SF8: Joan's Galaxy (2020)

A sweet short about living life to the fullest

Scifi has been relatively dark genre lately so it's nice to see a sweeter story for once. Joan's Galaxy poses the question of how knowledge of your lifespan may affect your outlook on life and how you use your time. It's answer is a little sentimental but it's nice enough for a special.

The real draw of this episode is the developing relationship between two women placed at the forefront. Genuinely cute, funny, and beautiful, I loved every minute they were on screen. It's not explicitly gay but about as subtle as bat to the face. I also loved the emphasis on doing little things that make you happy right now, like dancing in the rain or drinking coffee.

It is however, plagued with the issues that come with shoving several sci-fi concepts and world-building into a 50 minute special: infodumping and mildly pretentious moments. Worth noting that the discrimination aspect between N's and C's is relatively background and remained subtle, but effective enough.



Regarding the ending (SPOILERS AHEAD):

Scifi always poses a question and usually tries to answer it to some extent. The thesis here lies somewhere between "Live life to your fullest because you don't know how long you've got" and "It's best not to know how long you've got so you can live your life to the fullest". It's muddled and sentimental but it works well enough. In context though, it does gloss over one's right to know their own medical history a bit.

While it's foreshadowed several times their time together will be fleeting (and should be appreciated all the more for it), it was also mildly disappointing to have Jo-an and Yi-oh cut off contact completely.

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Girls love set in 2046

Set in 2046, The earth is plagued by heavy fine dust. The human race is divided into two categories, N and C. N means Non-clean, people who couldn't be vaccinated and C means clean, for those who are vaccinated with antibody shots. Life expectancy for C's is 100 years and for N it is 30 years. As result discrimination becomes a bigger problem than fine dust. Yi Oh (Choi Sung Eun) finds out she wasn't given shots during her birth, she is now an N. She develops an interest in Joan (Kim Bora), whose other N in her school. As her life is short, she spends time with Joan.

According to my understanding, this is clearly a GL (girls love). I could see the way they both look at each other. a beautiful lesbian story. Kim Bora sang a song in this drama and it's so beautiful. I loved the Bgm and cinematography. I love the 2046 set. Everything is foggy and there is longing to live. Who knows this might happen in the future. The story is beautiful and the acting was cute. As a hardcore fanboy, I wanted a kiss scene, I know it's a lot of ask but still, the bars were quite high. I need to confess that each and every scene was so beautiful.

There is a big twist in the end. I swear I saw that coming but it was just a thought and seeing it happen in the end was a shock. I love the way they ended the episode. it's beautiful. What I learned for Joan's Galaxy is sometimes you got to let things be the way it is, instead of searching and digging deep into it, just live your life and do good to others. - by Godwin

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