Crash Course in Romance (2023)

Banchan + Maths = happiness, mayhem and mystery

Characters, Actors

I can’t think of any character who is weakly portrayed – a rare feat!

 

Jung Kyung-ho (as Chi-yeol) and Jeon Do-yeon (as Haeng-seon) play their roles effortlessly.  They are funny and comfortable together as a couple, and hurray for the 'mature couple' vibes.  

I was fine with Haeng-seon being older than Chi-yeol but it might have been better to cast an actress closer to his age and perhaps they shouldn’t have him think she looks too young to be Hae-yi’s mother.  She doesn’t look too young.  Visually, she fits in with the other mums and, in fact, clearly looks older than some of them. 

Chi-yeol is such an old soul.  Sometimes he seemed to be Do-yeon’s real age (fifty)!  It must have been quite a job memorising all those mathematical lines but they came out naturally.  However, how is the chalk and talk teaching method good enough to make him a “star” tutor?  What more, he doesn’t bother to know his students personally and I hated his high kick!  

(and that psychiatrist of his sure was wrong about almost everything with her poor surmising, although she was a gentle, kind lady.)  

 

Oh Eui-shik (as Jae-woo) and Lee Bong-ryeon (as Young-joo) are great, though I didn’t think it was necessary to make them a couple.  

 

This was the first time I felt that I was watching Kim Sun-young (playing Soo-ah’s mother) really act – for once, I could see her as her character.  Such a horrid, self-serving mum she is – she makes you detest her.  However, her ending and redemption are glossed over.  Does she make amends?  How does she do so?

mean mums at work

As always, it was a nice surprise to see Hwang Bo-ra! As always, she is a quirky character and I was most pleased that she is the first to apologise to Haeng-seon and leads the other mums back to her shop.  I never knew there was such a thing as a Scene Stealer award, and it is just perfect for her!  I shall endeavour to name my own Scene Stealers from now on!

The high school lot portray wonderfully the angst and complexities of school, friendship, rivalry and growing up, without the excesses of the high-strung Penthouse kids!  You just want to give each of them a huge hug for what they are going through.

Roh Yoon-seo is fantastic as Hae-yi.  She can be emotional, funny, stressed and so on, holding her own in her (many) scenes with the vets, and (almost) always outshining the younger ones.  No surprise she won the Best New Actress award for this.  

Lee Chae-min is another impressive new actor.  His Sun-jae is realistic, and I especially liked his relationship with hyung Hee-jae (Kim Tae-jeong), who hardly has to deliver any lines (his character was such)!  He is quite the giant!  When he is with his mum, Sun-jae looks twice or three times her size!

Dan-ji (played by Ryu Da-in) is a lovely friend as well as a likeably unorthodox, forthright girl, and of course she has to be Hwang Bo-ra’s daughter!

Kang Na-yeon makes Bang Soo-ah a pitiable character, almost caving in under the pressure to perform.  Like her mum’s ending, her character development seemed short-circuited, though.  We don’t know how she recovered and managed to move on to perform well again.

My scene stealer in this show was Lee Min-jae playing Geon-hu – such a refreshingly honest, earnest and amusing guy.  His friendship with Sun-jae is especially cute, and I’d have preferred him to be with Dan-ji rather than Soo-ah.  

Sun-jae trying to help Geon-hu write his apology letter 😄

Manager Ji (played by Shin Jae-ha) is even more pitiful than Soo-ah.  He juxtaposed happy and sad well, and very sadly.  He isn’t really a chilling murderer, but more a very messed up boy.  I found Soo-ah’s mum much more a villain than he.  A stand-out scene for me was when Sun-jae is distraught with Hee-jae being taken away by the police but she just walks away, busily spreading the gossip about Hee-jae on her phone, telling everyone that Sun-jae is bawling his eyes out, and it is Haeng-seon and Chi-yeol who take Sun-jae in the car.  It’s not the most crucial scene but it encapsulated the gulf between the ‘good’ people and her.  Ji is nowhere near her level, yet he needlessly murdered people.

Finally, such a funny cameo by Lee Sang-yi (whom I didn’t recognise) as Mr Popular the revealer!!

The murders

I read comments complaining that the murders don’t fit into the plot.  I found them interesting and they show how damaging stress can be.  The murderous seeds were sown in young Ji struggling to live up to his mum’s expectations and to cope with his sister’s suicide.  

 

Where I think the murder element flounders is how the murders are not fully investigated and how Ji doesn’t get to redeem himself.  Yes, we can understand that he took it upon himself to protect Chi-yeol but why the need to murder?  I’d have preferred for him to have listened to Chi-yeol’s pleas to turn himself in and to accept his help.  After all, this was the only adult in the world whom he trusted, right?  It was weird that at that point, Ji appears to have lost hope – and hence lost himself – completely.  It is revealed that the head investigator hadn’t been convinced that Ji wasn’t responsible for his mother’s death, but why?  Ji never gets to give the details of what happened in the murders, and after he dies, the police disappear along with him.  The case of the annoying gift-giving girl, especially, is practically ignored.  Why is she never reported missing or dead?  Also, is it that easy to kill a person by shooting them with small metal balls?    To me, the murders didn’t sit comfortably not because they don’t go with a tuition-school-stress-high-school-kids story but because they weren’t properly explained.

The part which I found unnecessary was Hae-yi’s mother’s re-appearance.  She doesn’t add much to the plot and is just an annoying, shameless character but the worst was how Hae-yi inexplicably decides she will follow her to Japan, after her conversation with Sun-jae about how they should rise above their parents’ (poor) standards and become better people – how is leaving Haeng-seon and Jae-woo (and her fabulous friends) becoming a better person?  The reason why she doesn’t leave in the end is Haeng-ja somehow comes to her senses and leaves on her own.  Presumably, if she doesn’t leave, Hae-yi would be off to Japan.  Then after that, Hae-yi never explains or apologies for her earlier decision to leave.  It was just very odd, as they are such a close-knit and loving family.

 

Nevertheless, the mother-daughter relationship (Haeng-seon and Hae-yi, of course) is phenomenal, from the early days to the current!

Not forgetting Haeng-seon and Young-joo's beautiful friendship...

Just a bit of nit-picking now.  This is one of many shows that need a much better title.  There isn’t really a crash course, and romance is just a part of the story.  Also, is it so easy in Korea to get one’s hands on exam papers before the day of the exam??!

I enjoyed this show, with its great acting as well as its overall positivity and hope, and looking at the off-screen photos, the cast appears to have enjoyed putting it together!

16 episodes (with mathematical titles!), tvN