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May. 5th, 2018 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOK, it's time to talk about the show that tenillypo and I have agreed is the trashiest thing we've yet watched together - Nine: Nine Time Travels.
Was this show good? No, probably not. Was it interesting? I mean YES. Did we laugh uproariously every time the hero's life got ever more tormented? YOU BET!
Our hero is famous news broadcaster Lee Jin-wook, currently facing the normal run of kdrama woes plus a little extra:
- his father was murdered when he was a teenager
- the murderer went on to steal his family's hospital and achieve fame and fortune by coercing his female coworkers into donating their eggs to unethical reproductive science (a plot point, for the record, that will never be mentioned after the first episode)
- the stress sent his mother catatonic for the last twenty years
- his older brother's just died in the Himalayas trying to find time travel magic to reverse all the bad things that have happened
- and also, unrelated to the murder or any subsequent events, he's dying of brain cancer
In the first episode, our hero jaunts off to the Himalayas to bang his coworker, recover his dead brother's body, and also discover the time travel magic that his brother was looking for: nine incense sticks that send you twenty years back in time, to the exact date. Each incense stick gets you half an hour of time travel shenanigans, and if you miss the date of the thing you want to change, you're out of luck.
Fortunately, the twenty-year anniversary of his father's murder is in just a couple weeks! So for the first three episodes Jin-wook kills time by taking care of such important business as:
- flailing into his childhood bedroom and getting attacked by his entire family, who mistake him for a home intruder
- prying into his older brother's love life
- interrupting his mother before she can find out that his teen self skipped out on family Christmas dinner to go on a date
Meanwhile, his doctor bff is like "buddy you have ONE TIME TRAVEL JOB! tell yourself to get early screenings for brain cancer! that's it! ONE JOB!" and Jin-wook is like "yeah yeah I'll get around to it eventually."
Meanwhile meanwhile, the romance with his coworker, Jo Yoon-hee, is proceeding approximately as well as can be expected when the entire premise of the relationship is "idk, I just thought it would be nice if we had sex before I died of brain cancer."
About three-quarters of the way through episode four, I remarked totenillypo, "Does it seem weird to you how disconnected this romance plot feels from the time travel revenge plot?"
Five minutes after that, our hero returned from successfully hooking his brother up with the lost love of his life, a single mom with a plucky young daughter .... to find that in the new timeline, not only is his brother alive and well, but HIS GIRLFRIEND IS NOW HIS STEP-NIECE.
I'll be honest: the slow zoom in on Jin-wook's confused dawning horror in the last shot of episode four while the ominous choral music of niecefucking plays in the background is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
Jin-wook spends the next several episodes agonizing about the fact that he just! cannot! forget! the timeline in which he boned his niece!
He also tries, and fails, to save his dad from being murdered. He ALSO learns that his brother is the one who ACCIDENTALLY murdered his father to begin with, which leads to another one of the funniest scenes in the series when Jin-wook storms into a restaurant, punches his brother out, and starts shouting at him for all the ways in which he ruined Jin-wook's life:
Jin-wook: "You come back from the dead, plus you let me hate Choi! I wasted all those years. You introduced me to the incense which led me to find out these horrible secrets I didn’t want to know. You ruined my memory and took away my girl! It is beyond the point of no return!"
[Jin-wook's brother: sobs, wonders desperately what the actual fuck any of that means]
Eventually, Jin-wook swears off time travel altogether and decides he's just going to let himself die of brain cancer!
(Jin-wook's doctor friend: YOU HAD ONE JOB.)
However, by this point, this dashingly mysterious older man who claims to be his future self has made such an impression on teen Jin-wook that he starts leaving PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE MESSAGES TO THE FUTURE ON ALL HIS STUFF. "Where are you?" "Come back to 1993!!!"
Honestly, Jin-wook being haunted by the lovelorn, affronted ghost of his younger self is my actual favorite thing to happen in this drama.
Anyway, by the mid-point of the series, Jin-wook's interventions have set off a cascading series of timeline shifts, so he dies in the future, then changes the timeline in the past, then almost gets himself murdered in the past and starts seeing brand-new scars in the future -- it's a mess. Also I forgot to mention that whenever the timeline shifts, the camera zooms in on really hilarious faces of New Memory Overload:
As the series goes on, Jin-wook gets more and more insufferable. The worst comes when Yoon-hee's unclefucking memories finally return, and Jin-wook spends like two episodes gaslighting her in the GROSSEST POSSIBLE WAY. "You should get those disgusting fantasies out of your head." Buddy. BUDDY.
On the other hand, the more we hated him, the funnier his suffering was and the more cheerful we got when it looked like Fate was just absolutely determined to screw him over in every possible way!
(Meanwhile, Yoon-hee's sweet, supportive dynamic with her accidental murderer stepdad was probably the healthiest dynamic in the show and we were consistently rooting for it, despite knowing that inevitably it was going to get edited out of the timeline so our leads could bang.)
In the end, Jin-wook goes back to the past to save his younger self's life and break up his brother's wedding, thus changing it to a timeline where he and the heroine are engaged ... THEN GETS STRANDED IN THE PAST AND HIT BY THE BAD GUY'S CAR.
At this point, young Yoon-hee happens to wander by his bleeding near-corpse.
Young Yoon-hee: Should I call 911???
Jin-wook: Nah, don't bother. Just remember ... if you see a man in the future who looks like me .... STAY AWAY FROM HIM, HE'LL RUIN YOUR LIFE.
AND THEN HE DIES.
Honestly, we were pretty OK with that.
This happens in the second-to-last episode. The last episode then takes us forward through the timeline that grew out of this final alteration, and ends on a puzzling and nonsensical cliffhanger about the nature of time travel that breaks all the rules previously set up by the show. It's a bad episode and doesn't make any sense, so we agreed to ignore it!
tenillypo and I have agreed is the trashiest thing we've yet watched together - Nine: Nine Time Travels.Was this show good? No, probably not. Was it interesting? I mean YES. Did we laugh uproariously every time the hero's life got ever more tormented? YOU BET!
Our hero is famous news broadcaster Lee Jin-wook, currently facing the normal run of kdrama woes plus a little extra:
- his father was murdered when he was a teenager
- the murderer went on to steal his family's hospital and achieve fame and fortune by coercing his female coworkers into donating their eggs to unethical reproductive science (a plot point, for the record, that will never be mentioned after the first episode)
- the stress sent his mother catatonic for the last twenty years
- his older brother's just died in the Himalayas trying to find time travel magic to reverse all the bad things that have happened
- and also, unrelated to the murder or any subsequent events, he's dying of brain cancer
In the first episode, our hero jaunts off to the Himalayas to bang his coworker, recover his dead brother's body, and also discover the time travel magic that his brother was looking for: nine incense sticks that send you twenty years back in time, to the exact date. Each incense stick gets you half an hour of time travel shenanigans, and if you miss the date of the thing you want to change, you're out of luck.
Fortunately, the twenty-year anniversary of his father's murder is in just a couple weeks! So for the first three episodes Jin-wook kills time by taking care of such important business as:
- flailing into his childhood bedroom and getting attacked by his entire family, who mistake him for a home intruder
- prying into his older brother's love life
- interrupting his mother before she can find out that his teen self skipped out on family Christmas dinner to go on a date
Meanwhile, his doctor bff is like "buddy you have ONE TIME TRAVEL JOB! tell yourself to get early screenings for brain cancer! that's it! ONE JOB!" and Jin-wook is like "yeah yeah I'll get around to it eventually."
Meanwhile meanwhile, the romance with his coworker, Jo Yoon-hee, is proceeding approximately as well as can be expected when the entire premise of the relationship is "idk, I just thought it would be nice if we had sex before I died of brain cancer."
About three-quarters of the way through episode four, I remarked to
tenillypo, "Does it seem weird to you how disconnected this romance plot feels from the time travel revenge plot?" Five minutes after that, our hero returned from successfully hooking his brother up with the lost love of his life, a single mom with a plucky young daughter .... to find that in the new timeline, not only is his brother alive and well, but HIS GIRLFRIEND IS NOW HIS STEP-NIECE.
I'll be honest: the slow zoom in on Jin-wook's confused dawning horror in the last shot of episode four while the ominous choral music of niecefucking plays in the background is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
Jin-wook spends the next several episodes agonizing about the fact that he just! cannot! forget! the timeline in which he boned his niece!
He also tries, and fails, to save his dad from being murdered. He ALSO learns that his brother is the one who ACCIDENTALLY murdered his father to begin with, which leads to another one of the funniest scenes in the series when Jin-wook storms into a restaurant, punches his brother out, and starts shouting at him for all the ways in which he ruined Jin-wook's life:
Jin-wook: "You come back from the dead, plus you let me hate Choi! I wasted all those years. You introduced me to the incense which led me to find out these horrible secrets I didn’t want to know. You ruined my memory and took away my girl! It is beyond the point of no return!"
[Jin-wook's brother: sobs, wonders desperately what the actual fuck any of that means]
Eventually, Jin-wook swears off time travel altogether and decides he's just going to let himself die of brain cancer!
(Jin-wook's doctor friend: YOU HAD ONE JOB.)
However, by this point, this dashingly mysterious older man who claims to be his future self has made such an impression on teen Jin-wook that he starts leaving PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE MESSAGES TO THE FUTURE ON ALL HIS STUFF. "Where are you?" "Come back to 1993!!!"
Honestly, Jin-wook being haunted by the lovelorn, affronted ghost of his younger self is my actual favorite thing to happen in this drama.
Anyway, by the mid-point of the series, Jin-wook's interventions have set off a cascading series of timeline shifts, so he dies in the future, then changes the timeline in the past, then almost gets himself murdered in the past and starts seeing brand-new scars in the future -- it's a mess. Also I forgot to mention that whenever the timeline shifts, the camera zooms in on really hilarious faces of New Memory Overload:
As the series goes on, Jin-wook gets more and more insufferable. The worst comes when Yoon-hee's unclefucking memories finally return, and Jin-wook spends like two episodes gaslighting her in the GROSSEST POSSIBLE WAY. "You should get those disgusting fantasies out of your head." Buddy. BUDDY.
On the other hand, the more we hated him, the funnier his suffering was and the more cheerful we got when it looked like Fate was just absolutely determined to screw him over in every possible way!
(Meanwhile, Yoon-hee's sweet, supportive dynamic with her accidental murderer stepdad was probably the healthiest dynamic in the show and we were consistently rooting for it, despite knowing that inevitably it was going to get edited out of the timeline so our leads could bang.)
In the end, Jin-wook goes back to the past to save his younger self's life and break up his brother's wedding, thus changing it to a timeline where he and the heroine are engaged ... THEN GETS STRANDED IN THE PAST AND HIT BY THE BAD GUY'S CAR.
At this point, young Yoon-hee happens to wander by his bleeding near-corpse.
Young Yoon-hee: Should I call 911???
Jin-wook: Nah, don't bother. Just remember ... if you see a man in the future who looks like me .... STAY AWAY FROM HIM, HE'LL RUIN YOUR LIFE.
AND THEN HE DIES.
Honestly, we were pretty OK with that.
This happens in the second-to-last episode. The last episode then takes us forward through the timeline that grew out of this final alteration, and ends on a puzzling and nonsensical cliffhanger about the nature of time travel that breaks all the rules previously set up by the show. It's a bad episode and doesn't make any sense, so we agreed to ignore it!
no subject
Date: 2018-05-05 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-05 10:03 pm (UTC)Hahahaha, that's awesome!
AND THEN HE DIES.
AWESOME!
no subject
Date: 2018-05-05 11:36 pm (UTC)This recap is glorious.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 12:53 am (UTC)DYING
no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 04:22 am (UTC)honestly this sounds like 95% my jam
Date: 2018-05-06 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 06:26 am (UTC)Honestly, Jin-wook being haunted by the lovelorn, affronted ghost of his younger self is my actual favorite thing to happen in this drama.
It sounds it.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 07:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 01:11 pm (UTC)"But that was really expensive!"
"YEAH, so I DEFINITELY won't throw it away!!"
no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 01:13 pm (UTC)(I did call the murderbrother twist like 20 minutes before it actually happened)
no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 01:18 pm (UTC)Re: honestly this sounds like 95% my jam
Date: 2018-05-06 01:22 pm (UTC)(The heroine's poor, poor mom is like 'I TOLD you trying to marry into this family was a bad idea.')
no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 01:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-06 05:59 pm (UTC)...I guess it would be better to have a whole club of people in the same boat than to be by yourself remembering all of these timelines no one else knew about? You could all just roll your eyes at each other, at least.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-07 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-09 12:48 am (UTC)