Top 5
Terrible Endings
Nothing stinks quite as bad as a drama you’ve really enjoyed coming out of nowhere and whacking you with a bad ending. Of course, mediocre dramas that have unsatisfactory conclusions aren’t that fabulous either. Amazing endings aren’t super common, the point being that they feel amazing because they’re above average and thus not common, but you wouldn’t think it would be that hard to come up with an average, satisfying conclusion to a story. And yet Dramaland has undoubtedly given us some total plonkers. It shouldn’t be that difficult to give us viewers what we like, right? The couple gets together, the bad guys lose, the heroes triumph. But somehow every now and then a drama comes along that just sort of ignores what should happen and just does its own thing to the disappointment of everyone watching. I’ve far from seen every K-Drama to date, so this list will be somewhat limited. Also, if you didn’t already guess from the title with the word ‘Endings’ in it, there’s going to be SPOILERS.
5: Lie to Me
This was far from a good drama, and I wouldn’t even go as far as calling it mediocre, but boy the ending was a whole step below the rest of the show. Which should give you some idea how awful the ending was. All series long the heroine, Gong Ah Jong, is desperate to get married. She lies about being married to a rich dude, somehow ends up in a contract marriage with said rich dude, and being a K-drama rom-com, he obviously falls for her for realsies. So after 16 episodes of Ah Jong being so desperate to be married that she actually LIES about it and pretends, once the rich guy falls in love with her she…doesn’t marry him. For reasons known only to herself, suddenly Ah Jong won’t marry this dude despite his asking, until the end of the series when they get married because of reasons. It was a stupidly angsty, incomprehensible way to send of a drama that had been a pretty lighthearted series about a chick wanting to get hitched.
Hoo boy, the issues this drama created with its weird, weird ending. Long story short, our hero isn’t in the finale. Yes I’m not making this up. The drama is a great story about this couple coming to understand and accept each other despite their differences right up until the moment they break up. Yeah, what? After solid character development and an excellent romance, suddenly our hero was getting less screen time than the second male and female leads. Sure, the second leads needed to tell their story as it directly impacted on the relationship between the leads, but instead of actually resolving the conflict, the couple breaks up, the hero disappears and the final episode is all about the happily ever afters of the second leads. We get the dreaded ‘three years later’ tag, but even then our hero doesn’t make an appearance! All we see is that he’s read an email from the heroine and he crosses a road. Super duper lame. Especially because the show was so very, very good. Even writing this small recap is getting me angry about it all over again.
3: 49 Days
Oh ’49 Days’. It wasn’t a fabulous drama, mainly due from the complete lack of any acting ability in the cast (Jung Il Woo exempted), but the story was interesting enough to keep people tuned in. So basically Girl 1 dies before her time due to Girl 2’s failed suicide attempt. Girl 1 is then given a chance to live again if she can get three people to cry genuine tears over her death within 49 days. To complete her task her ghost is allowed to use Girl 2’s body as Girl 2 is the reason for her death. Stuff happens, relationships develop, mysteries are uncovered and at the end of the 49 days Girl 1 comes away with 3 tears. Hooray! She lives! For like 3 days. Then she dies again, and for real this time. She leaves behind a heartbroken cutie, a sister she only just discovered and a confused, unhappy audience. Because why the hell do we care that she got her chance to live again if she just dies again days later. What the sheet.
So this probably wouldn’t have been a sucky ending for all those people who wanted the main guy to get the girl, but there were significantly more people who wanted the second male lead to end up with the girl. Except that until the end it seems like the second male lead is the male lead. But he’s not. We were all on the wrong ship and we didn’t even know it. Here’s how. There's two twin girls. There’s two boys. One boy likes one twin, one boy likes the other. One boy who has EVERYTHING going for him doesn’t even realise when the girl he likes is actually someone else. Once he finds out, he doesn’t really care. Other boy has NOTHING going for him- his family doesn’t like him, he’s alone at school, the only thing that makes him happy is spending time with this girl. He’s literally set up as our broken-hearted, love-can-cure-him hero. Except love doesn’t cure him. He stays alone forever. The one character that was consistently well developed throughout the series was left high and dry because why make ALL the characters happy when you can leave one completely crushed and ship the other one overseas?
1: Big
The reason the ending for ‘Big’ was so bad is that it was completely and utterly senseless. I don’t think a single person who watched that drama understood why the writers chose to end the show the way they did. Because no one knew what was going on. No one. Admittedly, the drama was a body-swap drama and those can be a little tricky to handle as we spend the whole show watching the heroine doing cute stuff with the hero in a different body and that’s the body we’re used to, but simply choosing not to show the hero back in his body at the end isn’t exactly the way to handle things. But that’s exactly the way ‘Big’ did it. Sure, we’re used to seeing Gong Yoo as the hero because that’s the body the hero was in all drama long, but it really wouldn’t have been that jarring for us to see Shin Won Ho in the final episode considering that the whole bloody drama was the heroine choosing him over Gong Yoo. Instead all we see of the hero (we think) at the end is a silhouette and a hand. And we fangirls know 100% what Gong Yoo’s silhouette and hands look like thank you very much. The drama did not make it clear at all what character it was that the heroine was meeting at the end. Is it her ex-fiance? Is it the school kid back in Gong Yoo’s body? We’ll never know. I mean really, how hard would it have been to just show the heroine with the hero back in his own body? Too darn hard apparently. Sigh.
 |
| What are the worst K-drama endings you've seen? |
