Letter #33: Extraordinary Attorney Woo

Good morning, Erin. 
 
I haven’t had a lot of experience with weeklies, in my first year as a K-drama fan, so I thought it might be fun to not just jump into another one (or two…but we’ll get to that, eventually) but also do my best to sort of watch along with the internet as it came out. And…well, that was an experience.
 
[stares off into the distance]
 
ANYWAY—I watched Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and I’m just going to assume you watched this one, as well. From what I can tell, it was very much the darling of the moment—for good reason. And overblown reason. Which I’m sure is not what anyone else thinks.
 
But that’s why we’re here, right? To indulge my sense of self-importance by going over my too-detailed judgments about what is and isn’t good about casual entertainment!
 
Ready? Of course you are! Let’s go!
 
1. Cutting right to the chase: if you’re watching this show, it’s for the romance plot between Young-woo and Jun-ho, which is, I think, officially one of the less-used definitions of adorable, if you look it up in the dictionary. It’s so adorable, in fact, that I don’t know what else the show was about apart from them smiling shyly at each other. And waltzing through the revolving door. (Which is…I mean, it’s just gorgeous, isn’t it: all light and music and glass. If ever there was an iconic moment for a show, it was that. And it’s kind of a bummer that I saw Netflix use it as their “come watch me!” clip, eventually. Because you need to experience that moment fresh. So, in that sense, thank goodness I decided to watch it as it was coming out.)
 
2. I’m going to fawn over some of the ladies, later on, but let’s not kid ourselves: Jun-ho is #BestGirl. Even I’m a little in love with him. He’s just…perfect. I mean, Good Boy is still #1 in my heart, but…tell me I’m wrong about Jun-ho. You can’t. Because we’re all in love with him.
 
2A. Seriously, though—and more importantly—he’s perfect for Young-woo, which is so much of what makes their chemistry so great. He just gets it. Immediately. Instinctively. He knows when to roll with her zigs and stand up to her zags, even from the first moment he meets her. And it’s just wonderful to watch.
 
2B. The writers screw it up once, in my opinion, towards the end of the series, when they sacrifice logical character moments for drama and have Young-woo dump Jun-ho without Jun-ho even attempting to push back against her decision. They remove all his agency in their relationship in this one moment all so that they can get back together later on when it’s thematically relevant for her to want to get back together. And I hated it. Everything else about them? Fantastic. But this was a total blunder. 
 
3. My biggest fear, heading into this show, was that it was going to A) be trite and B) treat Young-woo’s autism like a superpower. And I’m happy to say that it mostly avoided the latter and didn’t (on balance) tilt too much into the former that I had to give up on the show. (Though, according to my notes, I came very close to jumping ship around Ep 6.)
 
4. That said, this is a terrible legal show. The cases are emotionally manipulative, contrived, and often illogical. There are a couple that aren’t bad, but none can garner much more praise than thankfully not cutting into our Young-woo x Jun-ho time. 
 
5. And that said…it’s not just the Young-woo x Jun-ho character stuff that’s really good—it’s the rest of the main cast, as well. In particular, I’m obviously a big fan of…well, in my notes, I keep referring to her as Cute Lawyer Girl (who came this close to being best girl), but I pretty much liked the character interactions between everyone else—even Surly Lawyer Guy, who is a bag of snakes in a necktie. 
 
6. The subtitles had quite a bit of magic-trick misdirection to work on us, whenever Young-woo would start running down her list of palindromes after introducing herself, because they had to “translate” the list into English palindromes rather than actually translate what she was saying, because (of course) palindromes in Korean are not the same as they are in English. But the magic-trick part was getting us not to listen to what she was saying, because some of her examples were English words—tomato and Swiss being the ones that I definitely caught. (Which, as I’m sure you know, are palindromes because Korean characters essentially mark syllables rather than individual components within those syllables (like English letters do), so to-ma-to is syllabically palindromic.) All of which I mention only because the subtitles got themselves a little mixed up, early on, and ended up including Swiss (soo-wee-soo) in the “translated” list. Which I had to go back and read several times to convince myself I wasn’t hallucinating: “Kayak, racecar, moon, Swiss, rota—wait a minute, Swiss???”
 
6A. Later on, in the episode about the self-proclaimed leader of the “Children’s Liberation Army,” the subtitles say the guy keeps referring to Young-woo as (I think) “Ms. Kayak” when he’s literally saying “Ms. Tomato,” and the overlap of English made me laugh every time.
 
6B. …okay, I think he was actually calling her “Attorney Tomato,” but you get my point. 
 
7. Fun fact: the giant whales floating in the sky? Literally the stuff of nightmares, for me. And the show would…not…stop. It was like going to the Museum of Natural History all over again. (Have I told you that story? I feel like I have.)
 
8. Actors I recognized—as though cast specifically to make me happy:

• All of Us are Dead Dad as Young-woo’s father

• Vincenzo Paralegal Guy as the ATM company employee

• Landlady Divorcee from Cha-cha-cha as the women’s rights attorney

• Start-Up Dead Dad as the tech CEO from the finale

• Excessive English Girl from A Business Proposal as the gambling den seductress

 
8A. I love Landlady Divorcee and have added her to my K-drama girlfriends list. I was super-excited to see her show up in the preview, at the end of the previous episode. And she was, of course, really good.
 
8B. I love Start-Up Dead Dad and still think he should be in everything. I didn’t catch that he was in the preview, but I was over the moon when I recognized him in Ep 15. 
 
8C. I love Excessive English Girl. So so so so much. And I think she should be in everything, too. (Also, she was as hilarious in this as she is in everything else. She doesn’t have much to do, in this, but she’s absolutely oozing femme fatale-esque vibes, and it’s awesome. The show even helps her out by queuing up almost parody-levels of cliche noir saxophone when she takes the stand. It’s brilliant.) Also, I didn’t realize she’d reached TikTok meme status. Good for her. Because she’s hilarious and should be in everything. (And, yes, she was also thiiiis close to being best girl.)
 
8D. …seriously, you should see my notes: “OMG IS THAT MY GIRL???” in huge letters. 
 
9. Oldie but a goodie: when everyone goes to the on-site inspection of the town that’s set to be bulldozed in favor of a highway, it is absolutely pouring outside, so our opposing sets of attorneys break out their umbrellas…with one side having red umbrellas and the other side having blue umbrellas. 
 
10. My favorite thing about this series that is not Young-woo x Jun-ho is the pair of love triangles that spin off of them: Young-woo >> Jun-ho << Cute Lawyer Girl << >> Surly Lawyer Guy << Geu-rami. 
 
10A. Geu-rami’s crush on Surly Lawyer Guy is hilarious. First, we get the great moment when she is supposed to bring something to the law office for Young-woo and hand it to the “handsome guy”—which of course is how Young-woo describes Jun-ho to her—and she assumes she must mean Surly Lawyer Guy, because he’s the one she’s immediately smitten with. (Extra bonus points for seeing Jun-ho and being mostly unimpressed.) Then, later on, once she twigs that he’s almost certainly into Cute Lawyer Girl, she gives him the utterly contextless ultimatum of “ME OR THE ANGEL?!” Which is not my favorite line, but it’s the one that sticks with me the most. 
 
10B. Again, Surly Lawyer Guy is a bag of snakes in a necktie, and the show does a terrible job trying to rehabilitate him riiiiight at the end. I mean, it was obvious to me from the start that he and Cute Lawyer Girl were supposed to get together (I think there’s even a line at the start of the series where she makes a snarky remark to him about no one loving him, just to make it super-obvious), and I ultimately really enjoy their hate-then-love turnaround…but she’s awesome, and he doesn’t deserve her. Like, in that he doesn’t make up for his jerkwad priors before he is rewarded with, well, basking in the “spring sunshine.” 
 
10C. But I think my favorite part of the offshoot love triangles is Cute Lawyer Girl’s massive crush on Jun-ho. Because she makes such a big deal about Young-woo being the girl who always took first place in college, it had to be devastating for her to lose A BOY to her, as well—which is something you’d think Cute Lawyer Girl would have the advantage with. 
 
11. Relatedly: Cute Lawyer Girl rocks my socks. She’s cool, she’s righteous as f***, and she’s, well, cute. All good things. (I was all set to pick #TeamHairBun, after she gives herself the “I even lost my crush to Young-woo” makeover, but…how could I even choose between her two looks?)
 
12. Y’know what else is adorable? That Geu-rami is as into Young-woo x Jun-ho as the audience is. 
 
13. And, sticking with Geu-rami for a moment, she’s also got my second-favorite line in the series: “This punk dined and dashed! Dined and dashed on love!” Brilliant.
 
14. “Whoa whoa” was a great joke, and it deserved to come back a third time, towards the end. And that it didn’t still bothers me.
 
15. That they managed to give me a running love confession with Jun-ho that also brought things back to the revolving door….mwah! I give the chef a big kiss on the mouth for that.
 
15A. …that’s how that saying goes, right? 
 
16. Here’s something fun I eventually noticed: the lawyers have this fun little lapel pin that they only wear when they’re in court. Seems like they’re official identifiers. Like, in real life. Who knew?
 
17. …okay, so, slight digression, but I’m texting my friend, as I write this, and the autocorrect on my phone has just betrayed its opinion of me: it keeps swapping “romantic” over to “manticore.” Apparently, it thinks I have no cause to discuss love but plenty to discuss D&D enemies. Wow. Not insulting at all. 
 
18. There were a couple of honest-to-God To Be Continueds, in this, which really excited me. Because it’s been FOREVER since I saw one of those, since everything has a serialized plot, these days. I mean, maybe NCIS has done it, recently, but…I don’t watch NCIS. The new episodes, I mean. Obviously I still let the old stuff play on Netflix for background noise. 
 
19. …I’m just saying: I’ve never even played D&D, so why would it—ugh, sorry, but it’s so frustrating!
20. Going back to the “Children’s Liberation Army” episode: I just want to mention how great a job the show did with making each of the little kids look both distinct and memorable. It doesn’t matter, in the end, because they don’t do anything with the kids that requires this, but it’s still good to see. 
 
21. There is a scene in Episode 9 where Jun-ho touches Young-woo and she doesn’t freak out that she’s being touched, and I literally wrote SQUEEEEEE!!! in my notes. Because I am a 12-year-old girl. 
 
22. Speaking of touching and freaking out: in Episode 11, Young-woo freaks out because she’s witnessed a car crash, and Jun-ho takes her in his arms to squeeze her so that she’ll calm down—not for romantic reasons but because it’s a method to settle an autistic person who’s having this kind of reaction to something. But what struck me about this was: of course Jun-ho knows to do this. Because he’s obviously done all the reading and research needed to be a lay expert on autism—because of course he would. 
 
23. My favorite line of the series is…well, it’s dialogue, so it’s the punchline that is my favorite, but—it’s when the lawyers are at the Buddhist temple and participating in prayers. They’re supposed to bow…a thousand time? It’s some large number I didn’t write down. But they’re supposed to bow, and everyone is trying to go along with it—except Surly Lawyer Guy, who is just standing there with his arms crossed. Cute Lawyer Girl elbows him to get him to do it like everyone else, and he just shakes his head and tells her he’s Catholic and, therefore, doesn’t have to do it. This causes Cute Lawyer Girl gives an unconvincing “S-So am I!” to try and get out of having to do the bows, so he presses her for her baptismal name: “Um…Jennie?” she says, causing him to raise an eyebrow and say, “Jennie? Are you the patron saint of BLACKPINK?” Which absolutely cracked me up. I’ll be shouting “ME OR THE ANGEL?!” for the rest of my days, but this hit the #1 spot, for me. 
 
24. Do you know what this pink gluestick-looking thing all the K-dramas are giving their actresses to use as product placement is? It seems to be some kind of emergency face…refresher. They just rub it all over their faces, and…something good happens that I can’t distinguish. Is it, like, makeup? It’s in literally all the shows I’ve been watching, lately. So, I can only imagine how much money the company must be spending to push it…and I have no idea what it is. If it’s not Subway, it’s apparently lost on me. 
 
25. One of the best scenes in the show is towards the end, when Young-woo’s supervisor is in the hospital and everyone is finding out he has stomach cancer, because A) Young-woo is rattling off statistics about cancer without even a hint of a clue that everyone is trying to shut her up because she’s being wildly inappropriate, B) Geu-rami—the only one there who could stop Young-woo—neither tries to stop her nor sees that the others are asking her to stop Young-woo, and C) Young-woo’s supervisor doesn’t even blink that that this is how she’s responding to him. It’s basically a microcosm of the general character interactions. And I appreciated that.
 
26. Speaking of: I really like the different dynamics we see between the various characters and Young-woo: Jun-ho tries to anticipate her hiccups, Geu-rami treats her the same way she’d treat anyone else, and her colleagues express varying degrees of acceptance/distance (depending on how uncomfortable with h, um, quirks they are). I was glad to see that everyone doesn’t just spend the whole time either treating her like a leper or letting her eccentricities rule every situation. 
 
27. I don’t know how many people caught this, but in Episode 3, when Jun-ho and Young-woo are taking pictures of the bedroom of their client’s dead son, they are both trying to look through the camera at the same time while holding it aloft…and they end up gently spinning around the room, with light pouring in through the windows, in a moment of comfortable synchronicity that calls back to the revolving door waltz scene from Episode 1. 
 
27A. No no no—I’m not reading into this. This is definitely really there. I’m the world’s greatest detective, Erin. That’s just a fact.
 
28. We get another “I’m about to poop myself!” emergency, in this series. In case you’re keeping track of how frequently this well is gone to, in K-dramas. 
 
29. When the stuff with Young-woo’s supervisor having cancer rolls around, she spends what seemed to me to be a weird amount of time going to see him at the hospital. I can’t tell if it’s just me or not, but I didn’t get the impression that she was that attached to him, during the rest of the series. I mean, maybe I just didn’t catch it. Not because I’m not actually the world’s greatest detective, of course, but because I was spending most of every episode going “When is she gonna talk to Jun-hoooooo???” whenever she wasn’t talking to Jun-ho. 
 
30. Sticking with the supervisor having stomach cancer: the lawyer that they bring in to replace him as the head of Young-woo’s team is supposed to be a bad and not as sharp and a lousy mentor—I get all of that. But that they make him so completely incompetent is absurd. It makes me think he can’t possibly have been able to succeed enough as a lawyer to get where he is, and it pulls me out of the story completely.
 
31. The adorable moment when Jun-ho, having noticed that Young-woo is trying (and failing) to stare surreptitiously at him through the window in her office—but having been stopped by one of the other lawyers just before he can get into her office to speak to her—casually places his hand on her window (as though he’s just leaning) so that she can press her hand against her side of the window in a contactless gesture of affection is adorable…but it’s not as adorable as the plastic wrap kiss from Pushing Daisies.
 
And that, as they say, is that.
 
It’s a mixed bag of a series, with the adorable romance stuff being pretty darn great and the…everything else being trite and contrived and dull. I’m not sure if my letter makes that clear, since I know I skipped over the “why are they doing this?” or “that’s not how that works” notes, for the most part. (And there were a lot of those.) I’d still say it’s worth the watch, but it’s the kind of show I’d want someone to clue me in about, in terms of pros and cons, before I gave it a go.
 
Also, f*** those sky whales.
 
Anyway. Back to the supernatural stuff, next. (You get 10 points if you can guess which one.)
 
--Daryl