“Penthouse: War in Life (Season 3)” (펜트하우스)

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
September 13, 2021

☆☆☆☆
Shim Su-Ryeon (played by Lee Ji-Ah)
Oh Yoon-Hee (played by Eugene)
Cheon Seo-Jin (played by Kim So-Yeon)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

One of the beauties of Korean dramas is they start at Episode 1 and end with Episode 16. There’s no long, drawn out multi seasons that peter out in quality. With all that said, I was very excited when the showrunners of “The Penthouse” announced after its spectacular debut that there would be two more seasons. But what started out as a compelling makjang series ended with a bloody mess, where vengeance wasn’t sweet. Rather, it took over the main characters’ lives to the point where they could see nothing else but hate.

But as we found out in the previous two seasons, it’s not easy to kill off these popular characters. So when the body bags start adding up in this final season, viewers are never quite sure if they’ve actually perished, or if there’s some diabolical scheme to trick their enemies.

And there are a lot of enemies to deal with. Though Su-Yeon and her boyfriend, Logan Lee (Park Eun-Seok), are perceived to be the good guys, wanting justice for the innocent who’ve been wronged, their actions aren’t that different from their arch enemy, Joo Dan-Tae (Um Ki-Joon). In Season 2, Dan-Tae had briefly escaped from prison (what?) and killed Logan by blowing him up. This season, Logan’s brother, Alex, flies in from the U.S. to find out who killed his brother and to get justice for him.

In Season 1, we learned that Logan’s parents adopted his sister — who’s also Su-Ryeon’s biological daughter — because he needed an organ transplant of some kind. Rather than waiting for his turn, his parents adopted a child who was a suitable match for what he needed to survive. And then nullified the adoption and returned her to Korea. I’m assuming Alex wasn’t a match for his brother. Or, maybe the parents just didn’t want to mar their own children’s bodies and sought out illegal methods instead.

Almost everything from this point on is a spoiler, so I will talk more about this in the Spoiler Alert section below.

But the series ends in a way that I felt was fairly realistic (for a makjang), but am not sure it will satisfy fans of the series.

Cultural Appropriation: My biggest criticism of the season has to do with a subplot that was wholly unnecessary. Though weaker in plot than the previous seasons, the storyline was still good enough that I looked forward to watching it weekly. But the writers threw in a weird-ass sub plot that was just off. They introduced Logan’s brother, Alex, who was a grotesque farce of a character. With his dreadlocks, grill on his teeth and street talk, he was modeled on negative stereotypes of African American gang members. The outrage over this character was enough that the actor who portrayed him (again, Park Eun-Sook) apologized and said having grown up in the U.S., he should’ve known better. But the real problem lies not with the actor, who is given lines to convey, but with the seasoned scriptwriters who at this stage in their careers should know better. Korean dramas are marketed for Koreans. Of course, we know that. However, K-dramas have a massive international audience. It’s time the storylines reflected more global awareness.

Racist tropes aside, Park proved to be a much more nuanced actor when he delivered his lines in Korean. He was not convincing at all as a rough-talking chaebol’s bad boy son.

Airdates: Fourteen 90-minute episodes aired on SBS from June 4 to September 10, 2021. You may also read my reviews of Season 1 and Season 2.

 

Spoiler Alert: There’s a sub plot that shows how Dan Tae got to be so despicable. Poverty-stricken as a youth, he watched his mother and baby sister die. His mother made him promise that he would grow up to become a rich man living in a grand house. And so began his obsession with living in the Hera Palace’s penthouse. This is meant to show why he is the way he is as an adult.

In the end, all the main characters die. Yoon-Hee is killed by the one-two combination of Dae-Tae and Seo-Jin. Dan-Tae is shot dead by Su-Ryeon. And Seo-Jin kills her ex-husband, Yoon-Cheol. Su-Ryeon and Seo-Jin essentially die by suicide. Logan dies of the cancer. Because “The Penthouse” has a history of resurrecting characters who seemingly were dead, but just pretended to die, I kept thinking that several of them would pop up in the finale.

Ro-Na (Kim Hyun-Soo) and Seok-Hoon (Kim Young-Dae) have become international classical musician superstars and go on their first official date. Seok-Hoon’s sister, Seok-Kyung (Han Ji-Hyun), rehabilitates herself from a spoiled brat who bullied classmates, to a hard worker holding down multiple jobs — including giving voice lessons to rich kids who look down on her, just as she used to look down on her tutor, Min Seol-Ah (Jo Soo-Min).

Actually, all the surviving teenage characters stopped bullying and turned their lives around. If only real life mirrored that kind of idealism. Wouldn’t that be something?

Though most of them were horrible, too, especially in the first season, they were products of their environment. Seo-Jin’s highly strung daughter, Eun-Byul, was raised to excel at all costs. And even after everything her mother did to her — as much as for her — she still loved her mother and was loyal to her. And as good as Su-Ryeon was to her stepchildren Seok-Hoon and Seok-Kyung, they were horrible children in the first season. And all the blame can’t be placed on their father Dan-Tae. She raised them since they were babies. So what went on in that household that the children initially took after their sadist father, rather than their sweet mother?

Of course, Seok-Hoon was rebranded as a romantic lead for Ro-Na and showed signs of remorse in Season 2. By Season 3, most viewers had forgotten that he used to bully kids, too.

And finally, it was revealed that Seok-Hoon and Seok-Kyung weren’t actually twins. The latter was a twin, but she was Su-Ryeon’s biological daughter and the sister of the late Seol-Ah, her former tutor whom she almost killed. Dan-Tae had switched children at birth to torment Su-Ryeon.

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