Review of The Legend of the Blue Sea / 푸른 바다의 전설

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m watching.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

I’ve been running a little series for a while now where I revisit old television shows and movies I’ve watched throughout the years. Even in the past, before I started this blog and began taking it more seriously, I was always jotting down what I wrote about XYZ show or movie.

I’ve been running through all of my lists to decide what to review next, and today I landed on The Legend of the Blue Sea. I can’t believe this drama came out in 2016—it feels like it came out much later than then, but I guess that’s also probably because I watched in 2020, when COVID was at its height.

I started this blog in 2021, as I bought my site in April 2020, so when I watched this show I wasn’t yet reviewing television shows for the entire world to see my thoughts. I did take some notes on what I felt back then, but this review is fairly fresh because I didn’t include really what I thought of the show back then.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to keep rambling, as I know that introductions can get quite long. I don’t want to keep you waiting for the main event.

Across two different time periods, a mermaid and her lover reunite and find themselves falling for each other once again.

This is a story that takes across multiple periods, as, in classic Korean drama fashion, there’s an element to it where the characters are star crossed lovers who actually were in love during the distant past in Joseon. We begin largely in the modern day though, when the mermaid Shim Cheong meets Heo Joon-jae on the coast of Spain.

Joon-jae, who works as a con artist, came to Spain to get away from Korea and have a vacation. One night a woman breaks into his hotel room (who is Shim Cheong on land), but he becomes curious when he sees the jadeite bracelet she’s wearing. He thinks it’s worth a lot, and he finds out his instinct is right.

But someone he conned before sent armed men after him, and while he’s running away, he runs into Shim Cheong. They go over the side of a cliff together, and she transforms into a mermaid. She kisses him to erase his memories, but says she is going to follow him to Seoul.

And that she does. Joon-jae realizes there are moments he can’t remember and after a few months, Shim Cheong finds him on the streets. He recognizes her from the photos he sent to identify the bracelet, and he allows her into his home. When she goes out and gets hit by a car, it marks the beginning of their relationship, which ultimately becomes romantic because this is a Korean drama.

It’s at this point of the series we start delving into the past, and realize that these two were connected far before the modern period. They were once two different individuals with a doomed love story, and we get into the nitty gritty of their innocent love that the world largely is against.

It’s when we see the past we wonder if this series is going to mimic the past/if history is going to repeat itself and this love story is going to be something that might making a more casual viewer start sobbing. We also have side plots of Shim Cheong learning how to be more humanlike, as she spends most of the show on land trying to act like a normal human.

Overall Thoughts

I feel like this show can be hit or miss. I think when I first watched the show I was ambivalent about how exactly it was, and I still feel this way today. It just kind of exists—the plot and story itself is grand in its scope, but then it didn’t have enough momentum for me.

I believe my personal problem lies with a lack of chemistry between the actors. I just didn’t believe it, although the Joseon period had so much more chemistry and action going on. I would’ve just been happy with the drama happening during the Joseon era and being reworked in that way.

I say if you’re interested and haven’t seen it already, go ahead and give it a chance. I don’t think I’ll be returning to this show in the near future, but taste is subjective, so you might love it more than I did!

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