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Doom at Your Service korean drama review
Dropped 12/16
Doom at Your Service
92 people found this review helpful
by AudienceofOne
Jun 2, 2021
12 of 16 episodes seen
Dropped 25
Overall 2.0
Story 1.0
Acting/Cast 8.0
Music 4.0
Rewatch Value 1.0
This show is like being stuck sober in a room full of drunk first year philosophy students.
They think they're being logical, original and profound but they are most definitely not.

A mess of bad writing and romcom cliches, this show is nothing but a shallow cohabitation romcom. But instead of embracing its own trashiness, it instead delivers the whole thing with an air of earnest profundity that comes across as pretentious.

SIG and PBY are good, especially considering their characters (all the characters) are nothing but chalk outlines. But as well as the rudimentary characterisation and non-existent plotting, the dialogue is ridiculous and unintentionally hilarious. Nobody has actual conversations, they just intone non-sequiturs at each other.

Doom himself (played by a SIG who is always mesmerising somehow no matter what he's doing) is nothing but a walking one-dimensional metaphor signifying the bad things that happen in the world. Kind of the chaos in chaos theory, the randomness of an ultimately ordered system. He is rebelling against Order, known as the deity: an annoying child, terminally ill as this cycle comes to an end and the new one begins. He makes a deal with the terminally ill Tak Dong-kyung to doom the world in exchange for... something. The terms of this contract change in every second episode and even when you think you understand it, you realise it still doesn't make any sense.

The two fall in love or something, although the basis of this love appears to be "he's hot and all about her" and "she's literally the only human he's ever spoken to". Which is to say, they're not in love at all. In fact, for a show obsessed with romantic love, nobody in it seems to know what love is nor is there any believable love relationship in it. It's as shallow as the connection between our leads, which consists of a bit of hand holding, weird nonsensical conversations consisting entirely of allegory and metaphor, and the odd kiss.

The plot structure is like being stuck on a carousel, you look like you're moving but in the end you're back where you're started and the ride just keeps on going. Each week the two episodes bring our two leads back to where they were before the episodes aired. As an emotional journey, it's glacial. As a plot, it's mind numbing.

With the thin shell of bright glossy surface and hollow innards, this show is a Christmas tree ornament. It's super pretty, stylised and somehow antiseptic, doing nothing but decorate. Lacking any real warmth or heart but having a slick and polished exterior.

With this nonsense, Korean romcoms have finally reached peak derp.
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