Reflection On A Bad Drama

This drama is so bad that I had to give up watching after several episodes. It is an imitation K Drama. The outfit, the architecture, the cookware, the food are all fashioned after a long gone Korean dynasty. The hero is androgynous, handsome, and strangely sadistic, while the heroine is a cutie who is determined to investigate her family’s downfall. So he is a young general (General Ji) every woman admires (despite his sadism), and she (Tianqi) pretends to be a man and becomes a medical doctor in the general’s mansion. He enjoys handing out corporal punishment to people who work for him, and the hapless medical doctor Tianqi is regularly disciplined for committing errors big and small. His food, his medicine, his insomnia, his memory, his suspicion. Anything can be used by him as an excuse to beat Tianqi up physically. And the more General Ji tortures Tianqi, the more Tianqi (who disguises herself as a man) wants to flatter him and serve him.

The problem is that whoever wrote this or directed this really enjoys the sadistic-masochistic relationship between the two. After a while, when General Ji’s sadistic antics become too repetitive, the plot starts to shift to the bloodier ideas of throwing her into a lake, shooting her with an arrow, getting her poisoned, or nearly chopping her head off. After two hours of watching it, I started to dread what would come next. For lack of an interesting way of telling a story, the writer (or the director) is resorting to bloodthirsty violence to spice things up, each more ridiculous and grisly than the previous one.

Actually if the story is told as a satire, it will be much better, but he (the writer or the director) has no intention for caricature; no flair for mockery. He is dead serious in telling his story and it is no laughing matter. Somehow I imagine he is frustrated by women in his life–his mother, his sister, his spouse, or his colleagues. They can be bossy, unsympathetic; they probably want to control him; they seduce him first with love but fasten him later with a loveless relationship, from which he is powerless to escape. So what does he do as a revenge–write a drama in which he can impose all the imaginary penalties.

The only reason I watched it is because it is dubbed in Spanish, and I was so bored by the Spanish learning that I was desperate to watch something new, no matter how bad it is.

Well, probably it is a good thing that he writes this drama as a catharsis. I mean if he has no place to unleash this tension, who knows what will become of him.

And what was more surprising was the fact that I realized that a quarter of million people have watched this online and most of them are women, some of whom had left raving reviews in the comment area.