Snowdrop: The Case of the Hysterical Hostage

My resentment towards Snowdrop can be summarized by one particular point; it actually made me question the legitimacy of the beloved drama, SKY Castle. I remember being sick with food poisoning one Easter and binge watching despite having one of the worst illnesses I had ever contracted. Regardless of this horrible circumstance and memory, I still loved that show. To have it sullied after watching the sophomore endeavour of the writer/director feels insulting because now the original drama feels transformed from a critical satire on Korean elites and their nefarious plans to buy their children’s futures into a run-of-the-mill makjang (though these elements were ever-present). Nonetheless, I still assert that SKY Castle was refreshing, tawdry, and fun; while Snowdrop was vanilla, repetitive and pretty boring.

Snowdrop focuses on the relationship between Eun Young-ro (played by Blackpink’s Jisoo) and Im Soo-ho (played by Jung Hae-in) and chronicles their initial meeting at a group first date; to their second meeting with him falling into her dorm window covered in blood and her hiding and feeding him for several days (thinking he is a student protester); to their third meeting where he takes her and her entire dorm hostage because he is actually a North Korean spy.

Let’s return to SKY Castle for a minute though. The former drama worked for two main reasons: firstly, SKY Castle used nameless doctors and lawyers as the main characters who could be condemned and redeemed in good measure to advance the plot. The rich protagonists were portrayed as equally terrible and pitiful; and aptly depicted as bullies who were motivated and haunted by their own misery. In using real-life perpetrators, like those represented in Snowdrop, this approach to characterization is not going to go over as well since the drama is portraying (and tacitly defending) those responsible for the torture and deaths of many South Korean citizens during the democratization process.

Secondly, one of the main reasons that the former drama was so successful is because of the outstanding performances by its female leads (particularly Yum Jung-ah; Kim Hye-Yoon; Kim Seo-hyung; Kim Bo-ra and Yoon Se-ah), whereas in the latter drama, each and every female character appears to be some sort of case note taken from a textbook on “female hysteria” that was triggered by some flawed love story.

Jung Hae-in as Im Soo-ho and Jisoo as Eun Young-ro. That awkward glance bascially sums up this couple’s chemistry which is seemingly based on the fact that they are both hot…?

The drama was heavily critiqued by South Korean scholars and citizens alike for distorting history, particularly legitimizing or sympathizing with the National Intelligence Service (ANSP) who were the secret police responsible for rooting out “spies” under the former South Korean dictatorship. The irony of their mandate, as you may have guessed, is that they were the ones spying on South Korean citizens to obtain information on anything that could be construed as political dissent or sympathy towards democratization.

A petition of over 300,000 Korean citizens was signed in December of 2021, which asked for the drama to be removed from the JTBC lineup (Conran 2021). In response to the backlash, the writer Yoo Hyun-mi noted that she wanted to represent the ANSP characters as “ordinary people” (Khan 2021, no pagination) and that she wasn’t valorizing them. I understand that the “banality of evil” (Arendt 1963) is a deeply interesting concept, and one that could be explored in interesting ways during the time period depicted in Snowdrop. The challenge of using this approach would be showing the characters’ mundanity without also making them overly sympathetic or a joke. It is unlikely that this can be accomplished with the nuance it deserves as a side plot in a bombastic hostage/spy drama. Therefore, in reality, the “ordinary people” argument kind of sounded like, at best, an afterthought, and at worst, a defense the ANSP (see also Souw 2022). This response, in my mind, also confirms a) the writer’s inability to grasp that her drama would not be an utter hit and b) that she didn’t care about the political implications of the setting in the first place. Moreover, since the main character is an actual North Korean spy, it adds another layer of betrayal to Korean citizens when in contradistinction with the time period since as many reviewers and commentators have pointed out (India Today 2021) since this was the justification of the arrest and torture of many student activists. Also, like other Twitter users, I found that one of the characters that I sympathized with the most was Eun Chang-su, the Director of the ANSP. Like fuck no. And even though the appropriate individuals were incarcerated in the end, their presence and conflict was used as comic relief throughout the drama thereby undermining the gravity of the history that was being represented, which The Fangirl Verdict blog (2022) aptly points out in their dropped post.

I feel like the tag line of this drama should be: “the men are talking.” Heo Jun-ho as Eun Chang-su and Park Sung-woo as Nam Tae-il.

Then there is the representation of women in the drama, where each character is a functional hysteric who is unable to move on from a weird relationship that they had/have with some dude. The main character, Eun Young-ro, experiences love at first sight and this serves as the obvious anchor for this drama’s outlandish plot but did I really buy the feels? Not really.

Full disclosure, I am incredibly suspicious of individuals who have little to no acting credits but still manage to get lead roles when there are relatively few to go around. I believe this performance confirms these misgivings. Her character’s family history made the portrayal of her “innocence” really irritating. I feel like her character was drawn as a bold young woman who faked naivety to cover her identity but what Jisoo ended up playing was a naïve young woman who seem to fake boldness at all the right moments (because it was scripted!). It’s like she got her role backwards on the first day and just continued to play it in reverse the whole time. For this reason, I just did not get why the lead male character would be interested in her, which sort of undermines the romance of it all. Despite Jung Hae-in being a decent actor, I feel like even he couldn’t convey to me why he would like her since her personality was all over the place. When they were in scenes together, I felt like metaphorically, he just didn’t know where to look.

Her colleagues and roommates were depicted as a hysterical hoard who cowered in fear at everything that came their way; she alone seemed to rise to the occasion over and over despite never convincing the audience of her competence or intelligence, even if given her background, her actions kind of made sense. Moreover, at the drama’s conclusion, the audience is only left to witness her feelings about “her dude”. The fractured relationships that she may have had with her peers after the hostage crisis and the revelation of her true identity were never really addressed or touched on. These relationships are never reconciled because the drama doesn’t care about relationships between women unless it is related to some torrid love affair with a man (as the relationship between the dormitory’s mistress and operator is).

There are some stand out performances by some of the female leads particularly that of Yoon Se-ah as the morose and severe dormitory matron Pi-Seung-hee, who is kind of badass but reduced to a spinster cuckold. The untrustworthy and wiley Gye Bun-Ok played by Kim Hye-yoon, whose character offered an interesting opportunity to imagine the lengths someone will go to avoid bodily harm and preserve their reputation, but is kind of reduced to a selfish, albeit traumatized, brat. The competent doctor and colleague Kang Chung-ya played by Yoo In-na is basically a lovesick fool whose skills are eventually used to corner some dude she met once to initiate some sort of elaborate elopement that is neither plausible nor compelling. And one of the most annoying and unredeemable characters, who the show constantly tries to redeem, is ANSP agent Jang Han-na played by Jung Eugene, a second rate spy that spends the entire drama trying to “investigate” why her finacee broke up with her (while also desperately trying to save his life?).

On top of that, the three top male agents are seemingly controlled by their conniving wives. They are beyond unlikeable, even going as far as convincing their husbands to sacrifice the lives of 13 virgins to ensure their ascendance to power. Yes, you did read that right and no, I don’t have an explanation for something that freaking weird…because how could you? I suppose it is meant to demonstrate how far out of touch these women are from reality that they would believe any story some random fortune teller told them (who FYI is also a North Korean spy)?

Yoo In-na and Kim Hye-yoon are given thankless, and frankly, bizarre roles.

In summary, not unlike SKY Castle, the drama is beautifully shot and a visual feast. The cast is very competent and capable of giving excellent performances but the writing keeps putting them in more and more insane situations which don’t feel interesting because they are just an amped up version of what they did in previous episodes.

I am kind of a fan of the absurd, and on paper, I could see why this project made a great pitch. But therein lies the problem, this drama feels like a pitch more than a drama. And the pitch is so good that you keep expecting more but keep getting less.

In the end, most of the drama’s marketing has been based on the potential dating relationship that the two main characters may have in real life, which is a deeply disappointing and adolescent strategy. This drama made me feel embarrassed by the way I had been taken in by SKY Castle. I kept grilling myself: Was the first drama also bad and I just didn’t know it? I think the answer is both a yes and a no but I do think that the comparisons and explanations offered here have allowed me to go back and justify my appreciation of SKY Castle. This took a lot of work! And work, I really shouldn’t have had to do it just because the writer/director team decided to make another drama.

References

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jeruselam: A report on the banality of evil. Viking Press.

Conran, P. (2021). Disney + K-drama Snowdrop: Blackpink’s Jisoo and D.P.’s Jung Hae-in star in controversial period romance that risks being cancelled over political content. South China Morning Post. 22 Dec. 2021.

The Fangirl Verdict. (2022). Dropped: Snowdrop. The Fangirl Verdict Blog. 12 Feb. 2022.

India Today Web Desk. (2021). Korean channel denies alleged historical distortion in K-drama Snowdrop. India Today. 23 Dec. 2021.

Khan, A. (2021). ‘Snowdrop’ controversy builds up as major produce P&J Group pulls out of sponsorship. SKPOP. 21 Dec. 2021.

Souw, R (2022). Disney’s Korean Series ‘Snowdrop’ beats court case, but can’t escape controversy. Variety. 6 Jan 2022.