This is exactly why I avoid kdramas with political and legal themes: I get easily triggered.

But despite being traumatized in the first 20 minutes of the show, I persevered for two episodes because the male lead is Song Seung Heon.  You see, my self-prescribed, and totally non-lascivious goal was to find out if the director and writer made him strip nekkid in the first week of the series.

Who could forget this scene from “My Princess”?

And this scene?

Kidding aside, I feel sorry for the guy because his body of work (i.e., his collection of movies and tv shows) is eclipsed by his sculpted body. It’s hard to be taken seriously as an actor when the lasting impression he leaves on the viewers is his shiny, hairless chest.

I’m delighted to report to you that he didn’t have any shower scenes in the first two episodes.

So, I wasn’t triggered by his naked body but I was triggered by other things. Let me list them.

1. Captain Firefly

Yup. He’s baaaaaack! He plays the teenage version of Song Seung Heon’s character.

I tell you. For a nanosecond, my brain froze, and I had to activate my mental facial recognition app. When I realized that he was Captain Firefly minus the bandanna, long hair and smug smile, I cracked up.

I guess he’s the “new face” of tvN.

The good news is he didn’t have to use his boyish charms to wheedle his way out of a crisis. He actually had to KNEEL to beg for his mom’s store to be spared from closure.

But the bad news is his teenager character had unprotected sex with another teenager whom he just met on vacation. lol.

Why is he playing these foolish characters?? Has been typecast as a player or a ladies’ man?

2. “Optics”

Remember this word: optics. It has a special meaning in politics. 🙂

When the hero Wi Daehan was eight years old, his mother brought him with her to witness her confrontation with his cheating father. His father was out on a date with the Other Woman and a nasty knock-down, drag-out fight ensued.

To me, this is the moment when he unconsciously learned the usefulness of OPTICS, or how an event or a decision is PERCEIVED by the public.

In retrospect, Daehan says, “Mom taking me over there was a calculated move. If she showed such a scene to her child, she thought my dad would stop cheating. But as a result, Dad chose to divorce my mom. And between my Mom and Dad, I had to choose which one to live with.”

Dad: Once I leave, I’ll never see your mom again. If you choose to live with your mom, I won’t see you again either.
Mom: How dare you threaten the child!
Dad: It’s not a threat, I’m stating the facts. Daehan, me or your mom. Who do you want to live with.

In retrospect again, he says, “For an eight-year-old child it was a tremendous choice. So I used a method which I relied on for making hard choices.”

Then the eight-year-old Daehan began to sing the Korean version of “Eeny meeny miny mo.” It’s a nursery rhyme used to eliminate or pick a player in a game.

The purported message of the grown-up Daehan here is that his life-altering moments were determined, not by careful deliberation, but by sheer luck. A game of chance decided his fate.

Or did it really?

When you look at the way his eight-year-old self played the game, you’ll notice that he cheated to select his mother. On the third stanza of the nursery rhyme, he kept singing but he’d stop picking between his mom and dad. His pointer finger rested on his mother. He only restarted when the song was down to the last four words, “Ding. Dong. Deng. Dong!” He chose his mom.

Do you see what happened there? He manipulated the game so he could pick out his mom. Of course, after seeing his mom duke it out with the Other Woman, his sympathies lay with mom. To put it simply: the optics of a suffering mom vs a cheating dad influenced his decision to vote for his mom.

This small flashback gives the viewers an insight into Wei Daehan’s past. It should also teach viewers that life isn’t at all that transparent as they think it is. Sometimes, things aren’t at all what they seem to appear. And, for better or for worse, the “appearances” of events can shape and change spectators’ perception and opinions. They fall for the optics. And that’s the theme of this kdrama, which is aptly called, “The Great Show.”

3. Opposition Research

This triggered me, too. Come on now.  Who doesn’t do “opposition research” nowadays? The male lead Wei Daehan lost because he was running a seriously unsophisticated campaign.

He was going up against the Establishment politician so he should have expected them to hunt for skeletons in his closet.

His absentee father was obviously his weakest link.  And he could have protected himself by a) trying to mend fences with his father before campaigning, b) finding a bigger scandal about his opponent and redirecting the negative focus on them, c) disclosing the truth of his estrangement BEFORE it was uncovered, or d) lol, gaining the public’s empathy by playing the victim card.

To his credit, however, he didn’t play the victim card.

Instead, he tried to gain the public’s sympathy by doing this crazy “Three-Step Pilgrimage of Repentance.” As the name implies, his repentance required him to take three steps (literally, three steps) and then to prostrate himself on the ground. It’s a “pilgrimage” because he began from the city center and walked all the way to his father’s ossuary outside of Seoul. It took him about six? five? days.

As a Westerner, I thought this was over-the-top but I understood the need for “optics.”

Wei Daehan was giving in to the people’s demand that he should have SHOWN filial piety to his father while his father was alive. Daehan gave the people what they wanted (i.e., his shame and punishment) while at the same time, he SHOWED them that he was a *noble* person (quote-unquote noble person) so he could win back their sympathies and their votes.

Do you see now where this story is heading?

Daehan declared that he desired to be a politician to get rid of corrupt politicians. In his own words, “From that day on, I had a dream. To become an assemblyman and to clean out those privileged pieces of trash.”

However, in the process of becoming an assemblyman, he began to corrupt himself, and doing these trashy things politicians did which he deplored.

He was becoming one of “them.”

Now, it would all have been easy for him had he come out with the TRUTH that his father was the one who walked away from his family and cut ties with him when he was a child. Seriously now: what kind of father wouldn’t vigorously protest losing custody of his son because of a stupid “Eeny, meeny, miny mo” game? His father should have declared the outcome of the game as stupid, and insisted on his shared visitation rights as a parent.

That’s the truth there.

But if Daehan had opted to share this family secret to the public, then he would have played the “victim card,” and DISHONORED his father’s name. His father was already dead. So was his mother.  And the Other Woman wouldn’t be able to contest Daehan’s version of the events, and salvage her reputation and the father’s. All things considered, they were the adulterers.

In my opinion, this is what many viewers don’t get that about Wei Daewan’s character.

As I said, it’s to Daewan’s CREDIT that he didn’t play the victim card. He chose to be notoriously known as the “Nation’s Sinner” rather than throw his dead father under the bus. He could have revealed the truth and let his dad be called, posthumously, as the “Bad Dad” or the “Nation’s Adulterer” for abandoning his own son for another woman.

Daewan’s choice of action tells me that despite all his shady-ness, opportunism, and self-promotion, he’s still capable of SACRIFICING himself for the benefit of another person, even if that person was one that he despised. He’s redeemable.

With this insight into his character, it’s also easy to understand why he didn’t reveal the result of the paternity test to his “daugher” DaJung.

A bit of background:

DaJung arrived at his doorstep claiming to be his biological daughter. Her dead mother had a one-time fling with him when they were in high school (or was it early years in college?). DaJung’s mother died recently and she and her siblings had no other place to go to but Daewan’s home. Her siblings weren’t blood-related to Daewan. Nevertheless, DaJung insisted on her father to take them all in, for humanitarian reasons.

At first glance, he looked like he was doing a trashy thing and use the children to gain public sympathy again. But if viewers review the timeline, he proposed sending the children to the orphanage even before he found out the results of the paternity test because he had no means to financially support all four of them.

Daewon: I went there (the orphanage) myself. It’s a clean building and the director is nice person.
DaJung: And so?
Daewon: You may think I’m grand since I was an assemblyman. But once an assemblyman is done, he’s nothing. And becoming someone’s guardian is a heavy responsibility to bear. I can’t afford to take on that responsibility right now.

DaJung: Even if…I’m your daughter? You’ll send us there?
Daewon: Even if I’m your biological dad, I’ve no relations with your siblings, right? I’ve no obligation nor the means to take them all in. And I can’t tear you and your siblings apart, right?

When he was forced to make another life-altering decision, he did his “Eeny meeny miny mo” again,

but the OPTICS of the kids being defenseless in the world had already worked its magic on him.

Against his better judgment, and despite his depleted resources, he went to rescue the kids and claim them all as his. They would be a burden on him but he decided to take them all in. And of course, being the shady guy that he was, he was going to get something out of this new family arrangement.

Now, in Episode 2, he chose NOT to inform Dajung about the paternity test result. He allowed her to continue believing that he was her father and that he had rescued them all. He also allowed her to think that he was helping them all out in exchange for her help in his political campaign.

I think, however, that he was repeating the same course of action when his father died. With his father, he protected the illusion that his dad was the “good” guy. With DaJung, he was protecting her illusion that her mother was an “honest” woman who told her the truth about her dad. She obviously looked up to her mother by the way she bragged that she was just “like her mom.”

To me, Wei Daehan is too willing to be painted as the blackguard or the bad guy for the sake of preserving someone else’s “good” reputation and maintaining someone else’s delusions.

As self-aggrandizing that he is, he does care for others.

4. Campaign Staff

Okkkaaay. Who runs a modern-day campaign with just a campaign manager? This was a triggering moment for me.

I say that Wei Daehan lost partly because of his staffing issues. He required:

political consultants to research and advise on strategy,
pollster,
foot soldiers or volunteers to bring the campaign door-to-door,
press relations to handle the press other media affairs,
social media person just to handle social media,
finance staff to deal with fundraising, and a
legal team to cover all their asses.

He couldn’t be a one-man show.

His supposed campaign manager looked dumber than him. It struck me that the campaign manager was a dolt when they were watching a panel discussion on TV and the campaign manager didn’t immediately get how the comment of the panelist Attorney Kang was actually a “backhanded compliment.”

Moderator: Coincidentally, Atty. Kang attended high school with Assemblyman Wie Daehan. Also your father is Assemblyman Kang Byung Hoon who is his opponent in the same district.
Kang: That’s why I hesitate to comment about this.
Moderator: However you must say something. That’s why you’re here with us.
Kang: I’m being cautious, and to state just one thing, all the criticisms against Assemblyman Wie Daehan are overboard. Assemblyman Wei was a good son to his mother who passed away a few years back. Due to this incident, labeling Assemblyman Wie a “sinner”…isn’t it a form of a witch-hunt?

Daehan’s assessment was right on the money. He said, “That was a double-sided punch….’He’s not a sinner’ makes people remember the word ‘sinner’ and not the first part. On the flip side, Kang Kyung Hoon is an honorable father with such an unbiased son.”

Seriously.  The show should have invited a representative from Daehan’s campaign, as special guest, to appear on TV for that particular segment.

5. Saving face

That night after losing the election, he’s dumped by his girlfriend. He knew that he was about to be dumped by his fake girlfriend. There was really no love lost between them. Their relationship was a strategic partnership. It was created for “optics.”

lol. Remember that buzzword word now: Optics. That’s why the title of this kdrama is “The Great Show.” Everything is for show. And that’s what optics means.

Instead of getting mad at being dumped, Daewon ended the relationship GRACIOUSLY. He preempted her, saying, “I didn’t keep my promise to you, so I’ll take responsibility. Let’s not see each other again. In my current state, I have no room to take care of you. I’m sorry.”

The girl then replied, “Oppa, you’ll become a successful politician. You say what the other party wants to say in their place.” And she got out of the car.

Her parting words are what I call a damning praise.

On one level, she’s praising him for his ability to express things better than she could ever have. On another level, she’s insulting him. What she’s saying is that he’s got it what it takes to become a politician because he can FAKE SINCERITY.

Look: they both knew that the nice things he said were simply to keep up the “appearance.” Moreover, they both knew that she insulted and trashed him for losing the election.

She said these, didn’t she? “How will you make a living? You come from a poor family and no job to go back to” and “What station would hire you? The national ‘sinner’?”

So his seemingly kind words to her were actually a “double-sided punch” just like what Attorney Kang delivered on the tv show. He was SCHOOLING her on how to break-up with dignity, with class.

That’s why on the third and deeper level, she’s damning him. She knew she’d been insulted. Because he took the high road, he made her look like she’s in the gutter.

And that’s why, in her estimation, he’ll make a very good politician. lol.

So this is my first and last impressions of this kdrama. I think it’ll be an interesting watch. If it wasn’t a political and legal drama, I’d stay to watch this Wei Daehan’s rehabilitation into a “good” guy.