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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Woman who Married Three Times" Episode 9

The storyline this time around reads like an ineffective beer advertisement. Characters constantly search out and consume liquor here, all while while entering into the recesses of memory to figure out where it all went wrong. It's a pretty gloomy pit of distraughtness and despair, from which only the sweet taste of alcohol offers the slightest reprieve. Oh sure, there were good times- punctuated by those same awful moments which we now understand in retrospect to have ruined everything.

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So, in case you couldn't guess, yeah, this episode is pretty depressing. It gets points over the last one for at least having some variety in the causes of depression on display here. Ironically, Seul-gi is actually doing pretty well in her new environment. Of course, when so much of the framing device is just flashbacks about terrible things that happened in that house, inevitably positive statements like that must be amended with an ominous "...for now".

In terms of the present-day storyline the fact that married life with Tae-won's parents seems to inevitably turn into an unbearable nightmare is another sad irony, given how ridiculously desirable Tae-won appears to be as a man. While I get that part of the point of this drama is to remove the stigma from divorcees, it really seems that these women need to be asking "why did he get divorced in the first place". Right now Tae-won is stuck in a pretty vicious cycle, one that's unrelated to his having good looks and lots of money, and one that the other characters really need to pay more attention to.

Still far too underutilized in this drama is Hyeon-soo. She gets to participate in the beer-related grousing, and has the closest thing this episode could reasonably call comic relief in a pathetic scene that I imagine all pet owners can empathize with on some level. But Hyeon-soo lacks any real plotline of her own- for the most part she's just reacting to other stuff that happens. I'd really like a clearer contrast between her life and that of her sister's.

Of course, that's mostly because all this melancholy backward-looking depression is doing a number on my pscyhe at this point. We finally get to a scene near the end that clearly indicates actual plot-related stuff will be happening in the present soon. Even though the event in question is a relatively discouraging one, I'm just relieved that this drama is going to have people actually react to current events again. If half the story is flashbacks, maybe you should consider just starting it a little earlier, huh?

Review by William Schwartz

"The Woman who Married Three Times" is directed by Son Jeong-hyeon and written by Kim Su-hyun and features Lee Ji-ah, Uhm Ji-won, Song Chang-eui and Ha Seok-jin.

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