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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The absolute worst of Taiwanese dramas featuring a female lead so passive, simpering and self-righteous that you'll be rooting for the second female lead to throw her under a bus.

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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Every time I thought this silly show couldn't get any dumber or more annoying, it proved it could.
I can't get more specific without ruining the plot - let's just say that the writers love their Noble Idiocy but can never quite nail the Noble part and end up only hitting the Idiocy.

It's a shame really because the premise is good, the acting is actually not bad (but the dubbing is atrocious) and the OTP have some nice moments of realistic cute. But the rest is just woeful and at a whopping 48 episodes it's a waste of time.

The biggest problem (apart from the endless Idiocy) is that the writers didn't actually know what to do with the dream-swapping and mostly used it for shallow diversions into lame romantic fantasies. There is a point in the plot where the ability of the leads to share dreams could have actually been used to enhance the plot. But in the end, it was just a conceit and not a well-utilised one.

By the end, this became one of the worst shows I've ever seen. Boring, bloated and pointless.

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This drama is pure crack.

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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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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I watched this drama because it's widely considered a kdrama classic. It has all the elements you see in later dramas but in their most cliched form.
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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It is such a shame that great young actors like Yeo Jin Goo were wasted on this adaptation of the Orange Marmalade manwha that fails to give justice to its source material.

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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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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I can't believe Lee Soo-yeon wrote this

I can't believe Lee Soo-yeon wrote this. It bears saying twice.
The first four episodes showed evidence of her deft procedural hand as BF CEO, Yoon Jayu (a flat and uninspiring Han Hyo-joo) finds her company beset by internal and external challenges just as it's overcome the challenge of cultivating seafood. She recruits one-dimensional sex bot Woo Chae-woon (a flat and uninspiring Ju Ji-hoon) to be her bodyguard. A job which seems to involve wearing turtlenecks and hair gel, driving her into ambushes and never wearing a bulletproof vest.

Chae-woon secretly has AN AGENDA, which in a better Soo-yeon show would mean something (everybody has AN AGENDA after all) but is rendered meaningless the minute it's revealed.

At episode 5, the show then quickly degenerates into a somewhat shallow (at times farcical) mess of cliches and tired conspiracies, combined with a dose of Alpha superhero nonsense that clashes wildly with the show's attempt to canvass Korean gender issues. Is it about political corruption? Corporatism? The impact of a disruptive technology? A study of humanity? A canvassing of corporate ethics? A warning against the widespread use of AI?
Who the hell knows. Not me and not the writer either.

For a writer famed for exploring Korean social issues from a place of nuance, perception and intelligence, her villains are suddenly crass and stupid while her protagonists' moral and ethical failings are swept under the rug or even portrayed as somehow acceptable. Character motivations are opaque and contradictory and if there was a theme(s) there I couldn't find it.

The acting, direction, lighting and cinematography do not help. All are approached with a lacklustre paint-by-numbers sensibility that suggests the whole thing is half baked. And while Lee Soo-yeon has long struggled with the strictures put on her by a Disney that has the money but a legendary lack of courage and imagination (just look at what they've done to Doctor Who), this is such a mediocre piece of work that I have to ask again.

Did Lee Soo-yeon really write this?

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There's a certain kind of joy that comes with watching a gleefully bad show, as those who read my review of Risky Romance will know. When a show embraces its awful, it can be delightful in how trash it is. Good trash.
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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There are two things to bear in mind before watching this episode of SF8. The first is that Koreans have a history with fortune-telling that we don't and the second is that the country has a history of technological optimism. Shamanism is deeply rooted in Korean culture and technology is frequently portrayed as being either benign or actively helpful. Concerns around privacy, surveillance and manipulation are not usually found in Korean films and television. So in that respect it's not surprising that a science fiction writer would marry these two societal influences in one story.

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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I think if I had written a review at various point in this drama, they would have all been completely different. Yes the show is that uneven.

The beginning is pure cracky, trashy fun. It's silly as hell but I laughed out loud anyway. The premise - of rival baseball teams as some kind of warring kingdoms - was milked for a lot of laughs and the female lead kind of sold me on the character despite overacting. Lee Dong Wook is a class act and his charisma drove a lot of what made the first half so appealing.

By midway through, I was kind of stunned at the uptick in quality. Show got more serious, more philosophical and even became quite good there for a while. While I missed the laughs, I wasn't complaining - show was way better than I was expecting.

But here I am writing a review about the whole drama. And unfortunately that includes the final sombre, meandering, turgid, boring final episodes of seriousness and filler and serious filler. There was so much comedy yet to milk around the original premise that could have filled a full hour of fun but instead it kept up the dour tone and filler plotlines until I just couldn't care anymore.

Show got trashy, show got good, then show got dumb. It's a shame but there it is.

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Unfortunately there's a basic word count for reviews so 'Show is dumb and everyone is stupid' will probably be deemed inadequate. So I will attempt to put some more words around that overall conclusion to at least meet the minimum requirements.

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 only Dark Hole here is the black hole of boredom this drama opened up as it sucked me into a soporific coma.

That's saying something considering the insane parade of elements and genres the show rained down upon us from the beginning. At one point a zombie film, a monster flick. a post-apocalyptic survival tale, a revenge melo, and a crime thriller, in the first episode alone, the show gave us:
A hole
Solar flares
A serial killer
Black crazy CGI mist in a mysterious crystal
Zombies
A tentacle monster

And that was only in episode 1.

Kim Ok Bin is quite good as the calm and rational, emotionally-controlled detective, Lee Hwa -sun, who gets caught in the small town apocalypse while hunting down her husband's murderer (the ever present Korean serial killer). And Lee Joon-hyuk is also good in his now-patented role of restrained no-nonsense badass, Yoo Tae-han. But their characters and performances are not enough to save a show that quickly degenerates into a mindless morass of elements ripped from other shows.

A strange mix of 80s monster flick, Stephen King novel, and Korean drama elements, Dark Hole is pretty much a mess. And while the first week shoots for moody and atmospheric and almost makes it, week two degenerates into a boring succession of post-apocalyptic cliches that mostly involve people running around in the dark. It also makes little sense since the mist that people inhale makes them hallucinate and act in response to a a traumatic memory. But by episode 3 they're just lurching around like classic zombies, hunting down and killing those who are uninfected.

I'm wondering if we have Stranger Things to blame, since many of the elements in this are taken from the same classic 80s scifi, fantasy and horror film sources of that show. But Dark Hole doesn't have its charm, its genuine sense of menace nor its appealing characters. And weirdly it also doesn't have the usual OCN gloss.

So rather than dropping it because it's a bit of a mess, I think I'm mostly dropping it because I don't care.

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The question to ask yourself is exactly what kind of silly you enjoy watching.
Because this show is silly.

And I don't mean that it's trash or that it's lightweight or that it's fluffy (you could argue it's all those things). I mean it's deeply deeply silly, from its basic premise to its unfolding plot to its source of conflict.

A brilliantly-cast Cat plays L, a feline that turns into a man. L tries to act too. This is not pretty. Hopefully the cat can give him some pointers while he's on set. Seriously, this Cat Sunbae is brilliant and actually looks like L. Except of course that Cat Sunbae can act.

The cat is taken in by an aspiring webtoon artist Kim Sol-ah (Shin Ye-eun). Sol-ah behaves like a 12 year old mostly, simpering and floundering and fulfilling every rant I ever made about Korean dramas infantilising their female leads. Shin Ye-eun is good here, I stress. It's the part she's playing that I don't like.

Sol-ah takes in the Cat (she renames it Hong-joo) to help out the man she's been crushing on since highschool who inherited the Cat from his recent breakup (or did he?). At one point we find out why her crush bailed on her in the past and it's very very silly (are you sensing a theme).

Hong-joo found out he could become human as a kitten when he turned into a child in her presence. The show then delights us with scenes of her as a full-grown adult with an adoring child. He then grows up, becoming a large man who follows her around, listens in on her conversations, changes into a human in her bed at night, pervs on her while she's changing, and generally behaves like a huge creepster. The first few episodes are basically a horror film with weirdly upbeat music.

Uncertain as to whether it's about bestiality, paedophilia, or a delightful romcom about a woman and her stalker, the show kind of embraces all three.

Sit back, relax and enjoy new conversational material such as, "Can a cat consent?", "Is it stalking if she let him into the house in his cat form?", and "Is it romantic if he imprinted on her when he was a baby and she was a full-grown woman?".

Or just suspend all your disbelief, turn off that squidgy thing in your head that won't shut up, and embrace the silly. It's up to you.

I couldn't. I'm out.

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