Review of W / 더블유

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.

Running through these shows that I watched so long ago has been such a trippy ride. A lot of them feel like they belong in such a specific moment of time—and they do! They’re all mid-2010s coded, and it feels weird to come back to these shows after so long, especially seeing how trope reliant they are in a way that feels more obvious (aren’t we still full of tropes today?).

Today’s blog post is dedicated to W, which I feel like is a show I loved way back in the day, then forgot about as time went on. I used to be really into this show and Lee Jong-suk, so coming back to it has been such an experience and nostalgia ride. I was sixteen when this show came out, and it has almost been a decade now.

Let’s get into the review! Intros can get quite long, so I don’t want to keep yapping.

A surgeon is sucked into the world of her father’s webtoon, then falls in love with the main character.

The female lead in this show is Oh Yeon-joo, and she’s the one who lives in the “real” world. She’s a second-year resident at a big hospital in South Korea, and while her job is quite stressful, she manages to keep it all in and together throughout her time as a medical resident.

Her father is Seong-moo, who happens to be a famous webtoon author. He’s well-known for his webtoon W, and while Yeon-joo is a fan of his work, she notices something is amiss after a while. One day he isn’t responding to any form of communication, and she decides she needs to do a wellness check on him to make sure he’s still alive.

As she comes into his home and studio, she finds out he’s not there, which is weird too. Things get even weirder when she’s sucked into an alternate universe, and she realizes it’s the world of the webtoon W. She happens to save the main character, Kang Cheol, from getting killed, and that kickstarts an entire chain of events.

Kang Cheol is the lead character, as I mentioned before, and he’s pretty rich and powerful. He runs a major company, a broadcasting channel, and even was an Olympic shooter when he was a young man. He took home a gold medal, but that becomes a subject of scrutiny when his entire family was shot dead—the media and public believes it was him, despite him clearly being innocent.

That murderer is still on the hunt for Kang Cheol though, as we see from the moment Yeon-joo is sucked into the world of the webtoon. Kang Cheol wants to know who the woman who saved him from his stabbing was, and while Yeon-joot keeps dangling between reality and the world of the webtoon, seriously altering the events of what was to come, it has consequences.

One of which, because this is a Korean drama, is a flair for romance between Cheol and her. One of the major plot points is the mystery behind what happened to Yeon-joo’s father, as well as the murderer who’s still actively hunting Kang Cheol down, and now because of her proximity to him, Yeon-joo is in his war path too.

Overall Thoughts

For me, this has ironically become one of those dramas that doesn’t relive up to the hype on its second watch. I liked it a lot when I watched it the first time, as I mentioned and alluded to before, but when I was watching it this time, I was just kind of bored with the plot. I barely remembered the plot outside of the main details, but there wasn’t a hook to keep me going in the end.

I did end up watching all of the show on this second run, but I felt like I wanted more from it. I did like the premise of the show still, and thought the chemistry between the two leads was fine enough to keep the momentum going for sixteen episodes. Maybe this would’ve been better as a 12 episode series, as it feels like it’s a little dragged out, which is why I started struggling to get through it.

I don’t regret rewatching it though, and I think if you want to watch it and haven’t already, you should. We should return to the dramas from the 2000s and the 2010s for a nostalgia blast sometimes, but also to see how we got to this point in the Korean television world.

Go see it if you haven’t already!

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