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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Happiness - Drama" Episode 12

So Sae-bom has left the apartment complex and drained of antibodies. I'm not sure a person can actually be drained of antibodies. Our bodies make more of them all the time. Of course if I really want to be pedantic, it shouldn't be possible for a virus to be transmitted both by a faulty drug and also bite marks. "Happiness - Drama" ends more-or-less the same way it began, with some of the worldbuilding making sense, other worldbuilding not so much, with still more of it being too vague to tell.

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Whether the worldbuilding matters at all is a matter of personal preference. If you've been watching for the character relationships, "Happiness - Drama" is much more straightforwardly satisfying. Yi-hyeon makes a suitably romantic proposal video for Sae-bom and Sae-bom, left alone at the hospital, compulsively watches it over and over. Apparently Sae-bom never took Yi-hyeon's professions of...well like is a better word than love, which is a nice summation of their overall relationship.

As far as the apartment building itself being a microcosm of society, everything has so thoroughly fallen apart there's not even much to do except for Yi-hyeon to go from apartment to apartment and issue status updates. I realize now that nearly all of the conflict in the apartment complex has been prompted by those stupid meetings. Infected people can't leave rooms on their own, as we saw in the first episode. Looking back I have a lot of trouble remembering what most of those meetings were even about.

"Happiness - Drama" is a weird show in that it's not really about a zombie apocalypse. It's about a world that's teetering on the edge of zombie apocalypse but never quite getting there. All of the social drama is less about public health as it is about various characters presuming that life will return to normal once the crisis is solved. While we're constantly shown that this thinking is dangerous, by the time we get to the epilogue as far as we can tell the world mostly is back to normal.

Overall "Happiness - Drama" has a lot of mixed messages. The story tries to do a lot of thematic beats at the same time, and manages to do all of them fairly decently, but none of them exceptionally. Any one of those beats could have been a good drama on its own. The love story, the social drama, the near zombie apocalypse setting, Colonel Han's perspective of trying to resolve the outbreak...doing all at the same time, in a shortened twelve episode run to boot, is a bit much.

Review by William Schwartz

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"Happiness - Drama" is directed by Ahn Gil-ho, written by Han Sang-woon, and features Han Hyo-joo, Park Hyung-sik, Jo Woo-jin, Kang Ji-eun-I, Lee Joon-hyuk-I, Park Joo-hee. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2021/11/05~2021/12/11, Fri, Sat 22:40 on tvN.

 

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