A drama I initially resisted, watched, threw up my hands at, then watched again proved the adage: hell hath no fury like a K-drama romcom fan scorned. Let’s unpack this coffin:
The unexpectedly controversial Heartbeat started out with grade-A preposterousness intact. It has it all: a feisty heroine, an immortal vampire and his three yutzy vampire pals, a quest to experience love, and solid idol drama casting. Ok Taec-Yeon, singer, songwriter, and rapper best known as a member of the group 2PM and for his creepily excellent portrayal of the dark horse villain in 2021’s Vincenzo, heads the cast in the role of Seon Woo-Hyeol. He’s a vampire who voluntarily embarks upon a sleep of one hundred years in a coffin in his basement in order to become fully human and experience love. Starring opposite him is Won Ji-An (Squid Game) as Joo In-Hae, a coldhearted school nurse who inherits a mansion from her estranged father and turns it into a guest house.
You will not need to consult an oracle to divine who just so happens to be inside the coffin in the basement of her new mansion.
Unfortunately for Woo-Hyeol, In-Hae disturbs his slumber a single day before his hundred-year sleep is up, and now the vampire is in a bind. He has woken up without the expected heartbeat, and is now a weak, blood-dependent half-human. His mentor, the mysterious shapeshifter Ko Yang-Nam (Kim In-Kwan, The Haunted Palace), and possible purveyor of incredibly inaccurate supernatural dish, tells him that the only way out of his predicament is to drink the blood of the woman who woke him up; if he fails to do so, Woo-Hyeol will perish for good. So far, so good; the drama has all the makings of a deeply satisfying screwball comedy. How does semi-feline Mr. Ko know that a voluntary sleep in a hawthorn wood coffin will make Woo-Hyeol human? Why does the secondary lead, Do-Shik (Park Kang-Hyung, Ash in the musical version of Evil Dead), need to eat Woo-Hyeol’s heart? Will Woo-Hyeol ever figure out how telephones work? Wait, didn’t they have telephones a hundred years ago?
K-dramas are, after all, genre fiction. When you read Agatha Christie, you assume there’s a body stashed somewhere. When reading Asimov, presumably robots are pulling the universe’s levers somewhere in the distant future. When watching K-dramas, the show’s subtype will likewise announce itself fairly early on. Whether the tale concerns mobsters, lovers, kings, or clowns, it must develop and resolve, often within sixteen to twenty episodes. This requires some pretty efficient storytelling, and in the first half of the drama, Heartbeat delivered. The story proceeded at a steady clip, the stakes were laid out clearly in the first few episodes, and this particular drama’s cosmology supported the plot just enough to be unseen, like a waiter in a five-star restaurant.
Until.
The story takes a turn in the second half and suddenly becomes a straight-faced story about tragic love—but even this level of dramatic whiplash would be okay, unevenness aside, if the story resolved itself.
It doesn’t. Sixteen episodes in, we’re left with a high-budget story starring an A-list idol that just…kind of drops the hero and essentially lets the heroine carry on contentedly, except for a strange flashback that maybe means everything will be okay in the end. When this ending dropped, the online reviews, forums, and K-drama spaces lit up. It was on.
Does it matter when a series ending is ambiguous? I would argue that this can be effective: ambiguity worked to outstanding effect in the ending of The Sopranos, or even Lost. But in a fish-out-of-water K-drama after the audience has spent sixteen episodes with a comedic, slowly developing love story, the pacing of Heartbeat doesn’t justify the ending. In the K-dramaverse, where good wins, bad loses, and the good guy (usually) is rewarded, to have essentially no resolution at all to the main storyline is…deeply unsatisfying, handsome vampires aside. I gave this one a rewatch, but in the end, what should have been a slam-dunk—Ok Taec-Yeon! Reincarnation! Vampires, man!—ended up being somewhat forgettable. I’d give this one a B. It’s a high B, maybe, but not the stuff of which comfort food viewing is made.
