★★★
“A not unpleasant Korean stew.”
The 16-part series proved an unexpected sleeper hit in its native land, more than doubling the audience from debut to finale. This is all over the place in terms of genre, with comedy, thriller, romance and action threads. While they aren’t equally successful, it does a pretty decent job of managing most of them, and is surprisingly accessible for a Western audience. The heroine is Do Bong-soon (Park B-Y), the latest in a matriarchal line of very strong women. She has been brought up to keep her power suppressed, due to the potential issues it can cause; Bong-soon has also been warned that if she misuses them, and hurts an undeserving person, they will go away. [Let’s not worry too much about how this presents an easy solution: slap one innocent, and she would become just like everyone else…]
Additionally hampered by low self-esteem, she has so far largely flown under the radar, but that ends when she stops someone from being bullied by an organized crime gang. The incident is witnessed by Ahn Min-hyuk (Park H-S), head of a game company, who is dealing with a stalker and hires Bong-soon as his bodyguard. She starts to fall for her boss, but is conflicted due to having feelings for long-time friend, In Guk-doo (Ji). He’s now a local cop, investigating a series of kidnappings which have terrorised the local area.
All these threads and more, intermingle and develop over the course of the series. The crime gang, who are trying to redevelop the area, seek revenge on Bong-soon, only to become semi-permanent residents in hospital. A group of young local wannabe gangsters turn to Bong-soon as their leader. Her parents go through relationship difficulties. The psycho kidnapper’s attentions target a victim too close to our heroine for comfort. She tries to leverage her bodyguard position into achieving her ambition, which is to design video games. She has a gay supervisor, who has a crush on their boss. Yeah, there’s a lot going on here: everything from a soppy post-teenage love-triangle to something which borders on Silence of the Lambs.
Credit is due, therefore, that the end result is even watchable, given this scattergun approach, though obviously some elements are not very interesting from my perspective. It’s hard to see quite who might enjoy all the angles; on the other hand, perhaps this is a case of there being something for everyone? Park B-Y is admirably deadpan as Bong-soon, dealing with the bizarre hand life has dealt her, and the action scenes, although less frequent than I’d like, are decently handled: the highlight is probably her duel with the entire crime syndicate in a warehouse. It works better for me in the first half, when the various elements gel into a more coherent whole: later on, it becomes almost entirely about the kidnapper or the love triangle, and the switches in tone feel more jarring. I can’t say I’m eagerly anticipating a second series, yet didn’t mind what’s certainly a different take on the genre of super-powers.
Dir: Lee Hyung-min
Star: Park Bo-young, Park Hyung-sik, Ji Soo, Jang Mi-kwan