UlisesGarcia

The idea is great, but not new.
We’ve already seen it to exhaustion.

Whenever a drama wants to explore “deep female friendship,”
they almost always throw in terminal illness
as the narrative glue.

The only truly remarkable part here
are the performances of Kim Bo Min and Park Seo Kyung
as the younger versions of the leads.
They deliver the real emotion, much more than the adults.

The real problem is the narrative structure.
That tendency in K-dramas to tell the story all over the place:
they start in one year,
jump back 40 years,
then 10 years forward…
and on top of that, insert another story inside a story.

If it had been told in a linear way —
childhood, youth, adulthood, and finally the blow of cancer —
the impact could have been brutal.
But they chose to fragment it.

There’s no accumulation of tension,
because they show you the consequences
before you even understand the causes.

The difference between narrative complexity and narrative disorder is clear:
this drama seems to believe that fragmenting the timeline is art,
when in reality it’s sacrificing emotion.