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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Blood" Episode 6

Ri-ta's principle motivation this episode is to prove decisively that Ji-sang has a better-than-average ability to recover from flesh wounds. Why..? Uh...I guess because she just really dislikes Ji-sang? This is exactly the kind of scale problem I'm talking about. When half of the action in "Blood" is drawn-out brawls between superpowered vampires, it's a bit of an awkward transition to go from that to petty office politics.

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To some extent the drama does at least manage to foment some interest by focusing on comic relief. Although I'm really not sure how much of this is supposed to be intentional comic relief. For the most part it's just goofy conversations, and I halfway suspect that the reason the actors are delivering their lines in this way is because they can't figure out how to play this story straight in a serious dramatic manner.

Jae-wook is a possible exception. This episode we learn that he's maybe...not evil? Well, I suppose that explains why he keeps needling Ji-sang with practical jokes instead of just killing the guy. This plot twist is to date the most interesting thing "Blood" has done so far, so I'm really left wondering here why we didn't get here a whole lot sooner. Well, then again, up until now we're the only ones who have been assuming Jae-wook is the bad guy, since all the actual characters have only the faintest idea what's actually going on.

Speaking of basic mysteries yet to be explained, I'm not even sure Ji-sang and Ri-ta are supposed to be a romantic pairing here. They continue to just act like people who genuinely dislike each other, but the actual reasons for this are frustratingly not that well-explored. Apparently Ji-sang is a very famous surgeon. Why? I mean, I get that his vampire abilities let him do things most surgeons can't, but wouldn't it be more interesting to actually show him doing these things than just having random people imply that he does them?

"Blood" continues to be thoroughly mediocre. Again, I'll grant that this is an improvement over the drama being actually aggressively bad- but that still doesn't provide much of an inducement to actually watch it. The nicest compliment I can come up with is that the acting is showing improvement. But it would be difficult for the acting to actually get much worse short of "Blood" straight up turning into camp. I remain undecided as to whether or not the drama would be improved if it dropped all pretense of seriousness.

Review by William Schwartz

"Blood" is directed by Ki Min-soo, written by Park Jae-beom-I and features Ahn Jae-hyun, Koo Hye-sun, Ji Jin-hee, Jung Hae-in, Kim Kap-soo, Son Sook and more.

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