Kill Me, Heal Me

                            

Song of the Day
(They played a version of this very briefly during one scene, and it stuck with me as perhaps the most fitting song for our couple)


Like I said in my blurb review, this show was a mish-mash of things. Seriously--a  medical-comedy-romance-melo? But like I also said, while it wasn't necessarily objectively 'good' (the ending was rushed, they spent way too much time on flashbacks, it got a little lost in the melo in the third quarter, the heroine was played a little over-manically for about the first half), it was still good. And what I mean by that was that I, as a viewer, just didn't care about the rest of it while watching, I was so deeply engaged in the story.

I don't know what it was that sucked me in so entirely. Possibly Ji Sung's amazing acting was the start. My heart bled so equally for Shin Se Gi and Cha Do Hyun. And the plot was also so quick moving and mildly unpredictable, I always had to know what happened next, from kidnappings by drug dealers to almost kisses in a locked basement.

                  

And then I became fascinated by the actual story, the way the writer deftly tied together metaphor and mirrors and identity, names and memories and senses of self. It was much deeper than the usual kdrama, much more about the inner workings of the psyche than I expected, and I loved it. Those are themes I adore, so it was great to get to watch them played out as major arcs of a story. I became weirdly fond of the haunting soundtrack. I became deeply invested in Oh Ri On, our charming, sad writer whose love was the most self-sacrificing I've seen in a long time, but without ever wanting him to get the girl.

It had to be Do Hyun and Ri Jin, always, once I started to see the way their backstories fit together, and all the ways they saved each other, from lonely children locked in a spiral of abuse to adults struggling to deal with the induced trauma. It was them, beginning and end, two halves of a whole.

The plot never got bogged down either, which was a pleasant surprise--all those tropes writers love were briefly examined and then tossed away, from meddling second leads to corporate power struggles. This was about characters and their internal worlds, not immediate external pressures.

                        

And it was so FUNNY. Yo Na and her mad antics, Perry Park and his bombs.  The gift of  this show, I think, was that it never gave us something funny that didn't have at its heart some sadness, and it never gave us sadness that didn't have at its heart some joy. Like Ri Jin said, maybe her memories were bad, but there were some good things buried in there too.

The ending was so perfect, too, I thought, so peaceful and  contented after all the emotional pain everyone had been through. It was the perfect place to leave them, and I couldn't ask for a better image to be left with after all the soul-searing.

                    

Conclusion: I loved it, despite its flaws. It couldn't be helped.

(photos courtesy of Dramabeans)