[Drama Recap] Make A Woman Cry: Episode 9

...And once more, it's back to the rich family. There's something terribly frustrating about a drama that insists on only being interesting half the time. The main issue is that most of these people just come off like jerks. Which isn't necessarily bad. Deok-in is definitely a pushy, bossy jerk. But she never comes off that badly because we can see the emotional heart underlying Deok-in's motivation. That's mostly gone any time the action shifts to the big house.

This is disappointing because I really just want to see Deok-in and Jin-woo interact more often. We get a very lovely later scene that for all intents and purposes is a pseudo-date. And the build-up is nice, too. Rather than the usual annoyance, Deok-in is genuinely disappointed when Jin-woo doesn't show up. And on Jin-woo's end the feeling is clearly mutual, even if in his usual dorky way Jin-woo fails to realize that he's spent the whole day sleeping.

The worst of it, though, is the cliffhanger and the preview which indicates that we're probably not going to get many more of these scenes in the near future. The problem with domestic fighting is that it really needs dramatic stakes. From the very beginning the drama has just had these characters fight without offering much in the way of context. And even now that the context has been clarified I can't bring myself to care to a very significant degree.

Cuteness can still go a long way. I do definitely like the extended bromance/dating scheme. I remain unclear as to what any of these characters are hoping to accomplish, but does it really matter? That's the whole fun and folly of youth, is just hanging out with people who seem like they're fun to hang out with, even if at times they seem to spend way too much effort trying your patience. Any relationship intimate enough to involve a tussle over a cell phone is fun enough to be watchable.

Everything else, though, really needs some kind of a road map. I was initially surprised by the cliffhanger because I thought Deok-in already knew about this- although in retrospect it was just all the other characters who knew except for Deok-in because no one bothered to tell her. While I don't have anything against improbable coincidences on general principle, it's easy to assume that the important stuff has already been established when so much of the plot is just extraneous characters I don't care about.

Review by William Schwartz