Letter #58: The Glory (Part 2)
Good morning, Erin.
All right, no time to waste—let’s get second-halfical on this! Which is definitely about enthusiasm for my commentary and not at all me trying to cover for yet again not having a worthwhile preamble planned!
1. Not gonna bury the lede, here: I was disappointed with the second half. I thought it was a bit of a mess, and I think it would take way too long to explain exactly why—so suffice to say that I thought, after the bevy of loose threads in Part 1, they didn’t follow up on many of the dramatic seeds they’d planted. In fact, I thought they dropped or ignored a lot of the loose threads only to then replace them with all new loose threads in Part 2.
1A. Slightly more specifically, I’d say the second half rushed to get to its ending, which sort of makes the slow (but not unsatisfying) pacing of the first half seem that much worse, since we could have spent less time dawdling with things that didn’t ultimately serve the story (cough Dr. Go’s revenge cough cough) and more on the unfolding of the revenge and the complexities of the character dynamics associated with it—particularly since the ending really only worked out because the villains seemed even more determined than the heroes to make it manifest.
1B. …by which I mean that the show needed us to ignore a string of contrived story beats, character inconsistencies, and unnecessary narrative detours to reach the story’s conclusion. And I was not smitten enough with the results to give any of that a pass.
1C. Or, more simply (but arguably less accurately): there was just far too much going on and far too little happening.
1D. I mean, seriously: did we need the time skip and spending most of the finale on trying to make the killer of Dr. Go’s father suffer? Who cared about that enough that we needed to sacrifice seeing Gloria’s plan unfolding more believably or running into genuine obstacles to spend time with it?
2. Speaking of the end…or, like, something from near the end: when we see Dr. Go hanging out by himself after Gloria has left (and we’ve done the stupid three month time jump), he’s eating unsliced gimbap in aluminum foil, just like Gloria spent all that time making back in the day. I thought that was a great little detail.
3. And speaking of Dr. Go: the welcome mat that he leaves for Gloria in the tent he sets up for her says “Sweet Home,” and I want it known I caught that cheeky little reference.
4. And speaking of cheeky things: the show sets up that Colorblind Bully might kill his dog because he heard that it might be bad for little kids to be around furry animals at home, only to then, the next time we see him, have him walk into the scene with the dog prominently displayed in his arms only to have a perfunctory dialogue with someone about how he just took the dog out to get groomed (thus eliminating much of the “furry” worries). Very good, show. I laughed quite loudly at this.
5. I feel really stupid for not noticing in Part 1 that both Gloria and Dr. Go have secret letter collections. I don’t know how I missed connecting that, when talking about them being mirrors.
5A. …and so I’m making up for it with these two nuggets:
• “Kang” – the name of Gloria’s ally and Dr. Go’s tormentor
• Gloria’s mom is a lingering abuser, while Dr. Go’s mom is a loving protector.
6. Speaking of Dr. Go’s tormentor: I really like this actor in the few things I’ve seen him in, and it’s no different here. I think he does probably the best job playing a regular, inhuman murderer I’ve seen in a long time, if not ever. Doesn’t overplay it, but doesn’t try to make him seem normal.
7. When Gloria tore down all the pictures she’d stapled to the walls of her apartment, I half-jokingly made note that she was never getting her security deposit back. I then less-jokingly noted it again when her mom set the place on fire.
7A. …speaking of overplayed performances.
7B. I mean, I think the character was written to be played that way, so I don’t fully blame the actress. Just…there wasn’t much nuance to her, is all.
8. Actually, that’s a good segue to mention one of the issues I had with the show: there’s a lot of stuff that happens just to have something else happen later. As in, it’s something that doesn’t seem to need to be there, but they want to have some kind of payoff with it later on—usually having nothing to do with the main story—so they include it despite it not feeling particularly necessary:
• The mom suddenly deciding setting the apartment on fire is something she should do? Well, how else would Gloria get to lock her in a psych hospital forever?• Jerkface Bad Haircut Teacher is suddenly a pedophile, which means Colorblind Bully can now freely beat him to a pulp and scare the little girl daughter so that we don’t have to worry about the resolution to the “which dad will get her???” problem.
• Turns out So-e was pregnant just so we can say Colorblind Bully was a rapist just so we can have him die later and feel totally justified in doing so (because he was so much more passively awful to Gloria, in the past, than the others).
9. For the record, though: I actually quite like the twist that Queen Meanie wasn’t the one to kill Long-Haired Bully, and that she has to rot in prison for a crime she (doesn’t know she) didn’t commit. And that she is bullied into doing fake weather forecasts whenever the top girl in her cell orders her to do so.
9A. That’s weather report thing is such a delicious detail. And the actress playing Queen Meanie absolutely nails that scene. Oof. I felt that.
9B. …though, at the same time, I’m not entirely certain that the revenge that’s doled out on her (or maybe even any of the bullies) is quite fitting enough to be fully justified. And I don’t think the show wants this to be a morally gray story, so…I’m left quite torn over the whole thing.
10. Oh, speaking of the “green shoe misdirection” misdirect, I would have appreciated that twist a lot more if they hadn’t all but overtly spoiled it by having Gloria go to the cashier/bully victim girl (who was totally her best friend in high school all along, guys, that’s not a total retcon!) and say, “QUEEN MEANIE HAS TO BE THE KILLER SO DON’T TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT IT NOT BEING HER ‘CUS I KNOW YOU WERE THERE AND ARE HAVING A HARD TIME WITH IT AND I’M NOT GOING TO SAY WHY ‘CUS WE BOTH KNOW WHY AND IT’S TOTALLY NORMAL FOR US TO NOT SAY IT LIKE THIS.”
11. Yes, I did shout “SO-EEEEEEEE!!!” every time So-e stepped on screen. I adore her. And honestly can’t wait to see her in more stuff. I thought she was really good.
12. …actually, I don’t remember if we knew the cashier girl was Gloria’s pal in high school, in Part 1. But I feel like that wasn’t the case.
13. Look…Stewardess Bully was potentially pregnant, in Part 1, right? I didn’t just imagine that, did I?
13A. That said—and I think I mentioned this in my Part 1 letter—this show made me feel like I wasn’t paying close enough attention or repeatedly dozed off for a couple of seconds or was just too stupid to follow what was going on in certain cases, because there were more than a couple of moments that left me wondering when they’d introduced or established stuff as having already happened or being true or, y’know, existing (people, events, information, etc). I don’t know if these were all gaps in storytelling or if I just didn’t make the mental leaps that the show assumed I would, but…the end result was the same: I felt a little confused, at times. Like, in a way that I’m rarely ever confused.
14. …you’re not going to tell me that they actually planned for Ms. Kang’s husband to get hit by Queen Meanie’s mom’s car, right?
15. The topless shot of Stewardess Bully was unnecessary (…not that I’m complaining, exactly), but it wasn’t anywhere near as unnecessary as Druggie Bully cranking one out at a giant cross in front of her church’s congregation because she was having a smack-induced flashback to blowing Long-Haired Bully for drugs. That was some legit edgelord s***, and I don’t think it needed to be in this show.
15A. Also…I refuse to believe the whole f***ing congregation would jump up and start recording her. I know this show has a pretty cynical stance on humanity at large (and, depending on how you want to look at it, religion), but I think this whole strand of the story should have been done differently.
16. Still not a single Edmond Dantes reference. Unbelievable.
17. Oh—before I forget…only one new recognizable face in Part 2:
• the bad guy mayor from The Uncanny Counter as Dr. Go’s dad.
18. In my Part 1 letter, I was supposed to mention that I noticed Gloria pretty much only ever ate gimbap, but I seem to have left it out. However, I’m going to mention it here because…as you let me know, there were a few crossover actors between The Glory and Extraordinary Attorney Woo (none of whom I noticed, because I’m still not the best at this, yet), and what did Woo Young-woo eat almost exclusively? Yes, that’s right, gimbap. Coincidence? Um, maybe. I don’t know enough about Korean cuisine to hazard a guess about the significance of it. But, regardless, that’s something, huh?
19. The relegation of Mr. Queen Meanie to a bit part is probably the biggest mistake in the series. Personally, I think he should have been the main romantic interest (regardless of whether or not they would eventually work out)—or that, at the very least, the potential love triangle aspect should have been played up a lot more, because those two absolutely crackled on screen—but I don’t think it would have been necessary for him to be any kind of romantic anything to be more involved in the story. I mean, he ultimately gets his own subplot as he sort of maneuvers through the increasingly chaotic tempest of the bullies’ unraveling, if you look back at it, but it’s so far in the background that it’s open to interpretation how much of where he ends up is of his own design and how much is happenstance. He’s such a strong character, and he has so much more investment in what’s going on than other characters who get far more to do.
20. In a similar vein, I could not believe that Queen Meanie was the one to strike back against Gloria in any way that actually mattered. By which I mean she doesn’t strike me as at all strategic, when threatened, and yet—however briefly—she was. (I mean, sure, she asked someone else to do the legwork, but she’s the one who figured out where the weak point in Gloria’s arsenal would be based just on the incongruous picture of Ms. Kang’s husband.) It just seemed out of place, to me.
20A. But I also think this is why they sidelined Mr. Queen Meanie so much: so that all the strategic counterpunches would come from the archnemesis character, not from a third-party antagonist.
20B. Also, they alternated between Queen Meanie being clever and being a total idiot to suit whatever the plot needed in the moment.
20C. THAT SAID…Queen Meanie’s “I was just trying to protect So-e’s reputation!” scheme was frikkin’ brilliant, and I totally believe she’d hatch that one on her own. Not that the story gave a damn, at that point.
21. When he’s doing his chain of phone calls to the other bullies, Long-Haired Bully puts on about a thousand fancy coats at once, and I kinda loved it.
22. On the huge list of things I assumed would happen or hoped could happen but didn’t at all happen, the one that probably surprised me the most was that Colorblind Bully apparently really did only care about having his daughter be his daughter. He was happy to sacrifice Queen Meanie. Which…I don’t know where any of that came from. But, whatever, it gave Stewardess Bully more screen time, which I support as an artistic decision.
23. But I want it known that, if you squint, I was sort of right about Mr. Queen Meanie not leaving his wife just because Gloria told him to.
24. I know this doesn’t matter, but I did a little side-by-side comparison, and I think they must have deliberately harshened Queen Meanie’s makeup for the show (they certainly too-darkened her eyebrows) to make her look less beautiful. They had to have, right? She’s frikkin’ gorgeous in these interviews I’m watching. It’s like she has a different face.
***EDIT: Okay. so, looks like this whole "different face" thing is owing to the interviews in fact NOT having Queen Meanie in them. I was so lost about everyone's names that I didn't realize it wasn't her. I just assumed it was. Instead, turns out it was Stewardess Bully. Which...is really embarrassing. And also explains why I thought she was gorgeous.
25. Now, when we last spoke, you made a quick comparison between this show and Vincenzo (in terms of striking back against a foe), with you siding with The Glory and me with Vincenzo. And I want to make a couple of points about that:
• The getting hit and hitting back aspects of these two shows is very, very different, with Vincenzo having its protagonists need to both react to constant threats and spend most of the series on the losing end of the battle and The Glory being a one-sided assault on the bad guys. As such, Vincenzo is set up to be more narratively satisfying (in a structural sense), because we experience the frustration of the villains winning for ourselves and then get our (vicarious) just deserts when the protagonists finally win. While we certainly spend time with the horrific bullying inflicted on Gloria as a teenager, it is all done in flashback, which means—though we are certainly infuriated by the bullying—there is an inescapable distance to the “hitting” that makes the “hitting back” seem much more disconnected to the audience than it is to the protagonist…and, as such, it is less narratively satisfying to experience. Further, it doesn’t feel like we’re getting revenge on the bullies (even if that’s technically what’s happening) because they kind of aren’t the people we meet in the flashback—which is even more of a problem when the flashback features different actors—and we are so far removed from whatever horrible things they did. This then becomes more of an intellectual quest for vicarious revenge than an emotional one, which means we are less invested in the revenge.
• Further, to me, the one-sided assault on the bullies via this mostly undeterred pre-planned scheme Gloria cooks up creates the need for a less conventional narrative perspective. That is, since this turns out not to be a game of cat and mouse or an all-out battle between two sides, we’re really just watching Gloria breeze through the plot without issue while the narrative struggles are carried by the bullies. This is fine, I think, if the bullies are the ones we’re following in the story as they desperately try to (unsuccessfully) counterattack Gloria as though she is some unstoppable supernatural monster hunting them, making them the structural protagonists of the story but the moral antagonists, allowing us to delight in the slow closing of the trap around each of them as they try ever more desperately to save themselves. Or, on the other side of things, Gloria could remain the structural protagonist with the same slow and unstoppable revenge but a series of moral or psychological obstacles to overcome as the toll of all her hatred and the fear of who she is without her revenge and the core goodness in her that knows she’s doing something horrible to not just the bullies but to innocent people around the bullies gain more and more of her focus as she nears the end of her mission. Regardless, what it shouldn’t have been is set up like a typical revenge tale, because it does not contain the elements of such.And…yeah, that’s all I got. Based on less than two pages of notes. Incredible.
I had a good time with the series as a whole, despite have a lot of storytelling issues. And I’m sure you’d someday like to hear the rough draft of the term paper-length discussion I could make comparing the storytelling for and seemingly contradictory personal opinions of The Glory, Little Women, and Alchemy of Souls, but…alas, that will have to be for another time.
…okay, you didn’t need to give a little sigh of relief, there, Erin.
Crash Course in Romance is next up—for watching, that is. The next letter will obviously be about Transit Love 2. ‘Cus ain’t no way I’m keeping my mouth shut about that.
More soon.
And…there’s something coming up in a couple of weeks. If only I could remember what.
--Daryl
P.S. – You know I didn’t forget Little Forest. I have it downloaded and everything. I might not chat about it right away, but you know how this works: you say jump, and I say, “Yes—also, is Kim Go-eun in it?”
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