Stream K-Dramas at OnDemandKorea

[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Heirs" Episode 19

There's lot of cuteness here as we get a bright cheery look at Kim Tan's birthday party, where all his friends have shown up and are having a gay old time taking pictures and doing basic teen stuff. Even the abrupt ending of Kim Tan confronting his father with Eun-Sang in tow is pretty fun. When the drama loses its pretensions and just lets its teen characters act like real teenagers, it can be fairly successful as light entertainment.

Advertisement

However, the more of this cute stuff that we see, the more the question comes up of how appropriate it is for the only apparent conflict in this drama to be deflated so close to the end. "The Heirs" has been zigzagging all over the place in terms of light-hearted funtime episodes versus the serious ones. The effect might be a pleasant one, for someone who enjoys watching the cute Kim Tan / Eun-Sang antics- but for me the enjoyment factor in those scenes went out several episodes ago. At this point it's really just kind of depressing realizing that Kim Tan's behavior hasn't really changed. It's just that other characters are more willing to tolerate it now for some reason.

The drama also makes a rather bizarre switcheroo close to the end. Kim Nam-Yoon has, even by the generally low standards of wealthy corporate types, been a pretty awful person. But when he runs into trouble we're supposed to...feel sorry for him? We've all been watching the same drama, right? The one where he's clearly been psychologically setting his sons against each other so that the most ruthless cutthroat one will finally take the reins of the company? We're supposed to be feel sorry for him? Basically any other character looks good contrasted to Kim Nam-Yoon, and it's frankly inexplicable that the people whose emotions he's been messing with the most are the ones who are now taking his side.

Yeong-Do's subplot also takes a weird turn. He shifts away from his Eun-Sang obsession into...something way more interesting than the Eun-Sang obsession, actually. This is a storyline shift that should have come up a long time ago. Goodness knows Yeong-Do hasn't been contributing much to the main plot lately. While I like his new goals, it's hard to be that satisfied since the build-up is so last minute.

The problem with these plot twists is that, even when they're effective, they have almost nothing to do with anything else that's happened in the previous eighteen episodes. There's no thematic cohesion. Even just in the context of this episode, "The Heirs" can't seem to decide whether excessive wealth is a good thing or a bad thing. The cute laughs can alleviate some of the annoyance from this, but that still leaves a basic emptiness in the soul of the storyline that can't be convincingly patched up.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Heirs" is directed by Kang Sin-hyo and written by Kim Eun-sook and features Lee Min-ho, Park Shin-hye, Kim Woo-bin and Jung Soo-jung.

❎ Try Ad-free