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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Dating Agency: Cyrano" Episode 13

The final stretch of "Dating Agency: Cyrano" is determined to take every convoluted aspect of the series to date and extend it to the most outrageous limits. The Cyrano Agency's final job looks to be an exceptionally complex meta-game of characters pretending to be doing one thing, when in fact they're doing another thing. But everybody knows that everbody else could be doing one thing while pretending to be doing another thing, because this entire series is about the use of complicated meta-acting narratives. So all anyone actually knows is that everyone has an agenda, and even if they can guess the end they might not be able to guess the method.

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What makes all this even more baffling is that characters also devote a lot of energy to manipulating themselves into believing that they want things they might not really want, in part because they've been rotting their brains with all these crazy romantic narratives. It's getting to be like a spy movie where characters flat out forget what their motivation is because they can't keep track of how many times they've changed allegiances.

There are lots of good individual moments here. The profile of the new romantc target in particular stands out as a case where everyone has to pretend like they're on the same page, when in reality everyone's trying to out-manipulate each other in strange, subtle ways. Everyone has to cooperate in order to further their own agenda, so acknowledging scheming from anyone else will just cause the whole plan to fall apart.

There's bad with the good, though. Clear, decisive moments which further the ends of the set-up work really well, but the long stretches where characters have not decided what to do yet are, by comparison, less effective. For what it' worth, these parts do sort of glaze off the memory. I'm trying to think of a scene I really disliked to illustrate my point, but I just keep coming up with scenes I actually like. And there's a fair number of those lying around.

The essential question right now is how Byeong-Hoon thinks he's going to pull this impossible meta-game off, and how, if, or whether any of the other characters will be able to stop him. There's a very deliberate feeling that everything about this drama so far, from the individual character moments to the clients to the Agency itself, have been deliberately designed to set up this finale. It's hard to say, as of yet, whether the closing episodes will actually pull it off.

Review by William Schwartz

"Dating Agency: Cyrano" is directed by Kang Kyeong-hoon, written by Shin Jae-won and features Lee Jong-hyuk, Choi Soo-young, Hong Jong-hyun and Jo Yoon-woo.

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