Don’t read if you want to avoid spoilers. While Reflection of You was about forgiveness, I came away with a feeling of sadness, in part influenced by the OST, but also the sense of terrible damage that lack of forgiveness perpetuates and a sense that the cycle of harm had not been broken. People made terrible mistakes, or if they weren’t mistakes, they did terrible things to each other. Jeong Hee-joo ran away from her husband with Seo Woo-jae, who was engaged to her best friend and artistic mentor Gu Hae-won. Gu Hae-won, who had probably lost a child before it was born or had an abortion or was maybe even simply planning a family with Woo-jae, could not forgive her friend who had betrayed her, and Hee-joo was never able to ask for forgiveness either because, in her words, she was afraid of losing everything she had. The two women subsequently tore each other apart, jealous of each other, unable to forgive.

In the previous generation, it was the same, the mother-in-law, Park Young-sun, had never gotten over her husband’s betrayal of her, and she spent her whole twisted life punishing him to his dying day and poisoning the lives of her children and grandchildren with her vicious self-defensive bitter controlling behaviour.

While the vengeance seems remorseless, we are shown a way out. Hee-joo’s brother, Jeong Seon-woo, had carelessly and accidentally killed his friend in a car accident and was dogged by the friend’s mother, who was determined to never let him forget what he had done. In a glimmer of light, at the end, provoked by Hae-won’s words, the mother lets go of him because she is able to acknowledge that her son would not have wanted his friend’s life to be steeped in the misery that she is exacting.

In another instance, Yoon Sang-ho, the bar tender, has learnt from bitter experience what it means to forgive. His wife had wasted their life savings and lost their home, presumably conned by Hae-won’s mother’s “partner”, and while he was bent on locating the perpetrator, to make them pay, the wife ended up in a coma in hospital (or was she dying of cancer? I’ve forgotten). In a further glimmer of forgiveness, once Gu Jeong-yeon realises that she is partly responsible for the damage inflicted on Yoon Sang-ho and his wife, she informs the police and attempts to make amends by at least apologising, but not to his face. Yet he still has trust in her that she will return and face him.

In spite of these glimmers of forgiveness, the cycle of revenge grinds on. Ahn Min-seo, Hee-joo’s sister in law, is exacting her own revenge against her husband who has taken the frustrations and humiliations inflicted by her family and especially by his mother in law out on her by physically beating her. Now the husband is helplessly disabled, she has complete physical control over him and he is at her mercy. There is no forgiveness on the horizon there. Some may argue she is justified because he was a monster to her, but at every point in the drama, we learnt that unforgiveness and revenge changes the person who exacts it as much as the person who is the target (no matter their egregious actions).

Finally, we never get the full picture of Woo-jae, who is both perpetrator and victim. He walked out on his fiancée, was sedated by Hee-joo, run over by Ahn Hyeon-seong so that he was in a coma for three years, lied to by Hae-won who wanted to keep him by her side and make him suffer for what he did at the same time, lied to and set–up by Hee-joo, who did not want him to spoil her family life, is stabbed and disappears forever when he is thrown into the lake in a suitcase. He appeared more and more to be selfish and even self-deceiving, for although he believed he loved Hee-joo, he told her husband he was bored with her and she had been an easy conquest. He is also physically violent and most probably had raped Hee-joo.

There may be some glimmers of relief, but there is not much light in this drama and this is reinforced by the colours and shadows in the scenes. Like I said, the overall feeling was sad – it left a bad taste, even though Hae-won survived the stabbing from the girl’s father and ended up having her own solo exhibition, I wonder if she was still a sad and self-pitying person and not her radiant former self before the betrayals. Certainly, she wanted to start again and we are told by Hee-joo that her story had just begun, but we don’t see it.