Summary
Heavenly Ever After continues to have some smart ideas in Episodes 5 & 6, but it’s also feeling a little narratively wayward, and the lack of a proper story arc with genuine pacing and stakes is beginning to become distracting.
I do wonder if Heavenly Ever After might be too mawkish for its own good. I continue to enjoy the K-Drama, don’t get me wrong, but in Episodes 5 & 6, I began to drift a little. It does seem like more effort has been expended on the themes and ideas rather than a coherent narrative with proper pacing and stakes. I’m unsure of where it’s all going and what the point is beyond a rather arch sentiment about how the afterlife is a reflection of how one behaves in life. But, when you think about it, all depictions of heaven and hell are about that. Conceptually, that’s what heaven and hell are.
The satirical bureaucratic overlaps are what give this show’s version of these concepts some identity, but I dunno – stuff that’s easy to forget in the earlier setup episodes is a bit more troubling as things continue to progress without a clear trajectory. Mileage may vary.
The concept of Hell is especially relevant in these two episodes, since that, as teased in the previous two episodes, is where Hae-sook ends up after one too many infractions. And while it can’t be said that Hell is a particularly swell place, it isn’t as horrifying as you might expect, given a soft touch treatment here to reflect the show’s broader, accessible approach to the metaphysical. But the setup, which is a bit like a less horrifying version of Dante’s Inferno, where sinners are organized into different versions of sin-specific torment, still works pretty well.
The bureaucratic trappings are familiar, from unclassified denizens who have been demoted from heaven and – I like this touch – people who have suffered near-death experiences and are just having a brief tour. As in heaven, there’s the equivalent of a head manager, but the spiel has a different tone. Here, nobody gets anything they want, and potential punishments are nasty and varied. Hae-sook and Young-ae, who both end up unclassified – the former for the demotion, the latter for, I suspect, not actually being dead – try to adapt to their new surroundings.
It seems like everyone wants to go to Hell in Episodes 5 & 6 of Heavenly Ever After. Nak-joon wants to get Hae-sook back, which is understandable, but there’s even a bit about a lost dog that ventures down there to save its abusive owner. It’s very arch commentary about the fundamentally wonderful nature of dogs, but I’m a huge dog advocate, so the idea that they’re incapable of holding a grudge under any circumstances sits well with me. I wish the worst to the owner, though.
Hae-sook and Nak-joon eventually return to Heaven, accompanied by Young-ae, thanks in part to Nak-joon’s heroic self-sacrifice to prove his devotion and also perhaps to some manipulation of the moral scale that would have decided where in Hell they would have been filed. Introducing Young-ae to the heavenly dynamic with Som-i is interesting, both because it finally proves to Hae-sook that they’re not the same person but also because it makes Som-i jealous of the relationship Young-ae has with Hae-sook.
There are consequences to diving into Hell, though, even for noble reasons, so Nak-joon loses his job and doesn’t take it well. Thanks to Heaven’s strict adherence to protocol, everything has to be worked for, and this is something I like too. Heavenly Ever After rejigs the idea of financial debt as a kind of moral ledger, monies “owed” being the relative value of good deeds committed in life. It’s a nice way to take something fundamentally impersonal and add a nice contour to it. But fundamentally, it’s still reiterating the same idea of being a good person having value.
This is how Nak-joon gets his job back, as it happens – his intentions are good. He wants to help people, and even in a quagmire of bureaucratic processes, that counts for more than anything else. I’ll be interested to see what the implications of his backstory with Som-i might be, since her amnesia is the primary thread that the show is continuing to develop. It’d be nice if there was more going on than that, but you never know how things might adjust as we go.
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