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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Welcome to Waikiki" Episode 10

Soo-ah gets a really good storyline this episode, and it looks to be a continuing one- she's now on a stake out at the convenience store, and is shocked to discover what Doo-sik has to deal with there. I was too. I refuse to believe that people act like that at convenience stores. But then, I've never worked at one. And neither has Soo-ah. Luckily, it turns out that Soo-ah can use her powers of being a mean girl for good instead of evil, even if the closing tagline was kind of ambiguous.

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Elsewhere Seo-jin finally starts work and I already dislike her workplace. Why did that unpleasant woman give Seo-jin a fundamentally impossible, illegal, and unethical task? Given her reaction at the end, this person obviously did not expect Seo-jin to actually succeed. And she didn't succeed- Joon-ki was the one who actually got the scoop. The dramatic thrust of wanting Seo-jin to make it after all is somewhat undermined if a man has to do all the work for her.

The Seo-jin/Joon-ki storyline prior to that one was a lot better, not to mention funnier, because it relies on that good old situation comedy standby- the perils of pronouns. You can really see how both Seo-jin and Joon-ki's interpretations of what the other is talking about make perfect logical sense, especially since it fits with their personalities. Seo-jin is excessively indifferent about everything, and Joon-ki is always overexcited. The crisis allows both actors to maximize their appeal without being cartoonish.

Left unspoken, of course, is the notion that the camera's destruction was Dong-goo's own fault. The guy lives in a guest house with random strangers coming in and out all the time. A teleporting baby lives there. Yoon-ah lives there, and she's always breaking things by accident. Thankfully not lately, but still. Why would Dong-goo leave his expensive camera on the counter and not somewhere safe?

I could also get pedantic about how the camera's obviously not really broken, just separated into interchangable pieces. But then I don't really want the crew of "Welcome to Waikiki" to break a perfectly good camera just for the sake of realism in a drama with such limited continuity. What camera was Dong-goo using in the second half of the episode anyway? Also, was that terrible baby video something he made himself or on commission from nerd parents? Because as bad as it is I can easily visualize idiot nerd parents paying Dong-goo money to make something like that.

Review by William Schwartz

"Welcome to Waikiki" is directed by Lee Chang-min-I, written by Kim Ki-ho, and features Kim Jung-hyunLee Yi-kyungSon Seung-won, and Jung In-sun.

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