Instead of a finale that’s essentially a drawn-out victory
lap with no reason for existing beyond filling the show’s final hour, Queen
In-hyun’s Man saved the best for last.
Poignant, powerful, and deftly scripted, episode 16 pulled together all the
show’s many tatty narrative threads and tied them into a big, gorgeous bow that
won’t soon be forgotten. It gave me goosebumps so intense they actually hurt,
and I’m pretty sure I need to rewatch the entire show now that I know we were
in good hands all along.
I enjoyed the earlier episodes, but I wasn’t as taken with them as the rest of the
blogosphere; like so many other Korean dramas, QIhM started off a bit broad and airheaded for my tastes.
Yes, it was effervescent and charming and youthful and fun—a downright
ice-cream sundae of a drama, all airy whipped cream and super-sweet hot fudge.
But for most of the show I found myself wishing that they’d bothered to serve
dinner first.
In truth, the recipe for my dream drama would involve
something like 80 percent melodrama, 15 percent comedy, and 5 percent steamy
make-out scenes. No matter how high its production values, QIhM started at a distinct disadvantage for me: its
measurements are more like 40/40/20. But I always respected how effortlessly it managed
to interweave three seemingly irreconcilable plots—a political thriller set
during the seventeenth century, a dramaland rom-com in the modern world, and a
mysterious time-travel fantasy.
Its expertly crafted plot isn’t the only marvel
Queen In-hyun’s Man has to offer. It focuses on one of the sweetest OTPs of all time, complete with
lots of fun banter and enough physical electricity to power South Korea for at
least a decade. Kdrama kisses may be getting more and more believable these
days, but
QIhM tops them all by
including some of the warmest, coziest hugs ever filmed. Unlike the awkward,
dead-fish embraces we’re used to, Ji Hyun Woo (who was also wonderfully cuddly
in My Sweet Seoul) tightly wraps himself around the female lead, as if
he could not possibly be close enough to her. (It turns out there may be good
reason for this: in a stunningly drama-friendly turn of events, he apparently confessed his love for her
at a fan meeting for the show. Are you paying attention, Hong sisters? You
could get a great script out of this.)
Queen In-hyun’s Man also
uses its magical McGuffin often and well, making the time-traveling talisman a
key factor in all three of the show’s contrasting plotlines. I’ve never seen
another Kdrama that so comfortably walks the line between the natural and the
supernatural—even Padam Padam, which
I really loved, lost sight of its otherwordly influences for most of its middle
episodes. On the
other hand, Operation Proposal kept
its supernatural aspects so front and center that they quickly got boring and
laughably repetitive.
I didn’t fully surrender my heart to this show until the very last minute
for a few reasons. In spite of lovely cinematography and a cast of likeable
characters, much of QIhM’s plot zooms by
at fast-forward pace, popping from past to present, from here-and-now to a
dizzying series of flashbacks, flashfowards, and maybe even a few
flashsideways. It felt like a vaguely overstuffed Cliffs Notes version of a
really excellent original.
Maybe it was because I missed visual cues while focusing on
the subtitles, but I kept getting lost in the timeline. (Were they torturing
him then? Or now? Or then, then? Did
they really just jump forward one month and then back one month in the space of
25 seconds?) What it boils down to, I think, is a story full of great
ideas that can’t be fully developed in the allotted time. Sure, QIhM is zippy fun, but all those boring, unsexy
scenes it left on the cutting room floor (or the screenwriter’s harddrive)
could have played an essential role: they might have provided the connective
tissue necessary to seamlessly hold together what wound up feeling like a
fairly choppy drama.
I was also a bit suspicious of the script’s treatment of
its male lead, Kim Boong Do. Clearly, this is a drama hero I was born to adore:
he’s a brainy scholar who excels with both the pen and the sword. He loves
learning and books. He has a calm, gentle charisma and a deep kindness that’s
impossible to overlook. Nonetheless, he’s a figure half-sketched: The script
made it clear that he was a widower in his timeline, but never once touched on
what that might mean to him as he entered into a romantic relationship in the
modern world. Did he love his wife? Did he miss her? Was he afraid to fall in
love knowing firsthand that you can’t always protect the people you care
about? QIhM lacked the maturity to
address any of these questions. It would have been vastly better to eliminate
that plot point altogether and make it instead the servant of his murdered
sister who gave him the talisman. How can anyone hope to build a character on a
field of sand like this, ignoring the foundation that should underpin the
entire structure?
And then, of course, there’s the issue of the female lead.
Choi Hee Jin isn’t someone who’s spent a lot of time being responsible for
herself. In her professional life she’s an infantilized celebrity who shows up
(on time or not), puts on a pretty costume, and recites some lines. In her
personal life, she lives with her manager, a best friend, boss, and parent all
rolled into one. She also spends a lot of time apologizing for how stupid she
is, and as the show progresses it becomes clear that this is actually a
get-out-jail-free card for her: “I’m stupid, so of course I can’t [fill in the
blank].”
It’s not until Boong Do shows arrives, fresh from the
1690s, that Hee Jin steps forward as someone who has the ability to understand
the world around her and be an active participant in it. Boong Do doesn’t know
how to open a car door or use an elevator or board an airplane, so as their
relationship blossoms it’s her turn to do the thinking. In episode 3, he even
lays the situation out for her: “I’m no different than an idiot. Treat me as an
idiot by nature and just take care of me.” If my love for this drama was
charted in graph form, that would have be the high point. I saw ahead of us a
clear path for Hee Jin: She would slowly come to realize that she wasn’t so
dumb after all, and thanks to her dreamy Joseon boyfriend, claim her personal
agency as a modern woman.
And yes, this is where the show ultimately goes. But right
up until the very end her character’s growth from a ditzy bubblehead was built
on the most tenuous of ground. At one point in episode 11, Hee Jin borrows
Boong Do’s words to say that she’ll take responsibility for him. That, I
thought, was the gender-bendy, politically correct moment when I could finally
give my heart fully to this OTP. But then Boong Do spoke up, and implied that she was nothing more than a girl who couldn’t understand men and therefore needed him to
save her. How could she ever take responsibility?
This was said in a joking way, but there are some places
you just don’t go. It seems the writers realized this, too: in the next episode
they addressed the problem by making Boong Do tell Hee Jin flat out that she wasn’t stupid. But for this show to be at all satisfying for me, Hee Jin needed to
accept this fact for herself and Boong Do needed to support her in it—not cut
her down in the name of bickering humor.
And then episode 16 happened, and gave me almost
everything I wanted for these two characters. In the end, Hee Jin’s smarts and
faith in herself saved the day in the most moving, breathless way I could
possibly ask for.
I must admit, though, that in their headlong rush to get
where they were going, the writers of Queen In-hyun’s Man often blinked at pesky little things like the rules
of time travel they themselves established. Boong Do needed to have his life
threatened to jump forward in time. But at the end of one of the Joseon
episodes, he wandered off by himself, and the next time we saw him was in the
future. How did that work, exactly? He had already stuck his sword in the
ground, so that tool was out of play. Did he hold his breath until he turned
blue? And how about the time jump from the bathroom of Hee Jin’s hospital room
on the 13th floor? In several scenes we saw evidence that his physical
coordinates stayed the same in each time. Are we to believe that he used the
magical parachute issued to all Confucian scholars to survive a fall through a
hundred feet of open air? Whoever was in charge of continuance should also have spent a bit more time considering the status of Boong Do’s top knot—it came and went rather more than it should have in the last few episodes.
And then, of course, there’s the show’s greatest failure:
that spiffy, attention-getting opening scene? Well, it doesn’t match up with
the drama’s closing scene…or any scene at all, as far as I can remember. But
you know what? Even if the chef changed the recipe partway through, that
doesn’t mean Queen In-hyun’s Man is any
less of a tasty treat.
(P.S.: Want to travel back in time and read the similar-but-snarkier incarnation of this review written before I watched the last two episodes?)
