Kdrama: Go Back Couple
Episodes: 12
Aired: October 2017 – November 2017
Rating: ★★★★
Choi Ban Do and Ma Jin Joo are both 38-years-old and a married couple. Choi Ban Do has been burdened with being the breadwinner and Ma Jin Joo is a housewife with low self-esteem. Even though they loved each other when they married, they now hate each other. They both regret marrying at such a young age. The couple travels through time and finds themselves as 20-year-old university students when they met for the first time.

This is a drama about second chances. When Choi Ban Do and Ma Jin Joo travel back to when they were twenty, they are both excited to become people who never get married to each other. All the opportunities they missed out on the first time, they are determined to take this time. But the drama also shows that sometimes the choices you made the first time around actually were the right ones. This concept has been done before in multiple different types of media, so I wasn’t going into this expecting anything truly mind blowing, but to my surprise the drama was able to put it’s own spin on this trope. While I don’t think this drama was particularly mind blowing, I still enjoyed it a lot.

The Good:

• The set up for the drama is good. Yes, right in the beginning they got a divorce but the drama shows that the divorce is due to misunderstanding and miscommunication, not because they no longer love each other.
• They didn’t forget about their baby. I’ve seen a fair amount of kdramas and even western tv shows where the main characters have children, but those children are ignored by both the plot and the characters themselves. Even though the baby wasn’t physically in the drama, he was always on his parents’ minds.
• The way they portrayed grief was really realistic and heartbreaking. You could see how grief negatively affected Ma Jin Joo and Choi Ban Do’s relationship, and I’m glad that this is something that they discussed later on in the drama.
• Their friends were so funny. Sometimes when dramas deviate from the main plot to follow the antics of the side characters I get bored and/or annoyed. But the leads’ friends were so funny and interesting that I loved their moments just as much as I loved the leads’ moments.
• Good blend of comedy and serious moments.
• The redevelopment of their relationship was paced really well and was done realistically. They didn’t just suddenly stop disliking each other, they discussed their issues and grew both separately and together.
• There was a second lead, but he wasn’t annoying in any sort of way. In fact, even though I didn’t want him to end up with the main lead, I did only want good things for him.

The Bad:

• The ending was a bit too rushed so things weren’t wrapped up as well as they should have been. I think they easily could have extended the drama out to sixteen episodes.
• The drama never explained anything about the time traveling (the leads didn’t seem to be at all curious as to how/why it happened), and when it was time for the leads to go back to the present time they just inexplicably knew exactly how to do it.
• Their lives in the present didn’t seem to change once they got back, it was just their love that changed. The problem is that even outside their marriage, they weren’t happy with their lives. Choi Ban Doo hated his job and when they went back to the present time, there was no indication that he had a more fulfilling.

The Ugly:

• Nothing!!