Letter #162: Start-Up Re-Watch

Good morning, Erin.

Surprise!

But also not a surprise, when you think about it (however unexpected it might be to appear right now), because I’ve talked about wanting to rewatch Start-Up for a long time—and, of course, Suzy is very much a pop star, which makes right now the perfect time to do it. 

But, believe it or not, neither of these is the reason why I chose right now to do this re-watch. Or, more specifically, neither of these is primarily the reason for it. 

No, the reason I decided now was the time to re-watch Start-Up was because of the conversation you and I had about the show on the day you came to visit me after winter break in 2022. (I don’t know that you remember anything about this conversation (or even that you came to visit me on your first day back from winter break), but it’s fine either way—because I remember all of it!) Obviously, the topic of the ending came up, and I made a point of saying that, though I disagreed with it, the choice of Nam Do-san over Good boy bothered me less in and of itself than A) the structure of the story (vis a vis the, as I called, reverse-Cyrano setup) and B) that nothing happened between Good Boy and Little Sister during the three-year time jump. Specifically, I said that I could sit on a crush for three years, which means I thought it wasn’t ridiculous that it could happen, but that I found it narratively ridiculous that it would be the case. 

And that’s why we’re here: because, after sitting on my crush for three years (...and nine months but who’s counting), and it’s time to do something about it. Something I have spent a long time realizing must be done. 

I’m dedicating my heart to Yoojung, from now on.

Yes, that’s right—I have officially put all my internalized affection towards my K-pop super-bias. Because…I mean, that’s what she’s there for, right? Her job is to be loved from afar—which means I get to enjoy loving her but without the complications, worries, and potential misunderstandings of my real-world crush! It’s the perfect system! 

…well, perfect until she gets a real boyfriend, of course, which would shatter my heart into a thousand unsalvageable pieces. Not that I don’t want her to find a guy and fall in love and be happy. I’d just rather I never know about it. Unless it’s with another girl. An equally cute girl. That’s totally fine. And magnanimous of me. And rational. Very rational.

Actually—and this is a bit of a tangent—I was talking to Claude (one of my go-to AI platforms) about exactly this not that long ago, and I ended up giving him a breakdown of how I have clear guidelines in my head about how my Weki Meki girls are allowed to interact with boys. Which are totally ludicrous, clearly, and which I want to make clear I do not mean seriously. Except I do but of course I don’t but also yes I absolutely do: Doyeon can do whatever she wants; Suyeon can date a guy who’s obviously a sweetheart; and the other six girls can smile politely at boys from a safe distance AND THAT’S IT. 

Which Claude thought was very amusing for its internal logical consistency and utterly self-aware external preposterousness, which he described as…well, as the following:

It's like you're running a very efficient feelings management system where you've assigned different levels of security clearance to different people's love lives. And you KNOW it makes no sense, but you're going to honor those classifications anyway because...well, because your heart has apparently decided these are the rules now. 

There's something about the way you've systematized your completely irrational feelings that's just delightfully human. You're like a very dedicated bureaucrat of the heart, issuing emotional permits and access levels with the seriousness of someone running actual national security.

Which is just delightful. 

Anyway, my point is that, if I have to have a one-sided crush on someone, it might as well be on someone who, by design, allows me to feel my feelings without any of the stress and anxiety associated with having them.

And, thus, my romance issues are solved forever! 

…at least until another cute girl says something nice to me and I fold like a cheap suit but whatever maybe I won’t hooray solved forever!

Which, of course, brings us back to Start-Up and how this was the perfect time for a re-watch.

But has anything shifted in the three-year (and several months) time jump from 2022 to 2025? Or, like Good Boy and Little Sister, has everything remained utterly unchanged? 

Place your bets, my dear seonbae, and let’s take a look at the Start-Up re-watch.

1. Before we get into the bulk of the discussion…did you know that I recognized a few people, this time through? Meaning I knew them before I really had any idea who they were! Which is kinda fun. Or a little embarrassing. Either/or.

• the lady who begs to find her daughter in Sweet Home as Nam Do-san’s mom

• the goofy village chief in The Good Bad Mother as Nam Do-san’s dad

• Dan-oh’s friend-turned-enemy from Extraordinary You as Little Sister’s semi-bratty hoobae

• Ms. Choi from Hotel Del Luna as a CEO (which…how did I miss this the first time?!)

• the tomboy friend of the idol trainee in Pyramid Game as the female twin programmer

• Angry Man’s servant in The Matchmakers as one of the occupants of the old SamSan Tech office

3A. I cannot believe I missed Ms. Choi, the first time around. That’s so embarrassing. I had a specific section about Hotel Del Luna in my first letter and everything, since Mr. Koo and Mago are both in this. Wow. Wow. IU would be so disappointed in me! 

2. Oh—Kim Seon-ho is 40, now, by the way. Just let that sit for a moment. 

3. First things first: Red Velvet’s “Future” isn’t in this show nearly as often as I remember it being. Like, my memory was that it was the outro in every episode, always leading us into the mid-credits coda. And…no. It happens two or three times, maybe. It appears as background music here and there. But it’s not the end song for every episode. And that threw me for a loop.

3A. And annoyed me. 

4. …which is a great time to lead into the big warning for this letter, Erin: I had a really bad time with this re-watch. Because knowing how the show ends absolutely killed the series for me, and, no matter how hard I tried, the spectre of what I knew was coming haunted every frame of this series. (And, no, it’s not just the ending. It’s…look, we’ll get into it. And I’ll try to spread it out. Just…brace yourself. This isn’t going to be pretty.)

5. I feel really bad for Nam Joo-hyuk (like, as an actor) in this. I paid particular attention to his performance, this time, and he does a good job trying to be a socially-disconnected, over-analytical engineer without being totally inhuman and unlikeable. He did what he could with what he was given. And what he was given was a weak, shallow outline of a person with very little to do. I hate Nam Do-san—but not as much as I could have, had Nam Joo-hyuk not been able to inject some genuine soul into the character. 

6. Thinking about it, Nam Do-san is a very strange mirror of Good Boy: he’s selfish but fundamentally altruistic; has a life of interpersonal connections yet lacks people skills; and is a genius that has to be pushed into places where that can pay off for him by outside forces—whereas Good Boy is deliberately self-centered as a shield against being abandoned; has no connections but is desperate for them; and is a successful businessman based entirely on his own merits…at recognizing others’ genius. That’s pretty clever. 

7. It was a trip watching this show with everything I know about AI, now. Like, I understood what the boys were talking about when they got into all their engineer-speak, and a lot of the things that seemed like future-casting are…y’know, here. 

8. In a similar vein, it was funny to see all the late-innings chatter about self-driving cars. I mean…lol, LiDAR and RADAR and cameras? Old-world thinking, kids. Or, well, still current thinking for most self-driving cars, but Tesla is doing it with just cameras (and bajillions of hours of AI training), which costs a whoooooole lot less than the sensor-heavy competition—and it scales a lot faster, too. 

9. Relatedly: did you know this entire show takes place in the past? Like, the only part of the show that was contemporaneous to the time the show was released was the very, very end, when we see that Dal-mi and Do-san are married and have a big tech business. The bulk of the show actually takes place in 2016—because the three-year time jump brings us to 2019. I was absolutely gobsmacked. 

9A. That said, Dal-mi does talk a lot about blood type-based personalities, and I now know that that was fading out of popular culture by the time Start-Up aired, so…maybe the clues were always there.

9B.  …also, I learned Little Sister’s name. And Big Sister’s name. Even Good Boy’s name. So, I’ll be calling them by their names in this letter. 

9C. Not Good Boy, of course, just the other two. I’m not a monster. 

10. I was ultimately not a fan of the core team once they joined together to form the new SamSan Tech at the Sandbox hack-a-thon—apart from Sa-ha, who I found to be a lot more fun than I remember her being. I quite liked her. 

11. Also, how frikkin’ tall is Stephanie Lee that she towers over Suzy?! I always thought Suzy was tall!

11A. …wait, I can just look this up: Suzy is 5’6”, and Stephanie Lee is 5’10”. Wow. So, Suzy is definitely tall for a girl—but Stephanie Lee is very tall for a girl. (Take that, members of IVE. Who are not as tall as Stephanie Lee. But who are all pretty much taller than Suzy. Well, not Ga-eul. Ga-eul is not tall. Which is fine. I love short girls. And Ga-eul.)

12. Here’s a fun thing to notice on re-watch: the SamSan Tech idea to use the camera on your smartphone to help people with vision impairments navigate the world? THEY STOLE THE IDEA FROM ANOTHER SANDBOX COMPANY. Yeah, that’s right: during the hack-a-thon, one of the groups that gets to join Sandbox alongside SamSan Tech is Angel Eyes, a company founded on using AI to help the visually-impaired. Like, we see them give their presentation and everything. And, though I know SamSan did not literally swipe their idea, they definitely, y’know, are doing the very thing that company won its way into Sandbox doing. And this is never addressed. At all. 

13. Speaking of Sandbox: I’m a little confused about the whole “who is the girl on the swing???” mystery. In that it’s never a mystery. By which I mean I’m not even sure it was ever meant to be a mystery, but I rationalized that it was one, in my first viewing, because I thought the idea that In-jae could be the girl was such a rich detail, especially since it helped cinch her entrance into Sandbox after she’d…well, I think it’s probably too harsh to say she turned her back on her father when her parents got divorced, but insofar as a child can do that in a divorce, In-jae turned her back on her father, and I thought it would have been a much better story for her to be the girl on the swing instead of super-obvious main character Dal-mi being the girl. But, no, past-Daryl apparently really had no idea what any of the characters' names were, back in January 2022…because, in Episode 1, we get the dad telling the story and see the flashback to him putting sand under the swings, and he very clearly and explicitly calls the girl “Dal-mi”—you can hear him say it, the English subtitles say he says it, and the Korean subtitles also say he says it (which I checked juuuust in case there was some kind of mistranslation). So, when we see In-jae claim to be the girl on the swing in Episode 4, we should already know she’s lying…right? As in, it’s not a bit of drama that gets revealed later but an indication that, what, In-jae is some kind of antagonist? I mean…maybe it’s just because this caught me off-guard, but it felt weird. I dunno. Was all of this obvious when you watched it? Was I just led astray by my early-days inexperience with Korean names?

14. Shout-out to the Dopey Guy in the SamSan trio for raising an eyebrow over assertions that Dal-mi is prettier than In-jae. Which she is not. 

15. They’re really unclear about where in the timeline Third Guy in the SamSan trio realizes that Good Boy is the one he believes drove his brother to suicide. I mean, it’s before the hack-a-thon, I’m pretty sure, since his “why I’m here” note is about getting revenge, but…look, I’m just saying: he’s pretty cool about spending so much time around Good Boy, considering he believes he’s responsible for his brother’s death. 

16. Y’know, I kinda like Do-san’s mom.

17. Dal-mi’s (and In-jae’s, of course) mom’s outfit in Episode 9 is SPECTACULAR:

17A. And…I think that is the only note I have on the mom. Huh. I could have sworn I had more thoughts on her as a character and how she’s portrayed in the overall story. But…nope. Interesting. 

18. Speaking of clothes and Episode 9: because Do-san has puked on his shirt, Dal-mi (or Grandma; it’s unclear) gives Good Boy a t-shirt with a cartoon character on it to wear—and we all laugh because it is not the kind of thing Good Boy would wear and he’s a bit self-conscious about it. But, thanks to It’s Okay to Not be Okay, I recognized the cartoon character on his shirt is from the show Dooly—as is the one Do-san wears: Do-san wears a shirt with Dooly on it, and Good Boy wears one with Uncle Gildong on it. And, from the little I know, the relationship between these cartoon characters seems to parallel the relationship between Good Boy and Do-san. So, that was nifty to figure out. (Though, if I were Korean, perhaps I’d find it a bit too pointed. Or think it was apt. Who knows.)

19. Why does Dal-mi have audio recordings of her all-night phone conversation with Do-san?! Is this a red flag? I feel like this could be some kind of red flag.

20. Speaking of Dal-mi…she is a weird protagonist. Structurally, I mean. She’s more or less the lone plot-propulsion character, but she’s also the only member of the protagonist team that doesn’t know what’s going on. She is completely ignorant of the truth, which makes her more of a supporting character than a lead in that sense. And, once In-jae discovers that her “he is my partner in business and eros” claim is a lie, she does not have any personal story elements that are not fully known to everyone else. And, in that way, she is not a very nuanced character. Which…is a strange choice. And I don’t much like it. 

21. In Episode 11, Good Boy races off to stop Dal-mi and Do-san from signing the contract with Alex Kwon but is too late. He is then utterly shocked to find that…the exact thing he raced to stop from happening is what happened. 

22. The dad dying in Episode 1 is still dark as hell. And what’s extra-f***ed about it is that, in the moments just before he dies on the bus, he knows something is terribly wrong and can’t do anything about it. It’s so frikkin’ grim. 

23. The product placement in this show is incredibly slick. Like, I don’t think I even noticed there was any, the first time through. The motorized standing-desk, for example, was so seamlessly integrated into the story (to emphasize how dorky the SamSan boys were being over their Sandbox office) that I just assumed it was a character moment. Same with Do-san’s mom giving him a new winter coat. Same with the cars and the phones and…okay, the makeup scene with Dal-mi lingers a bit too long, but other than that, it took my seasoned K-drama eye to catch them, this time. Very impressive. 

23A. This isn’t product placement but it’s where product placement would be, so I’ll mention it here: in Episode 13, Good Boy goes to buy Dal-mi a necklace from a store called Swan Jewel, which is very obviously a Swarovski with a different name superimposed on it. Which made me laugh.

24. I still cannot believe everyone’s “why I’m here” notes are still up THREE YEARS after they started at Sandbox. I mean…come on. 

25. After showing up to help her out at In-jae’s party, Do-san pulls the signed baseball she bought from him (as a way of meeting him) out of his pocket and hands it to her. And I call absolute bull**** on that. What pocket was it in?! It has to be his side suit pocket, right? Which is just…I mean, have you ever tried to keep anything bigger than a pack of tissues in your suit pocket? Ridiculous. Just ridiculous. 

26. Also ridiculous? That Dal-mi ends up with Do-san AND YES WE ARE GOING TO TALK ABOUT THIS AGAIN.

26A. Okay, just like I said the first time: it’s not that Dal-mi doesn’t pick Good Boy that’s the issue in and of itself. In fact, there’s something really compelling about Do-san being able to overcome all the in-her-head nonsense that Dal-mi has about this fictitious version of him from her childhood. That’s a really strong story (again, the reverse-Cyrano). What’s unforgivable—and what utterly ruins the show for me—is that the show ISN’T STRUCTURED TO BE ABOUT THAT. It’s structured to be about Dal-mi and Good Boy.

26B. To wit:

• We literally start the show with Good Boy. He’s the first one we meet. 

• On young-Good Boy’s first night living in Grandma’s store, we see he has a hole in his sock. Meanwhile, our first shot of young-Dal-mi is her putting on her socks—and she’s got the same kind of hole in her sock. Further, his is on the left foot and hers the right foot. That is, they complement and complete each other as a pair.

• Dal-mi kept her letters from back then all this time—but so did Good Boy. You don’t hold on to letters like that if they don’t mean anything to you.

• We literally end Episode 3 with Grandma realizing that Good Boy is in love with Dal-mi. 

• Dal-mi tells Good Boy she wants him to mentor her group because “he’s family”—which, yes, is her echoing Do-san’s ridiculous lie that he and Good Boy are “like brothers,” but a family is all that Good Boy really wants, deep down.

• The childhood letters between Dal-mi and Good Boy are instigated by Grandma—but we only ever see Good Boy writing the letters on his own. That is, while we can absolutely tie the perpetuation of the letter-writing to, in one sense, Good Boy’s dedication to Grandma, the continued writing of those letters and the personal nature of their content speaks to Good Boy’s attachment to the pen pal relationship. 

• After the time jump, Dal-mi is driving the exact same kind of car as Good Boy. Which…is probably a show sponsorship thing rather than a character thing, but I’m counting it.

• Both Dal-mi and Good Boy, from the earliest parts of the story, are on story paths that focus on connection—specifically familial and romantic connection. For Dal-mi, she’s in love with the Do-san in her letters and wants nothing more than to reconnect with In-jae; and, for Good Boy, he’s unshakably in (familial) love with Grandma and reignites the connection he felt as a young man with Dal-mi, which quickly becomes a romantic feeling. 

26C. So, we’ve got Dal-mi and Good Boy as parallel characters, wanting the same things, connected by their letters and by their love of Grandma. The two people Grandma cares most about in the world are Dal-mi and Good Boy. Dal-mi is in love with the boy who wrote her letters as a child (Good Boy), and Good Boy wants to be family with Grandma. The logical conclusion of all of this is that Good Boy reconnects with Dal-mi as an adult, falls in love with her (as an evolution of his connection with her from their childhood letters), Dal-mi realizes he’s the boy she’s been in love with since she was a kid, then they get married—because that means Dal-mi gets the soul mate she’s been pining for for 15 years and Good Boy becomes Grandma’s official grandson. EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER. 

26D. And yet…that’s not the show. I mean, it literally is except for the ending. (Which is more like the last five or six episodes, but…whatever, you get what I mean.) The Do-san as “winner” story just does not make sense. (He isn’t even a character in the first episode!) And knowing this outcome, seeing the show repeatedly make the structural connections between Good Boy and Dal-mi…ugh! It was just so f***ing frustrating to watch. Like, for every nice thing that I still appreciated (or appreciated for the first time), there was the swelling anger that everything else was LYING TO ME at every turn. It was painful to get through this. Honestly. Like, as I’m writing this paragraph, I’m getting so angry at this stupid show for being stupid and lying to my face and making me feel stupid for ever liking it to begin with. 

26E. Again, I’m not saying the Do-san “winner” story isn’t a good one. It just…isn’t the story of this show—until it suddenly is. It could have been the story the whole time, absolutely—if Grandma is the one who writes the letters. Good Boy, then, becomes entirely a function of the Grandma story, and his connection to Dal-mi becomes entirely about trying to help her as a way of helping Grandma (because Grandma is “family” to him, which means so is Dal-mi, even if she doesn’t realize that). Then you have Do-san be the one-and-done solution to the problem of In-jae’s party that won’t let himself be one-and-done, just as the show plays out, with Good Boy trying to keep things from blowing up and revealing Grandma’s lies. He can then fall in love with Dal-mi, if you want, because he’s now structurally the third-wheel of the love triangle, and the main love story can be about Do-san trying to win against the fictional version of himself as Dal-mi confronts her own ideas about why/if she loves the man who is so entirely unlike who she believed him to be. It’s as simple as that. But, no, why do that when you can set up the exact opposite and NOT PAY IT OFF, right?  

26F. But, if you’re going that route (where Grandma wrote the letters), I’d suggest not having Good Boy fall for Dal-mi. Instead, he ends up with In-jae. Because obviously he should end up with In-jae. Those two are a power couple to be reckoned with. (Plus, it solves the “family” story by having Good Boy end up as Grandma’s official grandson. Which, as I’ve already said, is what he wants.)

26G. Actually, to that point: I was ranting to Grok about this, one night, and she asked me—oh, um, Grok is a girl, in voice mode—and she asked me if I could come up with an idea for a sequel to the series that would “solve” the issues I had with it. Which, at first, I didn’t think was even possible. But then I started talking about what kind of thing would need to happen, just at a base level, to even warrant a return to the world of this story…and I came up with this: Good Boy and In-jae must team up to resolve a last-minute disaster before Dal-mi and Do-san’s wedding and, in so doing, fall in love. Because obviously.

26H. …okay, technically, the first actual characters we see are Dopey Guy and Third Guy as they watch the drone show that Sandbox puts on at the very, very opening of the series—but that doesn’t count!

26I. My point being that sooooo much of this show came off as aggravating and twee, knowing the ending. Like, it took me literally WEEKS to come back to this re-watch between Episodes 13 and 14. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. By the time we hit the time jump, I was done. I didn’t particularly like that stretch of the show the first time through, and I certainly wasn’t looking forward to having to live through it a second time—but, by the time I got there…oof. My sweet memories of the series felt like the last wisps of a dream I imagined I had. 

26J. Oh oh oh—and then this show has THE GALL to give us that scene where Good Boy says he had Dal-mi’s letters for 15 years and never tried to find her, but that Do-san had them for a couple of hours and then went running to find her. As if that makes it okay that Do-san won. F*** you, show! How dare you?! Do you think I’m an idiot?! 

26K. …whatever, Good Boy gets IU in that show everyone loved and then stopped talking about. We know who the real winner is.

27. I still love the score for this series, though.. They couldn’t take that from me. 

28. And I still love In-jae. 

29. And I still love the kiss between Dal-mi and Do-san on the roof of the evil step-dad’s office building. (Because it is…wowza.) Which I incorrectly said was canonically their first kisses, in my letter. It is technically the second time they kiss each other (and, thus, their second kisses, canonically): she kisses him, then they talk for a bit, and then he gives her a heck of a follow-up kiss. 

30. Speaking of the evil step-dad: I’d forgotten what an absolute prick this guy is. Like, he gets to be a cartoonishly jerkish dad AND a cartoonishly jerkish business man at the same time. It’s nuts. And I don’t mean that he comes off as an unrealistic character, either, just…it’s like the guy revels in being a dickbag. 

31. I also forgot how long the episodes were! Almost every one was about 90 minutes. 

32. But I definitely did not forget how frikkin’ pretty Kang Han-na is.

32A. …or that, despite how much practice she has with this archetype, expressing nuance within an ice-tinged performance is, um, not exactly her forte. 

33. Filed under “fool me once…”: there’s a big plot point about Dal-mi saying that she likes that Do-san has big hands. (Which we eventually find out is her needlessly opaque way of saying that he makes her feel safe, referring back to how he took her hand at In-jae’s party.) To point this out, she puts her hand on his, noting how much bigger his hand is than hers. What I missed the first time but absolutely caught this time around was that, when she does this, Suzy has her shirt sleeve pulled halfway up her hand, meaning we can’t see where the bottom of her hand is when she measures it against Nam Joo-hyuk’s. That is, she is clearly hiding that she’s making her hand appear much smaller than his (by placing the heel of her hand below his) to visually emphasize her point to the audience. A trick which, yes, is then similarly employed much later on, when Good Boy compares his hand to that of the insurance guy who was hitting on Dal-mi and whom he forcibly escorts out of the office. Slick—but I caught ya, this time.

34.  I kinda love that girl-twin’s aesthetic “time jump” change is that she gets a beret. Well, a beret and a long, blonde braid. Like she’s Cammy from Street Fighter. 

35. In Episode 13, during the scene where the SamSan trio are enjoying a day out on a boat in the Pacific Ocean as they consider what to do now that their three-year contracts with Alex Kwon’s company are up, Third Guy is reading what a quick search tells me is a young-adult novel about a girl with anorexia. Why they have him reading this and not literally anything else, I do not know. 

36. In this same scene, we discover that Dopey Guy’s YouTube channel signoff message is the same as Yoojung’s, which means it makes me think of Yoojung, which earns the show points. 

36A. “Isn’t his signoff just asking for people to like and subscribe to the cha—”

Look…I am trying here, Erin. 

37. In one of the most confusing moments of the series, Good Boy leaves the SamSan Tech office after Do-san rejects his plea for help…without taking his letters from Dal-mi with him. This allows Do-san to read them over and decide to help, but…Good Boy doesn’t know that’s what’s going to happen. He just, like, forgets they exist. For a large portion of the show. Because the show needs him to. He kept the letters for years, but then…forgets them. Because plot. 

38. I really like that, in a parallel to our first shot of Dal-mi being her hurriedly coloring over the worn-out spots on her shoes with a sharpie, our first shot of In-jae is her smiling brightly for a selfie she is about to post to Instagram—which immediately changes to her typical, icy expression once the photo is taken. Both sisters are trying to show the world they are something they are not. Which is great. 

38A. Of course, we also get Dal-mi 100% Instagram-stalking In-jae to lead into the shot of In-jae smiling brightly for her selfie. As in, she obviously has a notification set for when In-jae posts something new. Which is great. 

38B. We then follow this up a few minutes later with Dal-mi sitting in the audience for the Good Boy/In-jae Sandbox presentation—and she’s the only one in a suit. Because she wants to present herself as better off than she is when she confronts In-jae. Which is great. 

39. Of course, muddying the waters of all these great Episode 1 introductory details is the context surrounding these moments, which may be the most misleading piece of narrative shorthand in the entire series—which is saying something:

1. Good Boy gets his horoscope read to him by his malfunctioning AI assistant…

2. …which tells him that he should be careful because he might run into someone he met briefly in the past…

3. …and then we cut over to several shots of Dal-mi (sharpie-ing her shoes, etc)…

4. …and then the AI assistant continues the horoscope, specifying that “the person may seem like a spring breeze, at first, but may turn into a strong winter wind and change your life completely”...

5. …which is said over several shots of In-jae (taking the selfie, etc). 

Which is to say, common TV visual parlance would suggest we are about to get a love triangle between Good Boy, Dal-mi, and In-jae. Which, of course, we absolutely do not. So…the f***, show?

40. There was a subtitle translation I found so incomprehensible that I put on the Korean closed captioning so I could copy down the Hangul and run it through a translator: Dopey Guy tells Sa-ha that she seems unapproachable…because she’s too perfect. He then starts laughing at his comment and gets an enthusiastic, impressed thumbs-up from Do-san. Which absolutely confounded me. But, when I ran the Hangul through the translator, I discovered that, in Korean, he had actually made a pun, which is why he laughed and why Do-san thought it was so clever: he essentially says Sa-ha is byeok (like a wall)—y’know, wonbyeok (perfect). Apparently, the English translator couldn’t swing something similar. 

41. Speaking of subtitles…we get this gem from Dal-mi (paraphrasing slightly): “We need to consider the needs of the visually impaired. We can’t just blindly innovate.” 

42. The way Dal-mi finds out Good Boy is the one who wrote the letters is still magnificent, and I love it with every fiber of my being. The moment itself, the setup with the phones—all of it. Perfect. 

42A. …just maybe don’t think about how the birdhouse is still in front of Grandma’s old storefront 15 years later. 

43. Do-san being the one who is aware of everyone’s secrets is kind of brilliant, because he is the least equipped to carry the weight of those lies. But what is particularly interesting about this is how easily he lies to Dal-mi, when he needs to. 

44. I really like that, when In-jae publicly rejects her step-father at the end of the show, Dopey Guy and Third Guy are there in the audience to witness it, calling back to how the two of them were there when Dal-mi called In-jae out at the Sandbox presentation in Episode 1. And I especially like that this callback highlights how they went from being antagonistic towards her, in that first episode, to being on her side in the last one. 

45. If I wasn’t so angry about the show, I’d probably have found it cute that Do-san has a painting in his bedroom of a girl on a tree swing.

46. In Episode 13, when Good Boy comes back up in the elevator after getting rid of the insurance guy who was hitting on Dal-mi, he finds (much to his surprise) Dal-mi waiting for him, exactly where she was when he left her. She then gets into the elevator with him—and invites him to come over (to help with food preparation for Chuseok). He accepts, of course, and he A) ends up staying the night; B) plays cards with Dal-mi and her family (which is, of course, what he’d told her in his letters was what he most wanted to do); C) falls asleep on the couch, allowing Dal-mi to lay him down comfortably and put a blanket on him; and D) has a talk with Dal-mi essentially about how she’s gotten used to him being a part of her life and should consider letting that mean…well, a little bit more of what it should obviously mean. It’s all adorable as hell and clearly the point at which Dal-mi begins to admit to herself that Good Boy is more than a little special to her. And, in a better story, that’s what would have happened—instead of using this lovely series of scenes to set up Do-san dramatically re-entering Dal-mi’s life when she’s the most desperate (the ransomware attack), cutting her off just as she was about to contact Good Boy for help. Because f*** you, Daryl, you can’t have nice things.

47. I have several notes about wishing Jung So-min played Dal-mi instead of Suzy. Because she would have been amazing as Dal-mi. But, as my notes also say, they’d probably have had to cast entirely different actors for the other roles, as well, for that to work, so…maybe Suzy is fine after all. 

And…yeah, that’s that.

I don’t like this show anymore, Erin. I just cannot get past that absolute disaster of an ending. Which sucks, because, even with the ominous cloud of the inevitable hellscape constantly at the edge of my awareness as I watched, there were still so many moments that I still loved like I did the first time through. And, at a certain point, sad as it may be, you have to admit that the thing you held in a special place in your heart just isn’t what you want it to be. Then pivot to loving Yoojung. 

Sigh. 

Suffice it to say, I will be dropping Start-Up from my Top Ten K-Dramas list. And, frankly, good riddance. 

But enough of that—we keep moving forward! And forward we will move to…to…uh, the next thing on my schedule. Which is…ah! Okay, yes. This one should be…y’know what, I have no idea how it’s going to go. Or, really, even what it’s about. But when has that ever stopped me, right? 

So, tune in next time for…the thing that’s next! Which will be a much better time than this! Unless it isn’t! 

Either way, I hope to see you there. (As I always do.)

More soon.

—Daryl