K-Drama

Everyone knew that The Potato Lab would have a happy ending. Really, it deserved one, and Episode 12 provides it with relish. It wasn’t always...

It was obvious that Episode 11 of The Potato Lab was going to play out like this. The signs were there. You can’t have a romantic enemies-to-lovers K-Drama without the dreaded breakup period, where crossed wires lead to an absence that makes the heart grow ever fonder.

As suspected, Episode 10 of The Potato Lab is indeed the obligatory one where problems between the leads threaten to upend their entire relationship.

How a show navigates its pesky middle episodes usually says a lot about it. You expect a captivating opening, and you expect an ending to provide all the payoff you’re looking for. But it’s rare that your average show has a really stand-out Episode 9.

When Life Gives You Tangerines has been a complete surprise and a riveting portrait of loss, grief, and family, especially in a brutal, heartbreaking Volume 2.

Fundamentally, The Potato Lab continues to work in Episodes 7 & 8 about as well as it has worked up to this point, and in largely the same way.

I’m assuming that I know what the end of The Potato Lab is going to be already because it’s an enemies-to-lovers rom-com and they all tend to work the same in a macro sense.

Oh, boy. That was a lot, right? I can’t even begin to imagine how many viewers were left heartbroken by Volume 2 of When Life Gives You Tangerines.

There’s an easy charm to The Potato Lab that feels like alchemy; narrative gold from leaden rom-com tropes.

I get it. I get why The Potato Lab works, and it’s a surprisingly obvious realization, highlighted really capably by Episode 3.

Ever proving that there’s more than one way to skin a cat – or, in this case, air a K-Drama – Netflix elected to release When Life Gives You Tangerines, the expensively-produced IU-starring drama doubling as a love letter to Jeju Island, in four four-part volumes.

Oddly, my concern with The Potato Lab is now that the weirdness of it might put people off. And that’s an interesting position to be in as early as Episode 2, since I’m still making a few assumptions about where it might all be heading.

What is it with K-Dramas these days? The concepts seem to be getting more and more bonkers. Now seems an odd time to suddenly decide that a good old rom-com isn’t enough anymore; there needs to be some kind of unique qualifying gimmick.

Look, it was virtually a given that When the Stars Gossip was going to have a lackluster ending given how increasingly bad it has become...

Like many people, I can’t wait for When the Stars Gossip to end. And while that might sound a little harsh, don’t worry about it, since I firmly believe that the show itself can’t wait to end either.

I’m not exactly a soothsayer, but as soon as When the Stars Gossip returned to Earth, I just knew it had nowhere else to really go.

Given I’m professionally obligated to persist with shows long beyond their expiration dates, it isn’t a new feeling to be almost resentful of the time I spend with When the Stars Gossip.

Remarkably, as of Episode 11, there are still five episodes of When the Stars Gossip remaining. What on earth are they going to be about?

Unmasked continues to be a confounding show in Episodes 7 & 8, and it remains difficult to know what to make of it

As of Episode 9, When the Stars Gossip has pretty much lost me. It’s a shame, really, since there have been so many glimmers of potential that the fact the K-Drama doesn’t seem to be cohering into anything feels like a waste.