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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Triangle - Drama" Episode 14

Yeong-dal's melodramatic memory recovery session is actually pretty effective, all things considered. Presented at the beginning here without context, all I see is a crushed child who's lost his entire family. Then we get back to the rest of the drama and I'm left remembering that even though the unknown relationship between the three brothers is the entire hook of "Triangle - Drama", it doesn't seem to actually have anything to do with the revenge / romance plot currently in session.

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I find this particularly annoying because the drama's pacing has been very deliberate and slow. This whole time I've been assuming this was build-up, but in terms of the narrative arc, everything important that's happening right now was established a few episodes ago in the prison. Now everything is hinging on the actions of that one guy who's apparently very famous and well-known and I guess it's a good thing he got out the same time as Dong-soo and Yeong-dal or else this story wouldn't work at all.

This episode's even slower than the last one in terms of moving the revenge scheme forward. The most helpful characters are actually Yeong-dal's two goofy buddies, who observe and monitor the chain of events while everyone else is biding their time. It's never a good sign when I have to struggle to remember what anybody actually did this episode- mostly it was just talk. The only events that particularly stick out are the hypnotism, the spying, and the bad guys' counterplan.

That counterplan, by the way, is a pretty big disappointment. Assassination attempts, regardless of whether they're successful or not, tend to grind stories down. If the bad guys are willing to resort to an unsubtle, unimaginative brand of murder to accomplish their goals, and the good guys aren't even on the ball enough to see it coming, where are we supposed to go from there? Who cares about planning if you can just knife the guy instead?

The longer this goes on the more I wish "Triangle - Drama" had spent more time in prison, if only because it would have disqualified storyline events like this. The essential action in this drama has increasingly little to do with the characterization the show's first half spent such painstaking efforts building up. And I'll just be agitated if after having gone through all this hypnotism we don't even get an emotional multi-character scene out of it. Then again, if the brothers become a focus, who knows how long it will take for the drama to actually finish the revenge plot.

Review by William Schwartz

"Triangle - Drama" is directed by Choi Jeong-gyoo, Yoo Cheol-yong, written by Choi Wan-gyoo and features Lee Beom-soo, Kim Jae-joong, Im Si-wan, Oh Yeon-soo, Baek Jin-hee, Kim So-hyun.

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