What Dramas Am I Watching This Week?

So here's what I'm watching this week! Of course the list is split by country and the amount of episodes I've seen so far are written below! There will be spoilers from now on so if you aren't caught to the episode number on list, you might want to go watch that episode and then come back! If you're interested in previous lists, click here and if you want to see a list of my favorite asian OTPs and ships, click here!

KDRAMA

Catch The Ghost (6/16): "Catch the Ghost” is a romantic investigative drama about a woman named Yoo Ryung who solves cases with her overflowing sense of justice and exceptional spatial perception but always gets herself into trouble because of her rash actions. She meets the Wangsimni station constabulary chief, a man who avoids cases and seeks stability. However, he always ends up cleaning up after the problems caused by Yoo Ryung and holds the key to solving the cases.

I was so glad that Ryung started to settle down this week cause up to this point, she was all over the place with her inability to see anything except for the thing she was focused on no matter the consequences which is what drove me crazy about her. I think the victim in the domestic abuse case helped her see that despite her having no family, she wasn't alone in the fight and that her team but especially Ji Suk had her back. I loved the first episode that aired and everything about how they chased down subway perverts and how Ryung finally started to notice Ji Suk cause up to that point it was obvious that he was catching feelings but she was oblivious and it wasn't until he got beat up for her that she started to see what a good guy he was. I really wasn't a fan of their romance cause I thought it was moving too quickly but I actually really enjoyed their silent disco dance together and finally started seeing chemistry which is why it low key sucked that Ryung panicked about how much she wanted to trust Ji Suk and tried to pull away by returning to her off-the-rails mindset and wanting to switch partners though I don't know why she thinks one of the other guys on the squad would let her do whatever she wanted. I loved that scene when they fought over switching partners cause like the other guys said, it looked and felt more like a breakup than a professional partner switching! I'm wondering if the serial rape case is actually connected to the Subway Ghost after all cause it looked like the person who called one of the victims to tell her where to get her wallet was in the same secluded phone booth that the Subway Ghost used. We also saw the Grasshoppers unmasked and I'm curious why we got to know them now. It must mean that we'll either catch them soon enough or that they must be in the police or something cause the reveal can't have been for nothing.

FINISHED Chief Of Staff Season 1 (10/10): Jang Tae Joon graduated from the Korean National Police University and worked as a detective. He wanted to gain more power and decided to work in the National Assembly. Now, he is the chief aide to a 4-time lawmaker. He has excellent intuition, a cold-blooded decisiveness and a strong desire to win. He was able to place his lawmaker in the position of the party representative, but Jang Tae Joon has higher ambitions. Meanwhile Kang Sun Young is a first year lawmaker who got elected through proportional representation and is a spokesperson for her party. She worked as a lawyer and hosted a current affairs TV program prior to becoming a lawmaker. She is ambitious and does her job well. Kang Sun Young has an awkward relationship with Jang Tae Joon, whose boss is a rival of the senior lawmaker who got her to become proportional representation lawmaker.

Well as you can obviously see I clearly didn't watch this drama when it first aired but I had always kept it in the back of my mind cause I adore Shin Min Ah and then recently I started seeing clips of Tae Joon and Sun Young being cute together so I finally pulled the trigger. At first I was hardcore in love with this drama cause I adored how completely badass everyone in the cast was and it reminded me a lot of The West Wing (which if you know me you know that The West Wing is one of my absolute favorite American shows) so it made this show feel so unique in terms of a political drama. There was no naive bumbling characters, no over-the-top romantic drama and everyone felt kind of grey in terms of whether they were good or bad but then as the show went on it devolved back into the typical mess of kdrama cliches of cackling evil v incompetent good. From the moment Assemblyman Song threw Tae Joon under the bus to the very end of what I believe is only the first season of this show, I was so horrified to watch. Tae Joon had always been five steps ahead of everyone and now suddenly Song and Oh were able to play him like a fiddle. Where was this whenever Song needed a political rival destroyed? I do have a feeling that Tae Joon is playing a long game but it sucks that he ended the season having become the exact opposite of what he was. I do believe that Yun is still on his side and hopefully Sun Young cause he basically warned her that he was going to take some sketchy steps but asked her to trust him. It was one of my favorite things about this show how Tae Joon and Sun Young were able to separate their professional and personal life so that no matter what actions they took or who's side they ended up on, they knew it was nothing personal and loved each other the same. I'm truly not sure if it'll watch the next season cause the end of this one was so hard to watch... Overall I'd give it an 8 / 10 cause it only fell apart in the final fourth of the show.

Extraordinary You (24/32): What would you do if you found out that you were, in fact, a character in a comic? And an extra character on top of that? Change the course of the story, obviously! Eun Dan Oh is a 17-year-old high-school student from a wealthy family who suffers from a lifelong heart condition that inevitably means she will not live past her teenage years. However, when Dan Oh realizes she is experiencing long gaps in her memory as well, she comes into the unhappy inheritance of another fact in her life: she is a character in a Korean webtoon and all of her actions are predetermined by the artist who draws her. To make matters worse, she discovers she is only a supporting character in the cast. With her newfound understanding of the world she inhabits, she is determined to find true love in her own plot-line and circumvent the author’s plans for her character by utilizing the flashes of storyboard she alone is able to see.

Ugh why is Haru the absolute sweetest angel in this world? Ugh. I'm constantly melting into a goddamn puddle every time he does anything. It's funny cause when Kyung gets some screen time the part of me that loves Lee Jae Wook is like oh my poor baby look at him being heartbroken over a one-sided crush but as soon as Haru is back on screen I'm like nope 100% on Team Haru. I think it all comes down to the fact that Haru says exactly what he means when he wants to and doesn't have a problem expressing his feelings or doing romantic things without a hidden veil covering it. Kyung is in love with Dan Oh too but whereas Haru and Dan Oh are focused on the present rather than the past or the future, Kyung refuses to actually do anything in the present cause he likes to focus on the idea that the writer is in charge. Like damn Kyung would it kill you to be nice to Dan Oh or to woo her? It's the same thing with Joo Da who's aware now and very obviously into Do Hwa rather than Nam Ju cause again Do Hwa is actually nice to her! It feels like this writer is obsessed with tsunderes but like the asshole kind. We finally learned more about Trumpet Creeper and the story there is pretty much exactly the same as the one we have here with Kyung and Dan Oh engaged but Dan Oh and Haru falling in love in the shadow. It's kind of hilarious that Squid Fairy's line about how the writer has no creativity is so real. I mean he literally rewrote the same story with the same characters and the same lines into two mangas! I still think Kyung is going to end up the villain soon but I'm still curious to know what happened in the old manga where the girl Squid Fairy loved must have died and it looked like Haru might have been scripted to kill Dan Oh but he grabbed the blade to try to stop it but didn't have the strength to break the writer's will and ended up killing Dan Oh.

FINISHED Flower Crew: Joseon Marriage Agency (16/16): Before Lee Soo became a king, he was an ordinary blacksmith in the countryside. He life suddenly changed at the age of 23. This was when Lee Soo became the King of Joseon. Meanwhile, Lee Soo’s first love is Gae Ddong. He loved her before he took the throne. King Lee Soo wants to marry Gae Ddong, but, because of her humble background, it is virtually impossible. To marry Gae Ddong, Lee Soo hires the Flower Crew Matchmaking Agency. The agency consists of 3 handsome men: Ma Hoon, Do Joon and Go Young Soo and they are the best matchmaking agency in Joseon. King Lee Soo asks the Flower Crew to make Gae Ddong a noblewoman.

Okay so the ending was really silly with the whole German Korean-speaking man wanting to marry a Princess but other than that everything was pretty much wrapped up beautifully with our heroes having happy endings and the villains getting what they deserved. I don't think I believe in Ji Hwa's sudden patriotism or regret as much as the show would have liked me too cause she was the worst from day 1 and I never thought that her love for Joon was stronger than her need for power but I suppose in the face of her father becoming a traitor, the calculation was in her favor whether or not her father succeeded in his treason cause like she said had he won she would become the Queen but if he loses then Joon is there to put in a good word to the King that she helped in the end. I really loved everything with Hoon helping Gae Ddong and Soo with the fortune telling cause the angel that he is just wanted Gae Ddong to be happy whether that was as the Queen or by his side which once again showed us why he was better for her than Soo though I suppose in the very end Soo finally saw how much more harm he was doing than good by trying to force Gae Ddong to come back to him. I loved that she decided to stay with Hoon as herself and not the noble lady she was pretending to be and that she chose him even after everything and he had nothing but the matchmaking business. It makes me happy that the four remained together and are still doing what they love. Gae Ddong and Young Soo being the puppy team that they are were everything. This show did have a bit of a rough start at first but by the end I adored everything about this show but I have to give a special shoutout to the chemistry between Gae Ddong and Hoon and the way their beautiful romance played out. This show is definitely a 8.5 / 10!

Leverage (8/16): "Leverage" will tell the story of Lee Tae Joon, an elite insurance investigator turned scam strategist who recruits the best "players" in order to catch the real criminals who think they’re above the law.

We're now halfway through this show and it looks like we're seeing more and more of this mystery director which worries me cause he's clearly much further ahead than Tae Joon and co and he's clearly already got them under surveillance. I have a feeling he's mostly just letting Tae Joon and co go and letting them do whatever they want for now and he'll only step in if they touch something in whatever his plan is. Like when they targeted the nursing home, someone clearly notified him but he must have been like whatever cause they actually helped more than hindered him cause his plan must have something to do with this silver city. I was surprised though that he didn't mind when they took down the police commissioner but then again he did tell all of the men under him that they're expendable so maybe he truly doesn't care about them anymore? The plan this week was pretty fun though more low key than the usual ones since all they really needed was Tae Joon and Soo Kyung but I think we did set up a little with a future romance between those two cause Tae Joon was really worried about Soo Kyung being alone with Chairman Baek like Eui Sung with Na Byeol a few weeks ago. I still want Na Byeol with Roy but they're definitely playing up the Eui Sung and Na Byeol thing so it's probs not going to happen which is why I don't know why they had such a cute scene after Na Byeol got arrested and she called Roy instead of Soo Kyung to bail her out. My favorite thing this week though was how everyone wanted to steal money from the Baeks and tried to hide it from Tae Joon but they were so obvious about it.

Melting Me Softly (12/16): It’s a story about a man and a woman who participated in a project to be frozen for 24 hours, only to be waken up 20 years later due to a mysterious scheme. Once out of the freeze, the two experience a dangerous side effect from the project wherein they must maintain a core body temperature of 31.5 degrees Celsius (approximately 88.7 degrees Fahrenheit) to survive. Coupled with the warming of their hearts from romantic attraction, they find themselves in a sticky situation. Ma Dong Chan is a star variety show PD, who makes hits out of every show he creates. He decides to personally participate in his show called “Frozen Human Project,” but instead of waking up 24 hours later, 20 years have passed when he opens his eyes. Everyone he knows has aged 20 years, while he has maintained his perfect physique and youth from pre-freeze.

I keep feeling as though this show should be further along than it is and I really can't decide why. Maybe it's cause it ended up not being one of my favs so I'm not looking forward to it every week but as I finished watching this week's episodes my brain went okay so the finale must be next week only to realize that the finale won't be for two weeks. I think a lot of it is also cause we seem to be wrapping up all of our stories this week. The antidote for Dong Chan and Mi Ran was created and given to the two and now they're fine. Dong Chan and Mi Ran were outed as a couple to the company and the variety show they were working on was finished. The evil CEO was outed and we saved the real CEO. What's left for the next two weeks other than arresting the evil CEO? It doesn't entirely make sense and seriously show you don't have enough cute or funny to last four full episodes without a plot! On another note who was that random woman who we found out had revealed Mi Ran to the world instead of Mi Ran's friend? Have we ever seen her before? Why does she hate Mi Ran? I did enjoy all the Dong Chan and his siblings moments though and I really think the show should have focused more on that then this terrible CEO plot cause the emotional moments when Dong Chan and Mi Ran are with their families is the most poignant. I loved that Dong Chan told his sister that she was precious and that he loved her cause it gave her the strength to want to change her life.

FINISHED Mother Of Mine (108/108): This drama is about a story of a mother and three daughters living in modern-day Korean society. The drama conveys a message about the low fertility rate, divorce rate, and the problems of the younger generation who are avoiding marriage. While running a small beef soup restaurant, Park Sun Ja raised her three daughters Mi Sun, Mi Ri and Mi Hye alone. She still runs the restaurant to this day and her three daughters are now all grown up. Sun Ja's first daughter Mi Sun is married and she has a daughter. Mi Sun is busy working and taking care of her family. Second daughter Mi Ri cares about her mother a lot. She is confident in herself and good at her job. Mi Ri gets involved in a romantic relationship with her co-worker Tae Joo. He is the youngest son of the family that owns the company. The youngest daughter is Mi Hye. She used to be a promising novelist, but she is not any more. She helps her mother at the restaurant.

I've been on a bit of an obsessive family drama kick but as you all know I'm picky with my family dramas cause they need to have the perfect amount of warm family dynamic, cute romances and believable villains if they can't have none at all! As I've been discovering, it seems like KBS makes my favorite kinds of these and so I jumped into this one with fairly high hopes and found myself just as happy as I wanted to be watching this show. Mi Ri was obviously my favorite of the three sisters cause not only did I find her romance the most interesting but I loved what a complete badass she was in her competence and inability to back down. The reason I tend to dislike most revenge dramas is that the female lead is always a pushover and I will never understand the tendency to forgive and forget after being tortured for so long! That's why I liked the revenge lite story we got with Mi Ri and Tae Joo and In Sook and the Hansung Group. I loved the way In Sook's arc played out and how she started out as this selfish woman only to end up having given up everything just to be happy with her daughter and family. Tae Joo was the most precious cinnamon roll though I did get a little tired of how naive he was at some points. Mi Hye was also really fun to watch though as it seems no one else agreed with my opinion on this cause yeah Mi Hye was childish but I kind of adored her romance with Woo Jin though I think that was mostly cause I found him so attractive. I do have to admit that so little time was spent on them that it felt a little like Mi Hye forced him into dating her and then marrying her. Mi Sun and her entire story with her in-laws is better left unsaid tbh cause I straight up fast-forwarded through most of the nonsense with her childish husband and annoying in-laws. Of course I want to give a special shoutout to Sun Ja who was one of the best moms on tv though I did find her a little overbearing at some points but I think that's just a Korean thing. Overall I want to give this show a 9 / 10 cause I loved so much of it!

Vagabond (13/16): Cha Dal Gun becomes an awakened tiger in the face of his nephew’s death in a mysterious plane crash. As an orphan himself, he had raised his nephew singlehandedly in place of his brother who had passed on. Triggered by the large-scale cover-up of the incident, he sets off on a journey to discover the truth. Go Hae Ri is the eldest daughter of a marine who had died during an operation. She has always wanted to be a normal civil servant to support her family, but life had other plans and she ends up as a National Intelligence Service (NIS) agent. Their lives intertwine as they discover a tangled web of corruption behind the plane crash.

We only got one episode of Vagabond this week cause the other supposedly got preempted in Korea due to baseball (or so I read) which is a little annoying especially since as the rumor goes there will also be one episode airing next week before the last two air in two weeks. It does feel as though the show is wrapping up in terms of us being able to catch everyone we needed to from Jessica and John & Mark to Secretary Yun and Chief Min though it does suck a little that Director An got caught up but I'm not that torn up about it cause he did bend instead of staying firm when Yun came to seduce him. I don't understand Yun cause I really wouldn't have pegged him as so loyal to the President as to commit suicide instead of revealing the evidence he had that the President was involved in this whole mess too and I wonder if it'll come out at some point by the end cause of course it has to right? Beyond that I have a feeling that Dynamic's role in all of this will end up coming out as well cause I've had my doubts about them from the start cause remember when Lily called Edward disgusting and I was like well if an assassin thinks you're too nasty to work for then you can't be a good guy! I have a feeling that it was Edward through Mickey who convinced Michael to bomb the plane which is why Kim Woo Gi recognized Mickey on the boat (as Michael's girl) but I'm curious to know why Michael ended up changing his mind. Regardless of the reason, it was probs Mickey or one of Edward's men who killed Michael to shut him up and also hurt that woman at the airport who tried to report the terror attack. Edward's also probs the one who ordered Woo Gi to be killed on the prison transport bus to prevent the truth about Mickey coming out and release Woo Gi's wife though I'm not sure what her role will be. She got a note from Woo Gi and I'm assuming that she figured out who Mickey is and will probs go to blackmail Edward about it.

V.I.P. (8/32): VIP is a drama that seeks to find an answer in the secretive relationships we hold in today’s society. Jung Sun is a competent and successful career woman who works as a deputy manager at Sung Woon Department Store. Her job as a member of the VIP Management Team is to satisfy their top one percent of customers who are the special VIPs and VVIPs. Not only is she professional at work, but she has a happy household with a wonderful husband, Sung Jun. However, one day she receives an anonymous text message. It says that her romantic husband is having an affair with someone at the office. Anxious to lose everything she has, she desperately studies the office and her co-workers to find out the woman Sung Jun is seeing. In the course of events, secrets behind each of the workers at the VIP Management Team are revealed. Will Jung Sun find out the truth behind the anonymous text message?

I'm starting to wonder if maybe just maybe Sung Jun isn't actually cheating. It might just be my naivety peeking through but I just can't imagine a whole show about a husband cheating on his wife and part of me thinks it's too easy for the truth to have come out already. Like maybe something else is going on in the company and Sung Jun was trying to cover it up or hide it from Jung Sun but I can't imagine what's horrible enough to force Sung Jun to break his wife's heart that much cause his reactions to when she's telling him that he already lost her and then later when she says that she'll try to forgive him felt so raw. Maybe there's some sort of escort service happening with the VIPs and executives and Sung Jun accidentally found out about it so someone is blackmailing him now. Like I said I might just be reaching for something that's not there and the truth might be as simple as what we're told and if that's the case, I still vote on Mi Na being the other woman but maybe once again that's my want for Hyun Ah to be innocent cause she and Jung Sun have been friends for forever and I hate the thought that she's been fake this whole time. I mean we do clearly see that Hyun Ah's big secret is that her family went bankrupt and her mom is running from debt collectors so that just might be it all... I really just want Jung Sun to leave Sung Jun though tbh cause I can't believe that she's been calm enough to even look at his face cause I would be boiling every time I did. I mean the asshole literally said it was an accident like oh oops I accidentally managed to find a bed with this women and my clothes accidentally gave off and I accidentally slept with her. A kiss can be accidental but sex cannot, fullstop. 

CDRAMA

Dive (14/30): A story that revolves around a diving team in the brink of disbandment. Coach Yu Feng grooms four athletes to represent the school and turn the tide for the diving team. He finds Jiang Bai Long, a former star of tomorrow in the diving world, Wei Te, an exchange student from Thailand, the newly-enrolled star athlete Lu Hao Ran and his partner Tian Lin.

I'm so many episodes into this show and it's just really reinforcing my thought that cdramas just don't know how to pace their shows. I wish I knew the magic formula that something like My Mr Mermaid had but it's clearly not here. At the very least the pacing for the swimming story is working enough for me. I do think Bailong's PTSD around diving was fixed too quickly but I also never really cared for Bailong anyway so for me I was like sure fine let's just keep chugging along. His bromance with Weite is precious though and I love how excited he was when he was told he was going to partner with Weite even though he tried to hide it. I'm sure they're going to kick ass when they finally get to compete. Weite and Caiti had been building some sort of romance for a while but it still felt like overnight it went from around 15 to 100 which is annoying cause you all know they were my ship in this show! Despite that I do love that when he had to pick someone to bring to a party, his mind went to Caiti and that at least he saw her before he went back to Thailand. I also thought for a while that Haoran might end up doing something bad in order to get Weite to leave or give up cause he wanted to partner with Bailong so badly and like he tried a little but Weite clearly knew what he was doing and really just felt bad for him but I seriously feel bad for Tianlin who just wants to dive with his best friend who doesn't even care.

No Secrets (18/45): A story about a young man who can read people's minds and a worthless lawyer who come to protect each other. A tragic case from the past revolving around a car accident connects the lives of Lin Xing Ran and Jiang Xia. After 10 years, the young man who can read minds and the impulsive public defender meet again. Meanwhile, Zhang Xiao Quan is Lin Xing Ran's boss who has a reputation for never having lost a single case while Gu Si Yu is a colleague who becomes a bitter rival.

You can really tell that this drama is a remake from an older one with just how over-the-top annoying I find the second male lead. Nowadays the second male lead is usually the guy the girl grew up with or a nice friend she's made who kinda just exists to look sad whenever the male lead and female lead interact but in older dramas (and actually a few modern ones which I tend to dislike) he was the person who constantly competed with the male lead and said annoying things and just buzzed around constantly trying to force his attention on the female lead. It also doesn't help that Xiao Quan is also Xing Ran's boss so the show has that terribly annoying boss/subordinate power dynamic that I don't enjoy cause Xiao Quan thinks it's funny or cute to force Xing Ran to hang out in his office to do work and she's literally afraid to go to work the next day cause if she rejects him then he might make her work life a living hell and if that's not harassment I don't know what is. I do love how childish Jiang Xia is though he's supposed to be in college in this remake but he's still acting like a high schooler from the original so it's a bit of a weird dynamic though Xing Ran is just as childish around him so I think it works. I'm also interesting in the fact that the cases that we're getting are actually totally different than the korean ones (or so I can remember) which makes it more exciting to watch cause I don't know how they'll play out.

FINISHED Young Blood Agency (30/30): Young Blood Agency is an investigative agency during the Republican era that is dedicated to solving mysterious cases. Their reputation has risen with every mystery they solve, but the cases are not as simple as they seem as it relates to unsettled animosity from the previous generation. The four members of the team suddenly realize that they have complicated ties to each other.

I finally was able to go back and finish this drama cause the subtitles had stopped after episode 12 which sucked but I was able to find them this week so I jumped right back into this show. It was a little hard to remember what small clues we'd gotten about the overarching story and I awkwardly kept mixing up the stuff in this drama with the stuff in Detective L being that both were detective stories set in similar time periods. Eventually I caught up and I have to say that I loved the way the story ended up unfolding with each of the kids' fathers being all wrapped up in a conspiracy cause not only did it leave me guessing as each clue was unfolded but it prevents the kids from hating one another cause everyone's father had messed up at some point. Qiubai's mom and Rualuo's brother were killed because of everyone's greed for money and so Qiubai's dad and Rualuo's dad teamed up and killed everyone else leaving only Ye's dad alive. I had a strong feeling though from the start that Chu was probs the mastermind just cause of how sketch he seemed and on the plus side with his death, Qiubai and Qingmu don't have anyone blocking them from being together. The romances in this show were extra cute too and I adored both Qiubai and Qingmu and Yichen and Miaomiao! Overall I'd give this drama a 8 / 10 cause though some of the cases were boring, the overarching story was pretty exciting!

xoxo Allie