Crash Course in Romance (2025)

SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Crash Course in Romance
(일타 스캔들 / Ilta Sukaendeul / One Hit Scandal)
MyDramaList rating:6.5/10

Hello everybody! As I mentioned in my last review, I’ve decided to check out a couple of more recent Netflix K-Dramas that I’ve been putting off before I move on with my list of older watchlist items. Sometimes I just can’t help but get interested in new releases and then they crawl their way up to the top of my watchlist – it’s just how it goes sometimes! So yes, that’s why I decided to go off track for a bit, starting with this one! I remember seeing one scene from it, thinking it looked really cute, and I also heard about it from a friend, so I decided to check it out for myself. I wasn’t actually sure what it was about from the start, so that was exciting, but it left me with a lot of mixed feelings towards the end. Although I thought the show was good in itself in terms of acting and story/concept, I just kept getting frustrated while watching it and the ending really left me hanging onto so many unresolved feelings. My rating went a down a bit as I was watching it, but anyway, I still really want to share my thoughts, so let’s go!

Crash Course in Romance is a 16-episode Netflix K-Drama with episodes of each about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Its main story focusses on the vicious education system in South Korea, how far parents are willing to go to get their children into the best academies and cram schools to prepare them for CSATs, even when that leads to them losing sight of their children’s (mental) health in the process. Choi Chi Yeol (played by Jung Kyung Ho) is a high-level math teacher who basically has a celebrity status. He’s the teacher that every parent wants their child to be tutored by. His popularity comes not only from his social status and good looks, but also from his way of teaching and how he manages to energize and motivate his students. His nickname is The Trillion Won Man, for his societal value due to his success rate of getting students into top universities. Despite being a highly acclaimed teacher at The Pride Academy, the most sought-after private tutoring school in Seoul, Chi Yeol personally has trouble keeping up a healthy lifestyle. He suffers from insomnia which makes him constantly exhausted and irritable, and on top of that he can’t even eat properly – everything he consumes immediately comes back out. He only has his assistant Ji Dong Hee (played by Shin Jae Ha) to take care of him, who always tries to get him to eat and sleep properly, drives him everywhere and seems to be the only one to truly care about Chi Yeol’s wellbeing. Dong Hee is part of Chi Yeol’s management team at The Pride, that books events for him to participate in, such as interviews and Q&A sessions, but also math camps and exclusive tutoring programs. One day, Dong Hee gets him a bag of food from a popular side dish store and miraculously, Chi Yeol is able to finish the entire meal without throwing up. He is immediately intrigued by this food, not just because he’s able to eat all of it, but also because it gives him a nostalgic feeling; when he was a student himself, he used to get free meals from an elderly lady that ran a restaurant in his neighborhood, and this food takes him back to those meals.
As it happens, the food comes from a side dish store called Nation’s Best Banchan (Side Dishes), which is run by Nam Haeng Seon (played by Jeon Do Yeon). Haeng Seon used to be a very promising handball player, but her whole life changed after her older sister dropped her 5-year old daughter off at their place and disappeared. Shortly after this, Haeng Seon’s mother (another beautiful guest appearance of Kim Mi Kyung) passed away, leaving Haeng Seon to give up her handball ambitions to take care of her niece together with her ASD younger brother Nam Jae Woo (played by Oh Ui Shik). Now, a little over ten years later, Nam Hae Yi (played by Noh Yoon Seo) is like Haeng Seon’s actual daughter – in fact, to keep things simple they even refer to each other as ‘mom’ and ‘daughter’ in public, keeping the fact that they are actually aunt and niece a secret, even at Hae Yi’s school. Together with Jae Woo and Kim Young Joo (played by Lee Bong Ryeon), Haeng Seon’s bestie from her handball days who now works in the store with her, they are a happy little family.
Chi Yeol and Haeng Seon first meet under less than friendly circumstances – Chi Yeol confiscates Jae Woo’s phone after the latter takes a picture of his jacket with a tiger on it (Jae Woo is fascinated by lions and tigers), and he ends up breaking the phone altogether. When it turns out Jae Woo never took Chi Yeol’s picture, Chi Yeol tries to make it up to Haeng Seon without revealing who he is, and this is how the two keep running into each other. Haeng Seon is initially very wary of him, but after finding out that he’s the Star Teacher that Hae Yi has been talking about, her attitude towards him becomes very benevolent and grateful and they strike a deal: Chi Yeol will tutor Hae Yi in private and Haeng Seon will keep providing him with meals.
That is basically the preface of the main couple’s relationship: Chi Yeol has trouble eating, he discovers that for some reason he’s only able to digest Haeng Seon’s food, and eventually he realizes that she’s the daughter of the woman who used to feed him when he was a struggling student. As they get closer he starts getting more involved with her family and starts to see Haeng Seon as the bright, energetic and strong, caring woman that she is. Their romance develops in a very natural way, and it’s really sweet to see how Haeng Seon kind of ‘revives’ Chi Yeol to become healthier and happier than ever.

To begin with Chi Yeol, I have to start out by saying that this is probably the first time ever that the male lead has been my favorite character in a show. Despite his irritable behavior in the beginning, I really felt for him because he is, understandably, under a whole lot of stress himself. Not only does he have an incredible reputation to uphold which involves both good and bad responses – like any celebrity he also has some serious haters and is under a lot of pressure to perform – he is also very aware of the stress-induced industry he plays a part in. In the final episode, he even admits that he feels guilty about playing a small part as a radar in the machinery that occasionally drives students over the edge, and to have to deal with these toxic parents all the time. I really liked the fact that he was mature enough to acknowledge that, and he also seemed to be one of the few people at The Pride who actually saw things for what they were. They didn’t make it a secret that the director of The Pride was constantly being bribed by The Moms, and as soon as Chi Yeol got a whiff of something being off, he would immediately call the director out for it. He’d be like ‘yo, there’s something shady going on here and I don’t want to be a part of it’. Especially when Hae Yi suddenly gets kicked out of the All Care program for some weird made-up reason, he really went, ‘okay well, then count me out too, because this is some unfair shit’. I really loved him for being so real and it was really good to see him live up again after meeting Haeng Seon, she had such a great influence on him.
One major part of his stress, and also why he is so aware of what his position within this industry entails, is because he’s seen with his own eyes what it can do to people. There used to be a girl student, Jung Soo Hyeon, whom he tutored when he was still a teaching assistant, and she ultimately killed herself because her mother drove her into cheating her way to the top. Apparently, her mother had acquired the actual exam sheets and forced her daughter to ace the exam with those, and the girl couldn’t take that pressure. All in all, this mom was one of the worst examples, as the pressure she put on her kids was plain mental abuse. And even after losing her daughter, she just went on to treat her younger son the exact same way. The younger son, Jung Seong Hyeon, was ultimately charged for murdering his own mother because he also cracked under the pressure, especially after losing his older sister. He was eventually acquitted of all charges, but this story keeps popping up in the background as we get to know Chi Yeol better and we also learn that one of the presently active police detectives who was involved in the case at that time, always kept suspicions about the kid’s innocence. In any case, Chi Yeol’s insomnia is strengthened by nightmares about the last times he spoke with Soo Hyeon and he is plagued by how he might have been able to help her. I guess that’s also what drives him to become more outspoken towards similar issues after he becomes healthier. In his irritable state he can’t really be bothered, but after regaining his spirit because of Haeng Seon, he starts acting more and more benevolent towards less privileged kids and even offers to tutor Hae Yi in private after she’s kicked out of the All Care program. It was really nice to see someone learn from their experiences and using it as a way to improve themselves in future situations. Chi Yeol was such a good person and I really liked him, especially after he and Haeng Seon confirmed their relationship. The way he looked at her was just so adorable, he became such a doting boyfriend while never neglecting his duties as a teacher – if anything, you could say he just became more attentive to shady things that happened around him.

I honestly found the way they incorporated that case of Soo Hyeon’s younger brother into the story very nice. Like, they would start out by casually mentioning it a couple of times, but still often enough that I kept thinking, ‘this must be coming back at some point, otherwise they wouldn’t keep bringing it up’. And then when the weird stuff started happening and the police started investigating that metal ball killer case, more and more links were made and the way they eventually reached what was truly going on was pretty well drawn-out in my opinion. I was really interested to find out what was happening, and I found it a pretty original storyline.
So what’s happening is that there is a series of attacks in which people get shot at with small metal balls, resulting in at least two deaths. It’s first heavily suggested that the older brother of Hae Yi’s best friend is involved, since he tends to go out at night and dresses anonymously, and it does seem like he is somewhat involved when his mom finds some metal balls in his desk drawer. However, exactly because it was so heavily suggested, I never thought he was the culprit. For one, the attacks all happened to people who had bothered Chi Yeol in some way, and the older brother didn’t even have a personal link to Chi Yeol.
So then I started thinking about that younger brother, that story that kept popping up, and I started to expect him to come back into the story at some point. In a flashback we see that Chi Yeol was kind to him at Soo Hyeon’s funeral, and Soo Hyeon had been fond of Chi Yeol, so I thought it might have to do with the younger brother sticking up for Chi Yeol in memory of his sister.
I only started suspecting Dong Hee after that one scene in which that police detective lingered on him just a second too long, as if he remembered him from somewhere. That was the very first thing that made me go, ‘wait, is there something more to Dong Hee?’ So then I was left thinking, ‘ok so it’s either going to be Dong Hee who turns out to be more than just a loyal assistant, or that younger brother is coming back’. At that point, it still didn’t occur to me that they might be the same person.

The thing that probably bothers me the most in the entire series, besides The Moms that I still need to get to, is the ending. So many people do such nasty things, things that actually harm other people’s lives for no reason, and NONE of the victims actually end up getting any justice. In the metal ball killer case as well as The Moms’ cases, after all the damage they create, not a single one of them brings out a genuine apology or even an acknowledgement of the fact they did something wrong. It was like, every single person that needed to apologize for something was too shameless or self-absorbed to even feel guilty. As I am already on the topic of Dong Hee, I will start with him, and I will get to The Moms later.
So yeah, it turns out that Chi Yeol’s assistant Dong Hee is actually Jung Seong Hyeon, Soo Hyeon’s younger brother who was charged with the murder of his own mother (which is revealed to be true). Soo Hyeon had told him about Chi Yeol and how he was the only adult she could rely on, and Seong Hyeon then proceeded to honor his sister’s memory by becoming Chi Yeol’s right hand. That in itself would be an honorable thing, if it weren’t for the fact that Dong Hee has become completely delusional in his ‘quest’ to ‘protect’ Chi Yeol. He thinks he now has the right to ‘eliminate’ every ‘obstacle’ that gets in Chi Yeol’s way. He targets people that either bother Chi Yeol or that distract him from his teaching duties – the latter being his reason for eventually going after Haeng Seon and, consequently, Hae Yi.
On the one hand, I found it pretty original that the typically smiling, loyal assistant turned out to be the bad guy for once, and to me it wasn’t even that far-fetched to make Dong Hee secretly obsessed with Chi Yeol, if you thought about his mental state after being mentally abused by his mother and broken by the loss of his sister. But even within his messed-up logic, his arguments still didn’t make sense to me. He claimed that he only wanted the best for Chi Yeol, but that meant that he actually preferred him when he was swamped with work and tried to cope with his insomnia and inability to eat a proper meal. Like, if he really cared about Chi Yeol, why couldn’t he be supportive when he became properly healthy and happy? It just started feeling like Dong Hee became obsessed to the point where he wanted Chi Yeol all to himself. After all, anyone who saw the relationship between Chi Yeol and Haeng Seon would agree that Haeng Seon wasn’t bothering him, she was helping him become the best version of himself. But no, to Dong Hee, Haeng Seon was only getting in the way, she was taking away Chi Yeol’s time that he’d otherwise spend with Dong Hee, and therefore she was a distraction and a nuisance to him. Also, she was making Chi Yeol’s memories of Soo Hyeon fade away, and he could not let that happen. As if he had anything to say about Chi Yeol’s personal life and the people he chose to spend his private time with, now he wouldn’t even let Chi Yeol heal from his traumas. Dong Hee never felt even an inch of guilt about the people he’d harmed and killed. I couldn’t believe he’d go so far as to try and kill Hae Yi after she’d already gotten into a coma, it went really far.
And then, after that entire build-up, until the point where he is finally confronted by Chi Yeol, he just cries at him that he did everything for his sake, as if that made it justifiable. After making himself the victim in all of it he gets all dramatic, saying ‘I can’t live like this anymore’ and jumps off the hospital roof. And that was that. He is dead on the spot, he can’t even be charged with any of the crimes and murders he’s committed, and none of the victims will have justice. He will be mentioned on the news as ‘a suspect’ in the metal ball killer case, rather than ‘the culprit’. I really hated that they just cut off the storyline like that. I wanted him to be charged with everything he committed and get thrown into jail and some serious therapy sessions. Also, the fact that they did this in the first half of the second-to-last episode and then filled the remaining 1,5 episode with some casual family/redeeming arc really pissed me off. I didn’t care for it at all. I’d much more preferred it if they’d actually made a case about putting Dong Hee behind bars, and about making everyone who did nasty things apologize for what they did, it was the least they could’ve done to give the victims a bit of justice.

I want to give a short summary of the crimes that Dong Hee committed and why/how.
First of all, the stray cats. The inhumanity. Dong Hee actually practiced shooting his metal balls at a couple of stray cats to see if he could shoot hard enough to kill a living creature (at least, that’s what I imagine).
Before it gets picked up by the police, there is this girl who is seemingly obsessed with Chi Yeol who even sneaks into his house and hugs him without his consent one time. Not long after that, we see her walking down an alley in the dark where she gets attacked by someone shooting a metal ball at her. We see her falling down, seemingly unconscious, the next day she doesn’t show up at the academy, and we never see her again. I actually found it kind of weird that she was never mentioned again or even found. Like, did no one notice she was suddenly gone? They only kept mentioning the two cases that left a body behind, but I always kept wondering what happened to stalker girl. Even if she was delusional, she needed help more than she deserved to die.
The second time is when a metal ball is shot through Haeng Seon’s shop window, while Chi Yeol is in there with them. This happens after he comes to make amends for judging Jae Woo when he took those pictures, and in hindsight I feel like the metal ball may have either been meant for Haeng Seon or Jae Woo, as they both aggravated Chi Yeol at the time. This time no one gets hurt, but it’s still an attack so they report it to the police. Later, the police is able to link this report to the next couple of attacks.
As I mentioned before, at some point Hae Yi is kicked out of the All Care program. She was initially elected as one of seven students who would get exclusive tutoring by Chi Yeol in order to prepare for medical school exams. After getting in because of her own efforts in math, just before the program starts she is suddenly taken out of it for some weird reason that wasn’t specified before. In the meantime, we get to see exactly what happens. There’s a lady who keeps trying to persuade The Moms to get her delinquent son Young Min into the All Care program. Having a personal grudge against Hae Yi/Haeng Seon at that point, The Moms actually manage to bribe the director of The Pride into swapping her out with that boy. After one single lesson, Young Min is already so disrespectful towards Chi Yeol in class that Chi Yeol sends him away, and that same night the boy gets into a mysterious accident and ends up ‘falling off’ a balcony, leading to this death. Again, a metal ball is found on the scene. — Just in-between, they showed the scene of Young Min being followed by someone at the very beginning of the series. At the time, I just thought that was to show that weird things were already happening to Chi Yeol’s students before we were even introduced to Chi Yeol himself, but then the actual event happened a couple of episodes later. I was just wondering what the random foreshadowing was about. —
The final case is of a fellow The Pride teacher called Jin Yi Sang (played by Jin Il Joo), who by then had already been busted by Chi Yeol himself for being his main online hater, Chiyeolsucks. Yi Sang was about to reveal that Chi Yeol was private-tutoring Hae Yi and he was going to link that to his past of tutoring Soo Hyeon, creating suggestions of Chi Yeol getting involved with his female students more than once, but Chi Yeol had managed to keep him silent after busting him. Not long after that, Yi Sang is attacked in his own building and shot by a metal ball. He then goes missing for a while until his body is found in a river a while later. A metal ball was found in his breast pocket, and I’m guessing he may have put it there himself as a dying message.
As I said, just when the police suspect Dong Hee of being Seong Hyeon and therefore the metal ball killer, he jumps off a roof before they can officially hear him out and confirm their suspicions. Dong Hee will always remain a ‘suspect’ rather than a ‘culprit’. His inability to even relate to the severity of his actions, how needless they were, was alarming, and I keep repeating that every victim deserved justice. The stalker girl and Young Min were only teenagers who should’ve had all the time in the world to mature and reflect on their behaviors, and Yi Sang had already stopped posting malicious stuff about Chi Yeol and being busted by him was all the punishment he needed in my opinion.

Haeng Seon and her family become a main victim of a lot of stuff. Haeng Seon is one of the few ‘moms’ who is not familiar at all with the world of The Moms, the world in which their kids’ futures all depend on their grades. As someone who never got an education herself because she had to take care of Hae Yi, she’s been doing just fine making a living by selling her amazing side dishes, and she’s proved that she can do just as well in society as someone with an academic record. Anyways, she cares about Hae Yi’s wishes and puts in a lot of effort to get her niece into The Pride, purely out of support because it’s what Hae Yi wants. When The Moms start noticing that Haeng Seon is also suddenly trying to get her daughter into tutoring lessons, they don’t initially expect much result for her, but when Hae Yi suddenly starts acing her math tests and even exceeds the initial top students, they start getting suspicious that there might be something else going on. Hae Yi becomes acknowledged by Chi Yeol himself as he notices her great progress, and she’s even admitted into the exclusive All Care program. While Hae Yi has managed to get this far all because of her own efforts – in combination with Chi Yeol’s tutoring of course – it doesn’t sit well with many other students and their parents. After all, she wasn’t part of the ‘top’ before – how is she suddenly acing all those tests? There must be something going on there, right? This can’t just be the results of her own efforts, right?
As a result of these suspicions, Hae Yi becomes a target of The Moms, who will do anything to keep their own kids at the top. Hae Yi becomes a competitor and instead of trying to beat her fair and square, they resort to bribing and corruption to keep Hae Yi away from the top, starting with the All Care program. Their kids feel intimidated by Hae Yi, so she has to disappear, that’s basically what it comes down to. While Haeng Seon keeps trying to defend Hae Yi and talk to people to find out what is going on, no one comes clean, no one provides her with an honest explanation. The fact that they pulled all this fraudulous stuff behind their backs and then didn’t even come up with a proper explanation was really frustrating. Chi Yeol, who is also suspicious of the reason why Hae Yi was kicked out of the All Care program and who is all for giving her the chance she deserves, comes up with the idea to secretly tutor her in private at Haeng Seon’s house, as long as Haeng Seon will keep delivering him lunchboxes. At some point, The Moms get their hands on CCTV footage of Haeng Seon visiting Chi Yeol’s house to deliver the food. What follows is an entirely different ‘scandal’ in which Haeng Seon is accused of providing Chi Yeol with ‘sexual favors’ in return for him privately tutoring her daughter. It really gets out of hand and the rumors starts escalating in severity. I remember this part really, REALLY frustrated the heck out of me. These Moms created a LOT of worthless drama for Haeng Seon’s family.
The thing I appreciated most about Haeng Seon was that, like Chi Yeol, she didn’t just let things slide. She stood up against unfairness, and after someone had posted something, she would just go straight up to that person to demand an explanation. Something that personally always triggers me is the frustration of being the only rational person trying to talk to a bunch of ignorant people. Even after everything went down and The Moms started protesting at the school about something, Haeng Seon just came up to them all by herself and literally went, ‘I don’t understand any of you, but I don’t think this is right’. All the while keeping her humility, she kept speaking out when something didn’t feel right, and that was really admirable of her. Because yeah, stuff kept happening to her for no reason, and she had all the right in the world to receive a proper explanation and an apology, multiple ones even. She was just a really kind and down-to-earth character who saw injustice for what it was. Her hunch about Dong Hee was also right from the start, even if it initially seemed like plain pettiness. I loved how mature she was, she truly proved that you didn’t need an academic degree to be a properly functioning human being in society. She was better than all of them, and I stand by that.

I really loved Chi Yeol and Haeng Seon together. It’s been a while since I truly savored the slowburn of a relationship like this. The way they were attracted to one another just came across as so natural, they really fell for each other’s ‘person’, and the age gap didn’t even come into play as a reason to hold back. I loved how, even though it was an enemies-to-lovers trope, it wasn’t as standard or stereotypical as in other dramas. They still felt like a very original pair to me, and I loved how adorable they were in their scenes together. Their kissing scenes were really good and they just portrayed their love for each other so well. I loved their dynamic and chemistry.

I’m not going to lie, the first time Jae Woo popped up I really thought, ‘oh god, this is going to be a copy-paste from the older brother from It’s Okay to Not Be Okay‘. It’s like, that portrayal of a character on the autism spectrum has become so iconic that this is how autistic characters will be portrayed from now on. I felt like Jae Woo’s behavior in the beginning was very similar to Moon Sang Tae’s, and that made me feel a bit mixed about the character’s originality. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a really good thing that ASD characters are getting represented more and more these days, also through for example Move to Heaven and Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and even in those dramas the characters all display a different kind of autism. I’m just saying that I would feel a bit bad if it suddenly became a kind of caricature, with a comical effect, even. In the end, I do feel like Jae Woo was different, so I may have judged him too quickly in the beginning. For instance, I was surprised by the way Haeng Seon interacted with him. At first I found it kind of weird that she would call him out, hit him and occasionally not take him seriously or even listen to him, but in the end I realized that just meant she was treating him like she would anyone else, rather than as a handicapped person. She wasn’t the type of ‘glass child’ that Moon Gang Tae was, for example. Jae Woo was able to function properly, he went out by himself, he was helping out at the shop and everything. He also didn’t seem to have too much trouble being touched, and I was surprised by the development of him and Young Joo falling for each other.
The scene that angried me the most was the one with the waffle incident. Jae Woo often took walks as he had a certain routine, and he’d gotten attached to this waffle place, and specifically the waffles that this one female employee made. One morning, he finds out she changed her shifts to the evening, so he visits her again in the evening. From her reaction when he walks in it’s immediately clear that she must have changed her shifts because of him, because Jae Woo made her uncomfortable. After Jae Woo makes a clumsy attempt to help her when she accidentally gets chocolate sauce on her, the woman’s colleague (and boyfriend) steps in and threatens Jae Woo to leave his girlfriend alone, causing Jae Woo to panic and strike out so the guy falls down. Jae Woo is then even locked up for a night, as the guy calls assault. It was very hard to watch Haeng Seon apologize for her brother’s behavior to the couple. Seriously, it was just like that scene where Moon Sang Tae was pushed to the ground by those parents just because he was admiring their kid’s dinosaur costume. You could see in one glance that Jae Woo must be on the autism spectrum or something similar, so why would you treat him that harshly from the start when you know he can’t help it? Even when the female employee learned it really was just because of her waffles, she couldn’t even bring herself to be thankful for his patronage. It wasn’t that he was trying to get closer to her personally, he didn’t have a crush on her or anything, he just really loved her waffles. Honestly, even when the woman told Haeng Seon she would drop the lawsuit her boyfriend was threatening with, it just felt like she was doing it out of pity, as she was glancing down at Haeng Seon’s feet and saw she was only wearing slippers. It didn’t feel like she actually felt remorse over judging an ASD person, so it didn’t sit well with me. Anyways, through that speech of Haeng Seon’s it becomes clear just close she and Jae Woo are, how well she knows him, how closely she has always been watching him as they grew up together, and how she raised him after their mother died. It was just so sad that she had to bow down to a couple of rude ignorant people who’d judge an autistic person for behaving ‘abnormally’, because she and Jae Woo really had nothing to apologize for. But that again was Haeng Seon’s nature, as well. She knew her place, she knew she sometimes had to apologize just to keep the peace, and not because she was actually sorry for what happened.

I really liked Young Joo as well, she felt like part of the family. The only thing keeping her from that was the fact that she didn’t live in the same house as them. She was always the person Haeng Seon could fall back on, her #1 dial in case of emergencies (even after she got together with Chi Yeol). Young Joo would always drop anything to help Haeng Seon and her family out, ever since they’d been on the handball team together as teenagers. Their friendship was truly heartwarming, and they could never stay mad at each other for long. I kind of liked how they made Young Joo and Jae Woo a couple, like, it wasn’t even that unexpected but it still managed to surprise me. I really loved that scene where Jae Woo confessed and Young Joo kept stopping him from eating that squid and just pressed her face against his shoulder, that was really sweet.

Now that we’ve covered most of what was good about the show, let’s move on to the other families and my further frustrations, lol. Let’s start with Hae Yi’s best friend Lee Sun Jae (played by Lee Chae Min). His mother Jang Seo Jin (played by Jang Young Nam) is a top lawyer, and she is very strict on Sun Jae to get the highest grades possible. Sun Jae’s older brother Lee Hee Jae (played by Kim Tae Jung) was her first target – she pushed him until he cracked and ended up becoming a complete shut-in. He only rarely leaves the house in the middle of the night to do who-knows-what, and he barely even talks anymore. After losing Hee Jae, Mom then focussed her energy on Sun Jae. Instead of showing any kind of motherly warmth or genuine care for his wellbeing, the only thing she tells him is to study, and she even gets mad at him for sharing his notes with his friends and classmates (aka Hae Yi), because she sees everyone as competition. When at some point Sun Jae’s grades start slipping more and more, she resorts to illegal manners to get his grades up, and she actually gives him ‘practice questions’ that turn out to be actual exam questions. She literally forces her own child to cheat on his exams, a parallel to Soo Hyeon’s situation.
Sun Jae is a really nice boy and Hae Yi’s best friend for good reason. Despite the fact that he’s had a crush on her for a while, he never forces himself on her and he values her friendship more than anything. He’s always supported Hae Yi in her studies as well, even when she starts doing better than him, it doesn’t even bother him. He keeps sharing notes and practice sheets with her – that is, until it comes to the questions his mom provides him with. Of course, he doesn’t know that they are the actual exam questions so he also shares them with Hae Yi, ending up getting her into the situation of cheating with him, and this puts a temporary strain on their friendship (but only because he refuses to talk to her afterwards). His mom even goes as far as to contact Hae Yi personally to tell her to stop hanging out with her son because she distracts him. Sun Jae is driven to the edge of suicide at a certain point, he really loses it because of his mom’s tight grip on him and his social interactions. Luckily, he is stopped by his classmate. When he finally manages to get himself together, he confesses to Hae Yi and while she initially puts him on hold until she finishes her CSATs, we see in the final episode that she gives him a chance.
Sun Jae’s mom was vicious in the way that she herself was also not 100% mentally stable. She was constantly working overtime and has developed a habit of getting drunk by herself at night. She’s also fighting with her husband a lot, and even bans him from the house at some point, leaving her alone with her two estranged sons. As she discovers Hee Jae’s suspicious behavior and finds the metal balls in his room, she also starts linking him to the recent attacks. When Hee Jae gets arrested by the police (they’ve spotted his face on some of the CCTV footage), she brazenly steps in to defend her own son. Is this actually allowed? I thought that, just like with surgeons, there would be some sort of rule when it came to personal cases for lawyers? Anyways, she vows to ‘defend’ her son, but in truth she just wants him to stay silent because she also fears he is guilty in some way. I really loved how Hee Jae was so fed up with her at that point that he just went, ‘I’m a witness’ in court, and then when his mom asked him why he hadn’t told her that before, he was like, ‘You never even asked me about my connection to the case, you suspected me from the get-go just as much as the police’. Eat that, woman.
To add just a little more on Hee Jae, he’s introduced from the start as a very angsty character. We learn through Sun Jae that he has been incredibly pressured about his studies by their mom until he couldn’t take it anymore, and now he has become almost like a ghost in their house. It’s suggested that he has something to do with the metal ball attacks and this is strengthened by the fact that his mom finds the balls in his room. It turns out that he has been acting increasingly anxious not because he harmed people himself, but because he witnessed at least one of the attacks, the one on Yi Sang. He started following the metal ball killer after discovering what he did to the stray cats, as Hee Jae had been feeding them before. I was glad that, after giving his witness statement and finally talking back to his mom, he was able to calm down a little. And even though I still didn’t forgive Seo Jin for how she’d treated him, it was nice to see that they started taking trips together and it was sweet how he came to visit her when he was on leave from the military in the final episode.
Sun Jae ends up coming clean about the fact that his mom gave him the exam papers, even if that meant he would be disqualified from the midterms. He ends up dropping out of high school to later take the GED at his own pace.
His father comes back to defend his wife in her trial (they work at the same law firm), and this leads to them making amends and at the end the family of four is back eating dinner together again. Despite that ‘happy ending’, it was so obvious that the mom was trying to butter up her oldest son, like suddenly she was all about spending quality time with him, and I was like, yeah right, NOW you feel like you have to show that you care as his mother.
The thing that was a bit unpredictable about Jang Seo Jin was that, even though she was a tiger mom, she still didn’t really belong to The Moms’ group that was all about spreading rumors. I had really hoped that at least she would stay out of it, also when Soo Ah’s mom asked for her cooperation in kicking Hae Yi out of the All Care program. She rejected it at first, but then just happened to see Hae Yi and Sun Jae walking together and that made her go ‘oh right, she’s a distraction to Sun Jae’ and she still went along with the plan. That was probably the moment I lost all remaining shreds of respect for her, and she never reclaimed them for me because she also never apologized for what she did. It just seemed like at some point, what had happened was just ‘a done deal’ and it wasn’t even necessary to apologize for it anymore.

Moving on to my main cause of frustration throughout the entire show: Soo Ah and her mom. Bang Soo Ah (played by Kang Na Eon) is one of Hae Yi’s classmates in high school, and one of the most ambitious students. She puts everything she has into her studying and strives to always be number one. Her mother, Cho Soo Hee (played by Kim Sun Young) basically represents The Moms and has the most influence in bribing The Pride’s director. As soon as Soo Ah gives a squeak, Mommy would do anything in her power to appease her. Their mother-daughter relationship seemed really toxic to me from the start, as it actually looked like Soo Hee was a bit scared of her daughter. She just tried to comfort her whenever she was having moods (which was very often), and she was the kind of mom who would ‘take care of it’ when Soo Ah would whine about something. More specifically, about Hae Yi. Hae Yi’s sudden rise in math skills doesn’t go unnoticed in class and Soo Ah becomes positively intimidated by her. Instead of just doing her own thing and focus on her own stuff, she finds herself constantly looking over her shoulder to see what Hae Yi is doing, to see how Hae Yi did on her test. Soo Ah is the one who starts the suspicions that Hae Yi must be receiving private tutoring from Chi Yeol, or how else would she have all these materials that were exclusive to the All Care program? Based on her daughter’s whining and baseless suspicions, Soo Hee would get her nose into all sorts of things that had nothing to do with her, purely out of self-gain. She would start posting stuff on The Moms’ online platform, spreading baseless rumors and making sure that Soo Ah’s place in the top wasn’t at risk of being taken away by anyone else. The Moms justified their self-proclaimed entitlement to Chi Yeol’s tutoring classes as that they were just concerned of people trying to claim him for themselves, again making Chi Yeol into some sort of unattainable celebrity that belonged to everyone. Everyone The Moms approved of, that is.
Soo Hee may have held some power over The Moms and The Pride’s director, but she was definitely not a good mother. When Soo Ah would start crying like a baby about how annoyed she was by Hae Yi, she should’ve treated it for what it was, the childish whims of a teenager. She should’ve told her daughter not to keep looking at others but focus on her own life. But no, she actually went along with it, feeding Soo Ah’s vindictive moods, and that was so nasty. She literally went, ‘Oh no we can’t have that, Mommy will fix it for you so please stop crying’. It was so toxic how she didn’t even think about how many people’s lives she would ruin, as long as she could get Soo Ah to like her. It’s sad when in hindsight you realize it wasn’t even about Hae Yi – it was about Soo Ah’s lack of confidence and the fact that her study stress had already reached the level where she freaked out when anyone would come close to her in terms of grades.
I was truly shocked to see how shameless Soo Hee was. It was one thing to constantly poke her nose into other people’s business under the mask of ‘securing her daughter’s future’, but to actually post an entire article about Haeng Seon’s ‘sexual favors’ to Chi Yeol while she didn’t even have any evidence for it besides some CCTV footage of her bringing lunchboxes to Chi Yeol’s door? And then, when Haeng Seon came to her house to ask for an honest explanation (which she had every right to), she even hid inside her house, like seriously, how cowardly can you be? You knowingly post an article that ruins an individual’s life and then you’re too scared to face them when they come asking questions? And then when she went out and Haeng Seon was waiting for her she acted all victim-y, as if Haeng Seon was invading her privacy and she really went ‘I just wrote about what I saw’ when the actual person involved who knew the truth was standing right in front of her. I really wanted to punch her in the face there, my goodness. How could a person be like that? And then after the whole scandal was dissolved and it all turned out to be a lie, and the other moms were even urging her to apologize to Haeng Seon, she still acted all, ‘why should I, I just followed everyone’s suspicions’. Oh, she really set my teeth on edge. I was glad that after that, the other moms were kind of done with her, and when she came up with some new gossip, they were all like, yeah, right, there we go again. Everything she pulled after that was just embarrassing, really. Especially when she led this whole group of protestors to the school to demand Sun Jae be expelled for cheating on that exam. By then, Sun Jae had already confessed, the midterm scores had already been updated without Sun Jae’s score, everything had already been settled, so what the heck was she still doing, going like, ‘expel him, he’s not allowed to get first place!’ He already lost first place, it had already been dealt with by the school, and he’d already decided to drop out by himself. Any situation in which she felt like she had any kind of power just made her seem even more lame.
She was one of the people who I just desperately wanted to apologize to Haeng Seon because she needed to. She had done really nasty things. Even the apologies from the other moms didn’t mollify me because it needed to come from Soo Hee. And then they spent the remaining final episode time on ‘redeeming’ her when she’s faced with a scandal herself as it was revealed her husband was having an affair. Admittedly, her husband was an asshole for gaslighting her about how he ‘didn’t have a choice but to get his needs fulfilled somewhere else, because she had made him lonely’, that was solid BS. But the fact that she was now on the receiving end of a scandal herself did seem like proper karma. When Haeng Seon did something nice for her while she was injured and she started crying, I really wanted to say, yeah, I hope you realize now what a horrible person you’ve been. She didn’t need to be redeemed for me, I just wanted her to be a mature adult and own up to the harmful stuff she did.
Also, I completely blame her for what happened to Young Min. If she hadn’t gotten involved in giving Hae Yi’s place in the All Care program to him, he would have lived. It wasn’t directly her fault that he died, of course, but the situation could’ve been avoided altogether if the boy hadn’t gotten that place in the All Care program in the first place, if they’d just stuck with the original arrangement with Hae Yi, so that was definitely on her. But even for that, she never took any responsibility, she didn’t even express any kind of shock that a kid from Soo Ah’s private class died like that after she had made sure he had gotten that spot.
In the final half of the series, Soo Ah starts losing her mind, just like Sun Jae. The exam questions start swimming before her eyes and she even starts hallucinating about physically harming Hae Yi. It was kind of a comfort to see her get freaked out by that, because at least that meant that, despite her dislike towards Hae Yi, she didn’t actually want her to get hurt. Especially after hearing about Hae Yi’s accident, she definitely took a step back. Even though she also didn’t apologize to Hae Yi, she did improve her attitude after Hae Yi came back to school and she even started showing a kinder side to her personality that we didn’t see before. It became abundantly clear that sometimes the kids are more mature than the parents, as even Soo Ah at some point started yelling at her mom to cut it out already. The consistent inability of Soo Hee to recognize what was actually wrong with Soo Ah was mindblowing. The girl was completely freaking out because studying was driving her crazy and all Soo Hee could do was just blink her eyes and be like, ‘What’s wrong, why are you crying? Tell me so I can fix it for you.’ Like, there was 0% of any empathy or even recognition to what her daughter was going through, and that just made me feel like Soo Hee wasn’t even fully aware of what she was doing when she was trying to ‘fix’ stuff for her. It was pathetic.

I also don’t want to redeem the other moms, because even though they eventually came around and apologized to Haeng Seon in Soo Hee’s stead, they were all just as sanctimonious. None of them spared a critical thought for whatever Soo Hee was saying in the beginning, and it was only after the truth came out that they started acting all, ‘Oh, we’re so sorry we judged you so quickly, don’t worry we’re not like Soo Hee’. I mean, even after they started taking Soo Hee’s stories with a grain of salt, they still kept hanging out with her, they were still hungry for gossip. I personally found Dan Ji’s mom, Lee Mi Ok (played by Hwang Bo Ra) really annoying in her hypocrisy. She came back to Haeng Seon on her knees to apologize, but it really lacked sincerity. She just wanted to get back in her good favor so she could buy side dishes from her again. The fact that the other moms had the audacity to come crawling back to ‘apologize’ as a shield to ask Haeng Seon if she could talk Chi Yeol into coming back to teach at The Pride, that was really unbelievable. Mi Ok was just such a hypocritical character to begin with, her own daughter wasn’t even in The Pride and she still followed Soo Hee around as if she was one of The Moms, it was kind of lame.

Finally, and this will be my final criticism for this analysis, I want to briefly talk about Hae Yi’s biological mom turning up again. While Hae Yi is still in a coma from barely escaping Dong Hee, and the story of Dong Hee being Jung Seong Hyeon is still in full throttle, all of a sudden Hae Yi’s biological mother Nam Haeng Ja (played by Bae Hae Seon) comes back. My initial surprise of the writers’ choice to suddenly make her come back at that specific moment only made way for confusion and irritation when she turned out to be just as shameless as any of the other characters. They really made her come back only to create some sort of wry comedy situation with her as this typical money-obsessed caricature that acted as if she’d done nothing wrong in disappearing for over ten years. She actually responded to Haeng Seon’s question of where she’d been all that time with, ‘I was in Japan, so what’. In over ten years she didn’t even send Hae Yi a post-it note, and now she suddenly barged in claiming complete entitlement over her daughter. She lay crying over Hae Yi’s comatose body and started pointing fingers at Haeng Seon and Jae Woo for not taking care of her properly. The actual, freaking audacity of this woman. I couldn’t even laugh about it, it just came at such a random moment, and I still don’t understand why they put it in at all. I wouldn’t have minded if she never showed up at all, she disappeared and that was it. If she were to come back, I would’ve expected a more serious situation, but now they just had her come in acting like some silly funny lady, only to reveal that she wasn’t even back for Hae Yi – she just came to get money from her siblings. What the heck was that about? I just didn’t understand why they’d choose to completely cut off the Dong Hee storyline, only to create one final episode of Hae Yi’s biological mom receiving redemption. I am still at a loss for words regarding this decision.
Also, Hae Yi’s decision to move with her mom to Japan came out of nowhere. She had literally just talked with Sun Jae about how disappointed she was in meeting her mom again, how she didn’t like the kind of person she was and how she’d envisioned their reunion so differently, and then suddenly she starts cold-shouldering Haeng Seon and Jae Woo, saying that she wants to live with her mom in Japan. I still don’t understand where that came from, and it definitely didn’t look like Hae Yi was being honest, either. Her mom mentioned something (to whoever she was talking to on the phone) about Hae Yi feeling like a bother to Haeng Seon now that her mother was back or something, but that also came out of nowhere. I did expect the mom to just leave while Hae Yi was at school, because she herself didn’t even want Hae Yi to come live with her, that much was obvious. I just didn’t understand anything about this final arc, I wanted the storyline of the metal ball killer to be concluded in a satisfactory way, that’s all I asked for, not this randomness.

I will conclude my analysis of the characters and storylines by mentioning some final good characters. First of all, Hae Yi’s friends besides Sun Jae, Lee Dan Ji (played by Ryu Da In) and Seo Geon Hoo (played by Lee Min Jae). I loved how loyal they were to Hae Yi. Despite her mom’s involvement with The Moms, Dan Ji wasn’t even trying to get into The Pride herself, which also led to her slightly becoming a third wheel to Hae Yi and Sun Jae at some point, but I loved that she kept her chin up and she never left their side. Even when the truth about Hae Yi’s private tutoring was revealed, and the fact that Haeng Seon wasn’t her real mom (props to Hae Yi for coming out with that on that livestream simply to dissolve the scandal about her mom and Chi Yeol having a secret affair – because having an affair with a student’s mom was less bad than with a student’s aunt 🙄), she was always there to welcome Hae Yi back into the classroom with open arms. I also really loved Geon Hoo, he was such a refreshing character. He was introduced as a former ice hockey player who had to get back to school after sustaining an injury (I believe?) and he developed a crush on Hae Yi when she started helping him study. I also liked how he and Sun Jae had this kind of rivalry between them at first, which then turned into friendship, and Geon Hoo was the one who kept pulling Sun Jae back from the school roof’s edge when he was trying to jump. I also appreciated how he didn’t butt in when Sun Jae confessed to Hae Yi, even though he watched it happen from a distance and could’ve easily interrupted the moment. He was that fair. I didn’t personally care for him to be pushed towards Soo Ah at the end, I think it was enough that they acknowledged that she had a kinder side to her. Anyways, Hae Yi really had the best friends she could wish for. Especially after we learn that she was so scared to reveal that Haeng Seon wasn’t her real mom after she previously told a ‘friend’ and that girl used the information to get Hae Yi ostracized in class, as if it was a shameful thing for her to be raised by her aunt because her mom abandoned her 😣.

I also liked the homeroom teacher, Jeon Jong Ryeol (played by Kim Da Hwin), Chi Yeol’s former classmate. He was initially bitter towards Chi Yeol because he thought he looked down on his former classmates after getting the Star Teacher status, but he turned out to be a pretty nice guy and he and Chi Yeol even became friends again. He also really cared about his students and he kept standing up for Hae Yi and Sun Jae, that was really nice. They really needed a teacher to be on their side, and he offered help whenever he could.

All in all, I’ll just say that while I liked the show’s story and the dynamic of the main couple, there were just too many characters that frustrated the heck out of me, and I really didn’t like the ending. It was such a waste in my opinion, because the whole metal ball killer case and Dong Hee turning out to be that obsessed person made for such a good plot twist, and then they just gave it up like that. None of the characters who did something to apologize for were made to acknowledge their wrongful deeds and I didn’t like how they were actually redeemed in the end, as if we suddenly needed to sympathize with them. I didn’t, that’s for sure.
Of course, I still liked the ending in terms of the proposal (not the new scandal about Chi Yeol and that blind date girl thooo🙉) and how the people that did make amends made up and all, but there were too many things left that shouldn’t have just been brushed over and redeemed.

I liked the opening animation a lot, it really gave a clear image of Chi Yeol and Haeng Seon’s relationship, or at least the way they met. It didn’t include any references to the many other events that happened in the show, but I liked how simple and clear it was and it just made me think how well the two main actors were cast. The touch of adding a mathematical reference to each episode title was nicely found. Also, the food from Haeng Seon’s store looked soooo good. I really wished I could go there myself to assemble a lunchbox, it’s such a nice and unique store concept!
Regarding the title, I couldn’t help but notice that the English title isn’t an exact translation of the Korean title. The Korean title refers directly to a scandal, probably the scandal between Chi Yeol and Haeng Seon that only comes out in episode 9, if I remember correctly. I guess that for the English title they went with something that referred to the education-aspect of the show, the ‘crash course’. As I felt that their romance happened in its own little bubble on the side of all the other drama, it’s interesting how the title suggests it’s about the romance between Chi Yeol and Haeng Seon, as if they needed to get a ‘crash course’ in romance while it happened so naturally to them! The Korean title translates to something like ‘One Hit Scandal’. I just picked up that the ‘ilta‘ part also referred to Chi Yeol’s nickname ‘Star Teacher’, but I’m not sure. So it seems that the Korean title focusses more on their Scandal, and the English title focusses more on their Romance. I guess you can look at it whichever way you want.

Just before moving on to the cast comments, I just wanted to mention something that kept me busy during the entire series: what the heck is the math that they teach in school in Asian countries?! I’ve seen it before in Chinese and Japanese dramas, but what are all these incredibly complicated-looking formulas and terms? It’s all gibberish to me. I’m already on the verge of dyscalculia, but I couldn’t even try to make sense of what Chi Yeol was teaching. It didn’t even look like high school mathematics to me, more like physics or science or something. So yeah, I was in no position to judge if anything that was taught in this drama was true, I was just staring blankly at the chalkboard most of the time, lol.

It’s cast comment time!

I believe this is only the third drama I’ve seen of Jung Kyung Ho. Actually, I stand corrected, I know him from I’m Sorry, I Love You and Missing 9, but he’s also had some guest appearances in High-end Crush, Crash Landing on You, and Gyeryong Fairytale (the spoon-worm💀). I really loved him in this show and he was so well-cast, especially with his physique. As I mentioned before, I think Chi Yeol might be my favorite character, and it was all made possible by Jung Kyung Ho, because he made this character so wholesome. I really loved his acting, he brought such a fun side to it. He was effortlessly funny and his smile is so genuine and it just made me smile with him, haha. It was also nice that they gave him a couple of quirks, like consistently getting people’s names wrong and going fishing when he needed to clean his head. I know that in real life he’s Choi Soo Young’s fiancé, and that they’re finally getting married after like 10 years of dating! This drama definitely made me see his charm. I really liked his performance, and his chemistry with Jeon Do Yeon was really nice. Chi Yeol had so many different sides to him, but he still remained so unproblematic, and there were so many green flags about the way he responded to situations. He was definitely one of the main aspects of this show that got me through all the frustrations I felt, he made it worth watching until the end.

I’ve never seen Jeon Do Yeon in anything before. I see she’s also done a lot of movies. It was nice to see a normalization of a relationship in which the woman was older than the man. In real life, there is an 11-year age gap between them, Jeon Do Yeon is 50 and Jung Kyung Ho is 39. Funny how the other way around often seems to raise critical opinions, but this is totally passed as normal. Anyways, the characters’ ages are never mentioned in the series, Chi Yeol only starts calling her ‘noona’ at some point, so they generally don’t put too much emphasis on it. I liked how little it mattered to them, and how little they cared about other people’s opinions when appearing in public together. Jeon Do Yeon made Haeng Seon such a likable, bright and sober character, she was such a sympathetic person and it came to her so naturally. She really looked like a woman who had lived her life to the fullest and was still doing that in middle-age. I loved how at least she was acting like a normal person and lived her life without constantly comparing her life to that of other people. Her chemistry with Jung Kyung Ho looked so natural as well, the two really goofed around without it getting cheesy and I liked how she let herself be caught off guard by his unexpected silliness. I really liked her performance.

I love Oh Ui Shik, and I really hoped he wouldn’t become just another typical ASD character as they get depicted nowadays, but I’m glad that even despite the similarities, he still brought something new to the table. I’ve seen him in a bunch of stuff, like Oh My Ghostess, Moonlight Drawn by Clouds, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Circle, Fight For My Way, While You Were Sleeping, Are You Human Too?, Wife I Know, Romance is a Bonus Book, Touch Your Heart, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, and most recently in True Beauty. He pulled off the Asperger character very well, even though I can’t deny that it reminded me very much of Moon Sang Tae. I liked that, despite his inability to read people’s emotions that well, he was definitely able to pick up on people’s reactions, especially from Young Joo, after he initially rejected her. He was immediately able to recognize that she was upset even though she was laughing, and he instantly started reflecting on his words and how they may have hurt her. I felt really bad for him during the scenes when the metal ball shattered the window, when the thing happened in the waffle shop, and when that livestreamer barged into the shop to publicize Haeng Seon’s face to the world when she was being suspected of having an affair with Chi Yeol. He was literally walking around screaming from being triggered and people on the livestream were making fun of that, that was awful. I think Oh Ui Shik just has a face for a kind character, I don’t remember ever seeing him as a bad guy, it would just be such a weird switch, haha. Then again, it would be interesting to see. Anyways, I always love him in whatever he appears in, and this was no exception.

My girl Lee Bong Ryeon! I know her from Tomorrow With You, While You Were Sleeping, Melting Me Softly, Run On, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and the movie Burning, and I know I will see her again soon. I really love how she’s such a typical little lady but she always brings something strong and sassy to her characters, and I live for her deadpan-face. I really liked seeing her with Oh Ui Shik, they were two nice and familiar faces that finally got paired up together. I really liked Young Joo’s character, and how her running gag was that she was always joining random clubs to meet men, lol. She was a truly loyal friend to Haeng Seon, those two were really besties for life, and she also cared a lot about Hae Yi. She was a really nice addition and supporting figure to the ‘good side’ of the characters.

Noh Yoon Seo is definitely making her way up in the drama acting world! I just recently saw her for the first time in Our Blues and I also watched the movie 20th Century Girl in the meantime. Also, I just saw an article that she’s already in talks of a new drama. It’s like she really has been skyrocketing since her debut last year. Apart from the very final part where she suddenly announced that she was moving to Japan to live with her biological mother, I completely stood by Hae Yi throughout the whole show. She was a real victim of her surroundings, she was just focussing on her own life and her own grades and random people just decided they were entitled to take that away from her. I felt so bad for her, especially when that scandal came out about Haeng Seon and Chi Yeol, and how those brats in the cafeteria started yelling stuff about her and her mom. I was ready to throw some shoes there. I was so proud of her to just jump into that livestream to tell the whole world that Haeng Seon was her aunt, not her mom and that ‘it’s not an affair, it’s just a romance!’ It was so brave of her to just put everything on the line, and I was happy for her that she had such loyal friends in Sun Jae, Dan Ji and Geon Hoo. She was such a sweet girl, I liked her performance.

I kept wondering what I knew Shin Jae Ha from, but I see that he was in Pinocchio, Sassy Go Go, Go Ho’s Starry Night and While You Were Sleeping, so I probably remember his face from one of those. He has a really familiar face. I’m having difficulty looking at his smiling face without getting the creeps now, though, haha. Anyways, I still think it was a nice twist to make the typically loyal and kind assistant into a psycho. I really just wished his character would have grown a conscience at some point, the fact that he cared about Chi Yeol made him not 100% bad but he was really disturbed. I didn’t like that they just made him jump off a roof and be done with it. He deserved to get a proper villain arc after he was busted for being Jung Seong Hyeon. In the beginning he seemed such a nice guy, and it seemed like at first he just got a little uncomfortable that he suddenly didn’t have to take care of Chi Yeol anymore because of Haeng Seon, but then when he plain-out ignored her at the bowling alley and just told her off for distracting Chi Yeol with that sweet psycho smile on his face… and then when he pulled that when they were on the yacht and just went all puppy-eyed as soon as Chi Yeol came to him… He played it very well.

I hadn’t seen Lee Chae Min in anything before either, but I see he’s going to be in the adaptation of See You in My 19th Life, so I’m excited for that! He’s been doing dramas mostly since 2021, so I guess he’s also expanding his projects now, good for him! I really felt for Sun Jae, because you could tell he wanted to just enjoy his high school days. I really liked that part with him and Hae Yi where they just hung out and rode the bus together, it was so peaceful and you could just see how much they enjoyed each other’s company without any tensions. His mom really got the better of him at some point, and I did want to tell him off when he refused to speak to Hae Yi after that thing with the exam papers went down, I thought he would go to her immediately to apologize and explain that he didn’t know anything about it (I bet Hae Yi also didn’t immediately think the worst of him, she never did). Like, I would understand that he’d feel flustered, but then he suddenly pushed her away and I didn’t understand why. Anyway, he came back and they made up and his excitement when Hae Yi kissed him on the cheek and thereby kind of confirmed her feelings for him was really cute. I liked that Hae Yi took her time to settle her feelings for him, and I also liked that he gave her all the space after she told him to wait after the CSATs. Even as just friends, their chemistry seemed really comfortable.

I know Jang Young Nam from It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, as the head nurse who turned out to be the psycho mom. Apparently she also had a supporting role in The Moon That Embraces The Sun and Pinocchio and only NOW I realize she was the female coach from Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo! I kept thinking I didn’t know her from anything, but I was wrong. In any case, I didn’t really like Sun Jae’s mom, I don’t know what her deal was exactly but she was definitely not 100% alright. One scene that did stick with me was when she was at Soo Hee’s place with the other moms and Haeng Seon and she kind of provoked her and Soo Hee lost it, that scene was pretty intense but in a good way. At first I wanted to like her because she was so sceptical of the other moms and she at least seemed to have her own reasons for wanting Sun Jae to perform well, but she diminished by still going along with the plan to swap Hae Yi’s place in All Care out with that Young Min kid. I really wished she wouldn’t get involved in any of the other moms’ petty plans. I also saw her attempts to make amends with Hee Jae as buttering up, like she definitely had some stuff to apologize for, but as no one ever apologizes in this show, she just suddenly started acting really nice to him, and even he was caught off guard at the start, lol. Her attitude towards her sons was not okay, she was definitely at fault for being the kind of mother who would cheat to get her children to the top and not even bother with them after they cracked. But the actress’ performance was good, not gonna lie.

I was really impressed by Kim Sun Young, mostly because I’d never thought I’d hate a character she’d play so much as I hated Soo Hee. I loved that this was probably one of the few ‘serious’ roles I’ve seen of her, she usually always gets a kind of hysterical or comical role, but here I really saw a serious side and it was so refreshing. Now I know for sure how wide her versatility is. I’d been hoping to see this side of her acting for ages. I think it says a lot that I can still be so positive about the actress of the character that made me so mad on so many occasions. You know what they say, when you can’t stand the villain it’s because the actor’s doing a good job, and she definitely did. My goodness, this woman. After seeing her in Shopping King Louie, Legend of the Blue Sea, Lookout, Because This is My First Life, Romance is a Bonus Book, Her Private Life, Crash Landing on You, Backstreet Rookie and most recently in The Silent Sea, I can say confidently that she is definitely an actress with a LOT of talent and a LOT of versatility and I will always remain excited to see her appear in shows.

Kang Na Eon hasn’t been in that many dramas yet, I think this is only her second out of three so far. As much as Soo Ah bothered me in the beginning, I was just waiting for her to come to terms with the fact that she was under too much pressure. She was acting like a spoiled teenager, and it may be a kind of a stretch to say she was responsible for everything her mother caused, because of course she never actually asked her mother to get rid of anyone. She was cunning like that in the beginning, because she definitely hinted to her mom that Hae Yi’s presence was bothering her and that she wanted her mom to do something about it. But when she started spooking herself out with hallucinations of throwing Hae Yi down the stairs, it was clear that she was startled by that and that proved to me that she wouldn’t actually go that far. It was nice seeing a slightly nicer side of her at the end, although it was a shame it took that long to surface. Still, there was nothing wrong with her performance, she did well.

I’m going to make a similar remark about Hwang Bo Ra as I did in my previous review of her, because AGAIN I just saw the exact same thing that she always does. So far, I’ve seen her in Fight For My Way, What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim?, Touch Your Heart, A Business Proposal and most recently in Dali and The Cocky Prince. My issue with Hwang Bo Ra is that she always goes out of her way to be funny in an exaggerated way, and it often results in me not actually finding her funny. I keep hoping she’s going to show a more serious side to her acting, like Kim Sun Young did in this show for example, but she always shows the same thing and I’m getting a bit tired of it. Her character didn’t actually have to be a comic character, she was just a shallow follower who ended up using the dent in Soo Hee’s credibility to come out as a better person, as she was prepared to come crawling back to Haeng Seon for forgiveness. She always feels the need to move her face in every direction, both when speaking and when reacting to others, and sometimes it’s just too much. I am still hoping that I’ll see a different side of her, because from the last couple of things I’ve seen her in it seems to become a bit of a one-trick pony. Other than that, she’s always a familiar face and it’s not that I’m allergic to her, I would just like to see some more variety in her acting.

Is it just me or did Dan Ji and her mom not actually have a single scene together? It just occurred to me, lol. They only referred to each other as ‘I heard from my mom’ or ‘my Dan Ji told me…’ but I don’t think they actually appeared together even once. Typical. Anyways, I really loved Dan Ji, and Ryu Da In made her such an approachable and relatable friend to Hae Yi. Even when she was hurt after finding out that Hae Yi and Sun Jae had kept Hae Yi’s private tutoring from her, she didn’t stay mad for long, as soon as Hae Yi started getting targeted by rumors she was back at her side. When Hae Yi didn’t come to school she was beside herself with worry. Get yourself a friend like that! She actually reminded me of someone I know, haha, I don’t know, her energy was just super bubbly and likable.

Apparently, Lee Min Jae was in While You Were Sleeping, but that’s the only thing I’ve seen that he appeared in before. He’s definitely done more dramas than the other student characters in this drama. I really liked Geon Hoo, he was such a nice addition to Hae Yi’s group of friends. I loved how he brought this relaxed vibe into the classroom, like finally another student who wasn’t occupied with achieving as much, but who still got interested in improving his grades on his own terms, if his friends would help him. I liked the scene where he took Hae Yi ice skating, and I definitely saw the charm in him. The scene where they met when he stopped Hae Yi from tumbling down the stairs with his foot, lol, what an entrance. He was a really nice, fresh breeze within the chaos of stress. I really liked his character.

Bye-bee! ^^