When The Phone Rings: The Drama Never Ceases With These Poor People

This Korean drama tells the story of rising politician Paik Sa-eon (Yoo Yeon-seok) and how the tense marriage with his mute wife Hong Hee-jo (Chae Soo-bin) begins to unravel after a threatening call from a kidnapper (Park Jae-yoon) turns their lives upside down. Amidst this crisis, their contract relationship eventually develops into one of real love.

I was really excited for this show, mainly because it was my Wattpad-coded dream come to life. The plot was really creative and original, merging heart-racing action sequences with intimately emotional scenes. The chemistry between the two leads was electrifying; they expressed such intense and powerful emotions with amazing subtlety. This is partially a result of great writers, who weaved in different elements really well, like great comedic timing and genuinely shocking plot twists.

However, there were more impediments involved than I expected, which was really unfortunate. I felt that the plot was occasionally too fast paced; there were lots of details thrown at the audience at once that I felt it was difficult to understand. This made the timeline of events really unclear and although it eventually developed more sensically towards the end, messages were still ambiguous. Most of this ambiguity revolved around the second lead couple: Dr. Ji Sang-woo (Heo Nam-jun) and news anchor Na Yoo-ri (Jang Gyu-ri). Their relationship evolution was simultaneously underwhelming yet incredibly fast-paced. At one point they hadn't even addressed their feelings for each other and suddenly in the last episode, they're engaged?

Now, I need to set aside an entire paragraph just for the last episode. It was terrible and made me viscerally upset. Let me explain why. The first 11 episodes followed a consecutive pattern of unfolding occurrences and was comprised of a single genre, then the 12th episode did a complete 180, essentially erasing all of the developments that were made in the rest of the show. Sa-eon's actions were so uncharacteristic and was undoing all of the previous growth he had undergone. He initially hated to even be separated from his wife, and then he abruptly decides to abondon her? There is a reason why, but the context takes a long time to explain and plus, I don't think it's sufficient enough. The entire episode was completely unnecessary. Despite the ending souring my experience, it is one of the more enjoyable Korean dramas I've watched in recent years.