9/10 is my rating. This is a 2024 South Korean time travel, revenge romance with 16, 70 minute episodes.

First I provide a unique synopsis then review

Synopsis

In 2023 Kang Ji won (Park Min Young) is married to Park Min Hwan (Lee Yi Kyung) and is living a miserable life where she is emotionally abused by her husband his mother. Things worsen for her when she is diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. The one bright light in her life is her “other half”, her childhood friend Jung Su min (Uhm Seo hyun). Or so she thinks. What remains of her life is completely shattered when she finds her husband and best friend in the midst of an affair. Even worse they are not remorseful and mock her poor condition. Things get physical between her and her husband and he winds up pushing her, in her weak state, into a glass table. As her life light dims, she hears her best friend and husband talking about life insurance and how she was just going to die anyway. She comes to finding herself having traveled back in time to before she married her murderous spouse (2013). Fate has given her the opportunity to change her life path and get revenge on those that wronged her. You want my husband? Well you can have him. She discovered she can change her fate by having key events transfer to someone else. And she cannot think of anyone who deserves her horrible husband more than her former best friend. Can Jiwon get revenge, change her fate and find love in the second chance?

Review

This is an interesting and unique time travel romance. It ends happily. I would watch it again and recommend it to others. I read that Park Min young went on a very restricted diet to be even more thin for her role as a cancer patient and want to say she just, overall, did an outstanding job of portraying the role. I think she is a remarkable actress and I seek out series where she is in a lead role. Having seen Lee Yi Kyung in comedic roles, I was unsure he could play the sleazy, evil ex husband well, but he did an incredible job making the viewer loath the character.

Spoilers

I think it is a dramatically different experience watching this after having read the web novel and/or webtoon versus never having read either. It does follow the webtoon closely, which is good, but there are some deviations I do not think improved the story line or made it better adapted to a live show. I think they did it to add intrigue but, to me, the events from the webtoon were compelling enough.

The things that were different from the comic to the webtoon:

1. In the comic the Yoo Ji Hyuk (Na In woo), her former college classmate, who harbored an unrequited love for Jiwon, discovered her body after realizing she was missing from the hospital. He was so devastated by her death that he killed himself in the ocean. He didn’t ever have a fiancé and Jiwon was his one true love. He always knew he loved her but stayed away because he thought she found happiness elsewhere and didn’t want to interfere. That’s why he made an effort to get closer to her when they regressed. He wasn’t going to let her husband ruin her life again. In the live action version they chose to have him die in a car accident which, I felt, was less impactful.

2. In the Webtoon version, the lady supervisor, who becomes a good friend of Jiwon, had a very different romantic story. In the Webtoon, Yang Juran’s (Gong Min jeung) love interest was younger than her and had a fun, carefree personality. Because her married life was so difficult and she was so serious at work, it made sense for her to fall for the younger man. There was some moral conflict in the comic about whether it was okay to fall for him, but she lost out at the end. In the live action, Mrs. Yang’s love interest is Lee Suk jun (Ha Do kwan) who is an austere, older executive who is unapproachable to most but shows a softer side to Mrs. Yang. It took out the whole Noona trope and added in a cold executive vibe which I did not feel was a good fit for a side romance.

3. In the webtoon, Jiwon convinced Mrs. Yang to get tested for her stomach and that’s how she found out early enough to fight the cancer. It became a plot hole, in the live version, when Mrs. Yang’s cancer was not terminal like Jiwon’s was in the Webtoon version. Yet, in the live version, Mrs. Yang caught the cancer early, without any intervention from Jiwon. That type of cancer is infrequently caught in the early stages so it made less sense for Mrs. Yang to catch it early all on her own.

4. In the live action version, I didn’t like how active of a role Jiwon had to take to take down Minwan and Sumin. In the scene where she catches them cheating, she gets in a physical altercation with Sumin and Minwan which makes it look like she was the aggressor and the push that wound up ending her life was just them fighting back harder than they should have. They did not highlight, in the live action, that she was still alive after she fell against the glass table and they did nothing to try to save her life. The moral ambiguity continued through the live action when Jumin was completely willing to let Sumin die in her place. In the comics, once Minwan and married, they continued to attack each other. They self destructed. Minwan’s azoospermia took a more active role. After su-min “lost” her fake baby, the mom was a nightmare about conceiving and blaming her all the time. The home life was hell with the mom. She went to get fertility testing at the moms behest and demanded Minwan get tested too and that’s how she found out. She brought it to the mom and the mom was so angry she had a stroke. In the webtoon , Sumin became her mother-in-law’s sole caretaker and tormented her to get revenge for the way she was treated. But she was also was cruel to the mother-in-law after the stroke simply because she was not a very nice person as evidenced in the way she treated Jiwon when she had terminal cancer. Sumin’s evil nature was further revealed in the Webtoon when she resolved to kill the mother-in-law by putting air in her IV line. There was a witness and she was caught and sent to prison. Meanwhile Minwan decided to get ride of Sumin for insurance money and cuts her brakes. He hears about his mom and rushes over, forgetting about the brakes and dies. Sumin then escapes from custody and tries to run over Jiwon with a car but Mr Yu jumps in front to save her and goes to the hospital. SuMin is captured again. In the webtoon, Sumin, the mother, and Minwan bring about their own destruction while the Jiwon and Jihyuk build their relationship and remain happy. I liked that the Webtoon did not make Jiwon actively steering events so that others died. Having them self destruct made her a much more heroic and sympathetic character.

5. In the comics the characters weren’t quite so intensely bound by the concept of “transferring fate”. No one died by a coffee table again. Their actions had a real impact on the timeline and they weren’t as helpless.

6. There was no ex fiancé in the Webtoon. It was a huge cliche and caused way more drama than necessary. Oh Yu Ra (Kwon Bo ah or simply BoA) was a bland, stereotypical spoiled chaebol type with little dimension beyond “she’s just crazy”. It created a love triangle that was completely unnecessary to the plot.

7. The twist that Mr Yu regressed as well was made way too early in the show. In the comic it was a last reveal, and done through a letter while Mr Yu was in the hospital. Jiwon learned everything he had done for her and how long he loved her and why he died before. Her father brought him back from death. He overcame his fate to be with her.

8 The romance between the sister, Yoo Hui yeon (Choi Gyu-ri), and the chef, Baek Eun Ho (Lee Gi Kwang) was way cuter in the comics. They barely developed it in the show. She tried really hard to win his heart and he had lingering feelings for Jiwon but eventually came around. They shared a love of desserts.

#ParkMinYoung

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#KwonBoAh

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#LeeYiKyung

#LeeGiKwang

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