I had to fast forward all 16 episodes cos I was curious once I got started but it was more because it was quite unsatisfying not to know the ending and not because it was interesting.

= P

OMG just finished watching today’s episode (4) . Now I see why they set that scene up with such care. The wanted to imprint it on the viewer’s memory for the next time round. And the sheer shock effect of tracking the camera left to right instead of right to left when that walk to the edge is reprised. This really is fantastic stuff.

Another thing that contributes to the overall feel of the drama and offsets any depressing effect is the photography and camera direction, which is of the usual superb standard we have maybe come to take too much for granted from Korean productions.

Javabeans’ screencaps above of the near-suicide scene inevitably can’t convey the effect of the way the camera tracks sideways as Insoon steps slowly towards the yellow line, and pauses at a point, still the “right” side of that line, where all the perspective lines gather around the straight edge of the canopy edge directly above her head, with everything suffused with light from the glass roof spilling over one of those wonderful Korean color schemes (how come only the French and the Koreans can turn subway stations into works of art rather than hellholes?) reflected in the gleaming stainless steel safety rails and the brilliantly polished platform floor. Then she takes the last segment of her journey, from standing behind the yellow line to balancing on the platform brink and the camera tracks again, through the safety barriers – and all the color and opalescent light and gleaming surfaces are suddenly gone. There’s just the barriers, now out of focus to the extreme right of shot and looking now like slabs of concrete , the gritty matt beige platform margin, the tracks with their grey gravel ballast and a forest of skeleton-like power gantries against a murky-hazy sky, and of course the approaching train, with a sort of sardonic faint sun-gleam just ahead of it. Then Insoon’s feet advance to dominate the shot and get the focus, the train now just an ominous blur. Finally, an abrupt cut to a more distant wide-angle view, bringing the station roof canopy back into shot, but now the grey of the tracks and the underside of the opposite platform predominate, the angle hides the natural light from the canopy glass and we see just the roof ribs as apparently solid cast-iron with the strip lights down the middle. This really is the threshold of the shadowlands.

This would be impressive enough in an art-house movie that had been months in the making, but Korean production teams turn out work of this quality night after night, week after week and often on rival channels simultaneously. What astonishing talent!

Despite her self-deprecating remarks (likening herself to garbage, etc.), I find Insoon rather spirited and strong (in the mental sense). So I don’t think the drama will be depressing; on the contrary, I expect it to be uplifting. I agree with sarah that Insoon “can’t go anywhere but up, right?”

ive finished with episode1

it’s so sad. yet i find myself wanting to continue with this drama at once.
it gives me the same feeling when i was watching I Came In Search Of Flowers lol

thanks for your review! couldnt have understood it better without this.

The repeated use of “sad” in these comments, a word that admittedly can mean a whole lot of things (including what javabeans means at the outset when she calls Insoon “a terribly sad person”) is beginning to get me a bit anxious.
# 15 noemi “just by watching w/o translations… i felt sad too…”
# 17 vis “…but this first episode sure is an extremely sad one!”
# 22 ziziebrown “don’t usually like sad dramas but …”
# 26 Marzy “i hardly thought it would be this sad!! ”

Here, the “sad” has slipped from the place and the sense in which javabeans used it in her opening, and stuck instead to either the drama itself, or the dominant response it tries to invoke, or both. Which I think is rather premature and a tad misleading.

Of course, all the comments I quoted above are from people who intend to stick with this show, so no worries there. My anxiety is that there may be others who are thinking to themselves along the lines expressed by #6 nomae: “wow! this drama is depressing. i don’t know if i can get myself to watch it…[...], so sad. i might just read your summaries, that is if you continue to watch it”

Now here, “sad” has leaped to “depressing” and been joined by another notion that comes up in quite a few of the comments all over this blog (OK, I saw the smiley on nomae’s, but all the same…): namely that javabeans’ writing is superb (undisputably true) and that therefore it can be a substitute for the dramas themselves (horribly false, and contrary to everything that makes this blog worthwhile.)

That tagline up there reads “blogging my KDrama obsession”, and the wonder of this site is that instead of expressing that obsession in fangirl squeals, kneejerk exclamations or, — at the opposite extreme — pretentious post-modernist Media Studies bullshit, it articulates, grounds and explores it in a way that all those of us who also love (and occasionally hate) these shows can share and make our own, coming to understand our fascination better and enabled to think and talk about it. But it really would be “sad” if as a result of their admiration for this blog, people shifted the focus of their own obsession from Kdramas to javabeans’ writing, let alone javabeans herself.

I don’t want to say anything substantial here about why I think “sad” isn’t the right overall word either for the drama itself or for how I feel after watching the two episodes so far, because people come here to read javabeans’ views, not mine, and she hasn’t come out with her piece on ep 2 yet anyway. (I’m very interested to see how her initial reading of Sangwoo will be influenced by ep2 : I think the strongly contrasted personalities of the teenage Sangwoo and Insoon in the ep. 1 “I’m off to Canada” flashback, taken up again by the movie theatre flashback in ep 2, may prove to be the start of an important thread about his wimpishness and her strength).

Let me just quote two sections from javabeans’ ep 1 summary. First, with her usual acuteness and precision, she writes of Insoon talking to Teacher Seo after she’s lost the school job “brokenly though not whiningly”. And then she prominently quotes what I suspect may prove to the the first instance of a key motif, where Insoon in the first flashback to her arrest says in her voiceover “If somebody were to ask me what the saddest thing in my life has been, it would be that at the time I most needed to be strong, I gave up on myself.” In the original, that’s “누군가 내게 살면서 가장 슬펐던 일이 뭐냐고 묻는다면, 용기를 내야 했을 때 내가 나를 스스로 포기해버렸다는 사실이다.” where “슬픈”, the word behind “saddest” carries the sort of sense javabeans uses in her opening, rather than the implication of “bleakly depressing” it has in some of the comments I’ve quoted.

In a nutshell, what makes a drama “sad” or otherwise is not the events but the characters’ responses to them. The events we’ve so far seen or glimpsed are certainly sad enough, but the real dramatic meat is going to be in how Insoon copes, and the signs there are, I’d say, pretty good, and don’t point in a wholly depressing direction.