She is an idol on hiatus, a fractured soul no doubt, but very pretty, secretly stashed away on the ground floor of a coed shared house. He is an incoming Engineering sophomore (brains, no doubt) moving to a university in Seoul, from the outskirts of the city, coming from an ordinary family but with an extraordinary academic diligence—and very good-looking. The scene opens with him—fresh off his friend’s van that brought him to Seoul—lugging his luggage in the garden and to the door of the coed shared house.
The pretty idol and the handsome student meet at that moment in the garden of the shared house—she puffing away, he bungling the door lock; she eyeing him with suspicion (stalker!) and condescending amusement, he acting like a nerd.
But make no mistake. Doona is not about a pretty girl and a handsome boy. It’s not skin-deep. Suzy Bae as Doona, the idol traumatized by a burdened past, and Yang Se Jong as Lee Won Joon, the well-meaning student determined to excel in the university even as he juggles part-time jobs, pull off such powerful, realistic, highly nuanced performances that we almost forget about their good looks. They keep us immersed in the allure, conflicts and sadness of their young lives—and most important, the fun and romance too. They make your heart, to use a K-drama cliché, flutter.
The chemistry of Suzy Bae and Yang Se Jong is so palpable that I am now a full Suzy Bae fan (I was a half-fan in Start-Up and didn’t enjoy her rumored break-up from Lee Min Ho), and I loved having discovered Yang Se Jong so that I binge-watched his earlier series (Still At 17, Temperature of Love, Coffee Friends). In press meets, he comes across as a shy celeb who seems rather naively young.
View this post on Instagram
Doona is a naughty flirt to Won Joon’s almost clueless wholesomeness. Won Joon is too naïve to wear a mask, Doona does wear many masks—to protect herself from the cruelties of K-pop fame. A smug Doona plays with Won Joon’s naivete at the start; a bully Doona overwhelms Won Joon, until their roles are reverse; he becomes her protector.
Watch out for how each other’s vulnerability leads to romance. Yet this love story has no need for a fairytale ending. But don’t worry, it won’t freak you out the way the cop-out-ending of Twenty-five Twenty-one did.
To begin the story: Doona suspects the incoming tenant is a stalker—she espies him wearing a Dream Sweet limited-edition hoodie collected by Doona’s fandom. Dream Sweet is Doona’s idol band she abandons so suddenly after she collapses onstage during a performance in Japan (according to publicity report, this scene was filmed during an actual performance because the director wanted to capture the audience’s raw reaction). At that moment, with the camera flashes assaulting her eyes and her mind in sudden panic over the possible stalkers in the audience, she freezes and imagines herself sinking into the depths of the ocean. She can no longer sing, she tells her manager played by seasoned actor Lee Jin Wook. She has become fully dependent on this manager (who isn’t bad looking, by the way).
He sets her up—actually banishes her— in the coed shared home, the entire ground floor of it (you have money, an overwhelmed Won Joon would tell her later), where she disassociates herself from the world, in fear of stalkers, and where she waits for the call of her manager, which never comes. “Don’t make trouble” is the last thing he tells her.
Meantime, Won Joon moves in as a new student who hasn’t a clue who Doona is, which Doona, the darling of K-popdom, couldn’t believe. She browbeats him early on, especially after she sees him in a Dream Sweet hoodie (which his best friend back home, a devoted fanboy of Doona, just put on him), convinced he’s a stalker. In their early encounter, he tells her she looks familiar, but he doesn’t know exactly who (he’s seen her photos all over his best friend’s place). When finally she tells him, derisively, who she is, he walks past her, looks back at her, miffed, saying that anyway, the group he really likes is TWICE (the famous girl band).
Their early garden encounters are the same: she bearing down on him, blowing cigarette smoke into his face, and he, with a stoic face, just trying to literally walk out of the garden, so can she please get out of the way. His muffler stinks of her cigarette smoke—so that he ends up losing a tutorial gig because the mother gets a sniff of the scarf and decides she doesn’t want a chain smoker to be her child’s tutor.
It is light scenes such as those that provide comic fun early on—a levity that is a foil to the intense drama to unfold.
By the way, what’s up with smoking? Why is K-drama—and Netflix—turning into a Smoking Zone, more than ever?
By the way, what’s up with smoking? Why is K-drama—and Netflix—turning into a Smoking Zone, more than ever? Is a tobacco firm a major investor in all this content? It’s believable that a nervous wreck of an idol chain-smokes, but in this series, to show it in almost every frame—is a bit much.
That’s not to distract us from the character development of this well-written drama. Won Joon moves into the second floor flat which he shares with two other wacky guys: one is a jiujitsu champion played to comic level by Kim Do Wan (we loved him in My Roommate is a Gumiho), who has relationship phobia, while another is a sucker for romance. It is the wacky chemistry of this university bunch that give us the laughs —especially after they are joined by two female housemates. These are Won Joon’s first love from high school, Kim Jin Ju (played with such cool confidence by Shin Ha Young from Now We Are Breaking Up, Chocolate) and Won Joon’s lunatic “soulmate”—she and Won Joon were born in the same hospital, a few minutes apart, so their mothers decided to match them, at birth!
The camaraderie and cross-romances in this upstairs-downstairs home have that Reply 1988 vibe. They break the sober and poignant mood.
The roles of the bully (Doona) and the bullied (Won Joon) are reversed unexpectedly when Doona passes out in the garden one wintry night, and Won Joon has no choice but to rush her to the hospital, and serve as her “guardian”—even before she can find out his name, which he refuses to give earlier.
Here on, Doona, alone all her life, develops a need for Won Joon to the point of hilarious obsessiveness. Their relationship transforms into…not stereotypical romance. Won Joon’s first love, Kim Jin Ju, happens to be a student in his university. They run into each other, even in their part-time jobs, and rekindle their feelings for each other. Doona even gets to enjoy their circle and tries to coach Won Joon on how to win back his first love.
It’s the dynamic of the relationship among the three that makes this drama quite realistic and not cloying. At what point does Won Joon realize who he really loves?
Doona not only trusts Won Joon now but finds shelter in his good naïve heart. He brings her to a claw machine to give her normal fun. She drags him out of town when, depressed, she wants to get away—although incognito, she watches her band’s showcase and suddenly remembers what she misses. And he tags along on that getaway—clueless. Their intimate moment that night fires up the small screen, and the ratings—these two are romantic leads with a capital R— until Doona’s ties from the past reappear.
Even as they build one romantic moment after another, she cannot fully leave behind Doona the Idol. Won Joon’s empathy for her turns into concern, then affection, and finally, love. He loses himself in her. How will Doona reconcile this ordinary life with Won Joon, with the life of the industry’s most bankable idol?
You binge-watch the eight episodes because you want to know how the two characters will unfold and decide. You want to know if Won Joon will know pain in the hands of Doona.
Yang Se Yong is a master at turning that poker face into deadly charm; how can such baby face carry such depth of emotion? (That’s also how he makes his mark in Temperature of Love and Still 17.)
Suzy Bae is a tease—she’s so good at it. Her wicked coquetry is a foil to Yang Se Yong’s deadpan naivete.
How can Doona give up the fame and fortune of an idol—not when she has a capricious mother to support, financial debts, and agency contract, not when her dependence on her manager borders on love? He shaped her from pre-teenhood, the only adult in her life.
Will she go back to her band and resume being the industry’s top idol? Will Won Joon’s intense love of Doona not distract him from being a top civil engineering student?
“Before the world forgets you…” the manager, who holds full power over her, tells her to resume idol-ship. “What if I want to be forgotten?” she replies.
This drama’s strength is character development. Yang Se Jong’s romantic lead becomes a study of pain, confusion, and eventually confidence and acceptance.
“If you make a comeback, he’ll be the first thing they’ll rip to shreds,” Doona is told about her student boyfriend.
“A student…. A boyfriend is out of the equation in a career that costs billions,” the manager tells Won Joon to his face.
With life goals not on the same path, will they let go? Who is letting go?
That’s why you stay till the end to find out.
