Summary
Heavenly Ever After bites off a little more than it can chew in Episodes 7 & 8, grappling with big concepts but not always in a way that feels illuminating.
Maybe it’s just me, but Heavenly Ever After is starting to feel like a lot. It could be the episode runtimes, granted, which stretch to almost feature-length twice a week. But it could be something a bit more – and check out this relevant word choice – damning. Episodes 7 & 8 of the likeable but largely superficial K-Drama offer little new beyond a relatively decent exploration of in-law relationships, and mostly reiterate the same trite themes and ideas within the same satirical framework.
Not that the ideas are worthless – on the contrary, actually. But exploring them at this length can border on something a little patronizing, and one wonders who, exactly, this show is being aimed at. I appreciate the message that you should look after your dog, for instance, or that the good deeds you perform in life matter, perhaps more than you realize, but how many times does that need to be explained before we get it?
The focus in Episode 7 shifts to one of the most clichéd imaginable – the mother-in-law. The ire of your partner’s mother is, presumably, so ferocious that it can single-handedly result in an uptick of divorce rates even in heaven. Hae-sook and Nak-joon might be a model afterlife couple for now, especially given the age gap, but with a mother-in-law thrown into the equation, anything can happen.
It’s a little tropey that almost all mother-in-law characters are naggy and judgmental, but it also holds pretty true in my experience, so I’m willing to give Heavenly Ever After a soft pass. It’s also a little tropey for breakdowns in relationships to come from such obvious miscommunications, and that’s a bit of a trickier issue, since it can lead to frustration in the audience when two characters at clear cross purposes don’t just sit down and talk things out.
This problem is made a bit more explicit when it’s literally vocalized to Young-ae. Even though Hae-sook’s mother-in-law can identify her own inadequacies in the role – and knows that they came from her own mother-in-law – she still outright refuses to express that directly to the person who most needs to hear it. And that’s a shame since it causes other problems, like Nak-joon assuming that Hae-sook ducking his mother is the reason they don’t get along. Yikes.
It takes a while for Hae-sook and Nak-joon to finally sit down and hash out their issues. And here I think the show is biting off a little more than it can chew, thematically speaking. See, Heavenly Ever After Episodes 7 & 8 deal quite directly with generational trauma filtered through the literal concept of reincarnation, so a similar idea to what Nak-joon’s mother was earlier articulating about her learning how to be a mother-in-law from example becomes a plot point. She wants to reincarnate into a difficult life full of hardship as her own form of atonement, and this leads to a later idea that Hae-sook’s own life with Nak-joon was, in its way, penance for a previous life as his mother’s cruel mother-in-law. It’s all a cycle. The only way to break it is by paying good deeds forward in the next life.
These are pretty big metaphysical ideas, and I’m not sure a show with an entire plot thread that amounts to “be nice to dogs” is necessarily the one to grapple with them. But it’s food for thought, if nothing else.
What isn’t clear, yet, is the connection between Som-i, Nak-joon, and the man she choked so forcefully at the end of Episode 7 that he literally felt it from the afterlife. What we do know is that Som-i believes she needs forgiveness for a grave sin, and that sin is falling in love with a married man (Nak-joon, obviously). There’s definitely more to come here, and if I were a betting man, I don’t think I’d be lumping on Hae-sook and Nak-joon’s marriage surviving the season. But we’ll have to wait and see.
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