I need a gif of when the woman slapped Sung Joon’s face with her purse and made his nose bleed, ‘cause that pretty much sums up how I feel about this drama. I can’t root for a show when I want to watch one of the leads go down in flames. Even if supposed “character redemption” is part of the plot, if I don’t like the character, I’m not gonna care about him being redeemed.
Also the whole episode felt totally flat. There was no spark, nothing to grab me and capture my attention and make me want to root for any one. I didn’t anticipate sticking with this drama in the first place, but I thought the first episode would start out a little bit better. The direction, surprisingly, feels the weakest to me – none of the characters feel lived in. It feels like actors reciting their lines. That probably disappoints me the most (well, second most after the rage-inducing “experiment” of the first few minutes… okay maybe third-most because seriously there’s no reason for the random white dude. There are universities in Korea, c’mon now). The concept sounded like it had such potential, but the show feels like any typical drama stereotypes, just gussied up in a different premise.
I feel like I could really like Han Ye Seul’s character, but she also didn’t feel a fully realized character – more like the writer was just checking off boxes in a description to give us the short-hand of what she’s supposed to be like (messy, poor, etc.). Which, again, is far from being a novel character, but I thought with the whole “being able to channel the spirit of Marie Antoinette” she’d be a little more… unique.
I’m especially grumpy because I used this hour that could have been better spent on the Signal premiere, but I thought I’d be “productive” while I waited for that download and now I’m just angry at Dramaland, which is not a good place to be when you want to watch a show you’ve been anticipating for months.
Oh goddammit, is Madame Antoine trash? I wasn’t hoping for the moon and the stars, but at least something watchable, especially after High Society.
*flips table out the window*
Okay, here’s the thing – I’m not sure. All I know is had a visceral reaction during the first 5-10 minutes about SJ’s character and was full on ready to close the window and never look back when the lady walloped him in the face with her purse (literally seconds after I’d muttered to my screen, “I want to punch you SO HARD”). So, in that way, I suppose the show is self-aware and purposefully created the character to be like that.
Buuuuut I just don’t want to deal with watching his character grow and change as he discovers “love” and all that nonsense because I really, really didn’t like him and none of the other characters were compelling enough for me to get over how much I really didn’t like him.
It’s not that I don’t like the heartless scientist, because, hey, Chi Hoon! One of my favorite characters who is unable to feel things and lives for science! But this character is such a smug jerk that, ugh, yes, all the purses to the face, please.
So that just set the tone (and I felt that the first scene was a bizarre choice in and of itself – I think it was to get across the underlying point of the show, but I really don’t need any random white dudes to give a show an apparent scholarly validity), and the rest of the direction just never was good enough to erase it. I really wanted to like Han Ye Seul’s character because she totally seems like my kind of girl, but in my bitter jaded way I saw her more as a convenient amalgum of those kdrama girls who are poor and quirky and messy, and not a person unto herself. Even though she’s got this amazing trait to explore – hello, communing with Marie Antoinette? Con-woman or not, that’s a fun thing to play with, but she just didn’t have the off-beat zest I was hoping to see in order to effectively counter-balance the ass-hat that is SJ’s character.
It just made me really bitter and angry, watching the episode, and even the moments of cute and fun were overshadowed by it. There’s some potential there, but there isn’t enough to keep me watching. I need to either feel an immediate connection with the characters in order to tolerate a weak script and clunky directing, or vice versa. Something needs to grab me, and I didn’t get that here (well, I suppose something did, but it wasn’t the thing to keep me watching). I didn’t feel any magic in the show – just actors hitting their mark and saying their lines. I didn’t feel the chemistry, and not just between the leads, but between most people. Except for HYS and the cute girl from Let’s Eat 2 – they are adorable.
Honestly, if the show opened up with them in the cafe and “Madam Antoine” doing their thing before going to SJ’s jerk-tastic explanation of his “test subject” and his experiment to prove that love doesn’t exist, then I might have been more generous in my interpretation. But that’s why I think the directing fails me as much as the script (and the acting, because SJ smirks are not winning me over). The show could have been better introduced and the subject matter and conflict woven in a more organic and interesting way. Or at least a way where I didn’t want to reach through my screen to throttle a character.
The Obsessive Dilettante 