Bullet Point Review: Remember
Published in
3 min readFeb 2, 2021
- Just recently, I had watched The Defendant (a 2017 SBS drama, starring Ji Sung), but after the initial few episodes, I dropped the show. The reason? The crime and the criminal had already been revealed in these episodes, so why waste twelve hours waiting for the protagonist to find out the same? This is the exact same problem I had with Remember. The drama encompasses the crime, the criminal, and the corrupt legal system (that works to protect only the rich and powerful) in the first four episodes, which means that there isn’t much mystery as to what exactly happened. So, waiting twelve hours for our heroes to defeat a known villain feels tiresome.
This isn’t to say that a drama should always keep its card close to its chest, but in Remember, watching a boy be outwitted multiple times by the villains is just plain dispiriting to watch, especially when that boy is Yoo Seung Ho’s Seo Jin Woo, whose boyish face and puppy eyes amplify his innocence, helplessness, and his amateur revenge-taking skills. It then felt like the drama was just running around in circles, until the big final showdown. - In the same vein as Memory and The Defendant, Remember uses amnesia as an important plot point in a legal setting. While in the former, it was the protagonists themself who suffered from memory loss, here it is the protagonist’s father (Jeon Kwang Leol), who due to Alzheimer’s becomes an easy scapegoat for a homicide case. However, there is another angle involved — Jin Woo has hyperthymesia, meaning he has the ability to remember (hence the title) and recall the smallest of details. This is quite a stimulating premise. How does a son, who has no knowledge of anything relating to the crime, help prove his father’s innocence, one who can’t even remember the one simple detail that could save his life— where he was at the time of the murder? It’s a solid premise, but sadly the drama doesn’t do much with Jin Woo’s ability (at least, I didn’t stick around to find out) except that he easily passes the bar exam and becomes a lawyer in a short span of four years. And so, the remainder of the drama becomes the usual run-of-the-mill story of taking down an evil conglomerate.
- Few characters provide respite in the repetitive proceedings. Park Sung Woong’s Dong Ho is as flamboyant as his brightly coloured suits, (he reminded me a lot of Lee Joon Ki’s character in Lawless Lawyer) but as soon as the story lands in the present, his character is stuck in a perpetual I-should-do-the-right-thing-but-I-can’t mode. Nam Goong Min (whom I have only seen in cute or melodramatic roles) was amazing as the diabolical chaebol heir with anger management issues, and his relationship with his father adds a pinch of sympathy and reason for his wrongdoings.
- It was interesting to see how Jin Woo’s father’s case helped shape Jin Woo and In Ah’s (Park Min Young) subsequent pursuit of justice. While In Ah turns idealistic, working and finding solutions within the law to find the real culprit, Jin Woo turns cynical, believing that truth is relative and you need to be the one to decide what has to be revealed and when. And for that reason, he is often found using blackmail to get his job done.
