[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Heirs" Episode 3

By William Schwartz on 2013/10/16 at 19:11 PST

Ah, the American road trip. A long, boring drive into the middle of nowhere that quickly loses its novelty. Meeting up with people who probably don't actually want to see you. That empty feeling inside realizing an entire day was wasted on a pointless sentimental gesture. Vast open space of poorly maintained roads, easy accidents, and no cell phone reception to call for help. Truly a feature of the culture worth idolizing.

I have no idea how much of the metaphors "The Heirs" is using are intentional, but I'm just plain astonished at how striking they are. This entire episode is a wake-up call to Kim Tan that he is not, in fact, as cool as he thinks he is. There's all sorts of crummy stuff in his life that the surf and turf in Los Angeles can't make up for. Eun-Sang's diffident attitude to him is increasingly understandable and basically justified- I really like how she's her own person with her own state of mind, and who on a basic level simply doesn't trust this Kim Tan guy who she's only really just met. It defies romantic conventions, sure- but it's an attitude that rings very true to the kind of person she is.

There's also interesting sympathy developed for Kim Tan's fiance, Rachel Yoo (played by Kim Ji-won). She's a basically mean person who's immediately scoped out who Eun-Sang is and what she represents, and absolutely does not like the situation at all. Last episode Rachel Yoo just seemed catty- but this episode, in its more ambivalent context, makes her surprisingly sympathetic. Her aggressive-aggressive behavior is almost admirable in the face of the passive-aggressiveness we've seen up until that point.

Basic aggression seems to be the main character trait all the individual heirs have in common. It manifests in different ways, but all of them are raised in and expected to survive in a cutthroat environment.  The dimension it adds to the characters are interesting, and only compounds the sweetness when we see one engaged in a rare moment of actual friendliness instead of calculated realpolitik.

This is a very strong episode overall, but there's one complaint I really need to finish with before the drama leaves Los Angeles. The foreign actors are bad. They're not terrible bad. And the first two episodes did a decent job limiting the use to which good acting was really necessary, but in this one its inescapable. Fortunately these cringe-worthy scenes don't last very long, so that's something.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Heirs" is directed by Kang Sin-hyo and written by Kim Eun-sook and features Lee Min-ho, Park Shin-hye, Kim Woo-bin and Jung Soo-jung.

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