My spoon is too big

This was a fresh and exciting spin on the monkey's paw concept. It was full of clever plot twists, intense personal and familial drama, and of course lots of social commentary on how being poor and being obscenely wealthy can both wreck your life in certain ways. It was interesting to see what did and didn't change about the various golden spoon swappers' personalities after they assumed their new identities. I appreciated the moral complexity of their choices and circumstances. I do think the show struggled at times to handle the ramifications of big time jump that kicked off the second half of the drama. The characters didn't always feel like 10 years had actually transpired in their lives. The love lines and potential love triangles were conceptually interesting but fell flat in execution, there was not one ounce of chemistry between any of the potential romantic pairings.

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129 episodes of delightful chaos

This one is a real trip. It's impressive how entertaining this show is given most of it is just watching people yell at each other in tackily decorated living rooms. Sometimes to mix it up they yell at each other in their offices, in the street, or at the hospital. There's also plenty of slapping, hair pulling, and water to the face because sometimes words just aren't enough for all the big feelings and big drama every character is consumed by all the time. There is some filler and repetitiveness, particularly in the beginning (we get it, Eun Jae is saintly and downtrodden) but on the whole this show was good at keeping me entertained and invested in its flamboyant ridiculousness. The guy who played Gun Woo was underwhelming but every other actor seemed to have a keen understanding of how best to play this type of material and they delivered appropriately...enthusiastic performances that were always fun to watch.

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What does it mean to love someone?

My favorite thing about this show was how it managed to provide a lot of ridiculous soapy excess while also wrestling intelligently with its central thematic concern: the importance of timing in determining whether a relationship succeeds or fails. Successful romances aren't just built on who you love, but when and how you love. Early on Phoenix sells the audience on the powerful attraction between the leads as well as the significance of the internal and external obstacles that drive them apart and keep them estranged for so long. I was so emotionally engaged by these characters and their tortured circumstances even though I wanted to wring their necks a lot of the time. I thought this show also did a job making the typical plot obstacle second leads interesting characters in their own right because they're just so messy and weird. The second FL in particular was such a great baddie. There was some dragginess and repetition in the second half of the drama, as well as a minor and totally unnecessary "comic relief" subplot between a few useless supporting characters that could have easily hit the cutting room floor, but I was still captivated enough to binge 26 episodes in 4 days.

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Incredible Jang Na Ra performance

What an acting master class from Jang Na Ra. She was so impressive in this role, and I was so emotionally invested in her character from the outset. This was so intense and unpredictable, it did a great job of making me feel unsettled about what was going to happen next in the same way our unreliable narrator protagonist was. I thought the treatment of the FL's mental illness and childhood trauma was tender and sensitive and really moved me. The plot does get messy in the final episodes, it was overly convoluted and contrived in some respects, and there's one prominent supporting character I completely lost track of his motivations as the show progressed. However, they got the most important thing right, which was the FL's character arc.

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So many feelings

As I watched this I thought repeatedly of Roger Ebert's quote about movies being "machines that generate empathy" because that's exactly what this show was. The two leads, who are drawn into each other's lives during a period of adversity, love each other and take care of each other in such a selfless way. The warmth and tenderness of their conversations, their easy physical intimacy (there's only one quick, chaste kiss scene in the whole drama but I didn't feel deprived because of how swoony the hugging/cuddling scenes were), and their deep compatibility with each other moved me greatly. I got emotionally invested in the supporting characters as well, particularly the landlady of the FL's boarding house and the landlady's childhood friend who is also grieving a severe loss. This packs such a wallop emotionally and is so tender and thoughtful in how it treats its characters and relationships I was able to forgive the occasional bits of sloppy writing (like how the A.I. tech no sense if you think about it, or how Soon Ho was willing to betray her "uncle" to protect a sullen jerk she had known for 5 minutes). A beautiful, alternately heart wrenching and heart warming work.

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Kim So Yeon I love you so

Watched this solely for Kim So Yeon and she did not disappoint. What a fantastic performance she gave, she was only 19 years old in this and already a master of her craft. I was always captivated the range of expressions on her face, the changes in her voice as she switched between steely and simpering, the flashes of vulnerability and relatability amidst all the awful behavior. Young Mi was such a well written character as well, someone who became deeply manipulative and resentful and cruelly ambitious, who uses other people to compensate for a neediness born of neglect and abuse. I couldn't get enough of her on my screen. My whole review is about her because nothing else about this drama is particularly interesting (the other characters are bland, the other performances are competent but unremarkable) but this one character and performance are good enough to make the show a worthwhile watch. It was also funny to see the Truck of Doom up to its old tricks as far back as 2000.

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Sometimes you have to go on a journey...a blade journey

What a journey this show was. 2+ years ago I started watching this, thought it was terrible and dropped it during the third episode. However I decided to give it another shot because I was in the mood for a wacky show and I wanted to feed my perpetual Lee Dong Wook brainrot. The second time around I enjoyed the show a lot even though much of it is terribly written. The loud, over the top cartoony humor which I found obnoxious back then amused me this time, the show had surprisingly good production values, and despite how dumb it got I was strangely emotionally invested in the story and couldn't stop watching it. The relationship between the ML and his devoted secretary was the highlight. The romance/love triangle of sorts was deeply annoying because it was driven by truckloads of noble idiocy and constant miscommunication. The leads mainly sulk and squabble, there are few actually cute or romantic moments. Watching the last several episodes of this show was like tonguing a canker sore, painful yet irresistible. Don't look for any kind of consistent treatment of the fantasy element either. I'm giving this a much higher rating than it deserves by any objective metric but I have to live my truth, I was transfixed by this train wreck. It was just so weird and its mixture of sincerity and incompetence cast some kind of spell of me.

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A thoughtful and emotionally stirring meditation on what it means to love someone. This dug deep comparing and contrasting love as an uncontrollable feeling vs love as a series of deliberate choices and actions. The characters are all good people trying so hard to do the right thing, tying themselves into knots trying to honor their expectations of and obligations to each other in extremely trying circumstances. It really succeeded at making me feel for the characters and I longed for them to be able to come out of the other side of all the angst and pain with some measure of happiness or at least peace. The pacing is slow as molasses, I think it would have been better if we had seen more of the lead couple's courtship before the accident and resulting coma, but it was still a worthwhile watch for how well it wrestled with its central moral dilemma and for how strong Jung Ryeo Won and Kim So Yeon's performances were.

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Will You Be a Dog or a Pig?

An intense, gut wrenching look at what trauma does to a person and how some wounds are just too severe to ever heal. All the childhood flashback scenes are harrowing, every scene is thick with dread and suffering and the violence has such an unsettling visceral power. As dark as this gets the brutality never feels forced or like gratuitous misery porn, we get a good sense of the how and why the bullies are allowed to run rampant. I also appreciated this show's nuanced take on justice and revenge. Kim Dong Wook and Kim Sung Gyu both gave excellent performances playing compelling characters, though I was frustrated by Dong Wook's lack of screen time. He absolutely killed it (pun intended?) in every single scene so I wanted more time with him. I think the show should have spent more time following him and less time following the cops investigating him.

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Not enough meat on the bone

This was an enjoyable watch for a while. It had a warmth and heart to it I responded positively to and I was curious to see how the story and the characters were going to develop. However, I eventually became bored with it. The story is thin and cliched and the characters are two dimensional at best. The actors playing the boys in the band had an appealing natural chemistry with each other but that wasn't enough to compensate for how uninteresting they ultimately turned out to be as individuals and how rote their personal journeys were. This probably would have been a perfectly pleasant movie or miniseries but it was too shallow to sustain itself as a 16 episode drama.

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Twisty as a pretzel factory

At its best this show is pure adrenaline. The first half maintained such a breakneck pace that kept me glued to the screen. Since the show burned through so much plot so quickly parts of the second half dragged for me though because everyone gained or lost power or changed allegiances so much that the impact of some of the twists was lessened. The love line between the leads was forced as well. I did love the complicated, passionate, toxic relationship between the second leads. It has a satisfying conclusion which is important for a show like this. I also never stopped getting a kick out of the bombastic score/power walk/hallway standoff scenes.

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