[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Girl Who Sees Smells" Episode 4

Well, hm. Several of my assumptions about the last episode have turned out to be incorrect. In the first place Cho-rim really is mad at Moo-gak about what happened at the comedy club- she's just reasonably good at not getting too outrageously angry. I guess I'm just not used to seeing drama heroines exercise self-restraint. Of course, in the real world shame tends to be a better motivator than abuse anyway, which is how the Cho-rim / Moo-gak relationship is able to move forward.

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In the second place the murder mystery isn't quite what it looks like. Worry not- it's still a perfectly solvable mystery. Thinking back the right clues are there. The worldbuilding in "The Girl Who Sees Smells" is rather improbable, but at least it's consistently improbable. No one behaves stupidly for no reason- it's just that a lot of the intrinsic motivations are deliberately being kept hidden, mainly because the answered questions are about characters we haven't been paying much attention to.

Be that as it may, I'm not really sure how to react to a drama that tricks me into thinking it's telling a different kind of story than it actually is. I suspect most of this is just critical impulse. Provided you don't think about dramas too much, there's nothing here that's all that objectionable in terms of overall storytelling. Well, the dramatic coincidences are getting to be a tad much. Although it is possible that they aren't really coincidences and this is just more playing around with the format.

So, ignoring all that, was this a good episode? I'm inclined to say no, honestly. While there are a few funny moments here, the jokes last time were funnier. And the ending begs about as many questions as it does answers, because I'm really not sure how to view the homicide detectives if "The Girl Who Sees Smells" is going to insist on jumping back and forth between comic relief and serious dramatic revelations that totally upend the case.

The issues are mainly tonal. And I suspect this is why there's no preview- while "The Girl Who Sees Smells" has been doing decently ratings-wise, this is a concept that could easily collapse under its own weight if a more coherent narrative direction isn't established soon. I'm less convinced that writer Lee Hee-myeong actually has a plan so much as he is deliberately setting up clues that can be interpreted in multiple ways. I'm still fairly cautious about "The Girl Who Sees Smells", but at least I don't explicitly hate it.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Girl Who Sees Smells" is directed by Baek Soo-chan, written by Lee Hee-myeong and features Park Yoo-chun, Shin Se-kyung, Namkoong Min, Yoon Jin-seo, Kim So-hyun, Choi Tae-joon, and more.

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