The thread is open.
I’m going to repost @Welmaris’ research here on the name of the café. I find it brash and cocky (so just like the management!) to call it Café Handsome Crew when they’re all misfits. Like, Kwak Shi Yang’s character looks like everybody’s dreamboat but he’s really dumb as an ox and just as graceless.
But I guess that’s the whole point. They’re using an illusion (i.e., their fake handsomeness and their phony shamanism) to go after what they really want (i.e., capture the serial killer Gopuri).
Thanks, @Welmaris, for the breakdown of the café’s name.
I believe I’ve answered the question I posed above, after doing some research using my Papago app. For people who speak and read Korean, the word-play joke probably would be obvious at first glance.
The name of the show is Cafe Minamdang. The way the name came about is shown in Episode 3 around 21:55. The setting is Su Cheol’s failing detective agency, in a shoddy space he cobbled together from two offices he bought, one having been the Temple of Shamanka. There are notices taped on the doors of both offices from the electric company saying power is being shut off due to non-payment. When Nam and his sister enter Su Cheol’s office, it is lit by many candles.
Before Nam joined his sister in the building, he’d overheard a woman outside talking on her phone. Her son had gone missing, taking her bankbook and seal, behavior uncharacteristic him. Since the police just think he’s just a runaway, she wants to hire a detective to find him.
Show calls our attention to a particular window in what had been the temple portion of Su Cheol’s office when Nam tries, and fails, to open it. On it are written three phrases vertically in Hangul. The colors of the vertical phrases vary, and the one furthest to the right has five words, not four, like the two others, throwing some of the horizontal lines out of kilter. The vertical phrases read:
미녀보살 – beauty bodhisattva
남녀궁헙 – male and female compatibility
당사주천문 – our stock astronomyThe mother whose son is missing enters Su Cheol’s office, and immediately starts to withdraw upon seeing the mess inside. To stop the customer from leaving, Nam repeats the details of the case without revealing he’d overheard them downstairs. The woman turns back around, looks at the window behind Nam, and reads the top three words horizontally: “Mi, nam, dang.” She assumes Nam is a shaman.
Each word in the top horizontal line means separately:
미 (mi) – beauty
남 (nam) – other
당 (dang) – partyWhen you combine them, different meanings emerge:
미남 (mi nam) – handsome guy
남당 (nam dang) – a male party
미남당 (minamdang)- handsome party (why does this make me think of Coffee Prince or Chippendales?)Nam, Su Cheol, and Nam’s sister resolve the missing-boy case, stopping the bullies just as they’re forcing the boy to take out an illegal loan. The boy’s friend thinks Nam, et al. are cool and wants to be their assistant. When the four of them return to Su Cheol’s office, Nam proposes continuing the shaman business, accidentally named Minamdang (handsome party) by their customer. He tells Jo Na Dan that he’s hired. Why? “…Because you’re handsome.”
Let’s enjoy the show.
Thank you, @packmule3 and @Welmaris!
Great! Thanks again @pkml3 for giving us this thread and thanks to @Welmaris for the good research. I too was wondering what the 3 Korean characters meant as part of their original words and as the inadvertent name of the Shaman-detective agency. LOL, The Handsome Party Cafe,… no wonder there are just queues of women coming to ogle,… errr… admire the men in the cafe. 🙄 😁
Kalispera!
Thank you @Packmule3 for the thread and @Welmaris for the info!
lol. Coffee is NOT the selling point of the café. The handsome men serving at the café are the main feature.
Kinda like the restaurant Hooters here in the US. The food is not the selling point. The women with big “hooters” (or breasts) is the reason to come in and check out the restaurant’s menu.
(lol. The wings are good, though.)
Ah, seriously Detective Han, when you lose your stubborness, maybe you can see things as truly they are…*sigh*
Second day in a row that Detective Han is getting on my nerves…
Anyway, hopefully she will change her attitude not only towards Han, but also her colleagues. She was tactless.
@Cleopatra, I agree that she is tactless. Also too immersed in her righteous theories to be a good police detective. At the beginning of episode 6, she kept going into dangerous situations by herself. I was yelling at the screen, don’t be such a fool!
I had to look away during the murder scene. I didn’t know that prosecutor Han was conscious…
But I had a beef with Nam for harassing the witness Choi to the point of near-cardiac arrest. That’s out of line as well.
Both Nam and Detective Han are too emotionally involved to be objective in this case. However, it’s the female lead who annoys in most of her scenes. I’m tired of her never letting Nam Han Joon finish a sentence.Her physical violence towards him is supposed to funny I guess, but I’m not amused. On the other hand, I love the Cafe gang.
I agree, @Dlia.
They’ve lost their objectivity. This wouldn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t happen in real life.
I’m finding it hard to switching from slapstick comedy to psycho thriller to detective show. It’s like a whiplash.
Plus, as you all said, the female lead, Oh Yeon Seo, needs to tone it down. Sigh. I see that she’s been typecast as a crazy, mentally unhinged, intense, shrewish woman.
I didn’t mind it when she did “My Sassy Girl.” But she played a subdued character in “A Korean Odyssey.” But in this drama, she seems to have reprised her psycho performance in “Mad For Each Other.”
Kalimera Ladies!
My dear @Fern,
@Dlia and @Packmule3 got it first. I agree with them. Both Detective Han and Profiler turned into a Shaman Nam are too involved in this case in order to be objective.
Nam and Kong were witnesses of the murder, while Han was playing the detective following Choi Yeong-Seop. What is really impressive is that although Choi told her that she is in fault about Prosecutor Han’s death. She blames Nam for what happened to her brother.
Nam was correct into profiling what an arsonist does in his victims and the pleasure he gains from the act.
(Check if you are in the genre “Throught the Darkness” with Kim Nam Gil to see about the first profiler in Korea. It is an amazing show, but it has hard scenes because it has to do with serial killers’ cases.)
I agree with you @Packmule3, Oh Yeon Seo is repring her role for “Mad For Each Other” and I had a problem following her in there as well. I think she was too much in the beginning and at some point she narrowed it down.
I cannot seem to like the way Oh Yeon Seo portrays her characters. Since I am biased with her, I am trying to give her space to see mostly her performances, but in those two episodes she got into my nerves, again. Anyway, we cannot like everyone, but I am waiting to see her acting caliber and I am not impressed so far.
I don’t find funny either that Han is abusing Nam in every single scene they are together.
I am here for Seo In Guk and Kwak Si Yang. They made me laugh every single time!
Also, Kang Mi-Na and Baek Seo-Hoo are pretty good from the Cafe Gang. I have to agree with @Dlia.
I can’t turn off my logic radar. It seems very unrealistic to me that Detective Han should be on a case relating to her brother. It’s conflict of interest and definitely not a healthy practice. Likewise, why isn’t Nam being arrested for interfering in an investigation? He nearly caused the witness to have a heart attack. Both are suffering from guilt, imo, for their actions before/during the murder 3 years ago.
How can Det. Han subdue a gang of thugs at the docks singlehanded with her fighting skills, but not take down Choi in the warehouse? How can the perpetrator out-manoeuvre Nam so well despite Nam’s hand to hand fighting skills?
Han’s prosecutor friend learned from Nam 3 years ago that the perpetrator had a burn scar on his wrist, so Choi wasn’t the murderer. Was that brought out in trial so that Prosecutor Han knows? If not, why?
Whiplash is the word, @packmule3. Very funny scenes one minute, seeing someone graphically being set alight whilst drugged but conscious the next. I wasn’t ready for that. Nightmare.
As to the leads, we’re being set up for them to be romantically involved of course, but both are too reckless to do well in a relationship. While I love the comedy, I’m not sure about the drama as a whole.
While watching CM, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s being done as a live-action webtoon, rather than being based on a webtoon. The wide-mouthed crying by Nam and Su Cheol…classic manga drawings come to life. The prevalence of physical violence, some meant to be humorous, between characters–bang! pow! wham!–also classic manga fare.
I wonder if our discomfort lies in a reverse uncanny valley. In the uncanny valley, as an artificial human becomes more and more realistic, we feel greater unease. In this case, we’re watching real actors depict cartoon characters and situations, and we are not enjoying them as much as we would if they were drawings. It’s too much work for us to suspend disbelief.
As for the death of Prosecutor Han, I believe it was a huge mistake for Show to let us see his horrific final moments. We saw him fall into unconsciousness after being strangled: Show should have left it there. Instead, I feel Writernim and teh director indulged in the same pleasure of cruelty as the murderer; what we were shown was extraneous, as we didn’t need more evidence that the killer is a monster.
aNNyeong 🌴
Thanks @PM3 for reposting @Welmaris breakdown of the title – i love it! They are a handsome crew! even though SuCheol get’s geeky at night. I think he will end up with Nam’s sister. funny how they had to save her from her date. the CM gang are a hoot!
surprising that the orig shaman Sucheol can’t do the job and was acting like a kid with tantrum instead – oh man! i guess coz he’s not as smooth as Namjun. or he doesn’t see himself as the shaman anymore? he still gets the job done. oh, so sad how he ended up the bad guy coz the mom showed up. maybe that’s the reason why he’s so against doing it. he was the escape goat. poor guy!
we get more of the history of what happened 3 years ago. very sad indeed. how he died and that Nam and Sucheol was just outside the door. *cry. gosh. so brutal way to go. Nam and Han were both in the scene outside feeling dejected because they both lost someone dear. so close and yet so far as they stand in front of the building. how did the prosecutor and Nam became besties but officer Han was out of the picture? Can’t Det Han see that Nam see they are in the same mission together? Her vision is narrow. but yes, this case is both very personal with the two. Nam is outside the force now and clearly obstructing police work. he gets away with it.