Double standards. Things that make me bitter towards a well-loved show. (This post contains lots of spoilers from Forest of Secrets)
Forest of Secrets was an intense and captivaing show. I liked it a lot, but it didn’t end up on my favorites list, just my most favorite villain. I kept reading people naming it as their no.1 or even the best-written kdrama ever, and I wondered why I didn’t feel so deeply about it.
I decided to give it a rewatch (actually this is all excuses, I only wanted to watch YJM dapper and smashing in expensive suits again) and I’m finding more and more things that make viewers rant and bash in other shows but forgive here.
So I made a list as I go.
Note: This is not a bashing of FoS as I like this show a lot, and neither is it a bashing of any beanies that love and praise it. It is only me griping about double standards. Things that I mostly ignore in shows, but have seen used to shred other shows to pieces.
1. Overdramatic background music. It keeps ruining every scene that Han Yeo Jin(BDN) and Hwang Shi Mok (JSW) are trying to keep subtle and cryptic, and the dun dun dun at every dedution that HSM makes and later is proven wrong gets too old too soon.
2. Too many, much much too many flashbacks, some in the span of 3 seconds. Coupled with the overdramatic music it really is minus points for the PD.
3. Prosecutors and cops having all day and night to wander around and chat and sleuth. When do they actually work?
4. Random time-lines switching between day and night. Not the important case-related times, but like people getting in the car by day and reaching their destination at night.
5. Seo Dong Jae slaps girls’ backsides, bribes HSM’s secretary in broad daylight in front of HSM’s own office and gives wide-eyed glares like the perfect B-movie villain. He is lucky that he is so charismatic.
6. HSM searching SDJ’s office, not once but twice, so haphazardly that he gets caught immediately. Later he searches ES’s room in the exact haphazard way. It doesn’t match his meticulous character at all.
SDJ does it twice in LCJ’s office too and gets caught. Are these two truly respected prosecutors with 10 plus years of experience or hot-headed interns??
7. LOTS of wrist-grabs.
8. Young Eun Soo is the only character that I really dislike. She is supposed to be an independant and competent prosecutor, but the way she goes about doing things is just worthy of either a rookie half-timer or a schoolgirl.
9. The completely unnecessary existence of a comic-relief in such a show. HSM’s inspector/secretary/I don’t really know his title, felt out of place the whole time.
Fortunately some of these problems get much better in the latter quarter of the show. Actually the last four or five episodes were truely top quality in every sense.
So to leave a better after-taste I will end this rant by mentioning a few things that were truly good throughout the show:
5. SDJ’s relief when YES coughs back to life is Lee Joon Hyuk’s absolute best acting moment EVER.
6. SDJ’s crush on YES is really cute. Believe me, I’m the last person to call a crush or relationship cute, but this one was done so subtly that I loved it.
7. I LOVE the way Park Sung Geun plays his role.
As I mentioned above the last few episodes were very good with near to no fault. I just HAVE to leave these two here:
1.The funeral scene… All those suppressed feelings bursting… It was perfectly done.
2. The moment LCJ presses Record on his phone. That simple movement was so powerful in conveying EVERYTHING about this show that it is practically the first scene that comes to my mind whenever this show is mentioned. It sent shivers down my spine the first watch, and I felt exactly the same again this time around.
Ps. Omo! I had completely forgotten that Tae In Ho has a cameo in this. Now THAT is a scene stealer if there ever was one!
My only complain (or maybe I just don’t understand), is about the guy who killed himself in the beginning of the show and then that plot doesn’t seem have any impact for the rest of the story.
Why this guy had to kill himself?
The one who killed himself in prison? Yeah, true. HSM asked the killer: what about his suicide? He answered: I hadn’t anticipated that.
But the way they talked about his letter and his wife in the beginning it felt all a part of the conspiracy. It might probably have been the same as the way they found out the killer in the end. They deduced this whole theory about ES having seen Yoon’s tatoo and caught him correctly, but then she wasn’t killed by Yoon at all! It is very confusing on first watch. On the second watch one is free to interpret it as luck coming to their help, or plothole.
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Midnight
September 15, 2019 at 12:32 PM
Double standards. Things that make me bitter towards a well-loved show. (This post contains lots of spoilers from Forest of Secrets)
Midnight
September 15, 2019 at 12:34 PM
Double standards. Things that make me bitter towards a well-loved show. (This post contains lots of spoilers from Forest of Secrets)
Forest of Secrets was an intense and captivaing show. I liked it a lot, but it didn’t end up on my favorites list, just my most favorite villain. I kept reading people naming it as their no.1 or even the best-written kdrama ever, and I wondered why I didn’t feel so deeply about it.
I decided to give it a rewatch (actually this is all excuses, I only wanted to watch YJM dapper and smashing in expensive suits again) and I’m finding more and more things that make viewers rant and bash in other shows but forgive here.
So I made a list as I go.
Note: This is not a bashing of FoS as I like this show a lot, and neither is it a bashing of any beanies that love and praise it. It is only me griping about double standards. Things that I mostly ignore in shows, but have seen used to shred other shows to pieces.
1. Overdramatic background music. It keeps ruining every scene that Han Yeo Jin(BDN) and Hwang Shi Mok (JSW) are trying to keep subtle and cryptic, and the dun dun dun at every dedution that HSM makes and later is proven wrong gets too old too soon.
2. Too many, much much too many flashbacks, some in the span of 3 seconds. Coupled with the overdramatic music it really is minus points for the PD.
3. Prosecutors and cops having all day and night to wander around and chat and sleuth. When do they actually work?
4. Random time-lines switching between day and night. Not the important case-related times, but like people getting in the car by day and reaching their destination at night.
5. Seo Dong Jae slaps girls’ backsides, bribes HSM’s secretary in broad daylight in front of HSM’s own office and gives wide-eyed glares like the perfect B-movie villain. He is lucky that he is so charismatic.
6. HSM searching SDJ’s office, not once but twice, so haphazardly that he gets caught immediately. Later he searches ES’s room in the exact haphazard way. It doesn’t match his meticulous character at all.
SDJ does it twice in LCJ’s office too and gets caught. Are these two truly respected prosecutors with 10 plus years of experience or hot-headed interns??
7. LOTS of wrist-grabs.
8. Young Eun Soo is the only character that I really dislike. She is supposed to be an independant and competent prosecutor, but the way she goes about doing things is just worthy of either a rookie half-timer or a schoolgirl.
9. The completely unnecessary existence of a comic-relief in such a show. HSM’s inspector/secretary/I don’t really know his title, felt out of place the whole time.
Fortunately some of these problems get much better in the latter quarter of the show. Actually the last four or five episodes were truely top quality in every sense.
So to leave a better after-taste I will end this rant by mentioning a few things that were truly good throughout the show:
Midnight
September 15, 2019 at 12:35 PM
1. Evebody’s line delivery, and I mean EVERYBODY’S, is so curt and natural.
2. The voice-overs (HSM’s, LCJ’s, etc) are the best things ever. They should have left all the over-dramatizations out and tripled the voice-overs.
3.One-upping-the-one-upping-of-the-one-upping. Yeah.
4. YJM is only 46.
5. SDJ’s relief when YES coughs back to life is Lee Joon Hyuk’s absolute best acting moment EVER.
6. SDJ’s crush on YES is really cute. Believe me, I’m the last person to call a crush or relationship cute, but this one was done so subtly that I loved it.
7. I LOVE the way Park Sung Geun plays his role.
As I mentioned above the last few episodes were very good with near to no fault. I just HAVE to leave these two here:
1.The funeral scene… All those suppressed feelings bursting… It was perfectly done.
2. The moment LCJ presses Record on his phone. That simple movement was so powerful in conveying EVERYTHING about this show that it is practically the first scene that comes to my mind whenever this show is mentioned. It sent shivers down my spine the first watch, and I felt exactly the same again this time around.
Ps. Omo! I had completely forgotten that Tae In Ho has a cameo in this. Now THAT is a scene stealer if there ever was one!
mano
September 15, 2019 at 12:51 PM
My only complain (or maybe I just don’t understand), is about the guy who killed himself in the beginning of the show and then that plot doesn’t seem have any impact for the rest of the story.
Why this guy had to kill himself?
Midnight
September 15, 2019 at 10:37 PM
The one who killed himself in prison? Yeah, true. HSM asked the killer: what about his suicide? He answered: I hadn’t anticipated that.
But the way they talked about his letter and his wife in the beginning it felt all a part of the conspiracy. It might probably have been the same as the way they found out the killer in the end. They deduced this whole theory about ES having seen Yoon’s tatoo and caught him correctly, but then she wasn’t killed by Yoon at all! It is very confusing on first watch. On the second watch one is free to interpret it as luck coming to their help, or plothole.