[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Girl Who Sees Smells" Episode 11

The cliffhanger last time and the cliffhanger this time are for the most part the exact same cliffhanger. "The Girl Who Sees Smells" is having difficulty justifying its running time at this point. Even under the most charitable interpretation by all rights Jae-hee really should have been caught by now. Moo-gak actually manages to catch Jae-hee committing an explicit crime- at the very least there should be probable cause for a warrant. And a cursory investigation of Jae-hee's cellar would quickly reveal the existence of the books, and then it's game over.

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Fortunately the drama doesn't spend its runtime here having Jae-hee come up with more improbable schemes. Mostly it's just the police squabbling with each other and working at cross-purposes. While no new obnoxious plot trends are created here, unfortunately any plot development at this point has to remind me of these improbabilities because they make up the entirity of the foundation.

This does lend a weirdly comedic effect to the drama, though. Moo-gak's deductions don't make any sense from an objective standpoint, but they do make sense if we assume that Jae-hee's moves in the first place made sense. Which they didn't really but I'm trying to give the drama some credit at least. It's better for a mystery to be consistently inconsistent than for it to just make up new rules at random.

It's just...the tone's kind of weird. The relationship between Cho-rim and Moo-gak is threatened for some reason, and then we get a montage of their happy moments together, and I couldn't help but notice that almost all of these plot points were dropped without explanation so that "The Girl Who Sees Smells" could do the serial killer plotline instead. It'a a shame, really, because the flashback montage is mostly a reminder of the better parts of the drama.

Why couldn't "The Girl Who Sees Smells" have been more cute and fun like that? We're still getting almost no smell-seeing. The only time Moo-gak uses the power this time is apparently because this ability also lets her see in the dark. At this point I'm just waiting for it to become directly helpful at some point, and let her solve the case somehow. It's not really something I'm looking forward to all that much. Although for what it's worth, this episode did not make me angry. It just made me feel kind of lukewarm. Which I guess is technically an improvement.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Girl Who Sees Smells" is directed by Baek Soo-chan, written by Lee Hee-myeong and features Park Yoo-chun, Shin Se-kyung, Namkoong Min, Yoon Jin-seo, Kim So-hyun, Choi Tae-joon, and more.

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