[HanCinema's Drama Review] "The Girl Who Sees Smells" Episode 6

We open up with the resolution of the cliffhanger...well, it wasn't really much of a cliffhanger. Just Cho-rim and Moo-gak sitting in a romantic nighttime visage admiring the cherry blossoms. Or so it would seem. I do appreciate how "The Girl Who Sees Smells" has (probably inadvertently acknowledged) the reality of the weather lately. You think cherry blossom season would involve lots of beautiful flowers falling to the ground but no, this of all times everything has to be really muggy and rainy.

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Then it's on to more serial killer investigation. And I really do think my frustration with "The Girl Who Sees Smells" is mainly its reliance on serial killer tropes in general. Devious acts of villainous murder are constantly enabled by a script that seems deliberately designed to prevent the case from being easily solved. If the bad guy was actually managing these cover-ups personally through some sort of skill rather than dumb luck I'd have a different take on the situation. But he doesn't.

For what it's worth we don't actually know whether or not a murder was even committed this episode, so once again I have to grudgingly admit that personal preferences notwithstanding there's not really any essential problem with the script. Writer Lee Hee-myeong could easily pull a rabbit out of his hat at any point and turn all of this on its head. And I have to give him the benefit of the doubt on this question because the character mysteries that are unveiled this time are for the most part logical and internally consistent with what we've seen so far.

Elsewhere we get more wacky police adventures. And this is definitely the best use of Cho-rim's ability to muck out criminal activity that I've seen so far. Equally amusing are the increasingly convoluted logical deductions Moo-gak has to pretend to make in order to explain to the other characters how he's solving these crimes apparently through the use of magical powers.

The actual conflict is in murkier territory, though. I didn't think Moo-gak's admonition toward Cho-rim last episode was particularly convincing, and this one falls in to the same problem of only possibly being justified by a universe where criminals are violent even when they don't get any benefit out of it. Increasingly it seems pretty clear that Cho-rim would be a better cop than a comedian- her aspiring career choice seems to be in less focus with every episode. That, of course, could just be an issue with the drama juggling so many plot points at once, and only barely managing to keep them all in the air.

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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