Red Balloon (2022)

The drama kept teasing us endlessly to what might have happened in Italy but it never revealed it. Sure, you can make some obvious assumptions but that's not as satisfying especially with the constant teasing. Makjang shows are designed to push your buttons through what's obvious from the observer perspective and this drama does exactly that but also eases the pain by making every character to have an unadjust trait or 10, including all of the leads. By doing this, it also makes it easier for the viewers to go softer on some of the wrong doings. You end up watching it to see how the car crash will end. In this case, a lot of fast and big changes happened in the last 40 minutes despite the drama having all the time in the world to approach its resolution more gracefully. Although it the drama was somewhat alright, but the harsh shift in the last 4 episodes made it really bad and unbearable. The main confrontation of the involved parties in the cafe was an example of that. The writer just wanted to amp it up as high as possible to squeeze the last dribbles of broadcast ratings. One thing I didn't like is how the drama forced every character to be connected to one another, it pushed the improbability of interconnected stories a bit too hard that it became ridiculous even for a makjang drama. If I had to pick one thing that irked me the most, it's how Da Ba's mother react differently between her daughter and Eun Gang on the suspicions of potential infidelity despite her daughter is the one doing it 10 folds harder in front of her face. A true bruh moment right there. Looking into the writer's previous projects, she's consistently decent except for a few outliers and this drama was part of these outliers.