[HanCinema's Drama Review] "A New Leaf" Episode 11

Seok-joo has to ask himself an odd question this episode- if I were me, what would I have done in order to help the company? He doesn't like the answers that he finds. Probably the worst of it is that he knows exactly the kinds of skills and reasoning it took to get him to this point, but that for him to use his abilities in this particular way is, well, pretty evil. There's no silver lining to anything here. Seok-joo really just has no idea what to think.

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I'm not really sure either. The finer legal points of his plan escaped me. The only real obvious part of it from a layman's perspective is that Seok-joo helped the company get rich at the expense of people who needed it. Normally Seok-joo would just put on his best face of indifference and ignore the obvious suffering he's helped facilitate. That's a lot harder for him to do here when Seok-joo doesn't even remember why he thought this was a good idea in the first place.

He can't even relate to the other people caught up in the scandal. There's a dispassionate disconnected air about everything that actually annoys him slightly. Seok-joo feels like he's the only person the least bit curious about what happened- at least, in terms of the people facing prosecution. He does have his allies at the firm, but as usual, the value they pose to his mission is a questionable one.

Ji-yoon has increasingly little to do here. She pops up briefly to offer up another mild moral lesson, and also has her own minor subplot running. By and large though she's a non-entity. For the most part this is to the drama's benefit. Seok-joo is so focused on soul searching that Ji-yoon would just be a distraction. Even his dog is more helpful, if only because being with his dog gives Seok-joo a chance to think to himself, well, I can't be a completely horrible person. At least I have a dog.

We'll see about that. Seok-joo takes another important step to actually trying to bring on "A New Leaf" into his life. However, it seems likely that the conspiracy at the company ran even higher than Seok-joo suspected, and his apparent new frame of mind may only go so far considering the obstacles he now faces. The problem has now been identified, though, and it's up to Seok-joo how far he'll go to rectify the problem.

Review by William Schwartz

"A New Leaf" is directed by Park Jae-beom-II, written by Choi Hee-ra and features Kim Myung-min, Park Min-young, Kim Sang-joong and Ahn Sun-young