Summary
In Episodes 1 & 2, Heavenly Ever After introduces a unique take on the afterlife that raises some big, interesting questions.
The concept of heaven is in itself a cliché. Think angels playing harps on clouds, tearful reunions with your loved ones who haven’t aged a day, family pets frolicking through fields – you get the idea. The best thing about Heavenly Ever After is that it doesn’t have much time for cliches. Its afterlife is a uniquely bureaucratic thing, a warren of odd social dynamics and difficult questions and unexpected dilemmas. In Episodes 1 & 2 of the Netflix K-Drama, the expected themes are there, but they snake through gags about interest rates and public transport.
This juxtaposition is intentional and threaded throughout everything in this two-part premiere (which is overlong, as is standard in weekly K-Drama world.) The protagonist is an older lady who dotes on her bed-bound husband but keeps them afloat as a loan shark. Hae-sook is complex, as characters go. She has a questionable line of work but is doing it for the right reasons. She and her muscle, Young-ae, don’t blanch from threats and tough conversations, but there’s a softer, more caring underside. Hae-sook believes she’s destined for Hell, but when her husband, Nak-jun, passes on and she joins him a year later, she realizes she isn’t. But the waiting room of heaven isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either.
I found the logistics enjoyable, I must admit. Checking regrets at the door, being ushered to consultations, choosing a posthumous age, performance reviews. This isn’t an idyllic heaven full of miracles and beauty. It’s a bit of a nightmare, honestly. And the idiosyncrasies continue in 80-year-old Hae-sook discovering that Nak-jun elected to become a much younger man.
Some big questions spill from all this. Is Hae-sook making the most of her second chance? Is love blind? Does death free you from the prejudices and social faux pas of life? Is not being in Hell the same thing as being in Heaven? These are interesting building blocks for a romantic comedy and Heavenly Ever After straddles both of those genres well in Episodes 1 & 2, earning laughs through the bureaucratic satire but finding the poignant underside of its gimmicks.
This is why Hae-sook being 80 isn’t just a joke. Can her relationship with Nak-jun be the same now? Can he still love her the same way? Can she love herself without aching for the prime years she irreversibly skipped over? Posthumous ageism is a funny concept. But having to reckon with how truthful you and your partner were in life – whether claims that Hae-sook was most beautiful at 80 were honest, for instance – is a deeper notion, and the concept of the frankly honest narration button plays with this idea.
There’s also stuff going on in the margins that hints at deeper ideas and things to keep an eye on as the show progresses. There’s a more terrestrial subplot following a grieving Young-ae being blindsided by a charlatan that ends on an ambiguous note, suggesting that perhaps there’ll be another citizen in the show’s distractingly earth-like afterlife. But I don’t trust that afterlife, either. The idea of Heaven being a continuation of life with all its red tape and foibles might make a degree of logical sense, but nobody dreams of being in waiting rooms and community centres forever, do they? So much of life in this Heaven relies on conformism – carrying out good deeds to earn currency, avoiding sinning lest you be demoted to Hell, and so on, and so forth – that it can’t take as a permanent paradise. Something must be afoot.
But I’ll say this for Heavenly Ever After – it got me thinking. And that isn’t a prerequisite for shows these days, which often distract you with overfamiliarity in the hope that you won’t think too hard about anything at all. That, at least, is refreshing, and there’s plenty of potential here in a story about how the most essential human characteristics – our self-image, our love, our hopes and regrets – come with us wherever we go. It’s too easy to imagine Heaven as a wonderland where none of that matters. But maybe paradise is learning how to live with who we are.
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