[HanCinema's Drama Review] "That Man Oh Soo" Episode 3

So apparently the whole thing with the magic tree suddenly dying because of...uh...I assume because Yoo-ri drank Oh Soo's magic tea doesn't become an ongoing crisis. Oh Soo's grandfather Man-soo (played by Park Geun-hyung) simply solves the problem with his own magic powers, warning Oh Soo that next time the younger man will have to do it himself. So what we have is a possible future conflict, not something that's happening right now.

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Well yes there are of course the smaller conflicts. Take the sheer scale of coincidences that keeps piling up to force Oh Soo and Yoo-ri into the same room when they still are nowhere near even vaguely liking each other. Part of this is, of course, from sheer effort. that Yoo-ri was able to interpret Oh Soo's crazed muttering from the opening of the episode as an insult is legitimately pretty impressive. He wasn't even looking at her!

Later bizarre coincidences are amusing more from a metatextual point of view. They both get involved with trying to talk down the same suicide jumper. Oh Soo tails Yoo-ri, accidentally tricking her into thinking he was the mysterious guy that was following her. And in what is perhaps my personal favorite, they get set up on the same blind date by Man-soo. Yeah, apparently Man-soo knows Yoo-ri. She does live and work in the neighborhood after all, so that's not so surprising.

One question that is kind of begged is why Oh Soo and Yoo-ri weren't constantly running into each other up until this point. Maybe Oh Soo only just got back from robotics school, and Yoo-ri used to have a boyfriend, so the opportunities just weren't there? I'm not attacking "That Man Oh Soo" or anything, I'm just mildly amused by how writer Jung Yoo-seon appears to be going through just about every cliché imaginable to get the leads together without actually moving their relationship anywhere.

Or the plot. Yeah, that part I definitely find a bit more annoying. The closest we get to a long-term goal is when Soo-jeong and her idiot friends attempt to run a scam past their teacher Jin-woo (played by Kang Tae-oh) in order to prevent him from giving Yoo-ri a progress report on what a delinquent Soo-jeong is. Allegedly Jin-woo is the second lead, but alas, we don't know as much about him because the script doesn't contrive to tangle them up together every few scenes.

Review by William Schwartz

"That Man Oh Soo" is directed by Nam Gi-hoon, written by Jung Yoo-seon, and features Lee Jong-hyun, Kim So-eun, Kang Tae-oh, Heo Jung-min.

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