Family: The Unbreakable Bond (Drama Hangout)

Episodes 3 & 4

Hello beanies, I hope you’ve found the subs much better this week – I waited a couple of days to start ep 3, and it seems there’s been a noticeable improvement from last week’s initial subs. I think there’s still some weirdness with the correct attribution of titles and subjects in a sentence sometimes, but it has been much easier to follow! Thank you kind subbers! I appreciate your speedy and hard work!

I think the sheen is wearing off for me too, because there were a number of things I didn’t like about these two episodes.

Last week, I was not that put off by Min Seo and Bo Seok’s ‘loveline’ but I found it so much worse this week. It was very cringey (plus, a little girl played a character called Lolita in the play). I guess I don’t really see the value of including this particular side story… I hope we don’t get too much more of it.

I’m glad they moved on from the implication that Director Oh was having an affair with the ML fairly quickly. That was also a weird and unnecessary side story (with a ridiculous amount of drinking involved). But unrelatedly, I’m really happy they made a big deal about how beautiful Director Oh is because I recently watched the Coffee Prince reunion (from 2020), and I felt as though the actress was nostalgic for her youthful beauty when she is still stunning!! I hope she knows! (I suppose it’s not uncommon to look back and realise that we judged ourselves too harshly, yet still struggle to be kind to ourselves in the present.)

Anyway, back to the show, the main issue I have at the moment is that I’m not entirely convinced the two very different genres are meshing that well, and the various elements of this drama feel very piecemeal. On the one hand, I get that the over-the-top, shouty madness that is their family life has to do with how stressful his work is. It seems like he covers up his true feelings by being loud and exaggerated, so I kind of see that as a bridge between the two. But to make the family drama side of things work, they need to have invested enough time to make us like the characters, and for me, they haven’t quite managed. I’m not particularly fond of the sister-in-law, Min Seo, or harabeoji yet. It meant that I didn’t care about their family disagreement over whether their late mother wanted their father to find love again, and it didn’t help that it was drawn out for as long as it was. It also seems like the show wants to walk the line between the comedic and emotional, but that’s really hard to pull off. Jang Hyuk’s acting sold his emotional moment in the car, but it didn’t quite fit in with the rest of this drama. And don’t even get me started with the family visit to the noraebang…

I have quite a few questions about the spy storyline and I think the names and code names confused me. I’ll include those questions (that I already posted in the episodes 1-2 first impressions recap) as a reply to this already very long comment.

I’ll keep watching as…

Family: The Unbreakable Bond (Drama Hangout)
Source: Buzz Pinay Daily