To sell the slow burn story atmosphere, a drama needs to be accompanied with a memorable and fitting soundtrack. There was a desperate need for an actual original soundtrack in this one instead of filling it with random and generic sorrowful OST which ruined almost any big moment. Despite having an abundance of free time, the drama failed to give the side characters a "character", they never felt that they mattered. The drama behaved like a movie but failed to fit it in a drama (long) format. More often than not, it stuck out a bit too much and ended up being annoying.
I was losing my mind by the sheer amount of repeated flashbacks from their past. The exact same sequence of flashbacks was played more than any amount considered to be normal. The doubleganger didn't really have an active role in the drama, you see her once at the beginning and at the end. The chemistry between the leads was quite right. The introduction was interesting enough but once they switched the events to the family it fell apart. There were a handful of members in the family of which none of them were interesting or appealing, which is unfortunate because they occupy most of the runtime. All of them were a copy-paste of the exact bad-rich-scumbag character.
The same rancid formula we love to hate from these daily dramas except this one stinks more than the others like a swimming pool full of expired milk. Scummy through and through. That 10 years time skip ending had me sighing in agony.
The first 2 episodes were good enough for an introduction but the rest didn't hold up and ended up being a boring slice of life. The plot may seems interesting on the surface but they ended up being more like a mother-daughter relationship defying its original premise. They simply neglected the unique situation we were presented at the beginning. Regardless, it still didn't do a good job carrying its message despite having a very relaxed 16 episodes. It's still watchable, Yoo Hyun and his father were the most appealing part.
The characters were its biggest downfall. All the characters were insane, demented, deranged and devoid of integrity. There was no layers to their madness. You'll have to humanize them first before stripping it away. Skipping the first step would devalue their actions and take away from the watching experience. Aside from the characters, the drama was excruciatingly slow for no apparent reason other than filling the contracted runtime. Slow burners are acceptable when they serve a purpose to either immerse the viewers into its world or to seamlessly build up the tension. The drama failed to do either. The twists were overdone for the sake of it rather than adding to the narrative meaningfully. Even then, they weren't appealing nor interesting. Once the memory was restored the drama took a sharp and sudden turn for the worst going against what it tried to build up to, this includes the ending. One more thing, there was an attempt to have a play on artistic symbolism but none of which landed well. Partially because of the two aforementioned points.
It started off poor with a tacky set up failing to construct a half-assed mystery element, even a thriller one for what it matter. Which broke off the tension right from the beginning. The violent scenes weren't there to contribute to either themes but to be violent for the sake of it. The villains were utterly comical and straight up ruined the drama shamelessly! As if things weren't bad already, they went ahead and turned the whole thing into a cult chase. it's been proven time and time again that cult focused plots have a dangerously high failure rate, yet we've been flooded by these in the recent years. The handful of violent scenes weren't enough to save the drama. Despite all of that, they had the audacity to tease for possible future continuation! What a load of rubbish!
I can't believe they made Dal Rae end up with the obsessive deranged incel stalker!!!!!!!!! WHAT!
I believe they had, you may expect another one around Black Friday. If you go to their website and click signup you'll find a discord link you can join them and get notified when they do an open signup.
The production seems to be as bare-bones as they could come from the 2000s. A drama can still be functional even with the roughest cuts if other aspects held up which, unfortunately, isn't the case here. The writing was a big sloppy mess, incoherent, disconnected from reality and unbelievably corny, especially the older cast. The drama ended up with too many loose ends, these plot threads left untouched despite constantly building them up throughout the drama. For example, the story constantly hinted that Yoon Young and her husband were going to have marital problems and that was going to be their story but we never got to that point, making all the scenes including them leading up to that moment completely redundant. The writing definitely affected the cast's performance. You may have been excited to see the leads to be different from the typical young-blood dolled up faces but they don't bring much to this specific project, in fact, it's embarrassing to watch them here when you they're definitely more capable than that. They were in their 50s at the time but were acting like the typical shy 20s boy-girl for their romantic scenes. Speaking of cast members, I ALWAYS hated how Kim Hye Ok sounds when she screams or cries but this drama turned it up to 11. You may or may not develop tinnitus from the unbelievable intense screeching.
There was a transgender subplot and let's just say that the drama handled it as you would imagine Korean writers would do. The drama may seems promising from the surface but it's a big let down.
In the second half, I found myself waiting for the OST to play out more than the jokes themselves. Some bits didn't land well and there were plenty of redundant scenes. It's still a decent comedy and one of the better ones.
It was too expensive to keep Namkoong for another 2 episodes so we got this instead. These sloppy 2 episodes further highlight the worst points about the original series. Soo Yeon once again proven to be the worst character. We got less violence and a worse story, action and performance. If you barely got through the original one then I recommend skipping this useless prequel.
It's really disappointing to see a drama with a good and enjoyable start just to wither away later on, that includes everything even the cast. As if every single person that was involved in making the drama got tired of the project. Although the earlier parts were enjoyable but I was rolling my eyes every single time Je Yi & Soo Yeon show up on the screen and broke the momentum. They were both easily the worst part of the drama in general. As expected, by the time we got to see the real culprit, it turned out to be a caroonish joker knock off with zero effort put into writing him. To state the obvious, Namkoong was doing an unbelievable amount of heavy lifting to keep this drama afloat. The OST was decent at the right time, while other times it was just some background noise. It's still a decent watch and the slightly shorter runtime was helpful but temper your expectations a bit.
A poor fantasy that failed to establish a reasonable foundation from the very beginning, it even did a worse job with its brittle world building. The low budget visual effects weren't helping its case either. The cast may seems to be fine on the surface but the characters were as one dimensional as they could come. Its second biggest selling point after fantasy is the romance, of which was the least appealing aspect of the drama. By the end, I couldn't care the slightest about either of the leads and their fate. A cheap Chinese knock off fantasy with gods and dragons would have been better than this.
Does the ML’s mom divorces her husband or at least stand up to him , or does he change for the better? The way…
Yeah she stand up to him and they break up then he attempts to change for the better and eventually get back together. It's a really distasteful and agonizing cycle to watch.
Went from promising to disappointing real quick. Cults and hypnosis/mind-control is the worst combination to make a mystery/thriller/horror drama. It gives the writer an unlimited pass for a lazy writing and this is what we got here. The cast was alright tho.
The first episode won't encourage anyone to continue, it started off everything on the wrong foot. It relies heavily on flashbacks which makes the story continuity poor and loose since the writer can stir the mystery in any direction without much consideration on it being coherent or whatsoever. It's too long for such an insignificant piece of mystery. Things didn't get any better once all the mystery was revealed because of poor build up and a joke of an antagonist. I wouldn't label it as a mystery drama anyway, the majority of the drama seems preoccupied with portraying arrogance and high-class lifestyles, leaving only a minimal portion of the actual story and mystery. Even then, we didn't start to get much information until episode 9-10 which is too late. They made the FL's kid narrate most of the last episode like an adult which was weird. Cha Do Young was an utterly useless character, her character was meant to be a comedic relief and a filler but she was nothing but a horny bait. It's probably the weakest drama I've seen from Cho Yeo Jung.
There was a transgender subplot and let's just say that the drama handled it as you would imagine Korean writers would do. The drama may seems promising from the surface but it's a big let down.