Overall Rating: A (Wanna give this one an A+ but in deference to the A+ shows I’ve already rated I will settle for A)
Subtitles: I think these were decent Viki subs. There were moments where the translation was a tiny bit clunky and/or very literal, but overall easy to follow.
Brief Synopsis: Three rich high school graduates with difficult family situations take their desire for revenge too far and come up with a plot to hurt the people they’ve been hurt by, bringing many innocent bystanders into their cross hairs. Things do not go as planned. Watch it on Viki here.
**Full show spoilers below the image. If you do not wish to be spoiled, do not proceed**
Ending Type: This is definitely a “happy ending” show, even if I wanted a bit more of that soothing balm of contentment that the final 20ish minutes gave us. There was enough intense and painful stuff in the episodes leading up that I needed to be hugged a little more by the conclusion, but we’ll take what we got.
Characters:
Kwon Shi Hyun (Woo Do Hwan)
Eun Tae Hee (Joy)
Choi Soo Ji (Moon Ga Young)
Lee Se Joo (Kim Min Jae)
Full review: Whew.
So full disclosure this is one of my favorite K Dramas that I’ve watched possibly ever, certainly recently. Do I think it’s objectively the best? Certainly not. However it had that special sauce that made it exactly the kind of show that I enjoy, am engaged in, and find myself emotionally invested in. I loved every minute of it. I normally skim-watch parts of dramas because I’ll have them on while I’m working on projects, etc, and while I pay attention primarily to the drama I am normally content to miss a few things and go back and re-watch if I feel I’ve missed something critical. However all shows have verbal and visual queues to indicate when important things are happening so normally I end up catching most of what I need to catch and missing extraneous stuff.
This show took me longer than normal to watch because I couldn’t do that– there wasn’t a single part or single scene that I was willing to look away from for a few moments to get other things done.
I’m laughing a little bit at myself because I was watching Tempted while I wrote my review for My First First Love Season 2, in which I complain about how that show seems to suggest that men and women can’t be friends without having romantic feelings for each other, and about how one couple shouldn’t have ended up together because the level of betrayal that occurred was not the kind of thing you can really get over in a healthy relationship.
Both of those things are also true about this show, but the writing was so good that I didn’t care?
First, I would like to take a moment to praise Woo Do Hwan, without whom this show absolutely would not have been what it is. There are a whole lot of talented actors out there, don’t get me wrong. Like, crazy talented. But Woo Do Hwan is the only one I’ve seen who can switch so easily between a completely sinister character and a sweet, funny, warm one and be so genuine and believable on both ends of the spectrum. Shi Hyun was really a deeply complex being– he was awful, he was a bastard, he was cruel, but he was also a highly sympathetic character whose emotions were raw and real, and there was a very real warmth to him when he was being kind and gentle and was at ease and in his element. Such a dynamic character who really carried such an emotional and intense plot. Woo Do Hwan slayed every moment of it, and I was absolutely mesmerized by him.
Like I LOVED him in My County and I chose to watch this show because I was so delighted by his dual portrayal of Yeong and Eun Seop in King: The Eternal Monarch. Neither of those shows prepared me for quite how good he actually was, because honestly a character as dynamic as Shi Hyun doesn’t appear very often.
Joy was also great as Eun Tae Hee, though her character was slightly more straightforward. Still, she was believable and genuine enough that you felt what she was feeling at every moment. And man this story gives you a lot of things to feel.
Moon Ga Young was also crazy impressive– she’s on my list of actors to follow now. Kim Min Jae displayed some serious chops as well.
Overall the main four slayed really intense roles, and their acting compared with the very intense writing just made this a huge winner for me.
While I was obviously deeply invested in Shi Hyun and Tae Hee’s story, and constantly feeling the rollercoaster of emotions the story takes you on from the fake seduction to the growing actual attraction to the fall to the various revelations of betrayal and the twisted history between the two, it was a lot. Emotionally speaking. I felt a lot of things while watching this, and parts were supremely difficult to watch because they were uncomfortable and were supposed to be– it was so exquisitely written and executed that the hard things and the bad things really hit home.
The driving force of this, though, was the friendship between Shi Hyun, Soo Ji, and Se Joo. I remember commenting to one of my friends in the first couple episodes that their friendship was so pure and I loved seeing how close they were and how good they were to each other. It was absolutely fascinating because seeing the show from their perspective alone makes them and their dynamic seductive; you see the good and ignore the bad. I was obsessed with the way this narrative slowly unraveled as the show went on. How you got to know them all better but also how the toxicity of their lives and attitudes slowly started to bubble to the surface until everything was falling apart.
Eun Tee Hee makes a comment to Se Joo towards the end about how the three of them were in pain and think their lives were so hard and that excuses their behavior and they never stopped to think that anyone else may be in pain or have a difficult life too. And like wow that’s so spot on.
It was a bit painful to see how bad the falling out between Shi Hyun and Soo Ji was– in a perfect world I’d have loved to see them reconcile and learn how to be friends in a healthy way with each other. But I can also see how, given everything that happened between them, that was not possible and would not have worked for their characters. That was a very bittersweet ending for them.
Overall I think a huge strength of this show was in giving us complex characters who, aside from Eun Tae Hee who was a literal goddess, were both protagonist and villain at various moments. I loved that the show allowed them to get their punishment, as it were, for their sins, as well as allowing them to learn from it. The quietness of the finale was such a beautiful way to end it, such a good juxtaposition of a busy and chaotic and noisy show. (Though I still wish there had been more to it!)
I also appreciated the way all the threads of the story came together in the final confrontation. A lot of the side stories felt largely extraneous right up until that moment when I had to clap my hands in appreciation of the writers who did such a phenomenal job of laying that groundwork.
High Points: Everything.
Low Points: I guess I probably don’t like the implication that men and women really can’t be friends with each other, but it really didn’t feel like a big deal in this one.
K Drama Kween 