Spoiler alert, details including the ending are discussed. This discussion is for reading after you’ve watched or if you never intend to.
I spent 16+ hours with Do Do-Hee and Jeong Gu-wan, so I have to say something about it. They make the perfect couple with all the complications of wealth dating an evil demon while her step-family plots to kill her to keep her from inheriting the family business. My logline: A handsome evil demon becomes the bodyguard and lover of a beautiful CEO.
The drama wallows in sentimentality and sappiness, one-dimensional secondary and tertiary characters, and water-drop sound effects, to say nothing of the manual for demons. How many times can Do-Hee and Gu-wan stare lovingly into each other’s eyes? If someone stared at me like that, I would run for the mirror to see if there was a bear in the cave or worse. And if happiness means I have to brush someone else’s teeth, I want no part of it.
The devil has no horns, and Do-Hee could be doing product placement modeling. In what I believe was a moment of self-reflective but perhaps unintentional candor about the series, Do-Hee’s female employee says, “Don’t you think her bodyguard is unnecessarily handsome?” Her male employee might as well have responded, “Don’t you think our CEO is unnecessarily beautiful?” Especially for a woman who runs a dessert company. This series revolves around the beautiful people and those who serve, aspire, and resent them. In another telling line, when an office worker observes that Jeong is “glowing” in the follow-up to one of those sexless, intimate love scenes found only in K-dramas, the same office girl undercuts his statement with, “He’s always glowing, when is he not?”
For all its shortcomings, it does have its moments. The stars shine, and the writers had some fun with it. For a demon with nearly unlimited powers, Jeong Gu-wan uses it relatively sparingly on annoying people, like exploding an airbag on an annoying driver. He keeps his gruff character throughout, thinly masking his affection for his human companions. He says, “I just want to live eternally as an apex predator who never ages or dies. Is that too much to ask?” The wordplay provides some fun tension to the relationship. Jeong says, “For a demon, as an apex predator, to marry an insignificant human would be like a meat eater marrying a pig.” After a metaphorical explanation involving insects, Do-hee asks, “Are you comparing me to a long-horn beetle?”
I couldn’t help but admire the Tango fight scene. With Jeong’s powers stored in Do-Hee’s wrist, Jeong must hold her arm to use his powers, but the two are initially separated. Do-Hee pepper sprays her way to Jeong, and the dance battle begins
to fight off the gang trying to avenge their dead boss. As the couple tangos away, sidelined combatants twirl their weapons overhead in time with the music while the couple pummels each attacker in turn and in step with the music. Eat your heart out, Jackie Chan.
Pearls of wisdom emerge now and then. “What’s peaceful about marriage? It’s more violent than anything,” says Star Jin, a victim of Jeong’s unrequited love. “Fate is nothing more than a web woven by a myriad of choices of your making,” says God, a street lady living the Oscar the Grouch lifestyle with the dentition to match and wearing a baseball cap with Good missing an o as the lettering in case you weren’t clear who she is. “The words are so sweet, they could give me cavities,” says Do-Hee. And my favorite line, which I hope to use someday, “I wasn’t crying, I was just sweating out of my eyes,” says Jeong, attempting to deflect a display of human emotion.
Maybe the bottom line is, “Humans are each other’s personal hell,” and “Happiness can sometimes be poisonous.” Still, they wrapped up the series nicely, with everyone getting what they deserved, even if it wasn’t what they wanted. The psychopath gets locked up, the mother who overlooked child abuse starts a foundation, Star Jin becomes an angel to an abused child like herself instead of running away to England, Do-hee’s unrequited lover and step-cousin Ling Sang-yi becomes the CEO, Secretary Shin Da-jeong and Park Bok-gyu come out of the (heterosexual) closet to announce their office romance that was secret from no one, and the gang defeated in Tango wars manages to open a legitimate restaurant without scaring all the customers away. Even the dead people of importance got their backstories fixed. All with the oversight and approval of the beautiful couple.
I wonder if making God less than attractive was an attempt to balance out good and beauty or double down on it. Does beauty even trump omnipotence? “Jeong manages to defeat God once. I didn’t know that was possible,” says God after Jeong manages to break one of her rules without suffering the consequences of “a fiery death like a campfire.” No one else’s love is God-defying. The relationship between the seconds, Secretary Shin Da-jeong for Do Do-Hee, and Park Bok-gyu (F**k You) for Jeong Gu-won is outright cartoonish. So I reject that they were going for the love conquers all theme. And when that unavoidable ending comes to pass, when Jeong does, in fact, experience a fiery death like a campfire, God can’t bear to see the beautiful people suffer either and so intervenes Deus ex Machina style to give us the happy ending we want. And, of course, they live happily ever after, or at least as long as a mortal human can live with a demon, Do-hee managing to overlook all the moral dilemmas of living with a benign demon who henceforth only sends people to eternal fire if they deserve it, the scumbag class. A love story, sure, but if the story has any purposeful deeper meaning, it is to expose how much we bend our morality with our beauty bias. The story is a desert so sweet it could give you brain cavities.
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