The finale of My LOve From The Star ( from dramabeans/2014/02/you-from-another-star-episode-21-final) read :) Song-yi asks how long it’ll take, and Se-mi says for her it was fifteen years, but now it doesn’t hurt. Song-yi says sympathetically that it must’ve been hard for her, then wonders how she’ll be able to survive if it takes her that long. Then, we cut to Song-yi in Min-joon’s library, in interview mode. She describes how hard it is not to think of Min-joon, and revisits the places they’d gone to seek traces of him. She also describes how it felt to come upon their hundred-day anniversary, and as promised she goes to the Namsan Tower restaurant. She waits there all night, looking hopefully at every person who walks in, until finally someone sits down across from her. It’s Min-joon, and he smiles at her. She smiles back, but a moment later we see that she’s sitting alone at that table. In another interview, Song-yi says that at things started to feel different, though. Early on, she had assumed she’d been seeing things, but at a point she started to believe she’d actually seen Min-joon. “No, I did see him,” she corrects. But she knows that’s impossible, and wonders if she’s going crazy. Fortunately she has a kindred spirit in Lawyer Jang, who laughs that he’s felt the same thing. He recounts an incident where he’d been tending to Min-joon’s thriving plants and heard Min-joon call his name, appearing behind him. Lawyer Jang had gotten up excitedly to embrace him… only to have Min-joon vanish. Song-yi says that she’d gone to the hospital and been told it was grief-related stress. She figures that Lawyer Jang must’ve been quite close to Min-joon to experience the same thing. Yoon-jae makes an exciting discovery with his telescope—a minor planet that he reported to the international astrology bureau, which he’ll get to name if they credit him with the discovery. Mom suggests that he name it after her, but he says he’s gonna name it Do Min-joon Star. That segues us into three years later, when Yoon-jae gets his wish and the discovery is confirmed. He’s interviewed by a reporter and credits his mentor for helping him with the difficult achievement, hence the planet name Do Min-joon. Bok-ja has assumed the role of his manager, her hair now quite a bit longer than when we’d last seen her. Judging from the way she fawns over Yoon-jae, it’s not hard to see where her current (delusional?) interest lies. He rejects her flat, and she coos that he’s playing hard to get. The two investigators discuss the Jae-kyung case, which has given up its appeal and drawn strangely little support from S&C Group. Jae-kyung was recently moved to a safe cell because he has started insisting that he’s being visited by people he has killed. Seok figures this is one case of a criminal having a mental break when confronted with his misdeeds and facing a dead end. However, there’s one oddity that Seok has heard: Jae-kyung claimed to see Min-joon recently. Detective Park shrugs it off as further sign of insanity, but now we’ve had three Min-joon sightings. Dare we hope this signals a return? Is he appearing in flashes? Beam me down, Scotty? Song-yi’s career is back on top, with Hwi-kyung ever her faithful supporter/friend/investor. He denies any connection to being her investor despite all facts pointing to the contrary, feigning ignorance when she notes that his company keeps funding her movies. He’s outed when the film crew swings by and thanks him for all his constant attention, support, and food trucks. Ha. Just then, Song-yi spots Min-joon standing in the crowd of fans and gets up with a start, scanning the faces intently as she shouts his name. When she can’t find him, she dissolves into tears and Hwi-kyung does his best to comfort her. Mom and Dad ask about her tearful breakdown later, as Song-yi’s preparing for an award ceremony. Song-yi bursts into tears again, saying, “I miss him… I want to see him, and touch him, and be with him so much I want to die.” Award ceremony time. Stars make their arrival on the red carpet, giving us cameos from Sandara Park and Kim Won-joon. Se-mi gets her moment in the spotlight, but it’s Song-yi’s arrival that sends everyone into a frenzy. Cameras flash like crazy, fans scream, and Song-yi works the carpet like a pro. And then… time freezes. Aie! No! Is it…? Strangely, Song-yi doesn’t freeze. She looks around in confusion at the sudden halt of everything around her, and spots someone out in the crowd, walking past all the frozen people into plain view: Min-joon. Incredulous and speechless, Song-yi meets him at the landing, where Min-joon shrugs out of his jacket to place on her shoulders, reminding her that he told her not to go around all exposed like this. She can’t quite believe it’s him, but he assures her that it is, and she clutches him tightly. He apologizes for coming so late, then kisses her—just as time unfreezes on the spectacle. The crowd goes wild. For the first time, we get a joint interview with the couple as Min-joon fields the question of whether he’s back for good. Oh, is this an actual news interview? Min-joon wonders how to explain it, and Song-yi says that he did come back, but he disappeared soon after. Back at the award hall, Song-yi opens her eyes from the kiss to see that Min-joon is gone again. Everyone is stunned since he was just standing there moments ago, and she looks around in confusion, alone again. Interviewing, Min-joon explains that when he’d left three years ago, he’d been sucked into a wormhole. After he recovered his health, and started searching for a way back. He tried many times and had fleeting successes, but was only able to come to Earth for seconds at a time. The hundred-day Namsan Tower date was his first success, not a hallucination after all. Seeing Lawyer Jang was his second success, and then we see him appearing in Jae-kyung’s cell. He says that he is here to confirm that Jae-kyung had in fact lost everything, while Jae-kyung is deeply rattled, thinking himself mad. He experienced many failed attempts, but the crucial point is that with each try he was able to remain on Earth for longer stretches. This time has been a year and two months, Song-yi confirms. On a cozy night in, Song-yi and Min-joon settle back to watch the stars, his plants still thriving. Song-yi repeats the words she’d said the night of his proposal, “I’m perfectly happy.” But that’s when Min-joon disappears from his chair. Song-yi takes in the sight calmly this time, assured of his eventual return. He leaves his book behind, open to the line: “Once, there was rabbit that miraculously found its way back home.” EPILOGUE Song-yi interviews, and is asked the question of how hard it is to deal with Min-joon’s unpredictable departures. Of course it is, she says, but it also allows her to love him more: “If I think that this may be the last time I see his face before me, that moment feels incredibly precious.” And as she sleeps in bed alone, Min-joon appears next to her and is there when she wakes to say, “I’m back.” COMMENTS Ahh, it’s over. Time to make sense of it all! First off, I am happy that we ended on a happy note, one that left our two characters together and in the moment—I didn’t want to be given a poetic or metaphorical facsimile of a happy ending, I wanted my happy ending with a concrete win against the cosmos, tied up in a bow. And given the epic nature of this couple’s battle with the fates (in that it was like cancer to the tenth power, with an interfering meanie universe to boot), maybe some fanservice too. Maybe a lot of fanservice. By virtue of the fact that we got that, I can’t complain too much about loose ends or plot quibbles, because the overall emotional arc was resolved and I’m at peace with it. On the other hand, I’m not perfectly satisfied on an intellectual level, because in addition to the romance finding its cheerful resolution (which was the paramount concern), I was still hoping for all the mysteries and plot questions to be answered in a way that felt logical and feasible. It didn’t have to be scientifically accurate or believable in a real-world sense, but I wanted the drama to explain its mechanisms, and I don’t think it did that. This is a weakness in many a Korean drama dealing with paranormal/supernatural/fantasy elements so You From Another Star is hardly the only offender, but it remains that if you set up this fictional world with very distinct and quirky rules (you can only space-travel home once in four centuries, your existence is threatened if you don’t return, human saliva makes you sick), then I’m going to want to know why. Some answers were given (like the comet explanation for the 400-year cycle) but many were not. Since some of these rules are so interesting and amusing, I’ve been waiting all series long to get an explanation, however silly or fictional, and when the drama chooses not to address them at all, I can’t shake a feeling of disappointment. For instance, why does Song-yi not freeze when Min-joon returns? Did that last kiss make Min-joon sick, or is he completely fine now that he’s been back and recovered his health? Does that reset his sick-meter so that he won’t undergo the slow decay as he did the first time, or is he actually rejuvenated (so to speak) by his regular trips through the wormhole? Speaking of wormholes: WTF, wormhole. Talk about a last-minute deus ex machina, aka that magical answer to curing finale episodes in need of a happy ending. You From Another Star made me think of My Girlfriend is a Gumiho in that the supernatural beloved is whisked away out of reach, leaving the earthbound half to wait for years, to be then gifted with their lover’s return because of a solution that doesn’t really make sense. It seemed out of the blue to have Min-joon return home that first time via wormhole given the arrival of the UFO, but I suppose we needed it to establish the wormhole travel that would then account for his trips back and forth, but as this all came in the drama’s last fifteen minutes, I’m not sure it was necessary. How much do I love how the ending line of the drama (pre-epilogue) works with our hero’s journey, where the book describes the bunny finding his miraculous path home? Because despite the fact that Min-joon spent centuries waiting for his spaceship back to his planet, it turns out that home actually is on Earth, with Song-yi, with the people he loves. I’m not going to quibble about the Time Traveler’s Wife feel of the constantly disappearing Min-joon, because at least that gave us emotional payoffs that felt organic to these characters. And that’s the kind of thing that has buoyed my love of the show all series long, because when you pare down the plot to its essential bones, it’s a familiar story of lovers fighting a force outside of their control to be together, and barring that, to make the most of what they’re given. What made this drama such a winner for me was Song-yi’s irrepressible spirit and Min-joon’s unflagging devotion, and the fun alien-superpower stuff was mostly gravy—cause for a good laugh, but not the meat and potatoes. Not to downplay the value of a solidly crafted joke, because goodness knows we’ve seen enough bad attempts at comedy fall flat that I give respect when a drama pulls it off. There were some truly golden moments, like Song-yi’s verbal mix-ups, Min-joon’s brief but awesome dips into childish pettiness, Yoon-jae’s blind adoration (and ET fixation), and superpower-related sight gags. Some of that we owe to the leads’ chemistry, which was the main reason I tuned in—sure the alien premise was interesting, but mostly, I’d seen The Thieves. I’d seen the kissing. Rawr. There’s nothing worse than a romance that falls flat because of a lack of rapport, despite everything else working, so when you already know the couple is going to crackle together, that’s gold. Served up on a silver platter. Sparkling with diamonds. And I can’t even express how thrilled I am with Jeon Ji-hyun’s drama comeback—you could almost call it her drama debut, given that her last series was Happy Together in 1999 and she had very limited television work on her resumé. She had actually spent quite a bit of time lumped into the “pretty actress with limited acting skills” category, though I think she’s been underestimated. But it was hard to see all her potential in action when she only acted in select film projects and not that prolifically at that, so for her You From Another Star is something of a discovery moment, even though she’s well into the second decade of her career and is already an A-list star. Kim Soo-hyun, on the other hand, seems to be unable to put a foot wrong, though I can’t begrudge him his success since he has earned every bit of it by always being present and committed. He has some of the best crying skills in dramaland, because I never see a guy trying to make tears happen; he inhabits his pain so that you actually feel him trying to rein it in while everyone else is trying to force it to burst, and it can be quite powerful. So no, not a perfect way to tie up loose ends (in that some remain untied), but in the scheme of things the most important issues were resolved happily, and I can put this drama away with a sigh of satisfaction.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 08:44:19 +0000
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