Anjelle
This review may contain spoilers
There are better ways to waste your time
This drama is a mess. And I tried, I really tried, to give it the benefit of the doubt and watch to the very end. But in the end, all I ended up doing was wasting 16 hours of my life. I'm sure you'll see plenty of reviews like this, so I do want to mention the very, VERY few good aspects of the show as well to be fair.
The first 2 or 3 episodes were actually pretty good and I can easily see how the jumbled up pieces of it could have been turned into a really solid drama if it had a much better writer and director. The actors were all good, it was the roles that they were given that created all of the problems we saw and not the actors themselves. What stood out to me in the first episodes was how some things were handled. HBS finding out about OJI's circumstances with her mother was done well. Despite how poorly they got along at that time, he stopped everything to help her get to her mother even while not fully understanding what was going on. It may seem like common sense that you would help someone in a tough situation like that, but it's surprisingly not handled that well in most dramas. Another thing I have to give it props for was the arguing, oddly enough. In the beginning. Not after the stupid break-up episodes. But at the start, when they started to fight there weren't any big blow-ups where one would storm out or OJI would tell him to leave. They worked through it, maybe not amazingly but better than most fights in dramas. So again, props to that. There were some things like these that were handled nicely. In the beginning. And never again.
The drama after the first 2 episodes had no plot. Nothing, not even one bit. The characters would just lamely wax poetics at each other for 20-40min of an episode, we'd get the really annoying side couples to pop in and waste time, an unnecessary love triangle was thrown in to, again, pad run time, and then we had the cliche 'I'm breaking up with you to protect you' mini arch that was about where I had to start skipping through. And I never skim dramas. Usually even the worst trash I'll sit through, but I just couldn't.
The 'disappearing' aspect of the show was both stupid and unexplored. It isn't the first time a drama has given a character who has died or was going to die a second chance with a time limit to do things over and set things right before they leave. Off the top of my head, I can think of Please Come Back, Mister (which had a lot of problems of its own, but wasn't as bad as this) and Miracle That We Met (which doesn't have a time limit but is close enough that I think it could fit). While neither is a perfect show and has problems too, they at least had a plot. They had plot, they had character growth, and they were entertaining, even if some aspects were frustrating. They were watchable. But with Ladylord, after being hit, HBS spends so much time not even fully realizing the situation. It's only around the halfway mark that he even understands that he's going to just... pop out of existence. Which is weird to me. I don't know why they didn't just have him die 49 days later. I guess then they wouldn't have been able to do those weird 'disappearing' scenes... which probably would have been better for the drama anyway. But no, his biological father is apparently an angel there to tell him that doom is at his doorstep and 49 days from now - poof! Gone. Like magic.
That's the problem with the drama. Well, the biggest problem. Nothing is thought out and everything is haphazard. Instead of focusing on the plot and the details of what is happening, it gives us scene after scene of the leads being 'cute' together that amount to nothing long-term. It feels like the writer and director didn't actually care about what was going on with the show or whether their audience enjoyed it. The angel is seen only, what, 3 or 4 times throughout the whole series? The end game is an afterthought. The supernatural aspect of the show never should have been added to this drama because they weren't willing to flesh it out enough to make it a real part of the plot. It was just a consequence. It's just like how the step-father was so heavily in the early episodes and then after the mom found out, they just didn't need him anymore and it was like he never existed in the first place. And it doesn't even matter because he was just playing a cartoon villain anyway.
The writer didn't bother trying to make this drama good. I really feel that there was no effort put into the script at all beyond maybe the initial set-up. They should have tried to add a plot to the characters' everyday lives instead of these one-off instances of drugging and abduction, a dating scandal and a random accusation of plagiarism that came out of nowhere and left into nothing. Their lives had no structure. And it's not like structure can't be added with plots like these (I use 'plot' very loosely here) because we've seen it done in plenty of others. There are really amazing cohabitation dramas. Heck, Lee Min Ki himself was in one that was done really well! And there are plenty of great supernatural dramas out there, too. There are dramas dealing with a character's last days/months alive, there are ones that deal with a second chance of life after death, and most of them are better than this.
I'll stop there before I get more depressed over my wasted time. I've never said this about a drama before, but don't watch it. Don't even try. It's not worth it. The few positive points I mentioned disappear a few episodes in anyways.
The first 2 or 3 episodes were actually pretty good and I can easily see how the jumbled up pieces of it could have been turned into a really solid drama if it had a much better writer and director. The actors were all good, it was the roles that they were given that created all of the problems we saw and not the actors themselves. What stood out to me in the first episodes was how some things were handled. HBS finding out about OJI's circumstances with her mother was done well. Despite how poorly they got along at that time, he stopped everything to help her get to her mother even while not fully understanding what was going on. It may seem like common sense that you would help someone in a tough situation like that, but it's surprisingly not handled that well in most dramas. Another thing I have to give it props for was the arguing, oddly enough. In the beginning. Not after the stupid break-up episodes. But at the start, when they started to fight there weren't any big blow-ups where one would storm out or OJI would tell him to leave. They worked through it, maybe not amazingly but better than most fights in dramas. So again, props to that. There were some things like these that were handled nicely. In the beginning. And never again.
The drama after the first 2 episodes had no plot. Nothing, not even one bit. The characters would just lamely wax poetics at each other for 20-40min of an episode, we'd get the really annoying side couples to pop in and waste time, an unnecessary love triangle was thrown in to, again, pad run time, and then we had the cliche 'I'm breaking up with you to protect you' mini arch that was about where I had to start skipping through. And I never skim dramas. Usually even the worst trash I'll sit through, but I just couldn't.
The 'disappearing' aspect of the show was both stupid and unexplored. It isn't the first time a drama has given a character who has died or was going to die a second chance with a time limit to do things over and set things right before they leave. Off the top of my head, I can think of Please Come Back, Mister (which had a lot of problems of its own, but wasn't as bad as this) and Miracle That We Met (which doesn't have a time limit but is close enough that I think it could fit). While neither is a perfect show and has problems too, they at least had a plot. They had plot, they had character growth, and they were entertaining, even if some aspects were frustrating. They were watchable. But with Ladylord, after being hit, HBS spends so much time not even fully realizing the situation. It's only around the halfway mark that he even understands that he's going to just... pop out of existence. Which is weird to me. I don't know why they didn't just have him die 49 days later. I guess then they wouldn't have been able to do those weird 'disappearing' scenes... which probably would have been better for the drama anyway. But no, his biological father is apparently an angel there to tell him that doom is at his doorstep and 49 days from now - poof! Gone. Like magic.
That's the problem with the drama. Well, the biggest problem. Nothing is thought out and everything is haphazard. Instead of focusing on the plot and the details of what is happening, it gives us scene after scene of the leads being 'cute' together that amount to nothing long-term. It feels like the writer and director didn't actually care about what was going on with the show or whether their audience enjoyed it. The angel is seen only, what, 3 or 4 times throughout the whole series? The end game is an afterthought. The supernatural aspect of the show never should have been added to this drama because they weren't willing to flesh it out enough to make it a real part of the plot. It was just a consequence. It's just like how the step-father was so heavily in the early episodes and then after the mom found out, they just didn't need him anymore and it was like he never existed in the first place. And it doesn't even matter because he was just playing a cartoon villain anyway.
The writer didn't bother trying to make this drama good. I really feel that there was no effort put into the script at all beyond maybe the initial set-up. They should have tried to add a plot to the characters' everyday lives instead of these one-off instances of drugging and abduction, a dating scandal and a random accusation of plagiarism that came out of nowhere and left into nothing. Their lives had no structure. And it's not like structure can't be added with plots like these (I use 'plot' very loosely here) because we've seen it done in plenty of others. There are really amazing cohabitation dramas. Heck, Lee Min Ki himself was in one that was done really well! And there are plenty of great supernatural dramas out there, too. There are dramas dealing with a character's last days/months alive, there are ones that deal with a second chance of life after death, and most of them are better than this.
I'll stop there before I get more depressed over my wasted time. I've never said this about a drama before, but don't watch it. Don't even try. It's not worth it. The few positive points I mentioned disappear a few episodes in anyways.
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