[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Triangle - Drama" Episode 19

Yeong-dal gets to work on organizing some quality schemes here. It's the kind of gangster style corporate warfare I can really get behind- it's sneaky, and taking advantage of various character's personalities. But most significantly, it's not a direct attack against any of the antagonists. They're clearly tense and waiting for team Dong-soo and Yeong-dal to pull something. However, the immediate offensive objectives are vague, so for the most part everyone's caught off guard.

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Yang-ha in particular is blindsided mainly because part of Yeong-dal's plan involves trying to negotiate with a person Yang-ha is doing his absolute best to ignore. The lack of genuine camaraderie or even parental love on the part of the bad guys is clearly causing problems. There's only so much progress they can make on business trust alone, and they appear to be reaching their limit. A good metaphor about family values might be lurking around in there somehow.

This material is all well and good, then the drama decides every once in awhile that it's time to cut back to Jeong-hee's romantic troubles. The stairway that all the main characters are using at the same time by sheer coincidence is bad enough. Then the love theme starts blaring up and again I'm baffled why the production team thinks this romance is at all worth spending time on. It has nothing to do with the rest of the plot.

Unless we're going into the backstory about Dong-soo's father, which is just as bad really. We've already established that the bad guys are bad guys. This would have been much more appropriate exposition back at the beginning of the drama, when the dramatic stakes were as yet unclear. Here it's just filling time that could be better spent on the corporate backroom backstabbing, which is the first time in awhile this drama has actually done anything interesting.

Sadly, I don't think we're quitting the flashbacks anytime soon, thanks to the abrupt and incredibly convenient appearance of a couple of photos that establish a childhood relationship between two of the main characters. No, not between any of the brothers. That could have been a potentially interesting way to give Yang-ha doubts about his current familial arrangement. No, this is something that belongs in a much cheesier drama. Again, as expositon this would have made a lot more sense at the beginning than right at the climax when all the fun character driven stuff is finally happening.

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.