Letter #132: Bad-Memory Eraser

Good morning, Erin.

Catching up on the latest volumes of Rent-a-Girlfriend made me think of you:

…because of that time you told me you got into a relationship just to know what a breakup was like? (You remember: we were talking about Hee-do in Twenty-Five, Twenty-One.) I think that’s what popped into my head before my brain even registered what the line meant for the story. 

But, importantly, what’s generally associated with breakups? Very good, Erin: bad memories—the kinds one might even want to erase, you could say. 

Which brings us neatly along to the subject of today’s letter: Bad-Memory Eraser, a show about an ex-tennis prodigy whose life has gone awry for the last 15 years…until, in a total coincidence, he receives a surgical procedure to erase all his painful memories after a near-fatal concussion—a procedure that not only succeeds in entirely changing his demeanor but reunites him with his long-lost childhood love.

…or does it?

Well, stick around to find out, seonbae—because this show’s bad enough that we’re going full-spoilers so you don’t have to waste your time on it. 

On the show, I mean. Not this letter. This letter is awesome.

…this letter is not as bad as Bad-Memory Eraser. 

1. Yes, I only gave this a shot because Yang Hye-ji (the goth/punk girl from Nevertheless) was in it. We both know you were thinking it. No sense in me pretending otherwise.

2. But, yeah, this show is kind of a dud. It’s not unwatchable, and there are actually quite a few things about it that I enjoyed…but I’d give it a pass, if I were you. It’s so close to being good, but it just never quite makes it. And there’s so much more you could be spending your time on. Like, I dunno, Alchemy of Souls. Or whatever. 

2A. “As soon as you watch the BTS shows I recommended to you in 2022.”

2B. …touché. 

2C. Still, there’s a last-minute murder plot to contend with. And we know how you feel about that. 

3. The first of the show’s many problems is Goon, who feels more like an obligatory character than a necessary one—which is odd, because he’s the protagonist. Yes, this show’s lead is a two-dimensional side character, essentially. He’s alternately cartoonish and overwrought (depending on whether he’s the morose pre-surgery or anime-arrogant post-surgery version of himself), and, except for under a very specific set of circumstances, he’s entirely uninteresting. The actor can’t act (or, at least, can’t pull off the depth of performance needed for this character), and he has no chemistry with his love interest; but the core of the problem comes down to the writing, which wrongly insists that Goon and his problems are the central element of the story—when, logistically, he absolutely is not. 

4. On the other hand, Goon’s time with Si-on, the young tennis hotshot who decides she wants him to be her sports agent (after his post-surgery character change), is really, really good. Their chemistry is great, their characters consistently balance each other out, and the actors’ performances really complement each other. Whatever the writer might be thinking, the story wants these two together—despite the fact that Si-on is still in high school and, as such, more than a little too young for Goon. Unfortunately. Because, again, the characters (and the actors) are great together, making a potential romance more than workable, in that sense. (And, if I’m not mistaken, Si-on has a crush on Goon, at first, which I believe is why she bristles at the female lead when they first start interacting.) If Goon had been a secondary character with Si-on as the second female lead, I think it would have been a great subplot for the story, regardless of whether or not he was the character who had his bad memories erased. But, no: Goon keeps charging after the female lead, and Si-on is continually pushed to the back (which extra-sucks, because she’s great). 

5. Now, when I say Goon keeps charging after the female lead, what I mean is that his main character-driver is that he believes the doctor who is in charge of…okay, lemme take a step back: Goon is a depressed mess because of an accident that ruined his tennis career when he was about 12, and when he gets a terrible head injury from falling off a bridge (and hitting an electrical box on the way down), he is rushed to a hospital where there just so happens to be a handful of doctors who have been hoping to find a human test subject for their memory-erasing experiment—and Goon’s young brother, Shin, acts as his guardian and agrees to let this group of doctors have their way with his brother’s brain. While Goon is unconscious and possibly dying. He just agrees to let them experiment on his brother. Y’know, since they’re gonna be tooling around in his brain to save his life and all. Which…sounds sus as hell, no? I mean, they do address the legalities of it (I think it’s technically legal) but it takes until the end of the show for anyone to raise that it seems highly unethical—which was a HUGE issue for me, but also they couldn’t figure out how to make the plot happen any other way, so…here we are.

5A. Anyway, as I was saying: during his surgery, Goon wakes up briefly and sees the doctor in charge of the experiment, our female lead, Ju-yeon, and imprints his memory of his childhood love onto her. So, when he recovers from the surgery and sees Dr. Ju-yeon, he’s convinced she’s the girl he was in love with as a child and has been looking for ever since and spends all of his free time trying to win her over. And, because she doesn’t want to upset him in any way that might undo his memory erasure—and because it means she can stay near him to observe his progress without it seeming weird—she goes along with it and lets him try to woo her. And it’s really, really boring. Because he kinda sucks, and they have no chemistry. I mean, I guess they’re equivalently good looking, which is…nice…but they’re otherwise charmless as a duo, kept together entirely by the structure of the plot. Which is not what you want.

6. Especially when Goon’s younger brother, Shin, is also in love with Dr. Ju-yeon—and is a WAAAAAY more interesting character! He was slotted into the life Goon had to give up and forced to become a tennis star by a mother who wanted live vicariously through her son’s success; he’s got a fairly severe case of OCD he’s desperate to keep the public from discovering; he both resents and adores (and pities) his older brother, both wishing he could fix him (which is why he lets the doctors experiment on Goon’s brain) and that he would just go away; and, as we eventually learn, he so hates his superstar tennis life that he wants to kill himself. He then falls in love with Dr. Ju-yeon, the girl his brother is desperate to woo, and has to decide whether to be selfish or once again cede ground to the will of those around him. Plus, not only is he a much better actor, but he and Dr. Ju-yeon spark like crazy! They have so much chemistry, even though she’s not quite interested in him romantically—but the show wants her to end up with Goon, so…f*** that, I guess. The writer’s not interested in Shin being the protagonist—even though the story very clearly thinks otherwise. 

7. …but Goth/Punk Girl, so 10/10.

7A. No, I’m kidding. She is pretty great in this, though. Easily the best performance, if only by virtue of how charming she is—though, to be fair, her character (Sae-yan) is quite charming as well. Very energetic and sweet and unencumbered by silly things like fear or social hesitations. She’ll talk to anyone, acts before she thinks, and is so relentlessly positive that you can’t help but go along with everything she wants. She’s without doubt the brightest bright spot in the whole story. It’s unconscionable that it takes something like six or seven episodes for her to enter the story proper. 

7B. …that said, I kinda don’t know why she’s there. I mean, I know why she’s there in terms of her plot-functional role (especially towards the end—which we’ll get to), but she doesn’t really serve enough of a character purpose for her to be around: she’s really just a decoy, another girl from the past that we are supposed to think is the real girl Goon has been looking for. (Spoiler: she’s not. It was really Ju-yeon all along!) She’s also Shin’s ex-fling from when he was traveling overseas for a tournament. Neither of these roles add too much to the story, really—especially given how Goon/Si-on and Dr. Ju-yeon/Shin are already such interesting pairings; there’s no room for her, in that sense. I like her, and I really like her interactions with everyone (because she’s so bright), but she’s nothing more than functional. And, if it were up to me, a string too many to add to the story. At least, in how she’s utilized, here. Which sucks, because (again) she’s pretty great. 

7C. Though, as far as these things go, Goth/Punk Girl and the girl who plays Dr. Ju-yeon do look similar to each other (and their child counterparts even more so). Credit to the casting team. That’s some good work to make confusing the two in Goon’s mind easy for us to see. The writing fails it, but the casting team did their job. 

7D. And, yes, she’s quite pretty. Even with the golden-blonde hair. Which I was iffy on, at first, but came around on, in the end. 

7E. Oh—and, yeah, she’s #bestgirl. Though, for the record, Si-on was in competition for a while. Mostly before Sae-yan became more of a main character, but…she was up there. 

8. Speaking of Goth/Punk Girl, though, let’s talk about everyone I recognized:

• Goth/Punk Girl (of course) from Nevertheless as Sae-yan

• Ms. Choi from Hotel Del Luna as Dr. Ju-yeon’s mom

• Ha-ri’s dad from Business Proposal as Dr. Ju-yeon’s co-worker

• the magistrate from 100 Days My Prince as Goon and Shin’s dad

• the head of neurology is…okay, well, I know him from this, but he’s been in every-frikkin’-thing I’ve watched since this show started (or near enough), so I thought it worth mentioning

9. Every episode starts with a note about how the show followed all the rules when filming scenes with kids or animals. Which might be true, but…Shin’s dog sure seems like he’s being jostled around a bit more than I (as someone who has only ever had fish as pets) would think it’d be happy about. I mean, the dog is extremely accommodating and well behaved, so maybe it was totally fine. But I was worried about it getting a tweak or something, whether I should have been or not. 

10. Goon and Shin’s mom is awful—like, as a character, she’s overbearing and cruel and selfish, pushing her unrealized dreams onto one son while ostracizing the other (even though we see these are perversions of her trying to care for them)...and yet I don’t think she’s anywhere near as much of an ***hole trashbag of a human being as Shin’s sports agent. He doesn’t ever miss a chance to be a dick, if he can arrange it. Like, it’s not like he’s weak and has to tear people down to seem bigger than he is; he’s just needlessly mean. He doesn’t really get his comeuppance, but he’s not so much of a villain as to deserve a big karmic payback, satisfying though it may have been. He does get a little jab, at the end, which I guess is fine. But…man, I hated that guy.

11. So, in Episode 6, Goon leaves his apartment and takes his car for a drive. At the same time, Dr. Ju-yeon and my girl Sae-yan return from a night of drinking and try to make their way to Goon’s apartment (because Dr. Ju-yeon is staying in his guest room for the time being). The joke is that Dr. Ju-yeon is so drunk that she can’t make it up to the apartment and, instead, mistakes Goon’s spot in the parking garage for the apartment, lying down on the cement as though it were her bed. Sae-yan, being a dutiful friend, stays with her. They fall asleep. The next morning, Goon is called down from his apartment to “clean up” the two women who are asleep in his spot. So…where is Goon’s car? He’s obviously driven back from wherever he went—because he’s in his apartment. And he is surprised to find the girls in his spot, so it’s not like he came to park, found them, and then put the car somewhere else (...and then left the girls where they were). What are we doing, show? Did you think I wouldn’t notice? I am the world’s greatest detective!

12. This show uses the whole show-the-text-messages-on-screen thing, and…that visual convention is so silly and cloying—and I absolutely love it. Never change, shows. 

13. Early in the show, one of the reasons Dr. Ju-yeon is resistant to Goon’s advances is because she thinks it will cause trouble with her current boyfriend. Which I found a little odd because her supposed boyfriend seemed less to be her boyfriend than a guy she worked with on whom she had a crush. But she seemed to think they were a couple, not just that Goon was ruining her chances with him, which I just couldn’t understand—until Episode 5, when the show finally revealed to us that this dude had LITERALLY TOLD HER THEY WERE A COUPLE the day she left to do research in the UK for a couple of months. So, she came back after weeks and weeks of text-flirting assuming they were together. Which would have been really nice to know, I dunno, at any point earlier than Episode 5. Because she seemed a little weird because of this, those first few episodes. 

14. …which is actually a problem the show has the whole way through: it frequently lets the story unfold logically—but they leave out pieces of information that would help the audience see it as logical. So, it’s not that a character is holding back information from another character (and, by extension, us—which is one way to build a mystery) but the show. Which I would appreciate if the missing pieces of information were things we could put together on our own, but they weren’t. Admittedly, they aren’t all as blatant as this whole boyfriend detail, but I don’t think that makes the rest of them at all more forgivable. 

15. To wit: Dr. Ju-yeon’s backstory with Sae-yan is actually kind of interesting…but, because of how it’s kept a mystery, once revealed it made me feel like the show was retconning earlier parts of the story—even though I’m pretty sure they weren’t. Rather, the intensity of the reveal (and why it was revealed) seemed to clash with how off-hand and unimportant the previously established fact that Dr. Ju-yeon didn’t remember Sae-yan had been presented to us: turns out they were best pals, but Sae-yan’s biological father murdered Dr. Ju-yeon’s dad right in front of her, and she blocked out all memories about her life at the time as a result…which we only learn A) in the last couple of episodes and B) because Sae-yan’s dad has reappeared and kidnapped her. Because he’s a psychopath, apparently. Which is news to all the protagonists. 

15A. Similarly, Sae-yan’s mother whisked her away to Italy, like, minutes after the murder, so Sae-yan doesn’t know that’s what happened and can’t understand why Dr. Ju-yeon doesn’t remember her…but also doesn’t seem to care that she doesn’t remember, because it was 15 years ago and maybe that’s why. So, again, that she doesn’t remember Sae-yan is brought up and disposed of almost immediately—but it’s meant to be the precursor for this HUGE reveal at the end. And yet this groundwork is perceived by the audience from Dr. Ju-yeon’s POV—which is to say, we think Sae-yan insisting they were pals when they were kids seems like a weird exaggeration on her part, when, really, it needs to be something that sticks with us as being weird, even just for a moment, from Sae-yan’s perspective.

15B. Point is: this sure feels like it comes out of nowhere, despite elements of the concept being seeded into the story from the beginning. So, even when they try to let us know what’s coming, they hide it from us. 

16. A huge portion of the start of the series hinges on Dr. Ju-yeon and Goon having accidentally swapped suitcases at the airport. Then, despite knowing this is what happened, they never, ever swap suitcases back. Like, Dr. Ju-yeon spends half the show lamenting that she needs to get the suitcase back, but she only ever tries to get it back once—by sneaking into Goon’s house to grab it. Goon catches her on her way out, and she doesn’t even say that they accidentally swapped suitcases. It’s ridiculous.

17. As I mentioned above, Sae-yan has been in Italy for the last 15 years, so it’s no surprise that she will occasionally burst into Italian—which is why it’s so funny that she spends so much more time speaking in English.

17A. Her Italian’s really good, though.

18. I thought it was fun that, as Dr. Ju-yeon’s coworkers started to list how much they didn’t like her severe, uncaring personality, I was waiting for them to call her an “ice queen”—but they called her “Elsa,” instead. 

19. There’s a lot of drama surrounding the “erased bad memories” plotline (not directly connected to Goon, I mean), and I didn’t care about any of it. And I don’t know why anyone would. 

20. An exciting thing about Episode 16 is that the show actually remembers that Dr. Ju-yeon has an older sister: we see her as a teen in a flashback and as an adult who is finally home to take care of her young son.

21. Sae-yan frequently does a Naruto run out of scenes, and it’s amazing. 

22. Credit to the show: Dr. Ju-yeon freaks out when Goon rips his IV out of his arm, quickly applying pressure to where it had been inserted into his arm. Usually shows and movies make it look like it’s no big deal, but…it’s a frikkin’ needle in your arm. You could tear a vein or cause an embolism. And Dr. Ju-yeon reacts exactly as you would hope. So, points for that.

23. As Sae-yan is about to break open a piggy bank with a hammer to get the money inside, she hesitates and then yells at the pig to stop looking at her. And it’s amazing.

24. Shin’s father tells him that he’s made him a special tea to give him some extra energy—but he warns his son not to drink it at night, because it’ll make him horny. Which makes me wonder what taking it during the day is supposed to do, then, because I’m fairly certain human beings can get turned on during daylight hours, as well. 

25. Sae-yan and Si-on become immediate friends, when they finally run into each other…but then Si-on becomes incredibly jealous of her. Now, it’s obvious that Si-on, being awesome but not quite as awesome as Sae-yan, would have cause to feel jealous (having been the most awesome one on the show before Sae-yan showed up). But they never quite establish why she’s jealous in-universe. The closest we get is that one of the tertiary male characters seems to have taken a liking to Sae-yan and that Si-on perceives this as having been sniped by the new girl. But we have nothing to suggest prior to this that Si-on suddenly has a crush on this guy, just that A) the guy is showing interest in Sae-yan, and B) Si-on’s  seemingly upset at Sae-yan in a similar way to how she was upset at Dr. Ju-yeon, at first, who we sort of have to assume she felt was getting in between her and Goon. After this jealousy, though, Si-on and this tertiary guy pretty much only appear on screen at the same time, so…I guess they’re a duo of some kind? It doesn’t seem to go anywhere, and she’s (again) far too young for this guy at this point in the story. But…I dunno. I just thought it was odd for these Si-on crush(?) details to be the only things that aren’t explicitly explained by the show at any point. 

26. Not to keep talking about Sae-yan, but…the two best scenes in the series are Sae-yan scenes: 

26A. Goon comes down with a bad cold, and Sae-yan is dispatched to take care of him until he feels better. She spends the whole time acting as though she is a court lady in a historical drama. And she is absolutely hilarious. 

26B. Sae-yan’s reason for coming back to Korea was to find her biological father. When she believes she has the chance to finally meet him, Yang Hye-ji absolutely goes for broke with her monologue about all the things she never learned to do because your dad is supposed to teach you those things, and she refused to learn them from anyone else. She’s excited and scared and happy and heartbroken all at once, and she just kills that scene. I genuinely can’t tell if the dialogue is any good or not, but she sure as hell makes it sound great. 

27. …which brings us to this: after Si-on becomes jealous of Sae-yan, she slips a laxative into Sae-yan’s drink and then convinces her to come along so the hot boys on the swim team can give them lessons in the pool. For these lessons, the girls need to put on wetsuits. After she puts her skin-tight wetsuit on, Sae-yan, um, has some tummy issues—bringing to fruition Si-on’s plan to have Sae-yan literally crap all over herself. This is in Episode 11. Two episodes later, as Sae-yan is giving her speech about refusing to do anything dads are supposed to teach their kids how to do, she lists learning to swim as one of those things. So…what’s up with this swim lesson? I know there’s this whole draw of there being hot boys, but is this not something Sae-yan would very much be against doing? Did you not yet realize this was going to be the case, two episodes later, show? Or did you know about this apparent contradiction but once again fail to anticipate you would be facing the keen eye of the world’s greatest detective???

28. Of course, a show with this many problems would just have to end with a three-year motherf***ing time jump, wouldn’t it. Unbelievable. 

29. To end the show on a happy note, Goon and Dr. Ju-yeon meet after three long years and, to signify they still love each other, share a kiss. Naturally, the place they meet is where they met each other as children, signifying that they are, in some sense, starting again from the very first moment they fell in love. Of course, they met on a bridge over a small lake in a rural area. In a sort of no-man’s-land between towns. She just happens to be standing there, reminiscing, and then he walks up to her all dramatically and romantically. No cars around. Meaning they both—independent of each other—had to have driven out to the country, parked far enough away that their cars were nowhere to be seen, and then walked from a mile away onto that bridge. As though they knew they were going to meet for the ending of a romance drama. 

30. Of course, the very best thing about this series is that it was originally supposed to come out almost two years ago—which means all the soju bottles are still green. So, 10/10.

Which is where we’ll leave that. And, one hopes, soon forget about it. Except the Sae-yan parts. Those can stay in the ol’ memory barn. 

…gosh, that was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be. And probably way more garbled. 

“So, the same as ever?” I hear you ask.

…touché. 

Hope you’re as excited as I am that it’s finally Fall. Time for sweaters and blankets and promising myself that this year I’m going to get out ahead of my Christmas shopping and then not doing that at all. And also tea. Lots of tea.

More soon.

—Daryl