Rants and Weekly Raves #281 (RAWR)

Panda: Hmm, I see the eyekting King strolling by in the pic below :) How's the drama going btw?
Dramas watched: 0. I did see P.S. I still love you (To all the boys I ever loved 2) and that was cute.
Kakashi: I continue not to watch anything, but I am writing Kakashi fanfic and it's giving me much joy.
Trotwood: This holiday weekend was sandwiched between two 12-hour bus rides. I feel like I deserved to stay in hotel room in my pajamas for the day since I was the emergency contact person.
SakiVI: I watched a docudrama. Discussed below.

KOREA

The Game: Toward Zero

So many times I think to myself “this is a bad idea” when watching this show. The villain here has been able to hide and deceive and plot for years, but they think something as simple as putting tracking devices on his car or visiting him with a hidden camera is going to break this case? I feel the most sorry for Min-Jin’s mother who became a murderer to avenge her daughter but killed the wrong person because her husband and his band of reporters are still making the hasty decisions/assumptions that go them involved in this case 20 years ago. With his daughter dead and wife going to prison, you would think he’d be changing his ways. And what is with Teacher Baek? Why is he trying to stop Tae Pyong? I don’t like him either. But more people will die before any of them will get ahead of Do Kyung. He’s good. He’s a better villain than the story he’s in even.

Crash Landing on You (Finale?)

I was tempted but then I heard how long the episodes are. I refuse to watch dramas that do that.
Exactly my thought every time I think of clicking on it.

Tell Me What You Saw

I need to remind myself not to watch unless both of the weekly episodes are subbed. I almost had a heart attack at the end of ep. 5. It’s interesting to watch this show and Game: Towards Zero at the same time because this one shows what the other could be. I sort of wish the two villains, the mint killer and the Do Kyung from Zero could meet up and duke it out. Update:  Finished watching ep 6, and my nerves are no better. Child abduction cases are no better. Hopefully, we find the child and build some trust back in the team because clearly they need to work together to break through the cover up in the police force. Who would want to kill a professional cellist? And can be shallow for justa sec and give a shout out to Hot Hyuk?

Itaewon Class

Is anyone watching this? The reviews and ratings are amazing, but I don't have time to add it.
I added in my NF queue but at this rate I won't watch till 2030? Sigh
I am. It's good.

CHINA/TAIWAN

Some Day or One Day (penultimate & finale)

Ep. 12 So many twists and turns from disliking Chen Yu for pretending to be her future doppelganger just so she can have her life to feeling dory for her because everyone talks about how much more they liked her new self than her old self. If she wasn’t suicidal before, she definitely is now. And the pure heartbreak of LZW/WQS who knows that the person he loves is the other girl but now being convinced that the time travel and possible future love was all a lie was heartbreaking. I hope Guang/Greg Hsu gets more roles because of this show. 

Ep. 13+ I was guessing and sad and horrified and relieved by this episode. If a finale could be perfect, this was as close to perfection as it could be leaving us guessing and conflicted and torn and then wrapped up not in a fake way but in a logical but feeling way. The writers should get an award because they were clearly thinking everything through from the beginning. The Plus sign here is because the finale was leaked online early, so the production releases an extra special clip (4 minutes) of content on their IG account for fans who watched show legally. That was just a warm pot of love & I didn’t even need to understand the language to get it. I’m ranking this right up there with Signal and Secret Forest, and I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t seen it. I love the characters and already miss them terribly. I’m predicting that this is going to be my top show of 2020 even though it’s only February. I won’t even be sad if that is the case; it’s really that good.

A Little Thing Called First Love

I've watched five more episodes, and out heroine is working hard for her future inspired by her crush. He is such a good friend to her and genuinely believes in her abilities, seeing through her awkwardness to only note her kindness and sense of justice. As much as I find her adorable enough to want to adopt her, I'm still trying to figure out why his dad is so dead set against him being an architect, the antagonism between our heroine's old friend and new friend and how I bet they team together to take down the mean girl in college. They sure are everywhere. 

Because of You

This is an odd little show picked up by Viki. Taiwanese with a Korean actor known for starring in dailies who speaks in Korean while everyone else speaks in Chinese or Taiwanese. 15 min or so episodes but a plot synopsis that seems like it would require much more explanation. Three step-brothers—same father all different mothers—who are estranged from father who calls them all together to find yet another brother. To add to this, there is an uncle who thinks the dad’s empire should be his and not the brothers and also apparently all the brothers will have a love line with different men, one of whom may be the secret brother. There are only supposed to be ten episodes, so we will see how this goes.

JAPAN

Kono Otoko wa jinsei Saidai no Ayamachidesu/ This Guy is the Biggest Mistake of My Life

It is obvious to me that Yui is starting to soften towards her boss. I don’t think she is going to recognize this yet obviously. I also wonder how much of her annoyance at his behavior is that his behavior is annoying but also her concern about how it makes him vulnerable in ways that she doesn’t want him to be. I did not predict that all of that trip was part of a bigger scheme. I find the whole show a lark, and wish that I had the will power to save it to watch in between the episodes of the dark dramas I’m watching at the moment.

Shiranakute Kariyama/No Need to Know/Off the Record

Well, if we didn’t need the end of the last episode to know that Kate’s boyfriend, or rather ex-boyfriend, is a jerk, we get it here. He’s worse than a jerk; he’s a complete coward. I mean is he really going to act like he’s afraid of her, too, now that he knows about her father? This whole DNA discussion is frustrating because of the clear belief of the connection between DNA and behavior with no connection to environment. It seems inevitable that she will meet her father. The question is whether the show will take the easy road and have her determine his innocence, so the DNA question doesn’t really have to be answered or whether she’ll not find out and the show will keep going down the road to debunk the whole DNA determines your fate bit.

Sousa Kaigi wa Living de!/The Investigation Meeting is in the Living Room

This week’s ep has our sleuth family forced to have a house party by a suspicious and nosey neighbor. Of course they manage to solve a bank robbery case while this is happening. I love the way the family works together with our young neighborhood cop who they want to get all the glory for the sake of keeping Shoko’s cover. Poor Akira, though, he really wants to be a crime novelist, but I don’t think he’s going to be able to escape his househusband blogger popularity. But it’s funny how things that might scare or intimidate a regular family only makes this family excited.

THAILAND

Until We Meet Again

This week's episode tricked us into thinking there wouldn’t be a heart wrenching scene by not having one in the opening. Centered on the main couple this time and the progression into a new stage in the relationship, I really enjoyed the domesticity of the whole thing—shopping for groceries, planning trip to see Parm’s mom, the talk about living together after graduation. I’m glad Dean is so forthcoming about his feelings and his plans for a future with Parm because finding out more of the story of their past lives is going to be even more painful. Dean fell apart in front of Parm after one of his visions in this episode; I’m glad that the comforting goes in both directions.

Why R U?

I have a new philosophy about this show. I just pretend that I’m watching two shows at once. The one I like is the show with Tutor and Fighter, where Fighter is fighting the feelings that he has for Tutor while Tutor is trying to be a friend to Fighter’s girlfriend, ignore his attraction, and figure out how he is going to avoid having to quit school because he just lost one of his jobs and he still needs to pay off his dad’s debt. I completely understand why he hasn’t shared his desperate situation with anyone else, but I wish he weren’t so alone. The other show, I have to consider as a parody of  BL drama and pure Fawlty Towers-like comedy. 

Docudrama

Rise of Empires: Ottoman

I've yet to find a subbed drama on Mehmed II, a personal hero of mine, so I was so excited to see this docudrama thingy on Netflix.  It's part drama, part historians talking about the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.  Because Mehmed is meant to have been a prophesied conqueror, I'd have like a bit more of them talking about the two prophecies, both from Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, and from the Prophet Muhammad, and then matching them to the conquest, and less about red apples (maybe red apples was one of the prophecies, but it wasn't clear), but the story was still very well told.