Letter #3: My Mister

Good morning, Erin.

Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed your time away and managed to cram in some awful Christmas movies, once your finals were over. You so deserve the chance at some awesomely bad D-grade shlock. 

I figured the best way to ease you back into the absurdity that is my written-out thoughts on the shows you recommend to me was to start with something you said you didn’t watch, because then I can just give you some overall thoughts, rather than get into specifics—which should, in theory, make this a much shorter letter for you to get through. Which, I hope, makes the presumably too-long discussions to follow seem somewhat less daunting, when you get to them. (Or don’t. I mean, you’re really not obligated to read any of this.)

…anyway, so I finished My Mister, and I have some thoughts:

1. Ultimately, I really enjoyed this series. It’s slow and predominantly joyless (certainly in the first six or seven episodes), but something about the constant, albeit snail-like, ratcheting up of tension in the main plot made it an almost compulsive watch. And it’s well-written, well-acted. 

2. Sadly, for what turns out to be excellent reasons, the really good stuff—which is the interactions between the main leads—doesn’t really get going until you’ve watched, like, six hours of the show. Which is quite an ask. So, really, I don’t think I’d recommend this to anyone unless they felt the same kind of reasonless compulsion to keep watching that I did. 

3. That said…being a lost soul, I am drawn to stories about lost souls finding each other and, in the best cases, providing that which they substantively lack. This show is absolutely that, absolutely about broken people adrift in the world, incomplete, and what happens when they, through entirely impure happenstance, enter each other’s lives. And I think it was great, once that started to take hold. 

4. And that said…I don’t think I’d recommend it to you. Or, rather, I hope that it would make sense for me not to recommend it to you. I was very close to I Want to Eat Your Pancreas-levels of devastated by the end of this show. (Which…means more if you’ve seen that movie. Which you should. It’s great.) Seriously, I had to put on my “sad + mopey” playlist and wander around outside in the middle of the night, it left me that upset. Which is not to say I wouldn’t recommend something sad to you (see: Pancreas), but I would hope that the specific kind of heartbreaking this show ended up being isn’t something that you would relate to. And I feel like it just means more—possibly that it really only has meaning—if you’ve had a similar kind of pathos. I just…really want to think you’d find this dull rather than poignant. 

5. Also, while there’s a cluster of very pretty girls, in this one, I think the handsome dudes factor is waaaaay off. I doubt any of them would have made the cut to scroll on your phone. 

6. Actually, speaking of: it’s a literal plot point, in the latter half of the show, that no one thinks Lee Ji-eun is pretty. Like, someone literally says, “Thank God she isn’t pretty.” Yeah, okay, show. I laughed so hard at that. 

6A. Relatedly, I was watching this YouTube clip of a, like, 12-year-old girl talking to Lee Ji-eun about how she’s her favorite singer and her idol and stuff, and the girl said, “I love you to the moon and back,” which I thought was just the most adorable way to say that. 

6B. …of course, the translation also said, at one point, that getting her autograph was a “great honor for my family,” so I don’t know about accuracy. Or maybe it really was a great honor. IU’s a big deal. 

7. Oh, and I noticed this in Hotel Del Luna, as well, but…Lee Ji-eun looks silly when she runs. I’m not saying I’m any great shakes and Lord knows she wasn’t the only one to look less than stellar while running, on the show, but she looks particularly silly…which is why I laughed when it’s revealed that her character’s strength and hobby is listed as “running.” (Though, I suspect it is a play on words, and that she’s saying her skill is “running away,” but that’s a whole other discussion.)

8. Further, I’ve decided that you’re not allowed to have her be your favorite, anymore. I’m calling dibs on her. Forever. No backsies. 

9. Oh! The show did this really weird bit of censoring stuff. Like, there were movie posters and product labels that got blurred out, presumably because they didn’t have the rights to the images, but…they also blurred out vomit. I…don’t know. We could see a woman get repeatedly punched in the face, but puke? Heavens no! 

10. And, seriously, how is it that no one is driving a Hyundai in this series, either?! They make such good cars! (Have you seen their cyberpunk-y retro-future concept car, the Hyundai Grandeur? IT LOOKS RAD AS HELL!) I can’t tell if I’m more heartbroken over the ending or that all the characters were driving around in Chevrolets. 

…are my thoughts on that. Such as they are. 

And, if all goes to plan, you’ll have a couple of more letters immediately following this one, but about shows you actually care about, in some fashion. 

Glad you’re back. 

--Daryl