that for these people, happy moments are just temporary distractions that ultimately still don’t outweigh the unhappy ones. Fortunately, in Na Bi’s case, Kyung Hwi has saved her at this point and she still decides to keep on living because of him, even after slipping back for a moment. By then, Kyung Hwi has become the light in her life that’s strong enough to keep on living for.

But, as is usually the case with time travel, events always find a way of happening anyway, even if they differ slightly from the original scenario. In this case, for example, even though Kyung Hwi manages to avoid most of the bullying himself, the events he remembers still happen, but with different people, including Seul Gi. He realizes this quite quickly, just like he catches on fast that he has travelled back in time and that he has to save Na Bi.
In the end, he is able to save her, but at a price. After learning that Na Bi must have found out that her comatose friend passed away, he goes looking for her, scared she’ll still slip back. But then Na Bi calls him to tell him that she decided not to take her own life because of him. They meet and walk towards each other on a crosswalk to finally be united for good… and then a car comes out of nowhere and heads straight for Na Bi.
Basically, if Kyung Hwi hadn’t been there, and if he hadn’t been extremely alert for anything that was happening to her, Na Bi would still have been destined to die, or at least get into a serious accident right there and then. But it’s because Kyung Hwi realizes this, that he is able to push her out of the way – and then is hit by the car himself. A soul for a soul, apparently.
In the hospital, Seul Gi gives Na Bi a letter that Kyung Hwi wrote to her ‘in case anything would happen to him’. In this letter, he writes the truth about how he travelled back in time to save her.
The series ends with a travel back to the future 10 years later. We see the same opening scene as in the first episode, only now it’s Na Bi who’s an orthopedic surgeon. Kyung Hwi has been in a coma ever since the accident (note: he still looks exactly the same even after being comatose for 10 years) and she’s still taking care of him, believing what he wrote in his letter. Because of him, she now has a successful life, a good relationship with her father, and she has been able to put aside her guilt toward her friends enough to allow herself to live a happy life.
The drama ends on the day that Kyung Hwi originally went back in time, with the same mysterious voice on the radio saying that the next song they’ll play has been ‘requested by a caller who’s been waiting for a long time for someone to come back from a long trip’. In the final shot, we see how Kyung Hwi wakes from his coma with a smile on his face.

Even though his first thought after going back to high school was ‘ahh I should have watched a time travel movie’, I found that Kyung Hwi got used to his situation very quickly. He came to terms with the time travel in itself and also immediately connected the dots with the message he’d heard on the radio and that the reason must be Na Bi.
It also doesn’t take him too many incidents to realize everything still happens, in a way, and even takes it upon himself to humiliate his bully publicly, because Na Bi did that for him in the original timeline.
The only way he can know for sure that his actions change anything, is through Na Bi’s diary. He took her old diary from the original timeline with him and as he starts effecting Na Bi’s life in the new timeline, she writes new things in her diary that replace the original content. This is how he can see, even for a little, what she is thinking and if his plan is working, even if it’s slightly privacy-violating.

The only time where I went ‘uh-oh’ for a moment was when he didn’t tell her about the phone call. They are on a boat together at that point, on her birthday, one day before she is supposed to commit suicide. Na Bi goes to the bathroom and Kyung Hwi answers her phone to learn that her comatose friend isn’t doing well and probably won’t have much longer. Realizing that this must be the phone call that originally drove Na Bi to kill herself, he decides not to tell her about it, since he wants to make sure she lives through the next day.
I personally think that, even if she had taken the call at that point, with Kyung Hwi by her side, she would have still been fine. Although it might have effected the mood enough to stop them from having their first kiss that evening.
In the end, luckily they didn’t make a big deal out of the fact that he hid this from her. Having watched too many dramas, I was just instinctively scared she’d find out that he had taken the call and didn’t tell her and would get mad at him for not allowing her to say goodbye to her friend for the last time.

Because it was a short drama, I get that there was no time for the usual g r a d u a l build-up in relationships, but I still think Na Bi let Kyung Hwi into her life pretty swiftly. After he kept running after her to make sure she didn’t do anything reckless, continuing to stand up for her while she didn’t ask for it and fixing her bad relationships for her, I understood why she was initially very suspicious of him. But still, after he pulled down that bully’s pants and ran off with her as she’d done in the original time, it seemed like she’d accepted him as a good person. The three of them (incl. Seul Gi) even went to an amusement park right after, and the next day Kyung Hwi was already like ‘am I your boyfriend now?’, so it went quite fast.

The bus accident was terrible (I’m weak for big tragic accidents), and my K-Drama instinct told me it was going to happen, just like how I just knew there was going to be car coming when they started walking down that crosswalk in slow-motion at the end. But what I did think was inconsiderate of Kyung Hwi was that, when he took the hit of that car knowing he was going to get seriously hurt, he literally put Na Bi through the exact same experience of what happened to her friends. I was really worried that, seeing the next person she’d opened her heart to get into a traffic accident AGAIN ‘because of her’, she would be triggered back into her trauma immediately. Once again she would have to sit next to a comatose patient, hearing his parents blame her for everything… I was positively surprised that she was able to stay optimistic for 10 years after that.

I’ve seen Choi Min Ho in two other dramas before, To The Beautiful You and Hwarang. I remember he got a lot of negative comments on his acting in TTBY, but I like Hana Kimi and all its adaptations so it didn’t bother me that much.
I didn’t really like Hwarang that much, but that didn’t have anything to do with him in particular.
As for this drama, I found his acting quite alright. His transformation from high school geek with big round glasses and poofy hair to his adult look was funny, lol. It was cool to see how he could pull off both an adult and a kid with the same face, although he definitely acted a bit younger in his flashbacks of his original high school timeline.

Watching Min Ho in this drama now hits differently, of course. As many people will know, his fellow SHINee member Kim Jong Hyun committed suicide only a couple of months after this drama aired in 2017. Even though this series tries to keep it light and eventually has a happy ending, it definitely shines a light on young people facing so many fears and doubts and pains in their lives that they just want to get away from it all. Even though all you want is to scream at them not to give up and to keep on living, some people just can’t handle the pressure. It is highlighted in this drama that many young people don’t even take their own lives because they want to die, but just because they want to escape or take away the pain. I can’t even begin to imagine what Min Ho and his fellow members must have felt like. I just want to take this moment to remember Jong Hyun and many other young and talented people who couldn’t take this life any longer. May you find some rest, peace and quiet where you are now, beautiful souls.

I realized as I looked her up that I know Lee Yoo Bi from her role in Pinocchio, where she was the second female lead. I saw she was also in Uncontrollably Fond, but I don’t remember her from there (admittedly, it’s been 5 years since I watched it). I also saw her in the movie ‘Twenty’, although I don’t remember much of that either, except for the fact I watched it (I thank my mind for giving me the idea to write reviews so I’ll actually remember people). Anyways, I liked her performance here a lot. She was the embodiment of someone who looks strong and doesn’t show any ‘outer signs’ that she’s struggling with life. But when she had a scene alone, there was plenty of space for her to show the layers to her character. She made me feel sorry for her without becoming ‘pathetic’ and that isn’t as easy as it seems. So I think she did a great job portraying both strength and fragility as Na Bi.
(By the way, I love how the way Kyung Hwi said her name sounded like hanabi, the Japanese word for ‘fireworks’. But in Korean her name means ‘butterfly’ so that’s equally pretty.)

I’ve seen a few dramas with Kim Hee Chan such as Producer, Cheese in the Trap and School 2017. He has a very familiar face. I found his character interesting, because he was such a blatant coward but you could still see that he didn’t want to be one. He wanted to have the courage to help his friend but he was just so scared for himself. At least he told Kyung Hwi in his face why he acted like that. I had people like this in high school who would just disappear from my side when a bully appeared without a single explanation or apology afterwards. Those are the real cowards. At least Seul Gi had the common sense to owe up to his cowardice, haha.

The woman who played Kyung Hwi’s older sister also looked really familiar to me, and after looking her up I think I remember her mostly from My Love From Another Star, where she played Yoo In Na’s stylist. She was very feisty in this drama haha. In retrospect I would’ve liked to see a little more of the romance development between her and Seul Gi, because now it really seemed as if Seul Gi just married her because he felt indebted to Kyung Hwi after how he’d treated him in high school. I really hope there was at least some real romance between them!

I could find really little info on the rest of the cast, even though it was a really small cast. Still, I think everyone involved should be credited. I want to know who the voice on the radio was, haha.

All in all, it wasn’t the worst drama I’ve seen, it was intriguing enough that I wanted to see it through. I really wondered how it was going to play out and I’m glad it ended in a happy ending, even if it was a bit unrealistic. Apart from the fact that being considerate of people and ‘you never know if someone might be suffering’, I’m wondering if there was any additional message to the story besides raising awareness. I actually felt a little sad as well, thinking ‘so many people may have been saved from this fate if there had been someone to talk to them like Kyung Hwi talked to Na Bi’. But on the other hand I think a lot of people may still have faced the same end, even after being talked to like that, because in the end, the other person can never fully understand what you’re going through. Healing from depression/trauma is a long and rough process and you have to stick it out to the end, otherwise the urge to give up will bring you crashing down with no one to catch you.

However! I don’t want to end this review on a sad and dark note! I just hope everyone is taking care of themselves, I’ve been talking to some friends lately who are also facing some difficulties at the moment and I’m really proud to see people take some distance to recharge and choose their own (mental) health above their stressful jobs or other outward factors. It’s important to take care of yourself, because even though your body may physically warn you, your mind sometimes has the tendency to keep going beyond its limits. I hope everyone is able to take plenty of rest, these are stressful times, and I will keep writing reviews for your entertainment, haha. Being unemployed isn’t all bad, I’m currently also taking a lot of time to rest up 🙂

The next couple of dramas on my list are several that I’ve really been looking forward to! I’ll be back with another review in due time! Bye everyone! ^^

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.

It’s Okay to Not Be Okay
(사이코지만 괜찮아 / Saikojiman Gwaenchana / I’m a Psycho But That’s Okay)
MyDramaList rating: 8.5/10

(Surprised to find a new layout on WordPress, hope there’ll be no big changes in the actual post)
Hello everyone! It’s time for another drama review. I finally watched this and I knew from the start that it would be difficult to write a review about, haha. But I’m still going to give it a try! Rather than a descriptive summary like I usually do, I think I’m going to write about the overall themes and how (I believe) this series dealt with them.
One of the reasons that I find it difficult to write a review about this is because there is so much more to it than just the story. I’m just worried I won’t be able to construct my words and thoughts properly in one go. But that’s okay, if need be I can even spend more than one day on it, haha. Because it’s worth it. Let’s see how I do!


To start with a short summary: It’s Okay to Not Be Okay is a 16-episode Netflix K-Drama, each episode a little over an hour (as seems to be the trend). The main story is about Moon Gang Tae (played by Kim Soo Hyun), who works as a caregiver at a psychiatric hospital. He has an older brother, Moon Sang Tae (played by Oh Jung Se), who has autism spectrum disorder. Gang Tae has been taking care of his older brother his entire life, especially since they lost their mother when they were still children. Although there have been moments where he hated his brother for being handicapped since it limited Gang Tae’s personal possibilities in life, he loves his brother very much and he is willing to take care of him forever, even if that means suppressing himself for the rest of his life. To add some darker background: Sang Tae actually witnessed their mother’s death. She was murdered. Due to a cognitive error, Sang Tae has associated this incident with a butterfly. Ever since then, he has been having recurring nightmares about this butterfly coming to kill him as well. That is why, every year when the spring comes (and with it the butterflies), they move away to live and work somewhere else. They are constantly running away from this ‘butterfly’.
Then there is Go Moon Young (played by Seo Ye Ji), a famous author of childrens’ books who actually has an antisocial personality disorder. She was raised in seclusion by her obsessive mother in a castle and she has been so used to being on her own that she doesn’t know how to interact with other people. In fact, she always comes across as a sociopath – or even a psycho. What’s unique about her stories is that they’re not ordinary fairytales ; on first impression they’re actually quite morbid with grotesque illustrations. Despite the controversy around her books, she is very popular as there is always a deeper meaning behind her stories – and the fact that she’s beautiful herself probably also plays a part in it.

Gang Tae and Moon Young meet for the first time when Moon Young has a reading for the children patients at the hospital Gang Tae works at. As if their first encounter wasn’t bad enough, not soon after there is an incident where a dangerous patient escapes and ruins the reading. When cornering the patient, Moon Young ‘accidentally’ stabs Gang Tae in the hand with a knife when the latter tries to protect the patient she’s targeting.
After this encounter, Moon Young becomes fascinated with Gang Tae, this boy with ‘beautiful eyes’. Gang Tae, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with her. He is appalled by her way of treating people and handling things and wants to keep her as far away from his brother as possible. However, as it happens his brother is a big fan of her books. He’s also very gifted in drawing and he uses the illustrations from her books as drawing practice as well.
When Gang Tae reluctantly accompanies his brother to one of her book signs, they get involved in a row with other people waiting in line and he is confronted with Moon Young once again.
(Just as an in-between comment: this scene made me so angry!! Gang Tae left Sang Tae standing in line for just a moment while he took a phone call, and Sang Tae got all excited when he saw a kid in a dinosaur costume – he loves dinosaurs – and he goes there to examine it. When he starts talking about how much he loves dinosaurs, the kid’s parents literally grab his hair – which he dislikes very much – and push him away, yelling at him that he’s a freak and that he’s harrassing their kid. Moon Young comes down and, in her way of standing up for him, cusses at the parents, who then start pointing fingers at her ‘did you all hear what she called us?!’ and the thing went viral and Moon Young’s reputation blew up etcetera. And I was just sitting there, all like, ‘seriously?! NO ONE is going to say anything about how those parents assaulted a mentally challenged person and THREW HIM TO THE GROUND while he didn’t even do anything? He didn’t even touch their kid, he was talking about his freaking dinosaur plushie. This just proves that, when it comes to someone who is deemed ‘not normal’, people don’t even bother listening to what they’re saying, they just assume they’re a lunatic and point fingers. It was sickening, I felt so bad for Sang Tae.)
Gang Tae is forced to quit his job because of the first incident at the reading, actually taking the fall for someone else. When his friend Nam Joo Ri (played by Park Gyu Young) visits him in Seoul she suggests he comes back to their hometown Seongjin City, as they have an opening at the psychiatric hospital where she works as a nurse as well. Her ulterior motive is that she has a crush on him.
Gang Tae and his brother decide to go back there. Moon Young follows them, leaving behind her very stressed publisher Lee Sang In (played by Kim Joo Heon) and moves back into her own childhood home, the so-called ‘cursed castle’.
Through flashbacks we learn that Gang Tae and Moon Young actually knew each other when they were kids, and Gang Tae even had a crush on her, but because of her antisocial tendencies he got scared and ran away from her.
This first encounter between them is shown at the start of the first episode, in the form of an animation.
After a while, Lee Sang In goes after Moon Young, together with his quirky assistant Yoo Seung Jae (played by Park Jin Joo). This also goes for Gang Tae’s friend Jo Jae Soo (played by Kang Ki Doong), who has always moved along with the two brothers no matter where they went. All of them end up staying at Joo Ri’s house in the end.

Through the series we see how both Gang Tae and Moon Young struggle with their lives. They are both stuck in how they were raised, and unable to escape from their pasts or from what ties them to their pasts. I think the most important thing here was that they are both trapped in a way, forced down by someone or something, raised to believe they could never have an independent life in which they can do whatever they want. And while Gang Tae has his brother, Moon Young has always been alone. As soon as she moves back into the castle, her nightmares about her mother and all of the traumatizing things happened in that house come back to her. The part where her mother’s ghost was hovering above her bed, paralyzing her with fear… yikes.

This is the 3rd K-Drama in a row that I’ve watched on Netflix and also the 3rd that was completely different from what I expected. Again, I didn’t exactly know what I expected, but I was still surprised. Honestly, after the first episode I found myself thinking ‘this is pretty dark… and kinda creepy’. But as I continued watching, I found that it was very unique in its kind. I’ve never seen a K-Drama like this. Even though you might think that the story of two people finding each other and helping each other heal isn’t that original, this series sets itself apart by its way of storytelling. Because at the foundation of it, it’s a story about a story. The story that Moon Young and Sang Tae make together that sets everyone free at the end.

I find the use of fairytales really interesting in this drama, especially because it criticizes them and uses them in such an unorthodox way. Moon Young is a writer, but she interprets classic fairytales very differently than other people and children would. People like to find the romantic and the positive in stories, and Moon Young is the opposite of that. You might call that pessimistic, but it’s also very realistic and down-to-earth. Of course, she is made to think like this because of the mindset based on her traumatic experiences as a child. She has lived a dark fairytale of her own, locked in a castle, her every move influenced by her psychotic mother. After following Gang Tae to Seongjin City, she gets herself a job at the hospital he works at to teach a class about fairytales to the patients. However, the class mostly ends in heated discussions and hurt feelings because she refuses to address the stories as fairytales with romantic messages and happy endings.
There are a lot of stories depicted in this drama. Apart from the storybooks that Moon Young has written, there are mentions of many others, and there are several animated sequences as well. I think they did a really great job in visualizing these. Every single story was packed with deeper meanings and they all had a function within the drama. It definitely put things into perspective and made me think about how they could be interpreted in different ways than I was used to.
Even the animation in the beginning, telling of how Gang Tae and Moon Young first met as children, comes back in the end, as the way Moon Young and Gang Tae are depicted in the animation looks a lot like how they turn out in Sang Tae’s illustrations for the final book they make together.
I also liked how a lot of episode titles referred to actual fairytales and stories (The Red Shoes, King Bluebeard, The Donkey King, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, etc.) and in each case there was a referrance to this fairytale in the episode. They weren’t always a 100% apparent (at least to me), but they were definitely there.
Also, the whole opening sequence is refers to the fairytale-aspect of the series as well, both in imagery as in song.

“There was once upon a time
And all people have stories
Their own

Let her take all she wants
Set him behind
It’s not your fairytale, no

Have him take all he wants
Don’t be afraid
All these are part of you
Of you“

— ‘Sketch Book‘ by Janet Suhh

Looking at these lyrics, I really wouldn’t be surprised if they were written especially for this series.

For the title, I was surprised to see the original Korean title was basically ‘It’s Okay to be a Psycho / I’m a Psycho But That’s Okay’. I wondered if they softened the ‘psycho’ part into ‘not okay’ to make it sound friendlier, but the phrase ‘it’s okay to not be okay’ is actually a slogan inside the hospital director’s office. So I like how they took the English title from there. Also, the word ‘okay’ or ‘OK’ (‘gwaencha (na) in Korean) also comes back a lot, even in the name of the hospital, as it’s called OK (Gwaencha) Psychiatric Hospital. However, I did wonder who the ‘psycho’ in the end referred to. I suppose Moon Young, but she wasn’t really a psychopath. That’ll be interesting to discuss, I think!
One more word play thing: I loved the contrast that was made of the two meanings of the word psyche. When talking about butterflies and trying to help Sang Tae face his trauma, the hospital director tells him the Greek word for butterfly, psyche, also has the meaning of ‘to cure/to heal’. We later see a flashback of Moon Young’s mom telling her daughter that the word psycho was originated from the word psyche/butterfly.
I guess each interpretation just depends on the way you look at the world!

What also set this drama apart was how it shone a light on mental health issues and gave an insight in the daily business in a psychiatric hospital. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it depicted so elaborately in a K-Drama before. Psychiatric hospitals in movies and series usually bring with them a kind of eerie asylum vibe, with flickering lights in dark hallways and people tied to their chairs and stuff.
OK Psychiatric Hospital looked like a super nice play to stay. The interior was light, they had a beautiful garden, lots of place to sit outside and enjoy the beautifuls seaside view, a big cafeteria with good food, friendly staff… completely different from how they’re usually depicted. I liked that they picked a scenic spot like this rather than the busy streets of Seoul as the main setting. The patients in the hospital also aren’t aggressively inclined at all. The only occasional exception being Moon Young’s father, Go Dae Hwan (played by Lee Ul), who has been at the hospital for 20 years because of his dementia. Moon Young never goes to visit him because she has no familial feelings towards him at all. As she states at one point, ‘Isn’t it interesting? My father’s body is still alive but his spirit is gone. Meanwhile, my mother’s body is dead but her spirit is still around’. When he meets his daughter around the hospital one time, he attacks and chokes her, yelling that she should be dead and that she’s a monster. The speculation is that he mistook her for her crazy mother, but he also attempted to choke Moon Young when she was a kid, so it’s not certain.

The stories in this drama don’t just unfold, they also change. In the beginning, we are led astray about certain things and characters. At least this was the case for me. If I had an impression about someone in the beginning, in most cases at the end of the series I felt differently about it/them. We are led to believe something as it’s shown through one person’s eyes, but we’re consistently proven wrong when the whole story is revealed. And this is why I believe that this drama is also about the different truths about people. About the double-sidedness and deeper layers of stories. And about the danger of first impressions.
For instance, we are led to believe from the beginning that Moon Young’s father is a monster. From the way Moon Young treats him from the start as we are introduced to him, we are led to believe that he must have been a terrible father. We are granted one flashback, in which he tries to strangle Moon Young as a child. We are led to believe that he is the evil King Bluebeard who murdered his wife.
But just before he passes away, he is lucid and he tells the story from his perspective and I was so glad that he did. I was glad we got to see what truly happened. Not that it made it better what he had done to Moon Young, but at least I was able to understand him better. I still believe he cared a lot for his daughter, but that he was so scared of her mother and of the influence she would have on her. He was terrified that Moon Young would turn out the same, because she’d already been influenced by her mother too much. I mean, when you see how her mother was, I’d find him foolish for not being even a tiny bit worried, seeing how much time they’d spent together.
By the way, I thought they would just go for a younger actor of Moon Young’s father in the flashbacks, but they used the same actor and the way they made him look 20 years younger/older with make-up was amazing!

Returning to topic, the second example I have is Gang/Sang Tae’s mother. From the flashbacks we see from Gang Tae’s point of view, we are led to believe that their mother really neglected Gang Tae as a child. We see her often scolding him for not considering his brother enough, she keeps leaving him behind while tending to Sang Tae. We see young Gang Tae craving his mother’s warmth and attention and simply indulging in it when she finally hugs him. And when she finally gives him attention, she just says things like, ‘You have to always take care of your brother. That’s the reason I gave birth to you’. Like, what? Would a mother say that to her precious child? Seriously? You can’t help but feel so sorry for young Gang Tae.
However, as it turns out, this really was just Gang Tae’s point of view. He later learns from Sang Tae that their mom would always take them to this restaurant because she knew Gang Tae loved the food there and she would just lay awake and smile at his sleeping face, adoring the heck out of him while feeling guilty about making him feel like he mattered less than his big brother. It was so touching when Sang Tae ultimately told Gang Tae that ‘Mom loved you a lot and she didn’t just give birth to you so you could take care of me’, almost as if he could read Gang Tae’s mind and he remembered everything their mom had said and done to him in the past.
Moon Woo Jin, who played the young Gang Tae, is going to be the next big child actor hype, I just know it. This kid is only 12 years old and he just acts everyone away. He is a star. To be able to portray such dramatic emotions at such a young age is really incredible. We gotta keep an eye out for him, people!!
Lee Kyu Sung, who played the younger Sang Tae, also did an amazing job! Love seeing these young talents!

As for Moon Young’s mother, we are led astray multiple times: who was she? Is she alive? Is she a ghost? Is one of the hospital’s patients actually her mother in disguise? We are led to believe Moon Young’s father killed her, but then it turns out she’s still alive? Is the reason they’re not revealing her face in the flashbacks because she’s someone we know?
In any case, Gang Tae and Moon Young have both been imprinted with a certain image of their parents, and this image has traumatized them. In the end, they both find peace with the good memories they have of them and they are able to let them go, even Moon Young, whose only good memory of her father is when he read her a story one time.

Ill go back for a bit to the hospital and its patients. There was a small group of patients, all with a different reason for being there, who were highlighted one by one. There was an older man with PTSD, a younger guy with alcohol addiction, a girl with depression caused by an abusive relationship, a woman with borderline personality disorder, a woman with DID who had been a victim of child abuse, a manic patient, and a woman with psychotic depression caused by the death of her only child.
Each of them had their own story, and they all had their own purpose in the story. I really liked that they used their encounters with some of these patients in their final story, because each person had, in their own way, inspired them or confronted them with how stuck they were in their lives.
I especially liked the special appearance of Kwak Dong Yeon as the manic patient. This is by far the most energetic role I’ve seen him play, haha. I loved the scene where he ruined his father’s political rally and danced around trying to escape the security guards, and how Gang Tae for a moment saw himself dance like that, free to scream and shout and let it all out.

One thing that stuck with me was the conversation between the PTSD patient and Sang Tae. The old man said that they were both searching for an ‘exit’, a way out of whatever tied them to their past and trauma. For Sang Tae, it was the butterfly, for the old man it was the war he’d fought in. I loved how at the end, this patient received a pair of new shiny shoes from the director, who told him to walk out of the hospital in these shoes and go out there to search for his exit door. Sang Tae also chose to search for his door when he decided he would try to draw butterflies instead of running away from them.
The young alcoholic guy and the depressed girl fell in love and I really liked how mature they were. When the girl was released and the guy was determined to finish his treatment properly so he could be with her for good after he was fully rehabilitated. I was so proud of him when he spit out a drink one time, all like ‘this is alcohol’, and that he told her he knew he wasn’t done with his treatment yet because it still cost him a lot of effort to resist the alcohol. Admitting your own problem is a really big part of it, and it made it so much more worth it when they were reunited at the end.
The depiction of child abuse is always something that makes me nauseous. But the interesting thing about this case was that the issue lay more with the parent who had turned a blind eye rather than the parent who had actually hit the child. It still took on a different angle, which was also good, because people who turn a blind eye often get away with it because they weren’t the ones who actually committed the crime. If you ask me, they’re equally guilty.
I’m glad the series didn’t shy away from these topics, as they are still so very important.

Undoubtedly the biggest storyline in this drama is the relationship between Gang Tae and Sang Tae, or The Tale of the Two Brothers, as I’ll call it in accordance to one of the episode titles. Their relationship in itself is enough to build a story on. It’s beautiful but heartbreaking at the same time. You can tell that they care so much for each other, but when you find out about their past and how they have actually become forced to live together like that, always on the run for some invisible threat, it becomes kind of strained and painful as well You can’t help but feel for them.
The scenes where they fought in particular were very bad for my heart. You could see that Gang Tae was sucking it all up because he knew his brother couldn’t help it and that he would calm down eventually and he just needed to be patient with him. But then that one time when they fight and he yells back at his brother because he finally starts enjoying what it’s like to push back in his life – it was just F E E L S all the way.
The worst thing that happened between them is that, when they were children and they were playing on a frozen river once, Sang Tae fell through the ice and Gang Tae hesitated and even walked away for a bit before coming back to save him after all. He jumped into the water and pushed his brother out. After getting out of the water, his brother ran away and left him in the water. He was eventually saved by Moon Young, who had been watching them from a distance, and this initiated Gang Tae’s crush on her. But anyways, this happened and neither of the two brothers have forgotten about this incident, although they never speak of it. It’s just something that makes their past together so fragile, because it is so much more than just brotherly love. They’ve been through so much together, they hated each other’s guts so many times, but they still end up stronger than ever.

I found Gang Tae a very relatable character. Not that I would know how it feels to live like that, but his character was just explained so well that I could really understand his position, helped of course by Kim Soo Hyun’s amazing acting. He has been keeping the promise to his mother for so long that he’s started to lose himself, the essence of who he is and that he might have another purpose besides caring for his brother. He doesn’t even think about deserving a life of his own, he has already surrendered to the idea that he’ll always have to suppress himself.
Even though he has some deeply buried grudging feelings towards his brother and how his mother neglected him as a child, he’s always reminded of the fact that his brother is everything to him and he could never leave him.
Based on his personality and background, I guess it is both fitting and ironic that he would become a caregiver, because while he does it because he cares, it also shows that he’s literally devoting himself to only taking care of others and it only stimulates how much he suppresses himself.
But what I also loved was how Sang Tae, even though he knew that Gang Tae was taking care of him, kept saying that he was the older brother and that he was supposed to take care of his younger brother rather than the other way around. In the meantime, he learned so much from Gang Tae. One of my favorite parts was when Sang Tae was on a bus with the PTSD patient I mentioned before. This patient receives a day off from the hospital and they end up in the same bus. The old man at one point is triggered by some construction noises and gets flashbacks from the Vietnam War that he fought in. When this happens, Sang Tae copies what Gang Tae always does to calm him and manages to calm the patient down, putting a coat over his head, telling him it’s okay while hugging him.
That was so touching, especially because Sang Tae wasn’t one for hugging strangers, and it really made me realize that he was aware of so much more than people probably gave him credit for. He kept proving that he was able to care for others as well, that he wasn’t just the person who had to be cared for.

At some point when they had just had a big fight, there was a switch in which Sang Tae started turning the tables. It was usually Gang Tae who would check up on him, asking if he’d eaten already, etc. But then he started doing that to Gang Tae. He also allowed Moon Young to become a part of their family even though she wasn’t related to them and started treating her like his younger sister. It just showed that he had learned so much from other people around him and he really was a proper adult. He wanted Gang Tae to know that he wasn’t bound to him forever.
I can imagine it would be very difficult for Gang Tae to let go of his older brother after they had been leaning on each other for so long. But that made it extra touching when Sang Tae told him to let go, to let him go his own way, so that they could both go and find their own exit doors.

The next topic I wish to address is the fact that almost every single character in the series was stuck in their ways at the beginning, and managed to get out / find their door / cut off their leash at the end. It really made the final episode so wholesome to watch.
Besides the three main characters, there is Lee Sang In, Moon Young’s publisher. In the beginning of the series he is just a shallow man concerned mostly with money and keeping up his business and reputation. He knows about Moon Young’s personality and tendencies, but he still is more interested in the books she writes and the money he can make off them. When Moon Young leaves to Seongjin without a word, he goes after her, but when he is unable to convince her to come back and write a new book, he sticks around after meeting Joo Ri, as he is immediately attracted to her. Throughout the series he goes through a major metamorphosis, starting from the outside when he shaves off his moustache. After shaving it off he literally became a different person, haha. Spending more time in the countryside eventually turns into ‘taking a break’ and he comes to really appreciate things and people. He starts caring about Moon Young’s wellbeing more as well, rather than the profit he can make off her. At the end of the series, he decides to stay in Seongjin City to start his own new business rather than go back to busy Seoul and try to fix the mess they left behind.
Secondly, Joo Ri. I wouldn’t describe her as a typical second female lead, but she does start off with that kind of vibe. She’s interested in Gang Tae, she gets him to come back to their hometown and work at the same hospital as her… But Moon Young gets in the way by continuously distracting him. Joo Ri has an initial dislike for Moon Young, as they went through something when they were kids – Moon Young once pit their classmates against her because Joo Ri was her only friend and she didn’t want her to hang out with other kids. This hit hard because before becoming friends with her, Joo Ri was actually bullied, and after this happened she was ostracized again just after she started getting along with her classmates. Because of this past event, Joo Ri is initially stuck in her prejudice about Moon Young being a bitch. After she is rejected by Gang Tae (her acting in this scene was beautiful by the way), she initially falls into a habit of regular drinking to vent her frustrations. But after that she slowly starts accepting the fact that Gang Tae and Moon Young were drawn to each other because of their wounds and she and Moon Young slowly become more friendly with each other again. In the end, even though only Sang In expresses his feelings out loud, it is suggested that Joo Ri reciprocates his feelings.
Jo Jae Soo, Gang Tae’s friend who always follows him and his brother wherever they go, trying to become a part of their family, learns that trying to force yourself into something doesn’t work. He has devoted a lot of time into being a loyal friend to the two brothers, always moving with them and then opening a new business wherever they end up. Gang Tae ultimately tells him that he doesn’t need to keep following them anymore, that he can live his own life just like them, and he obliges by finally calling him ‘hyung’. You could say that Jae Soo was stuck in always sticking with the two brothers, trying to become a part of their family as well, rather than going his own way.
Lastly, in her own dorky way, Seung Jae does the same. She’s quite a mysterious character, you never really learn her true intentions and she also acts and presents herself way younger and less smart than she actually is. From the start, she is, very reluctantly, stuck under Lee Sang In’s regime, she keeps getting pushed around by him and even though we see how much it annoys her, she still sticks by him. In the final episode, she finally expresses how she’s had it with him, which was oddly satisfying.

Before I go on to next topic I need to address a couple of more people.
First of all, Joo Ri’s mother, Kang Soon Seok (played by Kim Mi Kyung). I’ve expressed by love for this woman multiple times already in earlier reviews, but I’m going to do it again. I was so happy to see her appear in this, I didn’t know beforehand she was in this drama. As Joo Ri’s mom, she only had one child but she ended up being literally everyone’s mom, haha. Everyone came to stay at her house and she would make food for everyone. She also took care of the food at the hospital because she was old friends with the director. Their friendship was so funny. She was such a nice presence, so warm, and it was really nice to see her and Kim Soo Hyun act together. When they hugged at the end, it almost looked like Kim Soo Hyun was just thanking her for existing haha. I also got teary-eyed when she got a free copy of the final book and Sang Tae had written her a message saying that he loved her like she was his own mom and she got all emotional #myheart

The director, finally, haha! I’ve already mentioned him several times but I really want to talk about him.
Director Oh Ji Wang (played by Kim Chang Wan) was so great. This actor acted with Kim Soo Hyun before in My Love From Another Star and he is just such a precious being. Seeing him and Kim Mi Kyung act together was a pleasure to watch. I really loved his character here, he was the perfect director for a psychiatric hospital. While you could see he really cared for all patients, he also had this mischievous streak and he used very witty ways to get people to face their traumas. He came up with the idea for Sang Tae to paint a mural in the hospital and then, very subtly, was like… ‘I would like there to be some butterflies’. In the end, this became a successful tool to get Sang Tae to face his trauma, face the butterflies and draw them rather than run away from them.
I really loved the scenes where he would just spy on people and record people on the CCTV, haha. There was this stupid guy who slapped Gang Tae in the face in his office and afterwards the director was like ‘…I caught him on camera’, lol. He constantly cracked me up.

As my bridge to the next topic, I have to introduce Head Nurse Park Haeng Ja (played by Jang Young Nam). She was Director Oh’s most trusted nurse and Joo Ri’s superior. There were a couple of more nurses/doctors that were supporting characters, but she was the most important one. Because she’s not who she seems to be.

I am a bit anxious to write this, but what I’m about to describe is the only thing in the drama that I didn’t like.
As we’ve established, Moon Young’s mother (played by Woo Jung Won in the flashbacks) was a psychopath. She raised her daughter in the spitting image of herself, to remain locked up because she was too pretty to go into the world.
To make matters even worse, she’s also the one who murdered Gang/Sang Tae’s mother, after the latter made one concerned comment about Moon Young’s worrying behavior as a child. After stabbing her in the throat with a fountain pen, she threatened a paralyzed Sang Tae that she’d come after him too if he were to talk. The only thing within his line of gaze was the butterfly broach on her jacket, which caused his cognitive error.
Moon Young’s dad, shocked to see his wife smiling and humming a song even after killing someone, pushes her so hard she tumbles over the railing and rolls down the stairs.
Up to this point in the series we have seen enough of Moon Young’s mother to understand why Moon Young is terrified of her, and even of her memory after she’s gone.
But then, weird things start happening at the hospital. Moon Young’s father keeps hearing someone hum the same song as his wife (‘Oh My Darling Clementine’) and the books that she wrote (Moon Young’s mother was also a writer) keep popping up. We are led to believe that in some way, somewhere, even if she’s just a ghost, Moon Young’s mother is still around, somehow. The next big shock comes when Sang Tae arrives to work on his mural and finds that someone has drawn a huge butterfly over his painting, the same butterfly that he saw the night his mother was killed.
And then it is revealed that the Head Nurse is actually Moon Young’s mother, still alive and with several layers of plastic surgery done to her face. She was also responsible for inciting several patients into doing something for her as part of her plan, including stirring up the dangerous patient in the first episode. Which is weird, because that took place when they were still in Seoul. Did she come to Seoul in order to do that? Also, didn’t Moon Young’s father dump her body in a river? How the hell is she still alive after that fall? It’s not explained. She’s just there, suddenly. ‘Hi, I’m still alive’.
Apart from shock value, I honestly don’t understand what the whole point of it was. It just had a big ‘It Was Agatha All Along’ effect on me (any WandaVision watchers?) and I couldn’t really take it seriously because I found it so far-fetched. It felt like they just really wanted a confrontation where Gang Tae learned why his mother was killed, and that was the only reason why they fit her into an already present character so she could still tell him in person.
But honestly, they already knew she was the one who killed his mom. Telling him the reason why she did it was just to stab Gang Tae even deeper in the heart, knowing that it really happened for no reason at all.
The only other explanation I can think of was that they had to create an event that brought Gang Tae and Moon Young back together, as they were apart at that point exactly because they found out her mom had killed his.
For me, it would’ve been enough if her mother had just remained an evil spirit or memory that Moon Young learned to get rid of. Because it was the trauma that she needed to heal from, not her mom being still physically around to keep tormenting her. It just seemed unnecessary to me. In the end, even after visiting her one last time in jail, it was merely to confirm that although she wouldn’t be able to fully erase her, she could just paint something new over it, just like Sang Tae painted over the butterfly on his mural.
It also didn’t make sense to me because they made the Head Nurse turn into a psychopath overnight, including the wide eyes and manic laughter (because that’s a stereotypical psychopath, right?). The worst part: the whole build-up to the confrontation between Psycho Mom and her daughter and Gang Tae, the whole big reveal and ‘look at me I’m psycho mom and you’re never getting rid of meeee’ – and then she’s literally knocked out by a freaking book and arrested the same day. So much for your big comeback, lady.
Not that I didn’t enjoy Sang Tae hitting her over the head, that was great, what a hero. But I mean, the whole thing with her was just so lame? I was so disappointed with this turn of events, it seemed so weirdly unrealistic and out of place in a series that, up to that point, had been such a deeply realistic portrayal of human healing.
Also, I still don’t get why they went to the whole thing of hiding Moon Young’s mom’s face in the flashbacks. It’s not like she already looked like the Head Nurse there or that we would recognize her from something else. If you’re keeping something hidden, I expect the reveal to have at least a tiny ‘oh my god’ effect. But now, when they finally revealed her face, it was just like ‘… oh. Okay.’
I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion, but I needed to put this down because I can’t lie about how I felt about it. This is just my personal opinion. I’m sure there are people out there who think it was the best plottwist ever. But even though I did have a slight gut feeling that there something up with the Head Nurse, it still wasn’t enough to make it an exciting plottwist for me.
Then again, this really was the only thing I didn’t like about the drama.

Before going on to some cast comments, I wish to make one more remark about the relationship between Gang Tae and Moon Young. I saw some pretty destroying comments of people saying that Moon Young is just a spoiled brat who forces Gang Tae to be with her by using his autistic brother. I don’t agree with that. These people clearly didn’t pay enough attention to what was happening and they didn’t fully understand what this series was about. It sounds like they just got annoyed with how aggressive Moon Young was in her pursue of Gang Tae in the beginning, and then never bothered changing their opinions even when her true character was revealed.
I personally didn’t find Moon Young annoying in the least. On the contrary, she was a very refreshing and unique kind of character. She is funny, sassy, but she also sees through people, she’s smart, she stands her ground, she is strong. She is a child that has seen too much darkness. She is scared. Her fascination with pretty things that leads her to Gang Tae is, in essence, a cry for help. She reaches out. And that is extremely brave for someone standing all alone in the world. Maybe she doesn’t even realize it because she is just instinctively drawn to him. But she definitely chooses to keep reaching out to him because despite her own issues and yearning for comfort, she also sees that he needs help. That he has locked himself up in his shell and is unable to come out on his own. So I agree much more with the people that say she ‘used’ his brother to get Gang Tae out of his shell, to make him see he does deserve a life of his own.
Two people, each with a lot of personal baggage, offering each other help in lifting this baggage. Not as a charity case, but because they can genuinely help each other. In the end, Gang Tae and Moon Young heal each other in multiple ways, they literally provide each other with their respective exit doors / they cut each other loose from their leash.

Moving on to cast comments! I’ve been looking forward to this because if there’s anyhing that made this show for me, it was the cast. Honestly, the entire cast of actors made me so incredibly happy, from the first episode on.

KIM SOO HYUN
I make this no secret, and I know I’m one of many, but Kim Soo Hyun is one of my favorite actors out there. Not just because he’s so good looking, but because he’s a genuinely good actor. He falls in the same category as Lee Jong Suk for me, although I would never go so far as to compare them with each other. I’ve seen a lot of Kim Soo Hyun’s dramas, of which there are less than you’d expect, but this just proves that he chooses his projects very carefully. I believe that I’ve seen everything he’s done from 2011 on. The first drama I saw with him was The Moon That Embraces The Sun, still one of my favorite historical dramas. I believe this is the first review I am writing on a drama with him! This is his first drama since he returned from the army, and I’m really excited about his future work.
I think he portrayed Gang Tae very well in this drama. There are so many layers to his character, he really has a mask on to hide his true face. When he is genuinely hurt by a situation, it seems like he only reluctantly lets the tears out, as if he doesn’t even feel like he has the right to cry. It was really beautiful to see how slowly but surely Moon Young inspires him to look at his own worth and makes him realize that he does deserve to jump out from his vicious circle.
In the meantime, he is also inspired by a lot of people at the hospital. Seeing him struggle with letting himself go was really heart-wrenching but he did it so well. The scene where he punched an abusive visitor in the face for attacking Moon Young and he came to her all smiley like ‘I got suspended! Let’s go on a trip :D’ was so adorable, you could see how good it did him to punch even the tiniest dent in his suppressing shell.
Although I expected nothing less from him, he still managed to surprise me. His awkward laughs, the tenderness in his eyes when he looked at his brother, his tears that made me cry with him every single time… Once again he managed to portray a completely unique and genuinely human character. It was so nice to see his character development.

SEO YE JI
Honestly, I’ve only seen one drama with her before this and that was Hwarang (which I didn’t like that much). I didn’t really have any clear impression of her, but she was amazing in this drama. She was an absolute QUEEN.
In the beginning she reminded me of IU’s character in Hotel Del Luna, this mysterious, bewitching, beautiful, secluded princess locked in her castle, doomed to be alone and pushing everyone away (also, her outfits?!).
She portrayed such interesting layers to the character! I loved how unpredictable she was, how her face could change in a split second and her smiles were extra powerful because her face literally broke with a joy she usually never felt.
She was a spoiled child that got angry whenever she couldn’t get her way, but she was also a heavily traumatized girl with nightmares of a witch she couldn’t escape from. She portrayed the different emotions so well, I couldn’t dislike her even for a second. Plus I thought she had really good chemistry with Kim Soo Hyun. Those kissing scenes?! Damn.
Also: she can read me fairytales any freaking time because her voice is perfection. I’m in love with her voice.
I hope to see more of her acting in the future!

🙏🏻OH🙏🏻JUNG🙏🏻 SE🙏🏻
I believe I already mentioned I really liked him in my review of Touch Your Heart, and I have liked him in basically every drama I’ve seen of him. But man oh man. What can I say. He more than received the Best Supporting Actor Award he got for his role in this series, without a doubt.
Truthfully, I don’t even know if the way he portrayed the autism spectrum disorder is realistic or accurate (I haven’t seen any criticism about his portrayal), but honestly, the way he performed it was just so incredibly endearing.
The thing about Sang Tae is that you just can’t hate him. Even when he lashes out and starts beating his brother and gets mad and hides in the cupboard, he just loves Gang Tae so much and he wants for him to have his own life so bad. A part of him probably always felt guilty that Gang Tae wasn’t able to go to school because of him. He never wanted that for him. In-between watching the same children’s show over and over again and collecting dinosaur figures and drawing, he has always been aware of how their mother neglected Gang Tae. At the end he is actively trying to get Gang Tae to become more independent without him, he gives him and Moon Young space to be together (‘a kiss is better than a fight’), he ends up leaving them alone on their trip, he reminds Gang Tae that he belongs to himself…
The part where I really bawled my eyes out was in the final episode, when Moon Young and Sang Tae publish their collaboration storybook and he goes to read it out loud to their mom’s tree, crying with joy… My god, you could wipe the floor with me right there and then.
Oh Jung Se was absolutely amazing. He didn’t break character once, he never did anything out of character, he was consistent in his acting. There were a few moments where it felt like he became a little comical, but then it would always become clear that that was never the intention of his character.
Seeing the bloopers at the end of the final episode, and the one part where Gang Tae fantasizes about what it would’ve been like to have a normal life and go to school, I was amazed to see how well he switched. He’s definitely going up in my list of favorite actors.

PARK GYU YOUNG
I still cannot believe I never noticed this woman before. She’s in several of my favorite dramas, but I only got to know her in Romance is a Bonus Book. And honestly, if I hadn’t seen her name in the opening credits, it would’ve probably taken me a much longer time to recognize her as Joo Ri because she literally looked like a different person.
Her acting was so natural, she was this really calm and subdued person but she could really act out when she was stressed or frustrated. Despite her simplicity I never found her boring. I really liked her in this drama and I really want to see more of her amazing versatile acting! (After watching this I even started following her on Instagram, lol)
This is only the second drama I’ve seen of her and she’s already becoming one of my new favorite actresses.

KANG KI DOONG
This guy deserves a medal. Also, he’s suddenly in everything I watch, lol. I was so happy to see him and Park Gyu Young act alongside again, they were also the most hilarious couple in Romance is a Bonus Book.
I really liked that even he, as a mainly comical supporting character, had layers. Really, the scene in the final episode when he’s talking with Gang Tae and the latter finally calls him ‘hyung’… his acting there was brilliant, so integer. He is probably one of those actors who (when he isn’t cast as a secretary) gets mostly comical roles while he’s actually a really good actor. I hope he gets lots more chances to show his acting to the world after this 🙂

PARK JIN JOO
I’ve seen many series with her, but never has her character been such an enigma to me as in this one. Honestly, even after finishing I’m still wondering what the real purpose of Seung Jae’s character was. It’s not that I was bothered by her or anything -I loved to see her in this- but I just didn’t really understand what her character was about in the end. However, I liked that they still put some layers in her character, as she was deliberately dumbing herself down to be accepted into the industry better, which was kind of sad, in a way. She’s the kind of actress that gets a lot of cameo roles, so I was glad to see her as an actual character again!

I loved the Choi Daniel cameo! I love Choi Daniel, haha. I saw that the series’ screenwriter also worked on Jugglers, where he was the main character, so maybe that’s how the connection was established, haha.
I am living for these surprise cameos of my favorite actors, keep ’em coming!

Also, random comment, but who knew deer could be such cockblocks??😂😂

I’ve spent most of my day on this by now, but I’m finally nearing the end!
Let me just say this: when I started this series I knew there would be mental health issues involved and I had prepared myself mentally that I was definitely going to cry. In the end, I didn’t cry as much as I expected I would, but I definitely cried. As I mentioned somewhere, the final episode was just so wholesome. Moon Young and Sang Tae finishing their book together, that story about the three of them finding their real faces, them going on a trip, everyone being whole and happy again… I laughed and cried on repeat.
Side note: I started watching this at the same time as Netflix series Behind Her Eyes, which is also quite heavily focussed on the psychological. There were several similar references, such as tapping your own shoulders/counting your fingers/counting down to calm yourself, etcetera. I’m not sure if it was a good decision to watch two quite heavy-themed series like that at the same time, haha, but I survived. Though I am looking forward to watching something lighter again now.

This drama is definitely not for everyone. It deals with heavy emotional issues and it’s not a light watch. I also stuck to watching just one episode a day, sometimes even skipping a day. It may not be your thing, and that’s okay.
But I just want to say make a note here. I’ve seen comments of people saying things like, ‘this drama is so overrated’ and ‘thanks for wasting my time’. People. There is literally an entire ocean of K-Drama out there. You can find anything you’re looking for, in genre, in theme, in story, there is something for everyone.
Just don’t go ruining it for other people. If you don’t like something you watched, that’s fine, but there are people who might still like it. People go on drama database sites like MyDramaList to search for interesting stuff. Your comments might as well scare people away from something they would actually like if they give it a chance. You can always state that you didn’t like it, but you don’t have to publicly throw trash on it as if your opinion is the only one that’s true.
This is why I always make sure to write ‘I thought/ I found / In my opinion’ in my sentence, so it won’t sound as if I’m saying ‘this sucked and no one can tell me differently’.
Because of the heavy theme, I would personally not watch it a second time. It was different than I’d expected and I was surprised by it, but I’m glad I watched it. That’s my opinion.

Now I’m going back to my to-watch list again, taking a break from Netflix. For some reason I find watching K-Drama on Netflix quite intense, haha, almost draining. But I have to admit that the ones I did watch on Netflix were all very unique and one of a kind, so I’ll probably go back to that platform after a little break.
Thanks so much for reading through this long review – it took me an additional day to completely finetune everything and give it one last polish haha – and see you at the next one! ^^

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.

Itaewon Class
(이태원 클라쓰 / Itaewon Keullasseu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hi everyone!! Being jobless has given me a lot of free time to watch a lot of series very fast, lol.
I admit I was in a bit of a rush to watch this series and I finished it within a week. Since this was one of the most hyped 2020 Netflix K-Drama and I was really excited to finally start on it.
In stark contrast to The King: Eternal Monarch, which I watched before this, Itaewon Class was as much a breath of fresh air as it was a snap back to reality. It took me the first couple of episodes to really get into it, anxious for the actual story to start. But all in all, I found it quite good and refreshing and mostly very interesting for reasons I will elaborate on in this review.
Because I knew it to be such a hyped and popular drama I was initially a little hesitant to state some more critical opinions I had about a couple of issues depicted in this series, but after reading some fellow reviews on MyDramaList, I was stimulated to still write them down. That is, after all, why I started writing and uploading drama reviews.

I do find it important to note that when I started watching, I had no idea what was waiting for me. If I had a notion of what the story would be about, I was completely wrong about it. It surprised me in more than one ways, and I will try my best to write a good review that’s not just one big summary (which I have a tendency to).

Itaewon Class is a 16-episode series on Netflix, each episode a little over an hour long. The story is about Park Sae Roy (played by Park Seo Joon), a slightly odd but very determined and just guy, who loses everything because of his ill connections to the Chairman of a very influential company, Jangga, and his son. When he tries to build his life back up from scratch, this Chairman keeps making things hard for him, determined to eventually get him on his knees. The main storyline revolves around Sae Roy’s plan to take revenge on this Chairman, his son, and his company Jangga, which is the biggest national food supply company. It’s a long and hard road, because the Chairman is a powerful opponent and he can pull strings like a puppet player. The issue of ‘bringing someone to his knees’ poses a recurring thing throughout the story, because it is the most conservative way of admitting defeat to one’s opponent and the two main leads are very traditional in their ways and principles.

Okay, just to get into a little more detail: Sae Roy grew up with his father (played by Son Hyun Joo), who was an employee at Jangga. As a teenager, Sae Roy wants to become a police officer, and he has very strong moral principles, due to his father’s upbringing. When he transfers to a new high school, he finds out that he’s in the same class as the son of Jangga’s Chairman, Jang Geun Won (played by Ahn Bo Hyun). What’s more, Geun Won is a big bully who can just go around harrassing people at school and do whatever he wants without getting reprimanded by the school staff. He is the Chairman’s son after all. Sae Roy doesn’t stand for this behavior. On his first day at his new school, he sees Geun Won bully a classmate and he goes to him to tell him off. When Geun Won scoffs and pushes him away, and when their teacher blatantly ignores what’s happening, Sae Roy loses his temper and punches Geun Won in the face.
As a result, he and his father have to face Geun Won’s father, Chairman Jang Dae Hee (played by Yoo Jae Myung). He tells Sae Roy that he will revoke his suspension from school if he gets on his knees and apologizes for punching Geun Won. Sae Roy refuses, sticking to his principles, saying he doesn’t feel sorry for punching someone who bullied a classmate.
So Sae Roy ends up getting expelled on his first day of school and his father resigns on the spot in front of the chairman, expressing his pride for raising such a just son. Even without the job at Jangga, he has enough money to start his own restaurant, and they start their new life together, father and son.
On his way back from deliveries one night, Sae Roy’s father is hit from behind by a car, falls with his scooter over a railing down a steep cliff and dies almost instantly. As fate has it, the person driving the car is no one other than Geun Won, who was driving under influence. Even though he didn’t mean to kill anyone, let alone Sae Roy’s father, Chairman Jang stops his son from turning himself in and tells him he will ‘take care of everything’. In the end, someone else ends up in prison and Geun Won never even has to testify. The detective in charge of the hit-and-run, Oh Byung Hoon (played by Yoon Kyung Ho) is forced to drop the case as his superiors have all been bribed by the Chairman.
When Sae Roy coincidentally finds out it was Geun Won driving the car that killed his father, he goes to the hospital and beats Geun Won bloody. For this, he is sent to prison for 3 years.

The series is divided into different parts. The part I just summarized is the first part, a flashback to 15 years ago from the point in the present where the series starts, when Sae Roy is in high school. It then skips to 2 years later, when he gets out of prison early for being an exemplary inmate. After that, it skips to 7 years later when he has managed to secure a building to start his own pub. After that it skips to another 4 years later I believe, when he manages to franchise his pub and creates a company for it. I may be missing one time leap, but anyhow this is how the series is structured.
When Sae Roy gets out of prison, his high school friend and first love Oh Soo Ah (played by Kwon Na Ra) invites him to come to meet her in Itaewon, a very lively district in Seoul with lots of clubs and pubs which is also very popular among foreigners. When he arrives there during Halloween night, he is amazed by the joyful atmosphere. He decides there and then that he wants to start his pub in Itaewon. He meets Soo Ah, who is about to start a job at Jangga. She knows what the company means to him as she went through a big part of his past with him – she was also very fond of his father since he managed the orphanage where she grew up. However, it’s still a great job opportunity. We only find out at the very end of the series what Soo Ah’s ultimate goal is for working there, but until then she gradually climbs up to becoming one of the Chairman’s most trusted employees, almost family. She was in the same class as Geun Won (and Sae Roy for that one day) and Geun Won has had a crush on her ever since, even though she’s not in the least interested in him.

The relationship between Sae Roy and Soo Ah is very interesting in itself. They seem to like each other, but Soo Ah keeps pushing and pulling and playing hard to get with him. Sae Roy very openly tells her he likes her multiple times, and knowing this gives her a certain confidence, but for some reason she never reciprocates his feelings, she keeps waiting. When they meet in Itaewon she jestingly says she likes rich men, and then Sae Roy promises her that one day he’ll become rich and make her quit her job at Jangga. But Soo Ah’s position is very complicated. Even though she cares a lot about Sae Roy, she is also part of Jangga and she also has to participate in Chairman Jang’s schemes to get in Sae Roy’s way. I think in the beginning we are led to be cautious of Soo Ah, since we really don’t know what her exact intentions are – why is she working at Jangga? Is she really on Sae Roy’s side? So in that respect she is a very interesting character in my opinion.
Sae Roy tells her that in 7 years, he’ll start a pub in Itaewon, and to get there he will first work his ass off in all kinds of jobs from fishing boats to factories. What he also does, and this is very characteristic of Sae Roy’s character, is read Chairman Jang’s (auto?)biography. To get a better understanding of him and his business. I think this was really good because it showed how serious Sae Roy was about his revenge plan and how far he was willing to go. Even though he wanted to bring the Chairman down, he still agreed he was a great businessman and he thoroughly read his book, not out of spite but to actually learn from him. Sae Roy was just an amazingly mature character, he didn’t just barge in screaming ‘REVENGE!!’, no, he really made a plan to slowly but surely catch up with Jangga and beat the Chairman in the thing he was most proud of: business.
When Sae Roy and Soo Ah meet again by chance 7 years later, Soo Ah is baffled to see he actually secured a building to start his pub in Itaewon.

When he first starts out, Sae Roy has two employees, Choi Seung Kwon (played by Ryu Kyung Soo) and Ma Hyun Yi (played by Lee Joo Young). Seung Kwon used to be in prison with Sae Roy. He used to be a thug, and he thought Sae Roy was really annoying. But after Sae Roy showed him that being an ex-convict didn’t mean your life was over, he came to work for him and now serves tables at his pub. Hyun Yi used to work in a factory that Sae Roy worked at and is hired as the cook. Seung Kwon and Hyun Yi have a friendly but bickering kind of relationship.
The pub’s name, by the way, is Dan Bam, or ‘Honey Night’. When asked about this apparently ‘lame’ name, Sae Roy explains this is a reference to his father. In the flashback when he has just been expelled from school, he drinks his first glass of soju with his father and when he says it tastes sweet, his father notes that ‘that means that he’s had an impressive day’. The whole notion of soju tasting either sweet or bitter depending on the situation you’re in when you drink it is also something that keeps coming back. With this name, he wishes to turn everyone’s night from bitter to sweet. I thought it was a lovely way of showing respect to his father.
When it’s just the three of them, they don’t have a lot of business. It’s hard to bring customers in and the inside of their pub looks like nothing, plus the food isn’t that great.

Just as they’re pondering what to do, they meet Jo Yi Seo. Yi Seo (played by Kim Da Mi) is a young genius high school student who is also a very famous blogger. She earns a lot of money with promoting small businesses and places on her social media and has a lot of followers. As she’s gifted in athletics, music, studies, anything, she’s accepted into several good universities. Her best friend is Jang Geun Soo (played by Kim Dong Hee). Geun Soo is Chairman Jang’s illegitimate son who has broken away from the Jang family because he was always treated as an outcast. He now lives a freer life and he has a crush on Yi Seo. When the two of them plus one other friend go clubbing in Itaewon one night, they try to get into a pub even though both Yi Seo and Geun Soo are still minors. Dan Bam is the only pub that lets them in, and only because Seung Kwon doesn’t want to turn away the handful of customers they got that night. When the plus one friend starts making a fuss over the measly quality of the pub and its food and gets into a semi-fight with Seung Kwon, the night seems already ruined enough. However, it turns out someone spotted Yi Seo through the window of the pub and reported the pub to the police for serving minors. In addition to Yi Seo and Geun Soo feeling bad, Dan Bam is forced to suspension for two weeks.
In these two weeks, Yi Seo offers her skills to the pub. Instead of going to college, she requests to become the pub’s manager to help them out with their marketing and redecoration. She starts coaching Hyun Yi on cooking and promotes the pub through her social media, causing it to become more popular. Geun Soo also starts working their part-time, partly because he feels guilty for indirectly causing the pub’s suspension. The team is lastly joined by Kim Tony, a half Korean half Guinean part-timer. With this team, they start working hard so that they are able to open the new and improved Dan Bam after their suspension period ends.

Yi Seo was a very refreshing and eccentric character. She seems like the kind of friend that’s super fun to hang out with, loves to party and have fun and not worry too much about the future. But at the same time, there’s a deeper layer to her that is kind of bored with life and will probably ditch you once she’s bored of you. Maybe that’s the reason she lives so freely, going her own way. There’s not a lot that actually genuinely interests her and she feels like ‘life’s a chore’. As a child, teachers and others have worried that’s she apt to become a sociopath, and she kind of is. She doesn’t seem to care if she comes across as inconsiderate or unfriendly to others, even people she’s close with. Despite his feelings for her, Geun Soo often remarks how mean she can be.
However whimsical Yi Seo may be, her interest is piqued by Sae Roy and his persevering big dreams. She initially declares him a fool when he says he wants to franchise the pub and become bigger than Jangga, but as she spends more time with him and the team, she finds herself falling for him and his ideals. She becomes determined to help him achieve his goals. I don’t find it hard to believe that Yi Seo is a popular character with viewers, exactly because she’s so non-mainstream. I have to admit I found her very refreshing and cool, despite the occasional dip in my sympathy for her. I do have to point out a couple of moments where my respect for her plummeted, though.

As I said, there were some themes and issues in this series that I’ve never seen a K-Drama deal with before, such as racism and gender identity. Although I appreciate they went for an inclusive concept, I couldn’t help but think that these particular themes could’ve been dealt with way better. Introducing Hyun Yi as transgender and Tony as half-Korean was exciting, I really hoped they would make a point of normalizing this, allthemore in the environment of a district like Itaewon. But after they were introduced as such, it seemed like that was all there was to their roles. They each had one ‘arc’ in which they got their own little struggle and after that they just disappeared into the background again. Which was a pity, because Hyun Yi was an absolute pearl and Tony deserved more than just being ‘the foreigner’. The way his role turned out, I find myself wondering what the purpose of it was at all.
Maybe I take it this way because I’ve had a similar experience when I was studying in Japan. I participated in two performances of a college theatre group and in the second play I was given the role of ‘foreign exchange student/part of the protagonists’ friend group who started studying Japanese because she liked samurai and ninja’ but I didn’t really get any character development besides just being the funny foreigner using old-school Japanese samurai words. Tony felt like this to me. He only got some nods in agreement and whenever he was feeling down, the significance of his feelings was kind of dismissed by all the other ‘more important things’ that were going on. Even though he was fluent in Korean, and he was legally half Korean since his father was Korean, his dark skin labelled him as a foreigner and no one could ever see him as Korean, no matter how good everyone’s intentions were with him. Also, for the racism theme, I’m talking about things like everyone immediately turning to Tony when some foreign people walk in, because they just assume that he speaks English. Turned around, that would be like working in a restaurant and two Chinese people walk in and you just turn to the nearest Asian-looking person to say ‘You’re Asian, you probably speak Chinese right?’ So that really didn’t sit well with me. Not all western-looking people speak English, y’all! Stop being negligent and get your facts straight. Just ask around the team and ask ‘anyone who speaks English here?’ It’s not that hard.
N O R M A L I Z E. Sorry, haha.
For Hyun Yi, of course I was apalled by how she was treated when people found out she was transgender – come on people, these aren’t the middle ages, gender identity is an actively discussed topic at the moment. I was really proud of her for finding the courage to still step up in front of people and come out proudly, but afterwards it just kind of disappeared from the story altogether. After she herself had proudly stated ‘I am transgender’, suddenly all the tension and weirdness people had toward it was gone and it went back to the main story as if to say ‘we got that part over with, back to the real story now’.
BUT. The point I wanted to make was how disappointed I was in Yi Seo’s character when it came to these two cases. The way she was introduced as a free-spirited open-minded modern girl, I couldn’t believe how racist and discriminating she acted towards them. When Tony wasn’t allowed inside a club because he looked African, and he tried to plead that he was Korean, she didn’t help him get inside or even stand up for him, she just straight out told him ‘Dude, how can you be Korean, you have dark skin’. And when they found out Hyun Yi was transgender, the first thing Yi Seo pointed out was ‘having a transgender as a cook will make people uncomfortable’.
Like, I couldn’t believe she of all people would belong to the group of people who frowned upon things like that. And when she eventually ‘apologized’, it didn’t come across as sincere at all. She just got away with a quirky ‘Eonni~ You’ll forgive me right~ You know I love you~’ and she literally just elbowed Tony casually like ‘Oh btw sorry’. The second thing that bothered me was that she actually promised Tony that she would help him look for his father (which was the reason he came to Korea) and then she didn’t even lift a finger. A little later it’s revealed that Sae Roy is spending months hanging up flyers to search for Tony’s dad and even helps him get a visa to stay in Korea (!) and Yi Seo never did a single thing to help Tony with anything. After agreeing to hiring him she didn’t even glance back at him. Things like that really pissed me off about her. She was able to get away with a lot because she was ‘just a kid’, but at some points things she said were really hurtful and she just wouldn’t take responsibility for them or reflect on them.
When she starts developing a crush on Sae Roy, Soo Ah naturally becomes her rival, and Yi Seo just starts treating her like a jealous child. When Soo Ah is about to kiss Sae Roy one time, she literally jumps in and grabs Soo Ah by the mouth, being all like ‘You can’t kiss someone without consent, that’s against the law’ —- while she literally kissed Sae Roy herself “without his consent” when he was passed out drunk after a drink one night. Girl….

In fact, this was one of the few K-Dramas I’ve watched where I actually didn’t need romance. The story in itself, of Sae Roy in his journey to revenge, was strong enough to stand on its own. Sure, let Yi Seo have her one-sided crush on Sae Roy and let him stay oblivious to her feelings (and female attraction in general) because he’s not paying attention to it. I wasn’t even that into him and Soo Ah getting together, because she’d already been keeping him waiting for forever.
But in the last few episodes, especially with the kidnapping at the end, I really felt like the series could’ve done without. Soo Ah could’ve just gone to the police with all the materials she’d gathered at Jangga throughout the years and it would still have happened without Yi Seo getting kidnapped for no reason and Sae Roy having to bend the knee to the Chairman for no reason.
Honestly, I felt like the series was just getting to where it was going and then the whole kidnapping thing came and it got me all confused, because this suddenly added a whole new angsty dramatic plotline which was so different from the entire vibe of the series up to that point.

Before getting ahead of myself, let me explain. So, at one point, Chairman Jang is determined to get Yi Seo on board at Jangga. Geun Won hears about this and slips in, determined to convince her himself to prove his worth to his dad for bringing her in. Instead, Yi Seo manages to get his confession of killing Sae Roy’s father on record. She releases it online and Geun Won is trialed again for what he’s done 15 years ago. Chairman Jang chooses the Jangga Before Son card and literally throws Geun Won under the bus, claiming in a national press conference that his son was guilty of everything, leaving himself out of the equation. Geun Won is then sent to prison for 7 years, but he gets out earlier for being an exemplary inmate, just like Sae Roy. Even though I really hoped he would’ve seen the light while he was there, getting back out he seemed to have turned into an even bigger idiot and monster than he was before. He actually kidnaps Yi Seo in order to lure Sae Roy out to kill him. As in, he actually attempts murder.
Just when I was so glad to watch a fairly safe contemporary drama with no murder attempts like in The King, this part threw me off so much. It was like suddenly the whole series changed into something else. He manages to hurt Sae Roy badly and takes Geun Soo (who followed Sae Roy) hostage together with Yi Seo. Then he threatens to kill Yi Seo ‘for causing him to go to jail’.
I mean, this guy was either getting his facts completely messed up or he was just soft in the head. No matter how aware he was of how his father had fed him to the lions, he still wouldn’t accept his father to be the source of his misery. In the end, his plan fails, Sae Roy beats him again and he’s just sent to prison again. Fat lot of good that last attempt was, my friend.

Despite being a jerk, I did find Geun Won a very interesting character. Because at some points you couldn’t help but realize that this is how his father raised him to be. He wasn’t evil to the core. When he hit Sae Roy’s father with his car as a teenager, he came to his father because he did feel guilty and terrible about what he had done – he was willing to turn himself in.
But he was raised by a father who had always let him do whatever he wanted. If he made trouble, he never had to apologize or do anything because his father would ‘deal with it’. That’s how he was raised. So part of me also felt kind of sorry for him. He was a buffoon, and made fun of a little because everyone knew he wouldn’t be able to take over the company. He was literally not smart enough. But there were such interesting layers to his character. When he wasn’t hissing through his teeth to hide his own embarrassment (or just to seem intimidating), there were moments where you could see him realizing what was happening to him and how his father was treating him. I believe he was just stuck in a position he couldn’t get out of and in an attempt to either break out of it or prove his worth he just made things worse.
The scene with the chicken was one of the most blatant examples of this. Right after Sae Roy is sent to prison, his father takes him to their livestock farm and tells Geun Won to twist a chicken’s neck, imprinting on him the idea that Sae Roy is like livestock and that they shouldn’t be hesistant or ashamed to eat livestock (his favorite saying being ‘the strong prey on the weak’). You can clearly see in this scene how much this messes Geun Won up. He initially doesn’t want to kill the chicken, but then his father’s words fill him with this crazy rage and he twists the chicken’s neck. The ‘Sae Roy is livestock’ quote is so clearly imprinted in his mind that he keeps repeating this several times when he lashes out, like some sort of mantra. And on the other hand, during a blind date one time he is hesitant to eat chicken because ‘he isn’t so fond of it’, which also suggests that he’s still not completely okay with what happened in the chicken coop.

When Geun Won goes to jail the first time, Geun Soo suddenly steps up. Yi Seo has rejected his feelings, said she’s in love with Sae Roy. However, her words, ‘If you really want me, take over Jangga’ keep him determined to win her back. At the time, it was a really mean comment, allthemore because she knew about Geun Soo’s relationship with his ‘family’. But for some reason he has taken those words seriously and actually attempts to get into Jangga in the hope of getting her affection, even though it was obviously a mean joke.
Even though Geun Soo used to work at Dan Bam and was close to the team and fond of Sae Roy (and vice versa), he suddenly starts working for Jangga and pulls some mean tricks to thwart them.
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what he was playing at. I first thought he joined just to spite his father, but then he actually started doing backhanded stuff and I was like, ‘Uhm… what?’ But I never truly believed he would follow in his father’s footsteps, I kept thinking he had some kind of plan. It was just incredibly naive of him to take Yi Seo’s words seriously, I couldn’t believe that was the real reason he started working there. But what was interesting was that he seemed way more fitting for the job than Geun Won, he seemed way more like his father than Geun Won. And this only pissed off Geun Won even more – it’s also probably why he took Geun Soo hostage as well, even though he still wouldn’t hurt him because he was family (way to be ambiguous, bro).

Having listed a couple of double-sided characters, let me just get straight to what I found most interesting about this drama. It was by far the ambiguity of people. The fact that no one is either good or bad, black or white. Every single character in this drama had good and bad traits, some of which were hidden better and deeper than others.
Sae Roy is depicted as the ultimate good guy. He has a strong sense of justice and follows his moral principles, but the fact remains that he’s out for revenge. He loses his temper. Although the reasons for these eruptions are always justified by what has been done to him, being vengeful (wrath) is still one of the seven sins.
Chairman Jang is depicted as the ultimate bad guy. But his initial reason for starting his company came from a very good place: to feed his family. As his business started growing bigger, he became more greedy and ambitious and he started to lose sight of his base purpose. Heck, he even ends up discarding his whole family for the company. Apart from that he is a petty old man, and despite being probably the oldest character in the show, he acts the most like a spoiled little child.
As much as I didn’t like him, as much as I didn’t respect him, I kept looking at him thinking ‘isn’t there even a shred of humanity left in this man?’ He used to be good. He used to care about his family. He treats his mosted trusted people well. That’s it.
The most pettiful thing he did was make Sae Roy go on his knees just for information on Yi Seo’s whereabouts after Geun Won kidnapped her. After all those years of their cat and mouse game, he settled for this petty excuse to get him on his knees? I was so happy when Sae Roy pointed this out to him, like ‘I can’t believe I wasted so many years of my life plotting revenge against an old grouch who would use the kidnapping of my loved one as an excuse to get me to my knees’.

There is something to say for every single character. I liked how the series played with human morals, how every single person is a complicated being. Because it made everything so much more unpredictable and exciting. I’d think I knew a person and then the next moment they suddenly did something that made me go ‘…wait what?!’

In the end, Sae Roy gets his revenge, but I still think they could’ve done without the whole kidnapping thing. Because Soo Ah literally had everything in hand to bring Jangga down. Soo Ah, not Yi Seo. Soo Ah revealed that, in her ten years working for Jangga, she had been gathering evidences for everything that could prove the Chairman’s corruption: borrowed-name stacks, embezzlement, slush funds, illegal requests, bribery… She gathered everything and brought it to the police. And then Jangga was done for – but then Sae Roy was in the perfect position to take over the company.

Oh my, I’ve forgotten a major thing: the title. ‘Itaewon Class’ is the name they come up with for when they start franchising Dan Bam. Taking the initials IC, they build an overarching company and ultimately lift it so high it can rival to Jangga. As the CEO of IC, Sae Roy ends up taking over Jangga, but not after bringing the Chairman to his knees.

I need to talk about two more important characters before approaching my conclusion.
Kang Min Jung and Lee Ho Jin. Kang Min Jung (played by Kim Hye Eun), was the daughter of Chairman Jang’s former business partner and as such she was like a daughter to him. She used to be on good terms with Sae Roy’s father as well when he was still alive, expressing her concern for when Jangga decided to stop funding the orphanage he was managing and offering to try and change the Chairman’s mind about it.
She was a director at Jangga, but she starts working with Sae Roy in secret to bring him down. Aware of everything the Chairman has done, and out of respect towards Sae Roy’s later father, she is willing to put her faith in Sae Roy and they make several attempts to undermine him, but they fail. When the Chairman finds out she’s been working against him, she’s exiled to Pajin, and that’s where she literally passes the baton to Sae Roy. While in Pajin, she becomes acquainted with Oh Byung Hoon, the detective that used to be on Sae Roy’s father’s hit-and-run case. After this incident he quit the police force and is now living in the countryside with his 10-year old daughter, supplying food exclusively for Dan Bam as a way of settling his debt with Sae Roy since he still feels very guilty about how he was forced to drop the case. He and Min Jung become closer at the end of the series, and I thought it was cute how the little daughter kept trying to push them together, haha.
Lee Ho Jin (played by Lee David) was the classmate that Geun Won was bullying when Sae Roy punched him in the face. He grew up to become an asset manager and he ends up working with Sae Roy and Kang Min Jung as their financial manager. Even though he’s still somewhat scared of Geun Won, I thought it was really nice he became such a big person and didn’t let the fact that he was bullied define him. I didn’t even realize this, but as he said in the end, he’s important because the feud between Sae Roy and Geun Won started with him. And he was just a very loyal and likeable character.

So the ending is very wholesome, Sae Roy’s revenge is wrapped up, everyone makes up with everyone, everyone gets their own closure. Soo Ah quits Jangga and finally starts living her own life as she’s always wanted. Ho Jin visits Geun Won in prison to get his own closure and to also basically tell Geun Won to suck it, I really loved that. It was like, ‘Hi, remember me, I’m the nerd you used to bully in high school. I’m now a financial manager for the guy who took over your dad’s company. Have a nice day.’
And Sae Roy and Yi Seo end up together. As I said before, I would’ve been fine if this didn’t happen. It doesn’t occur a lot, especially in K-Drama, but in this case I really didn’t need there to be romance. The story wasn’t about romance. And it felt a little forced at the end that Sae Roy ‘suddenly’ realized that he loved her too, after rejecting her for 4 years straight.
I also was a little annoyed by it because some part of me didn’t want Yi Seo to get to him like that. I really liked their dynamic as a business team, and her occasional flirtiness was fine as long as he just kept dismissing it, but I don’t know, it just felt like she got everything she wanted and I kind of didn’t want that, haha. She was already rejected quite harshly one time, which was mean because Geun Soo basically made Sae Roy reject her in front of the whole team out of jealousy that she hadn’t chosen him. And as awful and hurtful as that was, I still couldn’t help thinking it was a lesson for her. But she kept blatantly telling Sae Roy she loved him, flustering him until ‘suddenly’ he felt the same way. So it felt a little forced to me. Also, I didn’t ship them. But I just felt like, if they went for pushing them together, there would inevitably be a kissing scene at the end, which there was.
But I just didn’t feel it. I’m sorry if that offends anyone, but I need to be honest about it. The romance part between Sae Roy and Yi Seo, along with the whole kidnapping/attempted murder arc could’ve disappeared as far as I’m concerned, because it just distracted from the main storyline being wrapped up. Geun Won should’ve just stayed in jail. It didn’t do his character any good that he was let out and then went mad and was sent back again. It felt like they just wanted to fill up the final episodes.

I think one of the most important quotes of this series was ‘children will follow in their parents’ footsteps’, because this was what shaped the characters of both Sae Roy and Geun Won. They were both guys of the same age, but because of their upbringings, they couldn’t have been more different. And I also think it came back even with Detective Oh and his young daughter. He felt so guilty about being forced to drop a case, but he eventually decides to tell his daughter about this because he doesn’t want her to think of him as perfect when he’s done something like that, and also to just be honest to her – because he wants her to grow up without shame for her father.

There were two parts that made me cry. The first was when Hyun Yi was representing Dan Bam in a cooking contest and Geun Soo released the fact that she was transgender to the press to make her vulnerable before the final round. The scene where she and Sae Roy were sitting together and she broke down and Sae Roy hugged her… And then I also cried when she won after still showing up despite all the bad press.
The second time was when Sae Roy, after Geun Won’s murder attempt, was in a coma for a while and in his subconscious he meets up with his dad. When they’re at the edge of a bridge (it’s always a bridge, isn’t it?) and his father is about to cross it (presumably to the afterlife), Sae Roy says he’ll stay. The conversation they have there, until the point where Sae Roy wakes up from his coma and just starts crying uncontrollably… G O O S E B U M P S.

Park Seo Joon made this series for me. His modest acting as the simple and slightly naive but still determined Sae Roy was so endearing! I actually prefer these kinds of roles for him. I also really liked him in Fight for my Way, and though I just adore him in anything he does, I think this kind of role fits him the best. A humble guy strengthened by life experience in the real world rather than academic studying, finding and making his own way in the world. He is such a good actor. I’m really glad I got to see him in this drama, he was so real and engaging. The way he stroked over his head like that when he was flustered. The way he didn’t keep his emotions to himself and wasn’t afraid to cry like a man T^T You couldn’t help but root for him, as he was some sort of tragic hero. I subconsciously starting referring to him in my head as a male Candy Candy; the most pure and just guy ever who just keeps meeting bad luck on his way. But the most important thing was that he never backed down. He was the embodiment of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. He kept coming back, stronger than before, and the way he ultimately left the Chairman on his knees was just ENDBOSS.

Kim Da Mi is a film actress and this apparently was her first drama. I think she handled the whimsical role of Yi Seo very well, it came very natural to her. I’m wondering if, like Kim Go Eun, she’ll start appearing in more dramas from now on. Anyways, she really portrayed the multi-layered character well – I’m even using a screenshot of her from the series as a reference to a new portrait drawing I’m making.

I believe I have seen Yoo Jae Myung in more dramas (according to DramaWiki he’s in eg. Hwarang and Strong Woman Do Bong Soon), but I don’t remember him. He did seem familiar, though. For some reason he reminded me of Marvin ‘Krondon’ Jones III (who plays the bad guy in Black Lightning). I’m not sure why, maybe it’s the expression on his face or something. I felt like at the end, when he had to play the Chairman sick with cancer, he started overacting a little, being all over-coughing and making his face tremble and stuff. But he did manage to make me dislike him throughout the whole show, so I guess that’s a job well done, haha. What I did appreciate about him was that he was able to acknowledge his own pettiness. He really started acting like a child sometimes, and whenever he was flustered by something he would just sort of laugh it away as if it was nothing. He just didn’t want to admit to his own weakness, to the possibility that he could be beaten. But when he heard that Sae Roy was hurt in a hit-and-run, just like his father (before he finds out it was Geun Won’s doing), he doesn’t laugh or anything, he was just surprised. So I do think that he wanted to settle things with Sae Roy through business as well, and not by physically hurting him.

I’ve seen Kwon Na Ra in multiple things and she’s starting to grow on me a little as an actress. I really liked her performance in My Mister, and she was also the second female lead in one of my favorite dramas ever, Suspicious Partner. I thought she portrayed the double-edge of her character very well in this series. I was constantly wondering which side she was on. In the beginning it seemed like she would actually sell Sae Roy out, but in the end she really was loyal to him until the end. Even though it hurt when she found out Sae Roy has shifted his feelings for her to Yi Seo, she got over it like an adult and wished him lots of happiness. When she goes her own way at the end of the series, she starts her own restaurant and isn’t fazed by Yi Seo when she comes to spy on the place. Also, when Yi Seo is all like ‘Me and Sae Roy are dating now’ in her face, she was just like ‘Girl, you don’t faze me, as if I didn’t know that already, just take care of him’. And then there was that PARK BO GUM CAMEO!!! I swear, I’d seen it briefly before when checking the casting list on DramaWiki but I’d forgotten about it. I was so excited to see him, he’s such a puppy. I am loving these cameos, first Kim Soo Hyun in Crash Landing on You, now Park Bo Gum in this one… Love it.

Apparently Ahn Bo Hyun was also in Descendants of the Sun, but I don’t remember him from there (in my defense, it’s been 4 years since I saw it and it was way before I started writing reviews). Anyways, I was impressed by his performance. He gave the evil bully such layers, he was both pathetic and pure and naive and a buffoon. He was clearly born into the wrong family. I really believe that with at least one loving family member, he would’ve been less ill-behaved and less attention-deprived. I mean, the scene where his father hugs him right before exposing him… the look on his face when the Chairman is suddenly like ‘I’ve never given you a warm hug’. Geun Won actually looked scared there for a moment. As in, you could see in that second just how afraid he actually was of his father. And then he hugged him and you could see him soften into a boy who never got any attention from his father until now. And then these feelings are completely crushed. And he’s STILL not able to see his father for what he is. Or maybe he is and he’s in denial. Anyways, I found his character very double, very interesting, well done.

I didn’t know Kim Dong Hee, but for some reason he kept reminding me of Jin from BTS, lol. He’s only 21 years old, but he was able to portray a quite mature character as Geun Soo. I really liked his integer acting, and although he started doing some mean stuff to his former colleagues at Dan Bam, I never stopped having sympathy for him. I feel like he understood more than what others gave him credit for. I just wished he wouldn’t get hung up on Yi Seo, knowing how she was he should’ve known he wouldn’t stand a chance. On the other hand, I think Yi Seo treated him very unfairly, but he manages to keep his head up. Props to this young new talent!

I hadn’t seen Ryu Kyung Soo before, but I really liked Seung Kwon. Once you got to know him past his intimidating looking face, he was a really loyal friend and I think he was the first one to really get along with Tony and still kept in touch with Geun Soo after the left Dan Bam. In the end he proved himself a really cool director, staying behind while Sae Roy and Yi Seo escaped from the kidnappers. He even managed to beat his own former gangster boss – that just goes to show that he really ‘followed in Sae Roy’s footsteps’ as Sae Roy ‘raised’ him to be more than just an ex-convict.

Ma Hyun Yi was my absolute bae in this series. I was so happy to see Lee Joo Young again after Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo! She’s so gorgeous! I just wish she would’ve gotten a little more depth in her story. The whole ‘transgender’ thing was great, but it was only mentioned in words and we don’t get to see her perspective on anything, or even on how she grew up feeling she was in the wrong body or something. It was all just expressed in words, and when the little chapter was over, no-one mentioned anything about it again. I felt like introducing the theme of gender identity in a K-Drama – which is rare – could’ve been a little more of a breakthrough. Now it just felt like they put it in just for the sake of putting in some contemporary theme to make it interesting. The same went for Tony. Don’t just put in a foreign character if you’re only going to give him one line in each team meeting, and always just ‘I agree with it.’ It just felt forced. I was happy when he turned out to be the grandson of the grandma lady who turned out to be a big investor who even stood above the Chairman, but then it felt like they only created his character to make that link.
I really wished that, when choosing to address these issues, they would’ve stuck with it as one of the main themes in the story, and not just as a passing case before putting it away again. If that was their intention with this ‘inclusivity’, it wasn’t as successful as it could’ve been. Still, since it was one step in the right direction, I do appreciate that they tried. Just try even better next time.

I kind of wished the romantic relationship between Seung Kwon and Hyun Yi would have been more dug out. Like I said, the story didn’t need romance, but for them I would’ve been fine if it would’ve just happened in the background. It happens, though, because Seung Kwon is clearly fazed by Hyun Yi when she publicly comes out and he even tells Tony ‘Hyun Yi transcends the standard laws of nature by being who she is’. I’m not sure if this would be considered a compliment for a transgender person, but at least he made it clear in his own clumsy way how special he thought she was.

All in all, it was an interesting series to watch. I didn’t like it as much as I thought, though. Going by the recommendations I got from people to watch this because it was ‘so good’, maybe I was expecting a little too much of it. But it was still very good. I really liked Park Seo Joon’s acting and how unique the series was. It definitely set itself apart from other, more mainstream series. It was really educational as well, as it shows the makings of a business and what kind of tools you need for promotions and marketing and getting funds. The revenge plot as the main story through which the main character learns, rather than just lives in wrath, was very unique. And I think it was also mainly about friendship, loyalty, teamwork, and most of all: hard work pays off.

I’m not going to take some more time for the next drama, because I believe it will be a tear-jerker to say the least. You can maybe already guess which one is next. Anyways, I’ll see you again with the next 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.

The King: Eternal Monarch
(더 킹: 영원의 군주 / Deo King: Yeong-wonui Gunju)
MyDramaList rating: 10/10

Hello everyone! It’s been two weeks since my previous review, but I’m already back with a new one! #thelifeofadramaddict
Even though it’s only been two weeks, I did take my time with this drama, starting with only one episode a day since the episodes are quite lengthy and the content is very dramatic and intense.
I put this on my to-watch list because I saw it on Netflix and was surprised I never heard anything about it, even though it had a pretty well-known main cast. Reading the summary I didn’t really understand but I saw time travel and fantasy so I thought I’d check it out, since I don’t usually watch a lot of scifi/fantasy K-Drama. Let me tell you: it exceeded my expectations. It blew me away. It’s one of the best series I’ve watched in a long time. I actually rated it with a 10 on MyDramaList. And I have no idea how to write a review about this, because it’s so incredibly complicated to explain with just words. So I’m going to refrain from too many details, stick to the main story, pick out the most important characters (mostly the ones on the poster) and then just list every single thing I loved about it. Let’s go.

Okay, so first of all, let me start with the basics. The King: Eternal Monarch is a Netflix K-Drama with 16 episodes, each episode lasting about 1 hour and 10 minutes. It deals with the theme of parallel worlds. First of all, there is this magical/legendary bamboo flute called the Manpasikjeok, which according to legend has the power to open up portals to other worlds. This flute has been in the possession of the Royal Family that resides in the Kingdom of Corea. In this world, Korea has remained a monarchy, the North and South were never divided, and it’s basically a maelstrom of both traditional historical and modern Western influences. The Royal Family still lives in a palace, their most traditional staff still wears traditional garments, etc.
The story starts in 1994, when Imperial Prince Geum, real name Lee Lim (played by Lee Jung Jin) commits a coup against his brother, the King, in order to steal the Manpasikjeok. Just as he kills his brother, his little nephew the Crown Prince comes in. The little boy manages to cut the Manpasikjeok in half before his uncle attempts to strangle him. Before Lee Lim is able to kill the boy he is obstructed by a mysterious figure, dressed all in black, who enters the room and starts shooting at them. Wounded, Lee Lim is able to escape, and the mysterious figure kneels down at the little Crown Prince. Just as he gets up to leave, he drops something and the little Prince grabs a hold of it.
The object he drops is a police ID card issued in 2019, which belongs to a female police lieutenant.
25 years later, the Crown Prince is now King Lee Gon (played by Lee Min Ho) and he is still searching for the woman on the police ID, but she doesn’t seem to exist in the Kingdom. Apart from that, he is busy enough with running his Kingdom, including a necessary partnership with Prime Minister Goo Seo Ryung (played by Jung Eun Chae), who makes it obvious she’s interested in more than just being his Prime Minister. The people he is closest with are Head Court Lady Noh Ok Nam (played by Kim Young Ok) and his most faithful friend and bodyguard Jo Yeong (played by Woo Do Hwan). Yeong has been by his side ever since they were kids, they met right after Gon was crowned King when he was 8 years old.
Some time after the coup, Lee Lim’s body was found, and he has been pronounced dead since then.

However, nothing is less true. Lee Lim managed to escape the coup and stumbled upon a portal formed by two obelisks in a bamboo forest. Amazed by how the stories about the Manpasikjeok must be true, he goes through the portal and finds himself in a parallel world: the Republic of Korea (aka South-Korea as we know it in real life). Shortly after entering, he meets a man with the exact same face as his brother, whom he just killed in the Kingdom. Realizing this must be the parallel version of his family, he goes and kills his brother’s entire family, including his 8-year old song (Gon’s parallel), and himself – Lee Lim’s parallel in the Republic is in a wheelchair, unable to move by himself. He ends up using his parallel self to fake his death back in the Kingdom.
He only keeps his brother’s wife alive, Song Jeong Hye, the parallel of Gon’s mother. To use her in his future plans, he keeps her as a hostage, and she always has someone keep an eye on her. She attempts to kill herself multiple times, but Lee Lim is determined to keep her alive for some reason – this becomes apparent at the end of the series.
Lee Lim then continues to travel between the two worlds and starts creating an ‘army’ of parallel versions that all become interested in taking over their counterparts’ lives. He starts smuggling people from one world to another as children, he manipulates and blackmails people into killing their own parallels. All the while, even though 25 years have passed, he hasn’t aged at all due to the power of Manpasikjeok, and he wishes to remain immortal like this.

Lee Gon eventually ends up in the bamboo forest as well, following a strange, flute-like sound only he can hear. He finds the obelisks and goes through them, ending up in the Republic. And the first person he meets there is the woman he’s been looking for, the female police lieutenant Jeong Tae Eul (played by Kim Go Eun). He’s ecstatic to have finally found her, but she has no idea who he is. And so their love story begins. Since Lee Gon’s parallel was killed by Lee Lim when he was 8, his identity is not registered in the Republic and he’s initially locked up by Tae Eul, allthewhile trying to convince her he’s the King of the Kingdom of Corea. He even meets Yeong’s parallel, Jo Eun Sup (also Woo Do Hwan), but he doesn’t know him either.
It takes a while for Tae Eul to get used to Gon, but as she keeps discovering things about him that just don’t add up, she slowly starts opening her mind to the fact that he really might be something special. After a while, Gon is able to take her with him to the Kingdom and she’s able to see for herself. As they finally come to see eye to eye, their romance blossoms quite smoothly.
But, as Lee Gon quickly realizes Tae Eul couldn’t be the one who saved him as a child herself, he wants to find out who dropped her ID card from the future in his past – and as more and more people seem to be tied to Lee Lim in one way or another, he becomes more determined to stop his uncle from whatever he’s trying to do.

Okay, so I’ll go this far for the summary. If you’ve watched it you’ll understand how difficult it is to explain in words the intricateness of the story, since almost all characters have parallel counterparts. The drama strings it all together so brilliantly, but to write out everything in the same detail is just impossible. I really hope that I can convey the greatness of this drama properly, even if it means having to omit some minor details. Because mind you: literally EVERYTHING is important. Every single person that appears, however minor, every single person strung along by Lee Lim in this drama is important. Every single person manipulated into taking over his/her counterpart’s life, every child swapped with their parallel without being aware of what was happening; every single character in this drama is important and relevant. I’ve never seen a drama before where every single character was this important to the story. Because it really illustrated Lee Lim’s strategy. He took away seemingly insignificant people from around more significant people. He managed to convince people to give up their parenthood in order for their kids to get a better life in the other world, even if that meant being separated from them. And that is how dangerous Lee Lim was. That is how he was the ultimate bad guy, for committing the worst crime of all: literal identity theft. He violated every single rule in existence regarding identity and people’s private lives by just literally taking people out of their own lives and planting them in a different one, in a different world. Sometimes he would only correspond with one counterpart and the other one would just be killed or kidnapped or swapped into another life (the one of their parallel) without knowing anything that’s going on.
I remember especially feeling this when this pregnant lady, one of the Prime Minister’s ‘friends’, went through this. In the Republic, she was living in poverty with an abusive husband, and it didn’t take long for Lee Lim to convince her to take her parallel’s place in the Kingdom, where she was the daughter of rich pharmaceutical company’s owner or something and lived a glamorous life. In return, the rich version of her was dropped in her counterpart’s life of poverty without a single warning – she literally wakes up one day in a shabby house, wearing shabby clothes, the world around her nothing like the one she knew. That is some scary shit and no one should have the power to be able to do something like that.

As it turns out, Tae Eul does have a parallel in the Kingdom, however, as fate has it, her counterpart is a criminal who’s also terminally ill. Lee Lim gets this criminal parallel, Luna, to take over Tae Eul’s life in the Republic where she has a father and a better life. In the Republic, Luna even attempts to murder Tae Eul, but luckily she’s saved before it gets life threatening.

The love story between Gon and Tae Eul is very turbulent. Gon regularly has to travel between worlds, and their goodbyes are always hard on both of them, especially when he has to stay away for a longer time. Also, they are both remotely aware that their relationship is difficult since they are ultimately from two different worlds and Gon cannot stay in the Republic forever. There are multiple times when either one crosses over to the other’s world, voluntarily or not. When Luna crosses over to the Republic, Tae Eul finds herself drugged and kidnapped into the Kingdom, where her life is in danger either way because the police knows her face as that of a criminal’s. There were multiple scenes where I was literally on the edge of my seat, scared to bits that someone would get shot or killed – but Tae Eul is always rescued just in time, either by Gon or by someone else, luckily.

I cannot stress enough how amazingly complicated but at the same time genius the story is. After watching the first episode, I was all ‘WHAT THE FUDGE IS GOING ON’. I didn’t understand a thing. Everything from the flute to the coup to the parallel worlds is shown in such a hurry without any spoken explanation, it really felt as if I fell right in the middle of something.
However, the great thing is that everything, EVERY THING, is explained throughout the series.
Even when you would fast forward to some situation and you’re like ‘huh wait what, how are these people here’, you just had to wait a little longer and it would be shown how they got there in a flashback. It was so satisfactory to slowly but surely grasp more and more of what was going on. The way everything gradually came together was genius. The writers did an amazing job, I’m going to write their names down for any further projects they might work on because I believe they are geniuses. The whole thing, from begin to end, is wrapped up and comes full circle at the end and that is the best thing. To go from ‘What is happening’ to ‘Omg now everything makes sense!’ – they stretched everything neatly over 16 episodes and it was enough time. Honestly, it felt longer than 16 episodes, and maybe that’s what they went for: that it would also feel like a lifetime, haha. On several occasions I was so overwhelmed by the amazingness of it all I literally said to myself, ‘This series is killing me, I can’t go on’, haha. It has been a long while since a drama had this effect on me.

Because in the end, what it all comes down to, is that Gon realizes that it was him who saved himself from that coup when he was 8. He, his adult version from the future, was the one who dropped Tae Eul’s ID card with his younger self to lead himself to her. And even though that seemed to be such a obvious plot twist, it didn’t occur to me at all. Not until the point when he got the black jacket from Tae Eul and went ‘Hey, this looks familiar’ and then I was like OMG WAIT.
Also, and I’m quite proud of myself coming to this conclusion – I’m not even sure if it’s true because it’s never truly mentioned, but it has to be true: the case of the weird scars that some people would get on rainy days with thunder. We first see the scar appear on Gon’s shoulder and Lee Lim’s face, so we are led to think it has to do with crossing worlds. However, some people like Yeong/Eun Sup and Tae Eul, who also cross worlds, don’t get the scar. And then suddenly even the Prime Minister has the scar.
And at some point – literally, I had just finished an episode and was doing something else and then suddenly my mind went like ‘THAT’S IT. The scar only appears on people whose parallels/counterparts in the other world are dead.’ Because by then, they had just found the body of the Prime Minister’s counterpart.
I don’t think it was even explained in the series in the end, but it just has to be true because it was the case for every single person that got the scar. I was a bit proud of myself for figuring that out, haha.

I feel like I’m still skipping things, but you have to believe me, I’m trying to write down everything that I remember coming to my mind while watching it. I really just advise you to watch it – everything will make sense if you just watch it yourself, haha.

I’m not sure why the scars started appearing on people, except that it had to do with the Manpasikjeok. The one consistent thing was that time stood still whenever either Gon or Lim would cross worlds. And only the two of them were able to tell time stood still. So it became a constant warning of danger when there was a scene and suddenly time froze and you would be like ‘Uh oh, that means Lim crossed over again.’ What was great was that Gon figured out that each time this happened, time froze for a little while longer. As a skilled mathematician, he started cracking the code and counted the seconds of each ‘freeze’. That’s how he ultimately calculated the time when time would freeze long enough for him and Lim to come face to face: he cracked the code of the time freezes.

Let me talk a little more about Prime Minister Goo Seo Ryung. She was with reason one of the main characters, so I feel like I need to do her a little more justice. As I mentioned, she is initially kind of a ‘female second lead’ kind of character, just because she seems interested in marrying the King, but things do not go her way. As Gon discovers the other world and occasionally disappears from the Kingdom (he supposedly ‘locked himself up in his study’), she becomes more frustrated and we get to see how greedy she is. She comes from a low background, her mother sells fish at the market, and she’s paved her own way from assemblywoman to Prime Minister, dreaming of eventually becoming Queen. In her way to the top, she was even married for a while, her husband being the Chairman of KU Group, a very influential place that had access to a lot of intel on people. I’m actually not sure what exactly KU Group was, but it certainly had lots of information. Her now ex-husband is in jail, but she still visits him sometimes if she needs information since he still has contacts at KU Group (not sure how that works). Anyways, she doesn’t always play things clean, let’s keep it at that.
And then, she too is approached by Lee Lim, slowly but surely. It begins with him leaving his umbrella at her mother’s fish stall. Her mother tells her that she saw a man that looked just like Lee Lim, but of course she doesn’t believe her. Then, she starts getting strange newspapers stating the USA president Trump visited North Korea. As North Korea doesn’t exist and Trump clearly isn’t the USA president in the world of the Kingdom, Seo Ryung is puzzled by this. All the more when she spots her parallel self in one of the newspaper pictures. When she eventually meets Lim, he tells her about her other version and kind of manipulates her to take action because ‘she wouldn’t want her parallel version to take over her life, right?’ They don’t show exactly what happens or how, but at some point Tae Eul finds her parallel version in the Republic in a morgue, and we have to assume that Seo Ryung had something to do with that. But then her life starts to crumble. Her ex-husband in jail suddenly releases audio recordings of his meetings with her, in which she says things that cause her to be demoted as Prime Minister. She is suspended from her job and she doesn’t get Gon’s affection either, making her useless in even Lim’s eyes.

In the final episodes of the series, before Gon realizes he has to go back in time to revert everything, everything in the Kingdom seems to crumble down. People keep on disappearing and dying and the time is ticking: something has to be done.
First, Gon goes back in time to the coup in 1994, just to follow his own destiny of planting Tae Eul’s ID card with his younger self. Lim realizes at the same time that it had to be Gon himself back then, and he goes back to warn himself before committing the coup to kill the young Gon first, but his past self doesn’t take him seriously and even kills him #bigfail.
After Gon manages to fulfill his ‘destiny’, he still isn’t able to stop Lim from escaping and he realizes he’s stuck in 1994 as the Manpasikjeok is now with his younger self. So he has to travel through 26 years before being able to meet up with Tae Eul again. When he finally does, Tae Eul has just been stabbed by Luna and is in the hospital. They spend some wonderful time together, but then he has to go back as he’s realized nothing has changed and Lim is still able to cross and threaten people in the Republic.
Gon has to go back to even before Lim manages to get to the portal – however, this would result in a world where Lim never got to the Republic and it will therefore remove all Tae Eul’s memories of Gon, since he’ll never end up coming to the Republic either. Both aware of this, Gon has to promise Tae Eul that, when he succeeds, he will open every door in the universe to find her and come back to her again.
So the series ends with Gon succeeding in his mission – he kills Lee Lim right before he’s supposed to go through the portal for the first time and both worlds are restored to how they should’ve been without Lim’s influence. However, for some reason, Tae Eul still remembers everything. Gon travels through several parallel universes, all with their own version of Tae Eul under different names, but when he ultimately finds his way back to her he is surprised by the fact she still remembers him.
Their love story ends happily, as they meet up every weekend to visit a different world and time together (now that Gon has the Manpasikjeok in one piece) and this is how they truly live happily ever after until they’re old.

It’s time to talk about my absolute favorite character of the entire series, the man that has broken and healed my heart, and who gave me more feels about any character I’ve had in a long while: Kang Shin Jae. Shin Jae (played by Kim Kyung Nam) is Tae Eul’s friend and police colleague. He seems a bit stoic, but it’s clear from the start that he has feelings for her. But he’s so much more than just the ‘second male lead’. Shin Jae grew up in a less than desirable family, his mother gambles a lot and his father is in jail. Apparently, as a child he was in an accident and in a coma for a while before he miraculously woke up – but he doesn’t really remember anything about this.
When Gon starts frequenting Tae Eul and their work space at the police office, he starts remembering things that he can’t place. He remembers seeing Gon as a child on television crying in his royal robes. When he confronts Gon and Yeong about this, Gon quickly realizes that Shin Jae must have originally come from the Kingdom. As it is revealed later on, the person we get to know as Shin Jae throughout the series is actually the real Shin Jae’s parallel from the Kingdom, named Hyun Min. The real Shin Jae – the boy who got in a coma after an accident – was not going to wake up anytime soon and Lee Lim made a deal with the boy’s father that he would get him a replacement for his son in return for the use of a care center. So the real Shin Jae was kept hidden in a care center that was monitored by Lee Lim’s people, while Hyun Min was taken from his mother in the Kingdom (with her approval) to replace him. The real Shin Jae’s mother wasn’t even aware of this plan, she always lived under the impression that her comatose son one day magically woke up. Hyun Min’s mother in the Kingdom, also in a deal with Lee Lim, got to work as a palace worker under a different name. Lee Lim kept sending her pictures of her son in secret, but when he finally sends her poison to attempt murder on the King as her final mission, she chooses to drink the poison herself since she doesn’t want to be a part of Lim’s plans anymore. She survives, fortunately, and confesses the truth to Gon. In the end, Gon even lets her meet with Hyun Min one more time.
But honestly, Shin Jae/Hyun Min has stolen my heart. I really have never seen this actor before, but he robbed me of my heart. At some point I had it so bad that I would just start crying whenever he appeared on screen because his life was just so unfair. He literally lived another person’s life for as long as he could remember, in fact he didn’t even remember otherwise. He forgot who he used to be, his whole life turned out to be a lie. On top of that, the woman he loved didn’t love him back and he had to arrest his own mother and… ugh, do I need to keep going? His whole existence was so pitiful but he was such a good guy and it just broke my heart. Even when Lim approached him he refused to work with him, risking his own life. I was so scared that he would be killed somewhere at the end of the series, but luckily his whole life was put back together as it should have been.
Gon even ended up saving young Shin Jae from getting into that accident, even though it was by coincidence! In one of the trips Gon and Tae Eul make when they’re travelling together he meets young Shin Jae and talks with him for a minute and then suddenly that car crashes right behind him and I went ‘OMG SHIN JAE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE IN THAT ACCIDENT AND GON SAVED HIM’. Meine Gute, my heart.

When Gon puts the world back how it should be without Lim’s influence, we see most clearly how Lim messed up so many people’s lives. People that used to be dead are still alive and families are back together. Shin Jae never got into the accident and becomes kind of a big shot (we see him stepping into a car with his own driver). Hyun Min is back in the Kingdom where he actually seems to have a chance at romance with Tae Eul’s parallel Luna, who is now Goo Seo Kyung since she was adopted by Seo Ryung’s mom as a little girl (after she attempted to steal something at her fish market). Seo Ryung is in jail because she robbed people of taxes when she was an assemblywoman. (I liked how the guy who used to be her secretary was now still by her side as her correctional officer at the prison.) Eun Sup is married to Na Ri while Yeong in the Kingdom is having a secret relationship with Seong Ah (I forgot to mention her! Na Ri/Seong Ah (played by Kim Yong Ji) was a person that existed in both worlds, Na Ri was one of Tae Eul’s friends who ran a milk tea shop in the Republic and Seong Ah was a Public Affairs Officer at the palace in the Kingdom – Na Ri and Eun Sup & Seong Ah and Yeong are interested in each other in both worlds). People who commited crimes as a part of their allegiance to Lee Lim ended up still committing the crimes, but received proper punishment for it – Lim wasn’t there to cover their tracks or help them get away with it. Press Secretary Mo became Prime Minister – she was one of the most loyal people at the King’s side, besides the Head Court Lady.

The only thing that still remains a little bit of a mystery to me is the boy with the yo-yo. In both worlds, Lee Lim’s people had their secret hideout in a bookshop. In front of this bookshop, there was often a young boy with a yo-yo. He seemed to know a lot about what was going on. He is seen talking to several random people, from Luna to Song Jeong Hye, saying that there is only one of him and that he too travels worlds to ‘warn people and restore balance’. In the end, when all is restored, we see how his parallel is restored as well and his adult version is a guy who has appeared sporadically in the background in both worlds, both in the Republic and in the Kingdom. I still don’t really understand who he was or how this worked, because the things he said were always a little mysterious and he appeared as different people through time and world. But in some way I also like that he remains a bit of an enigma. It’s one of the reasons I liked his character, because you don’t really know who he is, he’s just ‘the boy with the yo-yo’.

I would like to make some special mentions now. First of all, for actor Woo Do Hwan, who played both Yeong and Eun Sup. The only other role I’ve seen of this actor was the male lead in The Great Seducer and in this series he played two completely different characters. It made me respect him so much as an actor, because he was also completely different from the role he played in TGS. He was amazing. I was a little surprised to Yeong’s stoicness since he was shown to be so expressive with his emotions as a child, but he pulled it off so well, especially in moments when he had to pretend to be Eun Sup or was caught off guard in some way. He was able to play Yeong pretending to be Eun Sup and vice versa and that was amazing. He gets full marks for his performance in this drama, I’m really starting to like this actor.

Grandma Kim Young Ok!!! I love how she’s still alive and kicking and her role in this drama was so beautiful. She was the grandma that everyone needed. I love how her part in the story became so important, and also when it was revealed that she too had travelled worlds: Gon’s grandfather (while using the Manpasikjeok) had saved her from the Korean War in 1950 in the Republic by taking her to the Kingdom, a place without wars. And she had devoted her whole life to serving his family after that. It was so beautiful that she seemed to be this old lady who only just worried about Gon, while in reality she knew much more of what was going on, when he started disappearing she must have known he was travelling worlds as well as his grandfather had with the Manpasikjeok. And when she came to terms with Tae Eul in the Kingdom, she even asked her what had come of the Korean War, causing Tae Eul to realize she was from there as well. Everything was just so beautifully intricate, I really loved her character.

PRINCE BUYONG. Speaking of lovable grandparent figures, Prince Buyong, or Lee Jong In (played by Jun Moo Song) was a relative of Gon whose whole family lineage was crumbled after the coup. I believe he was Gon’s uncle, but I’m not sure if he was Lim’s older brother or if he was from another branch of the family. Anyways, he ended up having to banish his whole family from having any right to the throne, except for his granddaughter who was only mentioned by name. His own son actually turns out to be a traitor, as Gon discovers he is the one who helped Lim escape on the night of the cup. But Prince Buyong always remained loyal to Gon, even when it became clear that he knew the truth about the body that was found that everyone thought to be Lee Lim’s. He realized, as a doctor, that it wasn’t actually Lim, but kept it a secret and he accepted his punishment for that.
I was so angry when Lim killed him. He was the nicest grandpa ever and he and the Head Court Lady basically raised Gon by themselves. His friendship with the Head Court Lady was also really lovely. I was so happy when, when Gon restored the world, he was the one to stop Hyun Min’s mother from committing suicide along with her son and offered to help them (in the original version Lee Lim was the one to stop them and manipulate Hyun Min’s mom into sending her son to the Republic to take Shin Jae’s place).

Apart from the interesting genre and themes of this drama that prompted me to watch it, I also really liked the fact Kim Go Eun was in it. After Cheese in the Trap and Goblin I’ve really come to like her as an actress (plus she’s gorgeous?!?!) and I also really liked her character in this series. I also liked how, when Gon visited multiple parallel universes, he kept meeting different versions of her, meaning she got to play a lot of different characters, not just two. I am definitely keeping an eye out for more of her projects, she’s a great actress. Again different from characters she played before, she showed yet another side to her and it keeps amazing me how versatile the actors in this drama were. I think it’s quite a challenge to play multiple double roles.

Honestly, and I’m probably stating an unpopular opinion here, I’m not a big fan of Lee Min Ho. I never really warmed up to him, I mean, I didn’t particularly dislike him or anything, but I just don’t have a very strong opinion about him. In Boys Before Flowers and Personal Preference, he was okay, but he was completely ruined for me in The Heirs and after that I couldn’t watch anything with him for a while. His character there was the epitome of toxic masculinity and it made me physically nauseous watching him. After that, I saw Legend of the Blue Sea, another very good drama in which he didn’t bother me as much, luckily. But the main problem I have with him is that he’s always casted in the same kind of male lead role, always excuding a kind of over-confident dominance (especially towards the female lead). And I think I was able to stomach his character in this series because of its strong female lead. Tae Eul was more than able to stand her ground and Gon didn’t have to constantly protect her, he knew she was able to take care of herself and that’s why he was also able to give her space. Within the amazingness of this drama as a whole, I really didn’t have time to be bothered by him at all, but I did realize I still sometimes had difficulty keeping my eyes fixed on him for a longer time. I don’t know, I guess I’m still not completely over my allergy of him. I just feel like I haven’t seen any real versatility of him as an actor in the several things I’ve seen with him. He’s always casted as someone from a rich background, or at least someone with a high social status, nobility even. He wouldn’t be casted a guy-next-door person, and I find that a little bit of a bummer. I would like to see him in a completely different type of character role. I understand that with his appearance, and since he’s also very tall and stuff, it would be weird for him to play a very inferior introverted character, but nonetheless I’m still waiting for the drama where I can see a different side to his acting.
It was nice to see him acting alongside Kim Young Ok again, she was also the head maid of his role in Boys Before Flowers.

By the way, on AsianWiki the list of characters and counterparts is listed very clearly, per time period and world and group, so if you’re curious to see more faces to the names and how they differed in appearance, please check it out!
It’s really helpful, haha.

All in all, this was one of the greatest dramas I’ve seen ever. And not just among K-Dramas, among series I’ve watched in general. It was great in story, plot, character development, design, cinematography, acting, dialogue, construction, build-up, balance… I can keep going. I can’t think of a single thing I disliked about it. And that’s rare because I always seem to find something, haha. But really, BRAVO. It had everything. Science fiction, parallel worlds, time travel, doppelgangers, and at the same time suspense, romance, drama, thriller. I really love how they came up with the idea of the Kingdom of Corea and how much it differed from the Republic. They thought of everything, they made political decisions as to why they moved the Royal Capital to Busan instead of Seoul, and where in history the two worlds had started to grow apart. They made up an entire fictional society with its own rules and political system. It was like a multiverse haha, showing there were even more parallel universes out there in the end. The versatility of the story and the themes was really unique.
In one of the earlier episodes, there was this really serious sequence where some Japanese military boats trespassed on Korean waters and they had to drive them back with warning shots. During that part it felt like a completely different kind of series, as the political and military sides of the Kingdom’s society were highlighted.
And at some point I even understood the intro sequence, which I never skipped. I finally saw how it wasn’t just a sequence of beautiful graphics – it actually tells the story of the Manpasikjeok and the parallel worlds in just images. They thought of everything. It’s absolutely genius. It was written exactly so that everything would fall into place at the end. It literally comes full circle.
I really enjoyed every single moment of watching this, the plot twists had me gasping for breath and clapping my hands and I cried and laughed and everything. I’m a little sad it’s over, but I’m also glad to start on a new drama, a new adventure.
This story has reminded me once again why I love watching series: you never know when you’ll come across a hidden gem like this that completely blows your mind. I’m so glad I watched it. It’s going to the top of my favorites list and I very much recommend it to everyone.

I’ll be back with a new review. Just a hint: I’m sticking to Netflix for a while 😉

See you! ^^