★★★★☆
The 2019 Korean drama starring Shin Hye-Sun
as Lee Yeon-Seo, Kim Myung-Soo as Kim Dan/ Yoo Seong-Woo, and Lee Dong-Gun as
Ji Kang-Woo. 32 episodes at 35 minutes apiece, written by Choi Yoon-Kyo and
directed by Lee Jung-Sub.
Plot summary: After becoming blind in a
freak accident, Lee Yeon-Seo lives her life bitter and dependent on the few
close people around her. She’s untrusting, hard-hearted, and hopeless.
Meanwhile, young angel Dan can’t seem to do anything right by Heaven. He’s
their #1 trouble maker. At the last straw, he’s offered one more mission as his
last chance to remain an angel—Lee Yeon-Seo. To get close to Yeon-Seo, Dan
takes up a position as her butler, not realizing just how much misery Yeon-Seo
throws at the people around her. But Dan will not be discouraged! With her as
his project, Dan is determined to make sure she finds love and becomes happy!
This drama is a quirky romantic fantasy
drama. Above all, the drama’s strongest point is its main character line-up.
Between our two lead characters, we have the happy Dan up against the miserable
Yeon-Seo. Both are formidable forces in their own elements, and even appear to
be polar opposites of each other. It’s a match we can’t look away from!
We also can’t help but love the idea for
the plot. At first, it looks like we have the perfect set-up for a love line
between Ji Kang-Woo and Lee Yeon-Seo. They follow all the tropes we’ve come to
expect out of K-dramas! But Dan is the variable that we fall in love with. He
begins the drama with a role that we question—why is he there when it looks
like the story is supposed to happen without him? But then as Lee Yeon-Seo’s
heart warms up to him, so do ours.
Kim Dan gives us the most memorable line
right from episode 1; “Not everyone who suffers hardship becomes as twisted as
you.” At the same time, we know Kim Dan is right but we also want to defend Lee
Yeon-Seo. She couldn’t do a thing about what happened to her. Yet Kim Dan is
right. Bad things happen to innocent people all the time. What each person
chooses do to about it defines character.
In episode 15 we hear “You don’t need to
spend a long time for it to be true love. If you can give her love that can
amount to 1000 years’ worth of love, that’s all.” Here, it’s suggested that
love might not be based on how long we’ve loved, but instead the potential of
that love. Not every love story works out, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t true
love.
“In this world, there’s no such thing as
meeting someone for no reason” (episode 16). Some part of us might want to
disagree, thinking of all the people that have come into our lives and yet we
can’t remember a single thing about them. If each of those people had a
purpose, why can’t we remember them? But maybe their purpose might not be to be
remembered. Perhaps they’ve influenced us in different ways. Still, the line
offers some insight on human interaction that maybe we haven’t considered.
Of all characters, Kim Dan is obviously a
favorite—Kim Myung-Soo’s best role yet! His facial expressions are worth gold
and more.
This drama has a lot of content about
ballet and ballerina’s. This is partially because it sets up the drama’s scenario,
but it also represents Yeon-Seo’s lost passion that she eventually finds again
with Kim Dan’s help. (Let’s also applaud the tactful move to the Nutcracker theme as background music for
the quirky scenes!)
One of the drama’s greatest ironies is that
Kim Dan has a lot of good instilled in him from his angelic duties that gets
through to Yeon-Seo, but it’s the angels and those angelic duties that are
interfering with our OTP! How do we settle our feelings about this? It
certainly throws the plot around, but it also irritates we who would like to
see our OTP settled as soon as possible.
Ji Kang-Woo says “Sometimes you need to
push yourself so you can go farther.” But throughout the drama we watch an
interesting stress habit—he takes a bit of chocolate. His statement is not
wrong, but when you’re going through difficulties, what you might really need
is the sweetness of chocolate rather than relentlessly pushing yourself in
hopes of achieving the impossible. We see this paralleled in Kim Dan and
Yeon-Seo’s relationship. Kim Dan is the sweetness that Yeon-Seo learns to
appreciate.
There’s a theme in episode 28 that makes us
pause. We’ve seen plenty of K-dramas about fate, but this couple in Angel’s Last Mission: Love throws fate
to the wind. The characters disregard all ideas of fate and instead decide to
believe in each other. Their belief in each other drives the ending of the
drama in a heart-warming way, trying to show us one more time that love can
conquer all, but it might not be in the way we expected.
The final episode. That dream thing just
about killed me. I won’t say much to preserve sensitivity for spoilers, but the
finale is definitely full of feels. “The time we were given was a gift…” and “Live.
Live like a person… It’s your gift to me.” I didn’t need to hear anything else
for a total K.O.
In conclusion, this drama is sweet. Really
sweet. It has plenty of plot turns and twists that I did not expect. Although
it’s not likely to be a personal favorite, it leaves me with a thought, a line
that I once heard in an operetta. Maybe you’ve heard it as well: “To love another person is to see the face of
God.” This drama portrays that sentiment well and is something to look forward to as you watch! 4/5 stars.
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