Gong Jun is back in the contemporary legal drama Hold A Court Now as Shen Xiezhi, a judge attached to the family court. While Xiezhi is astute and diligent when duty calls, he’d rather be elsewhere ie. working criminal cases. His mentor thinks that a stint at the family court would be good training for him. And no great surprise there… he’s not wrong. Xiezhi tends to see his fellow humans in black and white terms which partly explains his troubled relationship with his father. Ren Min, on the other hand, plays Qin Rui, a struggling family lawyer trying to make her mark navigating obstinate unreasonable clients who default to prevarication and/or routinely framing themselves as the victim. The set-up is such that they’re deliberately hard to root for. Neither side of the dispute seem responsible enough to be trusted with the sacred task of child-rearing. It isn’t just the plaintiff and the defendant either.
C dramas have a habit… a persistent one… of starting their leads at opposite ends of personality spectrum. It’s a common device used mainly to muddy the waters of misunderstanding and escalate conflict which could easily be avoided. Afterall (according to the C drama playbook at least) conflict is allegedly the most efficient way to begin building a 30 episode drama romance. Apparently there’s no better place to start than from zero. From verbal or ideological foes to comrades and then to lovers. It’s always a double-edge sword when their worst traits are on display especially as it colours audience perception of their professionalism.
7 episodes on, I have mixed feelings about whether to persevere. I’ve put it on hold for a several days now and wonder if I’m missing anything. Admittedly, the disputes are somewhat interesting even if it’s increasingly predictable that the clients are holding back some crucial piece of information . The parties involved in the cases are often unsympathetic which certainly creates unpleasant conundrums for the judges and their lawyer. Qin Rui insists on doing God’s work but is it possible with clients who are their own worst enemy?
Much less frustrating and much more fun has been The East Palace which I managed to binge over a 24 hour period at 1.5 speed. Even as I respect the showrunner’s right to title the drama as he/she wishes, the grumpy pedagogue in me revolts. Clearly donggung is equivalent to the Chinese 东宫 ie. dong gong which is more commonly and elegantly translated “eastern palace’.
Still none of that speaks to the quality of the actual drama. Overall it’s an entertaining watch although I suspect that the target audience is a much younger one than the one I’m a part of. Those who watch C dramas habitually will probably recall that the eastern palace is the official residence of he-who-is-next-in-line for the throne. The term itself is often used as a metonymic reference to the crown prince. This is an important fact to highlight because the untimely death of the crown prince is the catalyst for the fiasco that ensues.
The king of the day (Cho Seung-woo) does what he can to dispel anxious speculations that the crown prince has fallen prey to some kind of curse against the royal succession — pronounced by a resentful consort whose spirit now haunts the palace as a pond spirit. To bolster their case for a supernatural explanation, mention is made of several contenders for the throne have met a similar fate in recent years. Hence, it’s not completely unreasonable that the royal court is in a state of panic. Rather reluctantly and in an attempt to appease his officials, the king seeks out his favourite monk to get to the bottom of things. Said monk laments that his ghost hunting days are over and points His Majesty in a different direction.
Enter our young male protagonist. Nam Joo-hyuk is a layabout imposing on the hospitality of the temple. The lad (Nam Joo-hyuk doesn’t seem to have aged much since Cheese in the Trap) has the ability to see spirits and enter into the unseen realm that co-exists with the visible realm. He flatly refuses to help. Who can blame him when death is on the line. But the desperate monarch kidnaps the whippersnapper and breathes down threats. To ensure that Gu Cheon does his bidding, the king sends a “court lady” (Roh Yoon-seo) to keep an eye on him. Neither trusts the other at the start but through a series of life-threatening events, the pair of youngsters quickly develop a strong bond. The chemistry is good although it’s not immediately obvious if romance is on the cards. The audience member will take whatever they can get but for a show like this, it really doesn’t matter all that much.
Unlike some comments I’ve seen online, it’s really not that difficult a plot to follow despite the numerous twists and turns. It’s a dark fairy tale at it’s core. There might be a Rapunzel story in there somewhere although Gu Cheon is no prince. However, despite the kicking and screaming there’s something noble about Gu Cheon. At the start he seems an unlikely saviour and yet when push comes to shove, it turns out he’s the most reliable person in the room.
Although it’s billed supernatural horror, it’s unlikely to cause any hardcore fans of the genre sleepless nights. Koreans certainly love making monster dramas but this isn’t Kingdom. If anything it’s Kingdom lite sans zombies. The political ramifications fall along similar lines in that living human beings are far more terrifying than the undead.
Speaking of things supernatural, I’ve had a look at the more light-hearted Spooky in Love. So far there’s nothing especially groundbreaking about where it’s headed but then it’s not a show that takes itself too seriously . Park Eun-bin’s character, CEO Cheon Yeo-ri can see ghosts and to get them off her back, she goes body hunting. Other shows like Missing: The Other Side, Sell Your Haunted House are much more earnest in their aims. Yeo-ri finds her gift burdensome especially because her greedy relatives would love nothing more to dislodge her from the top job in the family business. In one of her nighttime misadventures she bumps into Prosecutor Ma Gang-uk (Yang Se-jeong) and that becomes the first of various encounters between our leads. It’s a lonely life for Yeo-ri. She can’t get too close to anyone lest they start seeing ghosts too.
With such a title, romance is definitely in the air. More than that, the show is already insisting on a love triangle early in the piece. An old friend of the family (Ong Seong-woo) has returned and he means to woo the lady. Evidently he’s too late because there’s someone else on the scene who has pipped him as the front runner.
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