lurkingshan

I liked the first half of this drama very much. It’s a unique premise and the cast is fantastic. And the two leads had wonderful chemistry. Their scenes together were always interesting.

Unfortunately, the drama got a bit too caught up in its own cleverness with undoing everything the audience thought we knew, until there was precious little to grasp onto with the characters. I don’t appreciate twists when they undercut character to the point that your emotional connection to them is severed. And that’s very much what happened for me with Sakiko in the final episodes.

Additionally, story focus in the last few installments shifted away from Itsuki and toward Mitsuru, and the former is a much more interesting character than the latter. I found myself irritated sitting through whole episodes where Itsuki barely appeared and I was asked to be sympathetic towards a childish coward who harmed many people because he simply refused to communicate. The show’s attempt to give Sakiko an “equal” relationship crime to level the playing field between them also fell quite flat for me, and the whole thing kind of limped to the ending after that.

It’s a shame this lost steam. It’s rare to get well written dramas about adults with interesting interior lives. I’d have been more interested in a version of this story that saw the original premise through rather than undercutting it to try to make some larger thematic point that didn’t land.