“While You Were Sleeping” (당신이 잠든 사이에)

By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
September 29, 2018

☆☆☆½
Jung Jae-Chan (played by Lee Jong-Suk)
Nam Hong-Joo (played by Bae Suzy)
Han Woo-Tak (played by Jung Hae-In)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

One of the things that I really love about Korean dramas is that many of them center around protagonists who knew each other as children — and reunite as adults. And such is the case with “While You Were Sleeping,” which follows a group of young adults who inexplicably see each other in their dreams.

There’s a lot going on in this series and so much of it is based on spoilers (which I’ll talk about later). So I’ll mention a few things that I really enjoyed in this series:

🔺Jae-Chan and Hong-Joo (a prosecutor and broadcast journalist, respectively) are both fatherless. She sees Jae-Chan in her dreams. He ends up saving her life. After that, he begins to dream about her.

🔺He also saves Woo-Tak (a police officer) and the latter subsequently dreams about Jae-Chan.

🔺In most dramas, there are two handsome men vying for the affections of one woman and this series is no different. Honestly, Hong-Joo could’ve picked either Jae-Chan (played by Lee Jong-Suk of “W“) or Woo-Tak (played by Jung Hae-In, who was so good in “Pretty Noona Who Buys Me Food“) and I would’ve been fine. (I also would’ve been fine if the two men chose each other, to be honest.)

🔺The internet seems to love hating on Suzy, saying she can’t act. This isn’t “Dream High,” where she was a teenage ingenue having to hold her own against Kim Soo-Hyun. She has grown into a talented actress and is so good in this series.

🔺There are some intriguing cases in this K-Drama: A battered wife who refuses to prosecute her husband; a brother accused of killing his younger sibling; a doctor imprisoned for killing patients he says he never did; and the death of an Olympian with no signs of forced entry into her home.

Want to take a guess at how the athlete died? And what’s up with that creepy drawing?

Airdates: 32 half-hour episodes aired on SBS from September 27 to November 16, 2017.

Spoiler Alert:

As young teenagers, Jae-Chan and Hong-Joo had met at their fathers’ funerals. Both had been murdered by a mentally-unstable soldier. Hong-Joo was a tomboy who wore her hair short and dressed in jeans and baseball caps. Jae-Chan had assumed that Hong-Joo was a boy.

The soldier’s older brother, Choi Dam-Dong, was a policeman (whose supervisor was Jae-Chan’s father).

I can usually spot plot twists from a mile away. But it took me a while to catch on that Dam-Dong (brilliantly played by Kim Won-Hae) is the fourth person who dreamt about the future. Now an investigator for the prosecutor’s office, he doesn’t let on who he is.

Through a flashback, we see that after his younger brother went on his killing spree, Dam-Dong was filled with guilt. He attempted to drown himself. But Jae-Chan went in the water after him and Hong-Joo pulled them both out. After that, Dam-Dong began to have dreams about the pair.

Dam-Dong’s death was bittersweet, but he was at peace with it. He had envisioned the day he would die and was able to right some of the wrong caused by his brother. That gave him (and the viewers) some much-needed closure.

Favorite Episode:

Ep. 11. It revolves around a corrupt college professor and bestselling author, who uses his teaching assistants as unpaid servants. When one of his T.A.s speaks out about it, the professor strangles him and then throws him down an elevator shaft. The student is alive, but brain dead. Jae-Chan’s job is to prove that it was attempted murder. But the professor and his sleazy attorney claim the T.A. was drunk and caused his own accident.

Jae-Chan has to decide whether to perform an autopsy, which would make that victim’s organs unavailable for organ transplants. Unbeknownst to him, one of the beneficiaries of the organ transplant would be the young son of Jae-Chan’s colleague. Her reply as to why she agrees with Jae-Chan — even though her child could die — is heartbreaking. She says that as a parent, she would want to know how her son died and to make sure that the perpetrator was punished for his actions.

I kept wondering, though: Why didn’t the hospital perform a toxicology test to see exactly how much alcohol — if any — he had imbibed. That would’ve contradicted the defense’s claims that the college student was the cause of his own accident.

Are You Human?:

You know that murder scene photo? It turns it there was no murder and that Woo-Tak’s high school friend — who had been charged with the crime — was innocent. The Olympian had a history of fainting. She fell, hit her head and bled out. The cult-like design made from her blood was caused by her robot vacuum, which then fell off her balcony (which they retrieved from the garbage dump later). Case solved.

Don’t get me started on how a forensics team wouldn’t be able to see the vacuum’s tracks in the blood … 🙄

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