[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Two Weeks" Episode 13

The episode starts out as being an interesting bit about the problems inherent in overconfidence. In rapid succession, characters who appear to have the upper hand are quickly taken out of it because they failed to anticipate the countermoves of their opponents. It's a neat turnabout to watch, as it really does call attention to the fact that these characters declare victory too quickly.

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That's the charitable interpretation, anyway. In light of subsequent events though, I'm less certain that this is actually a statement about the characters so much as it is about the writer. The gamut of turnabouts ends when one character, a minor one whose involvement with the plot at all is kind of random to begin with, delivers an absurd revelation. As in, so absurd I have no idea where the drama is planning on going with this idea. Neither of these characters are relevant in the story as actual people, they're just devices, and this is a heck of a connection to drop out of nowhere.

From there the story only gets dumber. You may remember that the main motivation of the bad guys, indeed, the only reason they're still bothering to try and kill Tae-san at all, is that they need to eliminate all possible evidence. Over the course of this episode, they create an absurd amount of incriminating evidence to achieve this goal. Even assuming their ridiculous plan goes perfectly and they actually kill Tae-san, the police now have witnesses, video, and multiple other concrete crimes that will almost certainly destroy the entire criminal organization even without his testimony.

There is absolutely no intelligent direction for the drama to go from here. The best I can hope for is that Seo-hee finds out about the plan, and immediately smacks Il-seok upside the head for his enacting such an incredibly stupid idea. She has emphasized, time and time again, that he needs to deal with problems deliberately and quickly. This plan is the opposite of that.

It really is that frustrating on so many levels. Are we actually to believe that no one was going to notice or find anything the least bit suspicious about any of this? Is Il-seok planning to murder everyone? When the whole reason this drama's plot got set into motion in the first place was that he killed one person, impulsively, and everything else has been an attempt to cover up that one obviously stupid mistake? I thought that "Two Weeks" was above this kind of idiocy. I can only hope that the writer came up with this shoddy plot development because she was too busy with Chuseok planning to come up with better narrative devices. I would hate to think that this episode was planned from the original storyboard.

Review by William Schwartz

"Two Weeks" is directed by Son Hyeong-seok, written by So Hyeon-kyeong and features Lee Joon-gi, Kim So-yeon, Ryu Soo-young and Park Ha-sun.