Journalist, Author & Syndicated Columnist
I finished watching the final episode of “Kill Me, Heal Me” early this morning, and I am left with a sense of melancholy — not because the ending was unhappy (it wasn’t), but because the series was so good I wanted to see more. This K-Drama unravels at a languid pace. As each new backstory is revealed, it felt like a jolt to my heart.
K-Dramas tackle topics not often talked about in everyday conversation. By doing so, they bring some important subject matters, like adoption, to the forefront.
I was going to review “Pinocchio” simply as I would any other K-Drama. But I started to write this at the same time that Soon-Yi Previn broke her silence about her relationship with Woody Allen (her husband) and Mia Farrow (her adoptive mother, and Allen’s former long-time girlfriend) — and that affected my take on this Korean drama. Is it wrong for family members who aren’t biologically-related to have a romantic relationship? If you condemn Allen and Previn, can you condone the two lead characters in this series?
I finished watching “I Hear Your Voice” around the same time that I started “Pretty Noona Who Buys Me Food.” Both deal with older women/younger men plots, where the woman is about eight years older than her partner. The problem I had with “I Hear Your Voice,” though, is that the boy is a high school senior when the relationship begins. And while Soo-Ha certainly is more mature than Hye-Sung in many ways, he is still a teenager.
A common element running throughout the plot is that you are not a “real” child if you don’t share your parents’ DNA. One of the central characters views herself as superior to her adopted sister, because … adoption. The emphasis on a family’s pure bloodline is still in effect today in Korea. And though more adoptive families are telling their children about their adoption stories, many still let their kids assume they are biologically related to their adoptive parents.
One of the things I enjoy about Korean dramas is that many tend to focus of the main characters’ childhood friendships and how that camaraderie evolves into their adulthood. Such is the case here, where four friends grow up with each other and, eventually, end up falling in and out of love with each other.
The heroine of this Korean drama is the epitome of a long-suffering doormat, whose life would’ve been so much better if she grew a spine and stood up for herself. Instead of being guilted into giving up her hard-earned money — that she had ear-marked for returning to college — to her ungrateful older half-sister, who is “studying” overseas in the United States; or giving up her own body, so that she can pay for her father’s surgery; or letting virtually everyone treat her like a servant … Eun-Nim just swallows her pride and accepts it as her life.
Let’s cut to the chase: the plot revolves around a high school student and a doctor who switch bodies after an accident. Yoon-Jae, the 30something doctor is in a vegetative state in the body of 17-year-old Kyung-Joon. Meanwhile, the teenager is alive and well, but he is trapped in the buff body belonging to Gong Yoo, er, I mean Yoon-Jae. Caught between these two is Gil Da-Ran, a wet dishrag of a woman, who (despite her beauty) has absolutely no confidence in herself. When she realizes that Yoon-Jae really isn’t Yoon-Jae and that it may take a while for the two to switch bodies again, she plays along with the charade.
If I were to rate this series, I would give it a 👎 for the first half. But the second half … wow. It was worth sitting through eight hours of meh to get to the satisfying ending. Bok-Joo is the top female wrestler at her school. In order to give the other women on her team a chance of medaling, her coach asks her to go up a weight class. The 5-foot-9 athlete weights roughly 127 pounds and must go up by about 10 pounds. Bear in mind that by U.S. standards, she would be considered thin. But much is made of the fact that she’s a big, overweight girl.
There are few things in life that would be more difficult than to watch generations of loved ones grow old and die, while you live on for centuries without them. Such is the case with Kim Shin, a dokkaebi (goblin). For more than 900 years, he has been cursed to live a life of loneliness as atonement for all the enemies he killed during his days as an unbeatable general. Yes, his victims would’ve slain him if they had the opportunity. But, as God says in the narration, they were all precious creations, as well.