I said I had 10 things to bitch about, didn’t I? I only gave my first five so here’s the last five.

Crash Landing on You: Episode 10, part 1

5. The Overrated Moment

I already wrote about here, Crash Landing on You: Ep 10, The Reunion

I can only take so much over-the-top heroics. There are still three weeks or 6 episodes to go. The director should scale down on these Rambo-style rescue missions and go back to basics.

I didn’t sign up for this:

I want more of these scenes:

gif credit: xiaozhanns’ tumblr

4. The mother-and-daughter drama

Please don’t drag this drama till the end.

Aside from JungHyuk, Seri’s weak spot is her “fake” mother. I was shaking my hand when she played the aggrieved daughter. She didn’t question for a second whether she got hold of the wrong end of the stick, and her mother had been worried about her disappearance. Her mother audibly released a deep breath upon seeing her.

That could have been a sigh of relief, but she construed it to be sigh of exasperation because she was apologizing afterwards.

SR: I’m sorry, Mom.
Mom: What do you mean?
SR: Did you hope that I would come back? When my company’s stock price bottomed out, a lot of people bought a lot of stocks dirt cheap. Among them, Sang-a bought the largest number of stocks. And you were next in line.
Mom: That was–
SR: I grew that company all on my own. It doesn’t belong to your kids. It belongs to me. Did you want to take my company away from me, too?
Mom: Seri-ya.
SR: Ah. Because you thought I was dead? Okay. Yes. It’s understandable. It’s understandable but you liked it, didn’t you? (her mother frowned) You thought I was dead, and you liked it, didn’t you? (and her mother inhaled) That’s why I said I’m sorry. I’m sorry I came back alive and hurt your feelings.

Then the mother didn’t join the family for dinner.

She didn’t consider that her mother bought her company’s stocks so her sister-in-law wouldn’t get her hands on her company and to protect her ownership until she reappeared.

I’m losing patience with the ambiguity of their relationship. Since Episode 1, we knew that there’s more to their mother-and-daughter relationship than meets the eye: a stepmother who set her nonbiological daughter as #1 on her speed-dial; a stepmother who was more distraught than the biological father about her disappearance; a stepmother who step in to protect her nonbiological daughter’s assets; and a stepmother who shared her memories of being lost at the beach.

Hmmm…did the stepmother feel guilty because she was the one who abandoned her at the beach?

While I don’t want the stepmother to be conveniently written off as a modern-day version of Grimm fairy tale evil stepmother, I also don’t want their history to be too complicated that the focus on the kdrama will shift towards the repair of their relationship.

3. Seri’s father

This one is odd, too.

Since Episode 2, we’ve been led to believe that the father is Seri’s biological parent. There was the fortune-telling ceremony when she was a year old, and she chose her dad’s hand.

In Episode 4, Brother #1 accused the mother of wanting to abandon Seri after their Father brought her home. His father conveniently stopped him from dwelling on it.

In Episode 8, after Seri’s death had been announced to the board, Secretary Hong wanted to approach the father with proof of Seri’s existence. He ruled out informing the mother because she wasn’t the biological parent.

Insurance guy: Let’s visit her mother. She gave birth to her. She’ll definitely recognize her daughter’s voice.
Hong: She’s not the birth mother. I found out not too long ago.
Insurance guy: Then how about the chairman? He’s her biological father, right?
Hong: You’ve finally gone insane. How could we possible meet him?

Then, in Episode 10, Brother #1 asked their Father point-blank when he had found that Seri was alive.

Seri glanced at her Brother #1. I suspect that this was news to her, too.

Their father glanced to his left, where Seri and Brother #2 were seated. I think he was looking at Brother #2 who in turn was studiously avoiding eye contact.

Father: (evasively) Why is that important?
Brother #1: It was that time, right? Was it about two weeks ago?

Seri, who had been looking at her Brother #1, rolled her eyes down.

This could be interpreted as Seri realizing that her father had known for two weeks that she was alive.

Brother #1: (continuing) You went on a business trip for three or four days. And you didn’t come back home.
Father: Well, that’s not important. Let’s not talk about –
Seri: (stepping in) Yes, it was probably then. It was when I was in the hospital….(starts talking about her amnesia and company chairmanship)

I hope many of you found this conversation bizarre like I did.

Did you see what she did here? She attacked her stepmother for thinking she was DEAD, but she passively accepted that her “real” father had known that she was ALIVE.

Did that make sense?

Put yourself in Seri’s shoes and think about this again. On one hand, you have a nonbiological parent who thought you were dead and bought your stocks. You get mad at her and accuse her of wanting you dead.

But on the other hand, you have a biological parent who knew you were alive but didn’t do anything to rescue you. You let him get away with it. You don’t start accusing him of wanting you dead. You don’t rant at him for leaving you alone to rot in North Korea. You calmly change topic and discuss business.

Seri’s thought-process doesn’t add up.

2. JungHyuk’s dad

I’m going to be a minority here. I don’t care if he loves his son and his wife. To me, he raises a red flag. If I had a daughter, there was no way I’d allow her to marry into this family unless some conditions were met to my satisfaction.

Fact: The father ordered Seri kidnapped at gunpoint.

One, I understand that this is a trope. The Kidnapping plot is often seen in makjang or soap-opera-ish kdramas. It’s acceptable convention.

Two, I understand that the screenwriter tried to present the mastermind, JungHyuk’s father, as a concerned and benevolent parent. As the director of the politburo, JungHyuk’s father was well within his rights to be concern about his son’s liaison and the repercussions of his consorting with a South Korean woman.

And three, I also understand that many viewers believed that the father had an UNIMPEACHABLE motivation for committing an otherwise irreprehensible act. The father’s motives could be viewed as logical, understandable, urgent, or excusable.

But I can tell you that his father could be charged with abduction, false imprisonment, and second-degree kidnapping. Without even needing Gorilla Glue, these charges would stick on him. In all honesty, I found that this whole kidnapping trope exposes JungHyuk’s father’s moral turpitude. I don’t approve of his decisions, and his action raises a red flag.

Think about this: if JungHyuk’s father can order the kidnapping of a grown woman, what will stop him from ordering the kidnapping of a young child?

When JungHyuk and Seri marry and have a child of their own, they can’t rule out child abduction by the grandparent. JungHyuk’s father can decide to kidnap his grandchild for some trumped-up reason, and he has the power and the resources to remove the grandchild from his natural home, and hide him in an inaccessible place. Ugh! Dangerous in-law.

Kidnapping is never a good trope, and I wish the writer didn’t use it to “humanize” JungHyuk’s father … or to get JungHyuk back to North Korea again.

1. Prayer bowl

JungHyuk’s squad were wondering where he was. One of them reported that he couldn’t eat nor sleep, and they’ve never seen such love sickness before. As they spoke, JungHyuk was at the hut, sitting near the pray bowl. He imagined Seri beside him.

SR: I heard what this is. Someone offered prayers with water. Pyo Chisoo told me earlier. There lived a mother with a son who went to war 60 years ago here.
JH: I know that.
SR: I wonder if the mother met her son. If I await desperately with prayers, will I be able to meet someone I miss?
JH: You do it to live. If you give up on waiting, the pain of loss will kill you. That’s why you wait.

He looked back and her vision had disappeared. He looked at the prayer bowl again.

The reason I’m annoyed with this scene is that there were two levels of interpreting this scene, and people got the first one easily, but not the second one.

On the surface, Seri was talking about their romance.

But on a deeper level, the story was talking about the tragedy that for more than half a century now, families have remained separated on either side of the 38th parallel.

After I heard about the uproar over the sympathetic depiction of North Korea in this kdrama, I’m aghast at how uncompassionate some people could be. It baffles me that they can’t and won’t understand that two nations may forever coexist as separate geo-political entities, but their citizens have life expectancy. They don’t have an eternity to coexist as separate families.

To me, this rice bowl scene was alluding to that.

As I’ve written a long time ago, majority of the separated family members are well into their 80s and they would like to see their loves ones before they die. At the very least, these two governments should prioritize the reunions of these elderly folks for humanitarian reasons. In my opinion, should this kdrama raise awareness about these survivors’ last request, and move even 0.01% of the population to see the urgency of their cause, then this kdrama has done a good deed.