Origin and release year: South Korea (2018)
Korean title: 하나뿐인 내편
Cast: Choi Soo Jong, Uie, Lee Jang Woo, Na Hye Mi, Yoon Ji Ni, Jung Eun Woo, Park Sung Hoon, Jung Jae Sun
Synopsis: Kim Do-Ran (Uie) has a bright and positive personality, even though she is in a financially difficult situation. One day, her biological father Kang Soo Il (Choi Soo Jong) appears in front of of her. She hasn’t seen him in 28 years. Kim Do Ran’s life soon becomes twisted. (AsianWiki)
This is one of the more infuriating weekend drama choices to watch. Infuriating in an entertaining way, but infuriating nonetheless.
The storyline is quite obvious. You can tell more or less how the story will unfold and there are some unexpected twists and turns in between.
More than that, the plot is filled with unreasonable characters which is where the fury kicks in. This drama sparks your humanity and protective instincts.
It does a great job of profiling characters and directing the audience’s perspective on them.
For example, they did such a great job of painting Daya (Yoon Jin Yi) as a spoiled rude brat, that by the time something terrible happened to her you found it difficult to sympathize.
This drama villainizes the villains and humanizes the saints in an emotionally titillating way.
It also provides a twisted but satisfying moral sigh of relief through the dementia storyline. The writer has found a way to punish most of the problematic characters in the show by making them the victims of Park Geum Byeong (Jeong Jae Sun) who has dementia and goes on violent hair-tugging sprees due to her symptoms.
There were some character inconsistencies though. Wang Dae Ryuk (Lee Jang Woo) was determined to be a ride-or-die through many events. Discovering his family’s driver is his wife’s father, finding out his father-in-law is a murderer; he claimed to want to stay by her side despite it all.
However, when it was discovered that the person his father-in-law supposedly killed was his sister-in-law’s father; he divorced her instantly. Granted it’s an extreme circumstance, but he didn’t ask any questions or put up an ounce of a fight. It was incredibly hard to believe considering the lengths that he went to before.
It was enough to turn fans of the character off (or at least for this writer).
Regardless of some slight character inconsistencies and the constant emotional rollercoaster, the storyline of this plot was entertaining.
It lacked some Korean weekend drama cliches but that made it all the more refreshing to watch. The cast also needs to be commended on their acting.
The drama also deserves applause for successfully filling 106 episodes (53 episodes if you’re watching on Netflix) without making it feel like too much of a stretch to watch. Granted there were some dull moments in the writing, but that’s inevitable in a drama of this length. It was still a relatively riveting story throughout.
The Muse Culture rating: 7/10