[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Snowdrop" Episode 1

Yeong-ro (played by JISOO) is a college student at Lake University in 1987. She lives in a very traditionally styled college dormitory ruled by Head Mother Pi (played by Yoon Se-ah), which isn't actually as important a part as I'm making it sound. Head Mother Pi only shows up in a few scenes, but the threat of her expelling students from the dormitory for staying out past curfew is omnipresent. This conflict drives most of the early plot. Our male lead Soo-ho (played by Jung Hae-in) only starts talking about half an hour in.

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"Snowdrop" will probably disappoint Jung Hae-in fans. The veteran actor remains cloaked in mystery despite the opening episode having a whopping length of nearly ninety minutes. What's worse, the episode manages to end with him getting a gunshot wound, so Soo-ho isn't going to get a whole lot of chances to explain himself. The convoluted love story wherein Soo-ho meets Yeong-ro just a couple of times is, apparently, reason enough for our female characters to risk a lot protecting him.

For being the first South Korean drama to premiere worldwide on Disney+, the jTBC produced drama relies an awful lot on relatively arcane South Korean cultural references. The classic baseball comic Lee Jang-ho's Baseball Team shows up here, the translator deciding to go with "mercenaries" rather than " alien " when describing the book's infamously difficult to translate title. One of our perky college students describes the story as being about love rather than baseball- which isn't much of a revelation considering how the story ends.

That vague digression about a minor detail felt awfully pointless didn't it? Well a lot of "Snowdrop" evokes that same sentiment. At one point a group of sinister politicians drinks their own blood as some sort of bizarre ritual. One politician has a really young girlfriend, with one politician's wife being very competent and managerial. All of these details, along with an entire North Korean spy storyline, are given supreme focus long before any of these stories are clearly tied to either of our lead characters.

And what does our leading lady even do? Well, mostly she just screams in excitement about boys, democracy, and popular music. JISOO isn't exactly bad in "Snowdrop" but there's an awful lot for her to do to no particularly obvious purpose. She kind of feels like what Lee Hyeri would have been like in "Reply 1988" if Lee Hyeri hadn't been exceptionally well-suited to the role.

Review by William Schwartz

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"Snowdrop" is directed by Jo Hyeon-tak, written by Yoo Hyeon-mi, and features Jung Hae-in, JISOO, Yoon Se-ah, Kim Hye-yoon, Jung Shin-hye, Kim Mi-soo. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2021/12/18~Now airing, Sat, Sun 22:30 on Disney Plus, jTBC.