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Tomorrow korean drama review
Completed
Tomorrow
1 people found this review helpful
by Edmondo
Jun 23, 2023
16 of 16 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 8.5
Story 8.5
Acting/Cast 8.0
Music 8.0
Rewatch Value 8.5
This review may contain spoilers

A well written series shining light on mental health

Tomorrow was a daring series that wasn't afraid to bring up tough topics that other dramas seem to stray away from. The whole series tackles the suicide crisis and dives into the mental health issues that cause people to contemplate suicide. With such a tricky concept and topic to navigate without misconstruing the difficulties that come with suicide and mental health, the series overall does a good job. Each episode comes with a nice message that goes along the lines that life is worth living through all the dark times.

The pacing of the show is simply a plot line for each episode. Each episode focuses on different victims that are about to attempt suicide and the grim reapers essentially have to get to the root cause and prevent the ultimate suicide. Each victim covers a different area of mental health issues (e.g., eating disorders, cyberbullying, etc). However, some episodes feel rushed and fail to cover the essence of the issue. For instance, for the episode pertaining to the person with the eating disorder, a majority of the episode was leading the viewer to think that the victim was one worker when it was actually a thinner worker. This illustrated that eating disorders would affect those you wouldn't think would have one, even if they are constantly praised and idolized for their slim body. I get that. But when you spent such a large portion of airtime on simply driving that plot device, the resolution of the episode was literally the grim reapers having a talk with her saying to love her body. Then she suddenly loves her body again. The whole thing feels rushed and feels like it doesn't serve those suffering with eating disorders justice. This is just one of the problems I had with the pacing.

Another issue I had was the 2-dimensional characters. The main 3/4 grim reapers are all given around one episode worth of backstory. Some of these backstories are full of depth and keeps me wanting to learn more from (Goo Ryun & Park Joong Gil) but unfortunately due to their ambitions of stuffing literal centuries worth of lore within an episode or two felt rushed and unsettled. Im Ryung Goo's backstory was fine but I feel like when it was shown, during the episode showed an immense change of character, but after his obligatory backstory episode everything went back to normal (except he stopped picking his nose ig). Lastly, Choi Joon Woong was a fun and bright character that brought a new and sensible approach to tackle these mental health issues. But again he lacks depth, and I was hoping that the finale would have showed the last victim as his mom or sister. Not because I want to see him suffer, rather I was hoping all that character development throughout the series would shine through when push comes to shove. I would've wanted to see how he would react to difficulties that hit close to home. That in my opinion would have been heart wrenching, seeing such a lighthearted character suffer like that. Overall, I can see that there was a lot of direction put into balancing regular episode arcs as well as main character arcs, but it felt like not enough was placed in the latter.

Overall, the series took a lot of confidence to tackle such a sensitive topic in such a time where mental health affects so many of us, so to that I applaud. In terms of plot, characters, and overall cohesiveness, do I think there are problems with it? Yea for sure. Do I wish some things were done differently? 100%. But it doesn't take away from the tremendous leap of faith and confidence to attempt to shine light on pressing issues impacting the whole world and destigmatize mental health.
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