Missing: the other side. Beware of some SPOILETS

I could finally finish and I have to say I liked it a lot. Not the best drama ever, for sure, but it was really entertaining and thanks to it I discovered Ko Soo, as I had never seen him in a drama. The acting was solid and the story was well developed even with all the tropes involved. When I began watching I was thinking that it was too light for an OCN drama, that I was expecting something darker. I mean: the town where the missing were was bright and beautiful, the villagers wee all happy, our hero and his sidekick helped solving cases and everyone seemed to be smiling, so where was the darkness?

Well, it was there. Missing didn’t care for minute, even if I was thinking otherwise. From the minute one of the leads was killed in episode one, to the overwhelming stories of the missing ones. From Jang Mi who was killed by her boyfriend and had no one to look for her for more than a year, to the tireless efforts by Mr. Jang to find her daughter passing through the frustration Wook feels about his mother abandoning him. It makes you think. It’s not so complicated to have a lonely life that can lead you not to be missed by anyone, to being the one who can look for you because your are the dearest person to a father, a mother, a sibling, a friend…

I have to say that while airing I kept thinking the show will give us the miraculous return of YeoNa, because she and Det. Shin were a really nice couple and you could see how much they cared about each other. It was not that I wanted it that way, but you know, we re in dreamland, and we get the happy ending more often than the sad one. Well, we didn’t get a happy ending and it was the best for the story. And it was so sad to learn that all the deaths of the children from the Blue Sunshine Orphanage were just because of money. If I wanted darkness, this really gave the correct share of it.

I found specially touching Her Jun Ho acting (when is he not?) and the story of Mr. Jang looking for his sweet HyunJi, and to think about all those children lost in this world, stolen from their parents and their families, the uncertainty of not knowing, because as the rational you thinks how little are the chances of that child being alive, you always hold on to the tiniest hope. The moment he realized his daughter had been dead since the day she was lost in the park, it was heartbreaking. It doesn’t matter that more then 20 years had passed, the pain was unbearable.

Above all the stories, the one I loved best was the one about Thomas. It made me think about all the young people who sacrifice their lives for a cause. In a war casualties are so many times forgotten, mass graves with so many people, not a record of who they were. My country lived a Civil War (1936 – 1939) and both sides committed crimes, mass graves are quite common and only recently have archeologist been working on them. As I listened to Thomas story, I could not help to think of all those families who saw a member (a son, a daughter, a father, mother, sibling…) running to fight for a cause an never returned and never new what happened and could never pay their respect to their rests, so I couldn’t think of a better ending than his smile.