Sirius

Dead End Job is a mess, and I enjoyed it anyway. It runs eight short episodes, the premise is genuinely good, the two leads are a lot of fun, despite the lackluster plot.

The premise: a man takes high paying part-time gigs, but each one turns out to involve some kind of monster, some kind of psycho, something deeply wrong, and the show is about him overcoming whatever he's up against. His sister gets involved by trying to find him, and she starts taking the gigs herself in order to track him down. That's the whole plot, and I mean that literally, because there's essentially no plot beyond it.

Which brings me to Go Min-si, who appears as a main lead. She plays some girl who keeps drinking tea with the two siblings and helps them? (I genuinely have no clue whether sue was helping or manipulating at the beginning) She truly had no goal until the last episode, where she convinced the main lead to open the door, which raises the question: is she a villain? I have no fucking clue what she's doing, but I assume she's the setup for a second season? Even her monologue in the final episode made zero fucking sense. She seems like someone who wants revenge against all of humanity or some bullshit, but like... why? I have the same question about the guy who gives the part-time gigs. Is bro a villain or a good person? What was their goal? Why protect the sister at the end and then turn around and give some weird ass villainous monlogue to the brother while stepping on their neck? I could not for the life of me figure what this dude wanted. Either way, it seems the main lead killed him lol.

The episodes themselves are wildly uneven. Episode one is probably the best of all eight. The clown episode was weird. The construction episode was just downright bad, because nothing in it actually warrants the amount of money this guy was being paid. It was just one psycho who wanted to kill you, and that's it. Compare that to the first job, which was literally an intelligent monster that turned into a gigantic rat and was going to eat you alive, or the hospital episode, which had literal parasites going inside you and eating you from the inside, or the clown, who is some kind of supernatural, super-powerful psychotic entity. The construction episode is just some guy with a fucking crowbar, and he's a fat ass by the way, so the main lead beat him up easily.

So the creativity is not that good, and it declines instead of improving. Everything related to the father, in my opinion, was completely stupid, baseless, and unnecessary. It was just a method to get the main leads back into the game even though they had left successfully by episode five or six. I think it would have been much cooler if they had gone in the direction of, I don't know, doing these part-time gigs where one of the leads crosses into the other world and the other has to save them. Which they did but immediately solved it in one episode for no apparent reason.

What holds it together is the cast. The two siblings are very fun. I loved the sister. She seemed like a genuine person, and she was kind, and at the same time she was strong and had that bad bitch energy, so it was interesting to see her dynamic with her brother and the way she dealt with everything. I generally enjoyed the acting, the characters, and the guest actors, even though we learn nothing about the part-time gigs guy, and nothing about Go Min-si.

So yeah: stupid plot, and a 7/10 anyway, because it's a lottt of fun.