Dramaland’s newest rom-com is here with fantasy, mystery, and hijinks for our viewing pleasure. Our heroine’s unemployed and uncomplicated life takes a different turn after she wakes up in the body of a middle-aged woman. Living a double life can be jarring and scary, but what’s a little complication when she can finally achieve her dreams of becoming employed?
EPISODES 1-2
This drama had me the second I saw our bicycle-riding heroine, LEE MI-JIN (Jung Eun-ji), cycling down to write yet another civil servant exam. Unlike Mi-jin, I can’t relate to a frustrating eight-year-long job hunt, but I can certainly relate with the feeling of multiple trials — and failure — at other life endeavors. After the oral interview, our heroine loses the position to a namesake, but she doesn’t have the heart to tell her celebratory parents that it was another Lee Mi-jin who got the job.
Still, our Mi-jin is as spirited as they come, so she does the next best thing: meet up with a mysterious man who helps job seekers like her to get a government job. But first, Mi-jin has a meet-cute at the cafe with her leading man, prosecutor KYE JI-WOONG (Choi Jin-hyuk). Never mind that Mi-jin looks like she time-travelled from the Joseon era in her court lady hanbok. Lol. It turns out that the mysterious man is a scammer, and our hotshot Seoul prosecutor is here in Seohan to catch him in the act. Welp!
The scammer is arrested after a chase around town, but it will take a while for Mi-jin to get her money back. Never mind that she gave him her bank book and she’s in danger of getting roped as an accessory to his phishing scam. Sigh. Like her day couldn’t get any worse, Mi-jin swaps the envelope containing her resume with Ji-woong’s identical envelope. And when he calls to inform her about the swap, she assumes he’s another scammer so she cusses him out and blocks his number. Lol. Don’t you just love the mistaken identity trope?
It’s been a depressingly long day for Mi-jin, and all she wants to do is drown her sadness in soju and chat with her stray cat friend — but she ends up drowning diving into a well to save the cat after it falls in. Mi-jin wishes to be someone else while in the well, and her prayers are answered when she wakes up the next morning as an ahjumma (Lee Jung-eun). Omona!
Mi-jin’s parents get the fright of their lives on seeing a “stranger” in their house, and they call the cops on her. What follows is a hilarious sequence involving her parents chasing her around the house, Mi-jin spotting her ahjumma reflection in a glass, and Ahjumma Mi-jin trying to convince everyone at the police station that she was born in 1996. Of course they all think she’s crazy, and she also thinks she’s gone crazy. Aigoo.
Mi-jin returns to her normal self at night, and she suspects the cat she saved has something to do with her predicament, but the cat is nowhere to be found. Her bizarre transformation is here to stay, and it’s such a chore to rush out of the house before the sun rises (when she transforms to an ahjumma) and stay out all day until the sun sets (when she returns to her normal self). Unfortunately for Mi-jin she finds no solution in hospitals, shamans, or plastic surgery clinics. If only she knew to ask her leading man since he knows all about jumping into a body of water and waking up as a different person. Heh.
Speaking of Ji-woong, he puts in for a transfer from Seoul to the Seohan District Prosecutors’ office, and this is most likely connected to his investigation into the mysterious disappearance of some women in Seohan twenty years ago. Of course, we can’t have a rom-com without mystery and intrigue. By the way, it would seem that our transformation-inducing cat belongs to one of the missing women — who just so happens to be Mi-jin’s maternal aunt. Of course, our leads have to be connected somehow. Lol.
Refusing to wallow in her current situation, our spirited heroine soon discovers that there are certain advantages to living as an ahjumma. For one, she can take over her missing aunt’s identity and apply for a senior citizens’ internship program! It’s ironic that Mi-jin — or rather, IM SOON (Lee Jung-eun) — is the youngest applicant as a senior citizen when her younger self used to be the oldest at job interviews (and thus passed over in favor of younger applicants).
While age is on her side now, I liked the fact that it’s the various skills Mi-jin acquired in her eight years of job prep that really gives her an edge over the other applicants. She lands the internship and she’s so psyched to finally get a job after all these years — even if, as she soberly realizes, she got employed as Soon not as Mi-jin. I’m so happy for her, I could cry. By the way, where is this internship? Why of course, it’s at the Seohan District Prosecutors’ office! Mwahahah. So what if Soon’s internship ends up being a cleaning position? She falls into Ji-woong’s arms — again — on their first day on the job, and that’s all that matters. Heh.
Before leaving Seoul, Ji-woong prosecuted famous idol member, KO WON (Baek Seo-hoo) for drug use. And while Won — from King Land idol group, lol — gets off on probation, he’s forced to enlist for his mandatory military service to cool off from the scandal. Since Seohan is the hottest place in this drama’s universe, Won ends up as a public service worker at Seohan District Prosecutors’ office, and our leads are finally coming together under one roof. Ooh la la!
Won’s first day at work features screaming fangirls who come to cheer him on and a masked assailant who attempts to douse him with acid. You know, nothing too dramatic. Thankfully, Soon pushes the assailant out of the way with her cleaning mop, and Ji-woong shields her from the acid with his Black Umbrella of Protection. They make such a great team! On a lighter note, Ji-woong’s umbrella has been through a lot: from fangirls’ eggs to acid. Umbrella-nim needs to be repaired ASAP because it’s a supporting character at this point. Lol.
According to K-drama math, the sum of an umbrella and a hot male lead equals a swooning female lead, and Soon is no exception — until she learns that Ji-woong is a straight-laced workaholic and a social misfit who is only nice to people outside work. Soon snaps out of her swoon and makes a mental note not to get involved with Ji-woong. But guess who’s driving down to Lee Mi-jin’s mom’s butcher shop to drop off her resume? Heh.
Soon does a Fast and Furious to Mom’s shop after getting the “a handsome man named Kye Ji-woong is here to see you” call, and thankfully, the sun goes down just in time for her to meet Ji-woong as Mi-jin. She gets her resume and he gets… nothing… because she already packed his envelope — investigation files on the missing women’s case — with the exam prep books that she sold to a used bookstore. Oops!
Mi-jin and Ji-woong go to the bookstore to fall into his arms look for the envelope and slightly chip away at the ice between them. But just when Mi-jin finds the envelope, Ji-woong is called away to a crime scene: a woman has just been murdered and dismembered! Thriller elements in a rom-com? What else is new? But you know what, I actually don’t mind it here because it doesn’t feel out of place in a plot that already features disappearing women.
Ji-woong spots the axe-wielding raincoat killer fleeing the scene, and he chases after the killer’s car on foot. He intensifies the chase when he gets Mi-jin’s “I’m on my way home” text because: 1) the killer is headed in the same direction as Mi-jin; and 2) her number is unreachable. Unaware of the situation, a curious Mi-jin stops in the middle of the crossroad to snoop into the contents of Ji-woong’s envelope, and Ji-woong can only watch from afar as the killer speeds in her direction and crashes into something or someone… What did they say about curiosity and cats again? This is the cliffhanger on which we end our opening week, and if I wasn’t already invested in the drama, I am now.
This premiere is everything I hoped for, and it was a delight watching the episodes. I came for the fun — which the drama delivered on — but I wasn’t expecting Mi-jin’s story to be so relatable, moving, and ironic. The not-so-subtle hints of ageism that played out as regards Mi-jin’s job search were well done, and I liked the hilarity of Ji-woong and the other detectives’ assumption that she was much older than she is — no thanks to her slight ahjumma-like aura.
Maybe that’s why she’s totally killing it as an ahjumma — even though her millennial/Gen Z lingo betrays her age in comparison with the actual boomers. Lol. Kudos to Jung Eun-ji and Lee Jung-eun for complimenting each other so well and making Mi-jin and Soon believable as the same person. Omniscient viewer aside, I totally understood Mi-jin’s mom’s feeling of familiarity with Soon because the synchronization is just that good!
In the coming weeks, I look forward to Ji-woong’s interaction with Mi-jin and Soon, and all the hijinks the “three” of them will have. So far, Ji-woong’s “bad personality” is more of what other people say about him than what we actually see, and the good in him shines through in the little things like protecting Soon from acid attacks and silently sliding a stack of books away with his foot so that Mi-jin won’t trip at the bookstore.
Ji-woong’s closed off and cold-hearted nature is probably as a result of some childhood trauma stemming from his mother’s murder, and who knows if said murder is connected to the missing women or the raincoat killer? In any case, since Mi-jin is also connected to the missing women via her aunt, maybe they can display another round of amazing teamwork by solving the case together. But first, Show needs to get Soon out of that cleaning uniform and give her a desk job stat.