Drama Stage 2020: Out of Communication Range

 

And with this episode, the Drama Stage 2020 comes to an end. It took me a while to watch all 10 standalone episodes and write short description. Maybe someone would be interested enough to check it. But I don't have such illusions.

The premise of this episode is bizarre, to say it mildly. And also - what a way to end the anthology - with an episode about deceit, lying, cheating - and not getting better. There was no redemption arc, even though the course of the story might suggest it. There was no "improving oneself"as a human being. It's a bleak portrait habits we all fall back onto whenever the danger is out of sight.

 

What a wonderful Shawol marked editing^^

The story starts with a married couple whose best days of the relationship are long gone.Kim Donghun and Cha Seon-young barely talk to each other, and as it turns out, have secrets that are on the verge of being exposed. Donghun informs his wife he's going abroad for a work related trip. Then, when sorting out the garbage, we learn he's not going alone, but with a girl from work. Coincidentally, he writes his cheating messages when another cheater from his apartment comes to... yes, to threw away his sorted garbage as well. So when a guy is extra willing to threw away the trash - be vigilant.

 

The very next day Donghun meets his cheating neighbor at the airport - dressed for tropics with a lady at his arm who is most definitely not his wife. A cheater recognizes his brood so they don't need words to know they are at the airport with exactly the same thing in mind - to have fun on the side. Wink here, smile there - it's an obvious language of such guys. And Donghun takes a short video of him flirting and kissing with his lady, but instead of sending it to her, he mistakenly sends it to his wife. At this moment we have the literal save Deux ex machina because just when he hit "send" the gigantic fire at the telecommunication center just severed all communication and wi-fi too. Millions of phones become useless, along with the cashless payment options, wi-fi and the whole wireless communication shebang.

 

Donghun then tries frantically to get to his wife to remove the message from her phone, and the whole episode is made of him looking for her. I wrote "looking" because yes - she's not home. What's worse - he can't get inside the house because the lock is not working properly. With the help of the guards, and the guy from the lock company, he manages to get inside and look at the clues for where she might be. He then goes (with many hiccups on the way) to his workplace only to learn that Seon-young left work over a year ago, making him perplexed with the question - where she was going out everyday then.

He then realizes, after breaking into her locked drawer, that she has a separate studio where she spends some time, and worse - he sees the USG photo of the fetus, prompting him to the conclusion she's having an affair. And here the ugly side of guys rears its head - he cheats on his wife but cannot compute that she would do such a thing. He can, but the thought of other man touching his wife - let's nuke them! He's convinced that her appointment at the ob-gyn clinic (that he learned of from the women in her baking group) is an abortion.

She also attends the school of baking, because she wanted to start her own bakery. This all is news to him, because he doesn't really know a thing about his wife.

Finally he finds her on the bridge and learns she threw away his phone, so she didn't see his message with the video attached. And explains that yes, she went for a procedure - of removing the cyst. 

And after the communication is restored, all life goes back to normal, that means - Donghun is back to cheating with the lady from work, his neighbor is back to cheating too. We see Seon-young leaving her studio and not their house. And we learn that she, too, was cheating but to sever the ties with her flame, she dropped the phone from the bridge - mere seconds before the message arrived. A glitch in the communication technology can lead to exposing of secrets, but also to burying the secrets. And the moral of the story is that people don't really change.

This episode was very cynical but, at the same time, deceptively light in a method of serving it.

 Cast:

• Kim Tae-Hoon - Kim Dong-Hoon
• Yoon Jin-Seo - Cha Sun-Young

 

THE END of DRAMA STAGE 2020.

Thank you.