This review may contain spoilers
Need to Know a Bit About What to Expect
There is a mild spoiler ahead, but it's from episode 2. I include because if you are thinking of viewing this show, there are three things you should know before you start:1. This is the story of Cha Mi Jo (played by Son Ye Jin) and her two close friends, Jeong Chan Young (Jeon Mi Do) and Jang Joo Hee (Kim Ji Hyun). In episode 2 we learn that Chan Young has a terminal illness and that she will not recover. The rest of the series is devoted to the ways Mi Jo and her friends deal with this awfulness, up to and beyond Chan Young's death. This is a tear jerker.
2. Reiterating something from #1, while this is the story of three friends, Mi Jo is clearly the main character, and Chan Young's passing is largely shown from Mi Jo's perspective. One reviewer suggested that Chan Young's death was a prop in Mi Jo's journey, which is exaggerating, but there is a kernel of truth there. Joo Hee is a third wheel in the friendship, almost from the beginning of the show (and from the beginning of the friendship troika going back 20 years). It shouldn't be too surprising, since in kdrama land Son Ye Jin is royalty, Jeon Mi Do is coming off her breakthrough role with Hospital Playlist (after a long experience on stage), and Kim Ji Hyun is a stage actress without any big kdrama roles before this.
3. Mi Jo gets annoying at times. There were a few times when I wanted to yell at the TV "Your friend is dying, stop nagging her!" It is awkward to have a show focusing on one friend's emotional, and at times irrational, reactions to another friend's impending death.
When thinking about the path to #3, I realized this is where the story starts to get personal, and in a way that's uncomfortable for me (at least). Mi Jo desperately loves her friend, and it is tearing her up inside that her friend will be gone soon. Most people face that position at some point, be it a close friend, a parent, or a spouse. Yes, it's their life, and I want to be supportive, but I will have to deal with the consequences too, and I can guess how bad it will be after this person close to me is gone. I am scared about what might happen if my wife, a cancer survivor, dies.
This story was a lot more challenging than the "happy go-lucky three friends find love and meaning as they approach their 40th birthdays" tale that I expected. That would be my summary of the series, solid story, good acting, just not what I was expecting. My only real complaint would be the adoption story lines, which were not exactly "bad" but felt barely relevant to the main story. Again, a good series, as long as you know what you are getting into.
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Love comes most cruelly to those who do not believe in it
The premise of this series is that an alien from another planet has been quietly living as a Korean with minimal social connections for 400 years. Three months before his return to his planet, he is working as a young college professor in Seoul, when the hottest TV star in Korea moves into the luxury apartment next door. She is arrogant, ignorant, and vain, but (perhaps because he has no idea who she is) she also shows her vulnerable side to him. Further, with his super sensitive ears he clearly hears her talk of her unhappy life and then he has premonitions that she is in danger and in need of protection. By the third episode, despite his best efforts to maintain his solitude, she has taken over his life.If I haven't lost you by this point, you will probably enjoy this show. There is a sci-fi component here, but much of that is seen through the eyes of a kdrama diva, often to comedic effect. Mainly the ML character (Do Min Joon) hops onto the FL character's (Cheon Song Yi) roller coaster, and we get to watch the ride. The writer has built a character in Song Yi -- lonely and vulnerable, but with an inexhaustible reservoir of ego and self-confidence -- that makes the romance with a reluctant super powered alien seem downright logical.
The series occasionally brought out my inner Roger Ebert to ding it in a review, but it is too much fun to be harsh. The many iconic moments -- the ending on the red carpet, the kissing problems, him literally sweeping her off her feet, his rigid lifestyle giving way to whatever she needs, the "You are my destiny" anthem -- make the story epic no matter its smaller faults.
Beyond the romance that leads the story, we have a memorable psychotic character who murders anyone who even thinks about getting in his way. We also have a handsome rich guy who desperately tries to ward off our male lead, but so good-natured that Min Joon enlists his help to care for Song Yi. There's also some social commentary about Korea's unhealthy habits with regard to celebrities and status.
So, yes, the writing at times seems to be filling-out a 16 episode story into 21 episodes with overdoses of flashbacks and double scenes, and the acting and staging occasionally feel dated, I guess? I also had questions about what actually is happening, especially between Min Joon and the girl he met 400 years before. But if you know what you're getting into, you'll likely enjoy the story.
For the sake of reference, this show was written by the same person who wrote Crash Landing on You. There are some obvious similarities between this series and CLOY. If you are looking for something like CLOY, then MLFAS is a kind of CLOY precursor that you might enjoy.
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Some Good, Some I Don't Understand
Let's do it by the numbers, starting from a baseline of 6.0.+1 because Kim Tae Ri nailed the Na Hee Do character the energy and innocence of youth, along with the various mannerisms of a teenage athlete. I don't how she did it, but she earned some awards for this performance. She made the character a lot of fun.
+1 for the rest of tbe acting cast and characters. There are a couple of jerks in the script but no continuing arcs of bad guys. These are young, mostly likeable young people trying to make tbeir way through life. What conflict that emerges is from reasonable differences in priorities and from social circumstances.
+1 for the relationship between Na Hee Do and Baek Yi Jin, two people who were too young to be so alone like that. They helped each other through some dark times in their youth when nobody else was there for them. We all should have someone like that in our lives. The payphone scene was an effective way to express how important these two were to one another.
+1 for the relationship between Na Hee Do and Ko Yu Rim. A relationship like this between two young women just doesn't seem to happen often in the shows I have watched. This relationship has only the slightest hint of being part of a love triangle, and that hint dissappears quickly enough. The hug in Madrid and Hee Do saying "nobody else knows what we have been through" conveyed the special nature of their connection.
+0.5 for the introduction to fencing, a sport I knew nothing about. I do wish the series had done some more here. In particular I wish there had been some more slow motion shots and better camera angles, because there were a few times where I could not tell what thr heck was going on.
-1 for the framing of the story as primarily a giant flashback from 2022 to 1998-2002. The times play a key role in the relationship between Hee Do and Yi Jin, so i understand why the story would start in 1998, but I don't understand the point of the bits of dialogue that take place in 2022. It feels like the primary purpose was to give us some hints on how the story will turn out, but judging by social media, a LOT of people did not get the hint. Adding the daughter character led to a cute "breaking of the fourth wall" scene but it also led to an obvious but futile question about the daughter's connections with the main narrative. There is another question -- is Hee Do happy in the present day? -- which gets almost completely ignored, which leads to...
-1 for the story gaps. So we get heavily invested in this character Na Hee Do, and we get little hints about her present day life, and, er, that is it. Just felt weird. I don't want to go into spoilers, but there are obvious questions about Mr. Kim that went completely ignored. The bigger gap though is what happens near the end of the main narrative, where the relationship between Hee Do and Yi Jin just... breaks down? Yi Jin made a decision that in some respects is true to his character, but also seems to violate his personal prime directive of not hurting Hee Do. That conflict needed to be presented explicitly on screen, and it wasn't, and a LOT of viewers were frustrated as a result. The other gap is what happened in the later years between Yi Jin and Hee Do; while it is easy to guess, it feels odd that we have to guess given the narrative framing mentioned above.
-0.5 because my wife thought the story didn't seem to have an underlying point. There is some discussion about impermanence and youth, and there is some discussion of "the times", that the forces of history at work on our little lives. But these themes seem to waft in and out rather than driving the story.
I am neutral on the ending. Some people were offended by it, but i thought it felt natural and true to the characters. If you are the type of person who will fall in love with an attractive actor like Nam Joo Hyuk, you will be frustrated with the ending, but I thought the presentation of the character made clear how this story would turn out. As mentioned above, the writing could have been tighter with the resolution, so no positives from me.
One aspect of the series that it is unclear to me is that Hee Do's mom was a well known journalist who completely fails to acknowledge in public that this extremely successful and prominent athlete is her own daughter. This is held out as a basic tenet of professionalism, but it is foreign to me. Is this common among Korean journalists? Or is this woman weird? For that matter, is her successor as UBS news anchor also similarly pathological during an interview with a close friend?
Finally, the idea that the best fencer in the world might be 18 years old and then retired by age 29 (or earlier) puts some additional negative vibes on the ending. The series has some uplifting moments at the start and then... well, we're past our peak at 25. There is a vague sadness around the older Hee Do, that she was done writing "her story" even when she still had more Olympic gold medals ahead of her. That does not seem true to the younger Hee Do, and again I will attribute the inconsistency to the clumsy present day framing.
In summary the plot was good, not great. The characters, their relationships, and the acting carried the series. It is a good watch, but clearly not for everyone. 8.0/10.
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