The Drama Bucket

                         

I like to think of my drama watching habits as a bucket being placed under a leaking roof. There are new dramas coming out every week that I want to catch. But at the same time I have a backlog of dramas from months ago I've never finished. I catch the new ones as episodes come out and if I have time I work on the ones that already ended and I never got to. This past week, the roof has been leaking, but the water droplets are stuck between the roof panes (the episodes I want to watch are not being subbed), so I've been going back to deal with the water that has been collecting in the bucket.

                      

The Best Hit

I finished this bad boy recently. I remember when I started this drama back in June, it was one of the most hilarious dramas I'd ever seen. But in the last bunch of episodes, it was pure emotion and angst. I've noticed that many dramas are like that, including Suspicious Partner, which I talk about below, and I'm not sure that I like that. It was just really difficult to continue finishing this because I picked it up in the middle of conflict and that made it hard to ease back into. I was also very much confused by the plot. Hyun Jae went back to 1994 to stop alternate timeline Hyun Jae from killing himself? And then after all of the effort he went through to change the past, he went back to the future (haha) anyways? What happened to alternate Hyun Jae if he didn't die in 1994? Did they explain the logic behind any of that? I don't think I would have been happy with him staying in the past, but I also would have liked the situation to be understandable. I think the only thing I concluded after finishing this drama is that Yoon Shi Yoon is a gift we do not deserve. He's the only reason I'm considering watching Grand Prince, but he is pretty much the only draw for me. I'm not interested in any other cast member, or the set up, so I don't know.

                            

Hwayugi

I actually quite liked the ending. Simply put, Sam Jang was destined to die in order to save the world. It didn't make sense for there to be some loophole to bring back to life, only to die again in a few decades, by the way. I did find it interesting that though Oh Gong and Sun Mi had a death fate with each other, neither actually killed the other. Sun Mi hurt Oh Gong, but she never killed him. And Oh Gong didn't kill Sun Mi, the psychopath politician did. They knocked fate. A lot of bows were wrapped up nicely by the end of the last episode. We finally learn what happened to Princess Iron Fan, which had bothered me. She reincarnated into a flower (awwww how poetic). Mawang gets to bond with his son in secret. Baja and the priestess are finally put to rest. Han Joo is given Hanbit real estate agency upon Sun Mi's death and will live a mostly normal life. I suppose Pal Gye and General Winter didn't really leave the story happily, but maybe they accepted their situations by the end. I think what made me happiest is that Oh Gong retrieved his memory of Sun Mi and returned to her ghost before she disappeared. It was so satisfying that he was able to have one last true moment with Sun Mi. And now he's traveling to the underworld to make a ruckus and I love it.

                              

Radio Romance

I don't know what it is, but I'm just not as in love with this as I thought I would be. It's weird that though the series is more than halfway finished, it still feels like it just started. It feels like we're still setting up the plot and the characters and there hasn't been very much development. I could do without the bitchy step mother and the second female lead who latches onto the male lead tenaciously. They're essentially the same as they were in the first episode. And the two leads, Geu Rim and Su Ho aren't really progressing in the way that I hoped they would, either. They're just so awkward, and not in a cute or realistically natural way. I don't know whether the two actors just don't have enough chemistry to sell the romance, or that the writers aren't giving them the opportunity to do so. My money is on the writers because Kim So Hyun and Yoon Doo Joon are phenomenal in everything they do. I hate to say it, but I think maybe Kim So Hyun was miscasted. And I really think her age and the age gap with Yoon Doo Joon limits what the character was written to do romantically.  I keep watching because it's light and enjoyable, I'm just disappointed.

                               

Waikiki

I can't get enough of these fools. After ten episodes of figuring out his feelings, Dong Gu has finally confessed to Yoon Ah. Of course, she will probably teeter on the edge for at least an episode or 2 before acknowledging her feelings and accepting him. I'm quite ambivalent about that couple. I'm way more excited about the Seo Jin/ Joon Ki pairing. I love them both as characters, so I love them even more together. It also seems like Doo Sik and Soo Ah might be a potential pair. I would only root for them if it means Doo Sik would toughen up and stop letting Soo Ah walk all over him. It was crummy of Mal Geum to dump him the way she did.

                           

Suspicious Partner

I finished this, too. I think it was important for me to take my time watching this so that I could extend the last time I would be seeing Ji Chang Wook in a drama before his military enlistment. I'm still anxiously waiting for a new Seo In Guk project, though I know he had a controversy with his health, so technically he's not in the military right now. Anyways, I suppose the most important part of the drama was for both Bong Hee and Ji Wook to confront the truth about the past. In actuality, Ji Wook mistakenly convicting Bong Hee's father of murder was way worse than the possibility of Bong Hee's father killing Ji Wook's father. Ji Wook had a lot more to be apologetic for than Bong Hee did. I was really happy when they both realized that they should focus all of their hurt feelings on the District Attorney, who caused all of their misery. It gave me so much life when Bong Hee finally confronted him on her own and did not accept his apology. It also made me happy that everyone was kind of friends in the end, however awkwardly.