Bullet Point Review: Secret Mother

Mild Spoilers Ahead…

• Secret Mother opens with a splash, literally, as a person falls (from the hotel rooftop) into a swimming pool during a school charity bazaar. Who is this person? Was she pushed or did she jump? What relation does Kim Yoon Jin (Song Jin Ah) have with her? Or the three other women (Seo Young Hee, Oh Yeon A, Kim Jae Hwa) who are also postured as the suspects?
• The women in question is Lisa Kim (Kim So Yeon), Yoon Jin’s son Han Min Joon’s (Kim Ye Joon) private tutor. Lisa Kim approaches Yoon Jin with the intention of finding her sister, who has been missing for the past year and was last seen by Yoon Jin. Yoon Jin on the other hand is trying to find the woman who kidnapped and killed her young daughter, Min Ji. Are these two incidents related? If so, what exactly happened the day Lisa’s sister and Min Ji went missing?
• The screenplay of the first half is near perfect. The drama begins with the aforementioned accident and then immediately dives into an eight episode long flashback, working its way backwards by slowly building up the intrigue and tension for the halfway mark blow up. It all comes back around in a neat little circle. It is the second half that fumbles a little in terms of its pacing and its subplots. The first half isn’t necessarily brisk but the steady pace gives a notion of a pot of water simmering on the stove, soon about to boil over to which was the opening scene. In contrast, the second half feels less urgent and for the most part, we are waiting for characters to figure out and communicate with each other what we have already discovered.

• Parallelly runs a track concerning the extremely competitive education system, mainly through the eyes of the mothers, who need to find, fund and schedule newer classes and study groups for their kids. Their days revolve around just dropping and picking them up from different classes. These proceedings mainly tie in with the overarching theme of what all mothers do for their children, and to what extent they can go for them. (For example, a loving and happy couple files for divorce just so that their son can apply for a prestigious science school under the single parent scheme). This subplot — which was well integrated in the earlier portions — runs on a wholly different track from the midpoint forth, disconnected from the main proceedings. Yoon Jin also never interacts with these three women again and this creates a detachment between the two plotlines and at times it felt like I was watching two separate dramas. The title too was completely misleading and had no correlation to either the story or the resolution. I was forming theories in my head based on the title and felt a little cheated when the mystery was finally uncovered.