[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Why Her?" Episode 5

The entire subplot regarding the mystery of So-yeong's murder is mostly ignored here for the fairly justifiable reason of Soo-jae's professional legal office being attacked. Amusingly enough, that's not really much of a mystery at all, mainly because there aren't very many suspects. Not that many people want the flash drive which the culprit was after. Chairman Choi is the main obvious person with a motive. But nominally, he's too smart for such a high-risk scheme.

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Inevitably, the blame is laid at First Son Choi. Incidentally, Second Son Choi (played by Bae In-hyuk) is one of Chan's confederates in Soo-jae's legal assistance squad. We still don't really know much about what's going on with Second Son Choi, except that he's keeping his identity a secret from just about everyone. Soo-jae already knows who he is, and seems to sincerely approve of his diffident attitude to family. Which isn't that big of a surprise when we see her backstory explained.

Soo-jae believed, at one point, that she would marry First Son Choi, and agreed to a convoluted scheme that involved her traveling to the United States. We also know that First Son Choi himself also believed in the scheme, at the time. While Chairman Choi tries to play off subsequent events as being part of his evil master plan, I found myself wondering, based on the age of his daughter, whether First Son Choi was the one who messed up, while Chairman Choi was just doing damage control.

This doesn't really matter for the sake of explaining the antagonism between Soo-jae and Chairman Choi. Whatever Chairman Choi's reasoning, he's a genuinely awful, sadistic person who doesn't even mind if his subordinates despise him just so long as they get the job done. Soo-jae has only become an inconvenience because she' actually managed to be too confident, or perhaps has been under Chairman Choi's thumb so long it didn't occur to him that she'd take advantage of a big opportunity.

Most of the plotting in "Why Her?" is very operatic like that. The somewhat awkward result of this is that Chan's cute crush on Soo-jae feels quite silly after all these scenes of epic law office politics. Director Park Soo-jin-II is only just barely able to juggle these plotlines in such a way that the tone even feels appropriate. "Why Her?" has a lot of potential target audiences- but of all the angles, the legal thriller is the most engaging.

Review by William Schwartz

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"Why Her?" is directed by Park Soo-jin-II, written by Kim Ji-eun-III, and features Seo Hyun-jin, Hwang In-youp, Huh Joon-ho, Bae In-hyuk, Ji Seung-hyun, Lee Joo-woo. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2022/06/03~Now airing, Fri, Sat 22:00 on Coupang Play, SBS.