✒ ✋️Hands of Compassion Join ✋️✋️ of Healing °6.3° °12 eps stretched into 16°
She sheds lots of tears. She's probably crying right now. Baek Dong “Joo” is going to give /her/ some relief. Just because she's dead doesn't mean she doesn't have feelings!
Joo is a weird woman. We've all heard of deathbed confessions, but she can hear embalming room last requests. She can speak to the dead. Only in the funeral parlor. Only when it's only Joo with the deceased. Only for a few minutes, and that's only long enough to hear last pleas. In ep1 we see a newly deceased Uber driver beg her to find his son whom he abandoned years (decades) ago.
Joo works with Im Il Seop (In Ho Tae from Misaeng-9.1) as a funeral director. Lee Jun Young, w/ the pinch-able round cheeks.(Melo Movie, Class of Lies) portrays Kim “Tae” Hui. He works at an errand service. One day it's his errand to break up with Joo in place of her actual BF, who hired him to do so. “I no longer want to hold your 🤚 because of what you do with your 👐,” he must say to her on behalf of his client. So, /these/ are the things this guy does for 💰? Joo has a few choice words about what Tae does for a living. After the breakup, she hands some cash to him, tells him to report back to the client that /she's/ breaking up with /that jerk/, NOT the other way around. Then she /kicks/ him. No fair! Tae just works here!
Life hasn't been fair. His little brother died years ago, and his family, career, and life “died” then, too. As it turns out, the little brother ties together several characters in the show. Tae's running an errand to the funeral parlor mere hours later. As he enters (limps) in, there's the woman who kicked him, and it still hurts. Ep2 is a string of fateful encounters. They run into e/o any handful of times. He even meets her dad, unawares, at the columbarium. He gets along well with dad, but Tae does not like Joo. Joo isn't impressed with Tae, either.
MIHY is a 20022 release that is rated 89 on AWiki. It is 1 season consisting of 16 70-minute episodes. Director Shim So Yeon brought us Welcome 2 Life, and screenwriter Lee Seon Hye also penned 20th Century Boy and Girl. MIHY is sweet, often cute, and totally forgettable.
‘Stop following me!’ ‘No, you're the one who's following me!’ The fateful encounters don't stop. He's in an errand business. She's a mortician who is getting last requests from departed souls. They're sending her on errands, and he's hired by many families to help clean up after deaths. Consequently, she's been getting in the way of his work so badly that it looks like the complaints she's generated will put his company under, once and for all. But then he finds the check that she told him to look for. He hands it to the disgruntled bereaved, and exits the job, triumphant. As they say in Forrest Gump, now “shrimping is easy”. Once the general public hears about how Tae recovered and handed over a cashier's check for a whopping sum, *everyone* wants to hire him. Now, the jobs are stacked up, and running errands is a breeze.
In spite of it all, the more he sees her, the more he dislikes her.
Lee Hye Ri from Reply 1988-8.6 is our FL. They found a child (Lee Dam) who looks quite a bit like her to play her when she was young. Weirdly, “Lee Dam” was the name of the character Lee Hye Ri played in My Roommate Is a Gumiho-7.9. Ms Lee looks better with black hair, not the brown she's sporting here. Long ago dubbed the nation's “little sister“ she's that everyday girl… if the everyday girl manages to be cute, spunky, pretty, funny, winsome, independent, and appealing, all at once. She has a way of appearing capable, but also in need of assistance. She also has a way of looking a tad bored and unhappy, yet she still makes the viewer smile. She's a charmer.
Song Deok Ho from Link: Eat, Love, Kill-6.7 & Smoke is a local beat cop who falls for Joo instantly. Lee Kyu Han (She Would Never Know-7.3, The Judge from Hell-4.5) plays “Vincent-seeing-other-people-have-fun-makes-me-jealous,” who is Tae’s cousin and boss, Lee Hyang Bok. He's in a perpetual state of distress, especially when the company isn't doing well. Even when the company is doing well, he has to deal with his always-yelling, never-satisfied mother.
Many people react negatively to what Joo does for a living. She hasn't told her father about it. He thinks she's studying for the Civil Service exam. The lies mount up because of that 1 lie. Dad begins to get suspicious. “If you don't do what you want and keep what you want to say inside, it'll end up causing stress… That's the source of all disease… be honest with (loved ones) about everything; there's supposed to be no secrets between two people that love each other. Once you start hiding tiny things from each other, you have a hard time seeing that person because of guilt.” He says that in hopes that she'll open up. Speaking of guilt, we see 1 character smile slightly when he erases evidence. He won't smile again. Not during the course of the show. Not for years. The weight of guilt… well, it /weighs/ on him.
Joo must endure the dead pleading with her to live again, or for this favor or that favor, but she's rarely able to fulfill more than one simple request. There's no time to handle anything more. The first person she attends to whom she knew in life is her friend's grandmother. Joo considered her a grandma as well. In that scene, Joo is the one crying & pleading with Granny to stay. Kim Young Ok (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha-8.2, Dear My Friends) plays grandma. This actress is so cute. Her earliest credited work is from 1957. She's almost 90 and she looks like she's in her 70s.
In one scene, a woman who was murdered when she was about to give birth pleads with Joo to save her baby. But she and the baby in her womb already perished. All Joo can do is endure it. Consequently, when that pregnant woman was begging, Joo is holding her, trying her best to console her, & Tae is delivering something. He walks in on them. When he enters the room, the beautiful surroundings that appear for the awakened deceased dissipate, and we're back in the cold, industrial embalming room with the departed no longer talking, but back to being a body. All Tae sees is Joo doing something very weird with the body. He really can't stand her. She tries to explain to him that she can talk to the dead, but he's only more scandalized by her odd behavior.
When Joo relays information that helps Tae prevent a suicide, he starts to soften his stance on her. Then he really softens on her. That begins to harden into positive feelings for her. He asks her out for a drink one night and… they are still together the next morning. Nothing happened, except the connection deepened. After several random encounters Dad & Tae become friends - Dad (played by Park Soo Young from My Mister-9.5 & Children of Nobody) makes friends with everybody. In one of those encounters, dad shows him a picture of his “beautiful daughter" and Tae realizes it's the woman that he'd been spatting with. That was before. Now they're starting to spend quite a bit of time together.
“I don't want to die.” Joo has to speak to a little girl who died when her mother committed a murder suicide. It's an act borne of misplaced views on parental love and protection. Parents who kill children because they intend to commit suicide see the children as property, not an individual human being, says the newscaster when reporting on the incident. “I want to live. Please let me live.” “I want to try dyeing my hair, fly on an airplane, have a boyfriend… drink boba tea one more time. I have so many things I want to do. I don't care if I'm poor. I don't care if I'm hungry. Please save me,” begs the child. Some of the conversations Joo has are agonizing. She wonders if what she's doing means anything. Is she helping?
When Joo needs to talk, she hits up father. Father Michael, that is - he's her uncle. Oh Dae Hwan (Life on Mars, Defendant,,Live Up to Your Name-7.6) is the priest. He has a very nice presence about him. He turns out to be old friends with Vincent - yet another connection.
MIHY is a hope injection. Accepting death, managing regrets and living on is the theme. Are we supposed to derive comfort from what the deceased say and request? I think so, and it's not too hard to guess how most deceased would see things. MIHY is more a commentary on death and loss than a romance, but romance is the vehicle that drives the commentary. It surfaces that Tae’s past was not a smooth road. He was in medical school, he had a girlfriend, and now it's obvious that she's not over him. Just as these two leads start to become interested in e/o, Tae’s ex tries to make moves. The local beat cop makes moves on Joo, too. Joo wants to back off when she sees Tae’s ex come back into his life. Yet, she /doesn't/ want to back off, so she just looks very uncomfortable whenever his ex is around. It's pretty much the same with Tae & the cop. At the same time, Joo's friend is falling for her immediate supervisor, In Ho, so love is in the air. (The secondary romance had the potential to boost the show up, but they treated it like a throwaway thing). Regardless of outside interference, Tae & Joo go together like ping and pong. Their relationship is sweet and cozy.
For most of its run, MIHY feels like a quiet space. This duo is comfortable. This is my 3rd look at Lee Hye Ri, and I must bow to her capabilities. For a tiny little thing, she's like a big comfy sofa. She's got that you're-home-now-everything-is-okay vibe mastered. Unfortunately, in the end MIHY didn't build up to anything and then it fizzled away. There is much to like about this show, but when the time came for the big reveal and wrap up, they lost me: It's cobbled together badly, it's half-hearted, and it's wholly depressing. The bad guy's actions and motivations don't make sense, and he's supposedly smart. It's written weakly. This is probably the furthest into the episode count that a show lost me. They don't have enough content for 16 episodes, though they don't run into serious trouble until the last couple. The intangibles can be hard to define, but just like the dead can't cross the threshold of the exit from the embalming room, MIHY can't cross the threshold from avg to good. It's sad.
On the + side, MIHY does the opposite of cheapening life. It reinforces that every life is precious and we have obligations to e/o. It wraps up nicely with a moving explanation of why and how this happened to Joo and why she and Tae are so very perfect for e/o. It isn't the worst, nor is it the best. It will kill some time.
QUOTES🗣
Success is the mother of failure.
Everything's an excuse.
IMHO〰🖍
📣6.5 📝6 🎭7.6 💓6 🦋4 🎨6.5 🎵/🔊7 🔚7 🤗2.5 ▪ 🌞6⚡4.5 😅2 😭5 😱3 😯2 🤢3 🤔3.5 💤1.5
Shazams: Goodbye My Friend, by JAMIE
Age 14+ Language: b!+ch, F💣s - all in the first 20 minutes or so. Then, not much, but it seems like every episode has some R-rated language. Scary elements not suitable for younger children. Rated: 15+
Re-📺? This is fine to watch once, but I'm not in a hurry to circle back.
In order of ~lite&trite~ to ~heavy&serious~ you may also like:
Crazy Love-7.8,
Racket Boys-8.3,
Mad For Each Other-7.7 ~ silly fun,
Mystic Pop-up Bar-8.2,
The Legend of the Blue Sea-7.2 (But for eps 20 &21 it's an 8+),
My Roommate Is a Gumiho-7.9,
Reply 1988-8.6,
Oh My Venus-7.4K,
Love to Hate You 8.9,
Oh My Ghost 10,
It's Okay Not To Be Okay 9,
Love Struck in the City 7.3,
Hotel del Luna-8.4,
Uncanny counter S1 only °S1-8.4 S2-4,
Be Melodramatic-8.7,
The Golden Spoon-8.1,
Because This Is My First Life-7.7,
Move To Heaven-8.4,
Misaeng-9.1,
Missing: The Other Side-8.3,
Hospital Playlist 9 (give it 3 episodes to get warmed up),
Itaewon Class-8.9,
My Liberation Diary-8.9,
SKY Castle-9,
My Mister 9.5,
Wonderful World-7.8,
Parasite-9,
Mother-8.8
The Wailing-8.8,
Romance junkies only -
My Secret Romance-7 (if you ff thru overdone flashbacks),
Boys Over Flowers-8 ~ melodrama to the max,
The Bride of Habaek-7,
Heirs-7.3,
That Winter, The Wind Blows-7,
Something in them Rain-9,
C🇨🇳: Well-Intended Love-7.5 Rom-porn - extra points for the dopamine,
When I Fly Towards You-7.8,
Wait, My Youth-8.4,
A Little Thing Called First Love-8.5,
Find Yourself-8.9,
Hidden Love-7.8
Consider a Chinese 🎎/🔮 romcom: The Romance of Tiger and Rose 9.8, Love Between Fairy and Devil 8.9, Love and Redemption 10 or Japanese romcoms: Maid Sama 10, Mischievous Kiss Love in Tokyo 7.8, Love, Chunibyo And Other Delusions 8.4, or Toradora 8.5
Joo is a weird woman. We've all heard of deathbed confessions, but she can hear embalming room last requests. She can speak to the dead. Only in the funeral parlor. Only when it's only Joo with the deceased. Only for a few minutes, and that's only long enough to hear last pleas. In ep1 we see a newly deceased Uber driver beg her to find his son whom he abandoned years (decades) ago.
Joo works with Im Il Seop (In Ho Tae from Misaeng-9.1) as a funeral director. Lee Jun Young, w/ the pinch-able round cheeks.(Melo Movie, Class of Lies) portrays Kim “Tae” Hui. He works at an errand service. One day it's his errand to break up with Joo in place of her actual BF, who hired him to do so. “I no longer want to hold your 🤚 because of what you do with your 👐,” he must say to her on behalf of his client. So, /these/ are the things this guy does for 💰? Joo has a few choice words about what Tae does for a living. After the breakup, she hands some cash to him, tells him to report back to the client that /she's/ breaking up with /that jerk/, NOT the other way around. Then she /kicks/ him. No fair! Tae just works here!
Life hasn't been fair. His little brother died years ago, and his family, career, and life “died” then, too. As it turns out, the little brother ties together several characters in the show. Tae's running an errand to the funeral parlor mere hours later. As he enters (limps) in, there's the woman who kicked him, and it still hurts. Ep2 is a string of fateful encounters. They run into e/o any handful of times. He even meets her dad, unawares, at the columbarium. He gets along well with dad, but Tae does not like Joo. Joo isn't impressed with Tae, either.
MIHY is a 20022 release that is rated 89 on AWiki. It is 1 season consisting of 16 70-minute episodes. Director Shim So Yeon brought us Welcome 2 Life, and screenwriter Lee Seon Hye also penned 20th Century Boy and Girl. MIHY is sweet, often cute, and totally forgettable.
‘Stop following me!’ ‘No, you're the one who's following me!’ The fateful encounters don't stop. He's in an errand business. She's a mortician who is getting last requests from departed souls. They're sending her on errands, and he's hired by many families to help clean up after deaths. Consequently, she's been getting in the way of his work so badly that it looks like the complaints she's generated will put his company under, once and for all. But then he finds the check that she told him to look for. He hands it to the disgruntled bereaved, and exits the job, triumphant. As they say in Forrest Gump, now “shrimping is easy”. Once the general public hears about how Tae recovered and handed over a cashier's check for a whopping sum, *everyone* wants to hire him. Now, the jobs are stacked up, and running errands is a breeze.
In spite of it all, the more he sees her, the more he dislikes her.
Lee Hye Ri from Reply 1988-8.6 is our FL. They found a child (Lee Dam) who looks quite a bit like her to play her when she was young. Weirdly, “Lee Dam” was the name of the character Lee Hye Ri played in My Roommate Is a Gumiho-7.9. Ms Lee looks better with black hair, not the brown she's sporting here. Long ago dubbed the nation's “little sister“ she's that everyday girl… if the everyday girl manages to be cute, spunky, pretty, funny, winsome, independent, and appealing, all at once. She has a way of appearing capable, but also in need of assistance. She also has a way of looking a tad bored and unhappy, yet she still makes the viewer smile. She's a charmer.
Song Deok Ho from Link: Eat, Love, Kill-6.7 & Smoke is a local beat cop who falls for Joo instantly. Lee Kyu Han (She Would Never Know-7.3, The Judge from Hell-4.5) plays “Vincent-seeing-other-people-have-fun-makes-me-jealous,” who is Tae’s cousin and boss, Lee Hyang Bok. He's in a perpetual state of distress, especially when the company isn't doing well. Even when the company is doing well, he has to deal with his always-yelling, never-satisfied mother.
Many people react negatively to what Joo does for a living. She hasn't told her father about it. He thinks she's studying for the Civil Service exam. The lies mount up because of that 1 lie. Dad begins to get suspicious. “If you don't do what you want and keep what you want to say inside, it'll end up causing stress… That's the source of all disease… be honest with (loved ones) about everything; there's supposed to be no secrets between two people that love each other. Once you start hiding tiny things from each other, you have a hard time seeing that person because of guilt.” He says that in hopes that she'll open up. Speaking of guilt, we see 1 character smile slightly when he erases evidence. He won't smile again. Not during the course of the show. Not for years. The weight of guilt… well, it /weighs/ on him.
Joo must endure the dead pleading with her to live again, or for this favor or that favor, but she's rarely able to fulfill more than one simple request. There's no time to handle anything more. The first person she attends to whom she knew in life is her friend's grandmother. Joo considered her a grandma as well. In that scene, Joo is the one crying & pleading with Granny to stay. Kim Young Ok (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha-8.2, Dear My Friends) plays grandma. This actress is so cute. Her earliest credited work is from 1957. She's almost 90 and she looks like she's in her 70s.
In one scene, a woman who was murdered when she was about to give birth pleads with Joo to save her baby. But she and the baby in her womb already perished. All Joo can do is endure it. Consequently, when that pregnant woman was begging, Joo is holding her, trying her best to console her, & Tae is delivering something. He walks in on them. When he enters the room, the beautiful surroundings that appear for the awakened deceased dissipate, and we're back in the cold, industrial embalming room with the departed no longer talking, but back to being a body. All Tae sees is Joo doing something very weird with the body. He really can't stand her. She tries to explain to him that she can talk to the dead, but he's only more scandalized by her odd behavior.
When Joo relays information that helps Tae prevent a suicide, he starts to soften his stance on her. Then he really softens on her. That begins to harden into positive feelings for her. He asks her out for a drink one night and… they are still together the next morning. Nothing happened, except the connection deepened. After several random encounters Dad & Tae become friends - Dad (played by Park Soo Young from My Mister-9.5 & Children of Nobody) makes friends with everybody. In one of those encounters, dad shows him a picture of his “beautiful daughter" and Tae realizes it's the woman that he'd been spatting with. That was before. Now they're starting to spend quite a bit of time together.
“I don't want to die.” Joo has to speak to a little girl who died when her mother committed a murder suicide. It's an act borne of misplaced views on parental love and protection. Parents who kill children because they intend to commit suicide see the children as property, not an individual human being, says the newscaster when reporting on the incident. “I want to live. Please let me live.” “I want to try dyeing my hair, fly on an airplane, have a boyfriend… drink boba tea one more time. I have so many things I want to do. I don't care if I'm poor. I don't care if I'm hungry. Please save me,” begs the child. Some of the conversations Joo has are agonizing. She wonders if what she's doing means anything. Is she helping?
When Joo needs to talk, she hits up father. Father Michael, that is - he's her uncle. Oh Dae Hwan (Life on Mars, Defendant,,Live Up to Your Name-7.6) is the priest. He has a very nice presence about him. He turns out to be old friends with Vincent - yet another connection.
MIHY is a hope injection. Accepting death, managing regrets and living on is the theme. Are we supposed to derive comfort from what the deceased say and request? I think so, and it's not too hard to guess how most deceased would see things. MIHY is more a commentary on death and loss than a romance, but romance is the vehicle that drives the commentary. It surfaces that Tae’s past was not a smooth road. He was in medical school, he had a girlfriend, and now it's obvious that she's not over him. Just as these two leads start to become interested in e/o, Tae’s ex tries to make moves. The local beat cop makes moves on Joo, too. Joo wants to back off when she sees Tae’s ex come back into his life. Yet, she /doesn't/ want to back off, so she just looks very uncomfortable whenever his ex is around. It's pretty much the same with Tae & the cop. At the same time, Joo's friend is falling for her immediate supervisor, In Ho, so love is in the air. (The secondary romance had the potential to boost the show up, but they treated it like a throwaway thing). Regardless of outside interference, Tae & Joo go together like ping and pong. Their relationship is sweet and cozy.
For most of its run, MIHY feels like a quiet space. This duo is comfortable. This is my 3rd look at Lee Hye Ri, and I must bow to her capabilities. For a tiny little thing, she's like a big comfy sofa. She's got that you're-home-now-everything-is-okay vibe mastered. Unfortunately, in the end MIHY didn't build up to anything and then it fizzled away. There is much to like about this show, but when the time came for the big reveal and wrap up, they lost me: It's cobbled together badly, it's half-hearted, and it's wholly depressing. The bad guy's actions and motivations don't make sense, and he's supposedly smart. It's written weakly. This is probably the furthest into the episode count that a show lost me. They don't have enough content for 16 episodes, though they don't run into serious trouble until the last couple. The intangibles can be hard to define, but just like the dead can't cross the threshold of the exit from the embalming room, MIHY can't cross the threshold from avg to good. It's sad.
On the + side, MIHY does the opposite of cheapening life. It reinforces that every life is precious and we have obligations to e/o. It wraps up nicely with a moving explanation of why and how this happened to Joo and why she and Tae are so very perfect for e/o. It isn't the worst, nor is it the best. It will kill some time.
QUOTES🗣
Success is the mother of failure.
Everything's an excuse.
IMHO〰🖍
📣6.5 📝6 🎭7.6 💓6 🦋4 🎨6.5 🎵/🔊7 🔚7 🤗2.5 ▪ 🌞6⚡4.5 😅2 😭5 😱3 😯2 🤢3 🤔3.5 💤1.5
Shazams: Goodbye My Friend, by JAMIE
Age 14+ Language: b!+ch, F💣s - all in the first 20 minutes or so. Then, not much, but it seems like every episode has some R-rated language. Scary elements not suitable for younger children. Rated: 15+
Re-📺? This is fine to watch once, but I'm not in a hurry to circle back.
In order of ~lite&trite~ to ~heavy&serious~ you may also like:
Crazy Love-7.8,
Racket Boys-8.3,
Mad For Each Other-7.7 ~ silly fun,
Mystic Pop-up Bar-8.2,
The Legend of the Blue Sea-7.2 (But for eps 20 &21 it's an 8+),
My Roommate Is a Gumiho-7.9,
Reply 1988-8.6,
Oh My Venus-7.4K,
Love to Hate You 8.9,
Oh My Ghost 10,
It's Okay Not To Be Okay 9,
Love Struck in the City 7.3,
Hotel del Luna-8.4,
Uncanny counter S1 only °S1-8.4 S2-4,
Be Melodramatic-8.7,
The Golden Spoon-8.1,
Because This Is My First Life-7.7,
Move To Heaven-8.4,
Misaeng-9.1,
Missing: The Other Side-8.3,
Hospital Playlist 9 (give it 3 episodes to get warmed up),
Itaewon Class-8.9,
My Liberation Diary-8.9,
SKY Castle-9,
My Mister 9.5,
Wonderful World-7.8,
Parasite-9,
Mother-8.8
The Wailing-8.8,
Romance junkies only -
My Secret Romance-7 (if you ff thru overdone flashbacks),
Boys Over Flowers-8 ~ melodrama to the max,
The Bride of Habaek-7,
Heirs-7.3,
That Winter, The Wind Blows-7,
Something in them Rain-9,
C🇨🇳: Well-Intended Love-7.5 Rom-porn - extra points for the dopamine,
When I Fly Towards You-7.8,
Wait, My Youth-8.4,
A Little Thing Called First Love-8.5,
Find Yourself-8.9,
Hidden Love-7.8
Consider a Chinese 🎎/🔮 romcom: The Romance of Tiger and Rose 9.8, Love Between Fairy and Devil 8.9, Love and Redemption 10 or Japanese romcoms: Maid Sama 10, Mischievous Kiss Love in Tokyo 7.8, Love, Chunibyo And Other Delusions 8.4, or Toradora 8.5
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