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Based on the (controversial, censored) Chinese web drama, Go Princess Go, Mr Queen tells the story of a modern day man who finds himself living in the body of Joseon Queen. The first two episodes were unwatchable slapstick but I persisted for one major reason: the acting, the amazing acting. These are two transcendent performances from some of Korea's finest actors.
I won't spoil anything for people who haven't seen it but this is a fusion Sageuk romp with a fun script, wonderful acting, brilliant production values and an ending that was as disappointing as it was inevitable. The show's attempt to backcast the themes as some sort of quest for justice or campaign against corruption rather than a romance is jarring but it doesn't mean you can't enjoy the ride, even with its last-minute attempt to walk back The Gay.
If you think about it too much you might get annoyed so, as with most fusion Sageuks, it's best to not think about it at all. Just enjoy. And there's a lot to enjoy. Especially around Shin Hye-sun and Kim Jung-hyun proving they are A grade actors with amazing comic timing and genuine gravitas.
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While Singto has already established himself as a young actor through the very popular Sotus series, Ohm shows he has definitely moved on from the dumpster fire that was Make It Right. Both actors put in fine performances aided by a script that's subtle and - considering it deals with ghosts - surprisingly realistic and sincere.
He's Coming To Me is characterised by consistent, sensitive plotting and its refusal to discount any characters. It is extremely well-written and even has a few twists and turns that are both surprising but also sufficiently telegraphed (this is no mean feat). It has not one but two well-developed and extremely real female characters, both of which are treated by the writer with respect. And it almost completely avoid the bad BL tropes that have plagued the genre since Love Sick. Despite the premise of the show and an ending that disappoints, this show is not about a ghost that falls in love with a boy but is instead about how we grapple with love, loss and identity through adolescence.
The Ending
When a drama is as coherent and well-written as this one is, if someone messes with the ending it becomes obvious. The show unfolded beautifully until about 5-10 minutes before the end where the whole thing becomes a mini trainwreck. You can almost see the tear marks where someone hacked off the original ending and stapled in a new, nonsensical version. This show could give kdramas a lesson in how to ruin a perfectly good drama by missing the landing. I'm sure a lot of people were fine with it (HAPPY ENDING!) but, quite frankly, it was dumb and almost ruined the rest of the show.
I'm not going to downgrade my rating because of the ending because almost everything else was executed perfectly. But it is jarring. Most if all it's stupid. I'll just pretend the drama ended as the writer clearly intended before this nonsense was pasted in.
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This review may contain spoilers
Hated it. Hated it. Hated it.Not the show. Overall, even with this episode I enjoyed almost every minute of this. I couldn't stop watching it. It was like Kdrama crack.
Frankly, I would love to give this 10 stars but I just can't because of the godawful extension.
For 20 episodes, Jealousy Incarnate was a fun, smart, romantic and chaotic discussion of all aspects of jealousy. Wonderful acting, witty script and exuberant tone. Great OTP. Loved every minute of it.
Until...
I felt the show started meandering after episode 21 and then this episode really disappointed me.
At the beginning of the series, Na Ri is a weather girl in love with Hwa Shin. At the end? A weather girl in love with Hwa Shin.
At the beginning Jun Woo is a single fashion designer and Mummy's boy competing with his best friend for women who always choose the other man. At the end? Exactly the same.
Hwa Shin's relationship with his niece, a really important part of his character, was almost completely glossed over for half the drama and then neatly resolved with one short scene.
In the end, this was Hwa Shin's show and his character got lots of development. But I felt that he finally resolved his masculinity issues especially around fatherhood only to have the show deliver children to him anyway. I was especially disappointed in that. It also came off the back of someone's asexuality being "cured", which I found actively offensive.
Basically, I felt that this show had a chance for a great ending about episode 20 when it (I'm assuming) was supposed to have ended. Instead, the last four episodes lost focus and momentum and the last episode almost hit the reset button on a lot of character growth and development in a way I very disappointing.
The thing is, they had several plot lines they could have explored for the end including Na Ri's own breast cancer risk, Hwa Shin's reconciliation with his niece, Na Ri's relationship with her father and his abandoned younger wife, Jun Woo's relationship with his mother, and several others. Instead the wedding was treated as the resolution and while I'll always pay money to see Jo Jung-seok sing and dance I felt a lot of it was pointless.
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The basketball scenes are lovingly shot and thematically, the show is quite strong but it'll take a lot of parking of the brain in neutral to deal with the nonsensical detours and strange mini-arcs that come out of nowhere and disappear as quickly. In one scene, our two leads witness a mass murder and then never seem to care - or even reference it again.
Some of the casting is also hilarious with early 30s actors playing senior school administrators and fathers of 17 year olds. Every time I was reminded that Ton apparently had a daughter in her late teens, it was enough to send me into peals of laughter.
In fact, The Rebound seems to be three dramas in one: a sports drama, a BL, and gangster action. But it's the heartwarming "teens coming together to save their basketball team" one that you'll mostly stick around for. The rest could have been easily jettisoned.
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I guess they told us what this would be on the tin. Rose by name. Rose by nature. Sure, she could have some personality, an arc, or some role in the text or she could just sit there being decorative while people fight it out around her. The worst part of this type of plot is that her lack of action, her lack of aspirations, her lack of agency are then used textually to defend her behaviour. While the male lead tosses over his fiancé because he wants to bang his secretary who's just so "pure, sweet and selfless", she manages both to be the object of that affection and the impetus to his change while somehow emerging innocent. All this despite her gross emotional manipulation and utter disrespect of his relationship.
The worst thing is that the premise itself bears no relationship to the actual plot. Because to have Miss Rose actively in the world trying to get married would have required her to have some kind of role in the text rather than being a passive impetus to the male lead's development (seriously, even the return of her ex was entirely about the male lead's emotional growth). It might also have meant we couldn't be told endlessly that she was merely a passive victim of an unfair world and then how could they lecture us about appropriate female behaviour?
You may ask precisely why I subjected myself to a viewing experience that involved me yelling at 23 episodes of television. I couldn't tell you. I just think it's a relief they don't make these horrid and misogynistic odes to female martydom anymore.
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There's a certain type of show that, for all its crazy Makjang flaws, you just CAN'T. STOP. WATCHING.
Yes, there's a Candy and a crazy second female lead and a perfect second male lead for you to have SML syndrome over. Chaebol scheming and a company to fight over like it's still the Joseon era.
Every trope under the sun and then a few more to tide you over: Amnesia, Trucks of Doom, Noble Idiocy, Evil Stepmothers, Asshole Male Lead cured by the Power of Love.
But, but, but... it's just so cracktastic you can't stop watching. Even when the show is extended and it's a good 8 episodes too long, you keep pressing play on the next episode. Even when whole episodes go by with people having the same conversations over and over and endlessly crying for no good reason, you don't drop it. You can't.
THE PLOT
When Ko Eun Sung (Han Hyo Joo) is thrown into the street with her autistic brother, she is taken in by self-made businesswoman Jang Sook Ja (Ban Hyo Jung). The Chairwoman sees herself in the younger woman and eventually throws her entitled family for a loop when she leaves the younger woman all her assets, including her company.
Yes, it's a standard Cinderella plotline with her and the Prince, Seon Woo Hwan (played by Lee Seung Gi, apparently a perpetually geriatric toddler) having the requisite number of misunderstandings and near misses before settling into the inevitable pining, sexless true love.
THE ENDING
The Shining Inheritance mentioned in the title is not just the money everyone starts fighting over once Grandma changes her will. What the older woman is bequeathing is not her money but her vision for the company she founded. It's this lesson about what's important in life that underpins the show's overly-strong moral message.
The show's moralising, especially in the back half, is definitely its weakest part. And it doesn't help that far too long is spent on a second female lead who needed to stop crying and monologuing and just get a damn life. But there's no need to spend too much time thinking about deeper messages when you can't stop watching because of how addictive the whole guilty pleasure is.
Crack is crack.
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This review may contain spoilers
Those who know, know.Those who don't know, should just watch.
Some performances steal a scene. Some an episode. Some an entire show.
Without it, this would be yet another mediocre highschool musical.
It is worth watching for that alone.
I have no other words.
Just press play.
You won't regret it.
They're making me type 500 words. I guess I should say something else.
I like that the music really sounds like something a group of talented highschool kids would belt out in their garage. I like the way it explores how rock clashes with the over-produced, cookie-cutter nature of the Korean music industry. I also like how the writers never lost track of their characters, even if some of them aren't particularly well-defined.
I wish the show had better female characters, and not so many pretty pot plants.
I still think Boys Over Flowers has a lot to answer for but this is head and shoulders above its predecessor, the woeful Flower Boy Ramen Shop.
This is my review.
The end.
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Shin Se-kyung (Oh Choi-rim/Choi Eun-seol) puts in an enjoyable performances in this show about a woman who can see smells. Unfortunately she's paired up with rapist, Yoo-chun and so you should probably avoid it for that alone. His character has some kind of traumatic narcolepsy.
Even in the romance scenes, this drama is paint-by-numbers. It consists of a succession of kdrama cliches, jarring tonal shifts and the obligatory serial killer. All of this could be forgiven if the plot wasn't almost entirely driven by people being excruciatingly stupid.
Even the male lead - who starts the show as the Best Detective Ever by virtue of not being a blistering idiot - gets quickly infected with Stupid once he's finally accepted by the crack team of morons in the Investigative Unit. These detectives are played almost entirely for comic relief by a number of quality Korean actors who really deserve better.
The central conceit of the show - the female lead's synesthesia - is treated more as a supernatural power than a medical condition and her emotional journey is regularly jettisoned in favour of the male lead's. This is a common problem with kdramas and this show is one of the worst examples of it.
Show gives us a generic and poorly-drawn antagonist whose genius is regularly achieved by the other characters being exceptionally dumb. We're supposed to think this antagonist is playing Chess with the police, but really it's more like a drunken game of snakes and ladders.
In the end, show is dumb and everyone is stupid. Oh and Yoo-chun is a rapist so you probably don't want to watch this anyway.
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The plot runs in a perpetual circle and gets more and more ridiculous as you go along. Memory loss, chaebols, controlling mothers, kidnappings, makeovers and second lead syndrome - this is like the mother of all kdramas. It gave birth to the rest.
I can't say that I liked it and I certainly wouldn't want to watch it again. But for some reason I don't dislike it and even want to recommend it. I have no idea why.
At 25 episodes it's a bit of a marathon so pace yourself.
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In many ways, this is basically three shows - a weird choice when there's only 12 episodes - and since one of them is a Sageuk with little relation to the rest of the show, it's impossible to know what on Earth the writers were thinking. If you watched the first three episodes and then the final one it would make just as much sense. You don't need to watch the rest as they contribute nothing to the plotline.
It is very disappointing to watch the final episode and realise what this drama could have been if they'd concentrated on the six pupils coming together to form Orange Marmalade. We could have seen them become friends and allies over 12 episodes, learning to understand each other despite their differences and defending each other because of their shared experiences. Instead they decided to skip all that for a boring historical diversion - even though we were told at the end that Orange Marmalade was the *main point of the drama*.
There's a charming - if unoriginal - storyline in here about some high school students who overcome bigotry with the power of music and I'm just going to pretend that's the one I watched.
I'll watch Yeo Jin Goo in anything because he's a great young actor. But I was let down by the writing of this drama.
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This review may contain spoilers
It now seems premature to have called Abyss the worst drama of 2019. Who knew dramaland had this televisual equivalent of listeria-laden warm ice cream waiting in the wings.Ma Dong-chan (Ji Chang-wook, in the world's most inexplicable choice for a comeback drama) is a smoking hot GENIUS film maker who wins awards and grasps complex scientific theories in mere days. He agrees to get frozen for 24 hours but ends up being frozen for 20 years instead. There is a female version of him but she is mostly just pink. No, really, this excruciating Candy gets literally dressed as candy. I feel quite bad for Won Jin-ah who has a thankless role as Go Mi-ran - forced to be nothing more than a bright, happy, naive love interest for a man who's kind of a jerk.
Both Dong-chan and Mi-ran find themselves 20 years in the future and forced to keep a hypothermic body temperature to survive. While Dong-chan's fiance is now 20 years older, Mi-ran's narcisstic Freud-quoting ex is now a lecturer at her university. There's a lot of potential conflict to work with here but the show ignores almost all of it; steaming full speed for a somewhat-icky romance between a man who doesn't like his fiancé now she's old and the comparatively-uncomplicated Candy he starts making googly eyes at ten seconds after his break up.
It's not difficult to find negative things to say about this shallow puddle of a show: rather it's difficult to know where to begin in outlining them. Nobody involved in this has done anything right - not the writer, director, producer, actors or anyone responsible for anything. Even the music is wrong.
The humour of the show is similar to the worst of Strong Woman Do Bong Soon (this writer's previous work) and the show insists on undercutting any moment that could be powerful and emotional with bland, tasteless slapstick. Between the shrieking and the flailing and the forced romance, the show fails to make you care about either of these people. More importantly, neither of the leads have a character arc. Compared to a show with a similar premise - Thirty But Seventeen - it's shallow and trite with the 20 year time jump treated like a mild inconvenience and the hypothermia a mere romance roadblock.
The show seems to exist for the purpose of getting Wookie in a make-out shower scene to "cool down"; something that will only justify 16 episodes of television for the most ardent Wookie fan.
In a more succinct version of this review: this show sucks worse than Abyss. Don't watch it.
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Just so very boring
But you know, at first it actually wasn't. Got to give full credit to those amazing Korean production values and the acting chops of literally everybody on screen because all of that propelled me through to about episode 3 before I realised I had no idea what was happening and the whole thing didn't make much sense.Plot points seemed to repeat endlessly to no purpose and characters did inexplicable things for vague reasons (although rank stupidity did seem to be a factor).
The male lead seems to be able to sign up to a dating app with his own image, lure women in and kill them with nobody noticing or caring - let alone the police. I've seen the whole thing and still have no idea what motivated our female lead, Sum, at any point. The writer seemed to think her being autistic was sufficient motivation and I don't even know where to start on how offensive that is.
Somebody and the titular app, Someone, seem to represent an intense desire for connection between people who leave themselves open and vulnerable in trying to find it and thus end up hurt. But the show's limp, oppressed storytelling left us with nothing but a lot of scrabbling around in the dark and, admittedly, healthy doses of Kim Young-kwang being in equal parts creepy and sexy as fuck.
What should have been menacing ended up being undercut by the serial killer's sheer overwhelming omniscience and everybody's vague motivations. Don't get me started on the drama's annoying detours into mysticism and mentions of 'evil spirits' and 'exorcisms'.
By the end, I was hoping I too could be strangled mid-coitus because that would be a hell of a lot more interesting than this show and I'd still end up stupefied to the same extent.
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And I generally like good trash.
Unfortunately, while Forest has several aspects of Good Trash and I got some joy in how bad the first few episodes were, it's just boring enough to be trash without any qualifiers.
The romance between a resident surgeon with a TRAUMA and a GENIUS tsundere CEO with a TRAUMA (no doubt due to a shared childhood experience they don't remember as yet) who both end up in a Forest of Secrets (I wish) is ludicrous in all the right ways but simultaneously a boring trope salad of romcom cliches, corporate shenanigans, and Candy-meets-Hot-Cold CEO scenarios (including forced cohabitation, a fake engagement, and a love triangle).
Park Hae Jin does his best with the material (and it's honestly just good to have him back on our screens again) but Jo Boa overacts, a somewhat disappointing performance from her after her kickass turn in My Strange Hero.
The show makes little sense, although that's not its biggest problem. It's just not fun enough to endure the bad writing, the bad cliches, or the inconsistent characterisation.
Also, considering how bad this year's fire season has been, turning fire fighting into a romcom for rich kids with other agendas leaves a bad taste in my mouth and that's something the show won't be able to overcome.
Dropped after six episodes.
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This review may contain spoilers
Remake of School 2013 is remake of School 2013
Not going to lie, I went into this cold thinking it was a BL having been fooled by... literally everything about it. Within one episode I was side-eyeing its obvious similarities to kdrama School 2013. By episode 2, I was wondering if they knew it was the plot of School 2013. By episode 3, I was convinced it was, indeed, a remake of School 2013. Then I noticed the credits where they literally say it's a remake of School 2013.All other issues aside, having seen the original (albeit a while ago), I had a few gripes about it as a remake. Firstly, the original's entry point was the teachers and how the school deals with a variety of modern adolescent difficulties. As a Thai drama, the writers obviously wanted to front and centre the wildly bromantic Shin/Saint relationship so they could fool everybody (including the characters, audience, and ultimately themselves) into this being a BL This is supposedly not a BL.
By front-ending Saint and Shin's relationship and burying the rest of the class and teachers in the background, they failed to set up the characters for the much more interesting second half and left us rolling our eyes as Saint and Shin have the same conversation 18 times until I wanted to throw something at the TV. Saint is worried about Shin and wants him to forgive him, Shin wants Saint to stay away from him. On the roof, in the street, outside Shin's house, at school... these are the various places in which they had exactly the same angsty conversation. almost word for word for literal hours until I also wanted Saint to leave Shin alone. Because if you get told the same thing in no uncertain terms well over 10 times (I was counting but then gave up), then ignoring it verges on harassment. All of this was done in a way that never accidentally revealed the reason for their separation, which was held back excruciating until the big reveal. The whole thing was just turning its wheels to fill the insane 16 hour screentime and it was only curiosity about the adaptation that kept me watching.
Finally, the teachers and my cutie-pie Chadjen step in and the plot is allowed to advance and we get thrown into the full plot of the Korean original but with secondary characters who simply don't feel sufficiently fleshed out after being ignored for 8 episodes. Of course, the original is at least one third school staff meetings so it's probably not bad that those got jettisoned in lieu of cute boys declaring their undying love for each other in a way that's definitely just a really great friendship between male humans who want to spend time with only each other for the rest of their lives and want to see each other's faces when they wake up every morning.
Which brings us to my second issue, which is that this particular intensely homoerotic bromance works a lot better in a Kdrama where it doesn't always come across as... well... really really really really gay.
Queer baiting aside - which is the only way I can characterise the final scene of Shin and Saint declaring their undying love while gazing lovingly into each other's eyes sharing an umbrella in the rain - the back half leans heavily into the themes of young adults needing to forge their own path in life but still needing caring and responsible adults to step in and help when necessary. The Thai version leans even more heavily into friendship and the importance of social support and relationships to get us through difficult times.
Well acted and emotional but with poorly choreographed fight scenes and a soundtrack that verges on intrusive and obvious, Highschool Frenemy is an enjoyable, if overly long, watch whose back half is much superior to its first and is worth persisting for.
And if you choose to imagine Shin and Saint's eventual wedding with a somewhat resigned mother-in-law and little sister Chingching as an adorable flower girl, well, that's up to you.
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In the near future, a fortune-telling AI called Manxin has been developed that mines big data and uses an algorithm to predict the future. The AI has an accuracy rate of over 96% and its associated app is free. As such, its use has grown until it underpins the majority of actions and interactions in Korea. The impact of the app is not beneficial, however, nor even benign. The economy has slumped, unemployment is high and homelessness is on the rise.
A young woman To Sun-ho (an almost-unrecognisable Lee Yun-hee) is on the search for answers about Manxin after her sister - a Manxin addict - died in a freak accident involve a sinkhole. How could this be possible? Didn't Manxin warn her? Did it send her to her death? Why would it do that? Essentially, Sun-ho is driven by the question that disaffected believers have been asking for eternity: why did God allow this to happen?
To Sun-ho is soon joined on her journey by Manxin cultist Jung Ga-ram (Lee Dong-hwi), who despite his worship of the AI is not a blind ideologue. The two begin their search for the AI, her to question it, him to be in its presence.
On the surface, this episode of SF8 is a simple discussion of free will in an ordered universe. It is a truism that if we knew the position of every molecule in the Universe we could accurately predict the future. An ordered and mechanistic Universe negates the existence of free will. Whether that Universal order comes from a consciousness or not isn't important in this context. Whether it's physics or God we ultimately have no control over the world and we will therefore cling to the idea that we can find a clue to the future. Basically, it's humans who want Gods. That's why we create them.
Whether Manxin has another level to it is up to debate. It's short - a mere 50 minutes - and so maybe it didn't have time to tease out some of its themes. Or maybe that really is all there is to it.
Unlike The Prayer, which was basically perfect, Manxin suffers from a number of flaws. The main one is the vague and almost trite "fortunes" that the AI delivers to people daily. They're designed to be familiar to people in a shamanistic culture but are open to interpretation in ways that undermine the "96.3% accuracy" of the show's premise. Which of course is one of the criticisms of shamanism from those outside the culture (of which I am admittedly one).
The ending opens up a lot of questions, which ultimately is what good scifi is supposed to do. If everything in the Universe is destined, then can we exert free will by our choice not to be informed of that destiny? Can we choose whether we want the illusion of free will? And if so, is that free will?
Overall, Manxin is an enjoyable watch but it left me wanting more.
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