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.
365: Repeat the Year
(365: 운명을 거스르는 1년 / 365: Unmyeongeul Geoseuleuneun 1nyeon / 365: One Year of Defying Fate)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10
Time for a new review! Writing reviews has been a bit challenging the past few months. I had to do all kinds of other things in-between that reduced my drama-watching time and ended up making me a bit disconnected from what I was watching, since my mind was constantly elsewhere. However, one of the things that took up a lot of my weekly time and energy has now come to an end, and it’s been a while since I’ve felt this refreshed to give a review my undivided attention. I was quite excited when my Wheel of Fortune app picked out this one, since it’s actually a Korean remake of a Japanese show that I’ve watched and reviewed before and I was really curious to see what the Korean version would be like. I’ll try not to make this too much of a comparative analysis, but I don’t think that’ll be an issue since this remake is very different and perfectly lends itself for a proper stand-alone review. Let’s just dive into it, shall we?
365: Repeat the Year is an MBC K-Drama which you can either watch in 12 episodes of little over an hour, or 24 back-to-back episodes of about 35 minutes each. I started watching it in the former format on Dramacool but then switched to BiliBili since DC suddenly wouldn’t load the episodes anymore.
It’s a Korean remake of the Japanese series Repeat (2018), which was adapted from the Japanese novel of the same title by Inui Kurumi (2004). The story revolves around a group of people that are invited by a mysterious host to participate in a “reset”, which will allow them to travel one full year back in time. In doing so, they get the chance to right a wrong, fix a mistake, fulfill a regret, or deal with anything else that happened in the past year.
While everything initially seems peachy after the reset and everyone is happy they did it, it doesn’t take long for strange things to start happening. One by one, the “resetters” find themselves taken out by someone that seems to know about their circumstances, and they realize that they’ve gotten involved in something potentially very dangerous. Were they really selected at random for this reset? Was there really not any link between them whatsoever? And what was their host’s real intention of bringing them along on this journey?
I’d like to start out by saying that I enjoyed this series a lot. I remember being very sceptical about the Japanese version because it was very typically angsty and cruel, but I was definitely not disappointed by how this remake dealt with the more serious aspects of the story. They somehow managed to retain the essence of the original story while completely changing the characters and their respective storylines. It kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the whole thing. Even if I took a longer break between episodes, as soon as I started watching again it immediately pulled me back in. I’m not even lying when I say that this remake actually fixed most of my issues with the original show. It dealt with all the intricate plot lines so well and fleshed out the characters and their personal stories way better than Repeat did. Admittedly, there were some loose ends and things that I still didn’t fully understand and would’ve liked to have explained a bit better, but overall I thought this was a great example of a remake that easily exceeded the original. The cast was amazing, the storytelling was great, the music was cool. I really enjoyed it.
Since there are so many characters in this show, I’d like to just go over the resetters one by one to talk about their personalities and backstories. I’m not going to go into too much detail about how exactly everyone was connected, because this is not supposed to be a detailed summary. I just want to point out the aspects of each character that I liked or that jumped out to me, here and there with a link to their supposedly alternate characters from Repeat.
First of all, we have our male protagonist, Detective Ji Hyung Joo (played by Lee Joon Hyuk). Hyung Joo is a Lieutenant at the Violent Crimes department of the Makang Police Station in Seoul. He’s good at his job and gets along well with the rest of his team. He’s particularly close with Detective Park Sun Ho (played by Lee Sung Wook), who is like an older brother to him. Apart from that, he also enjoys reading a crime webtoon called “Hidden Killer”, although he keeps missing the chance to get an autograph from the artist, Maru. Hyung Joo is a young, smart guy with his heart in the right place and a strong sense of justice. He can be quite reckless when it comes to protecting the people he cares about. This aspect of his character also clearly resonates in his reason for going along with the reset: a killer with a grudge against him ends up killing Sun Ho instead, and Hyung Joo desperately wishes to undo this. I loved how the bond between Hyung Joo and Sun Ho was established so powerfully from the get-go that it already physically hurt to see Hyung Joo find Sun Ho’s body, even when I had only known the characters for less than one episode.
I really liked Hyung Joo as a main character. He was in a very useful position as a detective, as this allowed him to actually set things in motion and secretly investigate people because he had access to certain systems and tools at this workplace. I thought he embodied a very assuring balance; he could switch between being genuinely nice and empathetic to being businesslike and serious when it was necessary.
I also really liked the choice to add his work team as a unit of supporting characters. Even when Hyung Joo started acting strange and even got suspected of being a serial killer, they were always on his side and even helped him hide despite knowing that they were basically aiding a potential criminal. I really enjoyed the scenes at the police station because I loved the dynamic between all the team members, from the bond between Hyung Joo and Sun Ho to Team Leader Heo Jang Il (Ryu Tae Ho) and the subtle office romance between Jin Sa Kyung (Yoon Hye Ri) and Nam Soon Woo (Go Yoon Hwan/Ryeo Woon). When things got tense towards the end I actually became increasingly scared that something would happen to the other team members, but luckily that wasn’t the case.
Anyways, I guess I just liked that this remake chose to feature some main characters that actually had resources to immediately investigate stuff as soon as things got weird. That’s actually something that bothered me about the original show, because although I believe there was a police officer – or a former one – the main characters in Repeat didn’t seem to have a single clue what they were doing or how to do anything. It was a power move from the start to make one of the main characters a police detective, as this enabled him to immediately take action in one way or another.
Let’s move on to our female protagonist, Shin Ga Hyun (played by Nam Ji Hyun). Ga Hyun is the artist of the “Hidden Killer” webtoon that Hyung Joo likes so much. She uses the pseudonym “Maru”, which is the name of her dog (the cutest fluffiest thing). In the original timeline, a hit-and-run car accident has left Ga Hyun in a wheelchair, feeling permanently bitter and sad despite the success of her webtoon and the support of her artistic team, which consists of her boyfriend (manager) and best friend (assistant). She sees the reset as a chance to avoid the car accident and decides to go along with it. After initially being over the moon when she gets to walk again, the tables quickly turn when she finds out that said boyfriend and best friend have been having an affair behind her back for a while. Not long after, the best friend dies in a hit-and-run that’s very similar to the one Ga Hyun originally got in, taking her place as it were. This immediately brought me back to the original show, as I remembered the focus on how you couldn’t change fate, and how it would come back in one way or another or happen to someone else even if you yourself managed to dodge it. In any case, I think it’s safe to say that Ga Hyun is one of the first – or maybe the first – to realize resetting didn’t solve all her problems.
Luckily, she finds a nice new friend in Hyung Joo very quickly. They first bond over her dog Maru – in the original timeline, Maru ran away and Hyung Joo had found him and taken him in – and then over the revelation that she is the artist of “Hidden Killer”. As the writer of a crime webtoon, Ga Hyun proves herself to be a useful aide to Hyung Joo as well, and they start their own little investigation on the reset and all the people involved.
I liked Ga Hyun’s character. I was mainly glad that she was the complete opposite of the Japanese female lead, who I found downright insufferable in her passive naivety. Ga Hyun was definitely a tough cookie and I was positively surprised by how well she handled dangerous situations. She never became the pitiful damsel in distress and I kept applauding the way she was able to keep a straight face against the killer even when she knew exactly who he was. I think one of her most defining qualities was that she just couldn’t sit still when people were in danger. She kept going from place to place to check in on everyone because she couldn’t bring herself to stay inside when she knew stuff was going down.
I thought Ga Hyun and Hyung Joo made a really good team, not just because they cooperated well together, but also because they shared the same compassion towards the other resetters, no matter how uncooperative some of them were, and wanted to protect as many people as they could. I thought that for Ga Hyun, this aspect of her personality came out the most in how she dealt with Se Rin – she just couldn’t help but care about her and feel responsible for her safety, no matter how lable and unreliable Se Rin was.
Another thing I liked about Ga Hyun’s character was that they kept in the relevance of her webtoon writing. Sometimes these things just kind of disappear, like when an occupation is introduced in the beginning but then you never actually see the person at work throughout the story. I liked that Ga Hyun was shown drawing occasionally, and that she even started incorporating her own situation into her webtoon. I liked the part where she asked her readers to help her figure out the quotes on the cards that they kept receiving. They could have actually done that a bit more, like having her draw something that sparked new inspiration for the investigation or something, but I did like that they at least kept it in a little bit, because that was the whole point of making her a webtoon artist specializing in crime stories. It was cool to see that she was able to put her experience and expertise as a researcher of criminal procedures to good use. Honestly, I was surprised when she pulled up that phone record list so easily, I thought that couldn’t have been easy, especially for someone who only writes about crime, lol.
In any case, I appreciated that Ga Hyun was such a decisive and active female lead character that didn’t just sit and wait for things to blow over. She was actually willing to put herself in danger in order to uncover the truth about the reset and help her fellow resetters. No matter how afraid she was for her own death at times, she really defined herself by sacrificing herself for Hyung Joo in the end, helping him change his fate at the cost of her own. Her determination and activeness was really refreshing.
On a side note, I can’t stress enough how happy I am with how the remake established the relationship between Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun as friends and partners. I remember how troubled I was by the forced romantic storyline between the leads in Repeat, because it just made everything even more messy and problematic. Honestly, I still stand by my point that there is no real space for romance in this story. The idea of forming a romantic relationship amongst all the death and danger going on just feels wrong to me, and I still don’t understand why it was added in the original version. This was definitely one of the things that the Korean remake “fixed”, in my opinion. While there definitely was a subtle development in the relationship between Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun, the nature of their affection for each other was very professionally put aside to allow all the focus to go to the dramatic developments of the main story, and I couldn’t have agreed more with that decision. For the story, their relationship didn’t need to be more than a solid partnership in which they gradually learned to trust each other. Even if they did have romantic feelings for each other, it would’ve made way more sense for them to wait until everything was over before possibly taking the next step, and I feel like that’s what they went for. In the final scene where Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun meet again after the final reset and Ga Hyun doesn’t remember anything, they definitely share a spark that suggests they might keep in touch as more than just two people who could occasionally help each other out. I liked that they kept it at that, introducing the possibility of a romantic tension between them at the end, instead of letting their relationship become a disturbing factor in-between all the ongoing drama throughout.
The first real change from the original version came with the introduction of Lee Shin (played by Kim Ji Soo), the host of the reset. Lee Shin is introduced as a psychiatrist, and claims that she, after going through several resets herself, has decided to pick out a selection of random people to join her for once. The resetters are asked to gather at her own private clinic, Zian Clinic, where she also offers them psychological support in the aftermath of the reset. She encourages them to come visit her whenever and seems genuinely concerned when the resetters start getting taken out.
Seeing how different this character was from the original version, I was really curious to see if Lee Shin’s intentions and true purpose of hosting the reset would also be different. By introducing her as an empathetic, dare I say motherly person that cared about giving other people the same opportunity as her and sincerely hoped they would make the most of the reset, the revelation of her true colors was much more of a twist than with the guy from Repeat, who didn’t even try to conceal his shadiness from the start.
Because her introduction was so different from the original, including the revelation that she was a mother who used the resets to try and cure her sick young daughter Yeong (Kim Ha Eun), I have to admit I was initially a little disappointed when she revealed her “true colors” to the group at the cafe. I guess I subconsciously didn’t want her to be that same kind of psycho who didn’t actually care one bit about any of the resetters and just wanted to fill her own time with some entertainment, looking on to see if any of the resetters would be able to escape their fated death. When she started laughing maniacally I just went “ugh okay then”. I don’t like it when the bad guy starts laughing, because it’s such a stereotypical thing to do and it usually just takes away the actual intimidating effect for me.
Having said that, in hindsight, I really love what they did with Lee Shin’s character. The final plot twist that she was actually being fooled and manipulated as well went beyond my expectations and I liked that there ultimately was a redeeming factor that set her apart from the original version. Although I did kind of like the idea that she was the sole main villain of the story, it made a big impact on me seeing her realize the truth of her situation and decide to be a better person for her daughter in the end by quitting the resets. I really liked Lee Shin’s character development and the way she was written to continuously make both the resetters and the viewers waver in their suspicions towards her.
While the whole concept of the reset is the same in both versions, there are some minor differences in the setup that I wish to point out. The most obvious difference is that the Japanese version of the time leap is called “repeat” and the Korean version is called “reset”. In the Japanese version, the repeaters are able to go back ten months, in the Korean version the resetters are able to go back a whole year, exactly 365 days. The size of the group is also slightly different, eight people in the original version and ten in this one. Apart from these minor differences, I feel like the Korean remake dealt with a lot of things very differently, from the characters to the storylines to the connections between everyone.
I’d like to go over all the other resetters and relevant important characters now, in the order of their deaths, and go over their contribution to the story, combined with some comparisons to some characters or elements from the Japanese version where relevant.
The first person to die after the reset is Park Yeong Gil (played by Jeon Seok Ho), a package delivery guy who wanted to use the reset to win the lottery after Lee Shin gave them the winning numbers during their introduction. While his death was pretty much identical to the truck driver character from the Japanese version, Park Yeong Gil actually remained a significant character in the story through flashbacks. I really appreciated that he was still featured throughout the story as they were piecing everything together, especially since we didn’t exactly get to know his character very well before he died so quickly. He even got some additional backstory with the twin brother and his relation to the unfortunate delivery guy who ended up getting killed in his place. I liked that they kept bringing up his name and kept including him in their investigation notes instead of just dismissing him as the poor guy who happened to reset to the wrong place at the wrong time and never mentioning him again. The way his character was treated made me feel as if the writers really put a lot of thought and effort into the characters and wanted to make sure that everyone was relevant to the full picture even after they died.
The second person to go was Choi Kyung Man (played by Im Ha Ryong), a security guard whose main objective with the reset was also to win the lottery – I guess some people are just very simple-minded, lol. He suddenly passes away due to what is passed off as a heart attack in the middle of the street. Just like with Park Yeong Gil, we didn’t really get to see much of his character as he died before getting the chance to meet up with the others at the cafe, but he was repeatedly mentioned and kept resurfacing in Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun’s investigation. Again, I liked that they didn’t just disappear completely after they passed away, but were revisited through flashbacks or visits to their family members to verify the circumstances around their deaths. Honestly, I still found it a bit sad that there were a couple of characters that we just didn’t get to know before they were taken out. It really felt like they only started invoking empathy for the resetters once the core group that gathered at the cafe was established, and the people who didn’t participate in those meet-ups were kind of left out of the team spirit or something. As there wasn’t much opportunity for us to really get to know Park Yeong Gil or Choi Kyung Man better, I thought it at least was a nice compensation that they weren’t forgotten as the story unfolded.
The third person to be taken out was Seo Yeon Soo (played by Lee Shi Ah), and she was the first character revealed to have a connection to another resetter in the original timeline. As it turns out, she was the one responsible for Ga Hyun’s hit-and-run. In the new timeline, where Ga Hyun’s friend got hit instead, it was Yeon Soo’s fiancé who was driving as Yeon Soo was determined not to get involved in the accident again. I’m not entirely sure what was the matter with Yeon Soo, although I feel like she was trapped in an abusive relationship and wanted to use the reset to get away from her fiancé. The conflict between her and Ga Hyun after the latter finds out the truth about the hit-and-run is the first real “character arc” we have, and this gives Yeon Soo’s death a heavier weight than Park Yeong Gil and Choi Kyung Man because her death was the first to raise the suspicion of murder, at least among Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun. After her death, they start seeing a pattern in how the resetters suddenly start dropping like flies one after the other. I actually thought Yeon Soo was quite an interesting character and it was a pity that she didn’t get to live a bit longer. I would’ve liked to see how she could’ve contributed to the group and the investigation, because despite being a victim of an abusive relationship she did seem quite fiery and mentally strong. If it weren’t for her involvement in Ga Hyun’s accident, who knows, the two of them might’ve even become friends.
The fourth person to die was Cha Jeung Seok (played by Jung Min Sung), a fund manager. With a wife and daughter in Canada and hating his job, he used the reset to quit his job before he got fired and planned to go to Canada to live with his family. I initially thought he would be the alternate to the salaryman character from the Japanese version, and that he and Jae Yeong would basically be that duo with the dark web activities, but again I was glad that the remake didn’t just copy-paste all the events from the original. Having said that, there was definitely more to Cha Jeung Seok than met the eye, because he did have the power to order goons around to rough people up that owed him money. He kind of fell under the same category as Seo Yeon Soo, as in that he was one of the resetters that got a bit more coverage before he was killed, in his case under the pretense of a suicide by carbon dioxide poisoning. The circumstances of his death raised even more suspicion under the resetters as he had literally told them the day before that he was going to move to Canada.
After Cha Jeung Seok’s death, there is a temporary lull in the killings, and this is when the remaining resetters start meeting up at the cafe more often, and Lee Shin reveals the truth behind the reset and the fact that they all died in their original timelines. From this point on, the story intensifies as the remaining resetters realize someone is after them and they are all destined to die in a certain order. Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun’s investigation takes a more serious turn from here on as well.
The next victim is Kim Se Rin (played by Lee Yoo Mi) and her death takes a while to unfold because she actually gets a full-fledged arc to reveal her true colors. Being possibly the youngest of the group (I guess she and Jae Yeong are around the same age?), Se Rin always presents herself as the most innocent and scared. With her weak constitution and anxious predisposition she quickly becomes everyone’s “precious little sister”. After learning about the girl’s pitiful story of being the disappointment of her family, Ga Hyun develops a special affection towards her, and she starts visiting Se Rin whenever the girl feels scared. However, when Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun start asking around after several weird attempted attacks on Se Rin, they find out that she isn’t actually as innocent as she pretends to be. In fact, she has serious mental health issues and suffers from Munchausen Syndrome, in which someone pretends to be sick and miserable to gain attention and compassion from others to feel loved and wanted. Everything she told the others, about her family issues and her weak health and her desire to pass the SAT to make her parents proud, has been nothing but lies. Her happy relationship with her boyfriend Choi Yeong Woong (Lee Tae Bin) also turns out to be a lie – she’s actually obsessed with him to the point that she moved into the house next to his and staged an assaulted attack on herself to get him to come back to her.
After several boy-cries-wolf attempts to get Ga Hyun to help her out, Se Rin is taken out the one time that Ga Hyun doesn’t pick up the phone out of spite. This leaves Ga Hyun feeling strangely guilty despite knowing that Se Rin was beyond reasoning and just needed a lot of mental help.
I honestly did not expect Se Rin’s character to escalate like this. I did feel like she probably wasn’t as innocent as she seemed and there would be more to her, but this was wild. Nevertheless, I actually really liked how her character was fleshed out. I actually have a theory I’d like to share here: y’all remember Machida Yuuko, the psychotic stalker girlfriend from the original version? I like to think that the writers put a bit of Yuuko in Se Rin’s character, but instead of making her a typical psycho, they attributed her issues to an actual mental illness. Explaining her obsessive behavior this way was much more effective than just introducing her as a girl who was crazy for no reason. I actually appreciated how Se Rin’s character was established because she was really just a victim of her own illness. She didn’t see how her behavior was wrong, and this made me feel strangely empathetic towards her until the end. She just needed help. I honestly don’t believe she ever meant to harm anyone and no matter how delusional she was, she really loved Yeong Woong. She even went against his past bullies to stand up for him and ended up giving up her own chance to escape her death because she convinced herself she couldn’t live without him. I was really impressed by her arc, to be honest, it made her death possibly the most pitiful of them all. No matter how messed up she was, she was nothing more than a troubled young girl with nowhere to go and no one to turn to, and it was undeniably sad that she had to end up this way.
Another character that was fleshed out considerably throughout the story was Bae Jung Tae (played by Yang Dong Geun). Although he pretty much disappears in the direct aftermath of the reset, Bae Jung Tae starts reappearing throughout several arcs in the story. He is a gambler, and the first character revealed to be in personal contact with Lee Shin. While definitely not a cuddly teddybear, Bae Jung Tae does have one weakness: his younger sister. He went through the reset to get her out of her abusive relationship and into the hospital to get her heart disease treated before it was too late – in the original timeline he only found out about that when she was already beyond treatment. Lee Shin helped him get the best care for his sister through her connections at the hospital (probably due to her own sick daughter’s check-ups), and in exchange Bae Jung Tae helps her out by keeping an eye on the other resetters. Despite being the most obvious person to point at when there’s been an assault, Bae Jung Tae isn’t actually guilty of as many charges as he is attributed, for example as we eventually find out that his alleged assault on Se Rin was orchestrated by Se Rin herself to get Yeong Woong’s attention. I already thought this was weird, because it didn’t seem like Bae Jung Tae would go out of his way to follow her to her house and beat the shit out of her only because she once accused him of being a murderer. Of course, he gets killed just when he has something important to tell Hyung Joo, and the recording of his final moments reveal yet another plot twist: the suspicion that a detective (be it or be it not Hyung Joo) is the killer.
As soon as Go Jae Yeong (played by Ahn Seung Gyoon) appeared on screen I got flashbacks of the cram school student from the original version who posted videos of himself assaulting women online. I was already bracing myself for another messed up youngster, but luckily Jae Yeong’s character didn’t have much in common with that guy except probably being around the same age. It is ultimately revealed that Jae Yeong is the son of a high-status politician (I can’t remember if it was a minister or a governor, but something along those lines), and because he’s quite the troublemaker, his father is always busy putting out his fires behind him. Jae Yeong is a pro-gamer and spends a lot of time behind a monitor, either at home or at a gaming room. From the start, he seems to be the least excited about socializing with the others, and he’s the first to start thinking up dark theories, for example that they’re dying in the order in which they stood up when they first met and stuff like that. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of compassion for his fellow resetters and I’m convinced that he would’ve always chosen to save himself no matter what. He frequently gets himself involved in other cases, by sneaking around and recording stuff only to anonymously send those through to the others to spread confusion and fear.
Honestly, despite the fact that he was a bully and he clearly liked instilling fear in others if it meant coming out stronger himself, Jae Yeong was definitely out of his depth here, just as much as the others were. He wasn’t prepared for the severe danger he found himself in, no matter how much he tried to brush it off and act cool. It was kind of enlightening to see him completely crumble when the killer finally got his hands on him. I’m not saying this in a sadistic way, but I did appreciate that we got to see how scared he actually could get in the end. All the murders were cruel and unnecessary, and Jae Yeong deserved a better life just as much as everyone else did, so even though he was kind of a prick, he still didn’t deserve to get pulled into this stuff at his age.
Finally, the resetter who lasted the longest after Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun, and who had the biggest plot twist of all: Mr. Hwang Noh Seob (played by Yoon Joo Sang). As the eldest resetter, he initially gives off the vibe of a kind elderly gentleman who is just trying to get by running his cozy cafe (which is ironically called “36.5°“) and caring for his wife, who is allegedly in a sanatorium and suffers from dementia. We never meet his wife, she only appears in a flashback of Mr. Hwang’s retelling of why he was present at a certain crime scene. During their meet-ups at the cafe, he always seems like the most concerned and compassionate man who’s shocked to hear what has happened to the other resetters. Honestly, even though I did find a bit strange that he was the last resetter to get attacked even though he would’ve probably been the easiest one to deal with as he lived alone and was just a “defenseless old man”, I never expected him to be revealed as “the Professor” that Lee Shin had been referring to, let alone that he was the actual true mastermind behind the resets. I will discuss this part in a bit more detail later on since I still have some ambiguities about this part, but let’s just say that he fooled everyone the most out of everyone. He was never just an innocent resetter, he was actually the one orchestrating the resets. Not only that, it is ultimately revealed that he and his secretary Ms. Song Ji Hyun (played by Ahn Min Young) – who had been posing as Lee Shin’s secretary at Zian Clinic all this time – were actually responsible for killing Lee Shin’s daughter Yeong at the hospital, on the same day at the same time, in order to convince Lee Shin that it really was an inescapable fate and to persuade her into going through the reset every single time to “try again”.
I’m sure there’s tons of foreshadowing and I would see the signs if I rewatched it now, but it was very subtle and it still caught me completely off guard. I remember that there was a scene in the beginning where he visited Zian Clinic and saw little Yeong playing and greeted her, after which the little girl ran away. Of course he knew her, he had been treating her at the hospital, but it also showed that Yeong wasn’t particularly keen on him, otherwise she would’ve probably just politely greeted him. All the things that Lee Shin told the resetters about her sadistic hobby to watch them try to change their fate were all the Professor’s words, as he was the one who’d encouraged her to take other people with her on the next reset.
As for Ms. Song, she was strung along by the Professor on the false promise that he would take her back on a reset to visit her deceased daughter, conveniently leaving out that a reset could only take you back one year while her daughter died three years earlier. Ms. Song apparently knew nothing about the resets, and just followed the Professor’s and Lee Shin’s orders out of fear because they seemed to know so much about her.
In contrast to the Japanese version, this remake also dealt with the deaths of two people that didn’t even participate in the reset, which made everything even crazier and scarier.
The first of these was a young woman named So Hye In (played by Kim Ha Kyung). She was present during the very first meeting of the resetters – meaning she got invited by Lee Shin – but didn’t show up for the actual event, meaning she chose not to participate. I mean, I couldn’t blame her, since she was very pregnant at that point. Even though she doesn’t join in on the reset, her character does appear in the new timeline, not pregnant this time, as the owner of the flower shop that creates and sends all the bouquets to the resetters before they die. She isn’t aware of this connection, since she doesn’t know about the reset, but she still ends up getting killed by the serial killer – I forget when exactly, but I believe it’s before the temporary lull. The fact that she was killed even though she didn’t reset only strengthens the remaining resetters in their conviction that the serial killer must know about all the original participants.
The last one to die in this wild game of fate and death was someone I already briefly mentioned before in Park Yeong Gil’s paragraph, one of his delivery colleagues called Jang Jin Ho (Jang Joon Hyun). As Yeong Gil died the moment he reset – he was on the road and got into an accident when he temporarily lost consciousness before he returned to his body – the serial killer couldn’t personally kill him, and decided to take out someone else in his place since he desperately needed a trophy for every single one of his victims. The sad thing was that Jang Jin Ho wasn’t only not involved in the reset, but he really wasn’t involved in anything – he literally just became collateral damage because he took over Park Yeong Gil’s truck and “took his place” after the former died.
All in all, I think the main part of the series in which everyone was killed off one by one wasn’t only the most thrilling to watch, but it was also the part that got considerably fleshed out and elaborated in contrast to the original version. If I remember correctly, the majority of the repeaters in Repeat weren’t actually connected to each other at all, and there wasn’t one specific killer that came after all of them – I do remember three people being taken out by the same person but I don’t believe it was actually someone who was aware of the repeat and actively sought them out one by one. The additional element of the serial killer in this remake only made the story even more thrilling and nail-biting to watch.
At some point I did feel like the killer would probably be someone we already knew, because it would’ve just been random to suddenly introduce an entirely new character at that point. Having said that, it never occurred to me in the slightest that it would be Park Sun Ho.
I didn’t have a single shred of suspicion towards Sun Ho throughout the entire show until he was revealed to be the killer. Initially, I didn’t see how it made sense that it was him, because when did he suddenly decide to start killing people for fun? How did he suddenly become a typical serial killer with one of those typical maniacal laughs (that I don’t like as I mentioned before)? Although I appreciated that they did explain it to some extent in the end, I still have a lot of questions, which I will touch on in the final segment of this review.
For now, I’ll just say something about Sun Ho’s character. As I said in the beginning, I really loved the brotherly relationship between Hyung Joo and Sun Ho. They were such a good team, and the affection they felt for each other – as manly as it was – was really endearing to see. He seemed genuinely likeable – I personally really liked his face and smile – and he didn’t seem to have a shred of evil in him. I loved the scene where Hyung Joo hugged Sun Ho tightly after seeing him again for the first time after the reset.
I also didn’t think it was weird that Sun Ho started keeping a closer eye on Hyung Joo after he got neck-deep into reset-stuff and tried to solve cases related to resetters on his own without informing his team members because let’s be honest, Hyung Joo did look suspicious and his whole team was constantly eyeing him like, “what the heck is he up to now?” 🤨. It really wasn’t until the point where Hyung Joo told Sun Ho about the reset and was all “I know I can completely trust him” that I started feeling something was off… and that was right about when Sun Ho was actually revealed to be the killer so yeah, I wasn’t actually ahead with my suspicions at all, lol.
Despite the fact that it was towards the end of the show, the part where Hyung Joo found out about Sun Ho being the killer and having to come to terms with that was one of the harshest parts. Honestly, imagine going back in time to save your best friend’s life only to find out that friend would actually go on to kill your entire reset group because you let him live. That scene where they talked in the interrogation room and Sun Ho was like, “I would do it again even after resetting” and Hyung Joo went, “Good, because I regretted bringing you back like crazy” and you saw the realization dawn on Sun Ho’s face was SO GOOD. It was the perfect moment to tell him that he actually saved his life before and I loved seeing that part of Sun Ho that actually really cared about Hyung Joo. Despite all his killings, there was always a part of Sun Ho that didn’t want to kill Hyung Joo and I just found it comforting that he had at least one tiny scrap of compassion in him.
The series ends with Hyung Joo as the sole survivor of the reset. He and Ga Hyun were supposed to die together on the same day as he sacrificed himself for her, but this time Ga Hyun pulled an uno reverse and saved him instead. After this, Lee Shin gives him the final instructions to reset by himself and he returns and immediately busts Hwang Noh Seob and Park Sun Ho before they get to the end of the reset cycle. After a brief “new” encounter between Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun, there is one final shot of a flashy yellow sports car racing over the road towards the reset point, suggesting that at least one other person is going through another reset, but we don’t get to see who.
In short, the ending is much more wrapped up than the Japanese version, which had an open ending of the female lead declaring she was going to save everyone next time. I was really glad they chose to at least close the story and bring Hyung Joo and Ga Hyun together in a new timeline, without any of the problematic circumstances through which they met the first time.
For the final part of my review I would like to point out some last confusions I have about the series, mostly connected to the plot twists regarding Park Sun Ho and Hwang Noh Seob. I guess it has to do with the fact that, since their true colors were revealed so late into the story, there was considerably less time to explain their full involvement and reasons behind their actions. I felt this particularly with Mr. Hwang, who literally only got one episode to explain who he really was and how it tied in with everything.
Let me start with Sun Ho, though. My first confusion lies within his reasoning for why he specifically killed the reset people. From what he tells Hyung Joo in the interrogation room, his first kill was an accident in which he hit a motorcyclist with his car. He was genuinely shaken up by it and actually went to see if the man was okay before proceeding to call 911. Just as he was about to do that, the severely injured motorcyclist addressed him as “Detective”, and here is where my confusion starts. The motorcyclist addressed him as “Detective” – apparentely he recognized his uniform despite being half-unconscious 🤔 – and suddenly Sun Ho is like, “oh shoot he recognizes me as a detective, shit I can get caught for this, I didn’t work for 12 years to become a police detective to have it all end here” and decides to kill him instead. Am I the only one who doesn’t understand this reasoning? As far as the motorcyclist was concerned, the detective was there to help him, right? He literally said, “Help me, Detective”, which didn’t sound like someone who’d accuse him of voluntarily hitting him with his car. So why was killing him a better option than helping him and getting on his good side where they could both come to terms with the fact that it was an accident? I don’t know, the whole “oh no he knows I’m a detective” logic behind his killing didn’t make sense to me because it was a legit accident. I guess he could get in trouble for accidentally hitting a civilian, but how was that worse than risking being caught for murder? I really couldn’t understand his reasoning for that. In any case, if I understand correctly he was surprised by how easily the case was brushed off as an accident and that spurred him on to keep killing people because he suddenly got a kick from getting away with it? And then he killed ten people, including Hyung Joo because he tried to save Ga Hyun. How he picked them out, I still have no idea. It seemed like he only finished off the remaining resetters after learning from Hyung Joo who they were, but what about those he killed before finding out? I’m still kind of lost on how he knew which people to go after. Maybe I missed something. In any case, it seems like it started with some other people, like the motorcyclist, because you could see that in the room where he kept his trophies, there were a couple of displays with items besides those from the resetters’. They were never explained, but I guess those were the first couple of victims he made after that motorcyclist before he learned about the resetters. So, instead of pointedly going after the resetters, it seemed like he just had a list from the get-go which happened to later become the resetters. I’m really still trying to make sense of his reasoning behind these specific victims, so please fill me in if you happened to pick up on it or have a better idea.
In terms of Hwang Noh Seob, all we know is that he knew about all the serial killer victims, because he’s seen giving Lee Shin a list with all the people to invite to the reset. Still, I am a bit lost on why exactly he went through the resets and also why he desperately needed Lee Shin to join them too, to the point where he actively kept killing her daughter time and time again to maintain the delusion that she had to reset in order to try again, all the while convincing her she would be able to save her child one time.
Who was he that he came up with such a plan? I did catch something about him being involved in some problematic trial or experiment – again, maybe I just missed it – but I was still left with a lot of questions of why and how in the end. The fact that he lied about his wife wasn’t hard to digest, because as I already mentioned before, we never actually got to see her, and the whole story of his wife leading him to the flower shop when it exploded and that’s why Ga Hyun saw him there (all by himself, not to mention) was very vague.
On the one hand I have to give it to the writers to keep popping one plot twist after the other until the end because it kept me on my toes, but on the other hand I wished they would’ve started hinting at the truth regarding Mr. Hwang a little bit earlier, if only to create a bit more space to explain his true involvement in a bit more detail.
I also found it kind of lame that Ms. Song fell for such a blatant lie of a promise. I mean, how could she actually not know about the resets when it was all the Professor and Lee Shin talked about, and how could she have never picked up that it only allowed you to go back one year? I don’t know, I found it a bit weird that she didn’t have a clue that the promise of letting her go back three years to see her daughter was a blatant lie – she was involved in so much of their plans that I found it hard to believe she wasn’t kept in the loop about the resets, because that meant that she really just went along with the wishes of two random people just because it freaked her out that they knew a lot about her.
In terms of “loose ends” or things that I would’ve liked to get more closure on, I can’t help but think that it would’ve been nice to get a final shot of the resetters in the final timeline, at least the ones like Ga Hyun that didn’t get killed by Sun Ho because this time Hyung Joo busted him in time. With regards to the final shot of someone rushing over Reset Road in that flashy yellow sports car, I’m actually not that curious as to who that might be, but it would’ve also been nice if they showed it was Bae Jung Tae or something, lol.
My only real regret is that we didn’t get to see Sa Kyung and Soon Woo’s wedding. #sadface
Now that I finished my main analysis for this review I’d like to point out a couple of other things that jumped out to me and that I appreciated while watching this show. First of all, I really loved the cinematography. There were some really cool shots in there, like the winding road towards the reset destination, and I particularly liked the transitions that they used. Especially in the beginning, they used a couple of really cool transitions to alternate between shots. I wish I remembered more examples to give, but I can only remember the one where a turqoise macaron transformed into the blueish circle on the floor in Lee Shin’s office. They were so creative with their transitions that it contributed greatly to my watching experience. It was fun being able to pick up on the aesthetic and quality of the cinematography while simultaneously getting sucked into the story.
Apart from that, I also really liked the soundtrack, especially the instrumentals. I saved a song on Shazam called “7 Month Later” by Park Se Jun and Song Jae Kyung which I thought was absolutely epic. I couldn’t find the soundtrack online or on YouTube but the whole soundtrack playlist is on Spotify if you search “365: Repeat the Year”. I’m listening to it again right now and it just puts me right back into it. I highly recommend it if you’re into OSTs. The music captures the vibe of the show so well, I kept finding myself bobbing my head along to the background music while watching. I guess I had a really great time both watching and listening to this show.
Last but not least, we’ve reached the cast comment section! I loved to see so many familiar faces in this show. I honestly feel like this series is quite underrated and not that well-known, but the cast is absolutely stellar and definitely deserves more recognition. Having said that, I’m not going to cover every single person that I mentioned in my review because the list is so long, but I will give a shoutout to some people in particular that stood out to me.
I feel like I’ve seen Lee Joon Hyuk in several dramas before, but this was the first main role I’ve seen him in, and this is probably what I will remember him by the most. He also appeared in Are You Human Too? and Our Beloved Summer, and I know I covered him (albeit briefly) in my reviews of those. In any case, it was nice to see him in a proper main role here and I really liked his portrayal of Hyung Joo. I think he embodied the different sides of his character very well. Despite him being the ultimate good guy, I liked that the series started instilling doubts in the viewer regarding his credibility, like in suggesting that he was the one who killed Bae Jung Tae. It gave his character a bit of edge and it was nice to be kept on my toes with even the most seemingly trustworthy characters. I thought he did great, he had really nice chemistry with Ga Hyun and it was cool to see how versatile he was expressing different emotions. I’m gonna remember him from now on!
Not gonna lie, Nam Ji Hyun was the main reason that I put this show on my list, because she’s one of my favorite Korean actresses and I was convinced that the remake of that weird Japanese show would at least be better for having her in it. Glad to say, I was right. I’ve seen her before in Suspicious Partner, Shopping King Louie and 100 Day Husband and I still have a bunch of shows with her on my to-watch list. Even after seeing her act in different things before, she still managed to show a side through her portrayal of Ga Hyun that I hadn’t seen yet. I think this is probably the first time I’ve seen her act out a role without a comical aspect. I’m so used to seeing her portray a quirky and funny character that it was very new to see her as a fairly serious character. It only made me respect her more as an actress. If I remember correctly one of the first scenes we see of her is a crying scene where she’s in the wheelchair and pushes everyone away and that was already such good acting, she immediately nailed it. I loved that she was, again, not your stereotypical damsel female lead but she actually threw herself into the action and didn’t want to sit back and keep herself safe, even though she was also terrified to die. I loved seeing her in this, it’s made me even more excited to see more dramas with her. Nam Ji Hyun is bae.
Not me realizing that Kim Ji Soo (or Kim Jee Soo as it’s stylized on MDL) was the Queen Mother from Hwarang, lol. I don’t actually think I’ve seen her in anything else, even though she looks so familiar. I really liked her as Lee Shin. If I didn’t already like the fact that they changed the host into a woman, as I mentioned before I really loved what they did with her character. I appreciated how well they supported all of the characters’ personalities and choices through their respective backstories in general, whereas in the Japanese version everyone was constantly dramatic and cruel just for the sake of it. I loved how the writers played with framing Lee Shin’s character and kept the truth about her a mystery until the end. I thought it was a really cool twist that she ended up being much more than just a villain, and that she was actually being fooled as well. I loved seeing her emotional range, how she effortlessly changed between the enigmatic and cold host to a warm and grief-stricken mother. I thought she performed her role really well, I was very impressed by her.
If there’s one thing this series has taught me, it’s that I don’t like seeing Lee Sung Wook as a bad guy. He has such a friendly face and kind smile, and after his role in The Silent Sea, I just can’t bring myself to see him in a bad light, lol. I really love this actor. There’s still a bunch of shows with him on my to-watch list, so at least I know I’ll get to see more of him. But man, the twist that his character made in this series was pretty wild. I never thought I’d see him portray a serial killer – it’s always the ones with the nice smiles and then suddenly that smile turns evil and you go from 🤗 to 😢. Anyways, despite the fact that there’s still a lot of things I don’t understand about Sun Ho’s reasoning for becoming a serial killer, I did like that he got to show this completely different side of his acting and throw the image of the good and kind older brother figure overboard. I’m all for discovering new sides to actors I like, so I can’t complain in that regard. I really liked how they wrote his character, and that even behind the whole “I’m a serial killer and I have no regrets” thing he still couldn’t hide how much he truly cared about Hyung Joo. It was refreshing to see a serial killer character that still had a shred of compassion in him for at least one other person. It set him apart from other, more stereotypical villain characters and I appreciated that. I honestly can’t wait to see more of him!
To think that for the entire series I was sitting here thinking, “yay, finally Yoon Joo Sang plays a role in which he’s not just a grumpy old man!” only for him to reveal his true colors as a merciless mastermind at the end 🥲. I’ve seen him in a bunch of things before, like Iris, Baby-faced Beauty, School 2013, I Hear Your Voice, EXO Next Door, High Society and Radio Romance. I initially thought his character might be the alternate for that elderly lady from the Japanese version who just wanted to dance with her husband one last time before he passed away. Boy, was I wrong! 😂 Although I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about him suddenly swooping in as the ultimate endboss instead of Lee Shin, I did like how they foreshadowed his involvement throughout the story so subtly that I kept going “…?” but still never really expected that he would actually be behind the whole thing. I just thought that he was secretly keeping Lee Shin informed, as he said, or was keeping up his end of a deal with her or something. That was a very interesting twist that they managed to keep under wraps very skillfully. It was cool seeing him in this series, as opposed to the grumpy and unyielding father-in-law characters he usually plays.
Is it me or is Lee Yoo Mi suddenly popping up everywhere? Apart from shows like Squid Game and All Of Us Are Dead – which I haven’t even watched – it feels like I suddenly see her everywhere. I’m very excited to see her portray more main character roles – Mr. Plankton has been on my list for a while now – because all the times I’ve seen her portray side character roles she’s been consistently good. I’ve seen her in 20th Century Boy and Girl, Go Go Waikiki and The Third Charm, and there’s still a bunch of other shows with her on my to-watch list. I really liked her performance as Se Rin, the way she managed to keep up that pretense of being the poor, victimized girl before subtly revealing her obsessive side was really impressive. Her character arc was really the turning point where I realized how much effort this remake put into fleshing out its characters. If my theory is correct, I think it’s really cool that they managed to morph Machida Yuuko’s character into hers like this, making her a resetter and expressing her obsessive tendencies towards someone else, supported by a mental illness instead of just making her a hollow psychopath. I loved her performance, she was great.
Yang Dong Geun is one of those actors that always pops up in unexpected places, and I’m always happy to see him. I’ve seen him before in Missing 9, Bride of the Water God and The Third Charm, and I happen to know that he also does musicals – he played Hermes in the Korean version of my favorite musical Hadestown, which was probably a sight to see. Just as with Nam Ji Hyun, I really liked seeing him in a more edgy, less comical role than I’m used to from him. He was the perfect casting choice for Bae Jung Tae, and I liked the energy he put into the role. Despite his aggressive tendencies, I actually felt bad for him in the end – he really wasn’t as bad as he was made out to be and he just wanted to care for his sister. It was really nice seeing him in this.
As much as I loved and appreciated the entire cast, I’m going to keep it at that for the cast comments, because I fear the list will go on forever and I’m good with just picking out some people that stood out to me in particular.
I will say it again and repeat it until the very end, but I really enjoyed this series. It was a great remake, both the story and the characters were written really well, and it literally kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. It’s been a while since I’ve revelled in a proper thrilling crime show, with or without the magical realism of going back in time. The fantastical element of the time travel didn’t take away anything from the seriousness of the story, and they put the focus on all the right things, in my opinion.
The storytelling was great, the acting was great, the cinematography and the music were great. I loved how they fleshed out the characters and added more layers to the story in comparison to Repeat, where a lot of things seemed to be overly dramatic and cruel purely for shock value and without any real reasoning behind it. I honestly didn’t think it would be possible to remake this story into something with not only a more credible storyline, but also with way more layers and fleshed out characters and parts that were lacking in the original. I’m actually surprised that this series isn’t hyped more, because it has a stellar cast and great quality. I would definitely recommend this – already did, in fact.
It’s also been a while since I’ve been so enthralled by a soundtrack, I’m still listening to it and it’s so eerie and cool and captures the underlying dread of the story so well it actually gives me goosebumps. I really enjoyed this. It was great seeing some favorite actors and discovering some new ones, and it’s made me only more excited for what they’ll put out in the (near) future.
I’m going to leave it at that for this review. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to write a review in one go without feeling rushed or troubled that I may not be able to put down my thoughts properly because of other things on my mind. I’m really happy that I get to focus on writing reviews again and hopefully I’ll be able to keep doing that. For now, I’m going to find out what my next watch is and I’ll be back with a new review soon.
Until then, bye-bee! x
