Big Post-mortem

I wish I’d averted my eyes, too, Kyung Joon.

So I finally got around to watching episodes 15 and 16 of Big. (And yes, it was just as much of a chore as that sentence makes it sound.) On a WTF scale of 1 to 10, this drama’s ending easily rates a 32.

I find it amusing that episode 4 featured a guest appearance by the work of a Russian writer—Turgenev’s First Love, per the Dramabeans recap. If only the Hong sisters had been thinking about Chekov instead, we might all have been spared a significant amount of frustration and annoyance. But I guess they missed the Literature 101 class when Chekov’s greatest gift to beginning writers was discussed: “If in act one you have a pistol hanging on the wall,” he advised a friend, “then it must fire in the last act.”

This is a helpful reminder to avoid pointless excess, to “make every character sing for its supper,” as one of my own writing teachers put it. If someone had piped up with this tip while the Hongs were drafting Big, I suspect I’d be writing a swooning, sloppy-with-love review of the show instead of shrugging it off as an embarrassing waste of time. Because, after 15 episodes snoozing in Kyung Joon's body, the unused pistol’s name is Yoon Jae.

Whether it’s because low ratings forced a mid-shooting change of strategy or because the Hong sisters need to lay off the crack cocaine, the first half of this drama set up a scenario that the second half had almost nothing to do with. The nifty mystery of Yoon Jae’s true feelings for Da Ran? Unaddressed. Why Yoon Jae was going to LA? Unaddressed. The reversal of the body swap? Unaddressed. Were memories lost and then regained, as posited in the last few episodes? Unaddressed. The giant, glowing, neon pistol that was the centerpiece of the early episodes was not only unfired by the time this drama’s finale rolled around, it was thrown out on the trash heap with yesterday’s dumplings.

I cannot even believe what I just saw: Did the character of Yoon Jae truly never make an appearance in this show’s entire timeline? Did Da Ran never have to face up to the fact that she cheated on her fiancé when he was in a coma? Did Yoon Jae’s family never become a real family? Did Kyung Joon never accept the familial love he longed for? Did Kyung Joon and Da Ran never have to convince her parents they were in love? His parents? Did Yoon Jae never have to let her go?

Sure, the last few episodes were deeply terrible, but I’d checked out a long time before. Big’s trajectory had clearly been out of control for a while (if not since the very beginning), so it’s no surprise that the end result was a catastrophic crash.

As far as I’m concerned, Big’s slow-motion failure began with the time jump at the end of episode 5. Up until that point, the show’s focus was on its compelling cast of characters and the complex web of relationships between them. The body swap was a device that allowed the writers to twist that web of relationships to the breaking point, giving us an opportunity to see what happened to the characters when their every point of connection was suddenly and fundamentally changed.

When the time jump happened, it was as if someone hit the Reset button. While some shows have benefited from this sort of narrative compartmentalization (Will It Snow at Christmas? comes to mind), Big just lost its way. Instead of developing the themes and characters it had created, it turned into a one-trick pony—a saccharine love story stripped of anything like nuance, spirit, or momentum. 

Episodes 15 and 16 felt as if the writers were throwing in any old scenes to fill time, intentionally staying away from the heart of things. Did they decide that the boy playing Kyung Joon looked too young to actually hook him up with Da Ran in the end? Did the allure of Gong Yoo prevent them from telling the story they needed to tell? Heck, did he have screen-time stipulations in his contract that made undoing the body swap impossible? The shift away from the show’s original premise might have been one thing if the romance was so epic it couldn’t be denied, but the scenes focusing on Kyung Joon’s relationship with Da Ran were cute at best, and dragged-out product placements at worst.

The Hong sisters may not be Shakespeare, but before thus show I actually trusted them to tell a decent story. How they went so tin-eared this time around I can’t even begin to imagine. I’m not ready to write them off forever, but I’ll be watching any future dramas they pen with a parachute on, ready for a dramatic escape at the first sign of things going downhill, ala Big.

P.S.: How about we erase our memories and pretend that the YouTube video below posted by psychobrit2008 is how the drama actually ended? I would have been able to forgive an awful lot if the last  scene had been even remotely satisfying...

Big: Homestretch, Here We Come

Watching Big as it airs in Korea has been a weird experience for me.

Usually, I wait until a drama is fully subtitled and available online before starting it. I’m now realizing this means that I spend very little time assessing the show’s ongoing quality—it’s an organic whole when you’re free to watch episodes at will, a complete entity rather than 16 (or more) free-standing episodes that each demand individual scrutiny.

Spending time with a drama that’s currently airing is also strange for another reason: I’m not spoiled rotten the way I usually am when watching older shows. When deciding what to watch based on years worth of online reviews, there’s no way to avoid spoilers. I almost always know what’s coming from the very beginning—the way the OTP will fizzle out by the drama’s midpoint, that the show will take a quality nosedive after episode 12, that the shocking surprise ending involves incest. (Okay. I guess that one’s a surprise to no one watching a Korean drama.)  Truly, I’m not convinced that I want to avoid spoilers, anyway; there’s something to be said for the comfort of knowing just what to expect.

This is exactly what I don’t have with Big. Waiting for new episodes to air feels like hanging in suspended animation: there’s no moving forward of my own volition, so I have lots of time to think about exactly where the show stands, snapshot-style, at any given moment. And episodes watched this way take on their own independent identities (“episode 2 was amazing, but episode 8 was kind of boring”) in a way that just doesn’t happen when marathoning an already completed drama (“Dal Ja’s Spring was awesome!”).

At this point, it’s hard for me to judge Big’s quality because my experience of watching it has been so very different from all the other dramas I’ve seen.

Here’s what I know for sure: At the beginning, I loved how Big’s traditional-to-the-bones noona romance was enriched by the drama’s trippy premise and mindfucky storytelling. With each passing episode, though, the former is overpowering the later. After the time skip, my greatest fear was that the changed circumstances would downplay the body swap angle and level the balance of power in the OTP’s relationship, turning Big into a straightforward romance just like all the others. And guess what? That’s exactly what happened.

I still enjoy watching Big and am excited to see where it goes, but as things stand my primary reaction to the show is disappointment. As of episode 12, the originality and excitingly skewed perspectives of the first few episodes have been jettisoned in favor of a slightly above average love story and enough mercenary product placements to choke a blue whale. And now that much of the mystery has been revealed to the viewer it’s physically painful watching the characters slowly, sllloooowwwwllly piecing it together for themselves.

What’s good about this show could still save it—an amazing, knock-your-socks-off performance by a beloved lead actor (although even Gong Yoo’s significant charms seem to be flagging in the most recent episodes, thanks to the underwriting of his character), a compelling central storyline that is chock full the of potential for greatness, and a pleasantly amiable tone and cast that shouldn’t be underestimated.

I could easily fall back in love with Big, provided that the home stretch uses some snazzy narrative sleight of hand to pull the many fragments of this drama into focus. Will that happen? Painfully, the only option is waiting another two weeks to see.

Some notes:
• There are still random mysteries out there:
—Did Kyung Joon’s dad fall in love with his mom, the surrogate? Is that why Yoon Jae’s mom hates them so much?
—Why did Da Ran’s mom have a shaved head, as mentioned in episode 12? Did she shave her hair in protest of her parents’ disapproval of her lover? Or was she being treated for cancer, maybe bringing her into orbit with Yoon Jae’s dad?
—Will Ma Ri’s talismans—and Choong sik’s involvement with them—come back into the story?
—Does the Miracle book have another part to play? Da Ran and Kyung Joon don’t know about it yet, after all.
—Did anything significant happen at the wedding? Why hasn’t the drama included a single scene from such a momentous event? Was another wedding not in the budget? Or are those wily Hong sisters intentionally holding out on us?
—Will Kyung Joon’s body wake up on his birthday, as Ma Ri’s dream seemed to portend? And whose soul will be in it if it does? (I suspect the catalyst for this will be gathering the four family members together in one place—Yoon Jae, Kyung Joon, and mom and dad.)

• When Da Ran removed her ring and put it in a glass in episode 12, it recalled Kyung Joon’s soul-swapping demonstration in episode 2. But in contrast to the earlier scene, Da Ran’s soul is represented by the ring and the ties she has to another person. It’s oddly fitting that such a flat, motivationless character is embodied by nothing more than a symbol of matrimony, while Kyung Joon and Yoon Jae’s souls were embodied by fully-formed beings in the shape of robot figurines.

In his cups, episode 2

In her cup, episode 12

Little Thoughts on Big’s 5th and 6th Episodes

I’m still liking Big a lot, but (in spite of Gong Yoo’s outrageous toothsomeness) I’m a little less insanely in love with its most recent installments than I was with the first few. Read on for spoilery discussion about this week’s episodes.


P.S.: Now with newly corrected names that actually reflect the ones used in the show! ::facepalm::

Big Love: Episodes 1 through 4

These days, the word marathon is more closely related to sitting on the couch than running insane distances (or that city in Greece, even). For me, it usually means devoting a chunk of time to watching a single drama without interruption, as if it were an enormous movie made for viewing from beginning to end in one sitting.

Really, though, that’s not a marathon: it’s a sprint. Rather than being a drawn out over the course of weeks and weeks, your experience of the show is over in the blink of an eye. Knowing you can just hit the play button on the next episode whenever you want unavoidably changes your involvement with the plot and characters: you may be totally immersed in the show for a while, but having easy access to all the answers discourages deep thinking along the way.

I’ve always liked marathon-style viewing of television—waiting until a whole season is available and then devoting all my television time to that one show. But now that I’m watching episodes of Big as they air, I’ve realized I was missing something all this time: curiosity and conjecture and the prolonged tension of having no choice but to wait an entire week to see how things turns out. Big is the perfect show for this, too—it’s exposing its secrets ever so slowly, one tiny but significant revelation at a time. As of episode 4, the characters and overarching plot are still only beginning to come into focus, and each new installment begs to be pored over for hints about what it all might mean.

I’ve only seen a few dramas written by the Hong sisters, Big’s screenwriters, but this show seems pretty significantly different from their recent efforts. A weird fun fact: there’s a fundamental difference between the things described by the words labyrinth and maze. A labyrinth has only one possible path—if you start at the beginning, you will always end up at the end, having inevitably walked the very same way and taken the very same turns. A maze, on the other hand, is full of possible paths; some are dead ends, some are red herrings, and some will take you where you want to go. Greatest Love and My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho, the Hong sisters’ last dramas, were labyrinths. From episode 1 you knew exactly where they were going and pretty much how they would get there. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it is a track record that makes Big’s more open-ended plot feel all the more exciting and surprising. As of episode 4, Big is definitely a maze. Sure, it’s clear that love will be the eventual destination, but it’s not clear how the show will take us there—or who will even be involved. This Christopher-Nolan-lite storytelling, where each new revelation changes everything you thought you understood before, is working absurdly well for me.

Beyond the premise of a young man suddenly finding himself in an adult body, Big doesn’t have much in common with the 1980s movie of the same name. (I do seem to remember that the Tom Hanks version also included a race-car bed, though.) The weird parallel I see here is with The Host, a novel by Stephenie Meyer. It wasn’t much of a book, but The Host had a great marketing hook: “it’s the first love triangle involving two bodies.” In a lot of ways, that’s what Big is shaping up to be: while he’s in Seo Yoon Jae’s grown-up body, eighteen-year-old Kang Kyung Joon is falling in love with Yoon Jae’s fiancée. What this development means for everyone involved—and whether Yoon Jae himself will ever show up at the party—is a complete mystery at this point.

Yoon Jae is one of Big’s many marvels. He’s a huge, complicated jigsaw puzzle just waiting to be put together, but the show is giving him to us one piece at a time with only the vaguest hints about what the finished product might look like. We’ve seen him a number of times—mostly in scenes filtered through the perceptions of other characters—but have yet to develop a sense for who he truly is; all we know for sure about Yoon Jae is that he’s utterly inscrutable. Even during flashbacks to cute couple moments he shared with Da Ran, his expression is unreadable. He might be tentatively happy, he might feel trapped, or he might even be repulsed.

His role in the show’s plot is just as obscure: It’s obvious that Yoon Jae is uptight, emotionally distant, and prone to keeping secrets, but beyond that anything’s possible. Is he a creep who’s leading on one woman while he’s engaged to another? Is he in love with the female lead, but afraid to fully commit to her for some crazy Kdrama reason? Heck, maybe he’s actually the perfect man his fiancée believes him to be.

The flashback to the wedding scene in episode 3 is the biggest argument for Yoon Jae actually liking Gil Da Ran—but even that can’t be entirely trusted. It’s hearsay, after all, told by Yoon Jae’s coworker who witnessed only two of the events included in the flashback. I’ve since rewatched episode 1 and can report that one point of Yoon Jae’s story doesn’t check out: He wasn’t actually in the elevator with Da Ran when she was delivering the flowers. Whether this is an oversight or something meaningful, I can’t say. The other flashback scenes were shot carefully enough so that Yoon Jae really could have been just out of frame, but there’s no hiding big Gong Yoo and his checked jacket in that little elevator.

Where’s Yoon Jae?
 (episode 3) 

Not here...
(episode 1)

 

With Kyung Joon, on the other hand, what you see is what you get. He’s a cocky, scowling teenage boy who’s never afraid to say what he really thinks. He and Da Ran have an easy, bickering chemistry from the very first time they meet, and I can barely wait to see their mutual attraction evolve into full-blown love. Yoon Jae may be a dreamy unicorn of a man, but it’s impossible to imagine him ever really belonging to anyone but himself. In contrast, belonging to someone is the one thing Kyung Joon hungers for most. One of the most poignant moments in Big’s first episode showed him enviously watching Da Ran and her brother, loving siblings with a close relationship.

When Kyung Joon lost his mother, he lost his strongest tie with someone outside himself. Suddenly relocated to Korea, he’s not making great inroads at rejoining the human race: At his new school, he immediately gets into a fight with his classmates, the people who should be his friends. His aunt and uncle are in Korea, but they don’t live with him or even care about his welfare--his aunt was the one loading frozen pizzas in his freezer in episode 1. She’s not going to be a mother figure for him.

This lack of connection is something Kyung Joon and Yoon Jae share. Both live alone and are isolated from their families in a culture that values shared multi-generational households. And although each is the object of a female character’s passionate love, neither returns that love. (It’s open for discussion in Yoon Jae’s case whether this female character is his colleague, or Da Ran herself.)

Big’s central plot device is another example of their anchorlessness. What greater disconnect can there be than not recognizing the face looking back at you in the mirror? Usually it’s Yoon Jae we see reaching out to someone but failing to actually touch them, first to Da Ran as she’s about to fall down the stairs at the wedding, then to Kyung Joon during the car accident when their bodies are switched. But when he wakes up in the morgue, Kyung Joon also reaches out without making a real connection: only this time, he’s reaching out to his own reflection.

I think it will eventually come out that Yoon Jae and Kyung Joon have one more thing in common: their dad. There have been hints that Kyung Joon’s dad is still alive and somewhere nearby, but Kyung Joon doesn’t seem to know about it. And it may take a child of divorce to notice this sort of thing, but I think it’s safe to say that Yoon Jae’s parents are separated. They’re always discussed individually (per Da Ran, “both his parents live overseas,” not “his parents live overseas”), and while Yoon Jae has pictures of himself with his mom and his dad, he doesn’t have any with his mom and dad. I’m hoping the Miracle picture book will fit into this storyline somehow, maybe having been written by their dad.

The female lead, as is often the way with dramas by the Hong sisters, barely merits discussion. Da Ran is cute and naive and needy and displays only occasional flashes of backbone. It’s easy to see what draws Kyung Joon to her, though. She’s effortlessly nurturing, stepping in almost against her own will to comfort and care for him. From absently handing Kyung Joon his silverware to getting him a school uniform to nursing him when he’s sick, Da Ran has taken on his lost mother’s role. She’s the only person in the world who understands him fully, and it’s increasingly clear that he feels safer in her presence than almost anywhere else. Kyung Joon may not have acknowledged his feelings for Da Ran yet, but he’s stepping in again and again to protect her. Seeing her hurt or taken advantage of upsets him, whether it’s at the hands of the students in her class or her fiancée. And as for Da Ran, she was immediately at ease around Kyung Joon. It’s hard to imagine that this bossy, physically aggressive woman is the same clingy little girl Yoon Jae knows.

For a long time, I was in denial that Kyung Joon and Da Ran would be this show’s OTP. The spark between them is intense (in either body), but for me there’s a slight problem: Kyung Joon in his real body looks like a boy, while Da Ran looks like a woman. Most noona romances involve older characters, so the age difference is a less glaring. The difference between a 25 year old and a 30 year old is mostly their lifestyles, but an 18-year-old highschooler and his teacher-cum-mother? That’s a big theoretical ick, although not necessarily a deal-breaker. The show itself seems to be saying that we can’t discount this relationship—it hasn’t come up in the script yet, but the character charts indicate that there’s also a huge age difference between Da Ran’s parents, who met under similar circumstances. (Without the body swap, I presume.)

And it’s not too late for Yoon Jae to come back and sweep Da Ran off her feet, either. He hasn’t had a chance to speak for himself yet—who knows what he’ll say when he does? I’m betting that he really does love Da Ran, and I can think of a few ways to forgive that packed bag and ticket to LA. Maybe Yoon Jae’s mom lives there, and he intended to visit in hopes of convincing her to accept Da Ran as his wife. (His mom saying they’ll talk about the wedding when they meet in person sounded pretty foreboding.) Maybe Yoon Jae realized he had a half-brother in LA and wanted to meet him. There’s nothing to put the fear of commitment in you like your parents’ foibles and failed relationships, so that could be why he’s so aloof around Da Ran. My money is on the second half of the drama revolving around Yoon Jae waking up in Kyung Joon’s body and realizing he needs to fight for Da Ran. (And, with the way things are going, my eventual death from sheer delight.)


In the early episodes of the show, we’re shown reflections again and again: during the accident, at the morgue, in the bus stop billboard. In my dream world this would be setting the stage for Da Ran’s realization that the Yoon Jae she loves is one dimensional—she’s in love with the idea of Yoon Jae and what he is, not who he is. The body swapping would be her wake-up call, a reminder that what’s on the surface isn’t always what’s true.

So far, I couldn’t love Big more. Its quality may have suffered a bit since its beautifully composed first episode,  but this is a surprisingly touching, funny, and romantic drama that’s just right for compulsive theorizing. I’m already insanely invested in Big’s plot and characters. Where it goes from here is anybody’s guess, but I can’t wait to find out.


(P.S.: Another difference between watching a show as it airs and waiting for it to be completed? Everyone who has a kdrama blog is writing about the very same things at the very same time, and I’m squirmy-uncomfortable about being part of the crowd on this one. My experience of fannish writing is mostly limited to pop music, which was different: even if forty people wrote about the same concert, they were really writing about forty totally different experiences. With television, we’re given a prepackaged experience that can only be milked for so much insight. I’m avoiding other people’s commentary about Big, but what’s the point? I’m sure untold numbers have already written about the very same things I just wrote about. ::sigh::)