FOE (16): The moment they mentioned amnesia, I knew I wasn’t going to like the ending. I didn’t.

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    So, let me guess, he was secretly a good guy, not a psychopath, its not nature but nurture and they reset his memories to give him clean slate? I thought so, they can never go fully dark with kdrama, everybody has to be redeemable somehow.

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      See, I don’t think they even went there! The tension of this episode is coming from the fact that Ji Won loved old Hyun Su and they can never get back to that. His memories regressed to before the car accident so he was pre-Ji Won Hyun Su that’s pretty much a psycho with no memories of loving someone (since he never got to experience being a family with Ji Won and Eun Ha).

      That makes it feel typical K-drama on my end, like they just made the ending fit into the amnesia trope mold they already had. More a cry-fest than anything else, it feels so detached from the previous episodes (that were perfect btw). It feels almost like they changed the writers at the last minute.

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        I think there’s more, though, that’s bad about this.

        By creating yet another external event that alters the dynamic of their relationship, we are once again prevented from seeing Hyun-soo and Ji-won as a normal couple trying to overcome and deal with some difficult stuff from their past. Importantly, at the end of this show, I felt like there was so much that was left unresolved in respect of their marriage. Ji-won found out he was lying to her for years! She thought he held a knife to her throat! She was legitimately suspicious of him at many points! He was angry at her for distrusting him! And he was also angry about being in this absurd situation (at least the character recognized how absurd it was; makes it less weird for us, as the audience). The show was never able to dwell on the fallout from all of this, because everything that was happening was time-sensitive. And then, rather then explore this stuff, they just turned around and decided to wipe his memory clean!

        And what about Ji-won?! Like yeah, Hyun-soo’s memory was gone, but she just lived through a set of hugely traumatic events! I get it, her focus was on her husband and trying to resuscitate their marriage in the aftermath of his amnesia. However, by making this the focus of episode 16, we literally never get any real emotional resolution. For a drama so focused on the relationship between these two, I thought that was a huge oversight. It really made me realize that there was an element of sensationalism to the way the show tried to study Ji-won and Hyun-soo’s relationship, an element of sensationalism that stuck around until literally the last few moments of the show.

        Also, given all the deception Ji-won, Hyun-soo, Moo-jin, and Hae-soo were involved in, I expected that at least one of them would face real consequences. BUT NOPE. Apparently not.

        And, okay, fine, put aside all of this. What the heck did they do to BHS’s dad? If one of the two parents were going to have that happen, it would’ve made more sense for the mom, who always more unstable.

        I’m also just really salty about the way they made Hyun-soo do things in the last phase of the show. I still don’t understand why he didn’t tell Ji-won about the call. I still don’t like that he went off and investigated things on his own (and I still think it’s awfully convenient that Ji-won’s colleagues accepted that phone recording and shifted their suspicion away from him so quickly). And that whole hunting thing in episode 15? So unnecessary.

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          Agreed on all points! Huhu, thanks for making me realize what it could/should have been. 🙁

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    Honestly such a disappointing ending. This drama lost so much steam near the end anyway, but this was a confirmation that all are interpretation and admiration for the earlier episodes were not necessary. In the end, this was just another typical, cliched melo.

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      Same thoughts really. The last quarter felt a bit slower, but still a lot better than that last episode!! Baek Hee Sung is the highlight of the later portion too, so I feel like him not being in the finale kind of contributed as well.

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        Part of my problem is that I think they really mangled BHS! I didn’t find him a compelling character at all. This is partly because they put him in so late and already had Hyun-soo and the police closing in on him by the time he became an active player in this show. As a result, we weren’t able to see much of him. I also felt like we never really got an opportunity to see his sinister mind at work — for somebody who’d won so many mathematical Olympiads, he was discovered by police surprisingly fast.

        Which reminds me: the entire investigation of DHS first and then BHS was pretty hammy IMO. It was always done in service of the relationship between DHS and CJW. However, by making things so melodramatic, by making Hyun-soo act strangely at various points, and by packing in unnecessary external obstacles in their relationship, I ended up losing some of my strong interest in the main couple. As a result, neither the investigation nor the couple were really holding my attention consistently.

        At this point, my view of this show is that it’s okay. It’s not great, but it’s not bad either. However, given the strength of the acting and the initially interesting premise, characters, and relationships, I can’t help but feel like the show was, on a whole, a failure. It could’ve been much better.

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          The entire of DHS qua Ji-won’s husband, I should say

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    YUP. I really thought they had turned things around during episode 15, but they couldn’t stick the landing. Amnesia was such a cop-out compared to all of the other ways the end could have went.

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      This! Amnesia throws away all the growth DHS went through, and takes away Jiwon’s chance to work through years of deception.
      If the ending was going to be this lame, they could at least have shortened the angst-trip and given us more happy OTP and Eunha time. Those last 5 minutes were way too short!

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    I’ve been so disappointed by this show from episode 11 and I have been expecting such a terrible ending that I actually didn’t dislike this one. Not that I liked it either.

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