You Can Check Out Any Time You Like

My first ever KDrama review on my blog, prompted by realising that 500 characters on Mastodon was nowhere enough to express how I felt about Check-in Hanyang.

I started this drama because the synopsis on MDL made it sound like a fusion sageuk, basically a youth/college drama transported into the Joseon era. And the first few episodes felt a little bit like that, but were also setting up the revenge arc which was at the heart of the story—a minor detail the synopsis I read completely omitted.

Particularly since 2023, K dramas of no more than 12 episodes have become much more common. So I was surprised that this one was 16 episodes of around 70 minutes each. That length contributed to one of the biggest problems I have with the drama – tonal confusion. When I speak of tonal confusion, I don't mean that I expect a Drama to have only one tone, or flavour. What I do want is for the Drama to be clear about which tone or flavour is dominant, and which is the garnish. This Drama, like many, many KDramas of the 400 or so I've started, struggled to make up its mind about its dominant tone, at least in the first half.

Because of its length it needed filler, and for me much of the first half was little more than that. As a cross dressing sageuk, I couldn't help compare this to Sungyunkwan Scandal, a drama I really enjoyed. The collegiate hi-jinks part of the story here mostly did not work for me, especially when combined with the active malice involved in the revenge arc and the frankly homicidal hatred of the leader of the group of rival students. His viciously malicious animosity did not fit with the "comedic" nature of that part of the story. It was tonally jarring - "we're students pranking each other and I'M LITERALLY GOING TO KILL YOU". So too was the absurdity of the male lead not knowing the female lead was female until she told him so in episode 12 of 16. EVERYONE else knew, but he didn't. An amoeba with an optic nerve would have known she was a female, yet apparently this Crown Prince was taken completely by surprise, and deeply offended by her deception.

The other big issue I have with the first half of the drama is that the female lead was mostly a passive presence. Her interesting and thoughtful interactions with a "mystery Guest" were really the only time when she was truly an active participant as opposed to just someone to whom things happened. Up until about episode 12, I couldn't really bring myself to care about her character, which is a big problem when her character's revenge arc is the core of the story.

The comedic collegiate pranks part of the story did cement the bond between the four Padawans, but apart from that didn't really add anything to the story – except to fill up time. For me, the romance arc added nothing. I never bought the OTP chemistry and the romance felt like it really did not belong. The story was about four disparate individuals going to know one another, learn from one another, bond with one another as a team and help each other to grow as individuals. By the very end of the story all of that had actually happened, and it could have been done without trying to force a romance between two of them. The romance arc was hesitantly used to generate conflict between the two male leads, but the background and status of those characters means that conflict and competition between them was pretty much guaranteed, with no need to have them "fighting over a woman" - especially when one of them did not even know she was a woman!

Had the drama been 12 to 14 episodes long, cutting those 2-3 hours of filler would have made for a sharper, more tonally focused story, and made the drama's strong points stand out better. Before highlighting those strong points one final major niggle.

Suspension of disbelief is always needed watching KDramas, but a good drama makes that requirement less difficult. In this drama two key characters were seriously injured by swords. Or rather, they should have been seriously injured. In the first instance, a character took a heavy sword blow to the back and then was stabbed in the abdomen with the sword plunging right into her, prtially pinning her to a tree. She staggered on and was to find her way off a mountain into a town where she had the strength to bang on a gate asking to be heard. In the second instance the male lead took a sword to the back that had been intended as a decapitation stroke for the female lead. The sword was swung with sufficient force to decapitate someone, the male lead threw himself between the sword and the intended victim and it struck his back. Immediately afterward he was able to pick up the female lead and walk away. That was eye-roll moment number two.

It also marks the end of my "hated it" section of the review. There was quite a lot to like about this drama.

Above all, the highlight of this drama for me was the character of Seol Mae Hwa and the performance of that character by Kim Min Jung. I'm a hardcore brony who loves a good romcom. I've only seen Kim Min Jung in one contemporary Drama where she was the romantic lead, and I was underwhelmed. That was largely due to my own shallow aesthetic preferences, but in THIS Drama that same shallowness manifested itself in my being blown away by how GORGEOUS she looked.

Besides looking stunning, for the first half of the drama, she was at the heart of everything: The apparently loyal acolyte to the evil big bad, and the sole focus of the female lead's revenge fixation. For much of the time her character could have gone Jedi or Sith, and Ms Kim played that well. Even after her miraculous survival of the assassination attempt that should have seen her bleed out, she continued to be a master manipulator. By that time, it was clear that she was on the side of the angels, a fact which had me convinced that she would eventually be killed, her superhuman immunity to swords not withstanding.

Overall I enjoyed the final third of this drama because of its clearer focus. It was more like a straight sageuk; political machinations, treachery and attempted murder without scenes played for "laughs". The final third also saw the female lead actually take the lead. She became fully engaged and active in the outworking of the story, including a resolution to her revenge arc.

A couple of weeks before watching this drama, I watched the sageuk Tree with Deep Roots and one of the very few complaints I had with it was that two central characters died tragically without those deaths being necessary for the story, other than to meet the apparent need sageuks have that some characters viewers care for must die. This drama gets a lot of bonus points for not going down that road. Seol Mae Hwa is given a perfect ending, I literlly could not think of a better way for her arc to end. The female lead's revenge arc is resolved in a very satisfactory (if slightly 21st-century) kind of way, and the "band of brothers" end up together. Pretty much the only people who die are the ones who actually needed killing, and the kids all grew in maturity and personality, especially the two male leads. Even the fact that the vicious bully more or less got away with it (one surprisingly satisfying beating aside) was very believable. The way the Drama nailed a happy ending that was still plausibly possible, and that still involved some loss for some of the 'winners,' was a big plus. So many KDramas don't nail the landing, this one did.

Another thing I enjoyed was the attention paid to a couple of the supporting characters. Ko Su-Ra was the "scholarship" kid, the poor relation of the 4 Padawans, and Park Jae Chan did a good job with the role. The character was given the role of being the conscience for the two male leads, and the (subtitled) dialogue he had was always on point. He was easily the most likeable of the three male Padawans, and his final scenes were VERY satifying as a result. I thought Park Jae Chan did OK in "My Sweet Mobster" but he seriously impressed me in this one. I also got another young actor to keep an eye out for, which is always a treat. Kwon Eun Bin's character, the War Minister's niece, did not have a big part, but it was still an important part, and she did well enough with it to pique my interest.

In the end, I gave this 8/10 in my personal Drama database, deciding that the things it got right, it got VERY right, and that they outweighed the things it got wrong, many of which may only have been annoying to a grumpy old man who's watched too many KDramas.