Letter #140: Dear Hyeri

My dear Wormwood,

You cannot imagine the pride with which I received word that the patient has succumbed to his base desire to connect with his correspondent, choosing the fleeting ecstatic shiver of his epistolary pursuits over the simple redirection of his attentions after the faultless souring of his efforts. That he would so readily inflict self-injury to avoid any manner of delay in communicating with his muse seems obvious, in hindsight, yet years of study by more senior members of our ranks could not identify this sizable weakness in his constitution you doggedly endeavored to exploit over just a few months. 

I do not doubt that you have already tried to assuage the merits of your success as happenstance, perhaps claiming to owe more to Dear Hyeri’s broadcast coinciding with your assignment to this perennially intractable patient than to any measure of skill on your part—but remember such protestation benefits nought but those in subjugation to The Enemy. (More pointedly, the story of your success is already on the lips of our departmental telltales, so it is most advantageous to keep stoked the fires of your victory. Pride cometh before the promotion!)

I look forward to your full report, upon your return. 

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

* * *

Good morning, Erin.

Forgive the introductory theatrics, dear seonbae, but a playful invocation of The Screwtape Letters felt instinctively appropriate to me, given the difficulties with getting this letter to you. Which is to say, I was supposed to get this letter to you days ago—but I simply could not bring myself to finish the last two episodes of the series, my finger hovering over the Play button at least five separate times over the course of the weekend, only to give in to one distraction or another instead.

But, finally, after days of a devilish whisper reminding me that I would not be able to write to you for perhaps another week or so if I did not finish this show presently, I decided I would rather subject myself to whatever wrapup Dear Hyeri had devised for itself than give up on it and have you wait even longer for me to get through an entirely new series in its stead. (Or it was more about me not wanting to wait to write to you than trying to avoid you having to wait to be written to, depending on which you think is the more accurate description.) Because, in the absence of your guidance and, as such, the guarantee that you will get to hear my thoughts on shows you’re interested in sharing, I am happy to serve as your canary in the broader K-drama coal mine. 

So, to at last clarify the pale Screwtape homage (if you’re not already familiar with the book and, as such, already aware), the wiser course of action for my mind, body, and soul would have been to simply move on to another show and mention in passing that I’d given up on Dear Hyeri—but, instead, I pushed on solely to experience the thrill of writing to you sooner than I would otherwise. And, alas, in so doing I have revealed my most exploitable weakness to the demons bent on turning me away from good life choices. You’d think it would be laziness or my love of mint chocolate chip ice cream, but no. Turns out it’s this. 

…which should also strongly imply to you that Dear Hyeri kinda sucks—which it does. But we’re going to talk about it anyway. Because I watched the whole thing, y’know. All for you!

Heh. Best episode of The X-Files. Genuinely hilarious. My sisters and I quote it all the time. 

And, yes, I am stalling—thank you so much for noticing!

Which means you were right to feel that nagging sense of deja vu, Erin, because Welcome to Samdal-ri, which also had Shin Hye-sun as its lead, also prompted a letter from me that spent much of its opening pages trying not to talk about the show because I didn’t like it. 

Coincidence? I’m starting to wonder—and not least because this makes two shows in a row whose titles end with “-ri.” 

Anyway. No sense in holding out any longer: sitting through the show can only be worthwhile if I tell you about it, so…let’s talk about Dear Hyeri.

1. I have no idea what this show is supposed to be. I can identify the different elements of the story—but if you think I would be able to explain how they work together to create a single, cohesive final product, well…you’ve got another thing coming. 

1A. So, there are three broad story threads at play:

• Eun-ho, our protagonist, has developed a split personality in response to a years-long buildup of stress over the various failings in her life. This second personality is Hye-ri—that is, Eun-ho’s perception of her missing (and presumed dead) little sister. As Eun-ho struggles with her life, Hye-ri thrives with hers, leading to a confrontation between the two personalities, where the truly happy Hye-ri, having discovered she is a split-personality, wants to permanently wrest control from the utterly miserable (and wholly unaware) Eun-ho. This connects directly to the character subplot for second-lead Ju-yeon, Hye-ri’s romantic interest, who is trying to live the life his deceased older brother wanted to live. 

• The work struggles of our leads and second-leads, all of whom are news presenters: Eun-ho’s inability to gain traction; male lead Hyeon-oh’s strategic deference to ex-girlfriend Eun-ho costing him his dream; Ju-yeon’s passionless pursuit of success; and second-lead Hye-yeon’s pushback against a system that tries to devalue her because she’s pretty. These individual threads sometimes overlap with the others, insofar as they exist within the same ecosystem and, on a practical level, influence the environment surrounding each thread. Eun-ho’s work struggles are the only ones that tie back to the split personality plot—but only by virtue of her being the one with the split personality.

• The romantic interests of our leads and second-leads: Eun-ho’s bitterness about being dumped by Hyeon-oh; Hyeon-oh’s regret about dumping Eun-ho; Ju-yeon’s adoration of Hye-ri, who spent months wooing him; and Hye-yeon’s performatively casual pursuit of Ju-yeon. These very obviously overlap and are contingent upon each other. And, given Eun-ho and Hye-ri are the same person but also have respective romantic interests, these functionally tie back to the split personality plot—and, at least broadly, link thematically to the internal conflict that makes the difference between misery and happiness. 

1B. Now, you’d think all of this would be in service of a particular concept, right? That it would all sort of loop in on itself, paralleling one aspect or another, stress-testing a core idea in different scenarios—a handful of throughlines working together to more fully explore the different facets of a specific something. We’ve got guilt, self-perception, the competing measures of internal and external fulfillment, with four leads who individually tie directly into each (or just about each) of these ideas. Surely, their stories become a cohesive mediation on, I dunno, what it means to be happy, rather than being, like, just a series of half-baked plot threads that get dropped one after the other for no good reason. I mean, who would do that, right?

1C. Well, the Hye-ri personality disappears from the story after Episode 4. And I want that to really sink in, Erin: the strongest, most interesting, and undeniably foundational conceit of the whole series just GOES AWAY and never comes back. Do the causes of this alternate personality’s appearance resolve themselves in Episode 4, thus healing Eun-ho of her “need” to escape from herself? Goodness no—they get much, much worse! So, of course, the easygoing, contented personality her mind created as protection against her troubles just disappears! [massive eye roll] Seriously—the moment Hye-ri leaves a note for Eun-ho encouraging her to relinquish control so that Hye-ri can fully live her life, we never see her again. Conflict over. Because f*** you who cares lol. 

1D. We then pivot to a shifting focus between Hyeon-oh’s tragic backstory and how it drives his pursuit of professional success while also making it impossible for him to love Eun-ho the way he wants to, Ju-yeon moping in the exact same way for weeks and weeks as he wonders where Hye-ri would have disappeared to, and the steady collapse of both Eun-ho’s and Heyon-oh’s individual careers—and the office politicking surrounding them. Which, of course, is tooooootally the hook we all originally tuned in for and definitely not to see Shin Hye-sun flex her acting muscles as multiple personalities (…for the third time (Mr. Queen, 19th Life, and this)), right, guys? 

1E. But, yeah, it goes from the split personality thing to the relationship thing to the work thing to the work thing woven amidst the relationship thing. To what end? I have no idea. But the final victory seems to be that Eun-ho and Hyeon-oh get back together and decide to get married. Because their relationship was apparently the real Dear Hye-ri all along. Or something. And who needs anything else to have a resolution, right, guys?

1F. And then there’s poor Hye-yeon, whose heartbreaking tale seems to exist in its own world, as though it is the main plot of a different, more deftly-crafted story about the struggles of being…well, hot. And competent. She spends a lot of the show getting harassed in a variety of ways, forced to alternate between responding with sass, subtle circumvention, or a powerless acceptance, all with an eye towards one day being happy with herself and her place in the world. Not that anyone around her ever gave half a s*** about any of this. (Well, Ju-yeon on two separate occasions, actually, now that I think about it. But it was less to do with her, specifically, than with his too-rational reaction to the nature of petty human behavior.) Why bother with any of this? Did she get a full arc? Does the story change at all without her? F*** you who cares lol. 

1G. My point being: I don’t have any idea what this show was supposed to be about—but I promise you an Our Beloved Summer-esque set-things-right romance was ABSOLUTELY NOT on the docket for the first four episodes. Don’t waste your time. Let me take that bullet for you. 

1G. …I’ve just read some of that back, and I’m 60% sure it’s incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t watched the show. At the same time, I have less of a problem with that than I’d have thought. Which is quite surprising. 

2. For what it’s worth: Shin Hye-sun is quite good in this. It’s not her best performance, but she’s just a very good actor. Which is funny, because her performance as the Hye-ri personality is so unrealistic. Like, she speaks and acts in a way that seems like such a put-on—but the clever thing about this is that, well, it’s actually a put-on! That is, for complicated reasons we can get into a little later, Eun-ho was occasionally pretending to be Hye-ri for a little while before she developed the personality split, so she’d already been affecting a different voice and demeanor—both of which get exaggerated by the sudden emergence of the Hye-ri personality. So, it comes off as being a bit of a send-up of Eun-ho’s impression of her little sister, because that’s kind of exactly what it is. And, because Shin Hye-sun is a total charmer, her ridiculous mannerisms quickly become much more enchanting than unbelievable. 

3. I’ve already mentioned a chunk of the main cast, so maybe I should get around to listing all the people I recognized:

• Ji-eum from See You in My 19th Life (Shin Hye-Sun) as Eun-ho

• Gangster Guy from Sweet Home as Hyeon-oh

• the losing side of the love triangle in A Time Called You as Ju-yeon

• Star Jin from My Demon as Hye-yeon

• Young-woo’s dad from Extraordinary Attorney Woo as Eun-ho’s department manager

• the bullied girl who kills the long-haired bully from The Glory as Eun-ho’s psychiatrist

• the cute girl from Episode 8 of Apartment 404 (Kim Si-eun) as actual Hye-ri (in flashbacks)

3A. Yes, the first time we see actual Hye-ri in a flashback, I did the whole “oo, and who is this?” thing I do when I see a pretty actress before then recognizing her three seconds later and excitedly exclaiming that I know who she is. Ya boy’s consistent, if nothing else. 

4. I’ve already told you that Shin Hye-sun is quite good in this, but I would like to make specific note of how well she handles comedy. She doesn’t have many chances to do this, given her character’s penchant for being either horribly depressed or (both as Eun-ho and Hye-ri) a bit of a loon, but the couple of times she is given a joke to land, she absolutely nails it. None of these moments was laugh-out-loud funny, and she knew not to try to sell them as such. Instead, she played those beats earnestly, allowing the moments to amuse us, rather than trying to be the amusing part herself. Which I think is worth appreciating. 

5. And while we’re on compliments: I mentioned that Hye-yeon’s storyline is mostly about her suffering abuse for being hot, and I want to compliment the show for how well it does this—specifically with how it doesn’t let this happen cartoonishly. The men who harass her are aggressive, thinking they can bully her into being a plaything, and the women who harass her lash out to preemptively protect their places in the career hierarchy, trying to play up that she’s going to sleep her way into success—but she also finds herself sometimes backed up by other men and other women who don’t tolerate the poor behavior. The situations feel real, the reactions and consequences feel believable (whether she comes out hurt or ahead after the encounter)—and none of it seems manufactured just to have a shallow, heavy-handed “girlboss” moment. That is, Hye-yeon’s struggle is not there for a disposable hit of catharsis but as a genuine obstacle for her to deal with as she completes her personal arc.

5A. …if she had a personal arc that this was in service of, of course, which she does not, despite the whole situation with her having more meat on its bones than the split personality part of the show—but I digress. 

5B. Point is: I really enjoyed her part of the story—and not just because she was, in addition to being wholly sympathetic, ridiculous. Though you know I love ridiculous. 

6. What the—hey, look at that! I just got sent a list at work, and you’re on it! And you are #23—my favorite number! Wow…how about that, huh? Sometimes, the universe goes out of its way to make ya smile. What a nice surprise.

7. Another nice surprise? Episode 2 takes place on April 3rd!

8. Yet another nice surprise? Eun-ho stumbles across a murder victim in Episode 2—but it doesn’t become a plot in any fashion! I made note that, for once, you wouldn’t be furious! 

9. For the record, as much as I disliked the shift over to Hyeon-oh’s backstory about midway through the show, the backstory itself is fine. Too much for the character and for this show, but it’s 100% the setup for a totally different show about him—and, really, about him running into his old girlfriend and finally trying to overcome the stuff that made him break up with her. Because his backstory is full of wacky nonsense responses to very, very serious turns in his youth, and he’s surrounded by a zany group of unique characters. (Again: too much for this show.) I don’t know why this was wasted on a character sub-subplot and not pitched for its own series—especially since the split personality thing disappears a third of the way through the show. 

9A. Which makes two separate plot elements that could have been their own show that feel very out-of-place in this show. Hmm. Leftovers that got tossed into a pot to fill the episode requirement for a series? I leave it to you to decide. 

10. One of the reasons Eun-ho ends up developing a secondary personality based on her little sister is because she feels responsible for actual Hye-ri’s disappearance, because she’d bullied the friendless Hye-ri into going on a college trip she didn’t want to take. And, of course, Hye-ri disappeared when she was on the trip, leaving Eun-ho obviously stricken with guilt. HOWEVER…though no light is ever shed on Hye-ri’s fate, the audience does get a look at the night she disappeared in a flashback—and it is an absolute whopper: rather than hanging out with any of her classmates to make friends like Eun-ho had suggested, Hye-ri seems to have spent the first night of the trip by herself, laying on her back at the edge of the rental property they were using while listening to music on her phone. Until she sees some fireflies. At which point she leaves her phone and headphones on the ground and wanders off into the forest, following the fireflies. Like, that’s it. That’s what we get. “Oh, but she clearly did it because it was beautiful and she was extremely lonely and—” DO NOT WASTE MY TIME, hypothetical internet commenter. The best-faith interpretation you can make of this segment is that the actual Hye-ri has some kind of cognitive handicap—which the show DOES NOT ever indicate in any way. Rather, while I am totally on board with the anti-social Hye-ri being so gripped by the beauty of the swarm of fireflies that she would take the opportunity wander away from the rental property (and the classmates she wants nothing to do with), I absolutely refuse to believe that she would just abandon her music in a fit of rapture and wander into a pitch-black forest without any concern for her sense of direction. Just…no. Yet I am certain we’re supposed to find the scene haunting and highly symbolic. Or something. Because f*** you this is poignant. 

11. …wow, I actually made a note about no longer writing “who cares?” in my notes because it was starting to take up too much space. That's funny. 

11A. Oh my God—which I then follow up with the following note: “They’re doing a ‘comedy’ scene where the three dudes argue over who should be ‘in charge’ of Eun-ho/Hye-ri as she recovers, and I’ve just started watching Weki Meki live performances because I don’t care.” 

11B. LOL—followed by a note saying, “There’s an advertisement in the corner of the screen for the new Kim Se-jeong show, and I’m tempted to just switch over to that.” Man, I really was not having fun, by the end. 

12. There’s this side character who works as a news anchor, and…I just don’t get why he’s there. Rather, I’m not questioning why he’d be a side character, but why he’s written to be the way he is. Initially, I thought he was just a bit offbeat or that socially awkward/annoying combo you get from people who mean well but with whom no one really wants to spend time. But, by the halfway point, it becomes obvious that he’s autistic. He’s shy of being Woo Young-woo, certainly, but he’s also got more going on than difficulty reading the room. Now, I’m not suggesting that you can’t have a side character just so happen to be autistic, but given his role in the story (with the exception of one very specific point that has nothing to do with his autism), he’s mostly just there to annoy everyone and get yelled at for being annoying. That is, you don’t have to do anything with his autism to justify his being a character with autism, but he’s also there often enough that his autistic tendencies begin to affect the audience in the same way that they affect his coworkers…leaving me with questions about, y’know, why he’s there. 

13. …not that there isn’t a whole list of “but why…?” elements to this show, to be fair. 

14. This show is more than a little in love with itself. That is, it thinks it’s really, really artsy. So very full of symbolism. Of course, you’d have to be very, very clever to notice—including:

• how Eun-ho is frequently framed so that she can be seen with her reflection in a mirror or computer screen or window, or how the camera will unfocus just enough to create a double-image of Eun-ho, as though she was two people at the same time. 

• how Eun-ho has a sudden crisis of identity while, in the background, a bunch of little girls inexplicably hold red balloons in their hands, just as little girl actual Hye-ri does in a photo of the two of them that Eun-ho keeps in her apartment. 

• how Hye-ri receives a simple thread ring from Ju-yeon’s mother, and Eun-ho receives an expensive necklace from Hyeon-oh that used to be his mother’s. 

• how Hye-ri works in the second office at the parking attendants stand, which is supposed to be empty because there only needs to be one attendant (the one who works in the first office)—that is, she is someone who is not supposed to be there but suddenly is.

14A. To be clear: they beat you over the head with all of these—but act like they’re being subtle as hell. 

15. This show was right out of Connection school of sound design: EVERYTHING sounded like it was recorded in a booth after filming completed and then added in post-production. 

16. Hye-ri works as a parking lot attendant with a woman named Min-young. Min-young is fun and interesting and horrifically underutilized—which is to be expected, of course, given that Hye-ri disappears from the story IN EPISODE FOUR. She gets to come back into the story in the final episode, but it’s not enough. 

17. Hyeon-oh has a surrogate little sister named Su-jeong who is also part of the production staff he works with at the news network. Su-jeong is snarky and interesting and hot and horrifically underutilized—which confused the heck out of me, because she seems like she should be a much bigger character than she ends up being. She spends most of her time standing off to the side rolling her eyes at things, but she also acts as a sort of translator of Hyeon-oh’s actions for the audience in the first few episodes. And then she disappears for the middle third of the series, just when the plot would seem to need her the most: Hyeon-oh’s cancer-stricken surrogate mother insists that he get married before she dies, and Su-jeong would seem to be the obvious “I’ll marry him” choice for that part of the story to play out. But, because she isn’t around, the show literally invents a girl it then insists has been there the whole time and is also Hyeon-oh’s surrogate little sister, and she takes on this role. When Su-jeong returns to the story, she’s just back to rolling her eyes and offering an occasional snarky remark under her breath. Which is great, but it’s not enough. 

17A. For the record: I was genuinely more interested in the out-of-nowhere surrogate little sister wanting to marry Hyeon-oh than pretty much anything else that was going on in the show, by the time that whole thing rolled around. 

18. Speaking of Hyeon-oh’s surrogate family, though: he and his three surrogate younger siblings all work at the same news network. He and his “brother” are news presenters, while his “sisters” are both part of the production staff. Because that doesn’t seem like a totally unrealistic circumstance at all. Nope. Not at all. 

19. Aww, look at that: I have a long note for Episode 8 speculating that Hye-ri would rejoin the story in Episode 9 because they’d finally finished making Eun-ho so miserable that she’d have to give over to her alternate personality to survive. Oh, Ep. 8-Daryl, you sweet summer child. 

20. Hye-yeon has a sequence where she’s playing dodgeball, and it looks like she knows how to throw a ball properly, which is just one more great thing about her. 

20A. …that is, in addition to being ridiculous and resilient and fun and genuine and unflappable and vulnerable and upbeat and self-assured and broken and lovely and absotively posilutely #bestgirl. (I don’t know that there was ever going to be much of a contest, but…with more screen time, Su-jeong or Hye-ri might—might—have been able to edge her out. That is, Shin Hye-sun’s Hye-ri, not actual Hye-ri. No matter how cute Kim Si-eun is.)

21. I like that Hye-ri doesn’t seem to be all that much like the actual Hye-ri we see in flashbacks. Whether it makes sense that this is the case or not. 

22. In the brief period when the show still cared about the split personality story, the way the show got us used to the idea that Eun-ho was switching from one personality to the other was by having her go to sleep—because, whenever she’d wake up, she'd have switched personalities. And, because Eun-ho was a news presenter, she had unconventional work hours, which meant that she would end up going to sleep in the early afternoon—which allowed her to wake up a little while later as Hye-ri, who would then report to her 3PM to 11PM job as a parking attendant. Then Hye-ri would get to sleep at around 1AM, leaving Eun-ho to wake up at about 3AM and start her day. All very straightforward—except for one little wrinkle: Eun-ho and Hye-ri had different apartments. 

22A. Now, these apartments are basically next to each other, so it’s not like they live in two different parts of the city or anything like that—but they are very much two separate apartments. Which means that every time Eun-ho wakes up, she’s in Hye-ri’s apartment, and every time Hye-ri wakes up, she’s in Eun-ho’s apartment. And NEITHER PERSONALITY QUESTIONS WAKING UP IN SOMEONE ELSE’S BED. She just gets up and leaves the strange apartment to walk over to her own apartment, beginning her day as if everything is normal. And, until the moment Hye-ri leaves the note for Eun-ho about allowing Hye-ri to take over permanently, this is never addressed. To my great consternation and confusion. 

22B. And riddle me this, seonbae: Hye-ri doesn’t wear glasses, but Eun-ho does. If Hye-ri goes to bed in her own apartment, and Eun-ho wakes up in Hye-ri’s apartment (after being Hye-ri)…how is it that Eun-ho is always able to reach over to the nightstand and grab her glasses? Why would Eun-ho’s glasses be in Hye-ri’s apartment? How do they not know about each other?!

23. Relatedly: does anyone else live at this apartment complex? Is it even an apartment complex? Is it just two apartments and a big courtyard? How does any of this work?!

…and maybe that’s enough of that. 

Woof.

I think this may actually have been worse than Welcome to Samdal-ri. Sure, I watched all of Hye-ri and skipped entire chunks of Samdal-ri, but at least Samdal-ri had those support character plots I genuinely cared about. Hye-ri turned out to be nothing but slog. No breaks. No breathing room. No pretty, pretty Mina. 

Again I say: woof. 

I’ll try to have something better for you next time.

[watches the first five episodes of Mr. Plankton on Netflix]

More soon.

—Daryl