W – Two Worlds Apart

You could say that the writers got a bit out of hand towards the end, changing the rules of the game as they saw fit. And a lot of times it may not have made much sense. It's just that as a viewer who willingly watches this genre, I have a tolerance for these things, and I accept that if there were a comic book world people could go visit, then pretty much anything can happen. Especially if I like the acting, the soundtrack, and the comic book setting in general. Aside from the main characters, who I wouldn't have believed could fit together as well as they did, I especially enjoyed Oh Yeon Joo's father and Soo-bong as well. I do have one complaint though. Jong-seok is turning into a really great actor, but the fight scenes just don't do it for me. Or rather, he doesn't. I don't know if it's the character, but I much prefer to watch fights like the ones Rain or Soo Ko do. Oh, and I have to praise the unforced car commercials. That was great. 4.5 stars. (10/29/2016)

Well, let's all settle down. :-D It was such an interesting idea and I was looking forward to it so much that I left very disappointed. The beginning was still good when it followed certain rules. But then the rules started to bend, suddenly there were no more boundaries, but a limitless deus ex machina (we need to nudge it in this direction, so suddenly this is allowed; we need to stretch it, so let's make it harder and give new powers to this one and that one, we’ll just "slyly" explain it somehow, the audience will fall for it). Even though it seemed to have one twist after another, when you start thinking about it, you realize that basically the main puzzle was already solved after seven episodes, but because they needed to stretch it to 16, we suddenly ended up with more "plots". If you ignore the fact that we are moving between two worlds, where one of them can be influenced in a rather brutal way, we end up with another ordinary romance with love through life and death. But because we don't unlearn that, we don't get anything proper and everything is half and half for me – the fight against evil, their relationship, the fantasy element off the leash. And then I had a personal problem – Jong-suk Lee is fine, but as soon as he put on that wide smile of his, I had a weird feeling about him, just that the smile wasn't genuine at all and it all went a creepy direction for me. So I couldn't find my way to his character, or really to any character at all. In the end I found the assistant cartoonist the most interesting, he seemed the most genuine to me. Admittedly, I wondered for a while if maybe it was also a parody of all those deus ex machina, weird twistplots that you find in these shows (I had that suspicion the moment the author of W talks about how he created the killer), but in the end it took itself so seriously, unfortunately. I can't give a higher rating, it wouldn't be fair and the series is incredibly overrated. Just don't overthink it and you'll have fun. Although it's possible that you, like me, will still have a lot of questions after the last episode ends; because after all the mess it made, the series still doesn't answer them. (09/15/2016)