[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Lucky Romance" Episode 16 Final

Initially the plot for the final episode centers around a scheme to try and get Bonnie and Soo-ho back together. Eventually it turns out that this scheme was a complete waste of time with no payoff as Bonnie and Soo-ho meet in their own special way. The reunion is actually quite sweet and heartfelt. It does a good job integrating all the best parts of "Lucky Romance" to deliver an effective closing message about love. But none of this changes the fact that the entire first half of the episode was a complete waste of time.

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It's a pretty effective metaphor for the overall quality of "Lucky Romance". While half of it is decent romantic comedy, the other half is just pointless subplots that never go anywhere. Every new episode resulted in the creation of at least one new subplot, and the old ones were only ever solved haphazardly. Even major plotlines were very hit and miss. Bonnie gives up on superstition, for example, but the only explanation offered is a very vague "power of love".

What makes this especially irritating is that there was plenty of potentially relevant material that simply went underdeveloped. Consider the thematic importance of Bonnie's parents being dead, I still can't figure out why "Lucky Romance" was so minimalist in exploring Soo-ho and Geon-woo's family relations. Geon-woo got all of one scene with his father, and Soo-ho's parents spent more time hovering around a birth secret that never materialized than they did with their son.

The rest of the cast was just more physically present than they were useful as characters in their own right. Bo-ra is the best example of this- she's quite literally the physical embodiment of all Bonnie's motivation, yet the last episode is the first time we see the young woman in enough context to get a good grasp of her personality. We do mostly find out what happened to everyone mainly because Soo-ho helpfully brings all of them together in the same room.

That's what they're there for after all- as bullet points in Bonnie and Soo-ho's own life, rather than people with internally consistent motivation. While this isn't a dealbreaker on its own, the time spent trying to build up these subplots rather than deal with Bonnie and Soo-ho's relationship as the primary focus makes too much of the ending unsatisfying. "Lucky Romance" ends, at best, as thoroughly average- an almost perfectly even distribution between good and bad, worthy neither of great praise nor excessive scorn. It just is.

Review by William Schwartz

"Lucky Romance" is directed by Kim Kyeong-hee-II, written by Choi Yoon-gyo and features Hwang Jung-eum, Ryu Jun-yeol, Lee Chung-ah and Lee Soo-hyuk.

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